The Limitations of the Material View of Things, p. 167

Opening Remarks
When we look at humanity in the light of a scientific understanding while we still labour in Ignorance, we are bound to get disillusioned. It is a life without purpose, a meaningless existence that has somehow evolved out of the worm while playing with the mud of earth.

Matter’s infinite
This is the sign of Matter’s infinite,
This the weird purport of the picture shown
To Science the giantess, measurer of her field,
As she pores on the record of her close survey
And mathematises her huge external world,
To Reason bound within the circle of sense,
Or in Thought’s broad impalpable Exchange
A speculator in tenuous vast ideas,
Abstractions in the void her currency
We know not with what firm values for its base.

All that we see here in the figure of the world is endless extension of material Space that has somehow come to be with s strange mathematical precision. Our understanding is clamped by the senses that cannot go beyond the hard material constructs built by the senses.

Unpovisioned cheques on the Beyond
Only religion in this bankruptcy
Presents its dubious riches to our hearts
Or signs unprovisioned cheques on the Beyond:
Our poverty shall there have its revenge.

On the one side there is the rigidly material world-view of science, while on the other hand there is the other-worldly view of Religion. Unlike Science, Religion believes in a Beyond and thereby opens a door to higher things. It gives some hope and value to life, at least an after-life if not this life. However very often it remains as a belief system to satisfy our heart’s need for Justice and meaning of life. Few venture further to actually discover the truths contained in a given religion.

Death’s passport
Our spirits depart discarding a futile life
Into the blank unknown or with them take
Death’s passport into immortality.

Religion looks upon this life as a preparation for another life that follows after Death. This too is not a true solution for earthly life. It is rather a consolation so that we remain hopeful.

Closing Remarks
There is little to choose between these two divergent world-views, – Science and Religion. One is fixated to Matter and physical existence, the other, is fixated to the Beyond with earthly life having only a momentary and subordinate value.