ged attitude towards savage races and defective classes affords
tangible illustrations of a fundamental transformation of point of view
which doubtless represents the most important result of the operation of
new scientific knowledge in the course of the 19th century. It is a
transformation that is only partially effected as yet, to be sure; but
it is rapidly making headway, and when fully achieved it will represent,
probably, the most radical metamorphosis of mental view that has taken
place in the entire course of the historical period. The essence of the
new view is this: to recognize the universality and the invariability of
natural law; stated otherwise, to understand that the word
"supernatural" involves a contradiction of terms and has in fact no
meaning. Whoever has grasped the full import of this truth is privileged
to sweep mental horizons wider by far than ever opened to the view of
any thinker of an earlier epoch. He is privileged to forecast, as the
sure heritage of the future, a civilization freed from the last ghost of
superstition--an Age of Reason in which mankind shall at last find
refuge from the hosts of occult and invisible powers, the fearsome
galaxies of deities and demons, which have haunted him thus far at every
stage of his long journey through savagery, barbarism and civilization.
Doubtless here and there a thinker, even in the barbaric eras, may have
realized that these ghosts that so influenced the everyday lives of his
fellows were but children of the imagination. But the certainty that
such is the case could not have come with the force of demonstration
even to the most clear-sighted thinker until 19th-century science had
investigated with penetrating vision the realm of molecule and atom; had
revealed the awe-inspiring principle of the conservation of energy; and
had offered a comprehensible explanation of the evolution of one form of
life from another, from monad to man, that did not presuppose the
intervention of powers more "supernatural" than those that operate about
us everywhere to-day.

The stupendous import of these new truths could not, of course, make
itself evident to the generality of mankind in a single generation, when
opposed to superstitions of a thousand generations' standing. But the
new knowledge has made its way more expeditiously than could have been
anticipated; and its effects are seen on every side, even where its
agency is scarcely recognized. As a single illustrat