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 with advanced thinkers than now. But I do not see any reason for supposing that the latter can be conspicuously greater than the thinkers of past time, from Plato to Herbert Spencer. Consequently it is impossible to restrict the inquiry to strictly popular developments. We must ask what direction abstract thought is likely to take: and it certainly does not seem that the influence of recent discoveries in physics—especially those which have produced the new theory of the constitution of the atom—can tend to materialism. With atoms resolved by the latest science into electrons, which have been declared in a passage already cited to be not merely carriers of electrical charge but the electrical charges themselves, the objectivity of matter has assuredly not received any new support. And if speculation as to the beginning of things (always the kind of speculation most important to philosophy, where philosophy is made the handmaid of religion) is relieved of the necessity of accounting for the creation of matter, and only has to concern itself with the creation of force, we evidently approach the more abstract conception of a "Something not ourselves" which is admittedly the philosophical necessity most favourable to spiritual religion.

But for many people natural religion is a poor alternative for revelation, and if we