8 Evolution of Life and Form. 



been left there from ancient days ; or without going 

 outside the limits of your own land, you may take 

 the literature that is our pride, the mighty books 

 written by the Rishis of the past ; and everywhere 

 antiquity speaks with a single tongue. Religion 

 reveals the spirit, the spiritual truth which is one. 

 Intelligence studies that truth in its manifold 

 manifestations, and its work ; science, studying the 

 phenomena which are images of aspects of the 

 Divine, is the handmaid, is the sister, of religion, 

 and between them discord is unnatural and fatal to 

 progress. That is the ancient view ; but when we 

 come to our own century a new phenomenon 

 presents itself to our gaze religion on the one side 

 suspicious of science in its progress, science on the 

 other hand apt to be proudly contemptuous of 

 religious claims. How has the divorce arisen? 

 Why this discord between two of the great helpers 

 of human evolution ? The reason is not far to seek. 

 In the western world the science of the elder time, 

 the science of antiquity, disappeared in the great 

 flood of barbaric invasions, underneath the whirl- 

 pool caused by the ruins of the Roman Empire, 

 and later on, underneath the wreckage of that 

 same Empire with its new centre in Constantinople. 

 The invasions of barbarians, both from the East 

 and the North, sweeping over the European conti- 



