The Part played by Infancy 117 



as collated with another set of facts, and contrast 

 it with the view which even the greatest of those 

 scientific French materialists could take. Con 

 sider how fragmentary and how lacking in arrange 

 ment was the universe they saw compared with the 

 universe we can see to-day, and it is not strange 

 that to them it could be an atheistic world. That 

 hostility between science and religion continued as 

 long as religion was linked hand in hand with the 

 ancient doctrine of special creation. But now that 

 the religious world has unmoored itself, now that it 

 is beginning to see the truth and beauty of nat 

 ural science and to look with friendship upon con 

 ceptions of evolution, I suspect that this temporary 

 antagonism, which we have fallen into a careless 

 way of regarding as an everlasting antagonism, will 

 come to an end perhaps quicker than we realize. 



There is one point that is of great interest in 

 this connection, although I can only hint at it. 

 Among the things that happened in that dim past 

 when man was coming into existence was the 

 increase of his powers of manipulation ; and that 

 was a factor of immense importance. Anaxagoras, 

 it is said, wrote a treatise in which he maintained 

 that the human race would never have become 

 human if it had not been for the hand. I do not 

 know that there was so very much exaggeration 



