Conduct of life; English essays -- 20th century; Ethics; Philosophy
This difficulty is not diminished when the person who is thus
hypertrophied on one side and atrophied on the other suddenly wakes up
to his one-sided state and hastily attempts to remedy it. The very fact
that such a one-sided development has come about indicates that there
has probably been a congenital basis for it, an innate disharmony which
must require infinite patience and special personal experience to
overcome. But the heroic and ostentatious manner in which these
ill-balanced people hastily attempt the athletic feat of restoring their
spiritual balance has frequently aroused the interest, and too often the
amusement, of the spectator. Sir Isaac Newton, one of the most
quintessentially scientific persons the world has seen, a searcher who
made the most stupendous effort to picture the universe intelligently on
its purely intelligible side, seems to have realised in old age, when he
was, indeed, approaching senility, that the vast hypertrophy of his
faculties on that side had not been compensated by any development on
the religious side. He forthwith set himself to the interpretation of
the Book of Daniel and puzzled over the prophecies of the Book of
Revelation, with the same scientifically serious air as though he were
analysing the spectrum. In reality he had not reached the sphere of
religion at all; he had merely exchanged good science for bad science.
Such senile efforts to penetrate, ere yet life is quite over, the
mystery of religion recall, and, indeed, have a real analogy to, that
final effort of the emotionally starved to grasp at love which has been
called “old maid’s insanity”; and just as in this aberration the woman
who has all her life put love into the subconscious background of her
mind is overcome by an eruption of the suppressed emotions and driven to
create baseless legends of which she is herself the heroine, so the
scientific man who has put religion into the subconscious and scarcely
known that there is such a thing may become in the end the victim of an
imaginary religion. In our own time we may have witnessed attempts of
the scientific mind to become religious, which, without amounting to
mental aberration, are yet highly instructive. It would be a
double-edged compliment, in this connection, to compare Sir Oliver Lodge
to Sir Isaac Newton. But after devoting himself for many years to purely
physical research, Lodge also, as he has confessed, found that he had
overlooked the religious side of life, and therefore set himself with
characteristic energy to the task—the stages of which are described in a
long series of books—of developing this atrophied side of his nature.
Unlike Newton, who was worried about the future, Lodge became worried
about the past. Just as Newton found what he was contented to regard as
religious peace in speculating on the meaning of the Books of Daniel and
Revelation, so Lodge found a similar satisfaction in speculations
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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