INTRODUCTORY 153 



we are free agents, and individually and exclusively 

 responsible for our own conduct. On the other hand, 

 we have sufficient reasons, both natural and spiritual, 

 to acknowledge that mysterious laws of heredity, and 

 an omnipotent will, are at work behind our wills, and 

 prior to our birth, which to an important degree deter- 

 mine our personal characters and moral dispositions. 

 This mystery stands over against the mystery — and 

 it is a mystery — of free will and responsibility. We 

 need to realize that what we call respectively freedom 

 and inherited propensity, responsibility and predes- 

 tination, are incipient truths. Their separate evidence 

 requires our acceptance of each as true. But their 

 fragmentariness warns us against making either one 

 absolute, as if complete by itself. 



The same principle needs to be borne in mind when 

 we compare the conclusions — I mean, of course, suffi- 

 ciently established conclusions — of theologians and 

 physical scientists. Separately examined, they may be 

 seen to be equally valid; but the lines of thought 

 which they initiate lead us into insoluble mystery. This 

 accounts for the fact that we cannot adequately ex- 

 plain the antitheses which convince one-sided thinkers {^' 

 ithat a contradiction exists between theological and 

 physical doctrines. We need to perceive that the 

 physical and the superphysical are both real, and that 

 their antitheses are caused by gaps in our knowledge, 

 not by any discontinuity between the physical and the 

 superphysical. 



Breadth of view is generally acknowledged to be 



