EVOLUTION AND SOCIETY 



they have smashed the authority of the humanities 

 and have changed our universities into technical 

 schools, where results can be determined by material 

 achievement and where scholars seek to uplift human- 

 ity by the process of levelling down all inequalities: 

 their works and ideas are chronicled in innumerable 

 books. They accomplished all these things and to 

 them belongs the great credit of having, by ridicule, 

 convinced us that the Christian Religion had en- 

 crusted itself with a mass of superstitious beliefs in 

 God and the Bible which could not withstand the 

 facts brought to light by science. By exalting the dig- 

 nity of human observation and reason, they undoubt- 

 edly diminished bigotry and idolatry. Thus, it is true 

 that in a very real sense they might have prepared the 

 way for a better and more spiritual religion, if only 

 they could have taken the next step and have shown us 

 what to believe as well as what not to believe. In this 

 nobler endeavour they failed; try as they and their 

 followers of today will, they cannot escape the taint 

 of materialism: the stimulus to live so as to advance 

 the future race leaves the individual unaffected; 

 smothered by the feeling that he is subject to an 

 impersonal general law of nature, his personal will 

 and personal responsibility for his conduct are re- 

 laxed in the unbreathable atmosphere of natural se- 

 lection; the worship of the Absolute Unknown may 

 have exalted the poet, but it leaves the less imagina- 

 tive person untouched, and he turns to the gratifica- 



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