Nineteenth-Century Science and Religion 153 



they preserve their value as means of expression, and as symbols 

 which serve for the communication of the direct feeling of the 

 Divine. The proof of dogmatic principles does not lie in logical 

 demonstration, but in the possibility of rekindling in oneself the 

 immediate experiences of which those dogmas are the expression. 

 The personality of God, for example, is nothing but a symbolical 

 transcription in representative terms of that Infinite Spirit which 

 we feel immediately within us. The immortality of the soul is 

 but an expression of the fact that, although we live in time, we 

 participate in the eternal, we are in the Infinite and for the Infinite, 

 The redeeming work of Christ is a symbol of the experience of 

 liberation from perceptible sorrows, and from the impediments 

 which our finite nature places to the sentiment of beatific union 

 with the Infinite. Science, again, can place no obstacle to the 

 individual creation of a religious symbol or to the adoption of those 

 which the positive religions have handed down to us, because 

 science itself is at bottom only a method of symbolic representation, 

 expressing by means of signs the effort of the spirit to understand 

 things — that is, to perceive the identity of existence and of thought, 

 which is an ideal that we can never realise. 



Thus romanticism seeks to put an end to the conflict by under- 

 estimating the importance of science. None the less, although 

 its assertions may appear excessive, romanticism has the credit of 

 having brought into relief the fact that faith, feeling, and practical 

 activity lie at the sources of all scientific construction. It deserves 

 also the credit of having regarded religion no longer as an abstract 

 form of Deism, but as a positive concrete whole, and as an historical 

 reality seeking to justify dogma as a symbolical garb of the feelings. 



3. Positivism and Social Philosophy 



The speculative caprices of the romantic spirit led to a re- 

 action against metaphysics and to an over- valuation of objective 

 science with its positive social advances as against the subjectivism 

 of the individual who sought freedom to create a world for himself 

 It is not merely by chance that the Positivism of Auguste Comte 

 bears a sociological imprint, because the world of human society 

 is the same as the world of science, with its objective laws which 

 can be controlled by all, and which reasserts itself against the 

 romantic individualism of sentiment which recognises no law out- 

 side itself. Auguste Comte, however, did not wish to banish the 



