Nineteenth-Century Science and Religion 167 



truth which must be reflected from without, or to which the 

 thought must correspond to be called true. Truth and reaHty are 

 constructed actively by ourselves. There exists no perfect system 

 laid down ah aeterno, with immutable laws ; but reality is always 

 on the road towards being made, a ceaseless creation, in which we 

 collaborate with our energetic forces. 



Religious truth too, like all truths, has the same practical value. 

 It is of no use to ask ourselves whether our religious conceptions 

 reflect an objective reality, but only whether religious vision brings 

 better practical results than naturalism. 



Pragmatism received a great repercussion in the religious field 

 because it really constitutes the philosophical basis of that tendency 

 which goes under the name of Modernism and which is charac- 

 terised by its decisive opposition to traditional intellectualism, which 

 considered religious truths as knowable and partly even demon- 

 strable by means of reason ; and, where reason could not reach 

 with its own forces alone, recourse was had to external revelation 

 and to the authority of tradition. Modernism denies to the 

 intellect the capacity of demonstrating and understanding the 

 Absolute, which is the object of religious faith ; and it admits a 

 special organ of experience, an experience directed by the Divine, 

 which really reduces itself to moral activity, to the ethical conscience. 

 In this intimate experience, in which we immediately grasp God 

 in his concrete life, lies the essence of piety. God is not an object 

 external to ourselves, an immutable Being, endowed with certain 

 eternal attributes, and who must be respected from without and 

 known in his objective properties, but a living spirit who works 

 eternally through the human spirit and is eternally revealed in it 

 in his profound intimacy. From the philosophical point of view 

 the Modernists arrive at a kind of dynamic Pantheism, which has 

 much affinity with the Idealism of Fichte. Divinity is immanent 

 in our consciousness ; but, as our finite activity never finally 

 succeeds in exhausting the infinity of the Divine, there is always 

 in it something which escapes us and surpasses us ; in this sense 

 therefore it can be called transcendent. Its revelation did not 

 happen once and for all at a fixed moment of time, but is eternally 

 taking place in the consciousness of humanity and in its develop- 

 ment. There is therefore no fixed body of unchangeable religious 

 dogmas, but a truth which is developed and revealed progress- 

 ively through the moral experiences of the human spirit. The 



