Nineteenth-Century Science and 'Religion 183 



belief in a still higher love. Experience of the divine is not con- 

 tact and absorption in an infinite immobility, but the dynamic 

 apprehension of an inexhaustible activity which makes us partici- 

 pators in a creative power which has no end. 



It would appear that thought must be condemned by these 

 premises, and that religion, which seeks the harmony of life in its 

 fullness, must place itself above philosophy, which aims at harmony 

 of thought. But religious experience would remain shut up in 

 the intimacy of the fugitive moment and would spend the treasure 

 of its riches unless it sought, by making itself known to itself, 

 to preserve itself in the life of the individual and of human society. 

 The agreement of our experiences among themselves and with 

 those of other individuals cannot be obtained if each remains in the 

 immediacy of the life which it has lived, in its incommunicable 

 subjective intuition. It is the conceptual schemes constructed 

 by reflection, and which transcribe those experiences into the 

 universal language of thought, that make it possible to render them 

 clear to the individual and to communicate those intuitions to others. 

 Only by means of these objective expressions can concord be realised. 

 Religion, if it wishes to become a universal possession, flows neces- 

 sarily into philosophy. Intuition, if it wishes to become eternal, 

 must rise to the level of thought. The mystic cannot hold aloof 

 from this law. Otherwise, he encloses himself in the ineffable, 

 and his religion flashes and dies out in the spark of genius. The 

 moment of experience is lost, if it is not preserved in order to be 

 enriched and integrated in the life of other experiences. The 

 work of reflection is therefore not useless ; and its office is illegi- 

 timate only if it tries to substitute itself for life, and to absorb in 

 itself the immediateness of religious intuition, which remains the 

 necessary starting-point and the point to which we must return, 

 because the unity of the idea is realised in the concrete harmony of 

 experience. Yet the travail of the thought will never have been 

 in vain. Plunging again into the ways of life, we shall never 

 return there as before, but shall be capable of more profound and 

 complex experiences and of more vast concords. The richest and 

 fullest faith is not the ingenuous simplicity which lies on this side 

 of the anguish of thought, but that which is recomposed beyond 

 it and includes within itself the torment of a doubt which has been 

 overcome. 



Dogmas, rites, and the Church, can appear accessory elements 



