[90] LECTURE X--Nov. 1, 1955 There are problems left from my last discussion of the relationship of religion and the technical realm. The one was the question of progress^a, which I think was very much in the mind of many of you, and rightly so. One of you asked me whether there is a progress in scientific research, and this brings me to a more general answer. Wherever man has a purpose and uses means for this purpose, there is a technical element. It is what I call, in my first division of the different forms of techniques, supporting techniques and not transforming techniques. Therefore you could apply this question also to education, to politics, to all those realms in which man has purposes and uses means for ends. In this sense, there is a large amount of technical means for ends in every scientific work. But there is something else also, in scientific work, and about this "something else" we want to talk when we come to the special subject: religion and science. So this is my general answer. All these things, in the reality of life which we treat here, point by point, do not appear in the reality of life point by point, but they appear in togetherness, and the function of a lecture like this is to DISTINGUISH, but not to SEPARATE. And I think that is something we all have to learn--especially in the academic world, where we always make distinctions--that if we make them, this does not mean that we separate realities. Distinctions are justified where variables are independently variable, where factors are independently variable. There we must make distinctions. But the reliability of factors doesn’t mean that these factors can be separated from each other. Now that is a very primitive logical footnote, but I have a lot of experience about this: whenever I made a distinction, somebody comes and says, "But can you separate these things?" And the answer is always, of course, "No, you cannot." But you must distinguish, nevertheless, because they are independently variable. Now this is also the case with these distinctions which we must make here, in order to go step by step from one relationship of religion to a cultural function, to the other. It does NOT mean separation. And I think I indicated this very clearly last time when I spoke, as an example, about the relationship of the visual arts and the technical realm. And I may add something here also--but first the answer to the question of progress^b involved in it.