possible without the falsity of religion, as duty may be done
with no other incentive than its visible consequences on the people
around us, so life may be lived in honour and closed in peace with no
other inspiration than comes from the contemplation of the human stream
from which we emerge and into which we finally go.

CHAPTER XV.

ATHEISM INEVITABLE.

Between Theism and Atheism the logical mind may halt, but it cannot rest
for long, and in the end the logic of fact works its way. Compromise,
while it may delay the end without preventing its inevitability, is
quite out of place in matters of the intellect. In the world of practice
compromise is often unavoidable, but in that of ideas the sole concern
should be for truth. When Whately said that the man who commenced by
loving Christianity more than truth would continue by loving his own
sect more than any other, and end by loving himself more than all, he
placed his finger on the great moral danger of compromise where opinion
is concerned. It begins, ostensibly, by considering the respect due to
an opponent's case, it continues by sacrificing the respect that is due
one's own, and it ends by giving a new sense of value to the very
opinion it aims at destroying. "No quarter" is the only sound rule in
intellectual warfare, where to take prisoners is only one degree less
dishonouring than to be taken captive oneself. And the value of an
opinion is never wholly in the opinion itself. No small part of its
worth is derived from the way in which it is held, and the importance
which is placed upon it.

When Professor Tylor said that the deepest of all divisions in the
history of human thought was that which divided Animism from
Materialism, he was saying what I have been endeavouring to say, in
another manner, in the foregoing pages. Atheism and supernaturalism are
fundamental divisions in human thought, and divisions that connote an
irreconcilable antagonism. The terms not only mark a division, they are
the badges of a movement, the indication of a pilgrimage. Dr. Tylor's
own work and the work of his fellow labourers tell the story in detail,
and although no one is in a position to write "finis" to it, there is no
doubt as to what its end will be. And the manner of the pilgrimage is
quite plain. The starting point is the creation by the befogged
ignorance of primitive man of that welter of ghosts and gods which make
so much of early existence a veritable nightmar