THE DOGMA OF EVOLUTION 



There can be no harmony between two such oppo- 

 site aspects of life so long as the man of science, con- 

 sciously or unconsciously, agrees with Buckle that 

 civilization is a progress due to the accumulation of 

 facts and the rational interpretation of our environ- 

 ment, and the religious assume that our civilization 

 is to be judged by its morality and otherworldliness 

 whose precepts were known and practised thousands 

 of years ago. Can it be denied that those who sub- 

 scribe to the dogma of power are sympathetically in 

 agreement with Spencer "? He tells us that religious 

 worship yielded him no pleasure and he saw in re- 

 ligion only: "The notion of a deity who is pleased 

 with the singing of his praises, and angry with the in- 

 finitesimal beings he has made when they fail to tell 

 him perpetually of his greatness."^ How can there be 

 peace, except the peace of exhaustion or the pax Ro- 

 mana^ between such an attitude and that of St. 

 Thomas Aquinas who declared the acquisition of 

 knowledge to be a sin except in so far as it displayed 

 the power of God, or of St. Augustine who would 

 limit all his knowledge to that of God and his soul*? 

 These are the extremes of the two attitudes towards 

 life and between them lie all degrees of opinion. The 

 captains of science will, however, always accuse the 

 religious of thwarting the activities of the reason, and 

 the leaders of the other side will condemn the men 



"^Autobiography, vol. I, p. 171. 



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