288 ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST 



reality their own personification of cosmic direction. 



Sooner or later, false thinking brings wrong con- 

 duct. Man can perhaps get along with empirical 

 methods and ideas which turn out on analysis to be 

 only symbols, provided that he does not attempt diffi- 

 cult construction. He can have some sort of a re- 

 ligion, which will be some sort of a help to him, even 

 when its so-called certitudes are only a collection of 

 mixed metaphors, in the same way as he can practise 

 agriculture on a basis of mingled empiricism and 

 superstition. But just as he is finding that he is only 

 able to raise agricultural efficiency to its highest pitch 

 by relying on the result of scientific method, as when 

 he uses synthetic nitrates instead of ploughing in a 

 leguminous crop, or just as a power-station would 

 be very difficult to run if the staff had only symbolic 

 ideas on the nature of electricity no closer to the real 

 than is the symbolism of most religions, so if he does 

 not bring scientific analysis into the intellectual side 

 of his religion, he cannot realize religious possibili- 

 ties. True that in a sense all knowledge and intellec- 

 tual presentation is symbolic: but there is the world 

 of difference between the merely analogical symbol- 

 ism which takes one idea or thing as symbolic of an- 

 other because there is some degree of similarity be- 

 tween the two and the first is more familiar, and the 

 scientific symbolism which strives to find a scientific 

 counter, so to speak, which shall represent particular 

 phenomena as closely as possible, and them alone. 



Not only this, but religion unillumined by reason 



