must live where the factory was, and could work only in one factory, for they could not afford to move.  Hence they must obey their industrial master in every particular, since the raw material, the plant, the tools, the very roof that covered them, were all his!  In this new human condition was a powerful reinforcement, from another angle of approach, of the humanistic impulse.  Man’s interest in himself, which had been sometimes that of the dilettante, largely imaginative and even sentimental, was reinforced by man’s new distress and became concrete and scientific.

Thus man regarded himself and his own world with a new and urgent attention.  The methods and secondary causes of his intellectual, emotional and volitional life began to be laid bare.  The new situation revealed the immense part played in shaping the personality and the fate of the individual by inheritance and environment.  The Freudian doctrine, which traces conduct and habit back to early or prenatal repressions, strengthens the interest in the physical and materialistic sources of character and conduct in human life.  Behavioristic psychology, interpreting human nature in terms of observation and action, rather than analysis and value judgments, does the same.  It tends to put the same emphasis upon the external and sensationalistic aspects of human experience.

That, then, which is a central force in religion, the sense of the inscrutability of human nature, the feeling of awe before the natural processes, what Paul called the mystery of iniquity and the mystery of godliness, tends to disappear.  Wonder and confident curiosity succeed humility and awe.  That which is of the essence of religion, the sense of helplessness coupled with the sense of responsibility, is stifled.  Whatever else the humane sciences have done, they have deepened man’s fascinated and narrowing absorption in himself and given him apparent reason to believe that by analyzing the iron chain of cause and effect which binds the process and admitting that it permits no deflection or variation, he is making the further questions as to the origin, meaning and destiny of that process either futile or superfluous.  So that, in brief, the check to speculative thinking and the repudiation of central metaphysical concepts, which the earlier movement brought about, has been accentuated and sealed by the humane sciences and the new and living problems offered them for practical solution.  Thus the generation now ending has been carried beyond the point of combating ancient doctrines of God and man, to the place where it has become comparatively indifferent, rather than hostile, to any doctrine of God, so absorbed is it in the physical functions, the temporal needs and the material manifestations of human personality.