native, the intuitive ranges of experience.
The very proposal carries a denial of their value-in-themselves.
Its inevitable result in the humanist is their virtual ignoring. The
greatest of all the humanists of the Orient was Confucius. "I venture
to ask about death," said a disciple to the sage. "While you do not
know life," replied he, "how can you know about death?"[13] Even more
typical of the humanistic attitude towards the distinctively religious
elements of experience are other sayings of Confucius, such as: "To
give oneself earnestly to the duties due to men, and while respecting
spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them may be called wisdom."[13]
The precise area of humanistic interests is indicated in another
observation. "The subjects on which the Master did not talk were
... disorder and spiritual beings."[13] For the very elements of
experience which humanism belittles or avoids are found in the world
where pagans like Rabelais robustly jest or the high spaces where
souls like Newman meditate and pray. The humanist appears to be
frightened by the one and repelled by the other; will not or cannot
see life steadily and whole. That a powerful primitivistic faith,
like Taoism, a sort of religious bohemianism, should flourish beside
such pragmatic and passionless moderation as classic Confucianism is
inevitable; that the worship of Amida Buddha, the Buddha of redemption
and a future heaven, of a positive and eternal bliss, should be the
Chinese form of the Indian faith is equally intelligible. After a like
manner it is the humanism of our Protestant preaching today from which
men are defecting into utter worldliness and indifference on the one
hand and returning to mediaeval and Catholic forms of supernaturalism
on the other.

[Footnote 13: _Analects_, XI, CXI; VI, CXX.]

For the primitive in man is a beast whom it is hard to chain nor does
humanism with its semi-scientific, semi-sentimental laudation of all
natural values produce that exacting mood of inward scrutiny in which
self-control has most chance of succeeding. Hence here, as elsewhere
on the continent, and formerly in China, in Greece and in Rome, a sort
of neo-paganism has been steadily supplanting it.

To the study of this neo-paganism we now address ourselves. It is
the third and lowest of those levels of human experience to which we
referred in the first lecture. The naturalist, you may remember,
is that incorrigible individual who imagines that