No false belief from which men have been delivered since the day of Copernicus has been dismissed without strenuous resistance from men of learning, and even from men of vigorous capacity. The belief in witchcraft was championed by Bodin, one of the most powerful minds of his day; Glanvill, who sought to maintain it in England after the Restoration, was a man of philosophical culture and a member of the Royal Society; and he had the countenance of the Platonist Henry More and the chemist Boyle. So great a man as Leibnitz repulsed the cosmology of Newton on the score that it expelled God from the universe. It was not professional theologians who invented the "higher criticism" of the Pentateuch, any more than they introduced geology. Samuel Parvish, the Guildford bookseller, who discovered in the days of Walpole that Deuteronomy belonged to the seventh century B.C., is not recorded to have made any clerical converts; and Astruc, the Parisian physician who began the discrimination between the Jehovistic and Elohistic sources in Genesis in 1753, made no school in his country or his time. Voltaire, no Hebraist, demonstrated clearly enough that the Pentateuchal tale of the tabernacle in the wilderness was a fiction; but three toiling generations of German specialists passed the demonstration by, till a Zulu convert set the good Bishop Colenso upon applying to the legend the simple tests of his secular arithmetic. Then the experts began slowly to see the point. CHAPTER II MODES OF CONSERVATIVE FALLACY