

SCIENCE AND RELIGION 205 



Science always begins not at the beginning, for 

 that is impossible, but from something "given" 

 which it does not explain. Moreover, in linking 

 happenings together, it is only in a limited set of 

 cases that Science can tell how the result is as it is. 



In the common denominator to which Science 

 reduces things, in the sequences where the result- 

 ants seem qualitatively different from their ante- 

 cedents, in the origins from which science starts 

 in its genealogies, there is mysteriousness. All 

 our scientific experience is rounded with mystery. 

 As Sir E. Ray Lankester has said: "No sane man 

 has ever pretended, since science became a definite 

 body of doctrine, that we know or ever can hope 

 to know or conceive of the possibility of knowing 

 whence the mechanism has come, why it is there, 

 whither it is going, and what may or may not be 

 beyond and beside it, which our senses are in- 

 capable of appreciating. These things are not 

 'explained' by science and never can be." 



If we will have for our human satisfaction 

 some answer to questions such as these, which 

 lie beyond Science, then it must be a transcendental 

 answer, and that means for most men, who prefer 

 to think naively, a religious answer. As Coleridge 

 said: "All knowledge begins and ends with 

 wonder, but the first wonder is the child of 

 ignorance; the second wonder is the parent of 

 adoration." 



