KIDD ON "SOCIAL EVOLUTION." 47 



How vehemently the most earnest exponents of religion have 

 repudiated the idea that it could be identified with morality, in 

 however comprehensive a form, need not be insisted on. 



To do justice to science it is not necessary to represent it as 

 the unfailing minister of truth, or to assign to it any absolute 

 character whatever. The less we deal in personifications and ab- 

 stractions the better, when historical or social problems are de- 

 manding solution. To understand the function of science in the 

 world we have simply to remind ourselves that man possesses a 

 faculty of comparison and judgment by which he is compelled to 

 recognize, unless overmastered by his imagination, likeness or 

 unlikeness, equality or inequality, agreement or disagreement, in 

 the things which occupy his attention. The exercise of this fac- 

 ulty leads to classification, which, in the higher form of generali- 

 zation, is the source and vital principle of all knowledge. The 

 more knowledge man acquires, the more certainly he can inter- 

 pret and correlate the data of sense. Among his impressions and 

 inferences there is a continual struggle as to which shall sur- 

 vive; and those which, by their deeper conformity to unchanging 

 facts, assert their viability, go to form the tissue of what we call 

 science. To talk, therefore, of what " science " does or does not 

 do is very apt to be misleading. Science is like a coral reef, built 

 up of innumerable accretions, the result of the life processes of 

 organic bodies. We may from one point of view define science as 

 the enduring products of man's intellectual activity. That the 

 history of science should be largely a record of errors and failures 

 follows of necessity from the fact that the work of science consists 

 essentially in the attacking of ever-new problems with more or 

 less inadequate means of investigation. But the very failures of 

 science are necessary to its successes ; and it never turns aside from 

 its main function and purpose of harmonizing, consolidating, and 

 extending human knowledge. Its permanent relation to religion 

 can thus easily be understood. Religion, appealing to imagina- 

 tion and resting more or less upon myth, incorporates in its creed 

 statements or assumptions which fall within the domain of science, 

 and which, if inacurate, the latter is obliged to challenge ; but 

 there is no necessary hostility between the scientific impulse to 

 know that which can be known and the religious impulse to wor- 

 ship a Power that can not be known, and to frame higher sanc- 

 tions for life than those of the market place and the law courts. 

 Religion, which is essentially emotional, is slow to recognize the 

 rights of science ; and science, in the conflicts which ensue, is in 

 danger of overlooking the fact that religion is something more 

 than a misinterpretation of the world and of history. 



The signs of the times all give us reason to hope, however, 

 that a better modus vivendi than the past has ever known is 



