who saw things as they wished them to be, and until he himself submitted to his own illusions he ground them to powder.  But we associate Napoleon’s clearness of vision with personal selfishness.  Here was a nation in which every private soldier outdid Napoleon in his determination to see in warfare not great principles nor picturesque traditions, but hard facts; and yet the fire of their patriotism was hotter than Gambetta’s.  Something of this may have been due to the inherited organisation of the Japanese race, but more seemed to be the effect of their mental environment.  They had whole-heartedly welcomed that conception of Science which in Europe, where it was first elaborated, still struggles with older ideals.  Science with them had allied, and indeed identified, itself with that idea of natural law which, since they learnt it through China from Hindustan, had always underlain their various religions.[64] They had acquired, therefore, a mental outlook which was determinist without being fatalist, and which combined the most absolute submission to Nature with untiring energy in thought and action.

[64] See Okakura, The Japanese Spirit (1905).

One would like to hope that in the West a similar fusion might take place between the emotional and philosophical traditions of religion, and the new conception of intellectual duty introduced by Science.  The political effect of such a fusion would be enormous.  But for the moment that hope is not easy.  The inevitable conflict between old faith and new knowledge has produced, one fears, throughout Christendom, a division not only between the conclusions of religion and science, but also between the religious and the scientific habit of mind.  The scientific men of to-day no longer dream of learning from an English Bishop, as their predecessors learnt from Bishop Butler, the doctrine of probability in conduct, the rule that while belief must never be fixed, must indeed always be kept open for the least indication of new evidence, action, where action is necessary, must be taken as resolutely on imperfect knowledge, if that is the best available, as on the most perfect demonstration.  The policy of the last Vatican Encyclical will leave few Abbots who are likely to work out, as Abbot Mendel worked out in long years of patient observation, a new biological basis for organic evolution.  Mental habits count for more in politics than do the acceptance or rejection of creeds or evidences.  When an English clergyman sits at his breakfast-table reading his Times or Mail, his attitude towards the news of the day is conditioned not by his belief or doubt that he who uttered certain commandments about non-resistance and poverty was God Himself, but by the degree to which he has been trained to watch the causation of his opinions.  As it is, Dr. Jameson’s prepared manifesto on the Johannesburg Raid stirred most clergymen like a trumpet, and the suggestion that the latest socialist member of Parliament is not a gentleman, produces in them a feeling of genuine disgust and despair.