s
been generally distinguishable by some marked intellectual development,
by some strong movement which has taken deep hold of the minds of men.
Thus the Renascimento period was followed by the century of the
Reformation, and that again by the inauguration of the era of modern
philosophy, while the eighteenth century has been claimed as the
_Saeculum Rationalisticum_, the age of rationalism, in which the claims
of reason were pushed to the forefront in the domains of religion and
politics. Nothing remained after that but an age of physical science,
and surely enough has been given us in the nineteenth century which may
with equal accuracy be termed the _Saeculum Scientificum_.

It cannot be doubted that a sort of mental intoxication has been set up
as a result of the extraordinary successes which have rewarded the
efforts of scientific investigators. Everything now-a-days is
expressed in terms of science and its formulae. Evolution is the
keynote to the learning of the age. Thus Mr. Spencer's system of the
Synthetic Philosophy is a bold and comprehensive attempt to take up the
whole knowable, and express it anew in the language of development. It
is emphatically, professedly, the philosophy of evolution, the rigid
application of a purely scientific formula to everything capable of
philosophical treatment. Now, having discussed the question of ethics
and religion, their distinction and their intimate relations; having
shown how that religion comes as the crown and glory of the ethical
life, the transfiguration of the ethical ideal and the most powerful
stimulus towards the realisation in practice of what is conceived as
theoretically desirable, it remains for us to complete our treatment of
this aspect of the ethical problem and determine the relations existing
between morals and science.

This question we conceive to be of vital importance. Just as we must
be inexorable in refusing to base our ethic on religion, and still less
on theology, so must we be equally determined in repudiating the claim
often put forward, that morality is a department of physics, or in any
way founded on physical science. The scientific professor, feeling the
ground strong under his feet, and sure of the applause of his very
numerous public, has made a bold bid for the control of the moral
order. He has made a serious attempt to capture the ethical world, and
to coerce morality into obedience to the inflexible formulae of
physics.