SCIENCE, RELIGION AND SOCIALISM 



which must always be an integral part of the religious outlook. The 

 principle of ethical neutrality leads to a general chaos in the traditional 

 systems of morals, and hence to decay in the religious emotion 

 formerly attached to the performance of certain actions. The emphasis 

 laid by the scientific mentality on the quantitative aspects of nature 

 runs diametrically counter to the emphasis which religion would like 

 to lay on the other aspects of the universe. And, above all, in actively 

 interfering with the external world, in persistently probing its darkest 

 corners, science destroys that feeling of creaturely dependence upon, 

 and intimate relation to, a transcendent and supernal Being, which 

 has certainly been one of the most marked characteristics of the 

 religious spirit. In the modern world, Epicurus and Lucretius have 

 come into their own. 



But here we find, paradoxically enough, that communism and the 

 christian religion are again on the same side. If these effects of the 

 domination of science w^ere to operate alone, we should have a truly 

 soulless society, much as is depicted by Bertrand Russell in The 

 Scientific Outlook^ and by Aldous Huxley, satirically, in Brave New 

 World? This is what we shall certainly get if capitalism can establish 

 itself anew and overcome the forces of fanatical nationalism which 

 threaten to disrupt it. For capitalism has a fundamentally cheap 

 estimate of the value of human life; mine disasters and wars alike are 

 but passing incidents in a society where the only principle recognised 

 is that might is right. Communism and Christianity, on the contrary, 

 estimate life highly. Ultimately the distinction here resolves itself into 

 what kind of human society we wish to aim at, and the choice may 

 be in a sense aesthetic. The logical continuation of the capitalist order 

 would be the tightening and stabilisation of class-stratification, which 

 seems to be the essential fiinction of fascism. This could then, in 

 time, be further fixed as biological engineering becomes more powerful. 

 In such a civilisation, the Utopia of the bourgeoisie, where an abund- 

 ance of docile workers of very limited intelligence was available, the 

 class stratification would be absolute, and the governing class alone 

 would be capable of living anything approaching a full life.^ Biological 

 engineering would have done what mechanical engineering had failed 



^ (Allen & Unwin, London, 193 1.) 



^ (Chatto & Windus, London, 1932.) We shall analyse this book in what follows. 



^ It is of much interest that the similarity between fascism and the ancient caste- 

 system of India is expressly admitted in Sanatana Dharma, an advanced textbook of 

 Hindu religion and ethics, published by the Central Hindu College, Benares, 1923, 

 pp. 240 if. Both are said to be based on the doctrine of immortality. 



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