about by purposeful thought, by
higher intervention and guidance of things. Certainly not before then.
Thus we can only speak of purposes, aims, guidance, and creation in so far
as we have within us the capacity for feeling and recognising the value,
meaning and significance of things. But natural science itself cannot
estimate these. It can or will only examine how everything has come about,
but whether this result has a higher value than another, or has a lower,
or none at all, it can neither assert nor deny. That lies quite outside of
its province.

Let us try to make this clear by taking at once the highest example--man
and his origin. Let it be assumed that natural science could discover all
the causes and factors which, operating for many thousands of years, have
produced man and human existence. Even if these causes and factors had
actually been pure "ideas," _formae substantiales_ and the like, that would
in no way determine whether the whole process was really subject to a
divine idea of purpose or not. If we had not gained, from a different
source, an insight into the supreme and incomparable worth of human
existence, spiritual, rational, and free, with its capacity for morality,
religion, art and science, we should be compelled to regard man, along
with every other natural result, as the insignificant product of a blind
play of nature. But, on the other hand, if we have once felt and
recognised this value of human existence, its highest dignity, the
knowledge that man has been produced through a play of highly complex
natural processes, fulfilling themselves in absolute obedience to law, in
no way prevents our regarding him as a "purpose," as the realisation of a
divine idea, in accordance with which nature in its orderliness was
planned. In fact, this consideration leads us to discover and admire
eternal plan and divine guidance in nature.

For it does not rest with natural science either to discover or to deny
"purpose" in the religious sense in nature; it belongs to quite a
different order of experience, an entirely inward one. Just in proportion
as I become aware of, and acknowledge in the domain of my inward
experience and through my capacity of estimating values, the worth of the
spiritual and moral life of man, so, with the confidence of this peculiar
mode of conviction, I subordinate the concatenations of events and causes
on which the possibility and the occurrence of the spiritual and moral
life de