spirit entered into history and literature; who breathed it in his
youth with the fervid and sacred enthusiasm of a poet seeing the world
grow brighter and intelligible to him, and who, at the age of twenty-
five, demanded of it a method and introduced this into criticism and
psychology in order to give these new life - the mechanical equivalent
of heat, natural selection, spectroscopic analysis, the theory of the
microbes, recent discoveries in physics and the constitution of
matter, research into historic origins, psychological explanation of
texts, extension of oriental researches, discoveries of prehistoric
conditions, comparative study of barbaric communities - every grand
idea of the century to which he has himself contributed, all those by
which science embraces a larger and larger portion of the universe, he
saw them containing the same essence; all combining to change the
conception of the world and substitute another, coherent and logical
in the best minds, but then confused and disfigured as it slowly
descends to the level of the crowd. - He would have described this
decent, the gradual diffusion, the growing power of the new Idea, the
active ferment which it contains after the manner of a dogma,
beneficent or pernicious according to the minds in which it lodges,
capable of arming men and of driving them on to pure destruction when
not fully comprehended, and capable of reorganizing them if they can
grasp its veritable meaning.

Its first effects are simply destructive, for, through Darwinism,
through experimental psychology, through the physiology of the brain,
through biblical exegesis, through the comparative study of savage
communities and their moral systems, the new concepts at first shocks
the religious idea which it tends to replace; even, with the half-
cultivated and in the minds of novices, it tends to pure negation, to
hostility against existing religions. To every social gathering around