Page:William-morris-and-the-early-days-of-the-socialist-movement.djvu/190

Rh to judge from my own experience in later days, as well as from what I gather from my book-reading and from my conversations with others, more keenly or, at least, more widely felt now, than in Morris' day—quite recent though that be.

Supernaturalism and mysticism of every kind were then still in almost complete intellectual disrepute, bundled out of cultivated consideration by the Higher Criticism and scientific agnosticism. Thoughtful minds generally turned as implacably away from theosophy or any sort of deism or theism as from Biblical revelation. Old-world wisdom and old wives' wisdom were alike tabooed.

But a great change in the attitude of free thought is manifest since then. Earnest minds no longer presume the all-sufficiency of the laboratory and dissecting table as oracles of the mystery of matter and life. The advance of scientific knowledge—the astonishing discovery of the atom and the cell, and of the unsubstantially or unmateriality, so to speak, of matter itself, and of the elusiveness of energy and life, as indicated by the newer theories of the nature of the ether, and the acceptance of thought-transference as a physical or psychological fact—these and other remarkable scientific discoveries which are leading science to what is seemingly the borderline of a world beyond the cognizance of the bodily senses, have powerfully affected the rationalism and idealism of the present day.

So great indeed has been the reaction of intelligent opinion in this respect, that no solution, however complete it be, of the problem of human happiness in relation to the material circumstances of life, suffices for the needs of thoughtful minds. Noble and beautiful as we may succeed in making the practice of life, this achievement alone will not yield us a self-containing philosophy or religion of life. It does not provide due nourishment and exercise for the intellectual and physical faculties of a large portion of the men and women in our midst to-day. The soul or spirit puts forth imperative claims for consideration.