 Lecture 18 of the Varieties of Religious Experience This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. Lecture 18, Philosophy The subject of saintliness left us face to face with the question, Is the sense of divine presence a sense of anything objectively true? We turned first to mysticism for an answer, and found that although mysticism is entirely willing to corroborate religion, it is too private and also too various in its utterances to be able to claim a universal authority. But philosophy publishes results which claim to be universally valid, if they are valid at all. So we now turn with our question to philosophy. Can philosophy stamp a warrant of veracity upon the religious man's sense of the divine? I imagine that many of you at this point begin to indulge in guesses at the goal to which I am tending. I have undermined the authority of mysticism, you say, and the next thing I shall probably do is to seek to discredit that of philosophy. Religion, you expect to hear me conclude, is nothing but an affair of faith, based either on vague sentiment or on that vivid sense of the reality of things unseen, of which in my second lecture, and in the lecture on mysticism, I gave so many examples. It is essentially private and individualistic. It always exceeds our powers of formulation, and although attempts to pour its contents into a philosophic mold will probably always go on, men being what they are, yet these attempts are always secondary processes which in no way add to the authority or warrant the veracity of the sentiments from which they derive their own stimulus and borrow whatever glow of conviction they may themselves possess. In short, you suspect that I am planning to defend feeling at the expense of reason, to rehabilitate the primitive and unreflective, and to dissuade you from the hope of any theology worthy of the name. To a certain extent, I have to admit that you guess rightly. I do believe that feeling is the deeper source of religion, and that philosophic and theological formulas are secondary products, like translations of a text into another tongue. But all such statements are misleading from their brevity, and it will take the whole hour for me to explain to you exactly what I mean. When I call theological formulas secondary products, I mean that in a world in which no religious feeling had ever existed, I doubt whether any philosophic theology could ever have been framed. I doubt if dispassionate intellectual contemplation of the universe, apart from inner unhappiness and the need of deliverance on the one hand, and mystical emotion on the other, would ever have resulted in religious philosophies such as we now possess. Men would have begun with animistic explanations of natural fact, and criticized these away into scientific ones, as they actually have done. In the science, they would have left a certain amount of physical research, even as they now will probably have to readmit a certain amount. But high-flying speculations, like those of either dogmatic or idealistic theology, these they would have had no motive to venture on, feeling no need of commerce with such deities. These speculations must, it seems to me, be classed as overbeliefs, buildings outperformed by the intellect into directions of which feeling originally supplied the hint. But even if religious philosophy had to have its first hint supplied by feeling, may it not have dealt in a superior way with the matter which feeling suggested? Feeling is private and dumb, and unable to give an account of itself. It allows that its results are mysteries and enigmas, declines to justify them rationally, and on occasion is willing that they should even pass for paradoxical and absurd. Philosophy takes just the opposite attitude. Her aspiration is to reclaim from mystery and paradox whatever territory she touches. To find an escape from obscure and wayward personal persuasion to truth, objectively valid for all thinking men, has ever been the intellect's most cherished ideal. To redeem religion from unwholesome privacy, and to give public status and universal right of way to its deliverances, has been reason's task. I believe that philosophy will always have opportunity to labor at this task. We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect from participating in any of our functions. Even in soliloquizing with ourselves, we construe our feelings intellectually. Both our personal ideals and our religious and mystical experiences must be interpreted congruously with the kind of scenery which our thinking mind inhabits. The philosophic climate of our time inevitably forces its own clothing on us. Moreover, we must exchange our feelings with one another, and in doing so we have to speak and to use general and abstract verbal formulas. Conceptions and constructions are thus a necessary part of our religion, and as moderator amid the clash of hypotheses and mediator among the criticisms of one man's constructions by another, philosophy will always have much to do. It would be strange if I disputed this, when these very lectures which I am giving are, as you will see more clearly from now onwards, a laborious attempt to extract from the privacies of religious experience some general facts which can be defined in formulas upon which everybody may agree. Religious experience, in other words, spontaneously and inevitably in genders' myths, superstitions, dogmas, creeds, and metaphysical theologies, and criticisms of one set of these by the adherents of another. Of late, impartial classifications and comparisons have become possible alongside of the denunciations and anathemas by which the commerce between creeds used exclusively to be carried on. We have the beginnings of a science of religions, so called, and if these lectures could ever be accounted a crumb-like contribution to such a science, I should be made very happy. But all these intellectual operations, whether they be constructive or comparative and critical, presuppose immediate experiences as their subject matter. They are interpretive and inductive operations, operations after the fact, consequent upon religious feeling, not coordinate with it, not independent of what it ascertains. The intellectualism in religion, which I wish to discredit, pretends to be something altogether different from this. It assumes to construct religious objects out of the resources of logical reason alone, or of logical reason drawing rigorous inference from non-subjective facts. It calls its conclusions