Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/192

 to be either proved or justified, were popularly supposed to be the touchstone of religion's fate. Meanwhile, though the combatants in the popular arena were quite unaware of it, the true thinkers were realising vast depths which science had left still unexplored, and the very investigations undertaken to account for the beginnings of life on this planet were proving the belief in the spontaneous generation of life a figment. Whatever effect science may have had upon myth, it was doing nothing to assail the ultimate mystery which is the basic fact of religion.

By degrees, too, the philosophical untenableness of materialism began to be popularised, and although it is a great deal easier to accept (or decline) scientific discoveries without understanding the evidence for or against them than to grasp such abstract considerations as the subjectivity of phenomena, popular scepticism began to be directed into new channels. If we could only know phenomena we really know nothing; and it was just as likely that the most absurd myths of the hagiologist might be true as that they might be false—since one could know nothing. Towards the end of the century there is no doubt that among the masses of the people the incomprehensibleness of things in general had the effect of popularising a certain tolerance of Christianity among the class which, a little