O genus infelix humanum, talia divis
     Cum tribuit facta atque iras adjunxit acerbas! 
     Quantos tum gemitus ipsi sibi, quantaque nobis
     Vulnera, quas lacrimas peperere minoribu’ nostris.

In every age, and in every religion there has been justification for his bitter words, “tantum religio potuit suadere malorum”—­“Such wrongs Religion in her train doth bring”—­yet, one outcome of “a belief in spiritual beings”—­as Tylor defines religion—­has been that man has built an altar of righteousness in his heart.  The comparative method applied to the study of his religious growth has shown how man’s thoughts have widened in the unceasing purpose which runs through his spiritual no less than his physical evolution.  Out of the spiritual protoplasm of magic have evolved philosopher and physician, as well as priest.  Magic and religion control the uncharted sphere—­the supernatural, the superhuman:  science seeks to know the world, and through knowing, to control it.  Ray Lankester remarks that Man is Nature’s rebel, and goes on to say:  “The mental qualities which have developed in Man, though traceable in a vague and rudimentary condition in some of his animal associates, are of such an unprecedented power and so far dominate everything else in his activities as a living organism, that they have to a very large extent, if not entirely, cut him off from the general operation of that process of Natural Selection and survival of the fittest which up to their appearance had been the law of the living world.  They justify the view that Man forms a new departure in the gradual unfolding of Nature’s predestined scheme.  Knowledge, reason, self-consciousness, will, are the attributes of Man."(1) It has been a slow and gradual growth, and not until within the past century has science organized knowledge—­so searched out the secrets of Nature, as to control her powers, limit her scope and transform her energies.  The victory is so recent that the mental attitude of the race is not yet adapted to the change.  A large proportion of our fellow creatures still regard nature as a playground for demons and spirits to be exorcised or invoked.

     (1) Sir E. Ray Lankester:  Romanes Lecture, “Nature and Man,”
     Oxford Univ.  Press, 1905, p. 21.

Side by side, as substance and shadow—­“in the dark backward and abysm of time,” in the dawn of the great civilizations of Egypt and Babylon, in the bright morning of Greece, and in the full noontide of modern life, together have grown up these two diametrically opposite views of man’s relation to nature, and more particularly of his personal relation to the agencies of disease.