netrate into the history of opinion, the more strongly are
we tempted to believe that in the great matters of speculation no
question is altogether new, and hardly any answer is altogether new. But
the Church had known how to deal with intellectual insurgents, from
Abelard in the twelfth century down to Giordano Bruno and Vanini in the
seventeenth. They were isolated; they were for the most part submissive;
and if they were not, the arm of the Church was very long and her grasp
mortal. And all these meritorious precursors were made weak by one
cardinal defect, for which no gifts of intellectual acuteness could
compensate. They had the scientific idea, but they lacked the social
idea. They could have set opinion right about the efficacy of the
syllogism, and the virtue of entities and quiddities. They could have
taught Europe earlier than the Church allowed it to learn that the sun
does not go round the earth, and that it is the earth which goes round
the sun. But they were wholly unfitted to deal with the prodigious
difficulties of moral and social direction. This function, so
immeasurably more important than the mere discovery of any number of
physical relations, it was the glory of the Church to have discharged
for some centuries with as much success as the conditions permitted. We
are told indeed by writers ignorant alike of human history and human
nature, that only physical science can improve the social condition of
man. The common sense of the world always rejects this gross fallacy.
The acquiescence for so many centuries in the power of the great
directing organisation of Western Europe, notwithstanding its
intellectual inadequateness, was the decisive expression of that
rejection.

After the middle of the last century the insurrection against the
pretensions of the Church and against the doctrines of Christianity was
marked in one of its most important phases by a new and most significant
feature. In this phase it was animated at once by the scientific idea
and by the social idea. It was an advance both in knowledge and in moral
motive. It rested on a conception which was crude and imperfect enough,
but which was still almost, like the great ecclesiastical conception
itself, a conception of life as a whole. Morality, positive law, social
order, economics, the nature and limits of human knowledge, the
constitution of the physical universe, had one by one disengaged
themselves from theological explanations. The fi