There is thus a crucial intellectual dilemma that faces us to-day. If
we accept whole-heartedly the spiritual world, we seem to be false to
the imposing new knowledge of science which is rapidly making the world
comprehensible to us; if we accept all the claims and implications of
science, we seem to trample on our own souls. Yet we feel instinctively
the validity of both aspects of the world. Our solution will seem to
be, then, to be content with remaining something less than monists.
We must recognize that this is an infinite universe, and give up our
attempt to get all our experience under one roof. Striving ever for
unity, we must yet understand that this “not-quite-ness” is one of
the fundamental principles of things. We can no longer be satisfied
with a settlement of the dreary conflict between religion and science
which left for religion only the task of making hazardous speculations
which science was later to verify or cast aside, as it charted the seas
of knowledge. We cannot be content with a religion which science is
constantly overtaking and wiping out, as it puts its brave postulates
of faith to rigorous test.
The only view of religion and science that will satisfy us is one
that makes them each the contemplation of a different aspect of the
universe,--one, an aspect of quantities and relations, the other, an
aspect of qualities, ideals, and values. They may be coördinate and
complementary, but they are not expressible in each others’ terms.
There is no question of superior reality. The blue of a flower is just
as real as the ether waves which science tells us the color “really”
is. Scientific and intuitive knowledge are simply different ways of
appreciating an infinite universe. Scientific knowledge, for all its
dogmatic claims to finality, is provisional and hypothetical. “If
we live in a certain kind of a world,” it says, “certain things are
true.” Each fact hinges upon another. Yet these correlations of the
physical world are so certain and predictable that no sane mind can
doubt them. On the other hand, our knowledge of qualities is direct and
immediate, and seems to depend on nothing for its completeness. Yet it
is so uncertain and various that no two minds have precisely the same
reactions, and we do not ourselves have the same reactions at different
times.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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