Biology's Contribution to a Theory of Morals 99 



is schooling students away from the ability to take broad 

 expanses of diverse natural facts into a single view 

 and then to push analysis under perpetual guidance of 

 the dominating whole. Instead of treating jocularly, 

 as we have been wont to do, these religious vagaries, 

 is there not ample ground in the nature of the case 

 for taking them as proof that man's religion-producing 

 instincts are bound to assert themselves in one way 

 or another, and that if they are not recognized and 

 guided to some extent by reason, by science, they are 

 prone to develop into such misshapen forms, even such 

 monstrosities, as we are seeing? Surely it is not the 

 spirit of science at its best to treat all phenomena as a 

 joke that do not come easily within its pre-established 

 doctrinal boundaries. If there is one thing more than 

 any other that ought to characterize science as con- 

 trasted with dogma, it should be its perfect readiness 

 to revise its fundamental conceptions at the behest of 

 indubitable evidence. 



That the great range of manifestations which has 

 Billy Sundayism at one end of one main axis and the 

 mystical tendencies in liberal Christianity at the other; 

 and on another axis has Christian Science at one end 

 and the transplantation of Oriental occultism into the 

 west at the other end,, is in reality one coherent system 

 of phenomena, seems not to have attracted the atten- 

 tion of many observers. And how many biologists, or 

 even sociologists, are taking notice of the great vogue 

 in this country of writings on astrology and are con- 



