184 Science Religion and Reality 



of religion only to him who erroneously claims to enclose the 

 religious life within the incommunicable individual sentiment, 

 whereas it is realised only in human society. Even when the 

 solitary anchorite seems alone in the face of God, the voice of the 

 whole of humanity is in his prayer and in the pain which is offered, 

 together with the torment of all creatures, as in the sacrifice of 

 Christ. The Church of the faithful is always vivid and present to 

 his inward consciousness. Even when the heretic rebels against 

 a religious community there vibrates in his spirit the aspiration for 

 a renovated Church of which he feels himself to be the apostle. In 

 other terms religion is, and cannot be other than, a determinate 

 positive religion with its beliefs and its ceremonies — that is, with all 

 its concrete intellectual and aesthetic expressions, through which 

 the Divine Unity of experience is realised in a form drawn from 

 life. If we try to eliminate every concept and every symbol, there 

 is left only the dark night of emotion in which religion vanishes. 



Religious intuitionism has had the merit of vindicating against 

 abstract intellectualism the reality of experience lived in the rich- 

 ness of mobile individual aspects. Every moment of life, every 

 subjective vibration of the feelings, every fleeting vision, is a real 

 moment in the history of the world. The objective does not 

 subsist if severed from these particular subjective impressions ; 

 and the attempt to separate it leads to the hypostasis of abstractions. 

 Reality does not exist in things absurd in themselves, but in things 

 which have been loved or suffered, and which are radiated by our 

 smile or veiled by our sadness. 



Intuitionism has done wrong to deny all theoretical value to 

 the conception, because the latter, when it does not try to take 

 the place of intuition, is the only means which permits us to 

 integrate the fugitive moment of life, which is an aspect of reality, 

 with all the other concrete moments which constitute the life 

 of the universe ; or to co-ordinate the experience of the instant 

 with all the other experiences of different moments and of other 

 individuals. In this way our life is enriched and rises to a fuller 

 vitality, ascending to a superior level of reality. 



We must in fact distinguish different degrees of reality and 

 thought according as more integral, more comprehensive, and more 

 harmonious forms of experience, individual and social, are attained 

 through the medium of science and philosophy. Yet scientific 

 and philosophic concepts, if they are able to complete the lived 



