he dim penumbra of our workaday world. Ancient revelations and
mysteries, however incredible if taken literally, might therefore be
suffered to nourish undisturbed, so long as they did not clash with any
clear fact or natural duty. They might continue to decorate with a
mystical aureole the too prosaic kernel of known truth.

[Sidenote: Needless anxiety for moral interests.]

Mythology and ritual, with the sundry divinations of poets, might in
fact be kept suspended with advantage over human passion and ignorance,
to furnish them with decent expression. But once indulged, divination is
apt to grow arrogant and dogmatic. When its oracles have become
traditional they are almost inevitably mistaken for sober truths. Hence
the second kind of supplement offered to science, so that revelations
with which moral life has been intertwined may find a place beside or
beyond science. The effort is honest, but extraordinarily short-sighted.
Whatever value those revelations may have they draw from actual
experience or inevitable ideals. When the ground of that experience and
those ideals is disclosed by science, nothing of any value is lost; it
only remains to accustom ourselves to a new vocabulary and to shift
somewhat the associations of those values which life contains or
pursues. Revelations are necessarily mythical and subrational; they
express natural forces and human interests in a groping way, before the
advent of science. To stick in them, when something more honest and
explicit is available, is inconsistent with caring for attainable
welfare or understanding the situation. It is to be stubborn and
negligent under the cloak of religion. These prejudices are a drag on
progress, moral no less than material; and the sensitive conservatism
that fears they may be indispensable is entangled in a pathetic
delusion. It is conservatism in a ship-wreck. It has not the insight to
embrace the fertile principles of life, which are always ready to renew
life after no matter what natural catastrophe. The good laggards have no
courage to strip for the race. Rather than live otherwise, and live
better, they prefer to nurse the memories of youth and to die with a
retrospective smile upon their countenance.

[Sidenote: Science an imaginative and practical art.]

Far graver than the criticism which shows science to be incomplete is
that which shows it to be relative. The fact is undeniable, though the
inferences made from it are often rash a