108 THE RECONCILIATION. 



Though it has not seemed so to those who made it, every step 

 in advance has been a step towards both the natural and the 

 supernatural. The better interpretation of each phenome- 

 non has been, on the one hand, the rejection of a cause that 

 was relatively conceivable in its nature but unknown in the 

 order of its actions, and, on the other hand, the adoption of 

 a cause that was known in the order of its actions but rela- 

 tively inconceivable in its nature. The first advance out of 

 universal fetishism, manifestly involved the conception of 

 agencies less assimilable to the familiar agencies of men and 

 animals, and therefore less understood; while, at the same 

 time, such newly-conceived agencies in so far as they were 

 distinguished by their uniform effects, were better under- 

 stood than those they replaced. All subsequent advances 

 display the same double result. Every deeper and more 

 general power arrived at as a cause of phenomena, has been 

 at once less comprehensible than the special ones it super- 

 seded, in the sense of being less definitely representable in 

 thought; while it has been more comprehensible in the 

 sense that its actions have been more completely predicable. 

 The progress has thus been as much towards the establish- 

 ment of a positively unknown as towards the establishment 

 of a positively known. Though as knowledge approaches its 

 culmination, every unaccountable and seemingly supernatu- 

 ral fact, is brought into the category of facts that are ac- 

 countable or natural; yet, at the same time, all accountable 

 or natural facts are proved to be in their ultimate genesis un- 

 accountable and supernatural. And so there arise two anti- 

 thetical states of mind, answering to the opposite sides of 

 that existence about which we think. While our conscious- 

 ness of Nature under the one aspect constitutes Science, 

 our consciousness of it under the other aspect constitutes 

 Religion. 



Otherwise contemplating the facts, we may say that Re- 

 ligion and Science have been undergoing a slow differentia- 

 tion; and that their ceaseless conflicts have been due to the 



