348 Science Religion and Reality 



book, a clear notion of acceptable terms of peace has suggested 

 itself to my mind, it will be desirable that I should say so, and that 

 I should not shrink from ruling out suggestions which seem to me 

 impossible. 



For instance, I have rejected with decision that kind of agree- 

 ment which rests on a delimitation of territory. Some recent 

 writers have said that there can be no conflict between religion and 

 science, because they never meet. They move on different planes. 

 To this way of thinking belong all such bisections of the field of 

 experience as those which oppose sharply to each other fact and 

 value, reality and appearance, the knowable and the unknowable, 

 the visible and the invisible, prose and poetry. To acknowledge 

 such distinctions, and rest an agreement upon them, assigning all 

 on one side of the line to science and all on the other side to religion, 

 is at best a proposal for an armistice; it can lead to no permanent 

 peace. I shall give my reasons later for dissenting from a solution 

 of the problem which is favoured by one or two of the essayists 

 and rejected by others. A religion which does not touch science, 

 and a science which does not touch religion, are mutilated and 

 barren. Not that religion can ever be a science, or science a 

 religion ; but we may hope for a time when the science of a 

 religious man will be scientific, and the religion of a scientific man 

 religious. 



I have not concealed the fact that I write as a Christian. It 

 would, I hope, be absurd for me to do so. But I have treated 

 the religion of Christ as one of the permanent achievements or 

 acquisitions of humanity like Hellenism and the Roman science of 

 law and government. There are few scientific men, in this 

 country at least, who would not allow so much as this, though the 

 question remains how much of traditional Christianity is essential, 

 and how much an accretion or an accommodation to transient 

 conditions. This question will not be dealt with directly in this 

 essay, though I shall not hide my conviction that some parts of the 

 tradition are not integrally connected with the kernel of Christ's 

 religion. 



Following the usual practice now, the editor has divided the 

 subject into two parts. The first part of the book is historical ; 

 in other words, it treats religion as a branch of anthropology. By 

 usage, anthropology has come to mean chiefly the study of the 

 backward races, though there is nothing in the name to exclude 



