The Sources of Religious Insight
by Josiah Royce · English · Gutenberg #33677 · 446,998 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Sources of Religious Insight
Author: Josiah Royce
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Language: English
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THE BROSS LIBRARY
The Problem of the Old Testament,
by James Orr, D.D. (Bross Prize,
1905) _net_ $1.50
The Bible: Its Origin and Nature,
by Marcus Dods, D.D. . . _net_ $1.00
The Bible of Nature, by J. Arthur
Thomson, M.A net $1.00
The Religions of Modern Syria and
Palestine, by Frederick Jones
Bliss, Ph.D net $1.50
The Sources of Religious Insight, by
Josiah Royce, Ph.D., LL.D. net $1.25
THE BROSS LIBRARY
VOLUME VI
_THE BROSS LECTURES . . 1911_
THE SOURCES OF RELIGIOUS INSIGHT
LECTURES DELIVERED BEFORE LAKE FOREST COLLEGE
ON THE FOUNDATION OF THE LATE WILLIAM BROSS
BY
JOSIAH ROYCE, Ph.D., LL.D.
PROFESSOR OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY
IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
NEW YORK .... 1912
Copyright, 1912, by
THE TRUSTEES OF LAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY
Published April. 1912
{v}
THE BROSS FOUNDATION
The Bross Lectures are an outgrowth of a fund established in 1879 by
the late William Bross, Lieutenant-Governor of Illinois from 1866 to
1870. Desiring some memorial of his son, Nathaniel Bross, who died in
1856, Mr. Bross entered into an agreement with the "Trustees of Lake
Forest University," whereby there was finally transferred to them the
sum of forty thousand dollars, the income of which was to accumulate
in perpetuity for successive periods of ten years, the accumulations
of one decade to be spent in the following decade, for the purpose of
stimulating the best books or treatises _"on the connection, relation,
and mutual bearing of any practical science, the history of our race,
or the facts in any department of knowledge, with and upon the
Christian Religion."_ The object of the donor was to _"call out the
best efforts of the highest talent and the ripest scholarship of the
world to illustrate from science, or from any department of knowledge,
and to demonstrate the divine origin and the authority of the
Christian Scriptures; and, further, to show how both science and
revelation coincide and prove the existence, {vi} the providence, or
any or all of the attributes of the only living and true God,
'infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power,
holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.'"_
The gift contemplated in the original agreement of 1879 was finally
consummated in 1890. The first decade of the accumulation of interest
having closed in 1900, the Trustees of the Bross Fund began at this
time to carry out the provisions of the deed of gift. It was
determined to give the general title of "The Bross Library" to the
series of books purchased and published with the proceeds of the Bross
Fund. In accordance with the express wish of the donor, that the
"Evidences of Christianity" of his "very dear friend and teacher, Mark
Hopkins, D.D.," be purchased and "ever numbered and known as No. 1 of
the series," the Trustees secured the copyright of this work, which
has been republished in a presentation edition as Volume I of the
Bross Library.
The trust agreement prescribed two methods by which the production of
books and treatises of the nature contemplated by the donor was to be
stimulated:
1. The Trustees were empowered to offer one or more prizes during each
decade, the competition for which was to be thrown open to "the
scientific men, the Christian philosophers and historians of all {vii}
nations." In accordance with this provision, a prize of $6,000 was
offered in 1902 for the best book fulfilling the conditions of the
deed of gift, the competing manuscripts to be presented on or before
June 1, 1905. The prize was awarded to the Reverend James Orr, D.D.,
Professor of Apologetics and Systematic Theology in the United Free
Church College, Glasgow, for his treatise on "The Problem of the Old
Testament," which was published in 1906 as Volume III of the Bross
Library. The next decennial prize will be awarded in 1915, and the
announcement of the conditions may be obtained from the President of
Lake Forest College.
2. The Trustees were also empowered to "select and designate any
particular scientific man or Christian philosopher and the subject on
which he shall write," and to "agree with him as to the sum he shall
receive for the book or treatise to be written." Under this provision
the Trustees have, from time to time, invited eminent scholars to
deliver courses of lectures before Lake Forest College, such courses
to be subsequently published as volumes in the Bross Library. The
first course of lectures, on "Obligatory Morality," was delivered in
May, 1903, by the Reverend Francis Landey Patton, D.D., LL.D.,
President of Princeton Theological Seminary. The copyright of the
lectures is now the property of the Trustees of the Bross Fund. The
second course of {viii} lectures, on "The Bible: Its Origin and
Nature," was delivered in May, 1904, by the Reverend Marcus Dods,
D.D., Professor of Exegetical Theology in New College, Edinburgh.
These lectures were published in 1905 as Volume II of the Bross
Library. The third course of lectures, on "The Bible of Nature," was
delivered in September and October, 1907, by Mr. J. Arthur Thomson,
M.A., Regius Professor of Natural History in the University of
Aberdeen. These lectures were published in 1908 as Volume IV of the
Bross Library. The fourth course of lectures, on "The Religions of
Modern Syria and Palestine," was delivered in November and December,
1908, by Frederick Jones Bliss, Ph.D., of Beirut, Syria. These lectures
are in process of publication as Volume V of the Bross Library. The
fifth course of lectures, on "The Sources of Religious Insight," was
delivered November 13 to 19, 1911, by Professor Josiah Royce, Ph.D.,
of Harvard University. These lectures are embodied in the present
volume.
JOHN SCHOLTE NOLLEN,
_President of Lake Forest College._
Lake Forest, Illinois,
_March_, 1912.
{ix}
SUMMARY OF CONTENTS
I
THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM AND THE HUMAN INDIVIDUAL
PAGE
Introductory statement: Limitations of the undertaking 3
I. Definition of Insight, and of Religious Insight. Arbitrary
limitation of the definition of religion here in question.
The problem traditionally called that of the "salvation
of man" as the main problem upon which the sources of
insight here in question are to throw light 5
II. Generalised conception of "salvation." Variety of forms
in which this conception has been defined and used.
Resulting problem regarding the meaning of human life 9
III. Outline of the programme to be followed in the
subsequent discussion 17
IV. The concept of revelation, and the "religious paradox."
First statement of this paradox 19
V. Individual experience and the "inner light." What sort
of religious insight is thus to be gained. Its limitations.
Prospect of an appeal to other sources for aid 26
{x}
II
INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE AND SOCIAL EXPERIENCE
AS SOURCES OF RELIGIOUS INSIGHT
I. The definition of the religious problem, as given in the
former lecture, simplifies our undertaking in certain
respects, but seems to complicate it in others. Review of
the situation. Outlook for further study 37
II. Outline of the undertaking of the present lecture 41
III. The motives that lead to religion are natural and
human. Reasons why the objects of religious insight are
nevertheless conceived as superhuman, and, as, for our
individual experience, mysterious 44
IV. Can these objects be defined as realities or as "values"
that our social experience sufficiently brings to our
knowledge? Social experience as a source of religious
insight. Its scope and importance 54
V. The inadequacy of social experience as a source of
religious insight. Objections urged by tradition, by
recent individualism, and by William James 58
VI. The social consciousness as an indispensable factor in
religion. The consciousness of guilt as a sense of
loneliness. Love as a glimpse of something saving and
divine. The mystical aspect of our social consciousness.
Despite this mystical aspect of all our better social life,
our literal social relations are never sufficient to meet
the religious need. The resulting outlook toward still
further sources of enlightenment 65
{xi}
III
THE OFFICE OF THE REASON
I. Current objections to the Reason as a source of insight.
Intuition vs. Reason. Reason vs. Experience. Usual
view of the reason as "abstract" and as "analytic" in
its procedure 80
II. But, in common usage, the words "reason" and "reasonable"
often refer to something which does not wholly
depend upon "abstract thinking" and mere "analysis."
The "rule of reason." The concrete use of the reason.
Reason as a survey of the connections of experience, as
synthetic, and as involving broader intuitions. The
alternative: "Either inarticulate intuition or else barren
abstract reasoning," is falsely stated. The antithesis:
"Either experience or else reason," also involves failure
to see how both may be combined. Abstract thinking
as a means to an end. This end is the attainment of a
new and broader intuition. Relation between "becoming
as a little child" and "putting away childish things" 84
III. Examples of the synthetic use of the reason. The
fecundity of deductive reasoning. Novelties discovered by
the purely deductive sciences. Reason and insight in
their general relations 93
IV. The reason and the "religious paradox." The "paradox"
as not peculiar to religion. Common sense as an
appeal to standards which are in some sense superhuman.
No human individual personally experiences or verifies
what "human experience," in its conceived character as
an integral whole, is supposed to confirm. The concepts
{xii}
of truth and error are dependent upon the concept of an
appeal to an insight which no human individual ever
possesses. This latter concept cannot be limited to the
mere world of "common sense," but must be universalised.
The whole real world as the object of an all-seeing
comprehension of facts as they are. Otherwise our
opinions about the world cannot even be false. Resulting
synthetic insight of the reason. The world as the object
present to the divine wisdom 102
IV
THE WORLD AND THE WILL
I. Historical relations of philosophical idealism. General
bearing of this doctrine upon the religious interest, and
upon the history of religion 120
II. Objections to our doctrine of the reason as having no
value for life, and as failing to help toward solving the
problem of salvation 129
III. First answer to these objections. Reports of religious
experience that show some relations of our doctrine to
the problem in question 131
IV. Relations of knowledge and will in general. Statement
of the position of Pragmatism. Resulting objections to
our whole doctrine of the reason. Truth as tested
through "workings." Absolute truth as indefinable.
Pragmatism as taught by James has defined its own
forms and tests of religious insight. These forms and
tests of insight are asserted to be superior to our own.
Religious insight as saving, but as also empirical, in
James's sense of that term, and as never absolute 135
{xiii}
V. Answer to pragmatism. Our agreement with some of its
principal positions. Our intelligence as the counsellor of
our actions. The point where we are at issue with
pragmatism. Reason and will, their general relations.
Vindication of the position taken in the former lecture 144
VI. The problem as to the absoluteness of truth. The close
relations of knowledge and action do not throw doubt
upon, but rather emphasise this absoluteness. For all
action is expressed in individual and absolutely
irrevocable deeds. These deeds, if the practical issues
of life are sharply defined, remain irrevocably on the
"score of life" as "hits" or "misses." This irrevocable
character of our deeds insures the fact that the
"counsels" or "ideas" of the intellect, which guide our
individual deeds, are as absolutely "hits" or "misses"
as are the deeds which they counsel. Resulting definition
of absolute truth, which is something perfectly concrete,
and as accessible as life itself 151
VII. Application of this view to the definition of reality.
The real world as a life of counsels and of deeds. The
divine wisdom and the divine will as inseparable. The
eternal as, not the "timeless," but the "time-inclusive"
insight and survey of life 158
V
THE RELIGION OF LOYALTY
I. Objections to all the foregoing sources of insight as
inadequate,--if considered as separate sources,--to
furnish a basis for a vital and positive religion. Need
of a new source. Appeal to life to furnish such a source.
The new source is due to men's efforts to solve the
problem of duty, and results from the relations between
the religious and the moral motives 166
{xiv}
II. The historical conflicts between religion and morality.
The relations between faith and works, divine grace and
moral strenuousness. Review of these conflicts. Need
of some unifying motive 170
III. Analysis of the bases of morals. Individual and social
elements in the idea of duty. Resulting first statement
of the search for a moral principle. Incompleteness of
this first statement 182
IV. The contribution of the reason to the definition of a
moral principle. Practical inadequacy of the result thus
far attained 186
V. The loyal spirit illustrated 190
VI. The motives of Loyalty analysed. Definition of what
is meant by a Cause to which one is loyal. The principal
of Loyalty, stated and developed. The religious
aspect of the loyal spirit. The finding of the cause is
not due to the will of the loyal being; his service of the
cause is due to his will. Resulting reconciliation of the
moral and religious motives. The cause as a free gift of
grace. The service as one's own. The absoluteness of
the principle of loyalty. The solution of the "religious
paradox" 197
VI
THE RELIGIOUS MISSION OF SORROW
I. The consideration of Loyalty leads over to a new problem.
"Tribulation" as a hindrance to religious insight.
Reasons why this is the case, introduced by a statement
regarding our experience of evil. The principle that "Evil
ought to be altogether put out of existence" stated, and
{xv}
the reasons therefore indicated. Man as in intent a
"destroyer of evil." Our natural interest in destructive
prowess 215
II. Resulting situation in which religion seems to be placed.
Religion appears (1) To presuppose as well as to experience
a vast range of evils in the real world; (2) To depend
upon the assurance that the ruling principle of the
real world is good; and (3) To agree with morality in
making use of the principle that "Evil ought to be
altogether put out of existence." Resulting apparent
dilemma: Religion seems either superfluous or else doomed
to failure 219
III. Illustrations of the dilemma as it appears in practical
life, and as a barrier in the way of the religious life.
Need of an abstract statement of the dilemma as a means
of discounting our emotional confusions 227
IV. Reconsideration of the principle that has led to the
dilemma. Not all evils equally worthy of abolition.
Idealised ills. Definition of Sorrow. The process and
the results of idealisation. Creative synthesis vs. mere
destruction. The winning over and conquest of ill.
Strength of spirit involved in such creative synthesis,
which, in its turn, is never passive, but always morally
active. Suggestions toward a solution of the dilemma.
Sorrow as a source of religious insight 232
V. A recent literary instance of such insight 241
VI. Summary and suggestion of possible results of such
insight 250
{xvi}
VII
THE UNITY OF THE SPIRIT AND THE INVISIBLE CHURCH
I. The sense in which the religious objects are
"superhuman" and "supernatural." Our present "form of
consciousness" and the "form of consciousness" that
belongs to the "Spirit" in the sense in which that term
is here used 257
II. The Church, visible and invisible 272
III. The membership of the invisible church 282
IV. Communion with the invisible church 291
V. The Spiritual Gifts of the invisible church. Charity,
Tolerance and Loyalty as the Fruits of the Spirit. The
work of the invisible church 293
{1}
I
THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM AND THE HUMAN INDIVIDUAL
{2}
{3}
I
THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM AND THE HUMAN INDIVIDUAL
My first task must be to forestall possible disappointments regarding
the scope of our inquiry. In seven lectures upon a vast topic very
little can at best be accomplished. I want to tell you at the outset
what are some of the limitations to which I propose to subject my
undertakings.
I come before you as a philosophical inquirer addressing a general
audience of thoughtful people. This definition of my office implies
from the outset very notable limitations. As a philosophical inquirer
I am not here to preach to you, but to appeal to your own
thoughtfulness. Again, since my inquiry concerns the Sources of
Religious Insight, you will understand, I hope, that I shall not
undertake to present to you any extended system of religious doctrine.
Upon sources of insight we are to concentrate our attention. What
insight may be obtained from those sources we shall only attempt to
indicate in the most general way, not at length to expound. What
theologians would call a system of dogmas, I shall not undertake to
define. What {4} philosophers would regard as a comprehensive
philosophy of religion I shall have no time to develop within our
limits. I am to make some comments upon the ways in which religious
truths can become accessible to men. What truths thus become
accessible you must in large measure discover by your own appeal to
the sources of which I shall try to tell you.
