2i8 SCIENCE AND THE HUMAN MIND 



complete in itself, which satisfied the majority of their 

 followers, and was in accord with nature, as appearing 

 in their daily life. The new facts brought to light 

 in the upheaval of the Renaissance, although they put 

 out of gear several minor parts of the great mediaeval 

 scheme of salvation, were not sufficient of themselves 

 to justify or to permit the reconstruction of a whole 

 new consistent model of theological opinion and re- 

 ligious practice. The mass of mankind require 

 emphatic warrant for their beliefs, and cannot be 

 reconciled to the twilight of faith in which greater 

 minds can soberly acquiesce. It may be perfectly true 

 that there is sometimes more faith in honest doubt than 

 in the majority of oft-repeated creeds ; but this is not a 

 proposition of general application, as the great Lincoln- 

 shire poet and mystic another typical Anglo-Dane 

 well knew. Therefore those people may have been 

 well advised who tried blindly to maintain the ancient 

 beliefs until a time came when it should be possible 

 to put something more satisfying than mere negation 

 in their place. 



The triumph of Copernicus, the success of Newton 

 in interpreting the phenomena of the heavens, led up 

 to the overestimate of the power of their methods 

 by the French Encyclopaedists, who at once conceived 

 a mind competent to calculate the whole of the future 

 history of the world from a knowledge of the initial 

 configuration and velocities of the masses. At each 

 step made, this joyful overestimate of the possi- 

 bilities of mechanism becomes a marked feature of 

 contemporary thought. As each piece of knowledge 

 becomes assimilated, it is seen that old problems are 

 in their essence unaltered ; the poet, the seer and the 