dogmatic theology or philosophy of the absolute, as the case may be. It does not call them science of religions. It reaches them in an a priori way and warrants their veracity. Warranted systems have ever been the idols of aspiring souls. All inclusive yet simple, noble, clean, luminous, stable, rigorous, true, what more ideal refuge could there be than such a system would offer to spirits vexed by the muddiness and accidentality of the world of sensible things. Accordingly, we find inculcated in the theological schools of today, almost as much as in those of the foretime, a disdain for merely possible or probable truth and of results that only private assurance can grasp. Scholastics and idealists both express this disdain. Principal John Caird, for example, writes as follows in his Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion. Quote, Religion must indeed be a thing of the heart, but in order to elevate it from the region of subjective caprice and waywardness, and to distinguish between that which is true and false in religion, we must appeal to an objective standard. That which enters the heart must first be discerned by the intelligence to be true. It must be seen as having in its own nature a right to dominant feeling, and as constituting the principle by which feeling must be judged. In estimating the religious character of individuals, nations, or races, the first question is not how they feel, but what they think and believe. Not whether their religion is one which manifests itself in emotions, more or less vehement and enthusiastic, but what are the conceptions of God and divine things by which these emotions are called forth. Feeling is necessary in religion, but it is by the content or intelligent basis of a religion, not by feeling that its character and worth are to be determined. Close quote. Cardinal Newman in his work The Idea of a University gives more emphatic expression still to this disdain for sentiment. Theology, he says, is a science in the strictest sense of the word. I will tell you, he says, what it is not, not physical evidences for God, not natural religion, for these are but vague subjective interpretations. He continues, of the animal frame, or his will gathered from the immediate issues of human affairs. If his essence is just as high and deep and broad as the universe and no more, if this be the fact, then I will confess that there is no specific science about God. That theology is but a name and a protest in its behalf and hypocrisy. Then Pius says it is to think of him, while the pageant of experiment or abstract reasoning passes by, still such piety is nothing more than a poetry of thought or an ornament of language, a certain view taken of nature, which one man has and another has not, which gifted minds strike out, which others see to be admirable and ingenious, and which all would be the better for adopting. But it is the theology of nature, just as we talk of the philosophy or the romance of history, or the poetry of childhood, or the picturesque or the sentimental or the humorous, or any other abstract quality which the genius or the caprice of the individual or the fashion of the day or the consent of the world recognizes in any set of objects which are subjected to its contemplation. I do not see much difference between avowing that there is no God and implying that nothing definite can be known for certain about him. Close quote. What I mean by theology continues Newman is none of these things. Quote, I simply mean the science of God or the truths we know about God put into a system just as we have a science of the stars and called astronomy or of the crust of the earth and call it geology. Close quote. In both these extracts, we have the issue clearly set before us. Feeling valid only for the individual is pitted against reason valid universally. The test is a perfectly plain one of fact. Theology based on pure reason must in point of fact convince men universally. If it did not, wherein would its superiority consist? If it only formed sects and schools, even as sentiment and mysticism formed them, how would it fulfill its program of freeing us from personal caprice and waywardness? This perfectly definite practical test of the pretensions of philosophy to found religion on universal reason simplifies my procedure today. I need not discredit philosophy by laborious criticism of its arguments. It will suffice if I show that as a matter of history, it fails to prove its pretension to be objectively convincing. In fact, philosophy does so fail. It does not banish differences. It found schools and sects just as feeling does. I believe in fact that the logical reason of man operates in this field of divinity exactly as it has always operated in love or in patriotism or in politics or in any other field of the wider affairs of life in which our passions or our mystical intuitions fix our beliefs beforehand. It finds arguments for our conviction, for indeed it has to find them. It amplifies and defines our faith and dignifies it and lends it words and plausibility. It hardly ever engenders it. It cannot now secure it. Footnote, as regards the secondary character of intellectual constructions and the primacy of feeling and instinct in founding religious beliefs, see the striking work of H. Fielding, The Hearts of Men, London, 1902, which came into my hands after my text was written. Says the author, quote, Creeds are the grammar of religion. They are to religion what grammar is to speech. Words are the expression of our wants. Grammar is the theory formed afterwards. Speech never proceeded from grammar but the reverse. As speech progresses and changes from unknown causes, grammar must follow. Close quote, The whole book which keeps unusually close to concrete facts is little more than an amplification of this text. And footnote, Lend me your attention while I run through some of the points of the older systematic theology. You will find them in both Protestant and Catholic manuals. Best of all, in the innumerable textbooks published since Pope Leo's encyclical, recommending the study of St. Thomas. I glance first at the arguments by which dogmatic theology establishes God's existence. After that, at those by which it establishes his nature. The arguments for God's existence have stood for hundreds of years with the waves of unbelieving criticism breaking against them, never totally discrediting them in the ears of the faithful, but on the whole slowly and surely washing out the mortar