These somewhat narrow limitations may have, as I hope, their
correlative advantages. Since I am to speak of sources, rather than of
creeds or of philosophies, I may be able to appeal to people of
decidedly various opinions without directing undue attention to the
motives that divide them. I need not presuppose that my hearers are of
the company of believers or of the company of doubters; and if they
are believers, it matters little, for my present purpose, to what
household of the faith they belong. I am not here to set people right
as to matters of doctrine, but rather to point out the way that, if
patiently followed, may tend to lead us all toward light and unity of
doctrine. If you listen to my later lectures you may, indeed, be led
to ask various questions about my own creed, which, in these lectures,
I shall not attempt to answer. But I shall be content if what I say
helps any of you, however little, toward finding for yourselves
answers to your own religious questions.
{5}
The limitations of my task, thus indicated, will become still clearer
if I next try to define the term Religious Insight as I intend it to
be here understood.
And first I must speak briefly of the word Insight. By insight,
whatever the object of insight may be, one means some kind of
knowledge. But the word insight has a certain richness of significance
whereby we distinguish what we call insight from knowledge in general.
A man knows the way to the office where he does his business. But if
he is a successful man, he has insight into the nature and rules of
his business and into the means whereby success is attained. A man
knows the names and the faces of his acquaintances. But he has some
sort of insight into the characters of his familiar friends. As these
examples suggest, insight is a name for a special sort and degree of
knowledge. Insight is knowledge that unites a certain breadth of
range, a certain wealth of acquaintance together with a certain unity
and coherence of grasp, and with a certain closeness of intimacy
whereby the one who has insight is brought into near touch with the
objects of his insight. To repeat: Insight is knowledge that makes us
aware of the unity of many facts in one whole, and that at the same
time brings us into intimate personal contact with these facts {6} and
with the whole wherein they are united. The three marks of insight are
breadth of range, coherence and unity of view, and closeness of
personal touch. A man may get some sort of _sight_ of as many things
as you please. But if we have insight, we view some connected whole of
things, be this whole a landscape as an artist sees it, or as a
wanderer surveys it from a mountain top, or be this whole an organic
process as a student of the sciences of life aims to comprehend it, or
a human character as an appreciative biographer tries to portray it.
Again, we have insight when, as I insist, our acquaintance with our
object is not only coherent but close and personal. Insight you cannot
obtain at second hand. You can learn by rote and by hearsay many
things; but if you have won insight, you have won it not without the
aid of your own individual experience. Yet experience is not by itself
sufficient to produce insight unless the coherence and the breadth of
range which I have just mentioned be added.
Insight may belong to the most various sorts of people and may be
concerned with the most diverse kinds of objects. Many very unlearned
people have won a great deal of insight into the matters that
intimately concern them. Many very learned people have attained almost
no insight into anything. Insight is no peculiar possession of the
students of any technical specialty or of any one calling. Men of
science aim to reach insight into {7} the objects of their researches;
men of affairs, or men of practical efficiency, however plain or
humble their calling, may show insight of a very high type, whenever
they possess knowledge that bears the marks indicated, knowledge that
is intimate and personal and that involves a wide survey of the unity
of many things.
Such, then, is insight in general. But I am to speak of Religious
Insight. Religious insight must be distinguished from other sorts of
insight by its object, or by its various characteristic objects. Now,
I have no time to undertake, in this opening discourse, any adequate
definition of the term Religion or of the features that make an object
a religious object. Religion has a long and complex history, and a
tragic variety of forms and of objects of belief. And so religion
varies prodigiously in its characteristics from age to age, from one
portion of the human race to another, from one individual to another.
If we permitted ourselves to define religion so as merely to insist
upon what is common to all its forms, civilised and savage, our
definition would tend to become so inclusive and so attenuated as to
be almost useless for the purposes of the present brief inquiry. If,
on the other hand, we defined religion so as to make the term denote
merely what the believer in this or in that creed thinks of as his own
religion, we should from the start cut ourselves off from the very
breadth of view which I myself suppose to be essential to the highest
sort of {8} religious Insight. Nobody fully comprehends what religion
is who imagines that his own religion is the only genuine religion. As
a fact, I shall therefore abandon at present the effort to give a
technically finished definition of what constitutes religion, or of
the nature of the religious objects. I shall here limit myself to a
practically useful preliminary mention of a certain feature that, for
my present purpose, shall be viewed as the essential characteristic of
religion, and of religious objects, so far as these lectures propose
to discuss religion.
The higher religions of mankind--religions such as Buddhism and
Christianity--have had in common this notable feature, namely, that
they have been concerned with the problem of the Salvation of Man.
This is sometimes expressed by saying that they are redemptive
religions--religions interested in freeing mankind from some vast and
universal burden, of imperfection, of unreasonableness, of evil, of
misery, of fate, of unworthiness, or of sin. Now, for my present
purposes, this _interest in the salvation of man_ shall be made, in
these lectures, the essential feature of religion in so far as
religion shall here be dealt with. The religious objects, whatever
they otherwise may prove to be, shall be defined as objects such that,
when we know them, and in case we can know them, this knowledge of
them helps to show us the way of salvation. The central and essential
postulate of whatever religion we, in these lectures, are to consider,
is _the postulate that man {9} needs to be saved_. And religious
insight shall for us mean insight into the way of salvation and into
those objects whereof the knowledge conduces to salvation.
This preliminary definition, thus somewhat abruptly stated, will
arouse in the minds of many of you serious doubts and questions. And
only the whole course of our study can serve to furnish such answer to
these doubts and questions as I can hope to supply to you. Yet a
further word or two of purely preliminary explanation may help to
prevent your thoughts, at this point, from being turned in a wrong
direction. I have defined religious insight as insight into the way of
salvation. But what, you may ask, do I mean by the salvation of man or
by man's need of salvation? To this question I still owe you a brief
preliminary answer.
II
The word salvation naturally first suggests to your own mind certain
familiar traditions which have played a great part in the history of
Christianity. I do not mean to make light of those traditions nor yet
of the significance of the historical Christianity to which they
belong. Yet, as I have already told you, these lectures will have no
dogmatic religious system to expound, and, for that very reason, will
not attempt the grave task of any extended discussion of Christianity.
I propose at {10} some future time, not in these lectures, but upon a
wholly different occasion, to attempt an application of some of the
principles that underlie the present lectures to the special problems
which Christianity offers to the student of religion. But these
lectures are not to be directly concerned with this special task of
expounding or interpreting or estimating Christian doctrines. I
repeat: My limited undertaking is to consider in company with you the
sources of religious insight, not the contents of any one religion.
You will understand, therefore, that when I define religious insight
as insight into the way of salvation, I use the word salvation in a
sense that I wish you to conceive in terms much more general than
those which certain Christian traditions have made familiar to you.
I have already said that both Buddhism and Christianity are interested
in the problem of the salvation of mankind, and share in common the
postulate that man needs saving. I could have named still other of the
world's higher religions which are characterised by the same great
interest. Had I the time and the technical knowledge, I could show you
how far backward in time, how deep down into the very essence of some
of the religions that seem to us extremely primitive, this concern for
man's salvation, and for a knowledge of the way of salvation, extends.
But the history of religion does not fall within my present scope. And
to the varieties of religious doctrine I can only allude by {11} way
of illustration. Yet the mere mention of such varieties may serve, I
hope, to show you that whole nations and races, and that countless
millions of men, have conceived of their need for salvation, and have
sought the way thereto, while they have known nothing of Christian
doctrine, and while they have not in the least been influenced by
those dogmas regarding the fall of man, the process of redemption, or
the future destiny of the soul of man which are brought to your minds
when you hear the word salvation.
Be willing, then, to generalise our term and to dissociate the idea of
salvation from some of the settings in which you usually have
conceived it. Since there is thus far in our discussion no question as
to whose view of the way of salvation is the true view, you can only
gain by such a dissociation, even if it be but a temporary effort at
generalisation. The cry of humanity for salvation is not a matter of
any one time or faith. The pathos of that cry will become only the
deeper when you learn to see why it is so universal a cry. The truth,
if there be any accessible truth, regarding the genuine way of
salvation will become only the more precious to you when you know by
how widely sundered paths the wanderers in the darkness of this world
have sought for the saving light.
So let me next attempt to define salvation in a sufficiently general
sense. Man is an infinitely needy creature. He wants endlessly
numerous {12} special things--food, sleep, pleasure, fellowship, power
in all its Protean shapes, peace in all its elusive forms, love in its
countless disguises--in brief, all the objects of desire. But amongst
these infinitely manifold needs, the need for salvation stands out, in
the minds of those who feel it, as a need that is peculiarly
paramount, so that, according to their view of life, to desire
salvation is to long for some pearl of great price, for the sake of
which one would be ready to sell all that one has. The idea that man
needs salvation depends, in fact, upon two simpler ideas whereof the
main idea is constituted. _The first is the idea that there is some
end or aim of human life which is more important than all other aims,
so that, by comparison with this aim all else is secondary and
subsidiary, and perhaps relatively unimportant, or even vain and
empty. The other idea is this: That man as he now is, or as he
naturally is, is in great danger of so missing this highest aim as to
render his whole life a senseless failure by virtue of thus coming
short of his true goal_. Whoever has been led to conceive human life
in these terms, namely, to think that there is for man some sort of
highest good, by contrast with which all other goods are relatively
trivial, and that man, as he is, is in great danger of losing this
highest good, so that his greatest need is of escape from this
danger--whoever, I say, thus views our life, holds that man needs
salvation.
Now, I beg you to observe that such a view of {13} life as this is in
no wise dependent upon any one dogma as to a future state of reward
and punishment, as to heaven and hell, as to the fall of man, or as to
any point of the traditional doctrine of this or of that special
religion. Philosophers and prophets, and even cynics, learned and
unlearned men, saints and sinners, sages and fanatics, Christians and
non-Christians, believers in immortality and believers that death ends
all, may agree, yes, have agreed, in viewing human life in the general
spirit just characterised. A very few examples may serve to show how
wide-spread this longing for salvation has been and how manifold have
also been its guises.
I have already mentioned Buddhism as a religion that seeks the
salvation of man. The central idea of the original southern Buddhism,
as you know, is pessimistic. Man, so the Buddha and his earlier
followers taught, is naturally doomed to misery. This doom is so
pervasive and so fatal that you in vain would seek to escape from it
through any luxuries, or, so to speak, excesses, of good fortune. On
the throne or in the dungeon, wealthy or a beggar, man is always (so
the Buddhist insists) the prisoner of desire, a creature of longing,
consumed by the fires of passion--and therefore miserable. For man's
will is insatiable, and hence always disappointed. Now we are here not
in the least concerned with estimating this pessimism. This gloomy
ancient Indian view of existence may be as false as {14} you please.
Enough--millions of men have held it, and therefore have longed for
salvation. For if, as the early Buddhists held, the evil of human life
is thus pervasive and paramount, then the aim of escaping from such
fatal ill must be deeper and more important than any economic aim or
than any intent to satisfy this or that special desire. If man is
naturally doomed to misery, the escape from this natural doom must be
at once the hardest and the highest of human tasks. The older Buddhism
undertakes to accomplish this task by teaching the way to "the
extinction of desire" and by thus striking at "the root of all
misery." In Nirvana, those who have attained the goal have won their
way beyond all desire. They return not. They are free from the burden
of human existence. Such is one view of the need and the way of
salvation.
If we turn in a wholly different direction, we find Plato, in the
great myth of the "Phaedrus," in the arguments and myths of the
"Republic," and in various other famous passages, defining what he
regards as the true goal of the human soul, portraying how far we have
naturally come short of that goal, and pointing out a way of
salvation. And, in another age, Marcus Aurelius writes his "Thoughts"
in the interest of defining the end for which it is worth while to
live, the bondage and failure in which the foolish man actually lives,
and the way out of our foolishness.
But are the partisans of ways of salvation {15} confined to such
serious and unworldly souls as were the early Buddhists and the
ancient moralists? No; turn to modern times. Read the stanzas into
which Fitzgerald, in a highly modern spirit, very freely translated
the expressions of an old Persian poet--Omar Khayyam; or, again, read
the great programme of Nietzsche's ethical and religious revolt as set
forth only a few years since in his "Zarathustra"; or recall Goethe's
"Faust"; remember even Byron's "Manfred"; and these few instances from
amongst a vast wealth of more or less recent literary examples will
show you that the idea of salvation and the search for salvation are
matters that belong to no one type of piety or of poetry or of
philosophy. Cynics and rebels, ancient sages and men who are in our
foremost rank of time, can agree, and have agreed, in maintaining that
there is some goal of life, conceivable, or at least capable of being,
however dimly, appreciated--some goal that, if accessible, would
fulfil and surpass our lesser desires, or would save us from our
bondage to lesser ills, while this goal is something that we naturally
miss, or that we are in great danger of missing--so that, whatever
else we need, we need to be saved from this pervasive and
overmastering danger of failure.
"Oh love, could thou and I with fate conspire
To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire,
Would we not shatter it to bits and then,
Remould it nearer to the heart's desire?"
{16} Thus Fitzgerald's Omar expresses, in rebellious speech, the need
of salvation. "What is your greatest hour?"--so begins Nietzsche's
Zarathustra in his opening address to the people. And he replies: "It
is the hour of your great contempt"--the hour, so he goes on to
explain, when you despise all the conventional values and trivial
maxims of a morality and a religion that have become for you merely
traditional, conventional, respectable, but infinitely petty. Now, if
you observe that St. Paul's epistle to the Romans, despite its utterly
different religious ideas, begins with an analogous condemnation of
the social world as it was, or as it always naturally is, you may
learn to appreciate the universal forms in which the need for
salvation comes to men's consciousness, however various their creed.
Swinburne's well-known chorus sums up man's life as it is, thus:
"He weaves and is clothed with derision,
Sows, and he shall not reap;
His life is a watch or a vision
Between a sleep and a sleep."
Such, then, is man's need. "Here we have no continuing city, we seek a
city out of sight"--such is another expression of this same need. What
I ask you to do, just here, is to catch a glimpse of this universal
form of the need for salvation. As you see, there is always a certain
element of gloom and tragedy involved in the first conception of this
need. {17} All depends, for the further fortunes of one's religious
consciousness, upon whether or not one can get insight into the true
nature of this need and into the way toward the needed salvation.
III
Religious Insight means then, for my present purposes, _insight into
the need and into the way of salvation_. If the problem of human
salvation has never come home to your mind, as a genuine problem of
life and of experience, you will feel no interest in religion in the
sense to which the present lectures will arbitrarily confine the term.
If, on the other hand, your live personal experience has made you
intimate with any form or phase of this problem of the pathetic need
and cry of man for salvation, then I care not, at least at the outset
of these discourses, whether you have thought of this problem in
theological or in secular, in reverent or in rebellious, or in cynical
terms, whether you have tried to solve it by scientific or by
sentimental or by traditional means, or whether the problem now takes
shape in your mind as a problem to be dealt with in a spirit of revolt
or of conformity, of sceptical criticism or of intuitive faith, of
hope or of despair. What we want is insight, if insight be possible,
into the way of salvation. The problem with which these lectures are
to deal is: What are the sources of such insight?
