Nineteenth-Century Science and Religion 185 



experience, do not take its place. When we have risen to a higher 

 idea of reality, we feel the need of making it concrete in an 

 intuition, and of realising it in the life which we live. In this the 

 work of reflection is not cancelled, but is assimilated, becoming 

 blood of our blood, just as mathematical reflection is incorporated 

 in physical action and fills it with itself, even when there is no 

 longer any explicit calculation, but it has become a habit. 



Scientific and philosophic criticism may disintegrate the in- 

 tellectual content of ancient beliefs, but it can never destroy religion, 

 because the concept will never take the place of lived experience. 

 By elaborating a more comprehensive and more integral idea of 

 reality, it can only prepare a new form of religious life if that idea 

 succeeds in becoming concrete in a form of life. From science 

 and philosophy to religion, from religion to science and philosophy 

 — that is the eternal rhythm of the process of the spirit, which 

 rises from life to thought and returns from thought to life in a pro- 

 gressive enrichment which is the attainment of ever higher levels 

 of reality and truth. The mystic intuition of genius is enkindled 

 with the light of thought and, by its divination, makes possible the 

 attainment of a higher idea. This, in its turn, elaborated by re- 

 flection, permits us to attain a more profound intuition. Religion 

 and philosophy are only abstractly separable ; the one always calls 

 us back to the other. There is a flash of mystic intuition at the 

 roots of all philosophy ; there is a philosophic exigency at the 

 foundation of all religious rapture. Religion, therefore, exercises 

 a function which cannot be replaced in the progressive attainment 

 of ever higher levels of reality, of an ever fuller and more complete 

 unity between our spirits and the world. The individual choice 

 of the feelings does not decide the truth of religion or the truth of 

 philosophy, just as the choice of a priori dialectics does not decide it. 

 No individual whatever can constitute himself outright a judge of 

 that truth, or of the value of its intuitions. As with scientific 

 hypotheses, so with religious intuitions, it is the social experiment 

 which decides — the experiment understood, not in its restricted 

 physical sense, but in a broader historical sense. We have already 

 said that we must put on one side the old conception of truth as 

 corresponding to the idea of an external object. It is not a criterion 

 which can be of service, but really has no meaning. The scientist 

 does not compare his tneories with things in themselves, but acts 

 in conformity with them in the world of his experience, and calls 



