Nineteenth-Century Science and Religion ijt, 



can be transformed, although their rule of conduct and their 

 practical application remain the same. 



9. Critical Discussion of the Above Theories and 

 Conclusion 



To Pragmatism belongs the great credit of having eliminated 

 many of those insoluble problems which sprang from the hypostases 

 of abstractions. Traditional intellectualism conceived of reality 

 as being completely outside ourselves, so that we ought to confine 

 ourselves to reflecting passively upon it. On one side stood the 

 soul, on the other the world, both existing in their immutable 

 substances. The question was how they could communicate with 

 each other ; and the thought laboured with the endeavour to 

 understand how the two could be united, or how the spirit could be 

 brought into relation with nature in order to know it and to act. 

 Intellectualism created similar difficulties by making God a perfect 

 reality outside our spirit, an ever-present infinity which one never 

 succeeds in understanding. The determination of His attributes 

 led to insuperable contradictions, in which the thought vainly 

 oscillated between divine predestination and human liberty, in a 

 desperate effort to conciliate them. The preordained plan of the 

 world took all significance from the spontaneity of the will. When 

 faced with a perfect reality, there is nothing more to be done : 

 there is nothing more to be added to existence in its infinite fullness. 

 Everything is exhausted in eternity, and time is only the illusory 

 projection of its shadow. But one could not understand how 

 those shadows could be generated outside the infinite, how the 

 perfect could decline into the imperfect, or the light of the spirit 

 into the darkness of matter. Theological disputes, syllogistic 

 developments, and sceptical and agnostic conclusions were the con- 

 sequences of those intellectualistic postulates. Tired of such vain 

 subtleties, a few souls fled to the simple ingenuousness of love, and 

 intoned the Canticle of Creation, like St. Francis of Assisi, They 

 felt, as if by a miracle, the ice of enigmas melt in the fraternal light 

 of the sun. They felt that there are no precise limits where God 

 ends and the world begins, where the eternal passes by in the 

 natural rhythm of the song of birds, the rustle of leaves, the breath 

 of men. 



" Let us draw near, then, to reality with love, let us return to 

 the fresh springs of life," says William James. We shall see God 



