296 ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST 



"acceptable incense"; so must all the externally- 

 projected parts of the ideas concerning the ordaining 

 of special priests; so must all notion of our having 

 a complete, peculiar, or absolute knowledge of God, 

 or of there being a divinely-appointed rule of con- 

 duct or a divinely-revealed belief. 



On such matters, most advanced thinkers have 

 been long in general agreement. But there is one 

 very important point which, so far as I know, has 

 been very little touched upon — chiefly, I think, be- 

 cause such radical thinkers have been for the most 

 part destructive, and so have not envisaged this par- 

 ticular side of the question. 



I hope I have been able to convince you that the 

 scientific manner of thinking can lay the foundation 

 for something constructive in religion: this great 

 problem, however, remains: what sort of form or or- 

 ganization shall any such new-moulded religion take 

 on itself? 



We have just decided that fixed and rigid dogma 

 is impossible, and that completeness is out of the 

 question. Yet humanity craves for certainty and 

 is not content to leave any factor out of the scheme 

 of things. 



To this we answer that it is here that real faith 

 enters. We cannot know the absolute, nor have we 

 discovered a goal for our efforts. But we have dis- 

 covered a unity embracing all that we know, and a 

 direction starting at the first moment to which our 

 reconstructive thought can penetrate, continuing till 



