ated from the
other-worldly pull of the traditional theologies and be sanely grounded
in the outlook of modern knowledge. There is no need for a rabid
anti-theism. The truth is, rather, that mankind is outgrowing theism
in a gentle and steady way until it ceases to have any clear meaning.
This is a hard saying and requires justification. In part, I have
given the justification in the preceding pages; in part, I have given
it elsewhere.[1] But the drift among thinking people is unmistakable.
With the imminent solution of the mind-body problem, the last bulwark
of the old supernaturalism will have fallen. Man will be forced to
acknowledge that he is an earth-child whose drama has meaning only upon
her bosom. It is my firm conviction that the clear realization of this
fact will startle men into insights and demands of far-reaching import.
May it not remove a dead-weight of inhibitions which has kept the human
spirit under bonds to past attitudes and methods? There will no longer
be a divided interest and an uncertain horizon. To many it will come
like a plunge in cold water: but may not such a plunge do them good by
waking them from their dogmatic slumbers?

The interpretation of the physical world of which man is a part must be
left to the cooperative work of {218} science and philosophy. These
will give to us tested and critical knowledge of the processes which go
on around us, of the drift of the stars in the world-spaces, of the
spiral movements of nebular matter, of the evolution of the elements,
of the integration of organic forms, of the development of historic
life. The universe is: it is meaningless to ask whence it came, for it
always was, and time is but a term for the changes which go on within
it.

But, having explored the universe by telescope and microscope, and
having thus come to some understanding of his world, man must return
again to his own pressing problems and possibilities, to his need to
interpret his own good, to his desire to further and maintain those
interests and activities in which he finds self-expression. His own
life, as a realm of affection and action, must rightly be for him the
significant center of the universe. These urgencies, interests,
possibilities, satisfactions, loyalties are inalienably human and
valid. He can no more ignore them than he can his hunger for food and
his thirst for water. Nothing can rob him of the values which he has
created, nor can any one take