298 Science Religion and Reality 



Thus the awareness of the reality of the supernatural is not 

 something added to the sense of the holy and the judgement of the 

 sacred by some kind of argument, say from the natural world. The 

 fatal misrepresentation is that, at this point, religion is identified 

 with theology, and theology is hung up in the air without any 

 world of its own to work in, so that it is expected to be its own 

 reality, instead of being, like other sciences, the study of a reality 

 already given. 



It is here that we must recall that, though we may analyse 

 them, we may not separate the elements of our experience. The 

 awareness of the supernatural is not given apart from and in addi- 

 tion to the sense of the holy and the j udgement of the sacred, but 

 in them, because they are the experience of it as an actual environ- 

 ment. And in this it does not differ from the natural world in its 

 way of manifesting itself. We know the natural world too as it 

 reflects itself in feeling and has meaning for us by its values. But 

 forthwith we are interested in it in itself and the world becomes an 

 objective concern for us, its existence being itself the assurance of 

 all values. And so it is with the supernatural, which must be 

 inquired into, like the natural, as a world in which we live and move 

 and have our being, if it is to be inquired into at all. 



Nor can we so easily separate the reality of the natural world 

 from the reality of the supernatural as we imagine. The reality 

 of the former is not proved merely by the violence of its assault on 

 the senses. The difference between us who take it to be the most 

 solid reality and the Indian to whom it is may a is no mere matter of 

 the senses, for the witness of the senses is the same for him as for us. 

 The difference concerns a different valuation of the world the 

 senses reveal and a keener response to it in feeling. And these 

 valuations are not, argue as we may, exclusively by natural values, 

 but consciously or unconsciously by a different sense of their place 

 in our higher life, being far more a difference in our religion, and 

 the place the natural world plays in it, than in our science. Did we 

 betake ourselves to the same kind of religion as the Indian, we 

 also should live in the world as in a vain show, and no kind of 

 physics could in the slightest degree make the world appear less of 

 a dream. But the existence of the supernatural world as a real 

 world no more proves that we may not be misled by illusions in 

 it than the existence of the physical world guarantees us against 

 mistake about it This, too, is a world in which we may err and 



