RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS
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views of the nature of existence itself-how can these conceptions of
the course of history, of the temporal and spatial universe-be
brought into harmony with the conceptions that exact knowledge sug–
gests to us? One of course knows the inevitable answer, which is that
so far as the two kinds of view cannot be harmonized, it is the
views suggested by exact knowledge (by "science") that must go into
the discard. And we are familiar to tedium with the highly emotion–
alized caricature these writers ask us to contemplate as a picture of
science. One can only observe that in the true ages of faith men ex–
hibited no such distrust as this of the results of patient investigation:
Dante found it easy and natural to include an experiment in optics
in a poem on the destiny of the soul, and the animosity of some
contemporary intellectuals toward the hobgoblin of Positivism (an
animosity not always free from the hysterical) is evidence not of a
fullness and depth but of a deep deficiency of religious feeling.
For the question whether there is a religious consciousness that
can exist without a belief in the supernatural-this question resists
a brief answer only, or chiefly, for semantic reasons. The language is
simply not rich enough in terms for all these intangible experiences
and valuings to make possible any statement that shall be both
condensed and lucid.
If
the noun "religion" happens to be unde–
tachably associated with an archaic supernaturalism, then the natur–
alistically-minded will surrender the term with a good grace-but
without admitting that there is no legitimate sense in which the ad–
jective "religious" can be associated with their own response to exis–
tence. They might even claim that there are senses in which it can be
more
validly used here than elsewhere.
If
the religious aspiration is
the aspiration toward wholeness and unity, as over against separate–
ness, division, and fragmentation, then a secular or naturalistic "philo–
sophy" is in our time far more seriously and reverently religious than
any supernaturalist dualism can be. There is a piety of nature and
man which deeply reflective spirits have entertained since the days of
the pre-Socratics and the Stoics, and in our own age it has taken on
a much more genuinely contemporary character. Many centuries
intervened during which the highest forms of thought were of another
order, and a secular pietism can by no means, at so early a date as
this, make boast of having arrived at a comparable richness, fullness,
depth, and magnificence. Surely, however, it is the primary task of
