How All This Affects The Religious Outlook


These denials and destructive criticisms of the mechanical theory, which

are now continually cropping up, lead, as must be obvious, towards a

deeper conception and interpretation of reality in general, and towards a

religious conception in particular. Unquestionably the most important fact

in connection with them is the fresh revelation of the depth of things and

of appearance, the increased recognition that our knowledge is only
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leading us towards mystery.



It is indeed questionable whether anything more than this can be said in

regard to the problem of life, whether we ought not to content ourselves

with recognising the limits of our knowledge, and reject all positive

statements that go beyond these limits. For the mechanists are undoubtedly

right in this, that "entelechy," "the idea of the whole," "co-operation,"

"guidance," "psychical factors," and the like, are only names for riddles,

and do not in themselves constitute knowledge.(106) The case here is

somewhat similar to what we have already seen in connection with

"antinomies." They, too, give us no positive insight into the true nature

of things, but they at any rate prove to us that we have not yet

understood what that is. And, just as they show us that our knowledge of

the world as it appears to us can never be complete, so here it appears

that we come upon inexplicabilities even within the domain accessible to

our knowledge. Thus the religious conception of the world gains something

here as from the antinomies, namely, a fresh proof that the world which

appears to us and can be comprehended by us, proclaims its true nature and

depths, but does not reveal them. Perhaps there is still another gain. For

in any case the vital processes and the marvels of evolution and

development are examples of the way in which physical processes are

constantly subject to a peculiar guidance, which certainly cannot be

explained from themselves or in terms of mechanism, organisation, and the

like. All attempts to demonstrate this in detail, all "explanations" in

terms of dynamic co-operation, of dominants, of ideas, or anything else,

are vague, and seem to go to pieces when we try to take firm hold of them.

But the fact remains none the less.



May not this be a paradigm of the processes and development of the world

at large, and even of evolution in the domain of history? Here, too, all

ideas of guidance, of endeavour after an aim, &c., which philosophical

study of history or religious intuition seems to find, make shipwreck

against the fact that every attempt to demonstrate their nature, fails.

All these theories of influx, concursus, and so on, whether transcendental

or immanent factors be employed, immediately become wooden, and never

admit of verification in detail. But precisely the same is true of the

dominance of the "idea," or of the "law of evolution," or of the

"potential of development" in every developing organism. Yet

incomprehensible and undemonstrable in detail as this "dominance" is, and

completely as it may be concealed behind the play of physical causes, it

is there, none the less.



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