veloped into a bitter feud. In any other circumstances it would probably have occurred to science at the outset to ask whether this struggle had not itself some meaning, and whether it was not connected with some deep-seated law of social development which it would be her duty to investigate. But this aspect of the position seems, hitherto, to have received scarcely any attention. These religions of man form one of the most striking and persistent of the phenomena of life when encountered under its highest forms, namely, in human society. Yet, strange to say, science seems to have taken up, and to have maintained, down to the present time, the extraordinary position that her only concern with them is to declare (often, it must be confessed, with the heat and bitterness of a partisan) that they are without any foundation in reason.

Now, to any one who has caught the spirit of Darwinian science, it is evident that this is not the question at issue at all. The question of real importance is not whether any section of persons, however learned, is of opinion that these beliefs are without any foundation in reason, but whether religious systems have a function to perform in the evolution of society. If they have, and one which at all corresponds in magnitude to the scale on which we find the phenomena existing, then nothing can be more certain than that evolution will follow its course independent of our opinions, and that these systems will continue to the end, and must be expected to play as great a part in the future as they have done in the past.

In such circumstances it is evident that the assault which science has conducted against religion in the past would have to be considered simply an attack on an empty fort. Not only has the real position not been assailed, but when we are confronted with it, it would seem to be impregnable. Many like the late Mr. Cotter Morison may have been so far impressed with the course of events in the past as to think that religious beliefs are so far shaken that their future survival "is rather an object of pious hope than of reasoned judgment;"1 or to assume, like M. Renan, that they "will die slowly out, undermined by primary instruction, and by the predominance of scientific over literary education." But no greater mistake can be made than to imagine that there is anything in evolutionary science at the end of the nineteenth century to justify such conclusions. On the contrary, if these beliefs are a factor in the development which society is undergoing, then the most notable result of the scientific revolution begun by Darwin must be to establish them on a foundation as broad, deep, and lasting as any that the theologians have dreamt of. According to the laws which science has herself enunciated these beliefs must then be expected to remain to the end a characteristic feature of our social evolution.

The more we regard the religious phenomena of mankind as a whole, the more the conviction grows upon us that here, as in other departments of social affairs, science has yet obtained no real grasp of the laws underlying the development which is proceeding in society. These religious phenomena are certainly among the most persistent and characteristic features of the development which we find man undergoing in society. No one who approaches the subject with an unbiassed mind in the spirit of modern evolutionary science can, for a moment, doubt that the beliefs represented must have some immense utilitarian function to perform in the evolution which is proceeding. Yet contemporary literature may be searched almost in vain for evidence of any true realisation of this fact. Even the attempt made by Mr. Herbert Spencer in his Sociology to deal with the phenomena of religions can scarcely be said to be conceived in the spirit of evolutionary science as now understood. It is hard to follow the author in his theories of the development of religious beliefs from ghosts and ancestor worship, without a continual feeling of disappointment, and even impatience at the triviality and comparative insignificance of the explanations offered to account for the development of such an imposing class of social phenomena. His disciples have only followed in the same path. We find Mr. Grant Allen, one of the most devoted of them, recently, in explaining the principles of his master, going so far as to speak of a characteristic feature of the higher forms of religion as so much

grotesque fungoid growth," which has clustered round the primeval thread of Ancestor Worship.1 Neither Mr. Grant Allen nor any other evolutionist would dream of describing the mammalian brain as a grotesque fungoid growth which had clustered round the primitive dorsal nerve; yet such language would not be more shortsighted than that which is here used in discussing a feature of the most distinctive class of phenomena which the evolution of society presents.

In whatever direction we look, the attitude presented by science towards the social phenomena of the day can hardly be regarded as satisfactory. She stands con

fronting the problems of our time without any clear

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faith of her own. That illustrious school of political philosophy which arose in England with Hobbes and Locke, and which earlier in this century had attained to such wide influence in the writings of Hume, Adam Smith, Bentham, Ricardo, and Mill, has towards our own time become unduly narrowed and egotistical largely through its own success. Although it has in the past profoundly influenced the higher thought of Europe and America in nearly all its branches, and has been in its turn enriched thereby, the departments into which it has become subdivided have shown a tendency to remain reserved and exclusive, and to a large extent unaffected by the progressive tendencies and wider knowledge of our time.

In this connection one of the remarkable signs of the time in England of late has been the gradually spreading revolt against many of the conclusions of the school of political economy represented by Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Mill, which has been in the ascendant throughout the greater part of the century. The earlier and vigorous, though unofficial protests of Mr. Ruskin and others against the narrow reasoning which regarded man in general simply as a type of the "city man," or, in Mr. Ruskin's more forcible phraseology, as a mere covetous machine,1 have long since in Germany and America found a voice amongst the official exponents of the science. Even in England, writers like Jevons and Cliffe Leslie have not hesitated to condemn many of its dogmatic tendencies, and conclusions arrived at from narrow and insufficient premises, in terms almost as emphatic. "Adhering to lines of thought that had been started chiefly by mediæval traders, and continued by French and English philosophers in the latter half of the eighteenth century, Ricardo and his followers," says Professor Marshall, "developed a theory of the action of free enterprise (or as they said free competition), which contained many truths that will be of high importance so long as the world exists. Their work was wonderfully complete within the area which it covered: but that area was very narrow. Much of the best of it consists of problems relating to rent and the value of corn; problems on the solution of which the fate of England just then seemed to depend, but which in the particular form in which they were worked up by Ricardo have very little direct bearing on the present state of things." 1

The school found its highest expression in John Stuart Mill's Principles of Political Economy, a book which has deeply influenced recent thought in England. Mill, it has been truly pointed out, has gone far towards forming the thoughts of nearly all the older political economists, and in determining their attitude to social questions. It is true that we have evidences of a widereaching change which is now in progress in England; and Professor Marshall's book, Principles of Economics, published in 1890, marks a worthy attempt to place the science on a firmer foundation by bringing it into more vitalising contact with history, politics, ethics, and even religion. The departure, it must be confessed, is, nevertheless, but the effort of a department of science to recover ground which it has lost largely through its own faults. It marks a somewhat belated attempt to explain social phenomena which political economists at first ignored, and evidently did not understand, rather than the development of a science with a firm