An attempt to foresee the probable position, as an institution, of religion in the future therefore demands the consideration of what net result is likely to be deduced from science and philosophy by the improved average intelligence of this century. I speak expressly of religion as an institution, intending thereby to limit the inquiry to an attempt to determine the popular view of religion; the pretence to anticipate the opinions of the great philosophers that this century will no doubt produce being a little too presumptuous even for the present writer, who may not be considered in any event to have fallen into many errors resulting from excessive modesty. We can only come within reasonable limits of safety and consistency in such an inquiry by allowing here, as I have allowed all through, for a great increase in general intelligence. Probably the mass of the population will be less greatly removed in reflective and reasoning powers from the greatest minds than at present; because the changes which have been predicted are likely to have more effect in raising the general standard of intelligence than in producing individual and exceptional minds of very great calibre. No doubt the people will be in closer touch with advanced thinkers than now. But I do not see any reason for supposing that the latter can be conspicuously greater than the thinkers of past time, from Plato to Herbert Spencer. Consequently it is impossible to restrict the inquiry to strictly popular developments. We must ask what direction abstract thought is likely to take: and it certainly does not seem that the influence of recent discoveries in physics--especially those which have produced the new theory of the constitution of the atom--can tend to materialism. With atoms resolved by the latest science into electrons, which have been declared in a passage already cited to be not merely carriers of electrical charge but the electrical charges themselves, the objectivity of matter has assuredly not received any new support. And if speculation as to the beginning of things (always the kind of speculation most important to philosophy, where philosophy is made the handmaid of religion) is relieved of the necessity of accounting for the creation of matter, and only has to concern itself with the creation of force, we evidently approach the more abstract conception of a "Something not ourselves" which is admittedly the philosophical necessity most favourable to spiritual religion.