The religious spirit is born of a conviction that some things matter more than others.  To those possessed by it there is a sharp distinction between that which is unconditioned and universal and that which is limited and local.  It is a consciousness of the unconditioned and universal that makes people religious; and it is this consciousness or, at least, a conviction that some things are unconditioned and universal, that makes their attitude towards the conditioned and local sometimes a little unsympathetic.  It is this consciousness that makes them set justice above law, passion above principle, sensibility above culture, intelligence above knowledge, intuition above experience, the ideal above the tolerable.  It is this consciousness that makes them the enemies of convention, compromise, and common-sense.  In fact, the essence of religion is a conviction that because some things are of infinite value most are profoundly unimportant, that since the gingerbread is there one need not feel too strongly about the gilt.

It is useless for liberal divines to pretend that there is no antagonism between the religious nature and the scientific.  There is no antagonism between religion and science, but that is a very different matter.  In fact, the hypotheses of science begin only where religion ends:  but both religion and science are born trespassers.  The religious and the scientific both have their prejudices; but their prejudices are not the same.  The scientific mind cannot free itself from a prejudice against the notion that effects may exist the causes of which it ignores.  Not only do religious minds manage to believe that there may be effects of which they do not know, and may never know, the causes—­they cannot even see the absolute necessity for supposing that everything is caused.  Scientific people tend to trust their senses and disbelieve their emotions when they contradict them; religious people tend to trust emotion even though sensual experience be against it.  On the whole, the religious are the more open-minded.  Their assumption that the senses may mislead is less arrogant than the assumption that through them alone can we come at reality, for, as Dr. McTaggart has wittily said, “If a man is shut up in a house, the transparency of the windows is an essential condition of his seeing the sky.  But it would not be prudent to infer that, if he walked out of the house, he could not see the sky, because there was no longer any glass through which he might see it."[6]

Examples of scientific bigotry are as common as blackberries.  The attitude of the profession towards unorthodox medicine is the classical instance.  In the autumn of 1912 I was walking through the Grafton Galleries with a man who is certainly one of the ablest, and is reputed one of the most enlightened, of contemporary men of science.  Looking at the picture of a young girl with a cat by Henri-Matisse, he exclaimed—­“I see how it is, the fellow’s astigmatic.”