382 Science Religion and Reality 



that is transitory is only a symbol." I honestly believe, as Otto 

 does, that the destruction of the supramundane physics of the 

 Middle Ages by the discoveries of astronomy will be found to have 

 done a good service to religion, by forbidding it to seek its treasure 

 and its everlasting home in space and in time. I have not room 

 to follovi^ Otto in his penetrating analysis of our conceptions of 

 time and space. As he says, the arguments of which Kant was 

 the pioneer, though they do not remove the curtain which separates 

 being from appearance, at any rate force it to reveal itself as a 

 curtain. 



The religious conception is made up essentially of a belief m 

 the pre-eminence of the spiritual world over the natural, and 

 rejects the common scientific view that " mind is but a kind of/usus 

 or /uxus naturae, which accompanies it at some few places, like a 

 peculiarly coloured aura or shadow, but which must, as far as reality 

 is concerned, yield precedence to ' Nature ' in every respect." And 

 although it is certain that when religion is in any way complete, 

 it includes a belief in the everlastingness of our spiritual nature, and 

 its independence of fleeting phenomena, it is a mistake so to 

 isolate the question of survival that opponents may dictate both the 

 questions and their answers. If this pre-eminence and autonomy 

 of the spiritual be not granted, it is misleading to use the word 

 God at all, and those who do so are open to F. H. Bradley's gibe 

 that they call the Unknowable God only because they don't know 

 what the devil else to call it. 



The naturalist arguments against a spiritualistic interpretation 

 of nature are certainly formidable. Briefly, the best answer to 

 them is to remind opponents that without the free and creative 

 activities of the mind there could be no naturalism. Further, it 

 is legitimate to point out that if the spiritual faculty is given fair 

 play, and suffered to develop normally, suspicion and distrust of it 

 must disappear. We do not disparage the results of science, or 

 throw doubt upon them, when we affirm that they are the creation 

 of the free spirit which finds in nature those laws which their and 

 our Creator has planted alike in the conscious and in the uncon- 

 scious world. " The world we know, the world of sound, light 

 and colour, of all properties whatsoever, of the ugly or the beautiful, 

 of pain and pleasure, is in the most real sense the product of 

 consciousness itself." The spirit is never dumb, and it speaks a 

 different language from that of mathematics or physics. 



