natures and astrological fancies, as undeserving the name of even primitive science, we have the Iatrochemical school of the seventeenth century, in which the reactions of the acid and alkali, and various other chemical principles and processes, explained every thing; then, in the first half of the eighteenth century, the mechanical school of Borelli, and the corpuscular hypothesis of Descartes, followed by the Vital Fluid theory, in which all the peculiar functions of life are supposed to depend upon a subtile ethereal substance diffused through the organism, this again yielding to the two rival theories of modern physiology, the Psychical and the Physical theories; one maintaining an immaterial vital principle, the other that the processes of life are but transformations of the various physical forces.1

Electricity similarly was first spoken of as a fluid, then as a force, now as an energy or motion readily converted into thermal, molar, or molecular motion of various kinds. To explain heat we have had the phlogistic, the caloric, and now the molecular motion theory. For light, we have had the Emission and the Undulatory theories; for the heavens, the Ptolemaic and the Copernican systems; in regard to forces, the Cartesian and the Newtonian conceptions. In the presence of the new dynamics, the new botany, the new chemistry of to-day, in the presence especially of those theo

1 Whewell's "History of Scientific Ideas," book ix, chap. ii.

ries most revolutionary to all scientific ideas-the natural selection and the evolution hypotheses-the natural philosopher of fifty years ago would feel that there was nothing for him to do but to learn his science over again, and learn it all differently. Great as have been the theologic changes in the last century, they are more than matched by the shiftings of scientific theory. If in former times the best men of science have made as many errors as it is now proved that they have, is it likely that the dicta of the present school of scientists are to remain forever unshaken? If the past errors, if the present possibility of error in some things, do not interfere, nevertheless, with the substantial trustworthiness and validity of present science, why should they with the trustworthiness and validity of religion?

CHAPTER VII.

POSITIVE SCIENTIFIC PROOFS OF RELIGION.

In the previous chapters I endeavored to show that, if the foundations of religion are insecure, those of science, also, for the same reasons and in the same way, are uncertain. Not only can this negative exposition be made, but positively it can be shown that religion has valid evidences similar to those of science. Physical investigation can claim no monopoly of scientific method; for, as Herbert Spencer says, it is nothing different from ordinary reasoning, but simply the processes of commonsense carried out with precision. Let us consider, then, the

SCIENTIFIC FOUNDATION OF RELIGION.

The starting-point of all science is in the observation of Nature. The various senses, sight, hearing, smell, touch, perceive various objects-star, rock, water, plant, animal; and notice their varied qualities, heat and cold, hardness, softness, perfumes, sounds, forms, etc. These are compared ;

their likenesses and differences noted. Then classifications are formed-families, species, substances, forces, laws-and, as the result of these inductions, general propositions are laid down, the general principle ruling in this inductive process being to classify together the like things, separating them from the unlike, and to interpret the unknown by the known, not vice versa.

Now, the course of religious thought has been the same. It may not have been aware that it started with observation, and proceeded by induction, any more than M. Jourdain knew that he talked prose. It may even have claimed to reach its knowledge entirely through other sources. Nevertheless, like science, its work has been, for the most part, the interpretation of the facts of Nature, only it has taken them up with other aim, and pursued them in another direction. Mr. Huxley himself, urging upon clergymen the study of science, points this out. "The theories of religion," he says, "like all other theories, are professedly based upon matters of fact."1

If we examine even the rudest forms of religion, we shall find their genesis, as Mr. Tylor says,' in "the plain evidence of men's senses, as interpreted by a fairly consistent and rational primitive philosophy." Mr. Tylor has explained, at length, the various processes and reasonings which suggest "Lay Sermons," p. 60.

2" Primitive Culture," p. 387.

to the savage the doctrine of spiritual beings. To sum them up, they are as follows: Thinking men, at a low level of culture, observing the strange phenomena of sleep, trance, dreams, disease, death, are deeply impressed by them, and seek to account for them. What makes the difference between a live and a dead body-a conscious and an unconscious man? What are these human shapes which appear in visions? Looking at these marvelous facts, the ancient savage philosophers made the induction of what we may call an apparitional soul, or ghost-soul -an unsubstantial human image or shadow-the cause of life and thought, independently possessing the personal consciousness and volition of its corporeal owner, past or present, and able to leave the body and flash swiftly from place to place.

This conception of spiritual beings as the causes of life and motion once attained to, two great postulates of religion were natural inferences from it. As the soul or spiritual being was able to leave the body during life, and appeared in dreams after death, it was not involved in the destruction of the body at death, but continued to live on.

This was enough to establish for them the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. Then, as they looked upon the mighty marvels of earth and sky, so full of awe to primitive man, the grand conception of Divine Beings was reached.

The blazing sun which warmed and lighted man; the cloud which swallowed up the sun in the