300 GRAND STRATEGY OF EVOLUTION 



of the morning, or in intermittent clouds and torrents, 

 which slowly raised the general level of human knowl- 

 edge unnoticed by mankind. The great majority were 

 unconscious of the storms of scientific controversy, or 

 the continuous patter of discovery, but they utilized 

 their accumulating power, nevertheless. Always eager 

 passengers of science, they sailed its rising tides to 

 ever more distant realms, viewing in wonder the other- 

 wise inaccessible works of nature, but as unconscious 

 as were their ancestral apes of the means by which 

 their vision had been enlarged. 



These discoveries of science were too intricate and 

 numerous to be apprehended by any one individual. 

 They had continually to be unified and summarized, 

 expressed in ever simpler and more comprehensive 

 terms, called "natural laws," to carry any message 

 whatever. That was necessarily a slow process. 



VIII. The Tests of Veracity 



The basic, or initial test of veracity, in religion 

 as in every other domain of mental life, is human au- 

 thority, or the concrete evidence afforded by the bod- 

 ily presence and well being of him who claimed to 

 have profited by his own experience. The older, 

 stronger, and more successful men being the larger, 

 more enduring vessels of experience, were therefore 

 rightly regarded as the chief sources of evidence. 



Science separated from religion and philosophy as 

 soon as it began to seek out and to utilize new and 

 larger sources of evidence than human authority in 

 order to test the veracity of its mental imagery. The 

 mutation in human thought and action out of which 



