RELIGION AND SCIENCE 249 



man — omnipotent, omniscient, with no parts, with no 

 limitations: but he retained personality — in other 

 words, a mental or spiritual organization of the same 

 general kind as man's, however superior in degree. 

 With time, the divine personality became com- 

 pounded more and more of man's ideals instead of 

 his everyday thoughts and attributes. And thus 

 and that God remains. He has created everything; 

 he is in some sense immanent in the world, in some 

 sense apart from it as its ruler — you take your choice 

 according to your philosophic preferences. Beyond 

 that, organized religious thought has not gone; and 

 now it finds itself fronting science in an impasse. 



That, very briefly and roughly, is how man's idea 

 of God has developed. But how have man's knowl- 

 edge and ideas of the natural universe developed? 

 What has Science to say to the impasse? 



Man has to deal with three great categories of 

 phenomena — the inorganic, the organic, and the 

 psychic. In the inorganic, chemistry first and then 

 physics have given us a picture whose broad outlines 

 are now familiar. There is but one type and store 

 of energy in Nature, whether it drives a train, ani- 

 mates a man, radiates in heat or light, inheres in a 

 falling stone. There is but one,^ substance. All bod- 

 ies of trees, of men, rivers and rocks, the clouds in the 

 air and the air itself, precious stones and common 

 clay — all can be resolved into a limited number of 

 elements. And these elements in their turn can be 

 resolved into combinations, differing, it appears, only 



