s before I pass to my own conclusions. Let me
call it the "Survival theory," for brevity's sake.

The pivot round which the religious life, as we have traced it,
revolves, is the interest of the individual in his private personal
destiny. Religion, in short, is a monumental chapter in the history of
human egotism. The gods believed in--whether by crude savages or by
men disciplined intellectually--agree with each other in recognizing
personal calls. Religious thought is carried on in terms of
personality, this being, in the world of religion, the one fundamental
fact. To-day, quite as much as at any previous age, the religious
individual tells you that the divine meets him on the basis of his
personal concerns.

Science, on the other hand, has ended by utterly repudiating the
personal point of view. She catalogues her elements and records her
laws indifferent as to what purpose may be shown forth by them, and
constructs her theories quite careless of their bearing on human
anxieties and fates. Though the scientist may individually nourish a
religion, and be a theist in his irresponsible hours, the days are over
when it could be said that for Science herself the heavens declare the
glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Our solar
system, with its harmonies, is seen now as but one passing case of a
certain sort of moving equilibrium in the heavens, realized by a local
accident in an appalling wilderness of worlds where no life can exist.
In a span of time which as a cosmic interval will count but as an hour,
it will have ceased to be. The Darwinian notion of chance production,
and subsequent destruction, speedy or deferred, applies to the largest
as well as to the smallest facts. It is impossible, in the present
temper of the scientific imagination, to find in the driftings of the
cosmic atoms, whether they work on the universal or on the particular
scale, anything but a kind of aimless weather, doing and undoing,
achieving no proper history, and leaving no result. Nature has no one
distinguishable ultimate tendency with which it is possible to feel a
sympathy. In the vast rhythm of her processes, as the scientific mind
now follows them, she appears to cancel herself. The books of natural
theology which satisfied the intellects of our grandfathers seem to us
quite grotesque,[334] representing, as they did, a God who conformed
the largest things of nature to the paltriest of our private wants.
T