542 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



reaction, a mutual pressure exerted by each upon the other. Religion 

 is the fulcrum and science the lever which together raise mankind. 



Recent debate on these matters is marked by a great improvement in 

 tone as contrasted with that prevalent thirty or forty years ago. Not 

 only is the spirit of the controversy altered, but its ground has shifted. 

 Both parties have changed their positions. The religious partisans no 

 longer dispute the verdict of the scientists in scientific things and many 

 scientific men have abandoned the position that " matter holds the prom- 

 ise and potency" of everything in the universe, and now assign this 

 " promise and potency " to energy, regarding matter merely as a symbol 

 of thought. 



Now the concept of energy is a good deal more closely related to that 

 of spirit than is the concept of matter, so that it has become easy for the 

 scientific men so to extend the bounds of their own field as to claim all 

 that which was formerly regarded as the exclusive domain of religion. 

 To make this new position clear, I might attempt to give a bird's-eye 

 view of the utterances of several recent scientific writers, to construct 

 a composite picture, so to speak. But to do this briefly would be im- 

 possible, so that I have perforce elected a different procedure, namely, 

 to present in outline the views of a single author, selected as highly 

 typical of the modern drift of thought along these lines. The writer 

 chosen for this purpose is Wilhelm Ostwald, formerly, for many years, 

 professor at the University of Leipzig, distinguished as a scientific man 

 and now editor of the Annalen der Naturphilosophie. 



In what follows, it shall be my aim to lay before you a brief sum- 

 mary of the position taken by Ostwald on the relations of science to 

 religion, in a manner as devoid as possible of any color reflected from 

 my own views. With this object, I shall not break into the presentation 

 by any comment or criticism, and shall follow Ostwald's own phraseology 

 so far as may be compatible with necessary condensations and omissions. 



Self-respect and happiness are, in the last analysis, the motives of 

 human conduct in those things that lie beyond mere maintenance of 

 existence. In fact, the greatest happiness which can come to a man in 

 advancing years is to diffuse happiness about him by the production of 

 creative ideas which relieve mankind of heavy burdens and increase the 

 general opportunities for happiness. The creative ideas which bring 

 happiness most directly are, in the first line, those furnished by science, 

 in so much as science lessens or removes many forms of disease and 

 misery which plague or threaten man in consequence of his biological 

 relationships. What no one of the many religions has been able to do 

 has been accomplished, in an ever-increasing degree, in bettering those 

 conditions of life which make for happiness, not alone through the 

 advance of medical knowledge in the treatment of disease, but still more 

 in teaching man how to minimize the causes of disease. The surprising 