{18}
At the outset of our effort to deal with this problem, I shall try to
show how the experience of the individual human being is related to
the issues that are before us. That is, in this and in part of our
next lecture, I shall discuss the sense in which the individual
experience of any one of us is a source of insight into the need and
the way of salvation. Hereby we shall erelong be led to our social
experience as a source of still richer religious insight. And from
these beginnings we shall go on to a study of sources which are at
once developments from these first mentioned sources, and sources that
are much more significant than these first ones would be if they could
be isolated from such developments. I ask you to follow my discourse
in the same spirit of tolerance for various opinions and with the same
effort to understand the great common features and origins of the
religious consciousness--with the same spirit and effort, I say, by
which I have tried to be guided in what I have already said to you in
this introduction. It is always easy to see that, in religion, one man
thinks thus and another man thinks otherwise, and that no man knows as
much as we all wish to know. But I want to lay stress upon those
perennial sources from which human insight has flowed and for ages in
the future will continue to flow. To understand what these sources are
will help us, I believe, toward unity of spirit, toward co-operation
in the midst of all our varieties of faith, and toward insight itself
and the fruits of insight.
{19}
IV
I can best undertake my brief initial study of the way in which the
experience of the individual human being is a source of religious
insight by meeting an objection that a reading of my printed programme
may have aroused in the minds of some of you. My list of the sources
of religious insight, as contained in the titles of these lectures,
makes no express reference to a source which some of you will be
disposed to regard as the principal source, namely, Revelation. Here,
some of you will already have said, is a very grave omission. Man's
principal insight into the need and the way of salvation comes, and
must come, you will say, from without, from the revelation that the
divine power which saves, makes of itself, through Scripture or
through the Church. Now, so far as this thesis forms part of the
doctrine of a particular religion, namely, in your own case, of
Christianity, I shall in these lectures omit any direct discussion of
that thesis. The reason for the omission I have already pointed out.
These lectures undertake a limited task, and must be judged by their
chosen limitations. But in so far as revelation is a general term,
meaning whatever intercourse there may be between the divine and the
human, all these lectures, in dealing with sources of religious
insight, will be dealing with processes of revelation. And in what
sense this {20} assertion is true we shall see as we go on with our
undertaking. This first mention of revelation enables me, however,
both to state and to answer the objection to my programme which I have
just mentioned, and in doing so to vindicate for the experience of any
religiously disposed individual its true significance as a source of
insight. Hereby, as I hope, I can forthwith show that even the present
deliberately limited undertaking of these lectures has an importance
which you ought to recognise, whatever your own views about revelation
may be.
Let me suppose, then, that an objector, speaking on behalf of
revelation as the main source of religious insight, states his case
briefly thus: "Man learns of his need for salvation chiefly through
learning what God's will is, and through a consequent discovery that
his own natural will is not in conformity with God's will. He learns
about the way of salvation by finding out by what process God is
willing to save him. Both sorts of knowledge must be principally
mediated through God's revelation of himself, of his will, and of his
plan of salvation. For, left to himself, man cannot find out these
things. Apart from revelation, they are divine secrets. Hence the
principal source of religious insight must be revelation."
Whoever states his case thus brings to our attention at this point
what I may venture to name: The Religious Paradox, or, to use other
terms. The Paradox of Revelation. I call attention to this {21}
paradox in no spirit of mere cavilling or quibbling. The importance of
the matter the whole course of these lectures will show. The religious
paradox, as we shall define it, is one of the deepest facts in all
religious history and experience. It will meet us everywhere; and
every devout soul daily faces it. Moreover, as we shall see, it is a
special case of a paradox regarding our human insight which is as
universal and pervasive, in its significance for us, as is our human
intelligence itself. I call it here the religious paradox. I shall
later show you that it might be called, just as correctly, the paradox
of common-sense, the paradox of reason, the paradox of knowledge, yes,
the paradox of being thoughtfully alive in any sense whatever.
The religious paradox, viewed as it first comes to us, may be stated
thus: Let a man say: "I have this or this religious insight because
God has revealed to me, thus and thus, his will about me and his
plans; has taught me my need of salvation and the divine way of
salvation.
"'Man is blind because of sin;
Revelation makes him sure;
Without that who looks within,
Looks in vain; for all's obscure.'"
Let a man say this. At once, addressing this believer in a revelation,
we must ask, in no jesting spirit, but with the fullest sense of the
tragic gravity of the issue: "By what marks do you personally {22}
distinguish a divine revelation from any other sort of report?"
Consider for an instant what this question implies. A depositor at a
bank, in signing a cheque, reveals to his bank his will that such and
such funds, which he already has on deposit at the bank, shall be paid
to the order of a certain person. How is the bank able to recognise
this revelation of the depositor's will? The answer is: The bank,
acting in the usual order of business, regards this revelation as
genuine because its officers already know, with sufficient assurance,
the depositor's signature, and can therefore recognise it at sight,
subject, of course, to a certain usually negligible risk of forgery.
Apply the principle here involved to the case of the one who
acknowledges the genuineness of a divine revelation. In asserting: "I
know that this revelation is from God," the believer in the revelation
asserts, in substance, that in some sense and by some means he
personally knows, as it were, the divine signature; knows by what
marks the divine being reveals himself. This is the vast presumption,
if you will, upon which the believer in revelation depends for his
assurance. He knows God's autograph. Now, how shall such a knowledge
of the divine autograph have arisen in the mind of the individual
believer? Has this believer first wandered through all the worlds to
learn how the various orders of beings express themselves, what marks
of their wisdom and of their interest in humanity {23} they show, and
who amongst them are, or who alone is, actually divine?
I repeat--the stupendous question thus suggested is one which I
mention not in any spirit of cavil, but solely for the sake of
directing us on our further way, and of calling attention at the
outset to a fact upon which all that is most vital in the religious
consciousness has in every age depended. Every acceptance of a
revelation, I say, depends upon something that, in the individual's
mind, must be prior to this acceptance. And this something is an
assurance that the believer already knows the essential marks by which
a divine revelation is to be distinguished from any other sort of
report. In other words, a revelation can be viewed by you as a divine
revelation only in case you hold, for whatever reason, or for no
reason, that you already are acquainted with the signature which the
divine will attaches to its documents, that you know the marks of any
authentic revelation by which a divine will can make itself known to
you. Unless, then, you are to make one supposed revelation depend for
its warrant upon another in an endless series, you must presuppose
that somewhere there is found a revelation that proves its genuineness
by appealing to what your own interior light, your personal
acquaintance with the nature of a divine being, enables you to know as
the basis of all your further insight into the divine. The one who
appeals to revelation for guidance cannot then escape from basing his
appeal {24} upon something which involves a personal and individual
experience of what the need and the way of salvation is and of what
the divine nature and expression essentially involves.
Nor is this remark merely the unsympathetic comment of a philosophical
critic of what passes for revelation. The truth of the remark is
acknowledged by all those who have in one way or another insisted
that, without the witness of the spirit in the heart, no external
revelation could enlighten those who are in darkness; that miracles by
themselves are inadequate, because signs and wonders cannot teach the
divine will to those whom grace, working inwardly, does not prepare
for enlightenment; and that, in brief, if there is any religious
insight whatever accessible, it cannot come to us without our
individual experience as its personal foundation.
Now, the religious paradox is this: What one pretends or at least
hopes to know, when there is any question of religious insight, is
something which has to do with the whole nature and destiny and duty
and fate of man. For just such matters are in question when we talk,
not of how to earn our living or of how to get this or that worldly
prosperity, but about our need of salvation and about how to be saved.
So deep and so weighty are these matters, that to pretend to know
about them seems to involve knowing about the whole nature of things.
And when we conceive of the whole nature {25} of things as somehow
interested in us and in our salvation, as the religiously minded very
generally do, we call this nature of things divine, in a very familiar
sense of that word. Hence the higher religions generally undertake to
know, as they say, the divine. And by the divine they mean some real
power or principle or being that saves us or that may save us. But how
is this divine to be known? By revelation? But knowledge through
revelation can enlighten only the one in whose personal experience
there is somewhere an adequate interior light, which shines in the
darkness, and which permits him to test all revelations by a prior
acquaintance with the nature and marks and, so to speak, signature of
the divine will. Hereupon arises the question: How should I, weak of
wit as I am, ignorant, fallible, a creature of a day, come to possess
that intimate acquaintance with the plan of all things, and with the
meaning of life, and with the divine, which I must obtain in case I am
to pass upon the marks whereby any revelation that can save me is to
be tested? The paradox is that a being who is so ignorant of his duty
and of his destiny as to need guidance at every point, so weak as to
need saving, should still hope, in his fallible experience, to get
into touch with anything divine. The question is, how is this
possible? What light can my individual experience throw upon vast
problems such as this?
{26}
V
I have stated what I call the religious paradox. The whole of what I
have hereafter to tell you is needed in order to throw such light as I
can here attempt to throw upon the solution of the paradox. You will
not expect, then, an immediate answer to the question thus brought
before you. Yet you see our present situation: Unless there is
something in our individual experience which at least begins to bring
us into a genuine touch, both with the fact that we need salvation and
with the marks whereby we may recognise the way of salvation, and the
essentially divine process, if such there be, which alone can
save--unless, I say, there is within each of us something of this
interior light by which saving divine truth is to be discerned,
religious insight is impossible, and then no merely external
revelation can help us. Let us then, without further delay, turn
directly to the inner light, if such light there be, and ask what,
apart from tradition, apart from external revelation, apart from
explicit theories or reports concerning the universe, apart from all
other sources, our own individual experience can tell us as to the
need and the way of salvation, and as to the marks by which we may
recognise whatever real influences, or divine beings, can intervene to
help us in our need. We shall not upon this occasion answer the
question; but we may do something to clarify the issue.
{27}
My dear friend, the late William James, in his book called "The
Varieties of Religious Experience," defined, for his own purposes,
religious experience as the experience of individuals who regard
themselves as "alone with the divine." In portraying what he meant by
"the divine," James emphasised, although in language different from
what I am using, the very features about the objects of religious
experience which I have just been trying to characterise in my own
way. Those who have religious experience, according to James, get into
touch with something which, as he says, gives "a new dimension" to
their life. As a result of their better and more exalted religious
experience, they win a sense of unity with "higher powers," whose
presence seems to them to secure a needed but otherwise unattainable
spiritual unity, peace, power in their lives. This "divine" thus
accomplishes inwardly what the individual "alone with the divine"
feels to be saving, to be needed, to be his pearl of great price. This
is James's way of defining the objects of religious experience.
Now James's whole view of religious experience differs in many ways
from mine. But just at the present point in our inquiry, where it is a
question of what I should call the most elementary and intimate, but
also the crudest and most capricious source of religious insight,
namely, the experience of the individual "alone with the divine," I
feel my own account to be most dependent upon that of {28} James and
my own position to be most nearly in agreement with his.
Let me refer you, then, at this stage, to James's great collection and
analysis of the facts of individual religious experience. Let me
presuppose some personal acquaintance, on your part, with individual
experiences of the various types that James so wonderfully portrays.
And then, in my own way, and as independently of James's special
theories as possible, let me tell you what, to my mind, is the
essential substance of these elementary religious experiences which
may come to the individual when he is alone with the problem of his
own salvation and alone with his efforts to know the divine that can
save. Let me try to show you that the individual, thus isolated, is
indeed in touch with a genuine source of insight. Let me try to
indicate both the value and the limitations of that source in such
wise as to prepare us to view this first source in its needed relation
to the sources hereafter to be studied.
The religious experience of the individual may concern three objects:
First, his Ideal, that is, the standard in terms of which he estimates
the sense and the value of his own personal life; secondly, his Need
of salvation, that is, the degree to which he falls short of attaining
his ideal and is sundered from it by evil fortune, or by his own
paralysis of will, or by his inward baseness; thirdly, the presence or
the coming or the longing for, or the {29} communion with something
which he comes to view as the power that may save him from his need,
or as the light that may dispel his darkness, or as the truth that
shows him the way out, or as the great companion who helps him--in a
word, as his Deliverer. The Ideal, the Need, the Deliverer--these are
the three objects which the individual experience, as a source of
religious insight, has always undertaken to reveal. James's collection
of the facts of religious experience richly illustrates what I here
have in mind. To that collection, and to your own individual
experience, I appeal as my warrant for thus characterising our first
source of insight. Can we say that this source gives us genuine
insight and is trustworthy? Does it teach us about anything that is
real; and if this be so, how far does this source of insight go? What
is the extent, what are the limitations of the truth that one can hope
in this way to gain?
As to the first two objects of the individual religious experience,
namely, the individual's own personal ideal and his sense of his need,
you will readily agree that one's private experience is, indeed, a
source of genuine insight. You will, however, find it hard at first to
define just how far that insight extends. For the world of a man's
private ideals and estimates is a world of precious caprices, because
not only does one man's private feelings or intuitions about ideals
and values differ from another man's, but every man's own ideals, and
his sense of {30} need, tend to alter endlessly with the play of his
passions, with the waxing and waning of all his natural powers, with
his health, with his age. One form of the religious paradox may, in
fact, be stated thus: Without intense and intimate personal feeling,
you never learn any valuable truths whatever about life, about its
ideals, or about its problems; but, on the other hand, what you know
only through your feelings is, like the foam of the sea, unstable--
like the passing hour, doomed to pass away.
James, as a psychologist, well knew this truth about the value and the
limitations of private experience; yet it was characteristic of his
enterprising soul that he was always looking, in his "pluralistic
universe," for the strange, new religious experiences of other and
still other individuals, without being able thereby even to define
what all these ardent souls were seeking, namely, some genuine home
land of the spirit, some place or experience or insight in which is to
be revealed that for the sake of which all the feelings, the caprices,
the longings, the efforts of individuals are justified--and fulfilled.
Now the best way of defining what it is which our inner experience of
our ideal and of our need shows us is, I think, this: We are indeed,
and so far just as the Buddhists said, naturally the creatures of
transient feelings, of passing caprices, of various and wilful
longings. But, just because of this fact, we can get an insight, as
intimate as it is fragmentary, into one absolutely valuable ideal. I
do not {31} think that the Buddhists best expressed our ideal by the
words "the extinction of desire." It is rather the ideal of triumph
over our unreason. It is the ideal that the reign of caprice ought to
be ended, that the wounds of the spirit ought to be healed. In the
midst of all our caprices, yes, because of our caprices, we learn the
value of one great spiritual ideal, the ideal of spiritual unity and
self-possession. And both our ideal and our need come to consciousness
at once. We need to bring our caprices into some sort of harmony; to
bind up the wounds of what James calls the divided "self"; to change
the wanderings of chance passion into something that shall bring the
home land of the spirit, the united goal of life into sight. And so
much all the great cynics, and the nobler rebels, and the prophets and
the saints and the martyrs and the sages have in common taught us. So
much Socrates and Plato and Marcus Aurelius, and our modern teachers
of the wisdom of life, and, in his noblest words, the Buddha also, and
Jesus, have agreed in proclaiming as the ideal and the need revealed
to us by all that is deepest about our individual experience: We need
to give life sense, to know and to control our own selves, to end the
natural chaos, to bring order and light into our deeds, to make the
warfare of natural passion subordinate to the peace and the power of
the spirit. This is our need. To live thus is our ideal. And because
this need is pressing and this ideal is far off from the natural man,
we need salvation.
