Again, when Mr. Kidd rebukes science for its failure to approach religion in a scientific spirit he shows that he fails to grasp the full bearing of the subject which he is considering. This failure comes in part from the very large, not to say loose, way in which he uses the words “science” and “religion.” There are many sciences and many religions, and there are many different kinds of men who profess the one or advocate the other. Where the intolerant professors of a given religious belief endeavor by any form of persecution to prevent scientific men of any kind from seeking to find out and establish the truth, then it is quite idle to blame these scientific men for attacking with heat and acerbity the religious belief which prompts such persecution. The exigencies of a life and death struggle unfit a man for the coldness of a mere scientific inquiry. Even the most enthusiastic naturalist, if attacked by a man-eating shark, would be much more interested in evading or repelling the attack than in determining the precise specific relations of the shark. A less important but amusing feature of his argument is that he speaks as if he himself had made an entirely new discovery when he learned of the important part played in man’s history by his religious beliefs. But Mr. Kidd surely cannot mean this. He must be aware that all the great historians have given their full importance to such religious movements as the birth and growth of Christianity, the Reformation, the growth of Islamism, and the like. Mr. Kidd is quite right in insisting upon the importance of the part played by religious beliefs, but he has fallen into a vast error if he fails to understand that the great majority of the historical and sociological writers have given proper weight to this importance. Mr. Kidd’s greatest failing is his tendency to use words in false senses. He uses “reason” in the false sense “selfish.” He then, in a spirit of mental tautology, assumes that reason must be necessarily purely selfish and brutal. He assumes that the man who risks his life to save a friend, the woman who watches over a sick child, and the soldier who dies at his post, are unreasonable, and that the more their reason is developed the less likely they will be to act in these ways. The mere statement of the assertion in such a form is sufficient to show its nonsense to any one who will take the pains to think whether the people who ordinarily perform such feats of self-sacrifice and self-denial are people of brutish minds or of fair intelligence.