Man and the Attainment of Immortality (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from Man and the Attainment of Immortality That this period of stress and of fierce challenge should have been without its in¿uence on that whole range of thought and activity that may be covered by the word Religion, was not to be expected. If some were persuaded by the very course of things that the world in which they found themselves was indeed God's world, there were many on the other hand whose contribution to the scrap-heaps of the war was religion, or what they deemed to be religion. In addition to the moral issues that were involved in the question of what kind of a world it could be in which such a cataclysm was possible, there was the circumstance that the whole conduct of the war was a matter of exact science in a degree which was true of no previous war in history. The mathematician won greater Victories than the musketeer: the engineer had everywhere laid the basis of success, If there were branches of science that were put under heavy contri bution in the saving and restoring of human life, there was no comer of the known that had not been ransacked for the wherewithal to destroy it. It was science ordered, tested, exact, organised knowledge - that was the sign in which men had conquered blessed be Science which gave us the victory! She it is that alone can guarantee certitude, and what goes counter to, or tran scends the limits of, her achievements, either of state ment or construction, may well be looked at askance. There is a realm of hard and fast fact, of things that can be known, and that with certainty, in a way to which there is nothing comparable in the whole field of religion. A life of faith all up in the air, so to speak, and nu related to everything else that is known, is not a matter for serious consideration in an age of continuously menacing realism. Such have been, and are, the thoughts consciously and subconsciously at work in the minds of many today, and with ample reason. Nevertheless the fact remains that investigation of the long history of mankind has disclosed no period in which the most distinctive thing about him has not been his sense of Powers or a Power, expressing itself in the universe, with which he instinctively wished to come into some sort of a satisfactory relationship. There is in man a sense of need and dependence on something without him there is that in his being which goes out to something in the universe which he feels secures his place in it, and with which he desires to be at one. Challenged from the dawn of intelligence by the world order external to him, and impelled by his sense of need, he has committed himself to that world order in one way or another. As the initial acts of self-committal proved to be justified, man with his awakening mind made ever greater demands upon that order, and in turn began to feel its demands upon himself. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.