every religion,[1] and that Ornament (of which cult-architecture is the highest form) is essentially number felt as shape. It is rigid, compelling forms, expression-motives and communication-signs[2] that the microcosm employs in the world of waking-consciousness to get into touch with the macrocosm. In sacerdotal technique they are called precepts, and in scientific, laws — but both are really name and number, and primitive man would discover no difference between the magic wherewith the priests of his villages command the dæmons and that wherewith the civilized technician commands his machines.
The first, and perhaps the only, outcome of man's will-to-understanding is faith. "I believe" is the great word against metaphysical fear, and at the same time it is an avowal of love. Even though one's researches or accumulation of knowledge may culminate in sudden illumination or conclusive calculation, yet all one's own sense and comprehension would be meaningless unless there were set up along with it an inward certainty of a "something" which as other and alien is — and is, moreover, exactly under the ascertained shape — in the concatenation of cause and effect. The highest intellectual possession, therefore, known to man as a being of speech-deduced thought, is the firm and hard-won belief in this something, withdrawn from the courses of time and destiny, which he has separated out by contemplation and labelled by name and number. But what that something is remains in the last analysis obscure. Was it the something of secret logic of the universe that was touched, or only a silhouette? And all the struggle and passion starts afresh, and anxious investigation directs itself upon this new doubt, which may well turn to despair. He needs in his intellectual boring of belief a final something attainable by thought, an end of dissection that leaves no remainder of mystery. The corners and pockets of his world of contemplation must all be illuminated — nothing less will give him his release.
Here belief passes over into the knowledge evoked by mistrust, or, more accurately, becomes belief in that knowledge. For the latter form of the understanding is radically dependent upon the former; it is posterior, more artificial, more questionable. Further, religious theory — that is, the contemplation of the believer — leads to priestly practice, but scientific theory, on the contrary, liberates itself by contemplation from the technical knowledge of every day life.[3] The firm belief that is bred by illuminations, revelations, sudden deep glimpses, can dispense with critical work. But critical knowledge presupposes the belief that its methods will lead to just that which is desired — that is, not to fresh imaginings, but to the "actual." History, however, teaches that doubt as to belief leads to knowledge, and doubt as to knowledge (after a period of critical optimism) back again to belief. As theoretical knowledge
