294 ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST 



those whom we may call the religious writers on re- 

 ligion so often lay such stress on this question of 

 transcendence and its special value and importance. 

 But you do not — in the long run at least — make a 

 thing more important by giving it an imposing title; 

 you only give it a false exclusiveness. 



Transcendence is the experimental side of what 

 we have been describing all along: it is the finding 

 of unity in diversity, the synthesis of discord in har- 

 mony and in especial the finding of something of su- 

 preme value (and therefore dominant) which can be 

 linked up with the whole extent of our mental being. 

 Transcendence in religion differs from transcendence 

 in art or love only in its objects. In love the dis- 

 crepancy between the object and the ideal values 

 hung round it is often so glaring as to provoke laugh- 

 ter from cynics, compassion from the rest. In art, 

 the operations by which an artist turns a collection of 

 mean and commonplace objects into a beautiful and 

 single whole, a poet invests failure and death with 

 authentic tragedy, or drags every-day to a seat in 

 eternity, are just as transcendent as that by which 

 the mystic converts the relation between the warring 

 passions of his soul and the infinite catalogue of 

 differences which he finds around him into what he 

 can only speak of as a divine communion, all-satis- 

 fying in itself, all-important for the conduct of his 

 life. Science can here help religion by analysing and 

 interpreting phenomena such as transcendence, par- 

 ing the false from the true, cutting down false claims, 



