RELIGION AND SCIENCE 289 



flict with what they believe to be immutable truths, 

 but are in reality conclusions drawn from false pre- 

 misses ; they tend to an acquiescent and obscurantist 

 spirit in the belief that such moral and intellectual 

 laziness is * doing God's will,' when that will is 

 in reality their own personification of cosmic 

 direction. 



Sooner or later, false thinking brings wrong conduct. 

 Man can perhaps get along with empirical methods 

 and ideas which turn out on analysis to be only 

 symbols, provided that he does not attempt difficult 

 construction. He can have some sort of a religion, 

 which will be some sort of a help to him, even when its 

 so-called certitudes are only a collection of mixed meta- 

 phors, in the same way as he can practise agriculture 

 on a basis of mingled empiricism and superstition. 

 But just as he is finding that he is only able to 

 raise agricultural efficiency to its highest pitch by 

 relying on the result of scientific method, as when 

 he uses synthetic nitrates instead of ploughing in a 

 leguminous crop, or just as a power-station would 

 be very difficult to run if the staff had only symbolic 

 ideas on the nature of electricity no closer to the real 

 than is the symbolism of most religions, so if he does 

 not bring scientific analysis into the intellectual side 

 of his religion, he cannot realize religious possibilities. 

 True that in a sense all knowledge and intellectual 

 presentation is symbolic : but there is the world of 

 difference between the merely analogical symbolism 



