Hence, when once the personality of the First Principle is reached in some other way — the way of philosophy as distinguished from that of science — science will then furnish the most abundant confirmations, the strongest corroborations; the more abundant and the stronger, in proportion as the First Principle reached by philosophy ascends continuously from materialism through deism and pantheism to personal theism. For the traits in Nature and in natural science that seem to point to a lower Principle, especially those that look so plausibly toward pantheism, are better explicable by the theistic Principle, when once true theism is reached; and science accords best with this purified theism, though in itself quite unable to attain to the view.
But the theism that science will corroborate, or that thorough philosophy can approve and establish, must be a theism that assumes into its conceptions of God and man all the irrefutable insights of materialism or of deism, and of pantheism most of all. These insights reached on the planes of lower philosophies have an unquestionable reality and pertinence, if also they are marked by undeniable insufficiency. Their insufficiency, when they are seen in the higher light of genuine theism, is indeed so great that they seem by themselves to have hardly any religious import at all. By themselves, they afford the soul neither outward hope
