II. HUMANISM AND RELIGIOUS
EXPERIENCE
T H E realisation of the decline of the humanist tradition and the prospect of the complete mechanisation of our civilisation have produced a striking change in the modern intellectual attitude towards religion. The last generation —the generation of H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw—was still prepared to idealise the machine and to place its hopes in a mechanised Utopia.
The present generation has lost this confidence and is beginning to feel the need for a return to religion and a recovery of the religious attitude to life which the European mind has lost during the last two or three centuries.
And this feeling is no longer confined to the Conservatives and the supporters of the traditional intellectual order, as was largely the case in the last century. On the contrary, it is especially characteristic of the most modern of the moderns and of those who are in revolt against the existing order of things—of men like the late D. H. Lawrence and Mr. Middleton Murry and Mr. T. S. Eliot in this country, of 26