I do not see how the situation could well have been otherwise. In the first place the older Humanists themselves dealt the naturalism of the ancients and such of it as was again coming to life a severe blow when they championed letters and remained indifferent to science. In the second place, the Reformation quite side-tracked the revival of learning, superseded it, and took over into its own service only so much of it as it found congenial to its religious interests. It was a mass movement, an attempt at a restatement of Christianity in terms of the philosophy of the common man, a philosophy to which the questioning, enlightened common sense and worldly wisdom of a Montaigne, a Voltaire or a Hume is never very congenial. Santayana says, “The philosophy of the common man is an old wife that gives him no pleasure, yet he cannot do without her, and resents any aspersions that strangers may cast on her character. “Of this homely philosophy the tender cuticle is religious belief; really the least vital and most arbitrary part of human opinion, the outer ring, as it were, of the fortifications of prejudice, but for that very reason the most jealously defended; since it is on being attacked there, at the least defensible point, that rage and alarm at being attacked at all are first aroused in the citadel. People are not naturally sceptics, wondering if a single one of their intellectual habits can be reasonably preserved; they are dogmatists angrily confident of maintaining them all. Integral minds, pupils of a single coherent tradition, regard their religion, whatever it may be, as certain, as sublime, and as the only rational basis of morality and policy. Yet in fact religious belief is terribly precarious, partly because it is arbitrary, so that in the next tribe or in the next century it will wear quite a different form; and partly because, when genuine, it is spontaneous and continually remodelled, like poetry, in the heart that gives it birth. A man of the world soon learns to discredit established religions on account of their variety and absurdity, although he may good-naturedly continue to conform to his own; and a mystic before long begins fervently to condemn current dogmas, on account of his own different inspiration. Without philosophical criticism, therefore, mere experience and good sense suggest that all positive religions are false, or at least (which is enough for my present purpose) that they are all fantastic and insecure.”