Science and Spirituality

Normally people (myself included) who recognize the spiritual life as the basis of life deny the reality, the necessity, the importance of studying the physical life, which evidently cannot lead to any conclusive results. In just the same way, those who only recognize the physical life completely deny the spiritual life and all deductions based on it — deny, as they say, metaphysics. But it is now absolutely clear to me that both are wrong, and both forms of knowledge — the materialistic and the metaphysical — have their own great importance, if only one doesn’t wish to make inappropriate deductions from the one or the other. From materialistic knowledge based on the observation of external phenomena one can deduce scientific data, i.e. generalizations about phenomena, but one should not deduce any guiding principles for people’s lives, as the materialists — Darwinists for example — have often tried to do. From metaphysical knowledge based on inner consciousness one can and should deduce the laws of human life — how should we live? why are we living? — the very thing that all religious teachings do; but one should not deduce, as many people have tried to do, the laws of phenomena and generalizations about them. 

Each of these two kinds of knowledge has its own purpose and its own field of activity.

-- Leo Tolstoy --