the
scientific mind; secondly because he gave to religious students the
example of patient and ardent investigation; and thirdly because by the
pressure of naturalistic criticism the religious have been driven to
ascertain the causes of their own convictions, a work in which they were
not without the sympathy of men of science. (The scientific rank of its
writer justifies the insertion of the following letter from the late Sir
John Burdon-Sanderson to me. In the lecture referred to I had described
the methods of Professor Moseley in teaching Biology as affording a
suggestion of the scientific treatment of religion.)
Oxford, April 30, 1902.
Dear Sir,
I feel that I must express to you my thanks for the discourse which I
had the pleasure of listening to yesterday afternoon.
I do not mean to say that I was able to follow all that you said as to
the identity of Method in the two fields of Science and Religion, but I
recognise that the "mysticism" of which you spoke gives us the only way
by which the two fields can be brought into relation.
Among much that was memorable, nothing interested me more than what you
said of Moseley.
No one, I am sure, knew better than you the value of his teaching and in
what that value consisted.
Yours faithfully
J. Burdon-Sanderson. 31-2.)
In leaving the subject of scientific religious inquiry, I will only add
that I do not believe it receives any important help--and certainly
it suffers incidentally much damaging interruption--from the study of
abnormal manifestations or abnormal conditions of personality.
(3) Both of the above effects seem to me of high, perhaps the very
highest, importance to faith and to thought. But, under the third head,
I name two which are more directly traceable to the personal work of
Darwin, and more definitely characteristic of the age in which his
influence was paramount: viz. the influence of the two conceptions of
evolution and natural selection upon the doctrine of creation and of
design respectively.
It is impossible here, though it is necessary for a complete sketch of
the matter, to distinguish the different elements and channels of this
Darwinian influence; in Darwin's own writings, in the vigorous polemic
of Huxley, and strangely enough, but very actually for popular thought,
in the teaching of the definitely anti-Darwinian evolutionist Spencer.
Under the head of the directly and purely Darwinian elements I should
class as preemin
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