RELIGION AND SCIENCE 287 



as well as emotional experience of it, and so far as 

 we can judge it will always continue to do so. 



But it is further found, as matter again of general 

 experience, that such formulations do not remain 

 innocuous in the vacuum of pure intellect, but re- 

 verberate upon action and influence conduct. When 

 men believe that they are surrounded with magical 

 powers, they spend half their lives in ritual designed 

 to affect the operations of these (wholly hypothet- 

 ical) influences. When they worship a God whom 

 they rationalize as man-like, they sacrifice a large 

 proportion of their produce on his altars, and may 

 even kill their fellow-creatures to placate his (again 

 imaginary) passions. When they believe in a Di- 

 vine Revelation, they think that they possess com- 

 plete enlightenment on the great problems of life and 

 death; and they will then cheerfully burn those who 

 differ from them, or embark upon the bloodiest wars 

 in defence of this imaginary certainty. When they 

 worship God as absolute and as a person, they can- 

 not help making deductions that lead them into ab- 

 surdities of thought and of conduct: they deny or 

 oppose ideas derived from a study of nature, the 

 only actual source of knowledge, because they con- 

 flict with what they believe to be immutable truths, 

 but are in reality conclusions drawn from false prem- 

 isses; they tend to an acquiescent and obscurantist 

 spirit in the belief that such moral and intellectual 

 laziness is "doing God's will," when that will is in 



