herhood is the glory of a free
soul."

In the age-long struggle for freedom, woman's most rigorous antagonist
has always been the Church.

CHAPTER XVIII

THE PHILOSOPHERS AND THE GREAT ILLUSION

_But the powers of man, so far as experience and analogy can guide
us, are unlimited; nor are we possessed of any evidence which
authorizes us to assign even an imaginary boundary at which the
human intellect will, of necessity, be brought to a stand._

BUCKLE.

There has been an effort made in certain religious publications to imply
that there is a dearth of thought and thinkers beyond the pale of
theism. The subsequent examination of the theological beliefs of great
minds will show that there has never been a lack of brilliant thinkers
who have not sought truth apart from the dominant faith of their age. It
was Socrates, I believe, who first asked if it was not a base
superstition that mere numbers will give wisdom. Granting this truth, it
certainly cannot be claimed that the philosophers of any time
constituted a majority of any population, nor that the philosopher, as
such, was not greatly in advance of the mental status of the populace of
his particular age. It would seem appropriate to briefly comment on the
opinions of the philosophers, both ancient and modern, concerning their
views on "man's giant shadow, hailed divine."

In former ages, philosophy was the handmaiden of theology. From the time
of Socrates and Plato, and throughout the medieval ages, the foremost
task of the philosopher seemed to be to attempt the proof of the
existence and nature of God, and the immortality of the soul. The
leading thinkers of the seventeenth century, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza,
Leibnitz, and Malebranche, liberated philosophy from its bondage to
theology. The criticism of Kant of the philosophical foundations of
belief destroyed the "theological proofs," and modern thinkers now spend
little time on the question of the existence and nature of God and the
soul.

Modern philosophy has been completely secularized, and it is a rare
occasion to find a philosopher dwelling on the problems of God and
immortality. This question in philosophy, as in all other branches of
thought, is utterly irrelevant and at present there is less insistence
on God and more on the world, man, morals, and the conditions of social
life.

It cannot be denied that we are under a heavy obligation intellectually
to the Greek phil