ne in what sense this
adaptation takes place if we do not comprehend the event, that is to
say if we do not perceive its starting-point and the innate force which
produces it. According to Taine, this force, in the present case, is the
progress the increasing authority of positive, verifiable science. What
a definition he would have given of science and its essence! What a
tableau of its progress, the man whose thought was matured at the moment
when the scientific spirit entered into history and literature; who
breathed it in his youth with the fervid and sacred enthusiasm of a poet
seeing the world grow brighter and intelligible to him, and who, at the
age of twenty-five, demanded of it a method and introduced this into
criticism and psychology in order to give these new life--the mechanical
equivalent of heat, natural selection, spectroscopic analysis,
the theory of the microbes, recent discoveries in physics and the
constitution of matter, research into historic origins, psychological
explanation of texts, extension of oriental researches, discoveries of
prehistoric conditions, comparative study of barbaric communities--every
grand idea of the century to which he has himself contributed, all those
by which science embraces a larger and larger portion of the universe,
he saw them containing the same essence; all combining to change the
conception of the world and substitute another, coherent and logical in
the best minds, but then confused and disfigured as it slowly descends
to the level of the crowd.--He would have described this decent, the
gradual diffusion, the growing power of the new Idea, the active ferment
which it contains after the manner of a dogma, beneficent or pernicious
according to the minds in which it lodges, capable of arming men and
of driving them on to pure destruction when not fully comprehended, and
capable of reorganizing them if they can grasp its veritable meaning.

Its first effects are simply destructive, for, through Darwinism,
through experimental psychology, through the physiology of the brain,
through biblical exegesis, through the comparative study of savage
communities and their moral systems, the new concepts at first shocks
the religious idea which it tends to replace; even, with the half-
cultivated and in the minds of novices, it tends to pure negation, to
hostility against existing religions. To every social gathering around
the religious idea that explains and sustains it, what