THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM. 11 



point out at present, there arise grave conflicts in our 

 modern life, which urgently demand a settlement. 

 Our modern education, the outcome of our great 

 advance in knowledge, has a claim upon every 

 department of public and private life ; it would see 

 humanity raised, by the instrumentality of reason, to 

 that higher grade of culture, and, consequently, to 

 that better path towards happiness, which has been 

 opened out to us by the progress of modern science. 

 That aim, however, is vigorously opposed by the 

 influential parties who would detain the mind in 

 the exploded views of the Middle Ages, with regard 

 to the most important problems of life ; they linger 

 in the fold of traditional dogma, and would have 

 reason prostrate itself before their "higher revela- 

 tion." That is the condition of things, to a very 

 large extent, in theology and philosophy, in sociology 

 and jurisprudence. It is not that the motives of the 

 latter are to be attributed, as a rule, to pure self- 

 interest; they spring partly from ignorance of the 

 facts, and partly from an indolent acquiescence in 

 tradition. The most dangerous of the three great 

 enemies of reason and knowledge is not malice, but 

 ignorance, or, perhaps, indolence. The gods them- 

 selves still strive in vain against these two latter 

 influences when they have happily vanquished the 

 first. 



One of the main supports of that reactionary system 

 is still what we may call " anthropism." I designate 

 by this term " that powerful and world-wide group of 

 erroneous opinions which opposes the human organism 

 to the whole of the rest of nature, and represents it 

 to be the preordained end of the organic creation, an 

 entity essentially distinct from it, a god-like being." 



