THE LOGIC OF SCIENTIFIC NEGATION.

                    I am Sir Oracle,
    And when I ope my mouth let no dog bark.

Before beginning to analyse the forces that are decomposing religious belief, it will be well to remark briefly on the means by which these forces are applied to the world at large.  To a certain extent they are applied directly; that is, many of the facts that are now becoming obvious the common sense of all men assimilates spontaneously, and derives, unbidden, its own doubts or denials from them.  But the chief power of positivism is derived otherwise.  It is derived not directly from the premisses that it puts before us, but from the intellectual prestige of its exponents, who, to the destruction of private judgment, are forcing on us their own personal conclusions from them.  This prestige, indeed, is by no means to be wondered at.  If men ever believed a teacher ‘for his works’ sake,’ the positive school is associated with enough signs and wonders.  All those astonishing powers that man has acquired in this century are with much justice claimed by it as its works and gifts.  The whole sensuous surroundings of our lives are its subjects, and are doing it daily homage; and there is not a conquest over distance, disease, or darkness that does not seem to bear witness to its intellectual supremacy.  The opinion, therefore, that is now abroad in the world is that the positive school are the monopolists of unbiassed reason; that reason, therefore, is altogether fatal to religion; and that those who deny this, only do so through ignorance or through wilful blindness.  As long as this opinion lasts, the revival of faith is hopeless.  What we are now about to examine is, how far this opinion is well founded.

The arguments which operate against religion with the leaders of modern thought, and through their intellectual example on the world at large, divide themselves into three classes, and are derived from three distinct branches of thought and study.  They may be distinguished as physical, moral, and historical.  Few of these arguments, taken separately, can be called altogether new.  Their new power has been caused by the simultaneous filling up and completion of all of them; by their transmutation from filmy visions into massive and vast realities; from unauthorised misgivings into the most rigid and compelling of demonstrations:  and still more, by the brilliant and sudden annihilation of the most obvious difficulties, which till very lately had neutralised and held their power in check.

Of these three sets of arguments, the two first bear upon all religion, whilst the third bears upon it only as embodied in some exclusive form.  Thus the physicist argues, for example, that consciousness being a function of the brain, unless the universe be a single brain itself, there can be no conscious God.[33] The moral philosopher argues that sin and misery being so prevalent, there can be no Almighty