and theologians might apply.  This was Comte’s contention.  Others conceded that there might be such an area, but claimed that we can have no knowledge of it.  Even the theologians, after their first shock, were disposed to concede that, concerning the magnitudes in which they were most interested, as for example, God and soul, we have no knowledge of the sort which the method of the physical sciences would give.  They fell back upon Kant’s distinction of the two reasons and two worlds.  They exaggerated the sharpness of that distinction.  They learned that the claim of agnosticism was capable of being viewed as a line of defence, behind which the transcendental magnitudes might be secure.  Indeed, if one may take Spencer as an example, it is not certain that this was not the intent of some of the scientists in their strong assertion of agnosticism.  Spencer’s later work reveals that he had no disposition to deny that there are foundations for belief in a world lying behind the phenomenal, and from which the latter gets its meaning.

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