544 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



cism, that is, of scientific investigation of anything whatsoever, under 

 the obligation of absolute sincerity. None will deny that science has not 

 always been conceived in this high sense, but the religions have fallen 

 still further short of their standards, because they have not contained 

 the source of self-betterment, which science possesses in the principle of 

 free criticism. 



It is of interest to enquire how it comes that most religions place 

 the paradise or golden age in the past, and teach that man has become 

 worse through sin, while science teaches that savagery, cruelty, blood- 

 thirstiness, murder and cannibalism are greater as we go backward in 

 the history of mankind, and points to the future, not to the past, as the 

 golden age. How does it happen that the opposite view has been so 

 general ? The answer is to be found in the attitude of the aged toward 

 the time of their own youth. The old, almost without exception, think 

 that the period when they were young was better, the weather more 

 brilliant, the apples more tasty, the bread their mothers made finer, and 

 the boys more industrious than is the case now. This is not difficult to 

 account for on the ground of the impairment of the keenness of all 

 organs of sense and the enhanced habit of criticism which age brings. 



The early writers, who presented views on the topics in question, 

 were naturally old men, for the young have but little inclination for 

 such activities. It comes, then, that the attitude of the aged, tinged as 

 it is by the limitations of age, has very often been accepted as represent- 

 ing a historic fact with regard to the past. Ancient literature is per- 

 meated with this myth. The influence of it on the religions of the 

 world has been potent. Admitting that the world has become worse, a 

 necessity is felt to account for the supposed fact by assuming the exist- 

 ence of a personal evil agency, to whom was due the introduction of 

 evil. There is in the religions, accordingly, a marked note of pessimism. 



The natural world is entirely filled with cruelty, roughness. It is 

 the theater of the wildest selfishness, in which the balance between the 

 beings who people it is preserved only by their devouring and destroying 

 one another. In it only the battle for existence, so well described by 

 Darwin, rules. Man is the sole being we know in nature which makes 

 himself more and more free from the tyranny of this conflict and pro- 

 vides for existence by peaceable work. He alone seeks to heal the sick 

 and to aid the feeble. The results of the good which he does are not 

 restricted to himself and to the recipient, since, as a result of a known 

 biological law, every time such conduct is practised the easier it becomes, 

 not to the individual only, but to all his descendants. That man is most 

 man who most consistently practises love and kindness in a world of 

 egoism. 



In early times, when mere existence was so hard a task that progress 

 could scarcely be thought of, religion with its fundamental principle of 

 stability was the most advantageous form of culture. Later, when the 



