Word: answerable
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...world is a vast whole, under the control of physical forces; an immense succession of phenomena, every one of which could have been predicted from all eternity by a mind powerful enough to know and to use some exact universal formula. Has such a world any religious aspect? The answer suggested by science is often stated thus: The world shows us universal evolution. Evolution in human nature tends towards the good, and is therefore a progress. Progress tends to realize the moral needs of man, and thus the world has a religious aspect...
...answer to this statement the lecturer suggested that progress can be a religiously encouraging fact only in case it is an essential, not a purely accidental feature of realty. But the progress that science discovers in the world is a local and transient fact, occurring at a particular stage in the process of the cooling of the solar system certain, in so far as we can judge to end before long altogether. If it be replied that progress, ceasing here, may reach a higher stage in some other planet, or in some other solar or stellar system, the lecturer insisted...
...what can we say, then, of the eternal nature of the world? To answer this question, said the lecturer, we must re-examine the assumptions on which the scientific conception of the world is founded. One of these assumptions was taken up and an analysis of this assumption was sketched. We assume in all discussions about the world that there is a difference between the truth of a statement and its falsity. But a statement is true by reason of its agreement with its object, and here arises a difficulty...
...students attracted to Harvard by the fame of particular instructors? In our opinion, a negative answer can be safely given to this query which brings up a distinctive feature of American and English universities as compared with German institutions. In Germany students are attracted by the peculiar brilliancy of some one instructor or department; men go to hear Helmholtz, or Virchow or some equally celebrated professor - not to attend the particular university. In England and America, a student selects the university in which he expects to find the best general efficiency, in which he sees the best scholarship...
...Then in answer to this question, first, all those views were excluded from consideration which lay stress on rewards and punishments as sanctions of the moral law. What is done for reward is, in so far, not a positively moral act. The real world offers support to true morality only in so far as it can show us that we are not alone when we try to act morally. If something in nature tends to realize genuine morality, then this something may show us a religious aspect of nature. For religion seeks in nature for something that gives support...