The conflict between science and religion has thus passed beyond the stage where a primitive and childish idea of the extent and origins of the visible world struggled against a more rational and better-founded outlook. No educated man to-day would seriously defend the cosmical theories of ancient times. It is simply absurd to deny that we have outgrown them once and for all. But this first victory of science only involved the capture of the weakest outposts of the religious view of the world. The heart of traditional religion seems to be the belief in a personal, superhuman agency at work in nature or, rather, upon nature. Even the religious mind, however, admits that investigation has shown that there is a routine aspect to nature which covers the ordinary course of events. The final crux of the problem comes, then, to be whether there is good reason to believe that there are unusual events which cannot be accounted for by natural conditions. The victorious career of science has undoubtedly cast {120} suspicion upon the occurrence of events which cannot be explained by means of regular changes in nature. The appeal to superhuman, personal agency to account for such events presupposes their occurrence, while the belief in their occurrence is psychologically based upon the acceptance of such supernatural agency. Hence it is probable that both beliefs will fall together. In the meantime, they give one another mutual support. He who believes in supernatural agency is the more likely to be credulous in regard to testimony advanced in its favor. Nature was at first regarded as a realm in which personal agency ruled. Yahweh thundered from Sinai and rode in the tempest. Apollo guided the horses of the sun. The gods did things in nature directly, much as man does them, only they are able to do things that man cannot do. By will and word of command, they make the mountains tremble and the hills to shake. But gradually man came to conceive nature as a self-contained realm in which parts affected one another. We owe the beginning of this view to the Greeks. They developed, from the first, a way of approach to events which was absolutely opposed to the older outlook. As nature became, for man, more and more self-sufficient and capable of explaining what occurred within it, there was less need to appeal to an agent of the old mythical sort.