y of evidence that a
psychic conversion will effect an actual revolution in the whole way
of living of the victim or patient, as you like it. William James,
in his "Varieties of Religious Experience," established that pretty
definitely. When it comes to groups, races, nations, the outlook is
wholly different. There is a conflict of so many and diverse habits
and interests, beliefs and prejudices, that hope for some common
merely intellectual solvent for all of them is rather forlorn. If at
all, the resolution of the conflict will come by a pooling of actual
powers and interests, in which the religion of science will play
the great part of the Liberator of mankind from the whole system of
torments that have made the way of all flesh a path of rocks along
which a manacled prisoner crawls to his doom.

SCIENCE AND HUMAN NATURE

Science has a future. The religion of science has a future. Can
science assure us that human nature, in spite of its beast-brute-slave
origins holds the possibility of a genuine transformation of its
texture? Can Fate's stranglehold upon us be broken? There will be
certainly a tremendous, an overwhelming increase in the general
stock of informations we call physics and chemistry and biology. An
abundance of new comforts, novel sensations, fresh experiences, and
breath-bereaving devices that will thrill or heal, will follow of
course in their wake. The religion of science will infiltrate
and penetrate and permeate by its capillary action the barbaric
superstitions, the ridiculous rites, the unsanitary insanities of our
social systems.

But what about the poor human soul itself, with its inherent vices
and virtues, its fears and indulgences, audacities and nobilities,
jealousies, shames, blunders, incurable likes, cravings and diseases?
Can science change the texture of the slave and careerist, if they
represent the subnormal and the abnormal? What about the Becky Sharps,
the Mark Tapleys, and Tom Pinches, not to speak of the Nicholas
Nicklebys and the Hamlets, the Micawbers and the Falstaffs? What
future have they as they recur in the generations? Indeed, does not
the very fact of their recurrence, of them and of the hundreds of
other types and temperaments, point implacably to the conclusion to
which the historian, the philosopher and the biologist have driven us:
that in the grip of an endless chain of pasts the human soul has no
future?

That may appear an irrelevant, an immaterial, and an i