renewed, nor the physical energy at its command, which is derived entirely from the inanimate world, but is the personality resident in the body and in control of it. There is no other interpretation of the difference between a man alive one moment and dead the next, which, in spite of the great advances in the interpretation of the mechanism of life made by biology, altogether eludes apprehension in terms of the other fundamental conceptions to which our inquiries into ourselves and our environment have led. In science we regard that which is indestructible as having real existence. In philosophy and religion that which has a real existence has been from time immemorial regarded as immortal, and it seems to be truly in accordance with the laws of thought, which in science has led to some of the grandest and most fruitful generalisations, to find the idea of personal immortality running like a thread through religious beliefs, even down to the most primitive. I make no pretence to using, in their correct technical philosophical meaning, such terms as consciousness, personality and spirit. All I am concerned, for my argument, to state is that in passing from the phenomena of the inanimate world to those of life in general we have to admit at least one fundamental conception which cannot be connected with the Conscions conceptions of the inanimate world, and which it now seems most unlikely ever will be. permality I have already warned you that from physical sim premises it is not possible or easy to proceed very far, and I make no pretence of discussing whether the personality, conscience and soul of a man is or is not, without any entirely new fundamental conception, capable of being regarded as the further development of the simple consciousness, or awareness, of its existence as a separate creature, possessed by the lowly organism. I accept the, to my mind, complete SCIENCE AND RELIGION. It is a nice question whether it is easier for the religious man to connect his system of thought with that of science, or for a scientific man to find the due relationship between his conclusions and the common current outlook upon ethical and spiritual, if not specifically theological, beliefs. I would have thought that just as it is easier for a coachman to learn to drive a motor-car than for a chauffeur to learn to handle horses, so it ought to be easier for those whose concern has always been with human personality rather than its mechanism to master the essential principles that have led to the mechanistic philosophy of science. But that is probably mere personal bias. The two studies belong to different worlds, as the poles apart, so far as they concern humanity, but men can afford to neglect neither. It is the priests, not religion, it is difficult for scientific men to live with, and science cannot coexist with priest-craft. The scientific man seeks truth as a continually developing revelation, and he changes his outlook on the world according as it unfolds itself before his eyes. The priest teaches SCIENCE AND RELIGION 155 that in some remote period of the world God Himself revealed Truth once and for all time, and his profession is to guard it against all comers. I do not believe that the soul any more than the mind can stagnate. It must grow or decay. Christianity cannot be crystallised into a creed binding for all time and, least of all, into a creed dating back to the century that preceded the relapse of Europe into intellectual barbarism. The world changes and has changed in the last hundred years out of all recognition, not on account of anything contained in the Mosaic or Christian revelations, but on account of the new revelations of science. Though these have come about by a process the reverse of supernatural, by laborious experiment and measurement, by slow accumulation of knowledge and honest and unbiassed weighing of the evidence, they constitute an essential part of the whole truth, be our religious convictions what they may. There is another important difference between what is understood by truth in the realms of science and religion respectively. A truth that claims to be a divine revelation must necessarily be supposed to be the absolute or ultimate truth, which, by common consent, is unattainable by any of the methods of human inquiry. What a scientific man conceives to be the truth is, in reality, something quite distinct. He is not concerned, and, indeed, it is hardly too much to say that he is not even greatly alrond interested, in ultimate, absolute and unattainable truth. He frames a hypothesis and tests it in every possible way. So long as every known or to be discovered fact is in accord with the hypothesis, and no other hypothesis is in accord with them, it is all he seeks to know. If, in the external universe, every event and phenomenon occurs in the precise and often predicable way it would occur if the hypothesis Space. were true, that hypothesis is regarded as the truth, until something occurs which proves it to be in error. There is sometimes loose talk-even among scientific men attempting to generalise concerning other subjects than those in which they have won their position that the scientific hypotheses of one age become the laughing stock of the next, but such talkers are often the laughing stock of their own age to those best qualified to form an opinion. As a matter of fact, there is a steady and increasingly rapid advance being made into the foundations of knowledge, which is impressive in no way more than in the continuous evidence it affords that these foundations have been well and truly laid. The methods of science in winning knowledge are of course its own. No one desires to suppose that they are the only methods by which Truth is to be sought or found. But when it comes to the modes of imparting knowledge already won, to educating the growing citizen to a knowledge of himself and his environment, we find differences as great. In matters of science we do not start a child upon fundamentals. We do not say that in all the varied happenings of the universe the sum of half the product of the mass into the square of the velocity and of the product of the distance into the force remains constant. We do not start with the conception of energy and from it deduce mechanical, thermal, electrical and chemical phenomena. The conception of energy belongs to the generalised philosophy of physical science and is the end result of generations of scientific thinkers. But the priests, of sections at least of the Christian religion, get hold of the child and confront it with all the end products of the philosophy of the childhood of the world, God and the soul, heaven and hell, angels, spirits, and the mysteries of the Trinity, almost before it can walk. CHILDREN AND GENERALISED EPITOMES 157 Philosophies, whether scientific or humane, are the end and not the beginning of wisdom. They are the epitomised expressions of the understanding of the age in which they originated, and, in themselves, or at any other age, they are as little intelligible as shorthand would be to one who has not learnt longhand. They are in no sense the stepping-stones from which a totally immature or uneducated mind can leap to the inheritance of the ages. It leaps rather into chaos and absurdity. Especially when there occurs, as did occur with the triumph of barbarism at the close of the fourth century, an almost total break of intellectual continuity between the age they served and that to which they survive, they are apt to convey meanings as remote from the original as the conception of energy is from that of the Deity. MAN AS THE Link. Science and religion could afford to ignore one another entirely, if sought entirely for their own sake and if the ordinary man was not the link between them. A Hindu mystic or a monk in one of the ascetic orders of the Roman Catholic Church, who has withdrawn himself from the world and practised starvation, celibacy and general mortification of the body, aspires to reach a spiritual plane from which the world, either in its mechanical or its vital aspect, can be left behind and forgotten as a distraction and a curse. Far be it from me to libel a calling I do not profess to understand. My criticism merely is concerned with the value to humanity of the results attained. For whatever pinnacle of pure contemplative philosophy that may thus ultimately be reached, little that is communicable or of general value to the life or thought of the world seems to have been the result. Y |
