RELIGION AND SCIENCE 237 



nessed to man's use. So with the wind and ihc rain, 

 the growth of crops, the storms of the sea. So, in 

 due time, with the thunder and the lightning, with 

 earthquakes, eruptions, comets, eclipses, pestilences. 



This process of liberating matter from arbitrary 

 and mysterious power, of perceiving it as orderly 

 and endowed with regularity of natural law, of bring- 

 ing it more and more beneath human control, was, 

 on the other hand, accompanied by what may be 

 called a combined condensation and sublimation of 

 the spiritual forces accepted by human faith. They 

 are built up from spirit to spirits, spirits to gods, 

 gods to God. But now it seems as if this condensa- 

 tion had reached its limit, and the sublimation could 

 only go farther by resolving the one God into an 

 empty name or the vaguest unreality. 



We look back and see the Gods of early man, 

 and are complacently prepared to believe that they 

 were based in error, products of mental immaturity, 

 tc be relegated to limbo without regret. But what 

 about the present? Why should we shrink from ap- 

 plying the same process to the God of to-day? 



Is it then to be so with every God? Is God only 

 a personified symbol of our residuum of ignorance? 

 Is to hold the idea of God in any form to be, as Salo- 

 mon Reinach believes, in an infantile stage of human 

 development, and must we with him define religion 

 as "a sum of beliefs impeding the free use of human 



faculty"? 



I think not; and I shall endeavour to justify my 



