METAMORPHOSES OF SCEPTICISM 



I am still a sceptic, but certain processes of metamorphosis have taken 

 place. 



We may pause for a moment to note the delineation of the forms 

 of experience. Science (as I then saw it) is abstract, dealing with 

 statistics and avoiding the individual, aiming at the establishment of 

 natural regularities ("scientific truth"), and quantitative, metrical, 

 mathematical and deterministic. It is essentially classificatory, mechani- 

 cal, analytical and orderly, generalising and impersonal. It has ethical 

 and aesthetic neutrality. It fights mystery and teleology, and it gives 

 a characteristic peace of mind, the Epicurean "ataraxia," drapa^la, 

 akin to the early Taoist conception of "cheng ching," ]£ ^. It is 

 both rational and empirical. Religion, on the other hand, is concrete 

 and individual, based on the sense of the holy, with which are con- 

 nected the sentiments of reverence and awe. It is qualitative in feeling, 

 opposed to measurement and analysis, "cornucopial" instead of 

 orderly, personal rather than impersonal, and essentially irrational and 

 alogical in spite of the cloak of rational thought based on uncertain 

 premises which rational theologians, such as the scholastics, have 

 sometimes succeeded in throwing about it. It naturally insists on 

 "free-will" as against determinism. As for Philosophy, it partakes of 

 the abstraction typical of science, but it is also interested in the indi- 

 vidual, the qualitative, and the teleological. Unlike science, it claims 

 to be normative, and it is not so vigorously opposed to mysteries 

 and paradoxes. History again partakes of many of the attributes of 

 science, but its criteria of evidence are not quite the same, and since, 

 like philosophy, it is debarred from the performance of any experi- 

 ments, its conclusions can never be tested in that way. Predictions are 

 ratlier in the province of science. Artistic experience finally approxi- 

 mates to the religious domain, in that it is sharply separated from the 

 rational and the expressible, but its importance to man is as great as 

 any of the others, and there is some connection between the appre- 

 ciation of beauty and the divination of the holy. Such contrasts will 

 be found at length in SB and GA.^ 



Looking back at my efforts ten to fifteen years ago to disentangle 

 the forms of experience, I think now that the description of science 

 was rather too narrow, and the description of religion certainly much 



^ This kind of treatment, done far better than I, as a working scientist, could ever 

 have hoped to do it, was given in R. G. Collingwood's Speculum Mentis (Oxford, 

 1924); and it is interesting that the subsequent development of this philosopher, as hi? 

 Autobiography (Oxford, 1939) shows, has paralleled my own. 



