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WHERE SCIENCEAND RELIGIONMEET
WHERE SCIENCEAND RELIGIONMEET
'We are still, as in Plato's age, groping about for a new method more comprehensive than any of those that now prevail; and also more permanent. And we seem to see at a distance the promise of such a method, which can hardly be any other than the method of idealized experience, having roots which strike far down into the history of philosophy. It is a method which does not divorce the present from the past, or the part from the whole, or the abstract from the concrete, or theory from fact, or th
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NOTE
NOTE
I have not named my authorities or given references to any passages in their books. My critics, friendly or unfriendly, may complain of this omission. But I hope they will not. I hope they will see that I have gathered my materials together for a clearly shown purpose with which particular references and frequent defined quotations would have interfered. I wanted to build a wayside cottage for travellers who are in haste and will soon pass on, not a museum for the leisurely student. I hope, then
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CHAPTER I
CHAPTER I
Deep in every one of us there is a passion of desire to understand, just as there is of desire to enjoy and of desire to be somehow or other 'in the right.' I say deep in us, because we are in the habit either of burying these desires beneath a pretence of satisfying them or else of diverting our attention from them and thus letting them sink out of sight. So we live our life in the pursuit of other ends than those likely to be reached through understanding and rapture and righteousness. We fals
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CHAPTER II
CHAPTER II
The green leaf of the tree, the blade of the wheat that gives me bread—I look at them and tell myself, as many a man has told himself before, that if I could read their secrets I should know, as from the 'flower in the crannied wall,' 'what God and man is.' So I might, but only as far as their secrets go. If I could read my own I should go farther and know more. I am man and hold far greater secrets in being man. And I have the inestimable advantage of being inside myself, of being alive, beside
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CHAPTER III
CHAPTER III
We have followed the physicist and the chemist to the farthest point they have reached in their research. They cannot show us anything beyond, and we, unsatisfied, must look elsewhere. The problems of life remain. We ourselves stand on the great pathway, its continuous road of rising orders, and from our place of vantage we contemplate the first living thing. A profound discrepancy, or what seems like one, stares us in the face, the discrepancy between our mastery over things and our self-consci
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CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER IV
The divergent streams of that primaeval fountain of life as they spread out upon the earth, in the earth, in the air, in, under and upon the waters, have given to it the endless variety of its creatures. In this variety, and of those streams, there are three and no more than three main currents; there are three directions and grouped characters and qualities of life. Each of these in its turn branches into minor streams and differences of creatures. The main currents are those of the plants, the
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CHAPTER V
CHAPTER V
There are signs that the life of the body is even in the lower animals to some extent imbued with the free creative spirit. There are creative efforts of determination, changes of direction, triumphs over circumstance, that find their enlightening context in the more emancipated life of man. A sea-urchin's egg, for instance, begins its development by dividing into two cells. Normally these cells, by a like division, share between them the making of the respective halves of the creature's body. I
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CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VI
When the brain dies it is resolved in the ordinary way gradually, or may be resolved in a laboratory quickly, into its constituents, which the chemist may collect as water, carbonic acid and so forth, together with, roughly, a few pinches of ash. Nothing is lost of what, as we say, it was made of. After death it is left to fall from its temporary high estate of power, and travel along the line of least physical and chemical resistance to the low estate from which life had raised its matter-stuff
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CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VII
In a world of creatures where the interests of each kind are focused on the preservation of the species, and each individual's attention and powers are in the main concentrated on the pressing need for reproduction, and for food and shelter to maintain life in itself and its young progeny, conflict must ensue, a conflict of both ends and means. Because, too, in these creatures the way of life is not open, as in man, habit-memories may be taken as being the chief agents for ensuring both species-
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CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER VIII
By the establishing of habit-memories in the nervous structures of man consciousness is liberated for another and, if the man will, a nobler use. The instrument may be forgotten, the work goes on. This liberation of the spirit from attention to modes of activity and actions that can be automatically or almost automatically carried on is among life's greatest triumphs. And the triumph is indefinitely extended in man's peculiar relation to his tools, and through the peculiar character of both his
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CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER IX
No doubt the great question for any man in regard to himself—if he is able and willing to put one so searching—is whether he is or is not on the way to aid in the fulfilment of the promise of life. It is a question hard to answer, for the promise of life grows ever greater in our eyes once we have begun to see it at all. There was a time when for our ancestors of the caves it must have called for little more than strength and skill, courage and perseverance, in attack or in defence and in the pr
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CHAPTER X
CHAPTER X
Without social life no one of the peculiarly human powers of a man comes to fruition. He may chatter, for example; he cannot speak. He has all the necessary organs and all the necessary power, but man-language is part of an inheritance stored up for him in community life. It is stored up there, just as clinging with his hands and sucking with his lips are stored up ready for him at birth, in his body. Society is for him an immense extension of his body, and therefore a further means of extension
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CHAPTER I
CHAPTER I
