Nineteenth-Century Science and Religion 169 



from it cannot go wrong, because it is as infallible as the instinct. 

 It is certain that deviations are possible, but only in the same sense 

 and in the same manner as it is possible to deviate from the moral 

 conscience. The man who follows faithfully the voice of moral 

 conscience, and who finds himself face to face with a church like 

 the Christian Church, feels that it is the voice of God Himself 

 ordering him to accept its truths. The Nicene Creed appears to 

 him as the portrait of which the moral conscience was but a rough 

 sketch. 



The dogmatic proposition is but the translation in explicit 

 terms, through the medium of reflection, of truths in which we 

 implicitly believed by unconscious instinctive intuition. Cen- 

 turies have been able to pass without the formal expression of 

 truth which has been for a long time the secret life of many 

 millions of faithful souls. Theology is the elaboration of in- 

 ternal truths, known by instinct ; an elaboration which needs the 

 labour of many centuries and is carried out tentatively. Formulae 

 never exhaust by their abstractness the intuitions of the divine 

 which are felt in the intimate conscience. Christian dogmas are 

 really nothing but symbols of a divine experience which has never 

 been attained by them and never can be, even if millions of other 

 dogmatic propositions were added. Dogmas, therefore, are 

 subject to a process of development through age-long attempts to 

 translate intimate and concrete religious experiences into intel- 

 lectual formulae which become more and more adequate. 



Still more than Newman, Blondel has exercised influence on 

 the Modernists by his book " I'Action," dedicated to his master, 

 OUe-Laprune. The latter, in his book " De la Certitude Morale," 

 had maintained, after the example of Renouvier, that the distinc- 

 tion drawn by Kant between pure reason and practical reason, 

 between scientific certainty and moral certainty, does not exist. 

 Reason, he says, is always practical, certainty has always a moral 

 foundation and depends on apredecision of our will. Not only 

 metaphysical and religious truths, but also scientific truths are 

 based on acts of faith. The sciences in fact all start from certain 

 undemonstrable principles, which we accept freely, because only 

 by accepting them is practical life possible, or even agreement with 

 other men ; but we can also doubt even these principles. For 

 example, the postulate of the uniformity of the laws of nature 

 which lies at the foundation of scientific induction — it would not 



