that
case, would the belief in the supernatural have ever existed? Would the
thousand and one 'spiritual beings' of primitive society have ever had
being? And if not called into being then, from what other source could
they have been derived? Is there anything in later scientific knowledge
that would ever have suggested the supernatural? We know there is not;
we know that the whole of modern science is an emphatic protest against
its existence. Unfortunately the scientist does not come first, but
last; and by the time he appears, the supernatural has made good its
foothold; it has permeated human institutions, and has bitten so deeply
into habits of thought as to make its eradication the most difficult of
all tasks.

Let us carry our imagining yet a step further. Imagine that even after
primitive ignorance had created the supernatural, it had come to an
abrupt stop when man had emerged from the purely savage stage. Suppose a
generation born, not without knowledge of what their progenitors
believed, but with a sufficient knowledge of their own to correct their
ancestor's errors. Suppose that generation in a position to recognise
disease, insanity, delusion, hysteria, hallucination for what they are.
Assume them to be under no delusion concerning the nature of man,
physically or mentally. Would the religious idea have persisted in the
way that it has done? Granted religion would still have continued to
exist as an ultimate philosophy of nature that appealed to some minds,
as other systems of philosophy number their disciples, would it have
been the dominating power it has been? What under such conditions would
have become of that evidence for the supernatural, accepted generation
after generation, but which is now rejected by all educated minds? Where
would have been that long array of seers, prophets, illuminants, whose
credentials have been found in states of mind that are now seen to have
been pathological in character? For remember it was not always--very
seldom, in fact--the justice, or the reasonableness of the teachings set
forth, that won support, but generally the 'signs and wonders' that were
pointed to as evidence of the divine commission of the teachers. Assume,
then, that these 'signs and wonders' had been wanting, and that for
thousands of years people had looked at natural phenomena from the point
of view of the educated mind of to-day, what would have been the present
position of the religious idea? Would