They make things admirably plain,
But one hard question will remain: 
If one hypothesis you lose,
Another in its place you choose,
But, your faith gone, O man and brother,
Whose shop shall furnish you another? 
One that will wash, I mean, and wear,
And wrap us warmly from despair? 130
While they are clearing up our puzzles,
And clapping prophylactic muzzles
On the Actaeon’s hounds that sniff
Our devious track through But and If,
Would they’d explain away the Devil
And other facts that won’t keep level,
But rise beneath our feet or fail,
A reeling ship’s deck in a gale! 
God vanished long ago, iwis,
A mere subjective synthesis; 140
A doll, stuffed out with hopes and fears,
Too homely for us pretty dears,
Who want one that conviction carries,
Last make of London or of Paris. 
He gone, I felt a moment’s spasm,
But calmed myself, with Protoplasm,
A finer name, and, what is more,
As enigmatic as before;
Greek, too, and sure to fill with ease
Minds caught in the Symplegades 150
Of soul and sense, life’s two conditions,
Each baffled with its own omniscience. 
The men who labor to revise
Our Bibles will, I hope, be wise,
And print it without foolish qualms
Instead of God in David’s psalms: 
Noll had been more effective far
Could he have shouted at Dunbar,
‘Rise, Protoplasm!’ No dourest Scot
Had waited for another shot. 160

And yet I frankly must confess
A secret unforgivingness,
And shudder at the saving chrism
Whose best New Birth is Pessimism;
My soul—­I mean the bit of phosphorus
That fills the place of what that was for us—­
Can’t bid its inward bores defiance
With the new nursery-tales of science. 
What profits me, though doubt by doubt,
As nail by nail, be driven out, 170
When every new one, like the last,
Still holds my coffin-lid as fast? 
Would I find thought a moment’s truce,
Give me the young world’s Mother Goose
With life and joy in every limb,
The chimney-corner tales of Grimm!

Our dear and admirable Huxley
Cannot explain to me why ducks lay,
Or, rather, how into their eggs
Blunder potential wings and legs 180
With will to move them and decide
Whether in air or lymph to glide. 
Who gets a hair’s-breadth on by showing
That Something Else set all agoing? 
Farther and farther back we push
From Moses and his burning bush;
Cry, ‘Art Thou there?’ Above, below,
All Nature mutters yes and no!
’Tis the old answer:  we’re agreed
Being from Being must proceed, 190
Life be Life’s source.  I might as well
Obey the meeting-house’s bell,
And listen while Old Hundred pours
Forth through the summer-opened doors,