INTRODUCTION 



profession of religious faith is the finest act in which 

 humankind can engage. In the name of religion some 

 of the most sublime deeds have been enacted and lives 

 lived. We would not be lacking for a moment in 

 proper recognition of all this; and a reverence for the 

 faith in whose name it was done. But we cannot see 

 that we are much nearer finding God as Cosmic Reality 

 through the help of religion, or of proving immortality, 

 than we were back in the time of the first dim dawning 

 in the primitive Neanderthal mind that there might 

 be such a reality; and that something might happen 

 to a man's spirit when, after bravely fighting, he was 

 killed by his enemy. 



Some are about to conclude now that we are going 

 to say that this remarkable swing of science away from 

 the materialistic and metallic interpretation of the uni- 

 verse, held generally by science up to the beginning of 

 this century, to an idealistic and spiritual interpreta- 

 tion of experience, means that science is going to do 

 what religion and philosophy have failed to do, namely, 

 find God, and assure us that we live on in other spheres 

 of activity. But we are not going to say that at all. 

 In the first place there is no man of science we know 

 who would for a moment assume that responsibility, 

 one which religion has blithely assumed for some cen- 

 turies; and in the second place most men of research 

 do not think it is in their province to capture and de- 

 fine ultimate reality. 



As to investigation into personal survival, the other 

 element of universal human interest which religion has 

 always considered within its particular jurisdiction, an- 

 other attitude needs to be taken, and is taken in the 

 two papers in this symposium on that subject. Psychic 



