Professor Bellah appears to cut the ground from under the scientific study of religion by insisting that all "scientific" efforts to advance the understanding of religion through sociology or psychology have regularly proven-and must regularly prove-failures. It is precisely the most influential studies of religion by the most renowned social scientists which reveal themselves on close gaze to be reductionisms of one or another form; all such views treat religion as a derived-epiphenomenalrather than as a prime and primary spiritual-noumenal-reality. If Bellah is right, Marx, Durkheim, Freud-and there were many others-sought to explain religion without first getting hold of the reality of religion. Access to the reality of religion, Prof. Bellah continues, is only available to those who collectively participate in the reappropriation of the religious symbols. Here he avows his debt to the teachings of Paul Tillich, Mircea Eliade, and Norman 0. Brown. Our world, Bellah adds, may now be at one of the most critical passes in its history. In our preoccupation with science, we have cut ourselves off from the power of the redeeming symbol. It is not even possible for science to claim a peculiar access to truth or probability. Michael Polanyi correctly insists on the inexorable subjectivity of all perception and judgment, Bellah explains. The sentence of Bellah's which strikes me as most questionable and which I am, therefore, most strongly driven to question initially, seems innocent enough on its face: "Religion is one for the same reason that science is one-though in different ways-because man is one" (my italics). I answer with the same directness. Man as such-generic, substantial Man-can hardly be the proper subject of any social science. We have no way of getting at Man's ultimate essence, except to see men at work in all of their surroundings, and against all the horizons of their experiences and expressions. Sociology and psychology are at their best when they deal with men rather than Man as such. Whether this be the case or not, I would question the statement that science is one because man is one. Science, as it happens, only becomes one because the method of science is one. Logic is one-whether Man is one or not. We are not helped in our grasp of this issue by our current social-psychological images of "science." Leading sociologists notwithstanding, science is not a system of action nor is it a sector of a system of action. Science comprises signs, symbols, agreedupon procedures. sentences, which more or less accurately, more or less plausibly, with more or less warrant, declare, describe, explain, and predict certain states of affairs. When we speak of the scientific study of religion we do not mean an activity carried on by