Thus I saw the value there is in the doctrine that Nature is more than it appears to us; a doctrine carefully elaborated and established by the arguments of a long succession of thinkers, and yet turned to so little use. It seemed to me like a weapon carefully wrought and keenly tempered, but the edge of which had not been tried: or like the splendid geometry of the Greeks, upon which a large part of modern science is built as its corner stone, but which its authors applied to no practical result. I saw especially how needful it was for the right understanding of scientific truths, and how perfectly it put at rest the strife which science has waged, more or less continuously, with the religion and with the higher emotions of the race.

For I perceived that while on the one hand we possess instinctive feelings which bind us consciously to nature as it truly is, on the other hand science is ever bringing more clearly into our consciousness what nature is to our apprehension, which falls short of this; it is continually bringing the phenomenal (or apparent) into clearer light, and forcing upon us thereby the contrast between that, and those feelings of ours which go beyond it. There could not fail to be such a result from the prosecution of the task which science sets herself.