As we looked at chlorophyll, at colloids and the sea-urchin's egg, so let us look at Christian habits and beliefs. And in the first place we will fix our attention on the central 'mystery' of worship in the Christian Church. All the world over and from the first days of Christian apostles and brethren, a man going into one of their places of assembly would at some hour or another find their devotion apparently gathered about common, familiar, bread and wine, or, sometimes, bread alone. They woul
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CHAPTER II
CHAPTER II
For the Christian a man is a being capable of receiving and assimilating life as no other creature can, and as the biologist has no biological reason to believe. The Christian declares that he has reason, good and ample. He knows whom he believes. This is a matter of living religious experience to which generations after generations have borne witness. There is a ladder of spiritual reality, he says, up which men are climbing and upon which some have reached great heights. The biologist's ladder
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CHAPTER III
CHAPTER III
The Christian has not escaped the dangers of the common lot. He too, despite his own contrary principles, has, from the beginning of the Christian Church, been tempted as we all are to trust to mechanism and even to sacrifice in its favour the powers of life. We ought not to be surprised; what else can reasonably be expected? A good machine, whether it be made of steel and brass, or of language, or of settled formulae and plans, or of any other product of life, is an admirable servant. It is con
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CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER IV
Studying at its best the Christian view of the world of life—and it is not worth any man's while to study it at less—we find that Jesus Christ stands there always as greatest among prophets, though 'more than a prophet.' He is in the line of the prophets but at their head; he is their culmination and their fulfilment. He knew himself to be a prophet, and to have the lot of one who 'is not without honour save in his own country.' He lived and taught, and he and his teaching were received, after t
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CHAPTER V
CHAPTER V
Aut Deus aut homo non bonus —so Christians have said and believed. The dilemma, though comfortable for not a few among them, and having about it a certain truth, often involves a false conception of both man and God. The truth it holds is not their comfort; they do not know that. What most people mean when they use the dilemma is that the prophet of Nazareth was either as a person God and not as a person man, or he was as a person man and a bad one. It seems conclusive, this either-or. But there
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CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VI
We are going far with the Christian. Life is indeed a bond; it is materialism that divides the seekers after truth. The secret materialism of the Christian and his trust in religious machinery must bring him into conflict with those who put their trust in other kinds of machines. We who are trusting life, and are trying not to interpret it in terms of the logic of things, find ourselves side by side with those Christians faithful enough to their supreme leader and their own principles to do the
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CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VII
The Christian shows in his root principles, we are bound to confess, a profound sense of personality and of the relations of persons. That this comes of his relation to the Supreme Person from whom he has derived them can hardly be denied. It is in a person, Jesus Christ, that he has seen God and learnt about him; and the judgements and love of God that he discerns he discerns in Christ. As the spirit of Christ becomes one with his spirit so do his own judgements and his own love become those of
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CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER VIII
It is quite true that to be popular a religion must be corrupt. The fact is noted both by its critics and enemies and by its friends and devotees. They express their minds in different terms but they agree. There is, however, a difference running through their agreement, at least in many cases. The critics who are also enemies regard the corruption not strictly as corruption but as the clearer manifestation of the true character religion has from the beginning. The religious man means precisely
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CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER IX
So far-reaching a confession of the spiritual freedom and the spiritual dependence of man as is shown in the principles of Christian incarnation and atonement has never been popular. As they passed through the popular mind incarnation was often and widely made to seem a thunderclap from on high and atonement a transaction of the heavenly courts. All generations have clamoured for signs; and because none, such as they desired, has been given they have invented signs for themselves. The spiritual
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CHAPTER X
CHAPTER X
The gain or the loss of life—this is what the Christian religion calls us to face. Will you be a slave to the life you have and in the end lose it, or at least all that makes it worth living? Or will you, in the liberty wherewith Christ makes you free, take up your heritage of more life in union with him? There is a good deal in our experience that may be read with advantage as commentary on this challenge of religion. There are men (we have known them) who grow smaller before our eyes. We say t
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CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XI
As heaven or hell depends on the choice between self-giving and self-seeking, so does the worship of the true God or the false. Names may be mockeries here. The self-seeking Christian, worshipping, as he may tell us, the God and Father of his Lord Jesus Christ, is doing nothing of the kind. He is worshipping that which he serves. If he could really use the true God as a means towards the end he has at heart, that is, make God serve him, he would do so. This, in fact, is what he tries to do. Natu
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CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XII
For the Christian the barrier that finally checks the advance of life is not death but a self-concentrated self. It is freedom misused and lost, freedom turning against the life that has striven to bring it to birth. Perversity builds that barrier and human life cannot pass it or—shall we not say with the Christian?—God cannot pass it. This alone thwarts the divine purpose for man and brings about the 'second' and only true death. We have nothing to urge against this teaching of religion; we see
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APPENDIX
APPENDIX
The cover was produced by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain. The original spelling and punctuation has been retained. Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved....
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