16 SOCIAL CULTURE 



pendent individuality and infinite powers of self-development in 

 will and intellect, in goodness and righteousness. Consciousness 

 proceeds through science and philosophy and theology everlastingly 

 towards a completer comprehension of the divine method of creation 

 of real being, that is to say, of moral beings through the inorganic 

 and the organic processes in time and space and through the discipline 

 of moral beings by means of their historic experience of life. This 

 development of consciousness makes possible the cooperation of 

 the human will with the divine will. This is the ultimate cause 

 presupposed by secondary causation. It is the second aspect of 

 experience in its fullness and perfection. 



(7) This view of the world elevates it into the highest significance, 

 not through its secondary causes, but through its first cause as the 

 divine self-activity in its goodness and righteousness. It is infinite 

 grace. 



(8) This view of the world makes secondary causes significant in 

 the light of the First Cause. It makes the history of nature thus 

 interpreted a part of the book of divine revelation. 



(9) With the pantheistic interpretation the divine purpose dis- 

 appears from the realm of secondary causes, and with this there 

 vanishes all true causality and high significance to science. For the 

 objects of science, namely, material nature and human history, when 

 separated from the divine and devoid of a share in the causal activity 

 of a transcendent being who is a real cause, become a chaos or illusion, 

 the East Indian maya. 



(10) In the ruder forms of religion, the varieties of ancestor- 

 worship and fetichism, science has no place, because all secondary 

 causes become capricious activities of spiritual beings not subor- 

 dinated to a first principle of goodness and righteousness. 



(11) It follows from these considerations that social culture in 

 the form of the church and the school as independent institutions 

 becomes possible only on the basis of the religious world-view of 

 Christianity; and that the perennial continuance of the world- view 

 of Christianity through the special form of social culture which 

 belongs to the church is a necessary condition presupposed by the 

 forms of social culture intrusted to the school. 



