Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/84

80 their real nature, but terribly potent to produce results. He can not easily trace cause and effect in dealing with these forces; hence it is natural that he should doubt the existence of relations of cause and effect. As the human will seems capricious because the springs of volition are hidden from observation, so to the unknown will that limits our own we ascribe an infinite caprice. All races of men capable of abstract thought have believed in the existence of something outside themselves whose power is without human limitations. Through the imagination of poets the forces of nature become personified. The existence of power demands corresponding will. The power is infinitely greater than ours; the sources of its action inscrutable: hence man has conceived the unknown first cause as an infinite and unconditioned man. Anthropomorphism in some degree is inevitable, because each man must think in terms of his own experience. Into his own personal universe, all that he knows must come.

Recognition of the hidden but gigantic forces in nature leads men to fear and to worship them. To think of them either in fear or in worship is to give them human forms.

The social instincts of man tend to crystallize in institutions; even his common hopes and fears. An institution implies a division of labor. Hence, in each age and in each race men have been set apart as representatives of these hidden forces and devoted to their propitiation. These men are commissioned to speak in the name of each god that the people worship or each demon the people dread.

The existence of each cult of priests is bound up in the perpetuations of the mysteries and traditions assigned to their care. These traditions are linked with other traditions and with other mystic explanations of uncomprehended phenomena. While human theories of the sun, the stars, the clouds, of earthquakes, storms, comets and disease, have no direct relation to the feeling of worship, they can not be disentangled from it. The uncomprehended, the unfamiliar and the supernatural are one and the same in the untrained human mind; and one set of prejudices can not be dissociated from the others.

To the ideas acquired in youth we attach a sort of sacredness. To the course of action we follow we are prone to claim some kind of mystic sanction; and this mystic sanction applies not only to acts of virtue and devotion, but to the most unimportant rites and ceremonies; and in these we resent changes with the full force of such conservatism as we possess.

It is against limited and preconceived notions that the warfare of science has been directed. It is the struggle for the realities on the part of the individual man. Ignorance, prejudice and intolerance, in the long run, are one and the same thing. In some one line at least, every lofty mind throughout the ages has demanded objective reality. This struggle has been one between science and theology only because theological misconceptions were entangled with crude notions of other