Here we should frankly admit that the soul’s hunger for the Infinite is, as the great Athenian so deeply realized, the very mainspring of Religion; and yet we must maintain that it is precisely this single bound away, instead of the ever-repeated double movement of a coming and a going, which not only helped to suppress, or at least gravely to stunt, the growth of the sciences of external observation and experiment, but (and this is the special point,—the demonstrable other side of the medal,) also, in its degree, prevented religion from attaining to its true depth, by thus cutting off, as far as Plato’s conviction prevailed, the very material, stimulation, and in part the instruments, for the soul’s outgoing, spiritualizing work, together with this work’s profound reflex effect upon the worker, as a unique occasion for the growth and self-detachment of the soul.
Now the necessity for such a first stage and movement, which, as far as possible both immanental and phenomenalist, shall be applied and restricted to the special methods, direct objects, and precise range of each particular Science, and the importance of the safeguarding of this scientific liberty, are now clearly perceived, by the leading men of Religion, Philosophy, Psychology and Physics, in connection with the maintenance and acquisition of sincere and fruitful Science.—It is also increasingly seen that, even short of Religion, a second, an interpretative, an at least Philosophical stage and movement is necessary for the full explicitation of Science’s own assumptions and affinities. And the keeping of these two movements clearly distinct or even strongly contrasted, is felt, by some far-sighted Theologians, to be a help towards securing, not only a candid attitude of Science towards its own subject matters, but also a right independence of Philosophy and Theology towards the other Sciences. Thus Cardinal Newman has brought out, with startling force, the necessarily non-moral, non-religious character of Physico-Mathematical Science, taken simply within its direct subject-matter and method. “Physical science never travels beyond the examination of cause and effect. Its object is to resolve the complexity of phenomena into simple elements and principles; but when it has reached those first elements, principles and laws, its mission is at an end; it keeps within that material system with which it began, and never ventures beyond the ‘flammantia moenia mundi.’ The physicist as such will never ask himself by what influence, external to the universe, the universe is sustained; simply because he is a physicist. If, indeed, he be a religious man, he will, of course, have a very different view of the subject; … and this, not because physical science says anything different, but simply because it says nothing at all on the subject, nor can do by the very undertaking with which it set out.” Or, as he elsewhere sympathetically sums up Bacon’s method of proceeding: “The inquiry into physical causes passes over for the moment the existence of God. In other words, physical science is, in a certain sense, atheistic, for the very reason that it is not theology.”[452]
2. Science builds up a preliminary world that has to be corrected by Philosophy and Religion, at and for their deeper levels.
The additional experience and analysis of the last half-century apparently forces us, however, to maintain not only that Physico-Mathematical Science, and all knowledge brought strictly to the type of that Science, does not itself pronounce on the Ultimate Questions; but that this Science, as such, actually presents us with a picture of reality which, at the deeper level even of Epistemology and of the more ultimate Psychology, and still more at that of Religion, requires to be taken as more or less artificial, and as demanding, not simply completion, but, except for its own special purposes, correction as well. Thus we have seen how M. Bergson finds Clock-Time to be an artificial, compound concept, which seriously travesties Duration, the reality actually experienced by us; and Space appears as in even a worse predicament. M. Emil Boutroux in France, Dottore Igino Petrone in Italy, Profs. Eucken and Troeltsch in Germany, Profs. James Ward and Pringle Pattison in Great Britain, and Profs. William James, Hugo Münsterberg and Josiah Royce in America are, in spite of differences on other points, united in insistence upon, or have even worked out in much detail, such a distinction between the first stage and level of Determinist, Atomistic, Inorganic Nature and our concepts of it, and the second stage and level of Libertarian, Synthetic, and Organic Spiritual Reality, and our experience of it. And the penetrating labours of Profs. Windelband, Rickert, and others, towards building up a veritable Organon of the Historical Sciences, are bringing into the clearest relief these two several degrees of Reality and types of Knowledge, the Historical being the indefinitely deeper and more adequate, and the one which ultimately englobes the other.[453]
