Reason is the power which, by interaction with our environment, has
generated the whole of our experience. And, just as natural science
interprets the phenomena given to it by ordinary opinion, _i.e._,
interprets and purifies a lower form of knowledge by converting it into
a higher; so the task of reason when it is exercised upon morality and
religion, is simply to evolve, and amplify the meaning of its own
products. The movement from morality and religion to moral philosophy
and the philosophy of religion, is thus a movement from reason to
reason, from the implicit to the explicit, from the germ to the
developed fulness of life and structure. In this matter, as in all
others wherein the human spirit is concerned, that which is first by
nature is last in genesis--[Greek: nika d' ho prôtos kai teleutaios
dramôn.] The whole history of the moral and religious experience of
mankind is comprised in the statement, that the implicit reason which we
call "faith" is ever developing towards full consciousness of itself;
and that, at its first beginning, and throughout the whole ascending
process of this development, the highest is present in it as a
self-manifesting power.

But this process from the almost instinctive intuitions of the heart
towards the morality and religion of freedom, being a process of
evolution, necessarily involves conflict. There are men, it is true, the
unity of whose moral and religious faith is never completely broken by
doubt; just as there are men who are not forced by the contradictions in
the first interpretation of the world by ordinary experience to attempt
to re-interpret it by means of science and philosophy.

Throughout their lives they may say like Pompilia--

"I know the right place by foot's feel,