The time has gone by, however, for any complacent assurance that the redemption of mankind is to be attained by a new religion of words. There is no doubt that the damnation or salvation of an individual has often been determined by a religious crisis, in which the magic of words have worked their witchery. There is plenty of evidence that a psychic conversion will effect an actual revolution in the whole way of living of the victim or patient, as you like it. William James, in his "Varieties of Religious Experience," established that pretty definitely. When it comes to groups, races, nations, the outlook is wholly different. There is a conflict of so many and diverse habits and interests, beliefs and prejudices, that hope for some common merely intellectual solvent for all of them is rather forlorn. If at all, the resolution of the conflict will come by a pooling of actual powers and interests, in which the religion of science will play the great part of the Liberator of mankind from the whole system of torments that have made the way of all flesh a path of rocks along which a manacled prisoner crawls to his doom. SCIENCE AND HUMAN NATURE Science has a future. The religion of science has a future. Can science assure us that human nature, in spite of its beast-brute-slave origins holds the possibility of a genuine transformation of its texture? Can Fate's stranglehold upon us be broken? There will be certainly a tremendous, an overwhelming increase in the general stock of informations we call physics and chemistry and biology. An abundance of new comforts, novel sensations, fresh experiences, and breath-bereaving devices that will thrill or heal, will follow of course in their wake. The religion of science will infiltrate and penetrate and permeate by its capillary action the barbaric superstitions, the ridiculous rites, the unsanitary insanities of our social systems. But what about the poor human soul itself, with its inherent vices and virtues, its fears and indulgences, audacities and nobilities, jealousies, shames, blunders, incurable likes, cravings and diseases? Can science change the texture of the slave and careerist, if they represent the subnormal and the abnormal? What about the Becky Sharps, the Mark Tapleys, and Tom Pinches, not to speak of the Nicholas Nicklebys and the Hamlets, the Micawbers and the Falstaffs? What future have they as they recur in the generations? Indeed, does not the very fact of their recurrence, of them and of the hundreds of other types and temperaments, point implacably to the conclusion to which the historian, the philosopher and the biologist have driven us: that in the grip of an endless chain of pasts the human soul has no future?