EVOLUTION AND THE PRESENT AGE 277 
atmosphere often work great and unsuspected results. 
Take, for example, the disappearance of the belief in 
witchcraft. From prehistoric times down to the last 
quarter of the seventeenth century the entire human 
race took witchcraft for granted; to-day it has com- 
pletely disappeared from the thoughts of educated 
people in civilized countries. What has caused the 
change? Probably no human belief has so much re- 
corded testimony in its favour, if we consider quantity 
merely, as the belief in witchcraft; and certainly 
nobody has ever refuted all that testimony. Yet the 
human mind which once welcomed certain kinds of 
evidence has now become incurably inhospitable to 
them. When at Ipswich, in England, in 1664, an old 
woman named Rose Cullender muttered threats against 
a passing teamster and half an hour later his cart got 
stuck in passing through a gate, one of the most 
learned judges in England considered this sufficient 
proof that Rose had bewitched the gate, and she was 
accordingly hanged. To this kind of reasoning the 
whole community assented, except half a dozen eccen- 
tric sceptics. To-day you laugh at such so-called evi- 
dence, and your laugh shows that your mind has 
become utterly inhospitable to it. What has caused 
the change? Might it be Newton’s law of gravitation ? 
Directly, perhaps, no; yet in a certain sense, yes. 
The habit of appealing to known and familiar agencies 
instead of remote and fancied ones in order to explain 
phenomena is a habit which has been growing upon 
the civilized mind very rapidly since the seventeenth 
century, and every triumph, great and small, which that 
habit has achieved has helped to strengthen it in many 
more ways than we can detect and point out. The 
