Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th CenturiesJones, Rufus M. (Rufus Matthew)
Religion
Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries
Jones, Rufus M. (Rufus Matthew)
Mysticism; Reformers
There is, I repeat, no ground for blaming the psychologist for making
these reductions. His science can deal only with an order of facts
which will conform to the scientific method, for wherever science
invades a field, it ignores or eliminates every aspect of novelty or
mystery or wonder, every aspect of reality which cannot be brought
under scientific categories, _i.e._ every aspect which cannot be
treated quantitatively and causally and {xviii} arranged in a congeries
of interrelated facts occurring according to natural laws. The only
cogent criticism is that any psychologist should suppose that his
scientific account is the "last word" to be spoken, that his reports
contain all the returns that can be expected, or that this method is
the only way of approach to truth and reality. Such claims to the
rights of eminent domain and such dogmatic assertions of exclusive
finality always reveal the blind spot in the scientist's vision. He
sees steadily but he does not see wholes. He is of necessity dealing
with a reduced and simplified "nature" which he constantly tends to
substitute for the vastly richer whole of reality that boils over and
inundates the fragment which submits to his categories. We do well to
gather in every available fact which biology or anthropology or
psychology can give us that throws light on human behaviour, or on
primitive cults, or on the richer subjective and social religious
functions of full-grown men. But the interior insight got from
religion itself, the rich wholeness of religious experience, the
discovery within us of an inner nature which defies description and
baffles all plumb-lines, and which _can draw out of itself more than it
contains_, indicate that we here have dealings with a type of reality
which demands for adequate treatment other methods of comprehension
than those available to science.
In the old Norse stories, Thor tried to empty the famous drinking-horn
in the games of Utgard, but to his surprise he found that, though the
horn looked small, he could not empty it, for it turned out that the
horn was immersed in the limitless and bottomless ocean. Again he
tried to lift a small and insignificant-looking animal, but, labour as
he might, he could not lift it, for it was grown into, and was organic
with, the whole world, and could not be raised without raising the very
ground on which the lifter stood! Somewhat so, the reality of religion
is so completely bound up with the whole personal life of man and with
his conjunct life in the social group and in the world of nature; it
is, in short, so much an {xix} affair of man's whole of experience, of
his spirit in its undivided and synthetic aspects, that it can never be
adequately dealt with by the analytic and descriptive method of this
wonderful new god of science, however big with results that method may
be.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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