How all this affects the Religious Outlook.
These denials and destructive criticisms of the mechanical theory, which are now continually cropping up, [pg 275] lead, as must be obvious, towards a deeper conception and interpretation of reality in general, and towards a religious conception in particular. Unquestionably the most important fact in connection with them is the fresh revelation of the depth of things and of appearance, the increased recognition that our knowledge is only leading us towards mystery.
It is indeed questionable whether anything more than this can be said in regard to the problem of life, whether we ought not to content ourselves with recognising the limits of our knowledge, and reject all positive statements that go beyond these limits. For the mechanists are undoubtedly right in this, that “entelechy,” “the idea of the whole,” “co-operation,” “guidance,” “psychical factors,” and the like, are only names for riddles, and do not in themselves constitute knowledge.[106] The case here is somewhat similar to what we have already seen in connection with “antinomies.” They, too, give us no positive insight into the true nature of things, but they at any rate prove to us that we have not yet understood what that is. And, just as they show us that our knowledge of the world as it appears to us can never be complete, so here it appears that we come upon inexplicabilities even within the domain accessible to our knowledge. [pg 276] Thus the religious conception of the world gains something here as from the antinomies, namely, a fresh proof that the world which appears to us and can be comprehended by us, proclaims its true nature and depths, but does not reveal them. Perhaps there is still another gain. For in any case the vital processes and the marvels of evolution and development are examples of the way in which physical processes are constantly subject to a peculiar guidance, which certainly cannot be explained from themselves or in terms of mechanism, organisation, and the like. All attempts to demonstrate this in detail, all “explanations” in terms of dynamic co-operation, of dominants, of ideas, or anything else, are vague, and seem to go to pieces when we try to take firm hold of them. But the fact remains none the less.
May not this be a paradigm of the processes and development of the world at large, and even of evolution in the domain of history? Here, too, all ideas of guidance, of endeavour after an aim, &c., which philosophical study of history or religious intuition seems to find, make shipwreck against the fact that every attempt to demonstrate their nature, fails. All these theories of influx, concursus, and so on, whether transcendental or immanent factors be employed, immediately become wooden, and never admit of verification in detail. But precisely the same is true of the dominance of the “idea,” or of the “law [pg 277] of evolution,” or of the “potential of development” in every developing organism. Yet incomprehensible and undemonstrable in detail as this “dominance” is, and completely as it may be concealed behind the play of physical causes, it is there, none the less.