from between their joints. If you have a God already whom you believe in, these arguments confirm you. If you are atheistic, they fail to set you right. The proofs are various. The cosmological one, so-called, reasons from the contingents of the world to a first cause which must contain whatever perfections the world itself contains. The argument from design reasons, from the fact that nature's laws are mathematical and her parts benevolently adapted to each other, that this cause is both intellectual and benevolent. The moral argument is that the moral law presupposes a law giver. The argument ex consensu gentium is that the belief in God is so widespread as to be grounded in the rational nature of man and should therefore carry authority with it. As I just said, I will not discuss these arguments technically. The bare fact that all idealists since Kant have felt entitled either to scout or to neglect them shows that they are not solid enough to serve as religions all sufficient foundation. Absolutely impersonal reasons would be in duty bound to show more general convincingness. Causation is indeed too obscure a principle to bear the weight of the whole structure of theology. As for the argument from design, see how Darwinian ideas have revolutionized it. Conceived as we now conceive them has so many fortunate escapes from almost limitless processes of destruction. The benevolent adaptations which we find in nature suggest a deity very different from the one who figured in the earlier versions of the argument. It must not be forgotten that any form of disorder in the world might, by the design argument, suggest a God for just that kind of disorder. The truth is that any state of things whatever that can be named is logically susceptible of teleological interpretation. The ruins of the earthquake at Lisbon, for example, the whole of past history had to be planned exactly as it was to bring about in the fullness of time just that particular arrangement of debris of masonry, furniture, and once living bodies. No other train of causes would have been sufficient. And so of any other arrangement, bad or good, which might as a matter of fact be found resulting anywhere from previous conditions. To avoid such pessimistic consequences and save its beneficent designer, the design argument accordingly invokes two other principles restrictive in their operation. The first is physical. Nature's forces tend of their own accord only to disorder and destruction, to heaps of ruins, not to architecture. This principle, though plausible at first sight, seems, in the light of recent biology, to be more and more improbable. The second principle is one of anthropomorphic interpretation. No arrangement that for us is disorderly can possibly have been an object of design at all. This principle is, of course, a mere assumption in the interests of anthropomorphic theism. When one views the world with no definite theological bias one way or the other, one sees that order and disorder, as we now recognize them, are purely human inventions. We are interested in certain types of arrangement, useful, aesthetic or moral, so interested that whenever we find them realized, the fact emphatically rivets our attention. The result is that we work over the contents of the world selectively. It is overflowing with disorderly arrangements from our point of view, that order is the only thing we care for and look at. And by choosing, one can always find some sort of orderly arrangement in the midst of any chaos. If I should throw down a thousand beans at random upon a table, I could, doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient number of them, leave the rest in almost any geometrical pattern you might propose to me. And you might then say that the pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and that the other beans were mere irrelevance and packing material. Our dealings with nature are just like this. She is a vast plenum in which our attention draws capricious lines in innumerable directions. We count and name whatever lies upon the special lines we trace, whilst the other things and the untraced lines are neither named nor counted. There are, in reality, infinitely more things unadapted to each other in this world than there are things adapted. Infinitely more things with irregular relations than with regular relations between them. But we look for the regular kind of thing exclusively and ingeniously discover and preserve it in our memory. It accumulates with other regular kinds until the collection of them fills our encyclopedias. Yet all the while between and around them lies an infinite anonymous chaos of objects that no one ever thought of together, of relations that never yet attracted our attention. The facts of order from which the physical theological argument starts are thus easily susceptible of interpretation as arbitrary human products. So long as this is the case, although, of course, no argument against God follows, it follows that the argument for him will fail to constitute a knock-down proof of his existence. It will be convincing only to those who, on other grounds, believe in him already. End footnote. The fact is that these arguments do but follow the combined suggestions of the facts and our feeling. They prove nothing rigorously. They only corroborate our pre-existent partialities. If philosophy can do so little to establish God's existence, how stands it with her efforts to define his attributes? It is worthwhile to look at the attempts of systematic theology in this direction. Quote, Since God is first cause, this science of sciences say, he differs from all his creatures in possessing existence assay. From this assayate on God's part, theology deduces, by mere logic, most of his other perfections. For instance, he must be both necessary and absolute, cannot not be, and cannot in any way be determined by anything else. This makes him absolutely unlimited from without, and unlimited also from within. For limitation is non-being, and God is being itself. This unlimitedness makes God infinitely perfect. Moreover, God is one and only, for the infinitely perfect can admit no peer. He is spiritual, for where he composed of physical parts, some other power would have to combine them into the total, and his assayate would thus be contradicted. He is therefore both simple and non-physical in nature. He is simple metaphysically also, that is to say, his nature and his existence cannot be distinct, as they are in finite substances, which