Meantime, after positivism was buried and agnosticism dead, a thing was achieved for which Comte himself laid the foundation and in which Spencer as he grew older was ever more deeply interested. This was the great development of the social sciences. Every aspect of the life of man, including religion itself, has been drawn within the area of the social sciences. To all these subjects, including religion, there have been applied empirical methods which have the closest analogy with those which have reigned in the physical sciences. Psychology has been made a science of experiment, and the psychology of religion has been given a place within the area of its observations and generalizations. The ethical, and again the religious consciousness has been subjected to the same kind of investigation to which all other aspects of consciousness are subjected. Effort has been made to ascertain and classify the phenomena of the religious life of the race in all lands and in all ages. A science of religions is taking its place among the other sciences. It is as purely an inductive science as is any other. The history of religions and the philosophy of religion are being rewritten from this point of view. In the first lines of this chapter we spoke of the empirical sciences, meaning the sciences of the material world. It is clear, however, that the sciences of mind, of morals and of religion have now become empirical sciences. They have their basis in experience, the experience of individuals and the experience of masses of men, of ages of observable human life. They all proceed by the method of observation and inference, of hypothesis and verification. There is a unity of method as between the natural and social and psychical sciences, the reach of which is startling to reflect upon. Indeed, the physiological aspects of psychology, the investigations of the relation of adolescence to conversion, suggest that the distinction between the physical and the psychical is a vanishing distinction. Science comes nearer to offering an interpretation of the universe as a whole than the opening paragraphs of this chapter would imply. But it does so by including religion, not by excluding it. No one would any longer think of citing Kant's distinction of two reasons and two worlds in the sense of establishing a city of refuge into which the persecuted might flee. Kant rendered incomparable service by making clear two poles of thought. Yet we must realise how the space between is filled with the gradations of an absolute continuity of activity. Man has but one reason. This may conceivably operate upon appropriate material in one or the other of these polar fashions. It does operate in infinite variations of degree, in unity with itself, after both fashions, at all times and upon all materials.