222 INTRODUCTION TO SCIENCE 



is superstitious, and it seems very unlikely that 

 its useful function in this direction has been 

 completed. As the late Prof. W. James said: 

 k *What mankind at large most lacks is criticism 



id caution, not faith." "What some," he went 

 to say, "most need is that their faiths should 

 ibe broken up and ventilated, that the north-west 

 wind of science should get into them and blow 

 their sickliness and barbarism away." 



SUMMAKY. Science and Religion are incom- 

 mensurables, and there is no true antithesis between 

 them they belong to different universes of discourse. 

 Science is descriptive and offers no ultimate ex- 

 planation; Religion is mystical and interpretative, 

 implying a realization of a higher order of things 

 than those of sense-experience. Men are led to 

 religion along many pathways -from the contra- 

 dictions of the moral life, from the facts of his- 

 tory, and from what is experienced at the limits of 

 practical endeavour, emotional strain, and intel- 

 lectual inquiry. It is not difficult to see why the 

 rapid development of Science should have affected, 

 for a time of transition at least, the frequency with 

 which men tread the last-named three pathways to 

 religion namely, from baulked struggle, strained 

 emotion, and baffled inquiry. The so-called "con- 

 flict between science and religion" depends in part 

 on a clashing of particular expressions of religious 

 belief with facts of science, or on a clashing of 



