The Glands Regulating Personality | Page 9

at each other. New destructive devices out of the laboratories
were raised into the commandants of the course of history. Then
science acquired prestige.
Science as King, science as power, looms as the great new figure, the
overshadowing novel factor, in practical statesmanship. Unlike the
factor X in the traditional equation, it is the known factor par
excellence, the factor by which the value of all the other factors of
human life will be ascertained and solved. As knowledge of the
conditions determining all life, it stands as the courageous David of the
race against the Goliath territory of the uncontrollable and the
inevitable, even the unknowable. Human history resolves itself into the

drama: Science contra Fate. Quite a change from the vaudeville show
of the restless personal ambitions of vindictive fools and greedy
scoundrels, the mischief and adventures of half-witted geniuses and
licensed rogues that have been figures of the prologue.
The future of science has become the future of the race. So much of an
inkling of the truth is beginning to be appreciated. That is ordinarily
taken to mean that the process by which the Wessex man became the
New York and London man, the accumulation of accidental discoveries
and inspired inventions of scattered individuals, will go on, providing a
succession of marvels and miracles for the careerist and his retinue. Not
only is he to be entertained and served by them, but any commercial
value will also be exploited by him. The natural wonders of the
laboratories have taken the place of the supernatural absurdities of the
medieval mind as a fillip for the imagination of the man in the street.
Even spiritualism apes the technique of the physicist. The credulity of
reporters alone concerning developments in surgery, for example, is
incredible. There is enough rot published daily for a brief to be made
out against the idolatry of science.
THE RELIGION OF SCIENCE
Science also as a religion, as a faith to bind men together, as a
substitute for the moribund old mythologies and theologies which kept
them sundered, is commencing to be talked of in a more serious tone.
The wonder-maker may have forced upon him, may welcome, the
honors of the priest, though he pose as the humble slave of Nature and
her secrets. Presently the foundations and institutes, which coexist with
the cathedrals and churches, just as once the new Christian chapels and
congregations stood side by side with pagan temples and heathen
shrines, may oust their rivals, and assume the monopoly of ritual.
Should its spirit remain fine and clear, should it maintain the glorious
promise of its dawn, should its high priests realize the perpetually
widening intimations of its universal triumph, and escape the
ossification that has overtaken all young and hopeful things and
institutions, the real foundation for a future of the species would be laid,
and so its ultimate suicide prevented.
The time has gone by, however, for any complacent assurance that the
redemption of mankind is to be attained by a new religion of words.
There is no doubt that the damnation or salvation of an individual has

often been determined by a religious crisis, in which the magic of
words have worked their witchery. There is plenty of evidence that a
psychic conversion will effect an actual revolution in the whole way of
living of the victim or patient, as you like it. William James, in his
"Varieties of Religious Experience," established that pretty definitely.
When it comes to groups, races, nations, the outlook is wholly different.
There is a conflict of so many and diverse habits and interests, beliefs
and prejudices, that hope for some common merely intellectual solvent
for all of them is rather forlorn. If at all, the resolution of the conflict
will come by a pooling of actual powers and interests, in which the
religion of science will play the great part of the Liberator of mankind
from the whole system of torments that have made the way of all flesh
a path of rocks along which a manacled prisoner crawls to his doom.
SCIENCE AND HUMAN NATURE
Science has a future. The religion of science has a future. Can science
assure us that human nature, in spite of its beast-brute-slave origins
holds the possibility of a genuine transformation of its texture? Can
Fate's stranglehold upon us be broken? There will be certainly a
tremendous, an overwhelming increase in the general stock of
informations we call physics and chemistry and biology. An abundance
of new comforts, novel sensations, fresh experiences, and
breath-bereaving devices that will thrill or heal, will follow of course in
their wake. The religion of science will infiltrate and penetrate and
permeate by its capillary action the barbaric superstitions, the
ridiculous rites, the unsanitary insanities of our social systems.
But what