it suspicions grow up in our minds! Verily, this kind of logic is perplexing. We admire the devout spirit which Mr. Bixby everywhere exhibits, but when it is paraded at the expense of true religion, and in a spirit calculated to lead astray the unwary, we must enter our protest against it. On page 222 he says:
“And religion needs not only to accept the corrections and recognize the coadjutorship of science in disclosing the ways of God, but it should engraft into itself, I believe, more of the scientific spirit. Instead of aiming to defend systems already established [!], and to bolster up foregone conclusions, it should go simply with inquiring mind to the eternal facts.”
And this passes current for reasoning! We write without bitterness of heart, but in the spirit which prompted Juvenal to say:
“Si natura negat, facit indignatio versum.”
Religion must borrow all from science, accept her criterion from science, see that she admit nothing but what the scientific plummet is capable of sounding, and reject all that does not conform to the square and compass of this arbitrary mistress. “Established systems” and “foregone conclusions” must be sacrificed at the beck of a scientific clique, and meek religion must sit awaiting crumbs from their table. Surely, had the great author of the apology for the Christian religion anticipated that an apology with such intent would be subsequently offered, he would have bestowed a different title on his famous work. But Mr. Bixby goes farther when he actually breaks down the barriers which have ever been supposed to divide science from religion. On page 223 he says:
“Thus religion is capable of being made a genuine science, and it will never, I believe, maintain the purity, attain the stability and accuracy, reach unto the depth and breadth of truth which is within the demands of its grand mission unto mankind, until it thus weds science to itself.”
This might not give offence if viewed as from the pen of a sophomore; but from a teacher—a philosopher! The passage jumbles science and religion inextricably together; it virtually identifies them, and yet pretends to hold them apart. The idea that religion is capable of being made a genuine science must sound oddly in the ears of those who have been taught to regard religion as the science of sciences, their queen, mistress, and guide. But, according to Mr. Bixby, religion is in the lowly position still of being a handmaiden to her proud sisters, with the possible prospect at some time of being elevated to their queenly plane.
In his chapters on the “Faiths of Science” and “The Claim of Science” Mr. Bixby very adroitly brings into contrast the arrogant aggressiveness of scientism with its own haltings, weaknesses, and vacillations, and we deem these two chapters to be really valuable contributions to the fast-swelling literature concerning the dispute between religion and scientism. They are inoperative of effect, so far as Mr. Bixby’s notion of religion is concerned, but they clearly prove that science is fully amenable to the charge of taking much for granted, of postulating much, of believing in the mysterious and inexplicable—the very charges it flippantly prefers against Christianity. Experience and observation have been the watchwords of science since the days of Locke, and the whole system of Scotch philosophy
as taught by Reid, Stewart, Brown, and Hamilton in the past, and Bain to-day, rests on the results of those two procedures. The supersensible finds no room in this system, and is relegated to the domain of the unknowable, the unthinkable. Says Büchner: “Those who talk of a creative power which is said to have produced the world out of nothing are ignorant of the first and most simple principle founded upon experience and the contemplation of nature. How could a power have existed not manifested in material substance, but governing it arbitrarily according to individual views?” Herbert Spencer calls supersensible conceptions “pseudo-ideas,” “symbolic conceptions of the illegitimate order.” Virchow says he “knows only bodies and their qualities; what is beyond he terms transcendental, and he considers transcendentalism an aberration of the human mind.” And so with the majority of the modern school of scientism. They deem nothing demonstrable but what responds to their tests of truth, to chemical or physico-chemical modes of investigation. For this reason physiologists reject the notion of soul as a distinct substance in man, for it cannot be investigated according to the methods known to physiology; and yet, with glaring inconsistency, these men admit as the very basis of experience and observation what outlies the range and limit of the senses.
The advocates of the germ theory of disease have neither felt, seen, nor heard one of those minute spores. “We have,” says Prof. Tyndall, “particles that defy both the microscope and the balance, which do not darken the air, and which, nevertheless, exist in multitudes sufficient to reduce to insignificance