in morality and religion, or abandon them as illusions. And we should at
least hesitate to deny that reason--in spite of its apparent failure in
the past to justify our faith in the principles of spiritual life--may
yet, as it becomes aware of its own nature and the might which dwells in
it, find beauty and goodness, nay, God himself, in the world. We should
at least hesitate to condemn man to choose between irreflective
ignorance and irreligion, or to lock the intellect and the highest
emotions of our nature and principles of our life, in a mortal struggle.
Poetry and religion may, after all, be truer then prose, and have
something to tell the world that science, which is often ignorant of its
own limits, cannot teach.

The failure of philosophy in the past, even if it were as complete as is
believed by persons ignorant of its history, is no argument against its
success in the future. Such persons have never known that the world of
thought like that of action makes a stepping stone of its dead self. He
who presumes to decide what passes the power of man's thought, or to
prescribe absolute limits to human knowledge, is rash, to say the least;
and he has neither caught the most important of the lessons of modern
science, nor been lifted to the level of its inspiration. For science
has done one thing greater than to unlock the secrets of nature. It has
revealed something of the might of reason, and given new grounds for the
faith, which in all ages has inspired the effort to know,--the faith
that the world is an intelligible structure, meant to be penetrated by
the thought of man. Can it be that nature is an "open secret," but that
man, and he alone, must remain an enigma? Or does he not rather bear
within himself the key to every problem which he solves, and is it not
_his_ thought which penetrates the secrets of nature? The success of
science, in reducing to law the most varied and apparently unconnected
facts, should dispel any suspicion which attaches to the attempt to