share their formal natures with one another, and are individual only in their material aspect. Since God is one and only, his essentia and his assay must be given at one stroke. This excludes from his being all those distinctions, so familiar in the world of finite things, between potentiality and actuality, substance and accidents, being and activity, existence and attributes. We can talk, it is true, of God's powers, acts and attributes, but these discriminations are only virtual, and made from the human point of view. In God, all these points of view fall into the absolute identity of being. This absence of all potentiality in God obliges him to be immutable. He is actuality through and through. Where there anything potential about him, he would either lose or gain by its actualization, and either lose or gain would contradict his perfection. He cannot therefore change. Furthermore, he is immense, boundless, for could he be outlined in space, he would be composite, and this would contradict his indivisibility. He is therefore omnipresent, indivisibly there at every point of space. He is similarly wholly present at every point of time, in other words, eternal. For if he began in time, he would need a prior cause, and that would contradict his assayity. If he ended, it would contradict his necessity. If he went through any succession, it would contradict his immutability. He has intelligence and will, and every other creature perfection, for we have them, and effect us nequate super rare kosim. In him, however, they are absolutely and eternally in act, and their object, since God can be bounded by not that is external, and primarily be nothing else than God himself. He knows himself, then, in one eternal indivisible act, and wills himself with an infinite self-pleasure. Since he must of logical necessity, thus love and will himself, he cannot be called free at intra, with the freedom of contrarities that characterizes finite creatures. Add extra, however, or with respect to his creation, God is free. He cannot need to create, being perfect in being, and in happiness already. He wills to create, then, by an absolute freedom. Being thus a substance endowed with intellect and will and freedom, God is a person, and a living person also, for he is both object and subject of his own activity, and to be this distinguishes the living from the lifeless. He is thus absolutely self-sufficient, and his self-knowledge and self-love are both of them infinite and adequate, and need no extraneous conditions to perfect them. He is omniscient, for in knowing himself as cause, he knows all creature things and events by implication. His knowledge is pre-vissive, for he is present to all time. Even our free acts are known beforehand to him, for otherwise, his wisdom would admit of successive moments of enrichment, and this would contradict his immutability. He is omnipotent for everything that does not involve logical contradiction. He can make being, in other words, his power includes creation. If what he creates were made of his own substance, it would have to be infinite in essence, as that substance is. But it is finite, so it must be non-divine in substance. If were made of a substance, an eternally existing matter, for example, which God found there to his hand, and to which he simply gave its form, that would contradict God's definition as first cause, and make him a mere mover of something caused already. If he creates then, he creates ex nihilo, and gives them absolute being as so many finite substances additional to himself. The forms which he imprints upon them have their prototypes in his ideas. But as in God there is no such thing as multiplicity, and as these ideas for us are manifold, we must distinguish the ideas as they are in God, and the way in which our minds associate them. We must attribute them to him only in a terminative sense as differing aspects, from the finite point of view, of his unique essence. God, of course, is holy, good, and just. He can do no evil, for he is positive being's fullness, and evil is negation. It is true that he has created physical evil in places, but only as a means of wider good. It is true that he has created totalitarian, preeminent, bonum parties. Moral evil he cannot will, either as end or means, for that would contradict his holiness. By creating free beings, he permits it only. Neither is justice, nor his goodness obliging him to prevent the recipients of freedom from misusing the gift. As regards God's purpose in creating, primarily it can only have been to exercise his absolute freedom by the manifestation to others of his glory. From this it follows that the others must be rational beings, capable, in the first place, of knowledge, love, and honor, and in the second place of happiness. For the knowledge and love of God is the mainspring of felicity. In so far forth one may say that God's secondary purpose in creating is love. Close quote. I will not weary you by pursuing these metaphysical determinations farther into the mysteries of God's trinity, for example. What I have given will serve as a specimen of the Orthodox philosophical theology of both Catholics and Protestants. Newman, filled with enthusiasm at God's list of perfections, continues the passage which I begin to quote to you in the pages of a rhetoric so magnificent that I can hardly refrain from adding them in spite of the inroad they would make upon our time. He first enumerates God's attributes sonorously, then celebrates his ownership of everything in earth and heaven and the dependence of all that happens upon his permissive will. He gives us scholastic philosophy touched with emotion, and every philosophy should be touched with emotion to be rightly understood. Emotionally, then, dogmatic theology is worth something to minds of the type of Newman's. It will aid us to estimate what it is worth intellectually if, at this point, I make a short digression. What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder. The continental schools of philosophy have too often overlooked the fact that man's thinking is organically connected with his conduct. It seems to me to be the chief glory of English and Scottish thinkers to have kept the organic connection in view. The guiding principle of British philosophy has, in fact, been that every difference must make a difference. Every theoretical difference somewhere issue in a practical difference and that the best method of discussing points of theory is to begin by ascertaining what