[36] _Sandro Botticelli_, by Emile Gebhart (1907), p. 9: "Paul III âme très haute, répond aux personnes qui lui dénoncent les vices de son spirituel spadassin: 'Les hommes uniques dans leur art, comme Cellini, ne doivent pas être soumis aux lois, et lui moins que tout autre.'" C. Philosophical Influences. Now, turning to our heritage in philosophy and science, do we find that it tends to resist, or to thwart in any way the principles of our religious heritage? Not in the slightest degree! At every point and at every stage it has confirmed and restated, with all the pomp of facts and statistics to support it, what the religious spirit had laid down for our acceptance. It is superficial and ridiculous to suppose, as Dr. Draper once supposed, that there has been a conflict between Religion and Science. I take it that he means the Christian Religion alone. Such a conflict has never taken place; what has taken place, however, is a conflict between Science and the Catholic Church. The Christian Religion and Science together, however, have never had any such antagonism, and least of all in England, where, from the time of Roger Bacon,[37] the first English Experimentalist, to the present day, nothing has been left undone, no stone has been left unturned, which might establish scientifically that which Christianity, as we have seen, wished to establish emotionally. Universal liberty, without a purpose or a direction; the free and plebeian production of thoughts and theories divorced from all aim or ideal, after the style in which children are born in the slums; devotion to a truth that can be common to all; the depression of the value and dignity of man, and a certain lack of reverence for all things--these four aspirations of Christianity and Protestantism have been the aspirations of science, and at the present moment they are practically attained. Unfortunately, it is in the nature of human beings to imitate success, and England's success as a colonizing and constitutional nation has undoubtedly been a potent force in spreading not only her commercial, but also her philosophical views among all ambitious and aspiring Western nations, who guilelessly took the evil with the good. The empiricists, Francis Bacon, Hobbes and Locke, were among the first, by their teaching, to level a decisive blow at genuine thought, at the man who knows and who is the measure of all things;[38] and this they did by arriving at a conception of knowledge and thought that converted the latter into possessions which might be common to everybody--that is to say, by reducing all knowledge to that which can be made immediately the experience of all. This was the greatest blasphemy against the human spirit that has ever been committed. By means of it, every one, whatever he might be, could aspire to intellectuality and wisdom; for experience belongs to everybody, whereas a great spirit is the possession only of the fewest.