8o POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



their real nature, but terribly potent to produce results. He can not 

 easily trace cause and effect in dealing with these forces; hence it is 

 natural that he should doubt the existence of relations of cause and 

 effect. As the human will seems capricious because the springs of voli- 

 tion are hidden from observation, so to the unknown will that limits 

 our own we ascribe an infinite caprice. All races of men capable of 

 abstract thought have believed in the existence of something outside 

 themselves whose power is without human limitations. Through the 

 imagination of poets the forces of nature become personified. The 

 existence of power demands corresponding will. The power is infi- 

 nitely greater than ours; the sources of its action inscrutable: hence 

 man has conceived the unknown first cause as an infinite and uncon- 

 ditioned man. Anthropomorphism in some degree is inevitable, be- 

 cause each man must think in terms of his own experience. Into his 

 own personal universe, all that he knows must come. 



Eecognition of the hidden but gigantic forces in nature leads men 

 to fear and to worship them. To think of them either in fear or in 

 worship is to give them human forms. 



The social instincts of man tend to crystallize in institutions ; even 

 his common hopes and fears. An institution implies a division of 

 labor. Hence, in each age and in each race men have been set apart 

 as representatives of these hidden forces and devoted to their propitia- 

 tion. These men are commissioned to speak in the name of each god 

 that the people worship or each demon the people dread. 



The existence of each cult of priests is bound up in the perpetua- 

 tions of the mysteries and traditions assigned to their care. These 

 traditions are linked with other traditions and with other mystic ex- 

 planations of uncomprehended phenomena. While human theories of 

 the sun, the stars, the clouds, of earthquakes, storms, comets and dis- 

 ease, have no direct relation to the feeling of worship, they can not be 

 disentangled from it. The uncomprehended, the unfamiliar and the 

 supernatural are one and the same in the untrained human mind ; and 

 one set of prejudices can not be dissociated from the others. 



To the ideas acquired in youth we attach a sort of sacredness. To 

 the course of action we follow we are prone to claim some kind of 

 mystic sanction; and this mystic sanction applies not only to acts of 

 virtue and devotion, but to the most unimportant rites and ceremonies; 

 and in these we resent changes with the full force of such conservatism 

 as we possess. 



It is against limited and preconceived notions that the warfare of 

 science has been directed. It is the struggle for the realities on the 

 part of the individual man. Ignorance, prejudice and intolerance, in 

 the long run, are one and the same thing. In some one line at least, 

 every lofty mind throughout the ages has demanded objective reality. 

 This struggle has been one between science and theology only because 

 theological misconceptions were entangled with crude notions of other 



