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DK. SILYANUS P. THOMPSON, F.E.S., ON 



grows, and his growth is effected hy food, climate, air and light, 

 independently of his consciousness or will. The development 

 of his mind and of his moral nature for good or ill is very 

 largely determined by his surroundings. What is true of the 

 individual is true also of the race ; and its development 

 physical, intellectual, moral and religions, is, whether 

 acknowledged or not, unquestionably dependent upon environ- 

 ment. It is impossible that it should be otherwise. The very 

 condition of life is changed. Decay and death are processes 

 inseparable in the order of nature from the possibility of life. 

 And this is true also of intellectual and religious life. No 

 advance in thought is possible without involving some change, 

 some abandonment of earlier, less advanced thought. In ethics 

 as in morals, men advance as " on stepping stones from their 

 dead selves." In religious thought no progress is possible, save 

 by the renunciation of some earlier beliefs, once held sacred in 

 the childhood of the race. Not that eternal truth changes, but 

 man's appreciation or perception of it does. Newer revelations 

 supersede old ones, or furnish proof that part of that which, in 

 the childhood of the race, had been taken for revelation was 

 rather revelation misinterpreted by human minds ; treasure 

 in earthen vessels ; wisdom but half understood, and admixed 

 with human imagination. The problems of one age differ from 

 those of another : the temptations of one age may differ from 

 those of another. It may be easy to mistake, amid different 

 surroundings, the precise import of words uttered to men of a 

 former time ; for words themselves change their meanings and 

 connote different ideas to men of different generations. If for 

 no other reason than this, it is needful from time to time that 

 there should be restatements of the things held to be true ; for 

 if the statement persists when the meanings of its terms have 

 changed, the statement ceases to be entirely true even though 

 the truth it is supposed to state remains unchanged. All this 

 may be admitted, nay, must be admitted, by the reverent and 

 intelligent seeker after truth. And the greater his reverence 1 

 for truth, the more freely will he make the admission. 



The fact is that here, in the twentieth century, we do not 

 stand precisely in the same position as our fathers stood in the 

 nineteenth, or our forefathers in the centuries before. The steam- 

 engine and the printing-press, the telegraph and the dynamo, 

 the telescope and the microscope, the camera and the spectro- 

 scope, have wrought revolutions not only in the material aspect 

 of town and country but in the thoughts of men concerning the 

 material world in which they live. During the last sixty years 



