The whole of the
first part of Spencer's _First Principles_, and especially the fifth
chapter entitled "Reconciliation"--that between reason and faith or
science and religion being understood--is a model at the same time of
philosophical superficiality and religious insincerity, of the most
refined British cant. The unknowable, if it is something more than the
merely hitherto unknown, is but a purely negative concept, a concept of
limitation. And upon this foundation no human feeling can be built up.
The science of religion, on the other hand, of religion considered as an
individual and social psychic phenomenon irrespective of the
transcendental objective validity of religious affirmations, is a
science which, in explaining the origin of the belief that the soul is
something that can live disjoined from the body, has destroyed the
rationality of this belief. However much the religious man may repeat
with Schleiermacher, "Science can teach thee nothing; it is for science
to learn from thee," inwardly he thinks otherwise.
From whatever side the matter is regarded, it is always found that
reason confronts our longing for personal immortality and contradicts
it. And the truth is, in all strictness, that reason is the enemy of
life.
A terrible thing is intelligence. It tends to death as memory tends to
stability. The living, the absolutely unstable, the absolutely
individual, is, strictly, unintelligible.
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