{32}
So much, I say, our individual experience can bring before us. This
ideal and this need can become the objects of an insight that is as
intimate as it is, by itself, unsatisfying. This need, I think, all
the devout share, however unlearned their speech, however simple their
minds, however various their creeds. Unity of Spirit, conformity to an
universal Will, peace with power--this is our need.
It remains for the individual experience to show to us, if it can, the
presence of our Deliverer, the coming of that which we shall recognise
as divine, just because it truly and authoritatively reveals to the
Self the fulfilment that we need, by bringing us into touch with the
real nature of things. We need to find the presence that can give this
unity and self-possession to the soul. This presence is what all the
higher religions seek to reveal. But if we are to learn of such an
object of insight we must, indeed, come into touch with a Power or a
Spirit that is in some true sense not-Ourselves. And so we must be
able somehow to transcend the boundaries of any _merely_ individual
experience. Our individual experience must become some sort of
intercourse with Another. And this Other must be in some sense the
Master of Life, the Might that overcometh the world, the revealer of
final truth. Without ceasing to be personal and intimate, our
experience must in some way come into direct touch with the very
nature of reality.
Is such a direct touch with the divine possible? The mystics of all
ages have maintained that it is {33} possible. Are they right? To
answer this question adequately would be to solve the religious
paradox. It would be to show whether and how the individual, even in
his isolation, "alone with the divine," can come to be nevertheless in
unity with all other spirits, in touch with all that lies beneath and
above himself, and with all that constitutes the essence of reality.
Perhaps this is indeed possible. Unless it is possible, revelation, as
we have seen, loses precisely its most intimate significance, as an
appeal of the divine spirit directly to the interior light. But, on
the other hand, all the mystics confess that, _if_ this is possible,
and if it happens in their own cases, they alone, viewing their
experience merely as an individual experience, know not _how_ it
happens, but must accept their revelation as an insight without
knowing in what precise sense it is insight.
It follows that individual experience remains a source of religious
insight as indispensable and as fundamental as it is, by itself,
inadequate and in need of supplement. Unless you have inwardly felt
the need of salvation, and have learned to hunger and thirst after
spiritual unity and self-possession, all the rest of religious insight
is to you a sealed book. And unless, in moments of peace, of
illumination, of hope, of devotion, of inward vision, you have seemed
to feel the presence of your Deliverer, unless it has sometimes
_seemed_ to you as if the way to the home land of the spirit were
opened to your sight by a revelation as from the divine, unless this
{34} privilege has been yours, the way to a higher growth in insight
will be slow and uncertain to you. But, on the other hand, no one who
remains content with his merely individual experience of the presence
of the divine and of his deliverer, has won the whole of any true
insight. For, as a fact, we are all members one of another; and I can
have no insight into the way of my salvation unless I thereby learn of
the way of salvation for all my brethren. And there is no unity of the
spirit unless all men are privileged to enter it whenever they see it
and know it and love it.
Individual Experience, therefore, must abide with us to the very end
of our quest, as one principal and fundamental source of insight. But
it is one aspect only of Religious Experience. We shall learn to
understand and to estimate it properly only when we have found its
deeper relations with our Social Experience. In passing to our social
experience, however, we shall not leave our individual experience
behind. On the contrary, through thus passing to our social experience
as a source of religious insight, we shall for the first time begin to
see what our individual experience means.
{35}
II
INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE AND SOCIAL EXPERIENCE
{36}
{37}
II
INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE AND SOCIAL EXPERIENCE
The results of our first lecture appear to have brought the religious
problems, so far as we shall attempt to consider them, into a position
which in one respect simplifies, in another respect greatly
complicates our undertaking.
I
In one way, I say, our undertaking is simplified. For, as we have
defined religion, the main concern of any religion that we are to
recognise is with the salvation of man, and with whatever objects or
truths it is important to know if we are to find the way of salvation.
Now the experiences which teach us that we need what I have ventured
to call by the traditional name salvation, are, from my point of view,
experiences common to a very large portion of mankind. They are great
and, in certain respects at least, simple experiences. You can have
them and estimate them without being committed to any one form of
religious faith, without accepting any special creed about
supernatural {38} things, and even without hoping to find out any way
of salvation whatever. The essential conditions for discovering that
man needs salvation are these: You must find that human life has some
highest end; and you must also find that man, as he naturally is, is
in great danger of failing to attain this supreme goal. If you
discover these two facts (and I personally hold them to be facts whose
reality you can experience), then the quest for the salvation of man
interests you, and is defined for you in genuinely empirical terms.
Given the problem, you may or you may not see how to solve it. You may
or you may not appeal to what you suppose to be a revelation to guide
you on the way. But in any case, granted these conditions, granted
that your experience has shown you your need of salvation--then the
problem of religion is upon your hands. Soluble or insoluble, the
topic of a revelation from above, or of a scientific inquiry, or of a
philosophy, or of a haphazard series of efforts to better your
condition, this problem, if it once comes to hold your attention, will
make of you a religious inquirer. And so long as this is the case, no
degree of cynicism or of despair regarding the finding of the way to
salvation, will deprive you of genuinely religious interest. The issue
will be one regarding facts of live experience. The concerns that for
you will seem to be at stake will be perfectly human, and will be in
close touch with every interest of daily life.
{39}
To conceive the business of religion in this way simplifies our
undertaking, in so far as it connects religion not merely with
doubtful dogmas and recondite speculations, but rather with personal
and practical interests and with the spirit of all serious endeavour.
Upon the other hand, this way of defining religion does, indeed, also
complicate certain aspects of our present task. For if, from our point
of view, religion thus becomes, in one way or another, the concern of
everybody who has once seen that life has a highest goal, and that we
are all naturally in great danger of missing this goal--still any
effort to study the nature of religious insight seems to require us to
be somehow just to all the endless varieties of human opinion
regarding what the highest goal of human life is, and regarding the
way to attain that goal after we have once defined it. In some sense,
in our further inquiry, nothing human can be alien to us, in case it
involves any deep experience of man's purpose in living, or of man's
peril as a seeker after the attainment of his purpose; or any
assurance regarding the presence or the power which, entering into
some sort of union with any man's own spiritual life, seems to that
man an apt Deliverer from his evil plight, a genuinely saving
principle in his life.
How great the resulting complications that threaten our investigation
seem to be the conclusion of our former lecture showed us. Countless
{40} souls, trusting to their individual experience, have learned, as
we at the last time indicated, to define their ideal, and their need,
and, upon occasion, to discover the power that they took to be their
saving principle--their deliverer. Who amongst all these were right,
either in their judgment as to their need or in their consciousness
that they had found the way that leads to peace, to triumph, to union
with the goal of human life? Were all of them more or less right? Were
any of them wholly deluded? Are there as many supreme aims of life as
there are individuals? Are there as many ways of salvation as there
are religions that men follow? And by what means shall we decide such
questions? Grave and infinitely complicated seem the issues which
these queries arouse.
Upon one side, then, our problem is pathetically simple, human,
practical, even commonplace. Daily experience, in serious-minded
people, illustrates it. The plainest facts of our life exemplify it.
It concerns nothing more recondite than that tragedy of natural human
failure which you may constantly witness all about you, if not within
you. Upon the other side, no questions more bring you into contact
with the chaotic variety of human opinion, and with the complexities
of the whole universe, than do the religious questions, when thus
defined in terms of men's deepest needs and of men's hopes and faiths
regarding the possible escape from their most pressing peril of
failure.
{41}
Our first lecture gave us a glimpse of this simplicity of the main
definition of our problem and of this complication with regard to the
conflicting proposals that are made toward its special formulation and
toward its solution. We have now to study further the sources of
insight upon which every solution of our problem must depend.
II
Our present lecture will be devoted to three tasks. First, we shall
try to show that the religious consciousness of mankind, when it is
concerned with the need and with the way of salvation, must needs
appear in many various and apparently conflicting forms, but that,
nevertheless, these conflicts need not discourage us. For, as we shall
attempt still further to explain, the underlying motives of the higher
religions are, after all, much more in agreement than the diversities
of creeds and the apparent chaos of religious experiences would lead
us to imagine. In order to make this deeper unity of the higher
religious life of mankind plain, we shall try to show, more fully than
we did in the last lecture, how the consciousness of the ideal of
life, and of the need of salvation, naturally arises in the experience
of the individual man. The religious paradox, as, in our former
lecture, we defined that paradox, depends upon the fact that the
principal religious motives are indeed perfectly natural and {42}
human motives, which need no mysterious movings from another world to
explain their presence in our lives; while, on the other hand, these
very motives, when once they appear, force us to seek for relief from
spiritual sources that cannot satisfy unless they are far above our
natural human level of life--that is, unless they are in some
definable sense superhuman. But about superhuman matters it is not
surprising that ignorant mortals should widely differ, despite the
deeper unity that underlies all our nobler religious needs.
Thus the unity of the religious concerns of mankind is perfectly
compatible with the fact that men differ so widely in faith. The
mysteries of religion belong to our natural failure to conceive
readily and to grasp adequately the religious objects. But our
religious need is not a mystery; and our religious interests are as
natural as is our ignorance. The higher forms of the religious
consciousness are due to perfectly human motives but lead to a
stubborn quest for the superhuman. To understand whence the higher
religions get their moving principle, you have only to survey our
natural life as it is, in all its pathetic and needy fallibility. But
if the higher religions are to find what they seek, they call for
sources of insight which you cannot define, unless we are able to know
a reality that transcends human nature as it is--unless we can come
into genuine intercourse with a spiritual realm that is above man.
This naturalness of the religious {43} motives, this supernatural and
naturally baffling character of the religious objects, I am, then,
first to illustrate still further than I at the last time was able to
do.
I shall thus be led, in the second place, to the mention of that
source of religious insight to which, at the close of the former
lecture, I directed your attention, namely, to our social experience.
Society, in a certain sense, both includes and transcends the
individual man. Perhaps, then, something can be done toward solving
the problem of the religious paradox, and toward harmonising the
varieties of religious opinion, by considering the religious meaning
of our social consciousness. The religious paradox is that the needy
and ignorant natural man must somehow obtain the spiritual power to
get into a genuine touch with a real life that is above his own level.
If he is to be saved, something that is divine must come to be born in
the humble manger of his poor natural lie. How is this apparition of
the divine in the human, of the supernatural in the natural,
conceivable? It is that question which most of all divides men into
various religious sects. Perhaps a study of our social experience,
which, indeed, often tends to mould our naturally narrow selfishness
into nobler spiritual forms, may throw light upon this problem. And so
I shall, in this second part of the present discourse, state the case
for our social experience as a source of religious insight.
{44}
We shall, however, no sooner state this case than we shall begin to
see how inadequate our ordinary social experience is to give us full
religious insight. Therefore, in the third place, I shall try to
estimate more critically both the merits and the imperfections of this
second source of religious light, and thus I shall be led, as I close,
to the mention of a third source, from which, as I hold, we can learn
what neither our unaided private experience nor our ordinary social
experience ever adequately shows.
III
Let me proceed at once to the first of these three undertakings. I am
further to illustrate, on the one hand, the unity and the naturalness
of the religious motives; on the other hand, I am to emphasise the
mysterious seeming of the religious objects. And I am thus to show the
reason why the faiths of men are so diverse but their religious needs
so nearly common.
At the last time I tried to define for you, in my own terms, what the
supreme purpose of human life is, or, in other words, what that
highest good is which we are all in such peril of missing that we need
salvation from this peril. My definition was this: We are naturally
creatures of wavering and conflicting motives, passions, desires. The
supreme aim of life is to triumph over this natural chaos, to set some
one plan of life above all the others, to give {45} unity to our
desires, to organise our activities, to win, not, indeed, the
passionless peace of Nirvana, but the strength of spirit which is
above the narrowness of each one of our separate passions. We need to
conceive of such a triumphant and unified life, and successfully to
live it. That is our goal: Self-possession, unity, peace, and
spiritual power through and yet beyond all the turmoil of life--the
victory that overcometh in the world.
Now this definition of the ideal life will have seemed to some of you
too much a merely philosophical formula. You will say that this is not
what plain men have in mind when they ask God's help, or lament their
sins, or look to religion for consolation.
I grant you that, since I am here concerned with philosophy and not
with preaching, I, of course, prefer, for my present purpose, a
formulation of the ideal of life in reflective, in thoughtful terms.
But I cannot admit that plain men, in their religious moods, are not
concerned with the ideal of life which I thus reflectively formulate.
I am trying to formulate the ideal of life that seems to me to
underlie all the higher religions. It is one thing, however, to feel
an interest and another thing to become conscious of the meaning of
the interest. No matter how inarticulate may be a man's sense of his
need, that sense, if deep and genuine, may imply a view of life which
a whole system of ethics and of metaphysics may be needed to expound.
{46} Philosophy ought to be considerate, and to use more or less
technical speech, but it need not be on that account inhuman. Its
concern is with what common-sense means but does not express in
clearly conscious terms. It does not want to substitute its formulas
for life. It does desire to add its thoughtfulness to the intensity of
life's great concerns and to enlighten us regarding what aims life has
always really intended to pursue.
My own effort to formulate the supreme end of life does not seem to me
to be foreign to common-sense. I think that this way of stating the
purpose of life may help us to see through many of the apparently
hopeless diversities of human opinion regarding what the highest good
is.
It is customary to describe that longing for salvation which is, from
the point of view of these lectures, the foundation of religion, by
saying that the man who begins to get religious interest discovers
that when left to himself he is out of harmony with what James calls
"the higher powers," that is, with what a Christian calls God. In
other words, as a customary formula states the case, the religiously
disposed man begins by learning that the chief end of his existence is
to come into harmony with God's will. And this discovery, as such a
view supposes, teaches him, for the first time, what his ideal of life
ought to be. And therefore, as many say, something that is of the
nature of a mysterious revelation from without is needed to {47}
initiate the religious process and to show us our goal. On the other
hand, writers like James, who insist upon interpreting religion, so
far as that is possible, in terms of personal experience rather than
in terms of external revelation, have nevertheless been led to agree
with many of the partisans of revelation in regarding this sense of
our disharmony with the "higher powers" as something that must have an
essentially superhuman source. For James, our sense of religious need
is an experience which mysteriously wells up from the subliminal self,
from the soundless depths of our own subconsciousness. James,
therefore, conceives it probable that, through the subliminal or
subconscious self, we are actually aroused to religious interest by
spiritual beings whose level is higher than our own, and whose will,
expressed to us through the vague but often intense sense of need
which the religiously minded feel, does set for us an ideal task which
is of greater worth than our natural desires, and which, when we can
get into harmony with these powers through the aid of their subliminal
influences, does give a new sense to life.
Now in contrast with such views regarding the origin of that deeper
sense of need which is indeed the beginning of religion, I have to
insist that the basis of the religious interest is something much less
mysterious than James's supposed workings of the "higher powers"
through our subliminal selves, and is also something much more
universally human {48} than is the opportunity to come under the
influence of any one revelation. Men who never heard of Christianity,
and men who have never felt conscious of any external revelation from
above, as well as men who have had no such sudden uprushes from their
own subconscious natures as James's "religious geniuses" have
reported, are able to win a genuine religious interest, to be aware of
an intense need for salvation, and to set before themselves, in
however inarticulate a fashion, the very ideal of life which I have
been trying in my own way to formulate. The need and the ideal can
come into sight in a manner that indeed does not in the least either
exclude or require a belief in one or in another reported revelation,
but that links both the need and the ideal to our ordinary personal
experience by ties which are not at all mysterious. Let me show you,
then, better than my time permitted in the former lecture, how an
individual may naturally experience what I have called his need of
salvation.
