Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/319

294 tific instinct, we all feel it hard to give a like trust to the religious instinct, whose most general tendency is to have some sort of faith in the goodness of things? Why is it that the doubtfulness and the contradictions of the real world seem to everybody to throw a cloud upon religion, even when it is not supernatural religion, but to have no significance whatever for the bases of science? This scientific notion of a world of law, all of whose facts could conceivably be predicted by one formula, why does that remain in our minds untouched by the doubts of the skeptical philosophers, while the same skepticism at once seems to remove from us that trust in the moral goodness of things which religion has tried to establish in our hearts? Shall the world be indifferent to one set of our ideals, and not to another? Shall the moral value of things be dark, and not also their value for the purposes of science? Why is the one doctrine so different from the other? You are placed in a world of confusion, and you assert that in its ultimate and eternal nature it answers your moral needs. That seems presumptuous. You did not make that world. How do you know whether it cares for your moral ideals? Very well then, be impartial. You are placed in a world of confusion, and you assert that it answers your intellectual needs, namely, that it is a world of order, whose facts could be reduced to some rational and intelligible unity. What business have you to do that? In both cases you transcend experience. Nature gives you in experience partial evil that you cannot in all cases perceive to be universal good. Nature also