ness not fully grasped, which inspired emotion. Evidently, if the object be one not fully to be grasped, and one to inspire emotion, the language of figure and feeling will satisfy us better about it, will cover more of what we seek to express; than the language of literal fact and science. The language of science about it will be below what we feel to be the truth.
The question however has risen and confronts us: what was the scientific basis of fact for this consciousness? When we have once satisfied ourselves both as to the tentative, poetic way in which the Bible-authors used language, and also as to their having no pretensions to metaphysics at all, let us, therefore, when there is this question raised as to the scientific account of what they had before their minds, be content with a very unpretending answer. And in this way such a phrase as that which I have formerly used concerning God, and have been much blamed for using,—the phrase, namely, that, 'for science, God is simply the stream of tendency by which all things seek to fulfil the law of their being,'—may be allowed, and may even prove useful. Certainly it is inadequate; certainly it is a less proper phrase than, for instance: 'Clouds and darkness are round about him, righteousness and judgment are the habitation of his seat.'[1] But then it is, in however humble a degree and with however narrow a reach, a scientific definition, which the other is not. The phrase, 'A personal First Cause, the moral and intelligent Governor of the universe,' has also, when applied to God, the character, no doubt, of a scientific definition.
- ↑ Ps. xcvii, 2. It has been urged that if the personifying mode of expression is more proper, it must, also, be more scientifically exact. But surely it will on reflexion appear that this is by no means so. Wordsworth calls the earth 'the mighty mother of mankind,' and the geographers call her 'an oblate spheroid;' Wordsworth's expression is more proper and adequate to convey what men feel about the earth, but it is not therefore the more scientifically exact.
