1 98 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



let him be also a philosophic amateur, unwilling to mix a hodge-podge 

 system after the fashion of a common layman, and what does he find 

 his situation to be in this blessed year 1906? He wants facts; he 

 wants science; but he also wants a religion. And being an amateur 

 and not an independent originator in philosophy he naturally looks 

 for guidance to the experts and professionals whom he finds already 

 in the field. A very large number of you here present, possibly a 

 majority of you, are amateurs of just this kind. 



Now what sorts of philosophy do you find actually offered to meet 

 your need? You find an empirical philosophy that is not religious 

 enough, and a religious philosophy that is not empirical enough for 

 your purpose. If you look to the quarter where facts are most con- 

 sidered you find the whole tough-minded program in operation, and 

 the ' conflict between science and religion ' in full blast. Either it 

 is that Eocky Mountain tough of a Haeckel with his materialistic 

 monism, his ether-god and his jest at our God as a ' gaseous vertebrate,' 

 or it is Spencer treating the world's history as a redistribution of 

 matter and motion solely, and bowing religion politely out at the 

 front door : she may indeed continue to exist, but she must never 

 show her face inside the temple. 



For one hundred and fifty years past the progress of science has 

 seemed to mean the enlargement of the material universe and the 

 diminution of man's importance. The result is what one may call the 

 growth of naturalistic or positivistic feeling. Man is no lawgiver to 

 nature, he is an absorber. She it is who stands firm ; he it is who must 

 accommodate himself. Let him record truth, cold though it be, and 

 submit to it ! The romantic human spontaneity is gone, the vision is 

 materialistic and depressing. Ideals appear as inert by-products of 

 physiology, what is higher is explained by what is lower and treated 

 forever as a case of ' nothing but ' — nothing but something else of a 

 quite inferior sort. You get, in short, a materialistic universe, in 

 which only the radically tough-minded can live congenially. 



If now, on the other hand, you turn to the religious quarter for 

 consolation, and take counsel of the tender-minded philosophies, what 

 do you find? 



Eeligious philosophy in our day and generation is, among us 

 English-reading people, of two main types. One of these is more 

 radical and aggressive, the other has more the air of fighting a slow 

 retreat. By the more radical wing of religious philosophy I mean the 

 so-called transcendental idealism of the Anglo-Hegelian school, the 

 philosophy of such men as Green, the Cairds, Bosanquet and Eoyce. 

 This philosophy has greatly influenced the more studious members of 

 our protestant ministry. It is pantheistic, and undoubtedly it has 

 already blunted the edge of the traditional theism in protestantism 

 at large. 



