" A man's being endowed with rare
mathematical talent is no cause why he should or should not be devout.
His gifts to weigh and measure the stars are purely intellectual; and
nature being seldom profuse upon one individual,--as she was upon
Pascal and Newton,--the presumption as to an astronomer, of whom we
know nothing, would be that what may be termed his emotive
appreciation of stars and stellar systems is probably not so full as
his intellectual. And no amount or quality of intellectual insight can
supply or compensate a want of sensibility. No matter how many
hundreds of millions of miles he may pierce into space, he has still
to do with the visible and calculable. But religion is the putting of
the human mind in relation with the invisible, the incalculable. A man
gets no nearer to God through a telescope than through a microscope,
and no nearer through either than through the naked eye. Who cannot
recognize the divine spirit in the hourly phenomena of nature and of
his own mind will not be helped by the differential calculus, or any
magnitude or arrangement of telescopic lenses.
That we ever live not only in a material, but also in a spiritual
world, can be easily apprehended without at all entangling ourselves
in the web-work of metaphysics.
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