The progress of science over these last few centuries and the gradual replacement of Biblical by scientific categories of reality have to a large extent emptied the spirit world of the entities which previously populated it. In carrying out this program science has undoubtedly performed a very considerable service for which it can claim due credit. The objectification of the world of spirit in popular superstition had certainly gone far beyond what the experience of spirit could justify or support. Science is fully competent to deal with any element of experience which arises from an object in space and time. When, therefore, it turned its attention to the concrete entities with which popular imagination had peopled the world of spirit, these entities soon lost whatever status they had enjoyed as actual elements of external reality. In doing so science has unquestionably cleared up widespread misconceptions, removed extraneous and illusory sources of fear, and dispelled many undesirable popular superstitions. There have been, indeed, many important and valuable gains from the development of our present scientific view of the world for which we may be rightly grateful.

All this has not, however, been an unmixed blessing. The scientific debunking of the spirit world has been in a way too successful and too thorough. The house has been swept so clean that contemporary man has been left with no means, or at best with wholly inadequate means, for dealing with his experience of spirit. Although the particular form of conceptualization which popular imagination had made in response to the experience of spirit was undoubtedly defective, the raw experience itself which led to such excesses remains with us as vividly as ever. We simply find ourselves in the position of having no means for inquiring into the structure and meaning of this range of our experience. There is no framework or structure of thought with respect to which we can organize it and no part of reality, as we know and apprehend it, with respect to which we can refer this experience. Science has simply left us helpless and powerless in this important sector of our lives.