46 THEOPHOBIA AND NEMESIS 



fessedly did. Such persons, and there were many 

 of them, honestly were unable to believe, and said 

 so. A great deal of this was due to the attitude 

 of popular science at that time. It was in a hot 

 fit, and was going to explain everything, if not 

 to-day, at least to-morrow. Now, as Sir Oliver 

 Lodge told us before the war, in his book Con- 

 tinuity, we are in a cold fit and we seem only to 

 know that nothing can be known. Sir Arthur 

 Conan Doyle, best known as the creator of 

 Sherlock Holmes, tells us in a recent book from 

 which I shall have further to quote (The New 

 Revelation, Hodder and Stoughton, 1918) : " When 

 I had finished my medical education in 1882, I 

 found myself, like many young medical men, a 

 convinced materialist as regards our personal 

 destiny." With the facts contained in this 

 statement I fully agree. The date in question is 

 almost exactly that at which I also became a 

 qualified medical man, and I, and I fancy most 

 of my generation, believed ourselves to be agnostics 

 if not atheists. It was the atmosphere of the 

 time, and so strong as with difficulty to be resisted 

 by those who resorted to the Universities The 

 point which I want to make is that during the 

 latter part of the Victorian period we had come 

 to a generation of intellectuals practically devoid 

 of religion and followed in that respect by that 

 always larger portion of any generation which, 

 not having brains to think for itself, yet desiring 

 to follow the intellectual motif of the day, adopts 

 whatever is the fashionable attitude for the mo- 

 ment towards unseen things. Yesterday it was 



