304 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



from experience, who forget every defeat they suffer, and always refuse 

 to see any power in the universe but their own wills. Sometimes, 

 indeed, they discover their mistake too late. Many barbarous races 

 are in this condition. In their childishness they have engaged them- 

 selves in a direct conflict with Natiire. Instead of negotiating with 

 her, they have declared a blind war. They have adopted habits which 

 they gradually discover to be leading them to destruction ; but they 

 discover it too late and when they are too deeply compromised. Then 

 we see the despair of the atheistic nation, and its wild struggles as it 

 feels itself caught in the whirlpool ; then, a little later, we find that 

 no such nation exists, and on the map its seat begins to be covered 

 with names belonging to another language. Less extreme and unre- 

 deemed, the same Titanism may sometimes be remarked in races called 

 civilized. Races might be named that are undergoing punishments 

 little less severe for this insensate atheism. " Sedet seternumque 

 sedebit," that unhappy Poland, not indeed extinguished but partitioned, 

 and every thirty years decimated anew. She expiates the crime of 

 atheistic willfulness, the fatal pleasure of unbounded individual liberty, 

 which rose up against the very nature of things. And other nations 

 we know that expect all successes from the mere blind fury of willing, 

 that declare the word impossible unknown to their language. They 

 color their infatuation sometimes with the name of self-sacrifice, and 

 fancy they can change the Divine laws by offering up themselves as 

 victims to their own vanity; they "fling themselves against the bars 

 of fate;" they die in theatrical attitudes, and little know how "the 

 abyss is wreatlied in scorn" of such cheap martyrdom. 



A wrong belief about God, however fatal it may be, is not atheism. 

 Ml*. Buckle tried to show that the Spanish empire fell through a false 

 conception of the order of the universe; and it seems clear that the 

 rigid Catholic Adew of the world is dangerous in this age to every 

 nation that adopts it. These are the effects of false theology. But 

 there is a state of mind which, though very far removed from the will- 

 fulness I have been describing, and often accompanied with a strong 

 and anxious religiousness, may nevertheless be practically regarded 

 as a form of atheism. It is the state of those minds which, fully be- 

 lieving in an order of the universe, yet have such a poor and paltry 

 conception of it that they might almost as well have none at all. 



People are sometimes led to this by a very reasonable and excus- 

 able process of thought. Naturally modest and distrustful of their 

 own powers, they despair of understanding the order of the universe ; 

 they think it almost presumptuous to attempt to understand it. 

 Wisely distrustful of any knowledge that is not precise, they avert 

 their eyes instinctively fi'om every thing which cannot be made the 

 subject of such knowledge. In all their transactions with Nature, to 

 use my former phrase, they make it a rule to be unambitious. They 

 aim at objects very definite and very near. Whatever they g^in they 



