may exist the causes of which it ignores. Not
only do religious minds manage to believe that there may be effects of
which they do not know, and may never know, the causes--they cannot even
see the absolute necessity for supposing that everything is caused.
Scientific people tend to trust their senses and disbelieve their
emotions when they contradict them; religious people tend to trust
emotion even though sensual experience be against it. On the whole, the
religious are the more open-minded. Their assumption that the senses may
mislead is less arrogant than the assumption that through them alone can
we come at reality, for, as Dr. McTaggart has wittily said, "If a man is
shut up in a house, the transparency of the windows is an essential
condition of his seeing the sky. But it would not be prudent to infer
that, if he walked out of the house, he could not see the sky, because
there was no longer any glass through which he might see it."[6]

Examples of scientific bigotry are as common as blackberries. The
attitude of the profession towards unorthodox medicine is the classical
instance. In the autumn of 1912 I was walking through the Grafton
Galleries with a man who is certainly one of the ablest, and is reputed
one of the most enlightened, of contemporary men of science. Looking at
the picture of a young girl with a cat by Henri-Matisse, he
exclaimed--"I see how it is, the fellow's astigmatic." I should have let
this bit of persiflage go unanswered, assuming it to be one of those
witty sallies for which the princes of science are so justly famed and
to which they often treat us even when they are not in the presence of
works of art, had not the professor followed up his clue with the utmost
gravity, assuring me at last that no picture in the gallery was beyond
the reach of optical diagnostic. Still suspicious of his good faith, I
suggested, tentatively, that perhaps the discrepancies between the
normal man's vision and the pictures on the wall were the result of
intentional distortion on the part of the artists. At this the professor
became passionately serious--"Do you mean to tell me," he bawled, "that
there has ever been a painter who did not try to make his objects as
lifelike as possible? Dismiss such silly nonsense from your head." It is
the old story: "Clear your mind of cant," that is to say, of anything
which appears improbable or unpalatable to Dr. Johnson.

The religious, on the other hand, are apt to be a