practical difference would result from one alternative or the other being true. What is the particular truth in question known as? In what facts does it result? What is its cash value in terms of particular experience? This is the characteristic English way of taking up a question. In this way, you remember, Locke takes up the question of personal identity. What you mean by it is just your chain of particular memories, says he. That is the only concretely verifiable part of its significance. All further ideas about it, such as the oneness or manyness of the spiritual substance on which it is based, are therefore void of intelligible meaning and propositions touching such ideas may be indifferently affirmed or denied. So Berkeley with his matter. The cash value of matter is our physical sensations. That is what it is known as, all that we concretely verify of its conception. That, therefore, is the whole meaning of the term matter. Any other pretended meaning is mere wind of words. Hume does the same thing with causation. It is known as habitual antecedents and as tendency on our part to look for something definite to come. Apart from this practical meaning it has no significance whatever and books about it may be committed to the flames, says Hume. Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown, James Mill, John Mill and Professor Bain have followed more or less consistently the same method and Shadworth Hodgson has used the principle with full explicitness. When all is said and done it was English and scotch writers and not Kant who introduced the critical method into philosophy. The one method fitted to make philosophy a study worthy of serious men. For what seriousness can possibly remain in debating philosophic propositions that will never make an appreciable difference to us in action? And what could it matter if all propositions were practically indifferent? Which of them we should agree to call true and which false? An American philosopher of eminent originality, Mr. Charles Sanders Pierce has rendered thought a service by disentangling from the particulars of its application the principle by which these men were instinctively guided and by singling it out as fundamental and giving to it a Greek name. He calls it the principle of pragmatism and he defends it somewhat as follows. Thought in movement has for its only conceivable motive the attainment of belief or thought at rest. Only when our thought about a subject has found its rest in belief can our action on the subject firmly and safely begin. Beliefs in short are rules for action and the whole function of thinking is but one step in the production of active habits. If there were any part of a thought that made no difference in the thought's practical consequences then that part would be no proper element of the thought's significance. To develop a thought's meaning we need therefore only determine what conduct it is fitted to produce. That conduct is for us its sole significance and the tangible fact at the root of all our thought distinctions is that there is no one of them so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference of practice. To attain perfect clearness in our thoughts of an object we need then only consider what sensations immediate or remote we are conceivably to expect from it and what conduct we must prepare in case the object should be true. Our conception of these practical consequences is for us the whole of our conception of the object so far as that conception has positive significance at all. This is the principle of pierce the principle of pragmatism. Such a principle will help us on this occasion to decide among the various attributes set down in the scholastic inventory of God's perfections whether some be not far less significant than others. If, namely, we apply the principle of pragmatism to God's metaphysical attributes, strictly so called, as distinguished from his moral attributes, I think that even were we forced by a coerce of logic to believe them we still should have to confess them to be destitute of all intelligible significance. Take God's aseity for example, or his necesariness, his personality, his simplicity or superiority to the kind of inner variety and succession which we find in finite beings his indivisibility and lack of the inner distinctions of being and activity substance and accident potentiality and actuality and the rest his repudiation of inclusion as a genus his actualized infinity his personality apart from the moral qualities which it may comport, his relations to evil being permissive and not positive his self sufficiency self love and absolute felicity in himself. Candidly speaking how do such qualities as these make any definite connection with our life? And if they severally call for no distinctive adaptations of our conduct what vital difference can it possibly make to a man's religion whether they be true or false? For my own part although I dislike to say ought that may grate upon tender associations I must frankly confess that even though these attributes were faultlessly deduced I cannot conceive of its being of the smallest consequence to us religiously that any one of them should be true. Pray, what specific act can I perform in order to adapt myself the better to God's simplicity? Or how does it assist me to plan my behavior to know that his happiness is anyhow absolutely complete? In the middle of the century just past, Maine Reid was the great writer of books of out of door adventure. He was forever extolling the hunters and field observers of living animals habits and keeping up a fire of evictive against the closet naturalists as he called them the collectors and classifiers and handlers of skeletons and skins. When I was a boy I used to think that a closet naturalist must be the vilest type of wretch under the sun but surely the systematic theologians are the closet naturalists of the deity even in Captain Maine Reid's what is their deduction of metaphysical attributes but a shuffling and matching of pedantic dictionary adjectives aloof from morals aloof from human needs something that might be worked out from the mere word God by one of those logical machines of wood and brass which recent ingenuity has contrived as well as by a man of flesh and blood they have the trail of the serpent one feels that in the theologians' hands they are only a set of titles obtained by a mechanical manipulation of synonyms verbality has stepped into the place of vision professionalism into that