The truth is that the religious and the scientific processes, though involving different methods, are identical in their final aim. Both aim at reaching the most real.
Indeed, in view of its function, religion stands in greater need of a rational foundation of its ultimate principles than even the dogmas of science.
Vision without power does bring moral elevation but cannot give a lasting culture.
Words, without power, is mere philosophy.
Art: If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.
If the object of poetry is, to make men, then poetry is the heir of prophecy.
When truth has no burning, then it is philosophy, when it gets burning from the heart, it becomes poetry.
The scientific observer of Nature is a kind of mystic seeker in the act of prayer.
It is the nature of the self to manifest itself, In every atom slumbers the might of the self.
The ultimate aim of the ego is not to see something, but to be something.
People who have no hold over their process of thinking are likely to be ruined by liberty of thought. If thought is immature, liberty of thought becomes a method of converting men into animals.
The ultimate purpose of religious life is to make this evolution move in a direction far more important to the destiny of the ego than the moral health of the social fabric which forms his present environment.
God is not a dead equation!
The Ego is partly free. partly determined, and reaches fuller freedom by approaching the Individual who is most free: God.
If faith is lost, there is no security and there is no life for him who does not adhere to religion.
The standpoint of the man who relies on religious experience for capturing Reality must always remain individual and incommunicable.
Yet higher religion, which is only a search for a larger life, is essentially experience and recognized the necessity of experience as its foundation long before science learnt to do so.
The possibility of a scientific treatment of history means a wider experience, a greater maturity of practical reason, and finally a fuller realization of certain basic ideas regarding the nature of life and time.
Another way of judging the value of a prophet's religious experience, therefore, would be to examine the type of manhood that he has created, and the cultural world that has sprung out of the spirit of his message.
The immediacy of mystic experience simply means that we know God just as we know other objects. God is not a mathematical entity or a system of concepts mutually related to one another and having no reference to experience.