The influence of scientific discoveries on that vaguely defined complex of beliefs and intellectual interests called culture seems, at first sight, to have something paradoxical about it. There can be no question that this influence is very widespread, and there can be as little question that ignorance of scientific discoveries is equally widespread. If our admittedly cultured classes were submitted to such a _questionnaire_ as the workers in Sheffield were recently called upon to answer, we should doubtless find that such questions as Who was Dante? Who was Plato? would act like holes in a dam; but it is to be feared that the questions under the heading _Science_ would evoke the merest trickle of information. And yet many of the questions in other parts of the _questionnaire_ would be answered very differently were it not for those scientific discoveries of which the examinee can give no satisfactory description. The apparent paradox is resolved by remembering that it is only the broadest generalisations of science, and only certain aspects of those, which exert a marked influence on the rest of a man’s beliefs. The varied and highly complicated studies which make up modern astronomy, for instance, can be known, in any real sense, to but a few specialists; the one significant thing, for purposes of general culture, that emerges from these studies, is that the earth is materially insignificant in the universe. We need not mind if so much knowledge and no more percolates through the barriers of a literary education; the damage is done; the rest of the man’s beliefs begin to be profoundly affected. In the papers on geology and biology the majority of cultured people would fail; they would all be amused, however, at the idea that the earth was formed in 4004 B.C. and that man was a special and separate creation. Psychological studies have not yet reached, perhaps, a great and easily understood generalisation, but there is a growing charity vis-à-vis the “criminal classes” and other moral outcasts. Our Victorian parents’ hearty condemnation of everybody they disliked is now just a little more difficult. Such generalisations as we have been mentioning are important to general culture because of what we may call their perspective effect. Their bearing on the rest of a man’s mental furniture is not direct; they put the furniture in a different setting. A change of residence, if the difference between the two houses be sufficiently marked, may well lead to a change of habits, and the furniture which looked quite well in four rooms may seem a little inadequate in forty. Those writers who declare that there is no “real” conflict between science and religion, for instance, may be perfectly good logicians; the point is whether a particular religion looks adequate in the modern universe of science. It is not a question of destroying the furniture; it is whether the contents of a bijou villa adequately furnish Salisbury Plain. The influence of science