BRIEF STATEMENT. 57 



tion of blindness to the truth; and the discovery of 

 errors committed by other people or ourselves is not 

 as many superficial people like to say the pulling 

 down of a structure already raised, unless an error 

 can be called a structure which is built out of the 

 fictions of our imagination which have no objective ex- 

 istence. Criticism often enables us to discover more 

 of the Truth, and nobody can do more than discover 

 Truth : nobody creates Truth, any more than Columbus 

 created America. 



Nowadays all intelligent men and women agree that 

 all knowledge must be subjected to criticism, and the 

 best men and women act on these beliefs. The books 

 and magazines published by the Open Court Company 

 are intended to help these men and women. 



We will dwell a little longer on the subject of re- 

 ligion, because it is in religion that the majority of us 

 have the one region of ideals above our bodily needs. 

 It is rare, though of course not unknown, that Science 

 or Philosophy satisfies the spiritual needs the purest 

 of human cravings. Nowadays, most of us realize 

 that an anti-scientific attitude of religion is impos- 

 sible. If there were an opposition between "science" 

 and "religion," there would be no question as to which 

 side would be victorious. More particularly during 

 the last seventy years, "religion," conscious of the 

 opposition which a rather crude doctrine which was 

 called "science" had towards it, has been gradually, 

 and often somewhat ludicrously, trying to bring itself 

 more into conformity with that "science." The result 

 is painful to the student of human nature ; though it 

 has its amusing sides, just as had the militant denial, 

 on the part of those who were "on the side of the 

 angels" about fifty years ago, of certain deductions 

 from facts. What is called a "conflict between re- 

 ligion and science" always has ended in a victory for 

 "science" and an agnosticism which ousted religion. 

 And thus many see that it is desirable that the matured 

 results of science should enter into the fabric of our 