of life instead of bread we have a stone instead of a fish a serpent did such a conglomeration of abstract terms give really the gist of our knowledge of the deity schools of theology might indeed continue to flourish but religion, vital religion would have taken its flight from this world what keeps religion going is something else than abstract definitions and symptoms of concatenated adjectives and something different from faculties of theology and their professors all these things are after effects secondary accretions upon those phenomena of vital conversation with unseen divine of which I have shown you so many instances renewing themselves in secular secularum in the lives of humble private men so much for the metaphysical attributes of God from the point of view of practical religion the metaphysical monster which they offer to our worship is an absolutely worthless invention of the scholarly mind what shall we now say of the attributes called moral pragmatically they stand on an entirely different footing they positively determine fear and hope and expectation and our foundations for the saintly life it needs but a glance at them to show how great is their significance God's holiness for example being holy God can will nothing but the good being omnipotent he can secure its triumph being omniscient he can see us in the dark being just he can punish us for what he sees being loving he can pardon too being unalterable we can count on him securely these qualities enter into connection with our life it is highly important that we should be informed concerning them that God's purpose in creation should be the manifestation of his glory is also an attribute which has definite relations to our practical life among other things it has given a definite character to worship in all Christian countries if dogmatic theology really does prove beyond dispute that a God with characters like these exists she may well claim to give a solid basis to religious sentiment but verily how stands it with her arguments it stands with them it is ill as with the arguments for his existence not only do post Kantian idealists reject them root and branch but it is a plain historic fact that they never have converted anyone who has found in the moral complexion of the world as he experienced it reasons for doubting that a good God can have framed it to prove God's goodness by the scholastic argument that there is no non-being would sound to such a witness simply silly no, the book of Job went over this whole matter once for all and definitely Rachiosination is a relatively superficial and unreal path to the deity quote I will lay mine hand upon my mouth I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear but now mine eye seeeth thee close quote intellect perplexed and baffled yet a trustful sense of presence such is the situation of the man who is sincere with himself and with the facts but who remains religious still footnote pragmatically the most important attribute of God is his punitive justice but who in the present state of theological opinion on that point will dare maintain that hellfire its equivalent in some shape is rendered certain by pure logic theology herself has largely based this doctrine upon revelation and in discussing it has tended more and more to substitute conventional ideas of criminal law for a priori principles of reason but the very notion that this glorious universe with planets and winds and laughing sky and ocean conceived and had its beams and rafters laid in technicalities of criminality is incredible to our modern imagination it weakens a religion to hear it argued upon such a basis and footnote we must therefore, I think bid a definite goodbye to dogmatic theology in all sincerity our faith must do without that warrant modern idealism as Pete has said goodbye to this theology forever can modern idealism give faith a better warrant or must she still rely on her poor self for witness the basis of modern idealism is Kant's doctrine of the transcendental ego of a perception by this formidable term Kant merely meant the fact that the consciousness I think them must, potentially or actually accompany all our objects former skeptics had said as much but the I in question had remained for them identified with a personal individual Kant abstracted and depersonalized it and made it the most universal of all his categories although for Kant himself the transcendental ego had no theological implications it was reserved for his successors to convert Kant's notion of Babelstein-Uberhaut or abstract consciousness into an infinite concrete self-consciousness which is the soul of the world and in which our sundry personal self-consciousness have their being it would lead me into technicalities to show you even briefly how this transformation was in point of fact affected suffice it to say the principle which today so deeply influences both British and American thinking two principles have borne the brunt of the operation the first of these principles is that the old logic of identity never gives us more than a post-mortem dissection of disjecta membra and that the fullness of life can be construed to thought only by recognizing that every object which our thought may propose to itself of some other object which seems at first to negate the first one the second principle is that to be conscious of a negation is already virtually to be beyond it the mere asking of a question or expression of a dissatisfaction proves that the answer or the satisfaction is already imminent the finite realized as such is already the infinite in posse in these principles we seem to get a propulsive force into our logic which the ordinary logic of a bare, stark self-identity in each thing never attains to the objects of our thought now act within our thought act as objects act when given an experience they change and develop they introduce something other than themselves along with them and this other at first only ideal or potential presently proves itself also to be actual it supersedes the thing at first supposed and both verifies and corrects it in developing the fullness of its meaning the program is excellent the universe is a place where things are followed by other things that both correct and fulfill them and a logic which gave us something like this movement of fact would express truth far additional school logic which never gets of its own accord from anything to anything else and registers only predictions and subsumptions or static resemblances