88 Science Religion and Reality 



science. In doing this, within the space at my disposal, 1 shall 

 not concern myself greatly with such solutions as have been pro- 

 pounded at various periods for the reconciliation of the two modes 

 of thought. 1 shall merely seek to indicate how the two activities 

 have diverged, approached, united, receded, or have run parallel 

 to each other, or again, how they have crossed each other's paths 

 and reinforced or injured each other during the passage of time. 

 It is specially my intention to avoid any discussion of recent con- 

 troversies or of modern attempts to heal such breaches as may exist 

 between religion and science. The treatment of these must be 

 the task of others, I therefore omit more modern and contem- 

 porary history, and there is the greater reason to do this because, 

 as it seems to me, the position has not fundamentally altered for 

 about two centuries. Moreover, many of the points of contact 

 between religion and science are better brought out in the simpler 

 atmosphere of ancient culture than in our own complex civilisation. 

 Lastly, consideration of space demands the omission of all 

 details concerning the lives and characters of the protagonists of 

 our story. We are concerned here only with the realm of thought. 



2. Primitive Man 



Until man reaches a certain level of civilisation he forms no 

 clear idea of the world as a whole. In spite of the number and 

 strangeness of his myths, in spite of the vast stress that he lays on 

 ceremonial, in spite of the bizarre character of the beliefs that form 

 the background of his magical practices — man on the " anthropo- 

 logical level " is yet intensely practical in all his aims and ideas. 

 His actions are controlled by his immediate ends, the acquisition 

 of food, the avoidance of disease, the production of offspring. Yor 

 such purposes he must placate powers whose motives he hardly 

 seeks to analyse. Still less does he seek nor is he able to attain any 

 comprehensive view of the essential nature of these powers. As 

 he emerges from the savage state, the poor attempts that he makes 

 to express his views as to the nature of these higher powers are still 

 almost incoherent. Man is as yet without any system either of 

 philosophy or of religion in our sense of the words. 



But has the savage any science .? He has certainly some of 

 those elements which become at a later stage incorporated into the 

 scientific mood. Even palaeolithic man, for instance, could 

 observe and record with marvellous accuracy the form and habits 



