372 Science Religion and Reality 



There is something absurd in the idea that a vast aggregation of 

 incandescent gas must have a soul of a dignity proportioned to its 

 bulk. But it is surely significant that panpsychism is once more 

 being taken seriously. And with panpsychism comes teleology, 

 and perhaps, as some think, the admission of freedom and con- 

 tingency. What we call mechanism may be the teleology of the 

 inorganic world. 



If Fechner is ever studied in this country, he will be found to 

 have laid down with great power and insight a spiritual philosophy 

 which may be acceptable to a speculative student of nature. To 

 the sceptical biologist or pragmatist who undermines our faith in 

 the objective truth of our convictions, he replies with much force : 

 We should not need religious faith if its objects did not exist. For 

 if man has made belief in those objects because he needs it, he did 

 not create the circumstance that he needs belief in them for his 

 •continuance and welfare, and is therefore obliged by that necessity 

 to make it. The production of this faith by man must therefore 

 be based on the same real nature of things which produced man 

 with his needs. It would be to impute an absurdity to the nature 

 of things, and it would be contrary to experience, so far as we can 

 speak of experience in such a matter, to say that nature has con- 

 stituted man in such a way that he can only prosper while he 

 cherishes a belief in a thing that is not. We may hope that what 

 Fechner calls the Day-view of the world (in contrast with the 

 Night- view which he rejects) will dissipate the mists of the 

 scepticism which would cut us off from any real knowledge of 

 things as they are. 



I have written at some length on the philosophy of science, 

 because science, no less than religion, aims at formulating a general 

 view of reality, within which its more abstract investigations may 

 be set. Neither science nor religion can claim less ; both involve 

 a philosophy. There is, in my judgement, something of a gap 

 between the scientific essays in this book ; the philosophy of 

 science is not adequately dealt with. I could have wished that 

 the filling of this gap had fallen into more competent hands ; but 

 I thought that the book would be incomplete without some such 

 discussion as I have tried to supply. If I am right, the materialistic 

 monism of the last century is giving place to a spiritualistic monism 

 which is still in a very tentative stage. The whole problem of the 

 interplay of the psychical with the physical is very far from settled. 



