as religion is gone, reason is going.  For they are both of the same primary and authoritative kind.  They are both methods of proof which cannot themselves be proved.  And in the act of destroying the idea of Divine authority we have largely destroyed the idea of that human authority by which we do a long-division sum.  With a long and sustained tug we have attempted to pull the mitre off pontifical man; and his head has come off with it.

Lest this should be called loose assertion, it is perhaps desirable, though dull, to run rapidly through the chief modern fashions of thought which have this effect of stopping thought itself.  Materialism and the view of everything as a personal illusion have some such effect; for if the mind is mechanical, thought cannot be very exciting, and if the cosmos is unreal, there is nothing to think about.  But in these cases the effect is indirect and doubtful.  In some cases it is direct and clear; notably in the case of what is generally called evolution.

Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which, if it destroys anything, destroys itself.  Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself.  If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism.  If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time.  But if it means anything more, it means that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change into.  It means that there is no such thing as a thing.  At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything.  This is an attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about.  You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought.  Descartes said, “I think; therefore I am.”  The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram.  He says, “I am not; therefore I cannot think.”

Then there is the opposite attack on thought:  that urged by Mr. H.G.Wells when he insists that every separate thing is “unique,” and there are no categories at all.  This also is merely destructive.  Thinking means connecting things, and stops if they cannot be connected.  It need hardly be said that this scepticism forbidding thought necessarily forbids speech; a man cannot open his mouth without contradicting it.  Thus when Mr. Wells says (as he did somewhere), “All chairs are quite different,” he utters not merely a misstatement, but a contradiction in terms.  If all chairs were quite different, you could not call them “all chairs.”