I assert that the cosmic religious experience is the strongest and noblest driving force behind scientific research.
I am among those who think that science has great beauty.
Human sciences dissect everything to comprehend it, and kill everything to examine it.[Науки человеческие всё подразделяют – чтобы понять, всё убивают – чтобы рассмотреть.]
How can this cosmic religious experience be communicated from man to man, if it cannot lead to a definite conception of God or to a theology? It seems to me that the most important function of art and of science is to arouse and keep alive this feeling in those who are receptive.
He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.
He who has learned to love an art or science has wisely laid up riches against the day of riches.
For scientific endeavor is a natural whole the parts of which mutually support one another in a way which, to be sure, no one can anticipate.
Experience, the universal mother of sciences.[translation by John Willis Clark]Experience itself, the mother of all the sciences.[translation by John Ormsby][La mesma experiencia, madre de las ciencias todas.]
Everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is surely quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive.
Every scientific ‘fulfillment’ raises new ‘questions’; it asks to be ‘surpassed’ and outdated.[Jede wissenschaftliche “Erfüllung” bedeutet neue “Fragen” und will “überboten” werden und veralten.]
Even though the realms of religion and science in themselves are clearly marked off from each other, nevertheless there exist between the two strong reciprocal relationships and dependencies.
As a science of the unconscious it is a therapeutic method, in the grand style, a method overarching the individual case. Call this, if you choose, a poet’s utopia.
