CHAPTER VII 



SCIENCE AS THE ARBITER OF ETHICS 

 Sire, in this system there is no need of a God. LAPLACE. 



WHEN Renan wrote that humanity must, in future, 

 look to science for what it craves in the way of a law 

 and symbol, science was in the full swing of conquest. 

 The war between it and religion was believed to be all 

 but over. The law of evolution was accepted not only 

 in its general aspects, but also it was believed that in 

 natural selection a cause had been discovered which 

 would permit us to trace the progress of the organic 

 world from the simple protoplasm to the most complex 

 forms of life. Search was made for the missing link 

 between man and the lower animals, and those at- 

 tributes which an earlier age was content to group as 

 spiritual powers were abolished as unscientific. It was 

 inevitable that philosophers like Renan and Spencer 

 would propose an evolutionary law for society, and 

 that even religion would fall in line and make of God a 

 sort of omnipotent and beneficent natural force which 

 gently led man up to ever higher types of perfection. 



And while to-day those who cultivate the more exact 

 sciences have come to believe that the objective and 



212 



