290 ESSAYS AND LETTERS
thought is continually and ubiquitously expressed in every form, from philosophic treatises down to news- paper feuilletons.
M. Berthelot says in that speech, that there were formerly two motors moving humanity : Force and Religion ; but that these motors have now become superfluous, for in their place we have science. By science M. Berthelot (like all devotees of science) evidently means a science embracing the whole range of things man knows, harmoniously united, co-ordi- nated, and in command of such methods that the data it obtains are unquestionably true. But as no such science really exists — and what is now called science consists of a collection of haphazard, disconnected scraps of knowledge, many of them quite useless, and such as, instead of supplying undoubted truth, very frequently supply the grossest delusions, exhibited as truth to-day, but refuted to-morrow — it is evident that the thing M. Berthelot thinks must replace religion is something non-existent. Consequently the assertion made by M. Berthelot and by those who agree with him, to the effect that science will replace religion, is quite arbitrary, and rests on a quite unjustifiable faith in the infallibility of science — a faith similar to the belief in an infallible Church.
Yet men who are said to be, and who consider them- selves to be, educated, are quite convinced that a science already exists which should and can replace religion, and which even has already replaced it.
' Religion is obsolete : belief in anything but science is ignorance. Science will arrange all that is needful, and one must be guided in life by science alone.' This is what is thought and said both by scientists them- selves and also by those men of the crowd who, though far from scientific, believe in the scientists and join them in asserting that religion is an obsolete supersti- tion, and that we must be guided in life by science only : that is, in reality, by nothing at all ; for science, by reason of its very aim (which is to study all that exists), can afford no guidance for the life of man.
