Page:The Limits of Evolution (1904).djvu/323

262 this objection would enforce it, too, by recalling our attention to the fact, that, in the very beginnings of this issue, we confronted the assertion—maintained by one great religious school—that reason is intrinsically incompetent to religion, because its judgments, however conclusive and infallible in its own field, are limited to that field, which is the world of sense-experience only, and not in the least the world of supersensible and spiritual reality. Our vindication of Rationalism will accordingly not be complete till we have grappled with this contention common to the religious dogmatist and the agnostic, and made an end of it by showing not only that the opposite is true, but that its truth is implied in this contention itself.

I am not the least disposed to evade this indication of a needed completion to our argument. Rather, I willingly grant the point as correctly made, and I cordially take up the task which I accepted at the outset as part of this hour's duty, namely, to show that reason is not confined in its judgments to the things of sense, but extends also to the things invisible,—to all the things of the spirit, the things of religion.

In entering upon this final stage in our discussion, it is only fair to take the preparatory advantage of noticing that the very parties which discredit reason and maintain the cause of author-