unities. Even to-day books are written about "the
conflict between religion and science," and other books are written
with intent to reconcile the two presumed antagonists. But when we look
beneath the surface of things, we see that in reality there has
never been any conflict between religion and science, nor is any
reconciliation called for where harmony has always existed. The real
historical conflict, which has been thus curiously misnamed, has been
the conflict between the more-crude opinions belonging to the science of
an earlier age and the less-crude opinions belonging to the science of
a later age. In the course of this contest the more-crude opinions
have usually been defended in the name of religion, and the less-crude
opinions have invariably won the victory; but religion itself, which is
not concerned with opinion, but with the aspiration which leads us to
strive after a purer and holier life, has seldom or never been attacked.
On the contrary, the scientific men who have conducted the battle on
behalf of the less-crude opinions have generally been influenced by
this religious aspiration quite as strongly as the apologists of the
more-crude opinions, and so far from religious feeling having been
weakened by their perennial series of victories, it has apparently been
growing deeper and stronger all the time. The religious sense is as yet
too feebly developed in most of us; but certainly in no preceding age
have men taken up the work of life with more earnestness or with more
real faith in the unseen than at the present day, when so much of what
was once deemed all-important knowledge has been consigned to the limbo
of mythology.

The more-crude theories of early times are to be chiefly distinguished
from the less-crude theories of to-day as being largely the products
of random guesswork. Hypothesis, or guesswork, indeed, lies at the
foundation of all scientific knowledge. The riddle of the universe, like
less important riddles, is unravelled only by approximative trials, and
the most brilliant discoverers have usually been the bravest guessers.
Kepler's laws were the result of indefatigable guessing, and so, in
a somewhat different sense, was the wave-theory of light. But the
guesswork of scientific inquirers is very different now from what it was
in older times. In the first place, we have slowly learned that a guess
must be verified before it can be accepted as a sound theory; and,
secondly, so many truths