INTRODUCTION 



opposition is due to the ignorant and clamorous ob- 

 jections of those who may be classed under his de- 

 scription of the religious: "Undoubtedly the usual 

 conception of God as Creator and Ruler is that he is 

 a supernatural being, a Great and Good Man in the 

 skies, who created the universe out of nothing, set it 

 going, and watches over it to see that it goes right; 

 that he established natural laws by his word but now 

 and again suspends them in order to accomplish par- 

 ticular purposes or to benefit his worshippers."^" But, 

 I doubt very much whether such persons are his dan- 

 gerous antagonists. They are rather those who accept 

 on faith a general law of change but who wish to 

 know his answer to the question of how we develop 

 and change. He does not tell us how natural law was 

 instituted nor why, if it was instituted, it camiot be 

 superseded by its institutor. Many of us do not see 

 why the idea of an incomprehensible natural law is 

 more rational than the idea of a God. Again, is a 

 universe created out of nothing and set going by a 

 Creator and Ruler a less satisfactory belief than a 

 universe uncreated, or self-created, and set going by 

 its own natural laws'? It almost seems as if men of 

 science believed that a natural law was an entity ex- 

 isting before the phenomena which it classifies; for 

 example, that the law of organic evolution brought 

 into being the first organism which appeared on the 

 earth. 



10 Direction of Human Evolution, p. 209. 



