Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/515

Rh polar antagonism, centripetal and centrifugal forces. The intellect which gives origin to science, and the sentiment of faith, or instinct of worship, which gives origin to religions, work in opposite spheres, and work against each other by action and reaction in historic periods, which the writer designates as psychic cycles. How deep is this necessity of contest, and how wide its field of operation, in the author's opinion, may be gathered from the following opening passage of Chapter II.: "I have attempted to show that the essential natures of the religious and the intellectual forces in man foreordain a species of antagonism; that this perpetual antagonism is not, nevertheless, an abnormal condition, but a grand example of the universal economy of God, who has ordained antagonism as the condition of progress in the natural and the moral worlds. I have deduced from the necessary relation of the ethical and cognitive powers a necessary series of oscillations in the relative dominance of religious and intellectual influences in the lives of men; and have indicated that the exponent of these oscillations has been, as it must be, a series of alternating periods of religious and of intellectual activity and progress. Such alternations, since the antagonizing forces belong to humanity as such, must characterize the history of all nations, all races, and all times."

He then proceeds "to show that the facts of the religious and intellectual history of the human race illustrate and confirm these deductions, and become in reality a broad inductive basis on which these propositions may be rested as valid generalizations. A prolonged and attentive study of the facts which make up the religious and intellectual history of our race has caused my attention to be directed to the following facts subsidiary to the general induction: 1. Religious faith recedes from its normal condition to one of abnormal subordination, or advances to one of abnormal supremacy; 2. Intellect from its normal condition either advances to a haughty dictatorship or falls into a condition of servitude; 3. These movements of faith and intellect are reciprocal and responsive; 4. The direction of the movement is determined by the initiative: if faith lead in activity, a religious phase succeeds; if intellect take precedence, religious pretensions shrink, and an intellectual phase succeeds. The two phases complete a psychic cycle." Four of these psychic cycles are traced in the course of Christian history.

This is an original and ingenious conception by which Dr. Winchell is enabled to group and arrange the elements of his discussion, historic, religious, philosophic, and scientific, in a very instructive manner for his purpose, and on this account the exposition is certain to be read by general students with interest and profit. Dr. Winchell's work will do especial service, among religious readers, by making the whole discussion, as we might say, a piece of natural history; that is, he treats it in both its aspects, as a part of the method and phenomena of Nature. While holding to the inspiration of the Bible, and the supernatural claims of Christianity, as matters of his own special faith, he nevertheless holds to the validity of the universal religious sentiment in man, and which is as much a subject of rational inductive inquiry as are the physical sciences themselves. We can hardly overrate the gain thus secured, by bringing the whole inquiry into the scientific sphere, and conducting it in the broad judicial spirit which genuine science always imposes.

In one respect, we think Dr. Winchell's work is open to critical objection: it fails to state, as fully as the subject requires, the bearing of the doctrine of Evolution upon the questions in issue. He gives a cautious adhesion to the biological aspect of this theory in the following passage from the preface: "In reference to the much mooted scientific question of the derivative origin of species, the reader will detect indications of a growing faith. A certain class of proofs has been accumulating at a rapid rate; and the author's present conviction is, that the doctrine of the derivation of species should be accepted."

Now, if the doctrine of descent, as here referred to, is to be accepted at all, it is on the ground of its truth; and, if it be true, it does not stand alone or as a proposition with which we have no further concern than simply to approve or reject it.