vere blow to the belief
in God as the creator of the universe and of man by a special _fiat_.
This, moreover, is why the most bitter opposition, and the only
opposition which still continues, to its scientific inductions, was made
and is made in the name of religion.

It is true that Darwin did not declare himself an atheist[26] and that
Spencer is not one; it is also true that, strictly speaking, the theory
of Darwin, like that of Spencer, can also be reconciled with the belief
in God, since it may be admitted that God created matter and force, and
that both afterward evolved into their successive forms in accordance
with the initial creative impulse. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied
that these theories, by rendering the idea of causality more and more
inflexible and universal, lead necessarily to the negation of God, since
there always remains this question: And God, who created him? And if it
is replied that God has always existed, the same reply may be flung back
by asserting that the universe has always existed. To use the phrase of
Ardigo, human thought is only able to conceive the chain which binds
effects to causes as terminating at a given point, purely
conventional.[27]

God, as Laplace said, is an hypothesis of which exact science has no
need; he is, according to Herzen, at the most an X, which represents not
the _unknowable_--as Spencer and Dubois Raymond contend--but all that
which humanity does not yet know. Therefore, it is a variable X which
decreases in direct ratio to the progress of the discoveries of science.

It is for this very reason that science and religion are in inverse
ratio to each other; the one diminishes and grows weaker in the same
proportion that the other increases and grows stronger in its struggle
against the unknown.[28]

And if this is one of the consequences of Darwinism, its influence on
the development of socialism is quite obvious.

The disappearance of faith in the hereafter, where the poor shall become
the elect of the Lord, and where the miseries of the "vale of tears"
will find an eternal compensation in paradise, gives greater strength to
the desire for some semblance of an "earthly paradise" here below even
for the unfortunate and the poor, who are the great majority.

Hartmann and Guyau[29] have shown that the evolution of religious
beliefs may be summarized thus: All religions include, with various
other matters, the promise of happiness; but the primitive religi