SKEPTICISM AND IDOLATRY 189 



beneficial either to society or to science. It would be 

 difficult to prove that the acceptance of the belief that 

 man has no divinity, in at least the sense of super- 

 natural powers, and no innate standards of right and 

 wrong in other words, that he is merely the most 

 complex machine in a world governed exclusively by 

 physical and chemical laws that such a belief has not 

 sunk him to a lower plane of morality and induced 

 in him a resigned weariness towards such a fate. 

 The victory has not only reacted on science in such a 

 way as to give the world a too implicit confidence in 

 its hypotheses, but it has also made men of science 

 dogmatic and rash in proposing bold and unsupported 

 speculations, impatient of criticism of themselves and 

 hypercritical towards religion, philosophy, and all 

 other methods of human thought. Thus the most 

 urgent need is a severe and just criticism, not of our 

 experimental observations or of our logic, but of our 

 hypotheses. One of the greatest difficulties in de- 

 veloping such a criticism lies in the fact that so few 

 men of science leave any record of their intimate and 

 personal convictions as to the limitations and the pos- 

 sibilities of their field of action. They content them- 

 selves, for the most part, with a mere statement of 

 experimental results, or they develop speculative 

 theories without much consideration whether they are 

 fanciful or whether their influence will be good or 

 pernicious. Such criticism as there may be is directed 



