164 Science Religion and Reality 



religion are brought into agreement only in so far as both are con- 

 demned to eternal silence. But the human consciousness could 

 not resign itself to this absolute silence 5 and the effort to penetrate 

 the mystery, to issue forth from the narrow barriers of intellec- 

 tualism, to assert life in all its concrete fullness — ideas which are 

 ill-fitted to the fragmentary schemes of scientific concepts — was 

 bound to lead to the rebirth of romanticism. 



7. The Radical Dualism of Ritschl 



The undefined consciousness of which Spencer speaks is too 

 vague and indeterminable to be able to contain the religious life. 

 If religion is to persist side by side with science in its own dominion, 

 it must, while abandoning every intellectual notion, have a content 

 of its own. This is the point which the school of Ritschl tries to 

 determine. 



Religion, he says, as it is commonly professed, is mixed with 

 extraneous elements which corrupt it. The first of these elements 

 is philosophy ; natural theology. There must be first of all a 

 definite break with intellectualism and with scholasticism, which, 

 expelled from the religious consciousness by Luther, has insinuated 

 itself there afresh. The philosophy which works only on the 

 abstract and disposes only of natural phenomena cannot, by defini- 

 tion, attain the religious element which is life, being, and super- 

 natural activity. The faculty of knowledge which exists in man 

 is limited to the understanding of the laws of matter, while religion 

 deals with purely spiritual things. The second parasitic element 

 of which religion must be disembarrassed is the human authority 

 which enslaves it in Christianity. The Christian must recognise 

 no other master than Jesus Christ. 



Ritschl tries to realise in its true life a religion thus purified of 

 its extraneous elements. With Schleiermacher he sees in senti- 

 ment the organ of piety. But it seems to him that this is an in- 

 sufficient basis for that systematic theology without which religion 

 dissolves into individual opinions. Sentiment must be nourished 

 with universal religious truths. Sentiment finds and recognises 

 in the Bible and in general history the concrete content which it 

 cannot do without and which it cannot produce unaided. For 

 example, the heart experiences the feeling of sin and the desire for 

 beatitude Now in Revelation there are, corresponding to these 