and differences nothing could be more unlike the methods of dogmatic theology than those of this new logic let me quote in illustration some passages from the Scottish transcendentalist whom I have already named principal card writes how are we to conceive of the reality in which all intelligence rests he replies quote if it did not presuppose the absolute reality of intelligence of thought itself doubt or denial themselves presuppose and indirectly affirm it when I pronounce anything to be true I pronounce it, indeed to be relative to thought but not to be relative to my thought or to the thought of any other individual mind from the existence of all individual minds as such I can abstract I can think them away but that which I cannot think away is thought or self-consciousness itself in its independence or absoluteness or in other words in absolute thought or self-consciousness close quote here you see principal card makes the transition which Kant did not make he converts the omnipresence of consciousness in general as a condition of truth being anywhere possible into an omnipresent universal consciousness which he identifies with God in his concreteness he next proceeds to use the principal that to acknowledge your limits is in essence to be beyond them and makes the transition to the religious experience of individuals in the following words quote if man were only a creature of transient sensations and impulses of an ever coming or going succession of intuitions fancies feelings then nothing could ever have for him the character of objective truth or reality but it is the prerogative of man's spiritual nature that he can yield himself up to a thought and will that are infinitely larger than his own as a thinking self-conscious being indeed he may be said to live in the atmosphere of the universal life as a thinking being it is possible for me to suppress and quell in my consciousness every movement of self-assertion every notion and opinion that is merely mine every desire that belongs to me as this particular self and to become the pure medium of a thought that is universal in one word to live no more of my own life let my consciousness be possessed and suffused by the infinite and eternal life of spirit and yet it is just in this renunciation of self that I truly gain myself or realize the highest possibilities of my own nature for willst in one sense we give up self to live the universal and absolute life of reason yet that to which we thus surrender ourselves is in reality our true self the life of absolute reason is not a life that is foreign to us close quote nevertheless principle cared goes on to say so far as we are able outwardly to realize this doctrine the balm it offers remains incomplete whatever we may be in posse the very best of us in actu falls very short of being social morality love and self sacrifice even merge our self only in some other finite self or selves they do not quite identify it with the infinite man's ideal destiny infinite in abstract logic might thus seem in practice forever unrealizable our author continues quote is there then no solution of the contradiction between the ideal and the actual we answer there is such a solution but in order to reach it we are carried beyond the sphere of morality into that of religion it may be said to be the essential characteristic of religion as contrasted with morality that it changes aspiration into fruition anticipation into realization that instead of leaving man in the interminable pursuit of a vanishing ideal it makes him the actual partaker of a divine or infinite life whether we view religion from the human side or the divine as the surrender of the soul to God or as the life of God in the soul in either aspect it is of its very essence that the infinite has ceased to be a far off vision and has become a present reality the very first pulsation of the spiritual life and the rightly apprehended significance is the indication that the division between the spirit and its object has vanished that the ideal has become real that the finite has reached its goal and become suffused with the presence and life of the infinite oneness of mind and will with the divine mind and will is not the future hope and aim of religion but its very beginning and birth to enter on the religious life is to terminate the struggle in that act which constitutes the beginning of the religious life call it faith or trust or self surrender or by whatever name you will there is involved the identification of the finite with a life which is eternally realized it is true indeed that the religious life is progressive but understood in the light of the foregoing idea religious progress is not progress towards but within the sphere of the infinite it is not the vain attempt by endless finite additions or increments to become possessed of infinite wealth but it is the endeavor by the constant exercise of spiritual activity to appropriate that infinite inheritance of which we are already in possession the whole future of the religious life is given in its beginning but it is given implicitly the position of the man who has entered on the religious life is that evil, error, imperfection do not really belong to him they are excrescences which have no organic relation to his true nature they are already virtually as they will be actually suppressed and annulled and in the very process of being annulled they become the means of spiritual progress though he is not exempt from temptation and conflict yet in that inner sphere in which his true life lies the struggle is over the victory already achieved it is not a finite but an infinite life which the spirit lives every pulse-speed of its existence is the expression and realization of the life of God close quote they really admit that no description of the phenomena of the religious consciousness could be better than these words of your lamented preacher and philosopher they reproduce the very rapture of those crises of conversion of which we have been hearing they utter what the mystic felt but was unable to communicate and the saint, in hearing them recognizes his own experience it is indeed gratifying to be reported so unanimously but when all is said and done has principle card and I only use him as an example of that whole mode of thinking transcended the sphere of feeling and of the direct experience of the individual and laid the foundations of religion in impartial reason has he made religion universal by coercive reasoning transformed