Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/320

Rh gives you in experience partial chaos that you cannot in all cases perceive to be universal order. But unwaveringly you insist that nature is orderly, that the chaos is an illusion; and still you do not feel ready to insist that the partial evil is universal good. Why is this so? Is the ethical side of reality less important than the other? Or is it the very importance of the religious aspect of things that makes us more ready to doubt the truth of this aspect?

Such questions occur to us as suggesting a possible way out of our difficulties. It is not exactly our desired way, but is it not possibly a good way? Science, namely, uses a certain kind of faith, whenever such faith is practically necessary. This scientific faith is indeed no faith in particular uninvestigated facts, but it is a faith in general methods and principles. The creed of science knows of no dogmas about unexperienced single facts, as such; but it does know of dogmas about the general form of the laws that must be assumed to govern all experience. Now why may not religion be reduced to certain essential general and fundamental moral demands, that we must make in the presence of reality? Why are not these a legitimate, yes, a morally necessary object of faith? Why, as the scientific man postulates a theoretical rationality in the world, may not we postulate a moral rationality in the world? These questions stand in our path. Might not the answer to them transform our barren doubts into something less disheartening?

We see what all this supposed religious faith would mean. It would not be a faith in any partic-