Collected Essays, Volume V: Science and Christian Tradition: EssaysHuxley, Thomas Henry
Religion
Collected Essays, Volume V: Science and Christian Tradition: Essays
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Agnosticism; Miracles; Religion and science
view. And, sometimes, calm reflection has taught the humiliating
lesson, that their point of view was not so different from my own as I
had fondly imagined. Comprehension is more than half-way to sympathy,
here as elsewhere.
If we turn our attention to scholastic philosophy in the frame of mind
suggested by these prefatory remarks, it assumes a very different
character from that which it bears in general estimation. No doubt it
is surrounded by a dense thicket of thorny logomachies and obscured by
the dust-clouds of a barbarous and perplexing terminology. But suppose
that, undeterred by much grime and by many scratches, the explorer
has toiled through this jungle, he comes to an open country which is
amazingly like his dear native land. The hills which he has to climb,
the ravines he has to avoid, look very much the same; there is the
same infinite space above, and the same abyss of the unknown below;
the means of travelling are the same, and the goal is the same.
That goal for the schoolmen, as for us, is the settlement of the
question how far the universe is the manifestation of a rational
order; in other words, how far logical deduction from indisputable
premisses will account for what which has happened and does happen.
That was the object of scholasticism, and, so far as I am aware, the
object of modern science may be expressed in the same terms. In
pursuit of this end, modern science takes into account all the
phenomena of the universe which are brought to our knowledge by
observation or by experiment. It admits that there are two worlds to
be considered, the one physical and the other psychical; and that
though there is a most intimate relation and interconnection between
the two, the bridge from one to the other has yet to be found; that
their phenomena run, not in one series, but along two parallel lines.
To the schoolmen the duality of the universe appeared under a
different aspect. How this came about will not be intelligible unless
we clearly apprehend the fact that they did really believe in
dogmatic Christianity as it was formulated by the Roman Church. They
did not give a mere dull assent to anything the Church told them on
Sundays, and ignore her teachings for the rest of the week; but they
lived and moved and had their being in that supersensible theological
world which was created, or rather grew up, during the first four
centuries of our reckoning, and which occupied their thoughts far more
than the sensible world in which their earthly lot was cast.
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