to be applied to metaphysics, to sociology, to psychology; and the day
will assuredly come when the human race will analyse the laws which
govern progress, which regulate the exact development of religion and
morality.

The demolition of credulity is, as I have said, a wholly desirable and
beneficial thing. Most intelligent people have found some happiness in
learning that the dealings of God--that is, the creative and originative
power behind the universe--are at all events not whimsical, however
unintelligible they may be. No one at all events is now required to
reconcile with his religious faith a detailed belief in the Mosaic
cosmogony, or to accept the fact that a Hebrew prophet was enabled to
summon bears from a wood to tear to pieces some unhappy boys who found
food for mirth in his personal appearance. That is a pure gain. But
side by side with this entirely wholesome process, there are a good
many people who have thrown overboard, together with their credulity, a
quality of a far higher and nobler kind, which may be called faith. Men
who have seen many mysteries explained, and many dark riddles solved in
nature, have fallen into what is called materialism, from the mistaken
idea that the explanation of material phenomena will hold good for
the discernment of abstract phenomena. Yet any one who approaches the
results of scientific investigation in a philosophical and a poetical
spirit, sees clearly enough that nothing has been attempted but
analysis, and that the mystery which surrounds us is only thrust a
little further off, while the darkness is as impenetrable and profound
as ever. All that we have learnt is how natural law works; we have
not come near to learning why it works as it does. All we have really
acquired is a knowledge that the audacious and unsatisfactory theories,
such, for instance, as the old-fashioned scheme of redemption, by which
men have attempted with a pathetic hopefulness to justify the ways
of God to man, are, and are bound to be, despairingly incomplete. The
danger of the scientific spirit is not that it is too agnostic, but that
it is not agnostic enough: it professes to account for everything when
it only has a very few of the data in its grasp. The materialistic
philosophy tends to be a tyranny which menaces liberty of thought. Every
one has a right to deduce what theory he can from his own experience.
The one thing that we have no sort of right to do is to enforce that
theory upo