rality is not based on that. But it will be worth our while to show
that Mr. Huxley and his brethren are under a serious misapprehension
when they suppose that having dispossessed theology of a property which
no sane man believes it ever possessed, they are at once entitled to
appropriate the same themselves in the name of physical science. We
shall see that there is a third claimant in the field of whom the
extremists on either side appear to have lost sight, and that when the
case is fully set forth a verdict in its favour will be inevitable.
Meanwhile, let us look at the scientific claim. Is the criterion of
conduct in the custody of the scientific experimenter? If a man wanted
to know whether a certain act was good, bad or indifferent, such a
course of conduct permissible or not, is he to consult the biologist or
the chemist?

I venture to affirm, in language of the most explicitness, that
physical science can know absolutely nothing about morality; that
ethics are a matter of profound indifference to it, that, as Diderot,
the encyclopaedist--certainly not suspect in such matters--says, "To
science there can be no question of the unclean or the unchaste". You
might as well ask a physician for an opinion about law as to put a case
of conscience before an astronomer.

There has been, as a matter of fact, an extraordinary amount of loose
thinking concerning the precise relations between science, ethics and
religion. The churches, having become irretrievably discredited in
their doctrinal teaching (their very ministers, in the persons of
Stanley and Jowett, openly avowing disbelief in their articles and
creeds), religion has come to be looked upon as a sort of no man's
land, and therefore the legitimate property of the first occupier.
Science, as the enterprising agency _par excellence_ of the century,
has stepped in, and in claiming to exhaustively explain religion,
virtually claims to have simultaneously annexed morality, erroneously
looked upon as a department of religion.

But a little more careful thinking ought to convince the most eager of
the advance-agents of physical science that the discipline they serve
so loyally is altogether unconcerned with the moral life, and wholly
incompetent to deal with its problems. Mr. Frederic Harrison once
asked, and with extreme pertinence, what the mere dissector of frogs
could claim to know of the facts of morality and religion? Positively
nothing, _as such_, and i