2i6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



But there are better minds who take up mystical theories (by which 

 I mean all those which have no possibility of being mechanically ex- 

 plained). These are persons who are strongly prejudiced in favor of 

 such theories. We all have natural tendencies to believe in such 

 things; our education often strengthens this tendency; and the result 

 is, that to many minds nothing seems so antecedently probable as a 

 theory of this kind. Such persons find evidence enough in favor of 

 their views, and in the absence of any recognized logic of induction 

 they cannot be driven from their belief. 



But to the mind of a physicist there ought to be a strong presump- 

 tion against every mystical theory ; and therefore it seems to me that 

 those scientific men who have sought to make out that science was not 

 hostile to theology have not been so clear-sighted as their opponents. 



It would be extravagant to say that science can at present disprove 

 religion ; but it does seem to me that the spirit of science is hostile to 

 any religion except such a one as that of M. Vacherot. Our appointed 

 teachers inform us that Buddhism 'is a miserable and atheistical faith, 

 shorn of the most glorious and needful attributes of a religion ; that its 

 priests can be of no use to agriculture by praying for rain, nor to war 

 by commanding the sun to stand still. We also hear the remonstrances 

 of those who warn us that to shake the general belief in the living God 

 would be to shake the general morals, public and private. This, too, 

 must be admitted; such a revolution of thought could no more be 

 accomplished without waste and desolation than a plantation of trees 

 could be transferred to new ground, however wholesome in itself, with- 

 out all of them languishing for a time, and many of them dying. Nor 

 is it, by-the-way, a thing to be presumed that a man would have taken 

 part in a movement having a possible atheistical issue without having 

 taken serious and adequate counsel in regard to that responsibility. 

 But, let the consequences of such a belief be as dire as they may, one 

 thing is certain : that the state of the facts, whatever it may be, will 

 surely get found out, and no human prudence can long arrest the 

 triumphal car of truth no, not if the discovery were such as to drive 

 every individual of our race to suicide ! 



But it would be folly to suppose that any metaphysical theory in 

 regard to the mode of being of the perfect is to destroy that aspira- 

 tion toward the perfect which constitutes the essence of religion. It 

 is true that, if the priests of any particular form of religion succeed 

 in making it generally believed that religion cannot exist without the 

 acceptance of certain formulas, or if they succeed in so interweaving 

 certain dogmas with the popular religion that the people can see no 

 essential analogy between a religion which accepts these points of 

 faith and one which rejects them, the result may very well be to ren- 

 der those who cannot believe these things irreligious. Nor can we 

 ever hope that any body of priests should consider themselves more 

 teachers of religion in general than of the particular system of theology 



