[352:1] This, perhaps, is one that is apt to be overlooked.  In order to be quite sure that the process of analysis is complete it must be supplemented and verified by the reversed process of synthesis.  If a compound has been resolved into its elements, we cannot be sure that it has been resolved into all its elements until the original compound has been produced by their recombination.  Where this second reverse process fails, the inference is that some unknown element which was originally present has escaped in the analysis.  The analysis may be true as far as it goes, but it is incomplete.  The causes are ’verae causae,’ but they are not all the causes in operation.  So it seems to be with the analysis of the vital organism.  We may be said to know entirely what air and water are because the chemist can produce them, but we only know very imperfectly the nature of life and will and conscience, because when the physiological analysis has been carried as far as it will go there still remains a large unknown element.  Within this element may very well reside those distinctive properties which make man (as the moralist is obliged to assume that he is) a responsible and religious being.  The hypotheses which lie at the root of morals and religion are derived from another source than physiology, but physiology does not exclude them, and will not do so until it gives a far more verifiably complete account of human nature than it does at present.

[354:1] Mr. Browning has expressed this with his usual incisiveness and penetration:—­

    ’I hear you recommend, I might at least
     Eliminate, decrassify my faith ... 
     Still, when you bid me purify the same,
     To such a process I discern no end,
     Clearing off one excrescence to see two;
     There’s ever a next in size, now grown as big,
     That meets the knife:  I cut and cut again! 
     First cut the liquefaction, what comes last
     But Fichte’s clever cut at God himself?’

But also, on the other hand:—­

                                 ’Where’s
     The gain? how can we guard our unbelief? 
     Just when we are safest, there’s a sunset-touch,
     A fancy from a flower-bell, some one’s death,
     A chorus ending from Euripides,—­
     And that’s enough for fifty hopes and fears,
     As old and new at once as Nature’s self,
     To rap and knock and enter in our soul ... 
     All we have gained then by our unbelief
     Is a life of doubt diversified by faith,
     For one of faith diversified by doubt: 
     We called the chess-board white,—­we call it black.’

Bishop Blongram’s Apology.