JOHN LANGDON-DAVIES 213 



of adventure: it is that, whether rationahsts like it 

 or not, man is a beheving animal, and the really en- 

 lightened man is not the one who believes nothing, 

 but the man who founds his belief on the firmest rock 

 of reality. Such a man sees in the scientific picture 

 of the universe which happens to be painted in his age 

 the most perfect foundations for his beliefs; and to 

 what is known he adds an overbelief, something which 

 cannot be proved, but which, on the other hand, can- 

 not be disproved by the body of natural knowledge on 

 which it is built. This overbelief is a man's religion; 

 any overbelief which can be disproved by what science 

 can show to be true is his superstition. 



A man's overbelief then depends upon his knowl- 

 edge of the universe; in so far as he is ignorant about 

 the universe, that far is his religion likely to be 

 valueless to himself and to every one else. For the 

 modern man to hold overbeliefs without a knowledge 

 of the historic books of his Bible, of Copernicus, 

 Galileo, Newton is as ridiculous as for a fundamen- 

 talist to doubt Darwin without having read Genesis. 



We have got so used to the idea that our beliefs 

 or faith consist in holding for true those things that 

 we have neither time nor training nor courage to ex- 

 amine logically, that this idea of founding our over- 

 belief, our religion, on a knowledge of the universe 

 derived from science may seem fantastic and impos- 

 sible. We haven't the time to study the universe, we 

 may complain; and yet we want to believe. The truly 

 great Victorian, W. K. Clifford, imagines just such 

 a man as this: "'But,' says one, 'I am a busy man; 

 I have no time for the long course of study which 

 would be necessary to make fne in any degree a com- 



