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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: LECTURE III THE NATURE OF RELIGION In the last lecture we pointed out a grave difficulty in following the injunction of Lord Gifford and treating Natural Religion "as a purely natural science, like astronomy or chemistry." We saw that the method of a science depends on the nature of the facts it professes to explain; and the facts of religion are spiritual facts, and seem, at any rate, to stand in striking contrast, and even opposition, to all "natural" facts. The significance of this contrast, we further saw, is realized by scientific thinkers to-day as it never was before. They recognize that even if the natural domain is not separate from the spiritual, but continuous with it, a natural explanation is incomplete and inadequate. In other words, it is now recognized by scientific men themselves that the purpose of the natural sciences is limited. They know that they set forth from hypotheses, and they do not pretend to give a final and full explanation of the nature of the real. They are becoming conscious that natural science omits an aspect of what is real. They even realize, to some degree at least, that when they omit the relation of natural facts to man, they may be omitting what is of vital significance. I have no doubt that they will yet correct the omission and help the philosopher to find room for man in the natural scheme, to re-interpret that scheme in his light, and to restore the wholeness of what is real. At present they acquiesce, as we have seen, in the limitation of their own aims, and they leave the investigation of spiritual phenomena to others. Now that which imposes limits on a science is always thesame. Its purpose is limited, and it deals with only single aspects of facts. Every science has its particular point of view and purpose, and it recogn...