it from a private faith into a public certainty has he rescued its affirmations from obscurity and mystery I believe that he has done nothing of the kind but that he has simply reaffirmed the individual's experiences in a more generalized vocabulary and again I can be excused from proving technically that the transcendentalist reasonings fail to make religion universal for I can point to the plain fact that a majority of scholars, even religiously disposed ones, stubbornly refuse to treat them as convincing the whole of Germany one may say, has positively rejected the Hegelian argumentation as for Scotland I need only mention professor Frazier's and professor Pringle Pettison's memorable criticisms with which so many of you are familiar footnote the most persuasive arguments in favor of a concrete individual soul of the world with which I am acquainted are those of my colleague Josiah Royce in his religious aspect of philosophy in his conception of God and lately in his Aberdeen Gifford lectures the world and the individual I doubtless seem to some of my readers to evade the philosophic duty which my thesis in this lecture imposes on me by not even attempting to meet particularly I admit the momentary evasion in the present lectures which are cast throughout in a popular mode there seemed no room for subtle metaphysical discussion and for tactical purposes it was sufficient the contention of philosophy being what it is namely that religion can be transformed into a universally convincing science to point to the fact that no religious philosophy truly convinced the massive thinkers meanwhile let me say that I hope that the present volume may be followed by another if I am spared to write it in which not only Professor Royce's arguments but others for monistic absolutism shall be considered with all the technical fullness which their great importance calls for at present I resign myself to lying passive under the reproach superficiality and footnote once more I ask if transcendental idealism whereas objectively and absolutely rational as it pretends to be could it possibly fail so egregiously to be persuasive what religion reports you must remember always purports to be a fact of experience the divine is actually present as it says and between it and ourselves relations of give and take are actual if definite perceptions of fact like this cannot stand upon their own feet surely abstract reasoning cannot give them the support they are in need of conceptual processes can class facts define them, interpret them but they do not produce them nor can they reproduce their individuality there is always a plus a this-ness which feeling alone can answer for philosophy in this sphere is thus a secondary function unable to warrant faith's veracity and so I revert to the thesis which I announced at the beginning of this lecture in all sad sincerity I think we must conclude that the attempt to demonstrate by purely intellectual processes the truth of the deliverances of direct religious experience is absolutely hopeless it would be unfair to philosophy however to leave her under this negative sentence let me close then by briefly enumerating what she can do for religion if she will abandon metaphysics and deduction for criticism and induction and frankly transform herself from theology into sciences of religions and make herself enormously useful the spontaneous intellect of man always defines the divine which it feels in ways that harmonize with its temporary intellectual prepossessions philosophy can by comparison eliminate the local and the accidental from these definitions both from dogma and from worship she can remove historic incrustations by confronting the spontaneous constructions with the results of natural science philosophy can also eliminate doctrines that are now known to be scientifically absurd or incongruous sifting out in this way unworthy formulations she can leave a residuum of conceptions that at least are possible with these she can deal as hypotheses testing them in all the manners whether negative or positive by which these are ever tested she can reduce their number as some are found more open to objection she can perhaps become the champion of one which she picks out as being the most closely verified or verifiable she can refine upon the definition of this hypothesis distinguishing between what is innocent over belief and symbolism in the expression of it and what is to be literally taken as a result she can offer mediation between different believers and help to bring about consensus of opinion she can do this the more successfully the better she discriminates the common and essential from the individual and local elements of the religious beliefs which she compares I do not see why a critical science of religions of this sort might not eventually command as general a public adhesion as is commanded by a physical science even the personally non-religious might accept its conclusions on trust much as blind persons now accept the facts of optics it might appear as foolish to refuse them yet as the science of optics has to be fed in the first instance and continually verified later by facts experienced by seeing persons so the science of religions would depend for its original material on facts of personal experience and would have to square itself with personal experience through all its critical reconstructions it could never get away from concrete life or work in a conceptual vacuum it would forever have to confess as every science confesses that the subtlety of nature flies beyond it and that its formulas are but approximations philosophy lives in words but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation there is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught and for which reflection comes too late no one knows this as well as the philosopher he must fire his volley of new vocables out of his conceptual shotgun for his profession condemns to this industry but he secretly knows the hollowness and irrelevancy his formulas are like stereoscopic or kinetoscopic photographs seen outside the instrument they lack the depth the motion the vitality in the religious sphere in particular belief that formulas are true can never wholly take the place of personal experience in my next lecture I will try to complete my rough description of religious experience and in the lecture after that which is the last one I will try my own hand at formulating conceptually the truth to which it is a witness end of lecture 18