Note 80 — Chapter V · THE ART OF RELIGION

It must be remembered that for science the mechanistic assumption always remains; it is, as Vaihinger would say, a necessary fiction. To abandon it is to abandon science. Driesch, the most prominent vitalist of our time, has realised this, and in his account of his own mental development (Die Deutsche Philosophie der Gegenwart, vol. I, 1921) he shows how, beginning as a pupil of Haeckel and working at zoölogy for many years, after adopting the theory of vitalism he abandoned all zoölogical work and became a professor of philosophy. When the religious spectator, or the æsthetic spectator (as is well illustrated in the French review L’Esprit Nouveau), sees the “machinery” as something else than machinery he is legitimately going outside the sphere of science, but he is not thereby destroying the basic assumption of science.