ion; and this emotional
tendency, more or less strong in the human race, we call religious
feeling or religion. Viewed in this light, religion is not only
something that mankind is never likely to get rid of, but it is
incomparably the most noble as well as the most useful attribute of
humanity.

Now, this emotional prompting toward completeness of life requires, of
course, that conduct should be guided, as far as possible, in accordance
with a true theory of the relations of man to the world in which he
lives. Hence, at any given era the religious feeling will always be
found enlisted in behalf of some theory of the universe. At any time,
whatever may be their shortcomings in practice, religious men will aim
at doing right according to their conceptions of the order of the
world. If men's conceptions of the order of nature remained constant, no
apparent conflict between their religious feelings and their knowledge
need ever arise. But with the first advance in our knowledge of nature
the case is altered. New and strange theories are naturally regarded
with fear and dislike by persons who have always been accustomed to
find the sanction and justification of their emotional prompting toward
righteousness in old familiar theories which the new ones are seeking to
supplant. Such persons oppose the new doctrine because their engrained
mental habits compel them to believe that its establishment will in some
way lower men's standard of life, and make them less careful of their
spiritual welfare. This is the case, at all events, when theologians
oppose scientific conclusions on religious grounds, and not simply from
mental dulness or rigidity. And, in so far as it is religious feeling
which thus prompts resistance to scientific innovation, it may be said,
with some appearance of truth, that there is a conflict between religion
and science.

But there must always be two parties to a quarrel, and our statement
has to be modified as soon as we consider what the scientific innovator
impugns. It is not the emotional prompting toward righteousness, it
is not the yearning to live im Guten, Ganzen, Wahren, that he seeks to
weaken; quite likely he has all this as much at heart as the theologian
who vituperates him. Nor is it true that his discoveries, in spite of
him, tend to destroy this all-important mental attitude. It would be
ridiculous to say that the fate of religious feeling is really involved
in the fate of grotesque cosmogo