THEOPHOBIA: ITS CAUSE 29 



men have a strong objection to putting their 

 trust in anything which cannot be subjected 

 either to scientific examination or to experiment. 

 In this attitude there is more than a germ of 

 truth. " Occam's razor " is as valuable an imple- 

 ment to-day as it ever was, and everyone will 

 admit that we must exhaust all known causes 

 before we proceed to postulate a new one. 



We have gone beyond the day of the absurd 

 statement that thought (which is of course 

 unextended) is as much a secretion of the brain 

 as bile (which, equally of course, is extended) is 

 of the liver. No one nowadays would commit 

 himself to such a statement, and men in general 

 would be chary of urging that we should not 

 believe anything which we cannot understand. 

 I have myself heard a distinguished man of science 

 of his day he is dead this quarter of a century 

 make that statement in public, wholly ignoring 

 the fact that any branch of science which we may 

 pursue will supply us with a hundred problems 

 we can neither understand nor explain, yet the 

 factors of which we are bound to admit. But 

 there is undoubtedly a dislike to accepting any- 

 thing which cannot be proved by scientific means, 

 and a tendency to describe as " mysticism " a 

 terrible and damning term to apply to anything, 

 so its employers think ! any explanation which 

 postulates something more in the universe than 

 operations of a physical and chemical character. 



My own opinion is that the state of things 

 which we are considering finds its explanation in 

 history, and I propose to devote a short space to 