Nothing is more obvious about the natural course of our lives than is
the _narrowness_ of view to which we are usually subject. We are not
only the victims of conflicting motives, but we are often too narrow
to know that this is true. For we see our various life interests, so
to speak, one at a time. We forget one while we are living out
another. And so we are prone to live many lives, seldom noting how ill
harmonised they are. Home life, for instance, may {49} be one thing;
business life in principle another; sport or social ambition another.
And these various lives may be lived upon mutually inconsistent
plans. We forget one part of ourselves in our temporary absorption in
some other part. And if, as our naturally complex and often
conflicting motives determine, these our various lives are out of
harmony with one another, we constantly do irrevocable deeds that
emphasise and perpetuate the results of this disharmony. And as we
grow older our motives alter; yet because of our natural narrowness of
interest, we often do not recognise the change. Our youth consequently
lays a poor foundation for our age; or perhaps our mature life makes
naught of the aspirations of our youth. We thus come to spend a great
part of our days thwarting ourselves through the results of our
fickleness, yet without knowing who it is that thwarts us. We love,
and, like Siegfried, forget our former beloved, and perhaps live to
feel the fatal spear-thrust that avenges our treason to our own past.
The deeper tragedies of life largely result from this our narrowness
of view.
But over against this narrowness of our ordinary activities there,
indeed, stand certain moments when we get a wider vision of ourselves,
when we review life, or foresee it with a broad outlook. These are,
indeed, moments of insight. We all know how tragic they often are,
because they show us at a glance how with the left hand we have undone
the {50} right hand's work, how we have loved and forgotten, how we
have sworn fealty to many masters, and have cheated one while we
served another, how absorption in business has made us unworthy of
home, or how we have wantonly sacrificed a friend in order to win a
game, or gained our bit of the world through what, upon review, we
have to call the loss of our souls. Such moments of insight come to us
sometimes when our friends die, and when memory reminds us of our
neglected debts of love or of gratitude to them, or when worldly
defeat reawakens the long-forgotten unworldly aspirations that we
abandoned in order to do what has ended in earning the defeat. These
are, I repeat, often tragic moments. But they enlighten. And they show
us our need. And they arise as naturally as does any other incident of
a reasonable life.
What need do they show? I answer, the need to possess what by mere
nature we never come to possess, namely, the power to "see life
steadily and see it whole," and then to live triumphantly in the light
of this vision. Can a plain man who is no philosopher feel this need?
I answer, Yes, whenever he has his moments of vision; whenever he
feels the longing for the clean, straight, unswerving will, for the
hearty whole life; whenever he sees and regrets his fickleness, just
because it means self-defeat; whenever he seeks to be true to himself.
At such moment his highest aim is the aim that there should be a
highest aim in life, and that {51} this aim should win what it seeks.
He has the longing, however inarticulate, for integrity of spirit and
for success in winning the fruits of integrity.
When the plain man feels what I venture thus to formulate, how will he
express his longing? He will, of course, not use my present formulas.
He will seize upon whatever expressions the creed or the language of
his tribe may suggest to him. He may say, and perhaps truthfully:
"This is the ideal that God sets before me. This is the divine will
regarding my life." For at such times he conceives of God as the being
who has widest vision and who knows him best. Therefore he conceives
of God's plan as the fulfilment of his own rational plan. But the
interior source of the plain man's view regarding the divine will is
simply his better vision of the meaning of his life, the vision that
comes at moments when he is not forgetful of the whole; when he does
not want to swear fidelity to one beloved, and then, like Siegfried,
pursue and win another; when he wants to be true to the whole of
himself. No wonder that he, indeed, conceives this supreme goal of
life as the goal set for him by some will higher than his own private
will. He is right. For, as we shall see, throughout our later study,
we are, indeed, helpless either to hold before us this our personal
vision of the triumphant life and of the unity of the spirit, or to
turn the vision into a practical reality, unless we come into touch
and keep in touch with an order of spiritual existence which is {52}
in a perfectly genuine sense superhuman, and in the same sense
supernatural, and which certainly is not our natural selves.
But in any case the plain man must needs interpret his vision of the
ideal in terms of whatever conception of God, or of the triumphant
life, or of spiritual power, his traditions and his stage of personal
development may suggest to him. Hence the endless varieties in the
formulation of the religious ideal. Whatever is suggested to a man, at
his moments of wider vision, as a law or as a motive which, _if_ it
were the ruling motive or the supreme law would make life a consistent
whole--this he takes to be God's will, or the truth that is to save
him if, indeed, salvation is possible.
If this account of the sources of the religious motive is right, we
need not view the religious interest as the result of an arbitrary
intrusion from above--as if the gods loved to disturb us and to
trouble our peace. Nor need we, with James, speak of a marvellous and
capricious uprush from below the level of our natural consciousness.
Yet just as little need we think of religion as having no concern with
what is, indeed, superhuman. Religion is, indeed, our own affair; for
it grows out of our personal vision of the transformation that a
divinely enlarged power to comprehend, to survey, to harmonise, to
triumph over our natural life would give. This vision comes to us at
moments, in glimpses--and is seen through a glass darkly. Our {53}
need is to see face to face and to live in the light thus to be
discovered. And so to live would be salvation. The word salvation is
fitting, because the need is so great and because the transformation
would be so profound. The endlessly various interpretations of this
one ideal and of the nature of the saving process are due to the
wealth of life and to the imposing multitude of motives and of
experiences that the religious consciousness has to consider. But
beneath and above all the varieties of religious experience lies the
effort to win in reality what the vision of the harmonious and
triumphant life suggests to us in our moments of clearness. Since our
own natures leave us hopelessly remote from this goal, while our
glimpses of spiritual harmony and power reveal to us its preciousness,
our religious need is supreme, and is accompanied with the perfectly
well-warranted assurance that we cannot attain the goal unless we can
get into some sort of communion with a real life infinitely richer
than our own--a life that is guided by a perfect and unwavering
vision, and that somehow conquers and annuls all fickleness, conflict,
and estrangement. Such a life rightly seems to us to be superhuman in
its breadth of view and in its spiritual power, if indeed there be
such a life at all. If there is no such life, none the less we need
it, and so need salvation. If salvation is possible, then there is in
the universe some being that knows us, and that is the master of life.
And we seek ourselves to know {54} even as we are known and to live as
the wise one would have us live.
Thus simple and, for all to whom even the occasional moments of wider
vision come, universal are the religious motives. James was wrong when
he sought them in any capricious interference of the subliminal self,
or of its superhuman controls, with our natural selves. It is we who
in our natural lives are capricious and narrowly interfere with our
own freedom. It is we who are the disturbers of our own peace. The
religious ideal grows out of the vision of a spiritual freedom and
peace which are not naturally ours. No two of us get that vision in
quite the same way. But all its forms show us the same far-off shining
light. The problem of religious insight is the problem whether that
light is a mirage.
No wonder, then, that men differ as to their special efforts to solve
such a problem. But it is now our task to seek for further sources of
insight.
IV
The foregoing discussion may seem to have led us far from the study of
our social experience as a source of religious insight. But in fact it
is a necessary preliminary to that study and leads us very near to it.
If one principal source of our need of salvation is the natural
narrowness of our view of the meaning {55} of our own purposes and
motives, and the consequent fickleness and the forgetful inconsistency
with which we usually live out our days, it seems right, in searching
for a way that may lead toward salvation, to get such help as we can
by looking to our normal social experience for whatever guidance it
can give. The social world is wide, even if it is still full of
conflict. It broadens our outlook at every turn. A man corrects his
own narrowness by trying to share his fellow's point of view. Our
social responsibilities tend to set limits to our fickleness. Social
discipline removes some of our inner conflicts, by teaching us not to
indulge caprices. Human companionship may calm, may steady our vision,
may bring us into intercourse with what is in general much better than
a man's subliminal self, namely, his public, his humane, his greater
social self, wherein he finds his soul and its interests writ large.
Perhaps, then, whatever the ultimate goal, the way out of the
distractions of the natural self, the way toward the divine insight
and power that we need, lies through our social experience.
No wonder, then, that in the religious discussions of to-day our
social experience is that source of insight upon which a great number
of our teachers, whether they are professional religious teachers or
not, most frequently insist. Our present time is an age of great
concern with social problems and reforms. No wonder, then, that we
have all learned to widen our vision, and to control our {56}
waywardness, by remembering that man is a being who can be neither
understood nor directed in case you try to view him in isolation. As
for salvation, many of our most influential leaders now teach us that
the problem of our day is the problem of saving, not the individual as
an individual, but the social order as a whole. The two tendencies
which seem to be most potent in the political realm are the general
tendencies known by the admittedly vague names of democracy and
socialism. Solidarity, collectivism, the common life--these are the
watchwords of some of the most widely influential movements of our
time.
And these watchwords have, for many of us, not only a political, but a
religious meaning. I need not remind you of the popular influence of
such dramas as "The Servant in the House," or of the numbers of
clergymen to whom the preaching of religion has come to mean, in the
main, the preaching of beneficent social reforms. If teachers who thus
view religion as, on the whole, a movement toward the increase of
social welfare are asked what their counsel is to the individual
regarding the salvation of his soul, they will reply: "If you want to
be saved, come out of yourself." Some of them would add: "Forget
yourself." But whether they use this latter extremely ambiguous and
doubtful form of advice, they very generally agree that to seek to
save your own soul by any merely or mainly inward and non-social
process is to secure perdition. "It is love that saves," they are fond
of {57} telling us. And in this doctrine, as interpreted in the light
of our modern social movements, many see the entire essence of
Christianity adapted to our present situation.
Nor is the tendency here in question limited to the practical counsels
of which I have just reminded you. There are those students of the
psychology and the philosophy of religion who are disposed to conceive
that the whole essence of the religion of all times, the entire
meaning of religious beliefs and practices, can be exhaustively and
accurately described in the purely human and social terms which these
practical counsels attempt to embody. A recent writer on the
psychology of religion defines religion as man's consciousness of his
highest social values, and maintains that all religious beliefs are
attempts to express this consciousness in whatever terms a given stage
of civilisation makes natural and possible.
One can easily suggest to any student of general history some of the
facts which such a writer has in mind. Have not the gods often been
conceived as tribal deities, and so simply as representatives of the
welfare and of the will of the community over against the waywardness
and the capriciousness of the individual? Was not the transition from
polytheism to the various forms of pantheism and of monotheism
determined by the social processes that formed kingdoms or empires,
and that finally led over to the modern appreciation of the value of
the {58} common interest of an ideally united humanity? Were not the
prophets of Israel social reformers? Was not the work of Jesus an
anticipation and a prophecy of the coming consciousness of the
brotherhood of man, as the lovers of mankind now conceive that
brotherhood? What has religion had to teach us, some will insistently
ask, more saving, unifying, sustaining, than this love of man for man?
From such a point of view, as you see, our social experience is our
principal source of religious insight. And the salvation that this
insight brings to our knowledge is salvation through the fostering of
human brotherhood. Such salvation accrues to the individual so far as
he gives himself over to the service of man, and to mankind in so far
as men can only be saved together and not separately.
I am just now depicting, not judging, a view concerning the solution
of religious problems which you know to be, in our day, as potent as
it is varied and problematic in its teaching. Can this view satisfy?
Does this way of stating the case really indicate to us any adequate
source of religious insight, any way in which we can define the true
salvation of man?
V
We cannot answer this question without taking account of the views of
those of our recent teachers to whom this purely social theory of the
religious {59} objects and values is indeed profoundly unsatisfactory.
That such opponents of the adequacy of the interpretation of religion
just suggested are to be found amongst the believers in familiar
religious traditions, we need not at any length set forth. The
traditions of the great religions of the world do not interpret the
old faiths in this way, just because these religious traditions all
agree in regarding the human social order as something which exists
for the sake of an essentially superhuman order. As these various
faiths assert, man can never be saved by purely human means, whether
you call these means preventive medicine, or socialism, or universal
brotherhood, or even love, so long as love means simply human love. As
for Christianity, in all its older forms, it has emphasised the love
of man, but always in a certain union with the love of God which
tradition could never conceive as adequately expressible in terms of
our recent social movements. The "Servant in the House" is supposed to
be a modern apparition of the Christ; but he is explicitly a heretic
regarding the old faith of the church.
But with tradition as tradition, these lectures have to do only by way
of occasional illustration. What interests us more, for our present
purpose, is the fact that, despite the predominance of the social
interpretations of religion of which I have just reminded you, there
are still some of our recent teachers who stoutly insist that our
social {60} experience does not adequately show us any way of
salvation whatever.
And here first I must call attention to certain of the most modern and
least theologically disposed of our leaders, namely, to those who
emphasise the most characteristic recent forms of individualism. I
have mentioned Nietzsche in my former lecture. Surely he stands for
opposition to tradition and he expresses tendencies that are potent
to-day. But while he lived and wrote, he aspired to be a sort of
Antichrist, and preached the doctrine that a religion of love can
never save, because, as he insists, what the self needs is power, and
power is not to be won by attempting to please a world of slaves.
Nietzsche may seem to you, as he has seemed to so many, a hopeless
abnormity; but his Titanism is in fact a wayward modern expression of
a motive that has always played its notable part in the search for
salvation, ever since heroism and the resolute will were first
discovered by man. Nietzsche's insight too, such as it is, is a social
insight. It comes through noting that, even if the individual needs
his social world as a means of grace and a gateway to salvation, the
social order, in its turn, needs individuals that are worth saving,
and can never be saved unless it expresses itself through the deeds
and the inner life of souls deeply conscious of the dignity of
selfhood, of the infinite worth of unique and intensely conscious
personal life.
{61}
As a fact, individualism is as potent an ethical motive in the life of
to-day as is the collectivism just characterised. Each of these
tendencies, in our present social order, feeds upon and intensifies
the other. Socialism opposes, and yet inevitably encourages, the
purposes of the very individual who feels his social ties as a galling
restraint. It preaches solidarity and brotherhood and love; but wins a
ready hearing from those who view all these tendencies mainly as means
whereby they may hope to have their own way, and to become, as
Nietzsche's Superman, "beyond good and evil"--masters in the coming
world of triumphant democracy. The social experience of our time is
full of ambiguous lessons. Its way toward salvation leads not only
over the Hill of Difficulty, but both ways around the hill; and it
shows us no one straight and narrow road to peace. Whoever would
traverse its wilderness and reach salvation needs to supplement his
social insight by a use of other and deeper sources.
And as to what these deeper sources of insight are, the teacher whom I
have already repeatedly cited--William James--asserts a doctrine that,
as you already know, I do not regard as adequate, but that I must
again here emphasise, because its contrast with that social theory of
religion which I just characterised is so instructive.
