A besetting temptation of the scientific apologist for religion is to take some of its current expressions and after clearing away crudities [Pg 349] of thought (which must necessarily be associated with anything adapted to the everyday needs of humanity) to water down the meaning until little is left that could possibly be in opposition to science or to anything else. If the revised interpretation had first been presented no one would have raised vigorous criticism; on the other hand no one would have been stirred to any great spiritual enthusiasm. It is the less easy to steer clear of this temptation because it is necessarily a question of degree. Clearly if we are to extract from the tenets of a hundred different sects any coherent view to be defended some at least of them must be submitted to a watering-down process. I do not know if the reader will acquit me of having succumbed to this temptation in the passages where I have touched upon religion; but I have tried to make a fight against it. Any apparent failure has probably arisen in the following way. We have been concerned with the borderland of the material and spiritual worlds as approached from the side of the former. From this side all that we could assert of the spiritual world would be insufficient to justify even the palest brand of theology that is not too emaciated to have any practical influence on man’s outlook. But the spiritual world as understood in any serious religion is by no means a colourless domain. Thus by calling this hinterland of science a spiritual world I may seem to have begged a vital question, whereas I intended only a provisional identification. To make it more than provisional an approach must be made from the other side. I am unwilling to play the amateur theologian, and examine this approach in detail. I have, however, pointed out that the attribution of religious colour to the domain must rest on inner conviction; and I think we should not deny validity to certain inner convictions, which [Pg 350] seem parallel with the unreasoning trust in reason which is at the basis of mathematics, with an innate sense of the fitness of things which is at the basis of the science of the physical world, and with an irresistible sense of incongruity which is at the basis of the justification of humour. Or perhaps it is not so much a question of asserting the validity of these convictions as of recognising their function as an essential part of our nature. We do not defend the validity of seeing beauty in a natural landscape; we accept with gratitude the fact that we are so endowed as to see it that way.