Nineteenth-Century Science and Religion 155 



energy, and chemical energy, can be transformed into motion and 

 vice versa, and according to which the same quality of mechanical 

 power is always equal to a certain quantity of those forms of 

 energies, brought forward a new argument in favour of materialism 

 and the mechanical conception of the world which explains all 

 phenomena by the laws of motion. 



3. The progress of physiology showed that the chemical 

 changes of organisms, the exchanges between these and their 

 surroundings, and the relations between animal heat and muscular 

 labour, enter also into the great law of the conservation of energy. 



4. The theory of evolution gave rise to the hope that it would 

 be possible to explain on mechanical lines not merely the origin and 

 transformation of living species, but also the genesis of psychic life 

 and human society, eliminating the intervention of supernatural 

 causes. 



5. Psychology, by becoming an experimental science, brought 

 out the connection between psychic phenomena and the functioning 

 of the nervous system, and led to the hope that it would be possible 

 to formulate mathematically with necessitatory laws even the life of 

 consciousness, which until then had been the impregnable rock of 

 spiritual theories. 



6. Pathological psychology, by experimenting on hypnotic 

 phenomena, on the subconscious mind and on changes in per- 

 sonality, and by establishing their affinity with mystic phenomena, 

 seemed to take from the latter their character of supernatural 

 revelations. 



7. Historical, ethnological, and sociological studies of primi- 

 tive religions explained such phenomena as being due to the same 

 natural, biological, and psychological causes as explained other 

 social facts. Of special note was the school of Durkheim, which, 

 overturning the social philosophy of Comte, regarded religion as a 

 deification of society, brought into existence through the individual 

 consciousness at solemn moments in the collective life, 



8. The historical criticism of the Gospels, carried out on 

 scientific lines, and the study of the historical formation of dogmas, 

 helped to shake the belief in superna^^ural revelation. 



5. Beginnings of the Reaction against Naturalism 



While science was thus following its ascending curve, the 

 germs of reaction against naturalism were coming to maturity in 

 its own bosom. 



