Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/49

Rh the social organism are antagonistic, and by which the former are rendered subordinate to the latter in the general interests of the evolution which the race is undergoing." Whatever is true in this definition is expressed in simpler and stronger phraseology by Dr. Maudsley. Whatever meaning there is in the word "ultrarational" is better expressed, it seems to us, in Dr. Maudsley's declaration that "it (religion) appeals to and is the outcome of the heart, not the understanding, and so goes down into lower depths than the fathom line of the understanding can sound"; while, as regards the furnishing of a sanction for actions performed in the interests of society, the language of Maudsley, who says that religion rests on "the deep foundation of sacrifice of self, devotion to the kind, the heroism of duty," surely covers the whole ground. On the next page to that in which these expressions occur we find the following: "Any one who looks forward with a light heart to the overthrow of Christianity might do well to consider what can ever adequately replace it merely as a social and humanizing force." We turn another page and read: "In him (the founder of Christianity) was the birth of the greatest social force that has ever arisen to modify human evolution"; and the paragraph ends with the declaration that if humanity is to progress, "it will, as heretofore, draw from a source within itself, deeper than knowledge, the inspiration to direct and urge it on the path of its destiny."

Now, we venture to say that Mr. Kidd has nowhere in his book put the case for the social utility of religion more strongly than it has been put in these passages and many others which we might quote from one of the most advanced of modern scientific thinkers. But Dr. Maudsley, as we have already hinted, does not, in what he says on this subject, take up any very peculiar position. Mr. Spencer fully recognizes religion as an indispensable source of moral control in early stages of society, and as one that can ill be discarded even in our own day. He believes that it will be progressively purified of all doctrines that are not essential to it, and that it will abide as an ineradicable consciousness of a power behind phenomena, in and by which all things exist. Schopenhauer declared that the metaphysical impulse of the human race, that by which it seeks to formulate those transcendent truths that are of the substance of religious belief, is no less fundamental in human nature than the scientific impulse; and the later Schopenhauerians, like Prof. Paul Deussen, whose excellent little book on Metaphysics has lately been given to the world in an English dress, use language which might be supposed to have been specially intended to forestall what Mr. Kidd evidently regards as his most striking and original utterances. Take the following passages, for example, from Prof. Deussen: "For