James, in his "Varieties of Religious Experience," shows the utmost
liberality toward differences of {62} faith, and insists in the
opening chapters of his book that religious experience is a field
where one must beware of defining sharp boundary lines or of showing a
false exclusiveness. Yet _one_ boundary line he himself defines with
the greatest sharpness; and in respect of _one_ matter he is rigidly
exclusive. Religious experience, he insists, is, as you will remember
from our first lecture, the experience of an individual who feels
himself to be "alone with the divine." And the social types of
religious experience James rigidly excludes from the "varieties"
whereof he takes account. And James's reason for this procedure is
explicit. In its social aspects religion, so he insists, always
becomes, or has already become, conventional. James no longer finds in
the religious life of communities the novelty and independence of
vision which he prizes. The essence of true religious experience lies,
for him, in its originality, in its spontaneity, and so in the very
solitude which is a condition, to James's mind, for the discovery of
that which saves.
The words "originality" and "spontaneity" emphasise the features
which, as I think, James most meant to emphasise. The problem of
salvation, for James, must be an essentially individual problem; for
nobody else ever faced _your_ need of salvation, or had your personal
issues to meet. If you win religious insight, you will have to win it
very much as you will have to die--alone. Of course James does not
hesitate to test the value of religious {63} experience, in his
pragmatic fashion, by its social as well as by its individual
consequences. The fruits of the spirit accrue to the general
advantage; and the saint, in James's opinion, must indeed undertake to
edify, not only himself, but also his brethren. But the effects of
religious insight must not be confused with the sources. James insists
that the sources are mainly from within the individual and are only
incidentally social. A religious discovery has in common with a poetic
creation the fact that the religious genius, like the artist, sees his
vision, and produces his spiritual miracle, in solitude.
If you ask whether this position which James assumes is anything more
than his own private opinion, and if you want to know his grounds for
it, a closer examination of his book will show you why he thus
deliberately turns his back upon the favourite recent interpretation
of religion as an essentially social phenomenon. James, in common with
the traditional faiths, although not in conformity with their
formulas, always conceived religious experience as an intercourse with
objects and with powers that, whatever their deeper bases in our
"subliminal" nature, do not adequately express themselves in our
everyday, worldly, overt human nature. And in our social life, where
the conventional reigns, where man imitates man or contends with man,
where crowds bustle and the small-talk or the passionate struggle of
the day fill the mind, where lovers pursue their beloved and are
jealous {64} of their rivals, and laborers toil and sweat, and worldly
authorities display their pomp, you meet not the solution, but the
problem of life. James, as man, was full of social interests, and, as
psychologist, was fond of studying social processes. But when a man
wants peace and spiritual triumph, James observes that, as an
empirical fact, he does not readily find them in the market-place, or
on the battle-field, or in the law courts, unless, indeed, he comes to
these places already full of the light that the saintly souls have
often found in the wilderness or in their meditations. In brief, James
always emphasises the mystical element in religious experience and is
full of the assurance that religion cannot find its food in the
commonplace; while our social life is a realm where the commonplace
holds sway. Or again, James holds that when the faithful have thought
of their religious experience as an intercourse with beings of a level
wholly superhuman, they may, indeed, have been wrong in their creeds,
but were right in holding that man as he lives in his social world can
never save man. Our social consciousness is too barefaced and open in
its union of triviality and pathos. What we want as the saving power
is, for a teacher such as James, something more mysterious, deep,
subconscious or superconscious, and in this sense, indeed, superhuman.
Still I am only depicting, not yet judging. I have now briefly stated
opinions that favour and opinions {65} that oppose an interpretation
of religious insight in terms of our social experience. But what are
the merits of the case? In what sense can there be a religion of the
social consciousness?
VI
The answer to this question involves, I think, two considerations,
both of them exemplified by the various views here in question, both
of them familiar, both of them easily misinterpreted. The first is the
very consideration upon which our popular teachers of salvation
through love most insist. We ourselves came upon that consideration at
the close of our first lecture. Man is, indeed, a being who cannot be
saved alone, however much solitude may help him, at times, toward
insight. For he is bound to his brethren by spiritual links that
cannot be broken. The second consideration is this: So long as man
views his fellow-man _merely_ as fellow-man, he only complicates his
problem, for both he and his fellow equally need salvation. Their
plight is common; their very need of salvation chains them together in
the prison of human sorrow. If, to adapt the symbolism of ancient
stories to our case, the angel of love is to appear in their prison,
is to loosen their chains, is to open the doors, it must be, in some
wise, as an angel, not as a merely human presence, that love must
appear.
Perhaps the best way to indicate wherein lies the {66} strength and
the weakness, the irresistible authority and the pathetic limitation
of our social experience as a religious guide, and the best way also
to indicate its true relations to the religious experience of the
human individual, is to remind ourselves of a very few familiar cases
in which an individual finds that his own way toward salvation, if any
such way is to exist for him at all, lies through his social world, so
that he cannot be saved without the help of his fellows.
Our first instance shall be an extreme one, in which the sense of need
is intense and the longing for salvation acute, but where there is
little or no hope of finding the way, although one knows that if the
way could be found it would bring one into touch with a new type of
human companionship. We all know how the sense of guilt may take the
form of a feeling of overwhelming loneliness. Now the sense of guilt,
if deep and pervasive and passionate, involves at least a dim
recognition that there is some central aim of life and that one has
come hopelessly short of that aim. I may regret a blunder, and yet
have no hint that there is any unified and supreme ideal of life. For
a blunder is a special affair involving the missing of some particular
aim. I may even bitterly repent a fault, and still think of that fault
as a refusal to pursue some one separate moral purpose--a violation of
this or of that maxim of conduct. But the true sense of guilt in its
greater manifestation involves a confession that the {67} whole self
is somehow tainted, the whole life, for the time being, wrecked. But
the bankruptcy of the self implies that there is one highest purpose
which gives the self its value; the sense of total failure is itself a
revelation of the value of what was lost. Hence the highly idealising
tendency of the great experiences of moral suffering. They lead us to
think not of this or of that special good, but of salvation and
perdition in their general bearing upon life. The depth of the despair
shows the grandeur of what has been missed; and it is therefore not
surprising that experiences of this sort have been, for so many, the
beginnings of religious insight. To believe that one is cut off from
salvation may be the very crisis that in the end saves.
Now some of those who feel this overmastering might of their guilt lay
most stress upon their assurance that God has condemned them. And
religious tradition has of course emphasised this way of stating the
case. But it is perfectly natural, and is surely a humane experience,
to feel the sense of guilt primarily in the form of a belief that one
is an outcast from human sympathy and is hopelessly alone. The more
abnormal types of the sense of guilt, in nervous patients, frequently
exemplify this terror of the lonely soul, this inner grief over the
homelessness of the remorseful outcast. But actual guilt may be
present with or without the more abnormal nervous conditions just
mentioned, and, when present, may bring home to the rueful mind {68}
the despair of the awakened but forsaken sinner, and may bring it in
the form of the feeling of guilty solitude.
A well-known expression of such a mood you find in Kipling's lyric of
the "Poor little sheep that have gone astray." In these verses the
outcast sons of good families, the "gentlemen-rankers," dwell together
in an agonised companionship of common loneliness. Their guilt and
their lost homes are for them inseparably associated.
Or again: Beneath all the fantastic imagery of Coleridge's "Ancient
Mariner," the poet uses a perfectly recognisable type of the sense of
guilt as the means to make his tale of wonders seem, despite all its
impossibilities, human and even plausible. The incidents are the
miracles of a magic dream; but the human nature depicted is as real as
is the torment of any guilty conscience. Somehow--no matter how, or
under how arbitrary conditions--the hero has committed a crime
without precisely intending it to be a crime. His tale is one of a
young man's adventurous insolence. His deed has all the too familiar
characters of the typical sins of wayward youth. And that is why the
gay young wedding guest must hear his tale. He--the mariner--in his
own youth, had consciously meant to be only a little wanton and cruel.
He awakened, as many a light-minded youth later awakes, to find that,
as a fact, he had somehow struck at the very centre of life, at the
heart of love, at the laws that bind the {69} world together, at the
spirit of the universe. When one thus awakes, he sees that nature and
God are against him. But, worst of all, he has become a curse to his
fellows; and in turn they curse him; and then they leave him alone
with the nightmare life in death of utter solitude. To his mind there
are no living men. He sees about him only "the curse in a dead man's
eye." What life he can still see is no longer, to his morbid eyes,
really human:
"The many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie;
And a thousand, thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I."
The Ancient Mariner's escape from the horrors of this despair, the
beginnings of his salvation, date from the first movings of love in
his heart toward all living beings. His salvation is won when, at the
end, he finds God along with the goodly company at the kirk. In brief,
the curse of his guilt is to be "alone on a wide, wide sea." His
salvation comes in preaching love and companionship, and in uniting
himself hereby to the God who loves all things both great and small.
Now one does not often think of the "Ancient Mariner" as a poem of
religious experience; but apart from its brilliant play with natural
magic, its human charm actually depends upon this well-founded
picture of the loneliness of guilt and of the escape through loving
union with one's kind. And {70} the poet deliberately gives to this
picture the form and the sense of a religious process of salvation.
If you turn from the dreamy product of Coleridge's youthful fancy to
the opposite pole of modern literature, you find an instance of almost
the same motives at the basis of that most impressive romance of the
Russian Dostoieffsky: "Crime and Punishment." Dostoieffsky had himself
lived long in what he called "The House of the Dead," in Siberia,
before he learned how to write this masterpiece. He had been forced to
sojourn amongst the guilty of the most various grades. He had come to
universalise their experiences and to struggle himself with one form
of the problem of salvation. Those who, like Dante, have looked upon
hell, sometimes have, indeed, wonders to tell us. Dostoieffsky
condenses the whole problem of salvation from guilt in this picture of
an individual. Raskolnikow, the hero, after his thoughtfully conceived
crime, and after his laborious effort at self-justification, finds
himself the prey of a simply overwhelming sense that he walks alone
amongst men, and that, in the crowded streets of the city, he is as
one dead amongst spectres. There is nowhere, I think, a more
persuasive picture of the loneliness of great guilt. Raskolnikow could
not be more the victim of supernatural forces if he were Coleridge's
Ancient Mariner. Like the Ancient Mariner, Raskolnikow in the end
finds the way to salvation through love--the love which the martyred
Sonia teaches him--herself, {71} as our Russian most persuasively
pictures her, at once outcast and saint. The author uses religious
conceptions which are both ancient and, in his use of them,
unconventional. But the central one of these is the familiar
conception that salvation involves a reconciliation both with the
social and with the divine order, a reconciliation through love and
suffering--an escape from the wilderness of lonely guilt to the realm
where men can understand one another.
In such elemental ways the process of salvation can be made to appear
as essentially a social process, just because its opposite, perdition,
seems to mean banishment from amongst men.
Another group of cases presents to us the same need for human
companionship as a means to salvation, but presents it in the winning
guise of salvation beginning through love, without the main stress
being laid upon the previous despair. In such cases the despair may be
mentioned but at once relieved. The religion of friendship and of love
is a familiar human experience. James, in his fear of debasing
religion by romantic or by grosser associations, unjustly neglects it
in his study of "varieties." In fact, to seem to find the divine in
the person of your idealised friend or beloved is a perfectly normal
way of beginning your acquaintance with the means of grace. You meet,
you love, and--you seem to be finding God. Or, to use our present
interpretation of what reveals the {72} divine, love seems to furnish
you with a vision of a perfect life, to give you a total survey of the
sense of your own life, and to begin to show you how to triumph. If
there be any divine life, you say, this is my vision of its beauty and
its harmony. So the divine appears in one of Browning's later lyrics:
"Such a starved bank of moss.
Till, that May morn.
Blue ran the flash across;
Violets were born!
"Sky--what a scowl of cloud
Till, near and far,
Ray on ray split the shroud
Splendid! a star!
"World--how it walled about
Life with disgrace,
Till God's own smile came out;
That was thy face!"
In the sonnets of Shakespeare this religion of friendship has found
some of its most perfect expressions.
"Haply I think of thee, and then my state.
Like to the lark's, at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate."
And again, in Mrs. Browning's "Sonnets from the Portuguese," the
religion of love not only uses speech intensely personal, fond,
intimate, but also, {73} and deliberately, accompanies all this with
words derived from reflective metaphysics, or from theology, and
intended to express the miracle that the nearest movings of affection
are also a revelation of the highest powers of the spiritual world.
"How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being, and Ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise;
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith;
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,--I love thee with the breath.
Smiles, tears, of all my life!--and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death."
Surely one could not better express, than this sonnet does, the
naturalness of the religious motive--the mystery of the religious
object.
And finally, turning from these cases to those which are social in the
larger sense, every patriotic song which deifies one's country, every
other form of the religion of patriotism, exemplifies the experience
of the devoted lover of his country by teaching that it is "man's
perdition to be safe" in case his social world calls for the sacrifice
of his life, and that salvation comes through service.
{74}
James is indeed wrong then to neglect the social roads that lead
toward the experience of what one takes to be divine. There is no love
so simple-minded that, if it be true love, the way of salvation may
not seem to be opened through it to the lover.
But observe that, as we review these instances, they show us how the
social world wherein they bid us seek our salvation is a world whose
very essence is transformed by love and by its vision into something
that seems to the lover mystical, superhuman, and more than our
literal and commonplace social life directly exemplifies. Those who
have failed to find in their actual social life such inspirations may,
indeed, have to look, as the typical mystics have generally done,
elsewhere, for their vision of the divine, than in so much of the
social world as they know. And such will, indeed, seek their vision of
salvation in solitude. When they tell us of their experience, they may
well remind the social enthusiast, as well as the lover, that the
religion of love is no religion at all, unless it conceives its human
object not only as this creature, or as this collection of needy men
and women, but as a hint, or revelation, or incarnation of a divine
process--of a process which is not only human but superhuman, and
which can never be comprehended in the "mart and the crowded street"
unless by the soul that is either mystical enough to meet God also "in
the bush," or rationally enlightened enough to know that human {75}
life is indeed a revelation of something that is also superhuman.
I conclude, then, for the moment, thus: Social experience seems to lie
on the way to salvation. Normally the way to salvation, if there be
any such way, must lead through social experience. But when our social
experience shows us any such way upward it does so, if it truly does
so, because human social life is the hint, the likeness, or the
incarnation of a life that lies beyond and above our present human
existence. For human society as it now is, in this world of care, is a
chaos of needs; and the whole social order groans and travails
together in pain until now, longing for salvation. It can be saved, as
the individual can be saved, only in case there is some way that leads
upward, through all our turmoil and our social bickerings, to a realm
where that vision of unity and self-possession which our clearest
moments bring to us becomes not merely vision, but fulfilment, where
love finds its own, and where the power of the spirit triumphs. Of
such a realm the lovers dream and the religions tell. Let us appeal to
a further source of insight. Concerning the realities that we need,
let us next consult our Reason.
{76}
{77}
III
THE OFFICE OF THE REASON
{78}
{79}
III
THE OFFICE OF THE REASON
Thus far we have dealt with sources of religious insight which are
indispensable, but which confess their own inadequacy so soon as you
question them closely. Individual experience can show us, in its
moments of wider vision, our ideal, and its times of despair, of
aspiration, or of self-examination, our need. But whenever it attempts
to acquaint us with the way of salvation, its deliveries are clouded
by the mists of private caprice and of personal emotion. Social
experience, in its religious aspects, helps the individual to win the
wider outlook, helps him also to find his way out of the loneliness of
guilt and of failure toward wholeness of life, and promises salvation
through love. But, like individual experience, it is beset by what we
have called the religious paradox. And it does not solve that paradox.
