distinctions between the normal and the abnormal; it is this which serves as test between the sane and the insane; no thoughtful student can venture to ignore the tremendous force of the consensus of human experience. But while he will not ignore, he must judge: he must ask, first, is this experience universal and unanimous? Secondly, on what experimental or other evidence is it based? The universal and unanimous verdict of human experience, based on clear verifiable experience, is one which the thinker will challenge with extreme hesitation. Yet cause may arise which justifies such challenge. Perhaps no belief has at once been so general, and so undeniably based on the evidence of the senses, as the belief in the movement of the sun and the immobility of our globe. All but the blind could daily see the rising of the sun in the eastern sky, and its setting in the west; all could feel the firmness of the unshaken earth, the solid unmoving steadfastness of the ground on which we tread. Yet this consensus of human experience, this universality of human testimony, has been rejected as false on evidence which none who can feel the force of reasoning is able to deny. If this belief, in defence of which can be brought the ne plus ultra of the verdict of common sense, be not tenable in the light of modern knowledge, how shall a belief on which the sensus communis is practically non-existent, on which human testimony is lacking in many cases, contradictory in all others, and which fails to maintain itself on experimental or other evidence, how shall it hold ground from which the other has been driven?
The reply to the question, "Is the evidence universal and unanimous?" must be in the negative. The religion of Buddha, which is embraced by more than a third of the population of the globe, is an Atheistic creed; many Buddhists pay veneration to Buddha, and to the statues of their own deceased ancestors, but none pretend that these objects of reverence are symbols of a divine power. Many of the lower savage tribes have no idea of God. Darwin writes: "There is ample evidence, derived not from hasty travellers, but from men who have long resided with savages, that numerous races have existed, and still exist, who have no idea of one or more Gods, and who have no words in their language to express such an idea" ("Descent of Man," pp. 93, 94, ed. 1875). Büchner ("Force and
