and arise out of the
impersonal agency of spatially existent things. In what sharp contrast
is this view of nature to the interpretation primitive man made for
himself when he read his own emotions and desires into the things
around him. Caprice and whim have no place in this regular procession
of the heavens.

Impersonal agency conquered, not only in man's conception of the larger
relations of bodies to one another, but also in his idea of those
events, like sickness and death, which strike nearer home. While the
agencies at work may not be considered mechanical, they are yet {119}
seen to be natural and regular in their working. The characteristic of
the personal agency to which religion makes appeal is that it
disregards space; it works here and there at its own will and leaps
across intervening distances as though they had no reality. Just
because it is spaceless, it is supernatural. It cannot be localized,
and brought into definite relations with other things in the universe.
The more we conceive the universe as a spatial, self-contained system
of things and processes, the more it excludes the presence of an agency
which intervenes in it but is not really of it. So long as events can
be explained as the effects of the natural working of things in nature,
the assumption of a supernatural agent is unmotived.

The conflict between science and religion has thus passed beyond the
stage where a primitive and childish idea of the extent and origins of
the visible world struggled against a more rational and better-founded
outlook. No educated man to-day would seriously defend the cosmical
theories of ancient times. It is simply absurd to deny that we have
outgrown them once and for all. But this first victory of science only
involved the capture of the weakest outposts of the religious view of
the world. The heart of traditional religion seems to be the belief in
a personal, superhuman agency at work in nature or, rather, upon
nature. Even the religious mind, however, admits that investigation
has shown that there is a routine aspect to nature which covers the
ordinary course of events. The final crux of the problem comes, then,
to be whether there is good reason to believe that there are unusual
events which cannot be accounted for by natural conditions. The
victorious career of science has undoubtedly cast {120} suspicion upon
the occurrence of events which cannot be explained by means of regular
changes