Generally speaking, it is not difficult to see the various steps by which man outgrew the conception of the government of the world by intelligent forces. From what we know of primitive thought we may say that at first the gods dominated all. From the fall of a rain-drop to the movement of a planet all was the work of gods. Merely to question their power was the wildest of errors and the gravest of crimes. Bit by bit this vast territory was reclaimed--a task at the side of which the conquest of the fever-stricken tropics or the frozen north is mere child's play. It is quite needless to enter into an elaborate speculation as to the exact steps by which this process of deanthropomorphization--to use a word of the late John Fiske's--was accomplished, but one can picture the main line by what we see taking place at later stages of development. And there is no exception to the rule that so soon as any group of phenomena is brought within the conception of law the notion of deity in connection with those phenomena tends to die out. And the sum of the process is seen in the work of the great law givers of science, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Laplace, Lyell, Dalton, Darwin, etc., who between them have presented us with a universe in which the conception of deity simply has no place. Apologies apart, the idea of deity is foreign to the spirit and method of modern science. In the region of the purely physical sciences this process may be regarded as complete. In morals and sociology, purely on account of the greater complexity of the subjects, mystical and semi-supernatural conceptions still linger, but it is only a question of time for these branches of knowledge to follow the same course as the physical sciences. In morals we are able to trace, more or less completely, the development of the moral sense from its first beginnings in the animal world to its highest developments in man. What is called the "mystery of morality" simply has no existence to anyone who is not a mystery-monger by profession or inclination. And here, too, the gods have been receiving their deserts. For it is now clear that instead of being a help to morals there has been no greater obstacle to a healthy morality than the play of religious ideas. In the name of God vices have been declared virtues and virtues branded as vices. Belief in God has been an unending source of moral perversion, and it lies upon the face of historical development that an intelligent morality, one that is capable of adapting itself to the changing circumstances of human nature, has only become possible with the breaking down of religious authority.