The religious spirit is born of a conviction that some things matter
more than others. To those possessed by it there is a sharp distinction
between that which is unconditioned and universal and that which is
limited and local. It is a consciousness of the unconditioned and
universal that makes people religious; and it is this consciousness or,
at least, a conviction that some things are unconditioned and universal,
that makes their attitude towards the conditioned and local sometimes a
little unsympathetic. It is this consciousness that makes them set
justice above law, passion above principle, sensibility above culture,
intelligence above knowledge, intuition above experience, the ideal
above the tolerable. It is this consciousness that makes them the
enemies of convention, compromise, and common-sense. In fact, the
essence of religion is a conviction that because some things are of
infinite value most are profoundly unimportant, that since the
gingerbread is there one need not feel too strongly about the gilt.
It is useless for liberal divines to pretend that there is no antagonism
between the religious nature and the scientific. There is no antagonism
between religion and science, but that is a very different matter. In
fact, the hypotheses of science begin only where religion ends: but both
religion and science are born trespassers. The religious and the
scientific both have their prejudices; but their prejudices are not the
same. The scientific mind cannot free itself from a prejudice against
the notion that effects may exist the causes of which it ignores. Not
only do religious minds manage to believe that there may be effects of
which they do not know, and may never know, the causes--they cannot even
see the absolute necessity for supposing that everything is caused.
Scientific people tend to trust their senses and disbelieve their
emotions when they contradict them; religious people tend to trust
emotion even though sensual experience be against it. On the whole, the
religious are the more open-minded. Their assumption that the senses may
mislead is less arrogant than the assumption that through them alone can
we come at reality, for, as Dr. McTaggart has wittily said, "If a man is
shut up in a house, the transparency of the windows is an essential
condition of his seeing the sky. But it would not be prudent to infer
that, if he walked out of the house, he could not see the sky, because
there was no longer any glass through which he might see it."[6]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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