Nor can man, even simply _qua_ religious man, consent to a simple finality in the experience and explication, in the apprehension and application of religion, either in looking back into the past; or in believing and loving, suffering and acting in the present; or in forecasting the future, either of the race or of himself alone. For the _here and now_, the concrete “immediacy,” the unique individuality of the religious experience for _me_, in this room, on this very day, its freshness, is as true and necessary a quality of living religion as any other whatsoever. And if all life sustains itself only by constant, costing renovation and adaptation of itself to its environment, the religious life, as the most intense and extensive of all lives, must somehow be richest in such newness in oldness, such renovative, adaptive, assimilative power. 5. _All this seen at work in man’s actual history._ Now it is deeply instructive to observe all this at work historically. For here we find every variety of attitude towards this very point. There are men of Religion who attempt to do without Science, and men of Science who attempt to do without Religion. Or again, men of Religion attempt to _level up_,--to assimilate the principles and results of the various sciences directly to religion, or at least to rule those scientific principles and results directly by religion. Or men of Science attempt to _level down_, to make religion into a mere philosophy or even a natural history. Yet we find also,--with so persistent a recurrence in all manner of places and times, as itself to suggest the inherent, essential, indestructible truth of the view,--another, a far more costing attitude. This attitude refuses all mutilation either of normal human nature or of its outlook, all oppression of one part by the other; for it discovers that these various levels of life have been actually practised in conjunction by many an individual in the past and in the present; and that, where they have been practised within a large organization of faith and love, they have ever led to a fuller reality and helpfulness both of the science and of the religion concerned. Hence the mind thus informed cannot doubt the truth of this solution, however difficult at all times may be its practice, and however little final at any time can be its detailed intellectual analysis. IV. SUMMING UP: HELLENISM OR HARMONIZATION, CHRISTIANITY OR SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE, AND SCIENCE OR ACCEPTANCE OF A PRELIMINARY MECHANISM, ALL THREE NECESSARY TO MAN. To sum up all this first chapter, we have got so far as this. We have seen that humanity has, so far, found and worked out three forces and conceptions of life, forces which are still variously operative in each of us, but which find their harmonious interaction in but few men, their full theoretical systematization in none.[33]