I shall reserve for a later chapter the treatment of the question from the purely religious stand-point, and shall only examine here the reasons which seem to me to have led so many sincere and able scientific men to a position at variance with the religious and spiritual point of view.
This is, of course, closely bound up with the whole topic of the various attempts which have been made to satisfy the perennial demand for light on the mysteries of life and death and on the spiritual and non-material aspects of the universe.
It is out of the question for me to attempt to classify here the countless religions, sects, and philosophies which have arisen from time to time. But they do seem to fall into three main groups and although it is impossible to label these in any really satisfactory manner I think one may say that the Materialistic Scientists are the representatives of one school, the Orthodox Theologians of another, and the Occultists of a third.
By the Materialistic Scientists I mean those who see in matter or ether the ultimate and only permanent reality and who attempt to explain every experienced phenomenon in terms of matter and ether and of these only.
According to their view, Thought, Emotion, Consciousness, are no more than electro-chemical changes in the protoplasmic constituents of the brain cells. "The brain secretes consciousness as the liver secretes bile."
The idea of "spirit" is inconceivable to them; for the whole essence of Spirit is that it is not matter nor, so far as we can imagine, ether.
Now although this attitude is utterly repugnant to me, I can yet easily understand and sympathise with the state of mind which occasions it. I, too, feel that if there is one thing above all others to which one's intellect must cling at all costs it is the general proposition of the coherence and continuity of the universe—in other words the great Law of Causation. If ever we let go of that we find ourselves in chaos—which is insanity.
Within the "ring-fence," so to speak, of matter and energy the law holds good, but anything outside appears to the scientist as "discontinuous" and therefore, quite rightly, revolting. As against this point of view my contention is that it is quite possible to form an intelligible concept of Reality, different from and yet perfectly continuous with, the physical reality of the scientist.
This first purely materialistic school admits of fairly easy delimitation whereas the other two schools mingle together and diverge within themselves in so complex a manner that it is much more difficult to distinguish them from each other than to separate either of them from the first. But I think the difference is something of this kind. The school of which the Occultists are typical seem to me to tend to replace logically coherent explanation by mere descriptive nomenclature. On the other hand the Orthodox Theologians, while dogmatically asserting the existence of spirit and constantly emphasising the supreme importance of the spiritual life, are apt to ignore the intellectual demand for intelligible explanation altogether.
It is merely foolish to ignore or to ridicule on 'a priori' grounds the statements of those who claim to have investigated the problems with which we are concerned by the cultivation of abnormal or commonly latent faculties.