Phaethon | Page 2

the Catholic
Creeds; that to my mind-God forgive me if I misjudge him- seemed to
me only one fruit of a deep root of irreverence for all things as they are,
even for all things as they seem. Did you not remark the audacious
contempt for all ages but 'our glorious nineteenth century,' and the still
deeper contempt for all in the said glorious time who dared to believe
that there was any ascertained truth independent of the private fancy
and opinion of- for I am afraid it came to that-him, Professor Windrush,
and his circle of elect souls? 'You may believe nothing if you like, and
welcome; but if you do take to that unnecessary act, you are a fool if
you believe anything but what I believe-though I do not choose to state
what that is.' Is not that, now, a pretty fair formulisation of his
doctrine?"
"But, my dear raver," said Templeton, laughing, "the man believed at
least in physical science. I am sure we heard enough about its
triumphs."
"It may be so. But to me his very 'spiritualism' seemed more
materialistic than his physics. His notion seemed to be, though heaven
forbid that I should say that he ever put it formally before himself-"
"Or anything else," said Templeton, sotto voce.
"-that it is the spiritual world which is governed by physical laws, and
the physical by spiritual ones; that while men and women are merely
the puppets of cerebrations and mentations, and attractions and
repulsions, it is the trees, and stones, and gases, who have the wills and
the energies, and the faiths and the virtues and the personalities."
"You are caricaturing."

"How so? How can I judge otherwise, when I hear a man talking, as he
did, of God in terms which, every one of them involved what we call
the essential properties of matter-space, time, passibility, motion;
setting forth phrenology and mesmerism as the great organs of
education, even of the regeneration of mankind; apologising for the
earlier ravings of the Poughkeepsie seer, and considering his later
eclectico-pantheist farragos as great utterances: while, whenever he
talked of Nature, he showed the most credulous craving after
everything which we, the countrymen of Bacon, have been taught to
consider unscientific-Homoeopathy, Electro-biology, Loves of the
Plants a la Darwin, Vestiges of Creation, Vegetarianisms,
Teetotalisms-never mind what, provided it was unaccredited or
condemned by regularly educated men of science?"
"But you don't mean to assert that there is nothing in any of these
theories?"
"Of course not. I can no more prove a universal negative about them
than I can about the existence of life on the moon. But I do say that this
contempt for that which has been already discovered-this carelessness
about induction from the normal phenomena, coupled with this
hankering after theories built upon exceptional ones-this craving for
'signs and wonders,' which is the sure accompaniment of a dying faith
in God, and in nature as God's work-are symptoms which make me
tremble for the fate of physical as well as of spiritual science, both in
America and in the Americanists here at home. As the Professor talked
on, I could not help thinking of the neo- Platonists of Alexandria, and
their exactly similar course-downward from a spiritualism of notions
and emotions, which in every term confessed its own materialism, to
the fearful discovery that consciousness does not reveal God, not even
matter, but only its own existence; and then onward, in desperate search
after something external wherein to trust, towards theurgic fetish
worship, and the secret virtues of gems and flowers and stars; and, last
of all, to the lowest depth of bowing statues and winking pictures. The
sixth century saw that career, Templeton; the nineteenth may see it re-
enacted, with only these differences, that the Nature-worship which
seems coming will be all the more crushing and slavish, because we

know so much better how vast and glorious Nature is; and that the
superstitions will be more clumsy and foolish in proportion as our
Saxon brain is less acute and discursive, and our education less
severely scientific, than those of the old Greeks."
"Silence, raver!" cried Templeton, throwing himself on the grass in fits
of laughter. "So the Professor's grandchildren will have either turned
Papists, or be bowing down before rusty locomotives and broken
electric telegraphs? But, my good friend, you surely do not take
Professor Windrush for a fair sample of the great American people?"
"God forbid that so unpractical a talker should be a sample of the most
practical people upon earth. The Americans have their engineers, their
geographers, their astronomers, their scientific chemists; few indeed,
but such as bid fair to rival those of any nation upon earth. But these,
like other true workers, hold their tongues and do their