The Sphere of Religion 281 



only self-consistcjit, scientific, and comfortable theory of the 

 universe. 



Yet the theory was plausible only to those who overlooked the 

 fact that the natural had been subjected by Rationalism to the same 

 test, and that its reality had been left in even greater dubiety. 

 From Descartes onwards the task was attempted of proving the 

 existence of a material world by other evidence than the way 

 it environs us. The result of this test was certainly no more 

 reassuring for the reality of the natural world than it had been 

 for the reality of the supernatural, and the questions raised were even 

 more embarrassing. The natural world is also known by feeling 

 and value, and surely that has even less to do with the reality of 

 a material physical world than of a metaphysical, which might be of 

 that mental structure. If we are not content with the meaning 

 and order of experience, and try to get behind it, we find nothing 

 but a stream of impressions, amid which knowledge and reality 

 are indistinguishable from dream and fantasy. 



This sceptical conclusion was as inevitable in the one case as 

 in the other, and in both for the same reason, which was neither 

 remarkable nor recondite. It is simply that we cannot prove the 

 reality of any environment while omitting the only evidence it ever 

 gives of itself, which is the way in which it environs us. If this 

 count for so little to us that we need to have its existence proved, 

 it would not seem to matter much whether it exist or not : and, 

 in any case, no environment presents further testimonials besides 

 its own witness. So far is reality from feeling obliged to meet 

 all our objections that it only dimly unveils itself to our most 

 sympathetic and far-reaching insight. 



It is an inadequate statement of the position to say that such 

 methods of proof left men's belief in the visible world no more 

 certain than their belief in the invisible, because, when we betake 

 ourselves to this kind of proof of reality, the world of the senses 

 is necessarily called in question earlier and more radically than the 

 world of the mind. All things, even though known by the senses, 

 are known only in thought, whereas thinking is at least a direct 

 experience. Hence, for many centuries, the Indian philosophy, 

 making use of this method, has denied all reality to the world ot 

 the senses. Its only external reality is a sort of nightmare of 

 Brahma, and the witness of our senses about it is mayay illusion. Yet, 

 with all this scepticism about the natural world of the senses, the 



