talked like an angel, and did nothing." And men may, in the midst of many opportunities, remain ignorant; but generally, when knowledge is received, when the mind really moves, there is a moral elevation, a higher civilization is created.

In a thoughtful paper entitled "Civilization in Danger," in the latest Hibbert Journal, René L. Gérard seems to contend for views directly opposed to those I have been defending. He says "that to believe that philosophic or religious doctrines create morals or civilization is a seductive and fatal error." He maintains that it is not because a people possess noble beliefs, broad and generous ideas, that it is healthy and happy, but rather that, being healthy and happy, it adopts or invents noble beliefs and generous ideas. And further he affirms that a people, by instinct, unconsciously (here he follows Bergson), will draw upon the vast moral and intellectual acquisitions of the past, the rich experience of all the ages, for the beliefs and ideas they need.

There is a profound truth in these suggestions, but is it the whole truth? Professor Gérard admits that noble beliefs and great thoughts are absolutely necessary, that they assure the survival of a people. And he affirms that a healthy people will adopt these ideas "instinctively, unconsciously." They will draw them from the intellectual and spiritual acquisitions of the past, the accumulated experience of the ages. But are not these acquisitions, the great and universal "acceptances" or beliefs, largely the fruit of the gigantic toil of the mighty thinkers of the past, like Isaiah, Socrates, Jesus, Paul, St. Augustine, Luther?

Professor Gérard contends that when the vital instinct of a people is healthy and vigorous it readily suggests to the people the religious and philosophic doctrines it needs to assure its survival. Let us see if this be so. I will take the same illustration that Professor Gérard uses. The barbarians who destroyed the Roman Empire were a people in whom the vital instinct was pure and strong. They were uneducated, but they adopted Christianity, a new religion. And this new religion, with its ideas of brotherhood and forgiveness, was distinctly opposed to their religious ideas of conquest and cruelty. But in receiving or adopting this new religion they were impressed, educated, elevated, (for the Christian missionaries came with the Bible in one hand "and Virgil in the other").

They ascended to a higher level of morals and civilization.

These were the ideas they needed. But if there had been no Christianity, no new religion, no Virgil, would they have invented these ideas, as Professor Gérard says they would? Ideas and beliefs do not grow on the bushes. Is it not most probable that if these new ideas had not been ready for their adoption the barbarians would have remained at the same low level? Without these ideas and teachers there could have been no progress.

Professor Bergson says that the instinct of the hymenopteræ is superior to the intellect of man. Can such a statement be taken seriously? Compare the work of the ants and bees with the proud achievements of the human reason. If instinct is the appropriate organ for apprehending reality, the discovery of truth, why should it be given in such measure to ants and bees, which care not to exercise it, whose range of freedom is so small? How comes it that man, who has a passion for the discovery of truth, has so little of this divine faculty of instinct, the truth-discovering faculty (I mean of course the hard and fast lines of instinct)? Can Bergson or Gérard explain this paradox?

A healthy, vigorous people will have constantly new material, intellectual and spiritual wants or necessities. There must be, then, new and fertile philosophic ideas crystallizing into religious beliefs and ideals. And the sure proof of vitality in a people is the adapting of these new ideas to its new physical, intellectual and spiritual

wants.

But unconscious instinct cannot supply these ideas and ideals. Here surely is the inevitable task of the thinker. Professor Gérard even admits that "the role of the conscious reason is, in spite of all, the higher role." We need the inspiration of instinct, of feeling, at times, but we must not forget that the most perfect thing, the most indispensable evolved on this planet is the human intellect.

And when M. Bergson affirms that the sphere of the intellect is "matter" and Professor James, following him, says that its province is "mere surfaces," it seems to me a discrediting of that great faculty which rose to its fulness in Socrates, Isaiah, Jesus, Paul, Pascal, Newton, Darwin. Is not the intellect a metaphysical faculty? And are not its problems metaphysical as well as physical, depths as well as "surfaces"? Show me great art, great music, great poetry, great sculpture that has not the intellectual, the metaphysical strand. Are not the Apollo Belvedere, the Divine Comedy, the Mona Lisa, the C Minor Sonata as well as Newton's laws, in part at least,

the fruit of intellect? Draw out the intellectual threads, and would you not destroy the integrity of the whole garment?

I think it will be conceded that religion will take a great step forward if philosophy shall touch the ground of reality, if it shall find a true answer to some of those questions which ever press upon the human spirit; if it shall rise above a mere rephrasing of its attitude to a consciousness of our mental demands.

I maintain it is not the function of religion to teach any theory of the world, any truth. This does not mean that truth is indifferent in religion, for that would imply that education and science are valueless. Ignorance makes for poverty and vice. But there is no coming to independent truth or knowledge, truths about real things, through a revelation from within, through intuition. Truth is attained only by observation, experiment, analysis, search, the most patient and exact generalization. Man's religion is of the imagination and the heart, but from his intellect he receives his truth, from the intellect the heart receives its light. Truth is ever a matter of discovery, of science, of philosophy; religion a matter of feeling.

