The underlying reason why science, when she regards her province as
covering everything, inevitably clashes with the interests of
religion, is that _she starts her view of the world from the
sub-human side_. The typical sciences are physics, chemistry,
astronomy, geology, biology, and the view of the universe which they
present is the basis on which all other sciences proceed. But this
foundation is sub-human; the master ideas involved in it are all
obtained with the life of man left out of account. Such an approach
presents a world-machine, immense and regular, and when, later,
psychology and sociology arise, how easy it is to call the human life
which they study a by-product of the sub-human world, an exudation
arising from the activities of matter.
Religion, on the contrary, _starts with human life_. Fall down in
awe, Science cries, before this vast sub-human world! And the
religious man answers: What world is this I am to bow before? Is it
not the universe which my mind knows and whose laws my intellect has
grasped? This universe, so far as it exists at all for me, is
apprehended by my vision, penetrated by my thought, encompassed by my
interpretations. _What is really great and wonderful here, is not
the world which I understand, but the mind that understands it--not
the sub-human but the human._ Man himself is the supreme Fact, and
all the world that man could bow before, man's mind must first of all
contain. The master truth is not that my mind exists within a physical
universe, but that the physical universe is encompassed by my mind.
Therefore, when I interpret life, I will start with man, and not with
what lies below him.
Romanes, the English scientist, illustrates in his experience the
difference which these two approaches make. When, returning from
agnosticism to Christianity, he explained his lapse, he said, "I did
not sufficiently appreciate the immense importance of _human_
nature, as distinguished from physical nature, in any inquiry touching
theism.... Human nature is the most important part of nature as a
whole whereby to investigate the theory of theism. This I ought to
have anticipated on merely _a priori_ grounds, had I not been too
much immersed in merely physical research." Of how many now does this
same explanation hold! They segregate man from the rest of the
universe, and endeavor an interpretation of the unhuman remainder.
They forget that man is part and parcel of the universe, bone of its
bone, as imperative an expression of its substantial nature as are
rocks and stars, and that _any philosophy which interprets the world
minus man has not interpreted the world_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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