time: the refreshing river 



called, in the manner of his generation, the search for truth. On it he 

 bases his argument for the existence of God. 



"The search after truth," he writes, "which appeals to all man, 

 implies the existence of personality which extends over and includes 

 all individual personalities. In other words, it implies all-embracing 

 personality, which for religious interpretation is the personality • of 

 God. In the furtherance of truth, as revealed in experience of any 

 kind, God as the supreme Person is revealed to us, and our trust in 

 experience is trust in God." But this is more poetical than philo- 

 sophical. If transcendence is assumed it is unconvincing. If immanence 

 only is meant, why should not this all-embracing personality be that 

 of the human collectivity, as McTaggart^ and Marx alike would 

 require ? If, moreover, there is any value in Otto's theory of religion, 

 "religious interpretation" is a phrase almost without meaning. Religion 

 is not concerned with interpretations, but with emotions favourable 

 or antagonistic to social coherence. Emotions favourable to social 

 coherence are perhaps the analogues of those bonds which hold 

 entities together at the physical level. From this point of view, one 

 can only accept the word "God" as a poetic term analogous to that 

 used in the apostolic precept already referred to — "He that despiseth 

 man, despiseth not man but God," i.e. the highest worshipful values 

 we know. 



The Ethics of a Machine Age. 



To some it may seem that this criticism of Haldane's paper has 

 too political a character, but one must remember that it has been the 

 opinion of many a christian theologian that politics cannot be 

 divorced from ethics; is, indeed a branch of ethics. Since ethics, in its 

 turn, cannot be divorced either from religion or from philosophy, no 

 one can undertake to discuss materialism and religion at the present 

 time without considering dialectical materialism and the communist 

 paradox within the realm of the numinous. In his address to the 

 World Congress of Faiths, Haldane made no mention of any political 

 issue. But in one of the pronouncements of this remarkable man, he 

 did touch upon such problems, and it is interesting to compare what 

 he then said with the theme of his last paper. It was in 1924 that he 

 was invited, because of his long life of research in industrial physiology, 



^ J. McTaggart, Some Dogmas of Religion (London, 1906), pp. 12, 121, 133; "If all 

 reality is a harmonious system of selves, it is perhaps sufficiently godlike to dispense 

 with a God," p. 250. 



132 



