NATURE'S INSURGENT SON 63 



" I do not agree with that view of the matter, although I find 

 Lord Kelvin's statements full of interest. So far as I have 

 been able to ascertain, after many years in which these matters 

 have engaged my attention, there is no relation, in the sense of 

 a connection or influence, between science and religion. There 

 is, it is true, often an antagonistic relation between exponents 

 of science and exponents of religion when the latter illegiti- 

 mately misrepresent or deny the conclusions of scientific re- 

 search or try to prevent its being carried on, or, again, when 

 the former presume, by magnifying the extremely limited con- 

 clusions of science, to deal in a destructive spirit with the 

 very existence of those beliefs and hopes which are called 

 'religion.' Setting aside such excusable and purely personal 

 collisions between rival claimants for authority and power, it 

 appears to me that science proceeds on its path without any 

 contact with religion, and that religion has not, in its essential 

 qualities, anything to hope for, or to fear from, science. 



" The whole order of nature, including living and lifeless 

 matter from man to gas is a network of mechanism the 

 main features and many details of which have been made 

 more or less obvious to the wondering intelligence of mankind 

 by the labour and ingenuity of scientific investigators. But 

 no sane man has ever pretended, since science became a defi- 

 nite body of doctrine, that we know or ever can hope to 

 know or conceive of the possibility of knowing, whence this 

 mechanism has come, why it is there, whither it is going, and 

 what there may or may not be beyond and beside it which our 

 senses are incapable of appreciating. These things are not 

 ' explained ' by science, and never can be. 



" Lord Kelvin speaks of a ' fortuitous concourse of atoms,' 

 but I must confess that I am quite unable to apprehend what 

 he means by that phrase in the connection in which he uses it. 

 It seems to me impossible that by 'fortuitous' he can mean 

 something which is not determined by natural cause and there- 

 fore is not part of the order of nature. When an ordinary man 

 speaks of a concourse having arisen * by chance ' or ' fortuit- 

 ously,' he means merely that the determining conditions which 

 have led by natural causation to its occurrence were not known 

 to him beforehand ; he does not mean to assert that it has 



