She can do this the
more successfully, the better she discriminates the common and
essential from the individual and local elements of the religious
beliefs which she compares.
I do not see why a critical Science of Religions of this sort
might not eventually command as general a public adhesion as is
commanded by a physical science. Even the personally
non-religious might accept its conclusions on trust, much as
blind persons now accept the facts of optics--it might appear as
foolish to refuse them. Yet as the science of optics has to be
fed in the first instance, and continually verified later, by
facts experienced by seeing persons; so the science of religions
would depend for its original material on facts of personal
experience, and would have to square itself with personal
experience through all its critical reconstructions. It could
never get away from concrete life, or work in a conceptual
vacuum. It would forever have to confess, as every science
confesses, that the subtlety of nature flies beyond it, and that
its formulas are but approximations. Philosophy lives in words,
but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed
verbal formulation.
Pages:
769
770
771
772
773
774
775
776
777
778
779
780
781
782
783
784
785
786
787
788
789
790
791
792
793