What are we to think of all this? Has science made too wide a
claim?
[64] See Appendix to this lecture for two other cases furnished
me by friends.
I believe that the claims of the sectarian scientist are, to say
the least, premature. The experiences which we have been
studying during this hour (and a great many other kinds of
religious experiences are like them) plainly show the universe to
be a more many-sided affair than any sect, even the scientific
sect, allows for. What, in the end, are all our verifications
but experiences that agree with more or less isolated systems of
ideas (conceptual systems) that our minds have framed? But why
in the name of common sense need we assume that only one such
system of ideas can be true? The obvious outcome of our total
experience is that the world can be handled according to many
systems of ideas, and is so handled by different men, and will
each time give some characteristic kind of profit, for which he
cares, to the handler, while at the same time some other kind of
profit has to be omitted or postponed. Science gives to all of
us telegraphy, electric lighting, and diagnosis, and succeeds in
preventing and curing a certain amount of disease.
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