The dance of life / Havelock Ellis.

  • Ellis, Havelock, 1859-1939.
Date:
1923
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The dance of life / Havelock Ellis. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    apt to misunderstand their holy functions and abuse their sacred names. Not only is there no necessary moral change in such a process, still less is there any necessary intellectual change. Religion need not involve intellectual suicide. On the intellectual side there may be no obvious change whatever. No new creed or dogma has been adopted.1 It might rather be said that, on the contrary, some pre¬ possessions, hitherto unconscious, had been realised and cast out. The operations of reason, so far from being fettered, can be effected with greater freedom and on a larger scale. Under favourable conditions the religious process, indeed, throughout directly contributes to strengthen the scientific attitude. The mere fact that one has been impelled by the sincerity of one's religious faith to question, to analyse, and finally to destroy one’s religious creed, is itself an incomparable training for the intelligence. In this task reason is submitted to the hardest tests ; it has every temptation to allow itself to be lulled into sleepy repose or cajoled into specious reconciliations. If it is true to itself here it is steeled for every other task in the world, for no other task can ever demand so complete a self-sacrifice at the call of Truth. Indeed the final restoration of the religious impulse on a higher plane may itself be said to reinforce the scientific 1 Jules de Gaultier {La Philosophic Officielle et la Philosophic, p. 150) refers to those Buddhist monks the symbol of whose faith was con¬ tained in one syllable : Om. But those monks, he adds, belonged to “ the only philosophic race that ever existed,” and by the side of their pure faith, placed on a foundation which no argumentation can upset, all the religious philosophies of the Judeo-Helleno-Christian tradition are but fairy-tales told to children.