RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS
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measure due to ignorance. More knowledge is expected to overcome
it. Meanwhile the control is verification.
The case is very different for the incompatibilities between re–
ligious, metaphysical, moral and historic fabrics.
Within
any of these,
there may be local logical structure, but in general plausibilities rather
than necessities supply the bond. And there may be opportunity for
control by verification in a strict sense comparable to that used in
physics. Much historical scholarship now aspires to such rigor. But
we must everywhere beware of confusing this strict verification
(which
is
itself controlled by highly systematic procedure) with larger
and vaguer congruence among experiences. And it is this con–
gruence- the matured judgment's sense of how things could and
could not be-which rules, for the most part, in these non-scientific
worlds. And rightly, for nothing else could rule there, and yet that
there should be rule there is supremely needed.
This sense of how things could be is easily shaped by wishes, by
familiarity with received opinion, by attention to one set of possibili–
ties rather than to another; in brief, by all the biases against which
science fights. To be so shaped, to be thus responsive, thus responsible,
is its business, as it is the business of science to submit to verification
-that is, to have all its intelligibles endlessly discredited and ruthless–
ly revised. The
l
other-than-scientific subjects, on the contrary, have
endlessly to find new ways to preserve their intelligibles despite all
the devices of that scholarship which is perhaps the Wooden Horse
of Science in their midst. These intelligibles contain the pictures of
man by which he lives, the knowledge of himself which keeps him
human.
But these pictures sadly disagree with one another, this know–
ledge
is
rent into factions. Philosophy is little better than the philoso–
phies-ever ready to come to terms with the enemy if that will win
power. Moreover, though devoted enough to their own liberty, these
subjects (who called them that, and why, I wonder ) are very ready
to take a neighbor's freedom from him. Religion, Philosophy, History,
Ethics . . . have a long record of alliances against one another, and
an almost European unwillingness to live in autarchic amity together.
Perhaps this is because in all the pictures of man which they jointly
inherit there is something coresponding to the Holy Roman Empire.
I have been suggesting that these studies should drop this pre-
