PREFACE Xlll 



the accepted belief of the majority is that there exists 

 a Providence who has assigned every one his proper 

 place, or even (oddest whim!) ordained the present 

 type of society; so long as they rely more on 

 authority than experience, look to the past more 

 than to the future, to revelation instead of reason, 

 to an arbitrary Governor instead of to a discover- 

 able order. 



The general conceptions of the universe which a 

 man or a civilization entertains come in large part 

 to determine his or its actions. There are only two 

 general and embracing conceptions of the sort 

 (though any number which are not general, and fail 

 because they leave out whole tracts of reality) : in 

 the fewest possible words, one is scientific, the other 

 unscientific; one tries to use to its fullest extent the 

 intellect with which we have been evolved, the other 

 does not. The thread running through most of these 

 essays is the attempt to discover and apply in certain 

 fields as much as possible of this scientific conception 

 to several different fields of reality. 



Of these essays, "Progress" has already appeared in 

 the Hibhert Journal, "Biology and Sociology" in the 

 Monist, "Us n'ont que de Tame" and Philosophic 

 Ants" in the Cornhill Magazine, "Rationalism and 

 the Idea of God" in the Rationalist Press Annual, 

 and "Religion and Science" in Science and Civiliia- 

 tion, this year's representative of the annual "Unity" 

 series edited by Mr. F. S. Marvin and published by 

 the Oxford University Press. They have all, how- 



