Page:History of Modern Philosophy (Falckenberg).djvu/592

 57° GREAT BRITAIN AND AMERICA. every error contains a kernel of truth, however small il be. No one of opposing views is to be accepted as wholly true, and none rejected as entirely false. To discover the incon- trovertible fact which lies at their basis, we must reject the various concrete elements in which they disagree, and find for the remainder the abstract expression which holds true throughout its divergent manifestations. No antagonism is older, wider, more profound, and more important than that between religion and science. Here too some most general truth, some ultimate fact must lie at the basis. The ultimate religious ideas are self-contradictory and untenable. No one of the possible hypotheses concerning the nature and origin of things — every religion may be defined as an a priori thtoty of the universe, the accompanying ethical code being a later growth — is logically defensible : whether the world is conceived atheistically as self-existent, or pantheistically as self-created, or theistically (fetichism, polytheism, or monotheism), as created by an external agency, we are everywhere confronted by unthinkable con- clusions. The idea of a First Cause or of the absolute (as Mansel, following Hamilton, has proved in his Limits of Religious Thought) is full of contradictions. But however widely the creeds diverge, they show entire unanimity, from the grossest superstition up to the most developed theism, in the belief that the existence of the world is a mystery which ever presses for interpretation, though it can never be entirely explained. And in the progress of religion from crude fetichism to the developed theology of our time, the truth, at first but vaguely perceived, that there is an omnipresent Inscrutable which manifests itself in all phe- nomena, ever comes more clearly into view. Science meets this ultimate religious truth with the con- viction, grasped with increasing clearness as the develop- ment proceeds from Protagoras to Kant, that the reality hidden behind all phenomena must always remain unknown, that our knowledge can never be absolute. This principle may be established inductively from the incomprehensibility of the ultimate scientific ideas, as well as deductively from thenature of intelligence, through an analysis of the prod -ct and the process of thought, (i) The ideas .'-pace, time,