History consists of the protocols that record the high lights of the interactions of materials and ideas which is the adventure of man in time and space.  Materials and ideas have reacted, the record shows; materials come upon have begotten strange fantasies.  Ideas that flashed from nowhere into a consciousness have transformed utterly the face of the earth.  The herd-brute, agglutinated with his fellows by a magnetism beyond his ken, could be infected with thought, and so cast in the heroic mould.  The possibility of communion,—­that possibility of possibilities, for without it none other could be possible—­has rendered man the heir of a divine destiny.  For the progressive education of the race, a single discoverer here, an inventor there, and thinkers everywhere have been inspired.  In due time their inspiration becomes the possession of even the lowest brain but capable of grasping it.

Man’s attitude toward himself, his self-consciousness, and his attitude toward his fellow creatures has grown and varied and evolved with his education about himself.  According to the theory he formulated concerning his being, his why and wherefore, he directed and governed, punished and mutilated himself and them.  But the pressure of his curiosity, and the inexorable quality of the truth would not let him stand still.  The poetic genius within him, as Blake called it, struggled on from one dogma concerning his nature to another.  Behaviour malignant or beneficent, horrible in its tragedy and pitiable in its comedy, flowed inevitably on.  Witchcraft trials and the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition belong among the more mentionable consequences of some of man’s theories about his own nature and its requirements.

Heretofore the imaginative spirit has had its day in the matter.  And, curiously enough, an obsession to subjugate the natural has made it exalt the supernatural.  Visions, dreams, portents, revelations, all symptomatic of an order of things above nature, are the stuff of what more than ninety-nine per cent of the millions of the race believe about themselves and their fate.  Man’s cruelty to man, through the ages, is a comment upon how vast and ramifying may be the consequences of a delusion.

But now for a couple of centuries the critical spirit, which is the spirit of science, has been invading the affairs of men.  Humble but persistent corrosive of delusion, it has infiltrated the furthest bounds of ignorance and superstition.  It has not dared to assert the supremacy of its fundamental views upon the everyday problems of human life because it was without concrete means of vindicating its claims.  That lack is now supplied by the growing understanding of the chemical factors as the controllers and dictators of all the legion aspects of life.