Confessing its own defects, it still undertakes to discern how to
overcome them. In so far as it is merely social experience it deals
with the world of weak mortals, of futile bickerings, and of love
that, in this world, deifies but never quite finds its true beloved.
By virtue of this transforming love it indeed gives {80} us the hint
that our social world may be an apparition or an incarnation of some
diviner life than any mortal now experiences. Yet how can mortals thus
ignorant pretend to get insight into anything that is divinely
exalted?
Thus, both the sources of insight that we have thus far consulted
point beyond themselves. Each says, "If salvation is possible, then
human life must be able to come into touch with a life whose meaning
is superhuman." Our question is: "Is there, indeed, such a diviner
life?" In order to deal with this question, we have resolved to
consult still another source of insight, namely, our Reason. The
present lecture must deal with this source of insight.
I
"What does one mean by the Reason?" As I attempt to answer this
question, with an especial effort to show the relations of reason and
religion, I shall be aided by reminding you at the outset that, at the
present time, there is a widespread tendency to discredit the reason
as a source of any notable insight into life or into the universe. And
this tendency depends upon so defining the business of the reason as
sharply to oppose, on the one hand, intuition and reason, and, on the
other hand, reason and common-sense experience. That is, some of our
recent teachers tell us that the only sort of insight which can be of
any use in religion must be {81} won by intuitions and cannot be
obtained by what these teachers call the abstract reason. By
intuition, at least in the religious field, such men mean some sort of
direct feeling of the nature of things, some experience such as the
mystics have reported, or such as many religious people, whether
technical mystics or not, call illumination through faith. Intuitions
of this sort, they say, are our only guides in the religious field. As
opposed to such direct apprehension, the use of reason would mean the
effort to be guided by formulas, by explicitly stated abstract
principles, by processes of inference, by calculations, or by logical
demonstrations. James is prominent amongst those who thus oppose the
abstract reason to the revelations of intuition; and, especially in
his later works, he is never weary of emphasising the inarticulate
character of all our deepest sources of religious insight. When we get
true religious insight, so he teaches, we simply feel convinced that
these things are so. If we try to give reasons for our beliefs, James
holds that the reasons are inapt afterthoughts, the outcome of
sophistication, or are at best useful only in putting our convictions
into convenient order for purposes of record or of teaching. James's
favourite statement of the contrast here in question identifies the
partisans of reason with the defenders of what he calls "barren
intellectualism." He maintains that religion is hindered rather than
helped by such people. You attain conviction by processes of {82}
which the "barren intellect" can give no adequate account. Conviction,
in religious matters, emanates, according to James, from those
mysterious depths of the subconscious about which I said something in
the last lecture. And convictions thus resulting feel overwhelming to
the persons who have them. Such convictions are what many denote by
the word "intuitions." The effort to define abstract principles, as
grounds for holding your convictions to be true, constitutes the only
effort of the reason in religious matters which James recognises.
According to James, such reasoning processes are inevitably bad. And
as a fact, so he insists, nobody seriously believes in God because
some theologian or philosopher pretends to have demonstrated his
existence. On the contrary, he says, belief in God is intuitive or is
nothing of value. And reason is employed in such matters merely
because of a frequent overfondness for abstract conceptions, or at
best because formulas are useful for the teachers of religious
traditions.
Another form of contrast, and one upon which James also often insists,
while many other recent writers, whose interests are not those of
James, emphasise the same matter, depends upon opposing reason to
experience in general, including under the latter term not only the
intuitions of the devout, but whatever goes by the name experience in
ordinary speech. We see and hear and touch, and by such means get
experience. But we make hypotheses and {83} deduce their consequences;
we assume premises and demonstrate conclusions; and, according to such
writers, what we then do constitutes the typical work of our reason.
The characteristic of the reason is that it attempts either to
elucidate the meaning of an assertion, or to prove some proposition to
be true, without appealing to experience to verify the proposition in
question. And such work of the reason, as these writers tell us, is of
very limited use, in comparison to the use of our direct experience as
a guide. What is found to be true through empirical tests is rightly
tested. What is supposed to be proved true by abstract reasoning is
thus at best made dependent for its explicit warrant upon the
presupposed truth of the premises used in the reasoning process. Or,
as is sometimes said, the reason can discover nothing essentially new.
It turns its premises over and over, and gets out of them only what
has already been put into them. Experience, on the other hand, is full
of countless novelties; for what you can find through observation and
experiment depends not upon previous assumptions, but upon the skill
and the good fortune of the inquirer, and upon the wealth of life and
of the real world.
In brief, for those who look at reason in this way, to use your reason
is simply to draw necessary inferences from assumed premises. And no
premises, as such writers insist, can warrant any inference except the
inference of a conclusion which is already hidden away, so to speak,
in the premises themselves. {84} Thus reasoning, as they tell us, is a
process which, in the conclusion inferred, merely lets out of the bag
the cat which was concealed in that bag, namely, in the premises.
Reason, therefore, is indeed (so such writers assert) barren wherever
novelty is sought. It is useful only for purposes of formulation, and
in certain parts of the abstract sciences, where deduction has a
technical place, as a means for preparing the way for experimental
tests. In life, experience is the guide to true novelty. And
therefore, if religious insight can be attained at all, it must be due
not to the reason, but to some sort of religious experience.
Such objections to the use of reason in the religious field depend, as
you see, upon identifying the reasoning process with the combination
of two well-known mental processes; first, the process of forming and
using abstract conceptions; secondly, the process of analysing
assertions, or combinations of assertions, to make more explicit what
is already contained in their meaning. Our next question may well be
this: Is such an account of the work of reason just to the actual
usage that common-sense is accustomed to make of this familiar name?
II
To this question I must at once answer that we all of us daily use the
word reason as the name for a process, or a set of processes, which
certainly {85} cannot be reduced to the mere power to form and to use
abstract ideas, and to analyse the already predetermined meaning of
statements. When we speak of an ill-tempered or of a prejudiced man as
"unreasonable," we do not merely mean that he is unable to form or to
define abstract ideas, or that he cannot analyse the meaning of his
own statements. For sometimes such a man is contentiously thoughtful,
and fond of using too many one-sided abstractions, and eager to argue
altogether too vehemently. No, when we call him unreasonable, we mean
that he takes a narrow view of his life, or of his duties, or of the
interests of his fellow-men. We mean, in brief, that he lacks vision
for the true relations and for the total values of things. When we try
to correct this sort of unreasonableness, we do not say to the
petulant or to the one-sided man: "Go to the dictionary, and learn how
to define your abstract terms." Sometimes contentiously prejudiced men
are altogether too fond of the dictionary. Nor do we merely urge him
to form the habit of analysis. No, we may indeed say to him: "Be
reasonable"; but we mean: "Take a wider outlook; see things not one at
a time, but many at once; be broad; consider more than one side; bring
your ideas together; in a word, get insight." For precisely what I
defined in my opening lecture as insight is what we have in mind when,
in such cases, we counsel a man to be reasonable. So, in such uses of
the word reason, reason is not opposed to intuition, as the power to
{86} form abstract ideas is supposed by James to be opposed to the
power to see things by direct vision. No, reason, in such cases, means
simply broader intuition, the sort of seeing that grasps many views in
one, that surveys life as it were from above, that sees, as the
wanderer views the larger landscape from a mountain top.
When, not long since, in a famous decision, the Supreme Court of the
United States called attention to what it called "The rule of reason,"
and declared its intention to judge the workings of well-known modern
business methods by that rule, the court certainly did not mean by
"the rule of reason" the requirement that acts said to be "in
restraint of trade" must be judged merely through a process of forming
abstract ideas or of analysing the signification of assertions. No,
the court was explicitly opposing certain methods of estimate which it
regarded as falsely abstract; and it proposed to substitute for these
false abstractions a mode of judging the workings of certain trade
combinations which was to involve taking as wide and concrete and
practical a view as possible of their total effects. Everybody who
read the court's words understood that, in this case, it was precisely
the merely abstract conception of something technically defined as a
"restraint of trade" which the court wished, not to make sovereign,
but to subordinate to the wider intuition of a fair-minded observer of
the whole result, of a given sort of corporate combination. The {87}
"rule of reason" was intended to bring the whole question out of the
realm of barren abstractions and of mere analysis, and nearer to the
realm where the trained observation of the fair minded man would
decide the case--nearer, in fact, to the realm of intuition. Only, the
decisive intuition must be something broad, and far-seeing, and
synthetic, and fair.
Now I submit that this meaning of the word reason is perfectly
familiar to all of you. Reason, from this point of view, is the power
to see widely and steadily and connectedly. Its true opponent is not
intuition, but whatever makes us narrow in outlook, and consequently
the prey of our own caprices. The unreasonable person is the person
who can see but one thing at a time, when he ought to see two or many
things together; who can grasp but one idea, when a synthesis of ideas
is required. The reasonable man is capable of synopsis, of viewing
both or many sides of a question, of comparing various motives, of
taking interest in a totality rather than in a scattered multiplicity.
You may, of course, admit that this use of the word reason is
familiar; and still you may say that James's contention is
nevertheless sound. For, as you may declare, the real issue is not
regarding the meanings that chance to be linked with the word reason,
but regarding the relative impotence of that process which James chose
to call by this name. As a fact, so you may assert, there exists the
familiar process of forming abstract {88} conceptions; and there also
exists the process of drawing conclusions through an analysis of what
is already contained in the meaning of the assumed premises. Whether
or no one calls these two processes, in their usual combination, by
the name reasoning, James is right in saying that abstractions, and
that such sorts of purely analytic abstract reasoning as he has in
mind, are incapable of giving us religious insight. And both James and
the others who oppose reason to concrete experience are right in
asserting that you get no novel insight whatever through mere
abstractions, or through mere analysis, but are dependent for your
advances in knowledge upon experience. Therefore, as you may continue,
the issue which James and other empiricists raise must not be evaded
by any appeal to vaguer uses of the word reason, whether common-sense
or the Supreme Court chances to authorise such special forms of
expression.
I fully agree to the importance of this comment and of the issue as
thus stated. I am ready to consider the issue. But I also insist upon
estimating the whole use of reason in its proper context. James, in
common with countless other partisans of intuition in religious
matters, is fond of insisting that all our nobler intuitions and all
our deeper faiths are, in their foundations, inwardly compelling, but
inarticulate, and that we degrade them rather than help them when we
define their meaning in abstract terms or employ processes of explicit
{89} demonstration in their defence. James, in common with many
empiricists, also opposes experience in general to all processes of
reasoning, and asserts that the latter never teach us anything novel.
The issue, fairly viewed, is therefore not a perfectly simple one. It
involves the question whether the two modes of getting knowledge
between which we are asked to choose are the only modes actually in
use. Intuition, and experience in general, are by James and by others
sharply contrasted with certain processes of abstraction and of
analysis. It is then pointed out that since these latter processes,
taken by themselves, never give us any essentially novel insights, you
must on the whole cease to use your powers of abstraction and of
analysis, except for the mere purpose of record or of teaching, or of
some other such technical end--computation, analysis of hypotheses,
and the like. You must, at least in religious matters, depend upon the
uprushes from your subconscious self or upon whatever else is
persuasively inarticulate. In the ultimate decisions of life,
inarticulate intuition, mere faith, and that alone, can save you.
Hereupon the perfectly fair question arises whether the alternatives
are thus exhaustively stated. Must one choose between inarticulate
faith and barren abstractions? Must one face the alternative: Either
intuition without reasoning, or else relatively fruitless analysis
without intuition? Perhaps there is a third possibility. Perhaps one
may use one's process of abstraction {90} as a sort of preparation for
certain articulate and noble intuitions that cannot be approached, by
our human sort of consciousness, through any other way. Perhaps
analysis is not the whole process which determines demonstrations.
Perhaps synthesis--the viewing of many facts or principles or
relations in some sort of unity and wholeness--perhaps a synoptic
survey of various articulate truths, can lead us to novel insights. In
that case inarticulate intuitions and barren abstractions are not the
only instruments between which we must choose. For in that case there
will be another sort of aid, a more explicit sort of intuition, a more
considerate view of our life and its meaning, which we may adopt, and
which may lead us to novel results. And these results may be not only
articulate but saving.
Or, to state the issue more generally: In seeking for any sort of
novel truth, have we only the choice between the experience of the
data of sense or of feeling on the one hand and the analysis of
abstract ideas and assertions upon the other? May there not be another
source of knowledge? May not this source consist in the synthetic view
of many facts in their unity--in the grasping of a complex of
relations in their total significance? And may not just this be a
source of insight which is employed in many of the processes
ordinarily known as reasoning processes? May not the formation of
abstract ideas, when wisely used, be merely a means of helping us
toward an easier view of larger unities of fact than {91} our present
sort of human consciousness could grasp except for this auxiliary
device? May not analysis be merely an aspect, a part of our live
thinking? May not all genuine demonstration involve synthesis as well
as analysis, the making of new constructions as well as the dissection
of old assertions? If so, then the issue as presented by James and his
allies is not rightly stated, because an essential part of its context
is neglected. Abstract conceptions are, in fact, in the live and
serious work of thought, a mere preparation for intuitions and
experiences that lie on higher levels than those which, apart from
abstract conceptions, we men can reach. Reasoning processes are
fruitful because they involve sorts of experience, forms of intuition,
that you cannot reach without them. In brief, reason and experience
are not opposed. There is an opposition between inarticulate intuition
and articulate insight. There is also an opposition between relatively
blind experience of any sort and relatively rational experience. And,
in view of such oppositions, it will be perfectly fair to define
reason as the power to get articulate insight--insight into wholes
rather than fragments. It will also be fair to define the reasoning
process as the process of getting connected experience on a large
scale.
Whoever views the matter thus will indeed not be forced to be a
one-sided partisan of the reasoning process as thus defined. He will,
first, fully admit that the formation of abstract ideas is but a means
{92} to an end, and that this end is the enlargement of the range of
our view of the connections of our experience. He will secondly admit
that, as soon as the process of forming abstract ideas is pursued as
an end in itself, pedantry and formalism result, whether the topic be
one of religion, or of science, or of the world's daily work. He will
further agree with James, and with the empiricists generally, that
merely analytic reasoning, if such were, in its isolation, a possible
thing, would be indeed "barren intellectualism." And finally, if he is
wise, he will go still further. He will not despise instinct, and
feeling, and the movings of faith, and the inarticulate intuitions.
For he will know that all these things are human, are indispensable,
and are the basis upon which the genuine work of the reason, the wider
view of life, must be carried toward its fulfilment. For whoever is to
comprehend the unities of life must first live. Whoever is to be best
able to survey the landscape from the mountain top must first have
wandered in its paths and its byways, and must have grown familiar
with its valleys and its recesses. Whoever is to get the mature
insight must first have become a little child.
But whoever, remembering the New Testament word about becoming as a
little child, one-sidedly defends the inarticulate intuitions, as the
only source of religious insight, should remember also the word of St.
Paul: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I thought as a child, I
understood as a {93} child; but when I became a man I put away
childish things."
