218 ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST 



and motion, more particularly the grand generali- 

 zation of the conservation of energy and the substitu- 

 tion by science of an orderly for a disorderly concep- 

 tion of nature, make it impossible to think of occa- 

 sional interference by God with this world's affairs. 

 Accordingly the value of petitionary prayer falls to 

 the ground. Revelation and inspiration have re- 

 solved themselves into exceptional mental states, and 

 are no longer looked upon as a sort of telepathy be- 

 tween divine and human minds. If we reflect, we 

 see that all these intellectual difficulties in modern 

 theology arise from the advance of scientific knowl- 

 edge, which has shown that the older ideas of God 

 were only symbolic, and therefore false when the at- 

 tempt was made to give real value to them. 



That being the quagmire in which traditional 

 Christian theology is floundering, it behoves us to 

 discuss the opposite side of the question, and to see 

 whether the very advance of science which has 

 seemed to exert only a destructive influence may not 

 have made it possible to build up new and sounder 

 conceptions of fundamental religious ideas. 



We have already seen that the conception of God 

 always represents man's idea of the powers operating 

 in the universe; that it has two components — the 

 outer consisting of these powers so far as they are 

 known to man, the inner consisting in the mode in 

 which the conception is organized and the way it is 

 related to the rest of the personality. It is obvious 

 that both man's knowledge of the cosmic powers as 



