liverance from this bondage.
The record of that deliverance is one of the most dramatic chapters in
the history of thought. Could one be surprised if, in the resentment
which long oppression had engendered and in the joy which overwhelming
victory had brought, scientific men now invaded the fields of their
opponents? They repaid their enemies in their own coin. There was with
some a disposition to deny that there exists an area of knowledge to
which the methods of metaphysicians and theologians might apply. This
was Comte's contention. Others conceded that there might be such an
area, but claimed that we can have no knowledge of it. Even the
theologians, after their first shock, were disposed to concede that,
concerning the magnitudes in which they were most interested, as for
example, God and soul, we have no knowledge of the sort which the method
of the physical sciences would give. They fell back upon Kant's
distinction of the two reasons and two worlds. They exaggerated the
sharpness of that distinction. They learned that the claim of
agnosticism was capable of being viewed as a line of defence, behind
which the transcendental magnitudes might be secure. Indeed, if one may
take Spencer as an example, it is not certain that this was not the
intent of some of the scientists in their strong assertion of
agnosticism. Spencer's later work reveals that he had no disposition to
deny that there are foundations for belief in a world lying behind the
phenomenal, and from which the latter gets its meaning.

Meantime, after positivism was buried and agnosticism dead, a thing was
achieved for which Comte himself laid the foundation and in which
Spencer as he grew older was ever more deeply interested. This was the
great development of the social sciences. Every aspect of the life of
man, including religion itself, has been drawn within the area of the
social sciences. To all these subjects, including religion, there have
been applied empirical methods which have the closest analogy with those
which have reigned in the physical sciences. Psychology has been made a
science of experiment, and the psychology of religion has been given a
place within the area of its observations and generalizations. The
ethical, and again the religious consciousness has been subjected to the
same kind of investigation to which all other aspects of consciousness
are subjected. Effort has been made to ascertain and classify the
phenomena of the religio