And, If I Had Done My Best In The Same
Direction, I Should Trust In The Unknowable For Help.
Then too, is not gratitude to Heaven the best of prayers?
Unhappy he who has never felt it! Unhappier still, who has
never had cause to feel it!
It may be deemed unwarrantable thus to draw the lines between
what, for want of better terms, we call Material and
Spiritual. Still, reason is but the faculty of a very finite
being; and, as in the enigma of the will, utterly incapable
of solving any problems beyond those whose data are furnished
by the senses. Reason is essentially realistic. Science is
its domain. But science demonstratively proves that things
are not what they seem; their phenomenal existence is nothing
else than their relation to our special intelligence. We
speak and think as if the discoveries of science were
absolutely true, true in themselves, not relatively so for us
only. Yet, beings with senses entirely different from ours
would have an entirely different science. For them, our best
established axioms would be inconceivable, would have no more
meaning than that 'Abracadabra is a second intention.'
Science, supported by reason, assures us that the laws of
nature - the laws of realistic phenomena - are never
suspended at the prayers of man. To this conclusion the
educated world is now rapidly coming. If, nevertheless, men
thoroughly convinced of this still choose to believe in the
efficacy of prayer, reason and science are incompetent to
confute them.
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