The one great lesson of the triumph of science is the
lesson of the vast significance of loyalty to the cause of science. And
this loyalty depends upon acknowledging the reality of a common, a
rational, a significant unity of human experience, a genuine cause which
men can serve. When the sciences teach us to get rid of superstition,
they do this by virtue of a loyalty to the pursuit of truth which is, as
a fact, loyalty to the cause of the spiritual unity of mankind: an unity
which the students of science conceive in terms of an unity of our human
experience of nature, but which, after all, they more or less
unconsciously interpret just as all the other loyal souls interpret
their causes; namely, as a genuine living reality, a life superior in
type to the individual lives which we lead--worthy of devoted service,
significant, and not merely an incidental play of a natural mechanism.
This unity of human experience reveals to us nature's mechanisms, but is
itself no part of the mechanism which it observes.
If, now, we do as our general philosophy of loyalty would require: if we
take all our loyalties, in whatever forms they may appear, as more or
less enlightened but always practical revelations that there is an unity
of spiritual life which is above our present natural level, which is
worthy of our devotion, which can give sense to life, and which consists
of facts that are just as genuinely real as are the facts and the laws
of outer nature--well, can we not thus see our way towards a religious
insight which is free from superstition, which is indifferent to magic
and to miracle, which accepts all the laws of nature just in so far as
they are indeed known, but which nevertheless stoutly insists: "This
world is no mere mechanism; it is full of a spiritual unity that
transcends mere nature?"
I believe that we can do this.
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