SCIENCE, YESTERDAY, TODAY, TOMORROW — SWANN 249 



dark side of the barrier in the past, on becoming promoted to the free 

 side, started to fortify still further the barrier which it had passed, so 

 that things which did not readily find a place in its philosophy were 

 held in the forbidden region. Yet behind this fortification of division 

 which materialistic science itself has strengthened, stand the shadows 

 of bygone days: the philosophies, the practices, the beliefs, and re- 

 ligions of ancient times, so vulnerable in many of the dogmas with 

 which history had endowed them, that they oft fell an easy prey to the 

 shafts of the newborn science of our era. The weaknesses in their 

 armor bred a kind of conviction that all the wisdom of the ancient 

 past was afflicted with the disease of superstition, a disease eating 

 like a cancer into its whole system. Thus, many things which had 

 been accepted for thousands of years were cast into the category of 

 witchcraft. In the totality of these things there were, however, 

 certain realms which, by virtue of the power which had supported 

 them through the ages and because of their moral influence on man- 

 kind, stood with some security against the attacks of modern phi- 

 losophy. These were, for the most part, the standard religions of 

 mankind. There was a sort of truce between the two camps, a truce 

 in which the realm of religion ruled on Sundays, while the material- 

 istic philosophy governed the rest of the week. Some things, well 

 accepted in the past, but apparently at variance with materialism, 

 found themselves without the powerful support accorded to the great 

 religions and so they were left to the ridicule of the new age. Some of 

 these things which had been part of the doctrine of the churches of 

 the bygone era found themselves disdained by the faiths which had 

 nurtured them, and the guardians of the faiths became anxious to 

 avoid contamination with practices which might be attacked with 

 some apparent success by the warriors of the new age. Thus, healing 

 by the laying on of hands, belief in the existence of spirit entities in 

 our midst, even such were cast out by the religions which had origi- 

 nally fostered them, or if admitted at all, were retained as machina- 

 tions of the devil, a being so beloved by the faiths that have created 

 him that he has succeeded in holding his own in religion in the face of 

 science itself. Naturally, at times he became very convenient as an 

 agent to whom one could attribute all the shortcomings and incon- 

 sistencies in the faiths and dogmas which sought to rule, as well as his 

 own shortcomings. In contemplating his identity, one is reminded of 

 the little girl who, on being asked by her younger sister the question : 

 "Is there really a devil?," replied: "No, of course not, it's just like 

 Santa Claus ; it's Daddy." 



And now what we call orthodox science has itself grown a type of 

 philosophy so different from the old science bom of materialism that if 

 it were forced to pause long enough to confess what, a hundred years 