There are our feelings, our common reactions, it will be said, the great beliefs, the universal "acceptances." But our feelings and our instincts, in the end, must wait upon our intelligence. Whenever Christianity ceases to hold the people intellectually, it will cease to hold their hearts. Mr. Balfour has shown, with fine scorn, the cowardice of those who would stand for the dogmas of Christianity, not because they believed they were true, but because to retain them would be better for the morals of the people. That is to say, they would retain Christianity for policy's sake. These men forget that when the more intelligent lose their faith, the multitude will surely, in the end, lose their faith also.

It is not the province of philosophy (no one will say) to strengthen the gross materialism so transcendent about us unless it shall have been first shown true by science. But the tendency of the thought of our greatest men of science is away from the material. hypothesis. They no longer believe religion to be a cunning fable devised by king and priest to be an instrument with which they might control the people. Religion is a mighty force and has its roots deep down among the primitive instincts and feelings of the human race. It will be a sad day for humanity when religion shall have become superannuated.

There must be, as Professor Gérard says, the healthy and

beautiful body. There must be intellectual vigor. But there must be, if a people shall endure, the material for intellectual nutriment. There are to-day new intellectual and spiritual wants. There must be new and fertile ideas which may crystallize into new religious beliefs and ideals. To furnish these ideas and ideals is the inevitable task of the poet, the artist and the philosopher.

While Professor Bergson has said many things derogatory of the human intellect, and a lot of nonsense about the original power of the intuitions which we have now lost, he has said many brave words for philosophy. He has made the vital suggestion (which, so far as I have seen, seems to have been unnoticed) that philosophy pursuing certain lines of facts all converging on the same point "may give an accumulation of probabilities which will gradually approximate scientific certainty."

Well, what greater certainty can we ask? And is not the human intellect, with its dogged slave, Observation, its angel-attendant Imagination, practically infinite? May not that intellect which sweeps over infinite time and space, which holds in its hand, like a flower, the whole stellar universe, solve at least some of those problems which are the very cause of philosophy's existence?

Why should we deny the final intelligibility of the universe? Why may not philosophy pass over the threshold of speculation into the domain of actual knowledge? Why may there not be a definite conquest by philosophy as well as by science? Who can limit what philosophy may do when squarely facing the supreme problems and not frittered away, as Bergson says, "upon a host of special problem in psychology, in morals, in logic.”

JAMESTOWN, N. Y.

JAMES G. TOWNSEND.

THE FALLACY IN MR. H. G. WELLS'S "NEW RELIGION."

In his book, God the Invisible King, which hails the appearance of a "new religion," Mr. H. G. Wells proclaims himself the spokesman of his age, the "scribe to the spirit of his generation." If he claims to speak for the scientists as well as for the less enlightened portions of society, his conclusions are startling, to say the least, 1 God the Invisible King, p. 171.

in view, not only of the commonly observed lack of religious belief among scientists, but also of the statistical study by which Professor Leuba has shown that the majority of scientists in America, and presumably elsewhere, disclaim any belief in God.

Were it not that he implicates "that very great American, the late William James," whom he calls his master, Wells's religious views would, perhaps, scarcely merit consideration by philosophers. So far, however, as the views of Wells are due to James's influence, they deserve examination; and the fact that God the Invisible King is a book intended primarily for popular consumption need not condemn it in the sight even of professional philosophers, when it is remembered that James (and so why not, perhaps, James's disciple?) could be both popular and profound.

A finite God is proclaimed in Wells's new religion, and at once a point of similarity between Wells and James is noted. James was insistent that the Absolute of the philosophers could not be the God of religion, and Wells is equally insistent upon this point. But, whereas James asserted that personal immortality is the core of religion, and that the chief function of God would be the guaranteeing of immortality, Wells regards this question as an irrelevant issue in religon, interest in which is evidence of egotism. Whether James was not nearer than Wells to a correct interpretation of the religious consciousness regarding the belief in immortality is a question that might appropriately be raised, though I shall omit consideration of it here.

Limiting my discussion to questions of the nature of God, and of the evidence for His existence, in Wells's view, I desire to point out the closeness with which Wells follows James's line of thought, to the extent of committing one of the same fallacies that James commits.

Wells's God is not the Life Force or the Will to Live, neither is He the Collective Mind of the Race. Wells, like James, insists that God must be genuinely personal, existing within a temporal. environment, aiding mankind in its upward struggle, and accessible to man through what James calls "prayerful communion". In

2 J. H. Leuba, The Belief in God and Immortality, Boston, 1916. p. 172.

3 Wells, op. cit.,

The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 524; Human Immortality, Ingersoll Lecture. This view of James's accounts in part for his interest in psychical research.

5 Op. cit., Preface, p. xix.

6 Op. cit., p. 17.

7

Op. cit., pp. 61, 62.