Morality as a Religion: An exposition of some first principlesSullivan, W. R. Washington (William Robert Washington)
Religion
Morality as a Religion: An exposition of some first principles
Sullivan, W. R. Washington (William Robert Washington)
Conduct of life; Ethics; Religion and ethics
But, before coming to close quarters with this extremely interesting
problem, I would protest that we are sincere in our loyalty and
enthusiasm for physical science, sincere in our deep admiration for its
chief exponents. We claim to be students of the students of nature,
for, after all, nature herself is the great scientist. The secrets are
all in her keeping. The All-Mother is venerable indeed in the eyes of
every one of us. "The heated pulpiteer" may denounce modern science as
the evil genius of our day, the arch-snare of Satan for the seduction
of unwary souls and the overthrow of Biblical infallibility, but we are
not in that galley. As true sons of our age, we are loyal to its
spirit, and that spirit is scientific. The late Professor Tyndall said
of Emerson, the veritable prophet and inspiration of ethical religion:
"In him we have a poet and a profoundly religious man, who is really
and entirely undaunted by the discoveries of science, past, present and
prospective, and in his case poetry, with the joy of a bacchanal, takes
her graver brother science by the hand, and cheers him with immortal
laughter. By Emerson scientific conceptions are continually transmuted
into the finer forms and warmer lines of an ideal world." It is in no
spirit, therefore, of hostility to physical science or her methods that
we venture to point out that the term science is not synonymous with
experimental research. The most brilliant work of Darwin, Kelvin or
Edison in no wise alters the fact that there are more things in heaven
and earth than are revealed by their microscopes or decomposed in their
crucibles. Mental science, and above all moral or ethical science,
have a claim to be heard as well as physics. Philosophy, strictly
speaking, working by the light, not of the senses, as does physical
science, but by the higher light of the intelligence alone, must be
reckoned with by the thoughtful man. Yet this is precisely what so
many of the lesser luminaries of science, the popularisers of the great
discoveries made by other and greater men, appear to be wholly unable
to see. They have borrowed their foot-rule for the mensuration of the
universe, and they apply it indiscriminately. Everything, from the
dead earth to the glowing inspiration of the prophet's soul, must be
labelled in terms of that infallible instrument. If it cannot be
reduced to their exiguous standard, so much the worse for it. Science,
or rather "the heated pulpiteer" of science (for these inflammatory
gentlemen are found both in the pulpit and at the rostrum), can take no
account of it, and that settles the matter once for all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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