The French materialists of the eighteenth century virtually declared: "We content ourselves with what we can prove by the methods of physical science and we will reject all else." But think how chaotic nature was to their minds compared to our present conception, and how different the universe they saw to what we see to-day. And it is not to be wondered at that there was antagonism between science and religion. Anaxagoras maintained that the human race would never have become human if it were not for the hand, and John Fiske says, "_man never would have attained his present psychic powers but for religion_." This is truth well stated, and the fact that man is the only creature that has a hand, an articulate voice and an aesthetic nature that is never satisfied, is strong proof that man is infinitely more than a mere animal, or a transient animate machine. The higher intellectual powers were dwarfed in the middle ages, when human life was made hideous by famine, pestilence, perennial warfare and bloody superstitions, fear of witchcraft and eternal torments, and men endured it because they had no experience of anything better. But the change wrought in six centuries is amazing, and shows that human genius and man's possibilities are beyond our comprehension. The genius of Aristotle proved that the earth is a globe, that of Copernicus showed that it was one of a system of planets, and that of Newton undertook to explain the laws and dynamics of this marvelous sun and world system.