420 LESSONS FKOM NATUEE. [CHAP. XIII. 



5. It accords with the teaching of common sense without 

 being bound down within its limits. 



6. It establishes the distinction between reason and in 

 stinct, and between language and emotional expressions. 



7. It takes cognizance of our highest perceptions, includ 

 ing those of truth, goodness, and beauty as such. 



8. It supports and enforces moral teaching. 



9. It harmonizes with the declarations of religion, both 

 natural and revealed. 



10. It asserts its own truth in affirming the validity of our 

 primary intuitions. 



What, then, can be the motive for rejecting a philosophy 

 which accords with the facts of experience, co-ordinates and 

 explains them, and for accepting one so laboured yet so 

 inadequate as the one here criticised ? It is much to be 

 feared that with many the objection lies in the last point 

 but one enumerated by us in its favour. If so, the sting must 

 lie in the fact of its harmony with religion. A passionate 

 hatred of religion, however discreetly or astutely veiled, lies 

 at the bottom of much of the popular metaphysical teaching 

 now in vogue. 



A belief in the necessary inconsistency of science with 

 Dislike of re- religion is therefore persistently propagated amongst 



ligion some- , i i i 11&quot; . 



timesmduces the public by writings and lectures in which more 



the accept- ..,.,. , 



anceofit. is implied than asserted. In such lectures attempts 

 have again and again been made to strike theology through 

 physical science, to blacken religion with coal-dust, or to pelt 

 it with fragments of chalk, or to smother it with sub-atlantic 

 mud, or to drown it in a sea of protoplasm. 



Delenda est Carthago ! No system is to be tolerated which 

 will lead men to accept a personal God, moral responsibility, 

 and a future state of rewards and punishments. Let these 

 unwelcome truths be once eliminated, and no system is 

 deemed undeserving of a candid, if not a sympathetic, con 

 sideration, and, c&teris paribus, that system which excludes 

 them the most efficaciously becomes the most acceptable. 



The appeal here made, however, is not to religion but 



