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PHILOSOPHY AND SPECIALTIES. 21 
earnest believers in nihilism and socialism who display the 
energy of their beliefs by dynamite and flame. It happens 
that in those particular instances the teachings of prevalent 
religions are now in the same direction with those of Philos¬ 
ophy, but if the numerical relation of the believers should 
be reversed in any country, religions of nihilism or of com¬ 
munism would there be recognized as orthodox. This rule 
was established by the political Protestants of the sixteenth 
century and gave rise to the motto “Cujus regio ejus religio.” 
Its full meaning was that every realm, through its ruler, had 
the sole right to determine the form of religion that should 
exist within its boundaries. With the growth of the repub¬ 
lican spirit and greater recognition of the rights of majorities 
the rule mentioned would be made still more operative. 
Philosophy does not turn upon such relations of numbers. 
It is not defined by the preponderance of classes in a census 
nor metamorphosed by revolutions between the fanatics in 
administration and in opposition. 
Theology presented forces and factors in axioms and pos¬ 
tulates and permitted the study of logic and mathematics be¬ 
cause they do not detect errors in admitted axioms and pos¬ 
tulates. Verities by common consent were adopted a priori, 
which verities, belonging to a low stage of culture, were 
universal errors not belonging to nature, and therefore only 
to be explained by the extra-natural, which necessarily was 
supernatural. It is worthy of remark that all the super¬ 
natural instructions, whether Scandinavian, Hebrew, Hindu, 
Egyptian, American Indian, Grecian, or the multitude of 
others, about this world’s phenomena, have been found to 
be erroneous when men have learned anything about those 
phenomena, as, for instance, they have learned in the realms 
of geology and astronomy. By the law of chances it would 
seem that among the myriad guesses the truth might once 
have been hit upon, but from the beginning an “ irrepressible 
conflict ” between the natural and the supernatural has been 
manifest at all points. 
The teachers who ignored facts found it convenient to dis¬ 
course in sophistic terms from the species to the genus, and 
