Ernest Renan, in "The Future of Science," illustrates the thesis that, henceforth, the advancement of civilization is to be the work of science; the word science being used in its largest signification as covering intellectual achievement in every direction open to the mind, and the co-ordination of the results in a progressive philosophy of life. The fundamental distinction which is expressed or implied, on every page, is that the earlier processes of civilization belong to an age of spontaneity, of unreflective productivity; an age that expressed itself in myths, created religions, organized social forms and habits, in harmony with the spontaneous creations; and that we have now entered upon the critical, defining, intellectual age; in short, as Mr. Nisbet has said, that the evolution of the human race has passed from the physiological into the psychical field; and that it is in the latter alone, henceforward, that progress may be looked for toward a higher civilization. [17] Philosophy, that is to say, rational research, is alone capable of solving the question of the future of humanity, says Renan. "The really efficacious revolution, that which will give its shape to the future, will not be a political, it will be a religious and moral revolution. Politics has exhausted its resources for solving this problem. The politician is the offscouring of humanity, not its inspired teacher. The great revolution can only come from men of thought and sentiment. It does not do to expect too much from governments. It is not for them to reveal to humanity the law for which it is in search. What humanity needs is a moral law and creed; and it is from the depths of human nature that they will emerge, and not from the well-trodden and sterile pathways of the official world." In order to know whence will come a better understanding of the religion which Christ taught, "the religion of the future, we must always look in the direction of liberty, equality, and fraternity." Not the French Commune liberty to cut one another's throats (an equality of misery, and a fraternity of crime), but that liberty to know and to love the truth of things which constitutes true religion, and which when it is bestowed without money and without price, as it will be, "humanity will accomplish the remainder, without asking anyone for permission." No one can say from what part of the sky will appear the star of this new redemption. The one thing certain is that the shepherds and the Magi will be once more the first to perceive it, that the germ of it is already formed, and that if we were able to see the present with the eyes of the future, we should be able to distinguish, in the complication of the hour, the imperceptible fibre which will bear life for the future. It is amid putrefaction that the germ of future life is developed, and no one has the right to say, "This is a rejected stone," for that stone may be the corner-stone of the future edifice.