experiment of reading solidly through a vast number of their records and
reviews and discussions; and still I do not know. The only third thing I
can think of to balance religion and politics is art; and no one well
acquainted with the debates at St. Stephen's will imagine that the art
of extreme eloquence was the cause of the confusion. None will maintain
that our political masters are removed from us by an infinite artistic
superiority in the choice of words. The politicians know nothing of
politics, which is their own affair: they know nothing of religion,
which is certainly not their affair: it may legitimately be said that
they have to do with nothing; they have reached that low and last level
where a man knows as little about his own claim, as he does about his
enemies'. In any case there can be no doubt about the effect of this
particular situation on the problem of ethics and science. The duty of
dragging truth out by the tail or the hind leg or any other corner one
can possibly get hold of, a perfectly sound duty in itself, had somehow
come into collision with the older and larger duty of knowing something
about the organism and ends of a creature; or, in the everyday phrase,
being able to make head or tail of it. This paradox pursued and
tormented the Victorians. They could not or would not see that humanity
repels or welcomes the railway-train, simply according to what people
come by it. They could not see that one welcomes or smashes the
telephone, according to what words one hears in it. They really seem to
have felt that the train could be a substitute for its own passengers;
or the telephone a substitute for its own voice.

In any case it is clear that a change had begun to pass over scientific
inquiry, of which we have seen the culmination in our own day. There had
begun that easy automatic habit, of science as an oiled and
smooth-running machine, that habit of treating things as obviously
unquestionable, when, indeed, they are obviously questionable. This