THE SUPERNATURAL IN NATURE. STATE OF THE CASE. "Je voudrais faire quelque progrès nouveau dans la connaissance des choses divines."-EMILE SAISSET. THE age in which we live reasonably boasts of great growth in knowledge and useful application of that knowledge. This breadth and accuracy, unless we exercise due care, will enrich the race at the expense of the individual. It is no longer possible for a single mind to occupy the whole domain of investigation. The student must limit his labours to one field of science; to one tree, branch, or even leaf of knowledge; if he will add any new thing to the intellectual store of mankind. That is a noble devotion which abandons vast mines of research, and concentrates every energy to carry one single line of inquiry to the furthest limit. Such devotion, for the sake of accuracy and of discovery, involves great sacrifices: not the least of these, though often overlooked, is a narrowing of the student's own intellectual and emotional nature. The eye, turned continually upon objects near and small, loses the faculty of far-seeking and wide discernment. The mind wholly given to one study and its special methods loses power and discrimination as to outlying provinces of thought. Nowhere is the evil effect so plainly seen as in those students of physical science the minuteness and mechanical nature of whose investigations render them like the carpenter who will have everything made of wood, or as the blacksmith B |