n chemistry and biology shows how dangerous it is to
base a theological and religious superstructure on the unfilled clefts
of natural science. The lesson here during the past hundred years ought
to be a grave warning against its repetition in the future. These clefts
have been filled more and more by the investigations and results of
modern chemistry and biology, so that the theologian is constantly kept
in a state of panic, and has to shift his camp and run away when the
tide of knowledge sweeps in with its newly discovered results. The whole
situation seems serious, but it is not so disastrous as it appears at
first sight. Doubtless the gains of science have been numerous, and have
shaken and practically ruined the old theological and metaphysical
foundations; but a halt has now been called on science itself, and its
limitations have become perceptible even to its own [p.62] leaders. It
is not quite so certain that the problem of organic life can be settled
in terms of chemical combinations and mechanism. Many scientists[14] are
agreed on this point, although they repudiate the claims of neo-vitalists
such as Driesch and Reinke.[15] No judgment can be pronounced on this
subject at the present day, and probably the problem will take a long
time before any important results will accrue. And even these results
will not solve the problem of organic life, for the manifestations of
life, the higher we mount the scale of being, are not things visible to
the senses but express themselves in the forms of meanings and
will-relations.

The limits of natural science become clearly perceptible when we enter
into the complex problem of the relation of subject and object, [p.63]
or of mind and body. The final tribunal in regard to the great questions
of life and religion is not natural science. This is not a matter of a
mere wish that it should be so on the part of religious teachers who
ignore the findings of science, but is a conviction of the scientists
themselves.

Natural science has been so busy with the investigation of the physical
world that it has had time to remember but little besides objects in the
external world. And yet what are objects in the external world without
a subject to know them?[16] And what are the hypotheses which science
frames in order to explain phenomena but syntheses of factors framed in
consciousness?[17] What are laws of Nature but mental constructions
framed concerning similar ways of behaviour