A profoundly significant current in modern philosophy will thus be brought, in part at least, to articulate expression and application. This current is well described by Prof. Volkelt. “German philosophy since Kant reveals, in manifold forms and under various disguises, the attempt to recognize, in Epistemology, Metaphysics, and Ethics, such kinds of Certainty, such domains of Being, such human Volitions and Values, as lie beyond reason, constitute a something that it cannot grasp, and are rooted in some other kind of foundation. In variously struggling, indeed stammering utterances, expression is given to the assurance that not everything in the world is resolvable into Logic and Thought, but that mighty resisting remainders are extant, which perhaps even constitute the most important thing in the world.… Such a longing after such a Reality can be traced in Hamann, Jacobi, Herder, in Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel, the youthful Schleiermacher, and Jean Paul. Indeed, even in Hegel, the adorer of Reason, the movement of Negation, which is the very soul of his philosophy, is, at bottom, nothing but the Irrational,” the Super-Rational, “element violently pressed into the form of Reason; and again the single Thing, the This, the Here and the Now, are felt by him as … a something beyond Reason. And has not the Irrational found expression in Kant, in his doctrines of the unconditional Liberty of the Will and of Radical Evil? In the later Schelling and his spiritual relatives the Irrational has found far more explicit recognition; whilst Schopenhauer brings the point to its fullest expression. Yet even Nietzsche still possesses such an element, in his doctrine of the ‘Over-Man.’”[454] And in England we find this same element, in various degrees and in two chief divergent forms, in the Cambridge Platonists, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Hill Green on the one hand; and in Bishop Butler and Cardinal Newman on the other hand.
We can thus point to much clear recognition, or at least to a considerable influence, of the profound truth that Science and Wisdom can each prosper and help and supplement the other, only if each possesses a certain real autonomy, a power fully to become and to remain itself, and, in various degrees and ways, to stimulate, check and thwart the other. And this truth ever presupposes, what human experience, in the long run, proves to be a fact,—that the different kinds, spheres, and levels of man’s apprehension, and of the total reality thus apprehended by him, are already immanently planned each for the other, within a great, largely dormant system of the world. Thus Man can and should call this congenital inter-relatedness into ever more vigorous and more fruitful play; whereas, if it were not already present deep within the very nature of things, no amount of human effort or ingenuity could ever evoke or insert it. Prof. Volkelt has, as we have seen, illustrated this great fact very strikingly, with regard to the relation extant between the apparently sheer contingencies of human History and the requirements of Philosophy, of normative thought and ideal truth. Yet a similar inter-connection can be traced elsewhere, between any other two or more levels and spheres of wholesome and permanent human apprehension and action, in their relation to various degrees and kinds of reality, as this environs man or inheres in him.
3. Necessity of the “Thing-element” in Religion.
But let us note that the recognition, of an at all emphatic, systematic kind, of such inter-relatedness is, so far, almost limited to the moods and persons preoccupied with the right claims of Science or of Philosophy upon each other or upon the remainder of Life; and is, as yet, all but wanting, when Life is approached from the side of the specifically Religious requirements and of the Spiritual consolidation of man’s soul. Yet here especially, at by far the most important point of the whole matter, the unique place and significance of Science can now be very clearly grasped.
Indeed it is deeply interesting to note how largely the fundamental characteristics of Catholicism really meet, or rather how they strictly require, some such vivid conception and vigorous use of the Determinist Thing and of its level for the full constitution of our true depth, our Spiritual Personality itself. If we take, e.g., the criticisms addressed, by so earnest and acute a mind as the intensely Protestant Emile Sulze, to the whole Thing-Element and -Concept, as these are at work in the Catholic practice and position, we shall find his sense of the difference between Thing and Spirit to be as enviably keen, and his idea of the end and ultimate measure of Religion to be as sound and deep, as his conception of the means towards developing Religion and the Spirit is curiously inadequate.
(1) “Personality,” says Sulze, “is, for Religion and Morality, the supreme Good, of which the source is in God, and the end, the fruit, and the manifestation is in Man.”[455] This I take to be profoundly true, especially if we insist upon Perfect Personality being Supreme and Perfect Spirit; and, again, upon our imperfect personality and spirit as possessed of certain profound affinities to, and as penetrable and actually moved by, that Perfect Spirit.