religion—that is, without any perceptive relation to the universe—is as impossible as a man without a heart. He may be as unaware of the possession of one as of the other, but neither without a heart nor without a religion can man exist. Religion is the relation which man acknowledges towards the universe about him, or to its source and first cause, and a rational man must perforce be in some sort of perceptive relationship.
But you may perhaps say that the definition of man's relation to the universe is a subject not for religion, but for philosophy, or, in general, for science, allowing that the latter term includes philosophy. I do not think so. I hold, on the contrary, that the supposition that science in its widest sense, including philosophy, should define the relation of man to the universe is altogether erroneous, and the chief source of disorder in the ideas of our educated society as to religion, science, and morality. Science, including philosophy, cannot define the relation of mankind to the infinite universe or to its source; if only because, before any sort of science or of philosophy could have been formulated, a conception of some sort of relationship of man to the universe, without which no kind of mental activity is possible, must have existed. As a man cannot by any kind of movement discover the direction in which he must move, yet all movement is made inevitably in some given direction, so it is impossible, by the
