288 Science Religion and Reality 



And the round ocean and the living air. 

 And the blue sky, and in the mind of man, 

 A motion and a spirit that impels 

 All thinking things, all objects of all thought 

 And rolls through all things. 



To this feeling or mood or intuition the sense of the holy is 

 certainly akin, and there are times when they are practically one. 

 Yet this aesthetic sense does not necessarily have religious quality, 

 nor has the religious sense necessarily aesthetic quality. As mere 

 feelings, however, they would be difficult to distinguish, and an 

 account of the difference would be impossible to give. Both are 

 exalted responses to what is taken to be more than a mechanical 

 environment. But the real difference is much less in the mere 

 feeling -than in the quality of this reference, much less between an 

 artistic and a religious feeling than between the artistic and the 

 religious valuation. 



And if it be difficult, as mere feeling, to distinguish rigidly 

 between the higher aesthetic sense of the numinous and the higher 

 sense of the holy, it is still more difficult to distinguish, purely as 

 feeling, the awed sense of the holy from the lower type of numinous 

 dread. That they are quite distinct is plain. No sense of the 

 holy is ever the merely shuddery, spooky feeling. This latter is 

 the basis of magic, but not of religion : and at all stages the feelings 

 connected with religion and magic are distinct. Yet, if we con- 

 fine attention to the feelings themselves, the distinction is almost 

 impossible to see and quite impossible to describe. Both are vague, 

 awed feelings, and both accompany what Leuba calls an anthropo- 

 pathic view of the world, but which, in its numinous form at least, 

 is also theriopathic, and, in all forms, is something more immediate 

 than anything to be described as a view. Views might only be 

 wrong inferences, but this is the practical sense by which apparently 

 life has always conducted its business of living : and just for that 

 reason it is difficult to draw distinctions in it, and they would be 

 impossible to convey to others. Ideas we can explain more or less 

 successfully by other ideas, but feelings are more direct experiences 

 and are not to be described from other feelings. Yet we are not, 

 for this reason, incapable of speaking about them. Only we must 

 speak about them through the values they attend or the objects to 

 which the values are referred. There is little success in describing 

 feelings, because, the moment we start, we are dealing with ideas. 



