Our ideals
are as foreign to the real natural world as the interests of the ship's
company are to the ocean that may tolerate, but also may drown them. Be
free from superstition, then; and next: avoid false hopes. Such are the
two theses that seem to embody for many minds the essentially modern
view of things and the essential result for the philosophy of life of
what we have now learned.
But hereupon the question arises whether this is indeed the last word of
insight; whether this outcome of modern knowledge does indeed tell the
whole story of our relations to the real world. That this modern view
has its own share of deeper truth we all recognize. But is this the
whole truth? Have we no access whatever to any other aspect of reality
than the one which this naturalistic view emphasizes? And again, the
question still arises: Is there any place left for a religion that can
be free from superstition, that can accept just so much of the foregoing
modern results as are indeed established, and that can yet supplement
them by an insight which may show the universe to be, after all,
something more than a mechanism? In sum, are we merely stones that
deflect the stream for a while, until the waters wear them away? Or are
there spiritual hopes of humanity which the mechanism of nature cannot
destroy? Is the philosophy of life capable of giving us something more
than a naturalism--humanized merely by the thought that man, being,
after all, a well-knit and plastic mechanism, can for a time mold nature
to his ends? So much for the great problem of modern insight.
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