Where Science and Religion MeetPalmer, William Scott
Religion
Where Science and Religion Meet
Palmer, William Scott
Religion and science
Think of it: I have a history; indeed I am a history, I am time alive,
time that accumulates and lasts. I have a past that is not past, because
it is at work in my present and is writing its indelible signature on my
future. There is no least action in my past that has not left its
impress on me, made me different from what I should have been without
it, and therefore will make my future different too. My whole history is
alive, active and changing in my actions and my change. The history of
my forefathers, too, is alive in me and in my character and powers. I
have an inheritance from their living; I am as and what I am, in part
because they were as and what they were. But I have power and I use it
to create myself and recreate my inheritance through an impetus
transmitted to me in the transmission to me of my life. Therefore every
moment of my life is a unique and original moment of a unique and
original history, mine and mine alone, never to be repeated, never to be
wholly predicted, even by me. The evolutionist philosophy tells me that
I endure, I _last_, and that all my changes and experiences endure,
last, in and with me, changing in themselves and among themselves as
though they were alive to influence and interpenetrate each other.
Indeed they are alive in me and in my life or they could not endure.
They would pass like the stages in the height of a sand heap as it
grows, as the little heap it was is merged and lost in the larger heap
it is. They would be lost as the flowing tide is lost when the ebb
succeeds it. Such changes are mere successions, displacements and
replacements; they are not history. They enter history only in sharing
that of the universe which itself endures, lasts, and within which they
are parts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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