Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/166

 degrees all the creatures and events which constitute that universe. As his knowledge of that universe is enlarged by science or by ordinary experience, he comes to feel a closer kinship with his non-human as well as his human surroundings. It is that sense of kinship that gives new substance to our modern religion with its double significance for humanity, first as the co-operative body of human beings, secondly as the corporate part of a system inspired and moulded by some evolving process that may be realized as purpose or even spirit. For the nineteenth-century scientific rejection of purposes or spiritual hypotheses was clearly overdone. Among our leading scientists and philosophers there is little of that pride of intellectual self-sufficiency so blatant in mid- or late-Victorian times. Many of them admit some other faculty than reason as a means of getting truth. Materialism, Determinism, Rationalism are all discarded as inadequate instruments for reaching the highest realms of truth and for explaining the nature of a changing world. Modern analyses of the mental processes which even mathematicians undergo in reaching new “laws” indicate the operation of some creative imagination that goes beyond their accumulated knowledge and is akin to intuition. Indeed, in a world where history never repeats itself exactly but