FULL KNOWLEDGE

Evening Star, Issue 22540, 7 January 1937, Page 11

FULL KNOWLEDGE

f T« GO DEEPLY YOU MUST GO FAR I ... - •• If the ordinary man -wants to go very Seepiy into certain problems of which he has heard, he must be patient and prepared to go a long way. If he makes the existence of these problems, without (going into them, an excuse for rejecting religion, he condemns himself to a sadly impoverished and ineffective life, writes (the Bev. Morgan Watcyn-Williams in this booh, ‘ Where the Shoe Pinches.’ If {science is true, men argue, then religion must be illusory. If religion is valid, science must be mistaken. On that ■ treadmill the minds of thousands have danced to despair. Most of us think in. terms of an uneasy compromise between the two ; and so avoid the extremes of pessimism or optimism. It is (worth while reminding ourselves that koience, as reflection upon our experience or material and theology, ha reflection upon religious experience, (alike tend to concentrate too narrowly (upon one phase of our life. Each tends Ito overlook facts which are too important to be left out. The result is abstract ideas, not the concrete world we know. The exponents of determinism hnd of free will shut their eyes to a wide range of human experience, and Ignore many things which qualify the positions they adopt. Actually our freedom grows with a deeper understanding of necessity. In this process of abstraction men discuss “ the universe “ nature ” as though the words stood (for a reality over against man, in which pe has no part or lot, and to the character of which his experience of himself kffords no clue. They explain man in terms of “ nature.” but they refuse to think it even possible that his life, with its hopes and fears and loves, might help to explain the natural world. Yet man is a part of nature, and not to be bolated from it in the effort to underftand the whole. If with some scienists we leave out human life as a clue to the character of reality, or with some

theologians we ignore the natural world, we shall end either in complete scepticism, or in a one-sided picture of the universe.