To feel one's self individually
cared for and protected by God gives a special dignity and beauty to
life. Monotheism lightens the struggle for existence. But does the study
of nature allow of the maintenance of those local revelations which are
called Mosaism, Christianity, Islamism? These religions founded upon an
infantine cosmogony, and upon a chimerical history of humanity, can they
bear confronting with modern astronomy and geology? The present mode of
escape, which consists in trying to satisfy the claims of both science
and faith--of the science which contradicts all the ancient beliefs, and
the faith which, in the case of things that are beyond nature and
incapable of verification, affirms them on her own responsibility
only--this mode of escape cannot last forever. Every fresh cosmical
conception demands a religion which corresponds to it. Our age of
transition stands bewildered between the two incompatible methods, the
scientific method and the religious method, and between the two
certitudes, which contradict each other.
Surely the reconciliation of the two must be sought for in the moral
law, which is also a fact, and every step of which requires for its
explanation another cosmos than the cosmos of necessity. Who knows if
necessity is not a particular case of liberty, and its condition? Who
knows if nature is not a laboratory for the fabrication of thinking
beings who are ultimately to become free creatures? Biology protests,
and indeed the supposed existence of souls, independently of time,
space, and matter, is a fiction of faith, less logical than the Platonic
dogma.
Pages:
469
470
471
472
473
474
475
476
477
478
479
480
481
482
483
484
485
486
487
488
489
490
491
492
493