Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/50

42 opposed to the natural and egoistic actions, affirming the will to life, are certain actions which show a diametrically opposed striving. The only explanation of these actions is that the actor always sacrifices in them, to a certain extent, his own individual and limited existence by expanding his ego beyond the bounds of his individuality, recognizing his own self in others." "In investigating the action of man, which is, in general, an expression of the affirmation of the will to life, we meet a series of actions which are, in the natural order of things, inconceivable, being diametrically opposed to this world and its laws, contradicting these in every sense, and, as it were, totally unhinging them. These phenomena are the deeds of a genuine morality." "Thus the totality of human action appears as the expression of two opposed currents—one, egoistic, affirming, mundane; the other, ascetic, denying (i. e., self-denying), supramundane." "We may denote faith as that which has as its inevitable result morality." It is impossible for any one who has read these passages and many similar ones to be much startled when he is informed by Mr. Kidd that "throughout its existence (viz., of the social organism) there is maintained within it a conflict of two opposing forces: the disintegrating principle represented by the rational self-assertiveness of the individual units; the integrating principle represented by a religious belief, providing a sanction for social conduct, which is always necessarily ultra-rational."

The fact is that the conception of religion as an influence constraining men to identify their own good with that of the community apart from all calculations of selfish interest is one very generally entertained in the present day, and not less, certainly, by men of science than by others. It lies at the basis of Feuerbach's remarkable book on The Essence of Christianity. It is clearly expressed in one or two of the late Prof. Clifford's essays; it can be traced in the writings of the late Prof. Tyndall and of Prof. Huxley; probably it would be difficult to discover an intellectual region of any note in which it is not more or less distinctly accepted.

But, says Mr. Kidd, "Science from an early stage in her career has been engaged in a personal quarrel" with successive religious systems. The quarrel "has developed into a bitter feud." Yet, instead of investigating this historic antagonism in a scientific spirit, and asking "whether it was not connected with some deep-seated law of social development," 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 that they are without any foundation in reason." Now this seems to us, to speak plainly, not only an incorrect but a very nonsensical statement. Science has only antagonized religion in