Excerpt from The Unseen World: And Other Essays A savage condition. The theories of the world wrought out by early priest - philosophers were in great part made up of such grotesque notions and having become variously implicated with ethical opinions as to the nature and couse quences Of right and wrong behaviour, they ac quired a kind of sanctity, SO that any thinker who in the light Of a Wider experience ventured to alter or amend the primitive theory was likely to be vituperated as an irreligious man or atheist. This sort of inference has not yet been wholly abandoned, even in civilized communi ties. Even to-day books are written about the conflict between religion and science, and other books are written with intent to reconcile the two presumed antagonists. But when we look beneath the surface of things, we see that in reality there has never been any conflict between religion and science, nor is any reconciliation called for where harmony has always existed. The real historical conflict, which has been thus curiously misnamed, has been the conflict be tween the more-crude opinions belonging to the science of an earlier age and the less-crude opin ions belonging to the science of a later age. In the course of this contest the more-crude opin ions have usually been defended in the name of religion, and the less-crude opinions have inva riably won the victory; but religion itself, which is not concerned with opinion, but With the as. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.