37^ Science Religion and Reality 



to all experience is not only a psychological necessity which we 

 cannot escape, but an avenue leading to objective truth. I do not 

 think that any religious view of the world, or any genuinely 

 religious conviction, is possible if we do not believe that value is as 

 objective as existence, and inseparably connected with it. I am 

 not afraid to say that there can be no existence without value, and 

 no value without existence. I know well that in putting forward 

 this claim for our value judgements we are in danger of an 

 intractable dualism, which we must not seek to escape either by 

 reducing the world of becoming to a mere appearance, or the 

 eternal world to an unrealised ideal. We cannot solve the problem 

 by setting an imperfect world in the present against a perfect world 

 in the future. As I have said elsewhere, we cannot levy unlimited 

 drafts on the future to avoid bankruptcy in the present, like the 

 belligerents in the late war. If the world of becoming is unreal, 

 the will is an illusion, and time, space, and moral choice disappear 

 with it. If, on the other hand, the ultimate values have no 

 objective existence, but are merely regulative ideals on which we 

 are to model our conduct, we have no absolute standard left, and 

 are abandoned to subjective and fluctuating valuations. My own 

 conviction, if I may quote from myself, is that " reality is neither 

 mental nor material, but a realm in which thought and thing, fact 

 and value, are inseparable, neither having any existence apart from 

 its correlative. The real world is a coherent organic unity, space- 

 less and timeless, but including all happenings in space and time 

 in their proper relations to itself — that is to say, sub specie 

 aeternitatis.'* 



The attributes of ultimate reality are values ; and we may 

 follow the usual classification by saying that the ultimate values 

 known to us are goodness, truth, and beauty. Windelband even 

 says : " There can be, as regards content, no further universal 

 values beyond these three, because in these the entire province of 

 psychic activity is exhausted." We are nearest to God, and to 

 knowledge of the world in which His attributes are reflected, when 

 we can see and feel these ultimate values without us and within. 



Science is not, as some have erroneously supposed, a description 

 of fact without valuation. Such a description would be utterly 

 impossible, and it should be superfluous to point out how widely 

 the world as known to science differs from the final analysis of 

 material objects into electrons and protons. The mind of the 