It is the business of reason not to make naught of the indispensable
intuitions of the childlike and of the faithful, but to work toward
the insight such that, if we possessed it, we should "know even as we
are known." That which is weak in this world may indeed confound many
who are called wise; but there is no objection to its becoming also
truly wise itself. For then it would all the better know why it had
been able to confound false wisdom.
II
All such considerations will seem to many of you hopelessly general.
You will have missed, thus far in my account, concrete instances to
illustrate how what I have now called the reason actually works, how
it is related to experience, how it helps us toward the broader view
of things, how it makes the connections of life more obvious, how it
raises our intuitions to higher levels. And unfortunately, since I
have no time to discourse to you upon the science called Logic--the
science part of whose proper duty it is to define the nature and the
office of what I have now called the reason--I must indeed fail, in
this brief summary, to give you any adequate account of what can be
accomplished through the appeal to this source of insight. All that I
shall try to do, on this occasion, is to mention {94} to you a very
few instances, some of them relatively trivial, wherein, through
reasoning processes, we actually get these larger intuitions on higher
levels, these higher modes of grasping the unity of things. Having
thus very imperfectly exemplified what I mean by the synthetic
processes of reasoning, I shall be ready barely to suggest to you, as
I close, how the reason can be, and is, a source of religious insight.
In some recent logical discussions, and in particular in my colleague
Professor Hibben's text-book of logic, there has been used an example,
trivial in itself, but in its own way typical--an example which is
meant to show how there exists a mental process which is surely worthy
of the name reasoning, and which is, nevertheless, no mere process of
forming abstract ideas and no mere analysis of the meaning of assumed
premises, although, of course, both abstraction and analysis have
their subordinate places in this process. The reasoning involved in
this example is of the very simplest sort. It is expressed in an old
story which many of you will have heard.
According to this story, an aged ecclesiastic, garrulous and
reminiscent, was once, in a social company, commenting upon the
experiences that had come to him in his long and devoted life. Fully
meaning to keep sacred the secrets of the confessional, the old man
was nevertheless led to say: "Ah--it is strange, and sometimes
terrible, what, in my profession, one may have to face and consider.
{95} You must know, my friends, my very first penitent was--a
murderer! I was appalled." The old priest had hardly spoken when the
company was joined by an aged and prominent nobleman of the region,
whom all present greeted with great respect. Saluting his priestly
friend with no little reverence, the nobleman turned to the company
and said, with calm unconsciousness: "You must know, my friends, in my
youth I was the very first person whom my honored friend here ever
confessed."
Now observe. The priest had not said who the murderer was. The
nobleman in his contribution to the conversation had not confessed to
the company the murder. He had not mentioned it in any way. And the
priest had scrupulously avoided mentioning him. But all present drew
at once the reasonable conclusion that, granting the correctness of
the two assertions, the nobleman was a murderer. We, of course, must
all agree in this conclusion. Now is this conclusion the result of a
mere analysis of either of the two assertions made? And does the
conclusion merely result from our power to form abstract ideas?
Plainly, the conclusion is due to the power of all present to make a
synthesis, or, as one sometimes says, to put two and two together.
Plainly, whatever abstract ideas are here used, it is not these which
constitute the main work of a reasonable being who views the situation
in which the nobleman is placed by the whole sense of the
conversation. Reason here discovers a novel fact which {96} neither
the priest nor the nobleman had stated. This discovery is as much an
experience as if it were the observation of an actual killing of one
man by another. Only it is the discovery of the relations involved in
a synthesis of meanings. This discovery is at once empirical (yes, in
the broader sense of the word intuitive), and it is a discovery of a
necessary connection. It is not due to mere analysis. It is not a bit
of barren intellectualism. It is not an unpractical comment. It is a
discovery that might wreck the nobleman's reputation, and that might
more or less indirectly lead to his ultimate conviction upon a capital
charge. Now, that is an example, trivial enough if viewed as a mere
anecdote, but a typical example, of the synthetic and constructive use
of reason as a source of insight.
Let me turn to another also at first sight seemingly trivial case. An
English logician, De Morgan, long ago called attention to a form of
reasoning which, up to his time, the logicians had unduly neglected.
If you assume that "a horse is an animal," you can reasonably conclude
that "the owner of a horse is the owner of an animal"; that "whoever
loves a horse loves an animal," and so on indefinitely. In brief, as
you at once see, from the one assertion, "A horse is an animal," there
rationally follow a limitless number of possible inferences of the
form: "Whatever is in any relation R to a horse is in that same
relation R to an animal." Now you may indeed at first, as I just said,
{97} imagine such reasonings to be comparatively trivial. Whether they
prove to be so, however, depends wholly upon the objects in question,
upon our own interests in these objects, and upon circumstances. They
might be vastly important. From the assertion, "Mr. Taft is President
of the United States," there follows, by this sort of reasoning, the
assertion, "Whoever is a personal friend of Mr. Taft is a personal
friend of the President of the United States." And such a conclusion
some people might be very glad to have you draw. So, too, whoever is a
member of Mr. Taft's family, or household, or club, or of the
university whose degrees he holds, or whoever is a fellow-townsman, or
fellow-countryman, or partisan, or opponent, or enemy of Mr. Taft,
whoever agrees with what he says in his speeches, whoever plays golf
with him, or whoever hopes or fears for his re-election, stands in
just that relation, whatever it may be, to the President of the United
States. And how important such rational inferences might appear for
the comprehension of somebody's actual situation and prospects and
acts depends upon the persons and the interests that may be in
question. To some people just such inferences, at one moment or
another, will not seem trivial, will be worth making, and will be
anything but feats of barren intellectualism. That they are easy
inferences to make is beside the mark. I have no time to ask you here
to study with me the harder inferences upon topics that do not concern
our main purpose. What I {98} need, however, is to illustrate to you
that such reasoning processes go beyond mere analysis, and do involve
a rational and articulate intuition of a novel aspect of experience.
For I defy you to find by any mere analysis of the assertion, "Mr.
Taft is President," the innumerable assertions about friends, about
family, about speeches, and policies, and so on, which as a fact
rationally follow, in the indicated way, from that first assertion.
You find these new results by taking a broader view of the unity of
experience. What, then, I need to have you see is that the reason
which, even in its lightest deeds, can accomplish such syntheses, and
which can lead to such ordered intuitions, and can be the endless
source of such novelties, is not merely the reason of whose powers as
a source of insight James gives so discouraging a picture.
Having thus barely illustrated the thesis that reason can be both
productive of new insight and constructively synthetic in its grasp of
wider ranges of experience than we could observe without it, let me
add that, in the exact sciences, and in particular in mathematics, the
reasoning process, using just such forms of synthesis as I have now
illustrated, is constantly leading investigators to the most varied
and novel discoveries. These discoveries are not due to mere analysis.
They are reports of facts and the results of synthetic construction.
As Mr. Charles Peirce loves to point out, the new discoveries made in
mathematics, and by purely rational processes, {99} are so numerous
that for each year a volume of many hundreds of closely printed pages
is needed to give, with strictly technical brevity, even the barest
outline of the contents of the papers containing the novel results of
that one year's researches. In their union with other sciences, the
mathematical researches constantly lead to still vaster ranges of
novel discovery. Reason, then, is not merely barren, is not mainly
concerned with unproductive analysis, but does enrich our survey of
experience, of its unity and of its meaning.
Perhaps some of you may still object that, if I define reason in the
terms suggested by these instances, there seems to be danger of making
the word "reason" mean simply the same as the word "insight." For
insight, as I defined it in my opening lecture, means a coherent view
of many facts in some sort of unity. And in this case, as you may now
say, why use two words at all? I reply that, in fact, all true insight
is, to my mind, rational insight, upon one or another level of the
development of our power to become rational beings. But you will
remember that insight, as I defined it, also means knowledge which is
intimate and manifold, as well as knowledge which views facts and
relations in their unity. The words intuition and experience are often
used to lay stress upon that aspect of our insight which either makes
it intimate or else brings it into touch with many and various facts.
And such usage is convenient. The word reason, as I have just {100}
exemplified its more synthetic meaning, calls our attention precisely
to that aspect of our better insight which is involved in our power to
grasp many facts in their _unity_, to see the coherence, the
inter-relationship, the totality of a set of experiences. Now when
insight reaches higher levels, these various aspects of our knowledge
are never sundered. But as we grow toward higher insight, we know in
part and prophesy in part and are child-like in so far as that which
is perfect has not yet come.
In these, our imperfect stages of growth, sometimes our knowledge
possesses intimacy, but still has to remain content, for the moment,
with a more inarticulate grasp of deeper meanings. In such cases
James's sort of intuition, or what is often called blind faith, is
mainly in question. And this is indeed a stage on the way to insight.
We feel unities but do not see them. Sometimes, however, as in much of
our ordinary experience, the state of our minds is different; our
knowledge revels in, or else contends with, the endless variety and
multiplicity of the facts of life, and lacks a grasp of their unity.
In that case our insight is often called "merely empirical." We have
experience; and so far our knowledge prospers. But we neither feel
vaguely nor see clearly the total sense of things. And in such cases
our sight is too busy to give us time for higher insight. As the
Germans say, we do not see the wood because of the trees.
In a third stage of partial insight we may stand {101} where, for
instance, the masters of the exact sciences stand. We then grasp, with
clearness, larger unities of controllable experience. We create
objects, as the mathematicians create, in an ideal world of our own
contemplation; and we then come to see that these ideal creations of
ours do, indeed, reveal the eternal truth regarding a world of
seemingly impersonal or superpersonal reality. We learn of this
reality through the coherent synthesis of our ideal constructions. Our
intuition is in this case at once empirical, articulate, and such as
to survey the broad landscape of the genuine relations of things. But
alas! in most such cases our objects, although they are indeed
presented to our rational intuition, are often abstract enough in
their seeming. They are objects such as numbers, and series, and
ordered arrays of highly ideal entities. In such cases the reason does
its typical work; but often the objects of our insight fail to meet
the more intense needs of life.
Thus, then, inarticulate intuitions, ordinary or sometimes more
scientific observations of the details of life, and mathematical
reasonings concerning the unity and the connections of highly ideal
objects such as numbers, come to stand in our experience as more or
less sharply sundered grades of imperfect insight. Thus we naturally
come to view the typical achievements of our reason as a thing apart,
and the rational or exact sciences as remote both from the intuitive
faith of the little ones and from {102} the wealthy experience of the
men of common-sense and of the men of natural science. As a fact, all
these stages of insight are hints of what the Supreme Court meant when
it appealed to the "rule of reason." True insight, if fulfilled, would
be empirical, for it would face facts; intuitive, for it would survey
them and grasp them, and be intimate with them; rational, for it would
view them in their unity.
IV
Our lengthy effort to define the work and the place of the reason has
brought us to the threshold of an appreciation of its relation to the
religious insight which we are seeking.
In looking for salvation, we discover that our task is defined for us
by those aspects of individual and social experience upon which our
two previous lectures have dwelt. We have learned from the study of
these two sorts of experience that, whatever else we need for our
salvation, one of our needs is to come into touch with a life that in
its unity, in its meaning, in its perfection, is vastly superior to
our present human type of life. And so the question has presented
itself: Have we any evidence that such a superhuman type of life is a
real fact in the world? The mystics, and many of the faithful, answer
this question by saying: "Yes. We have such evidence. It is the
assurance that we get through intuition, through feeling, through the
light revealed to us {103} in certain moments when thought ceases, and
the proud intellect is dumb, and when the divine speaks quite directly
to the passive and humbled soul." Now when we calmly consider the
evidence of such moments of inarticulate conviction, they strongly
impress upon us what we have called the religious paradox. Faith, and
the passive and mysterious intuitions of the devout, seem to depend on
first admitting that we are naturally blind and helpless and ignorant,
and worthless to know, of ourselves, any saving truth; and upon
nevertheless insisting that we are quite capable of one very lofty
type of knowledge--that we are capable, namely, of knowing God's voice
when we hear it, of distinguishing a divine revelation from all other
reports, of being sure, despite all our worthless ignorance, that the
divine higher life which seems to speak to us in our moments of
intuition is what it declares itself to be. If, then, there is a pride
of intellect, does there not seem to be an equal pride of faith, an
equal pretentiousness involved in undertaking to judge that certain of
our least articulate intuitions are infallible? Surely here is a
genuine problem, and it is a problem for the reason. We know that men
differ in faith. We know that one man's intuition regarding the way of
salvation may seem to another man to be a mere delusion, a deceitful
dream. We know, from the reports of religious experience, that at
times even the saints of greatest renown have doubted whether some of
their most persuasive visions of the {104} divine were not, after all,
due to the cunning deceit of an enemy of souls whom they more or less
superstitiously feared. We know that to common-sense, despite its
interest in salvation, the reports of the mystics and of the faithful
have often appeared to be but the tale of private and vain imaginings.
It is fair to ask what are the criteria whereby the true spiritual
gifts, the genuine revelations, are to be distinguished. And this, I
insist, is a question for the reason, for that aspect of our nature
which has to do with forming estimates of wholes rather than of
fragments--estimates of life in its entirety rather than of this or
that feeling or moment of ecstasy in its isolation.
If, hereupon, without for the moment attempting to discuss how others,
as, for instance, James himself, deal with the problem of the
reasonable estimate of the value of our religious intuitions, I sketch
for you my own opinion as to how reason does throw light upon the
religious paradox, I must again emphasise a matter that I mentioned in
my opening lecture and that is much neglected. Religious faith does,
indeed, involve a seemingly paradoxical attempt to transcend the
admitted ignorance of the needy human being, to admit that of himself
this being knows almost nothing about the way of salvation, and
nevertheless to insist that he is able to recognise his Deliverer's
voice as the voice of a real master of life when he hears that voice,
or--apart from metaphor--that he is able to be sure what revelation of
a divine life, not {105} his own, is the true one when he happens to
get it. But religion is not alone in this paradoxical pride of
humility. Science and common-sense alike involve a similar admission
of the depths of our human fallibility and ignorance, on the one hand,
and an analogous assurance that, despite this our fragmentariness of
experience, despite our liability to be deceived, we nevertheless can
recognise truth when experience once has not wholly verified it, but
has sufficiently helped us to get it. For, as individuals, we are
constantly confident beyond what our present experience, taken by
itself, clearly reveals to us. We, for instance, trust our individual
memory in the single case, while admitting its pervasive fallibility
in general. We persistently view ourselves as in reasonably close
touch with the general and common results of human experience, even at
the moment when we have to admit how little we know about the mind or
the experience of any one fellow-man, even our nearest friend. We say
that some of our opinions, for instance, are warranted by the
common-sense of mankind. That is, we pretend once for all to know a
good deal about what the common experience of mankind is. And yet, if
we look closer, we see that we do not directly see or experience the
genuine inner life of any one of mankind except the private self which
each one of us regards as his own, while, if we still further consider
the matter, we can readily observe how little each one of us really
knows even about himself. When {106} we appeal then to what we call
common-sense, we pretend to know what it is that, as we say, the mind
of mankind finds to be true. But if we are asked to estimate the real
state of mind of any individual man, how mysterious that state is! In
brief, the paradox of feeling confidence in our own judgment, even
while regarding all human opinion as profoundly fallible, is not
merely a religious paradox, but also pervades our whole social and
personal and even our scientific types of opinion. Not to have what is
called a reasonable confidence in our own individual opinions is the
mark of a weakling. But usually, if our personal opinions relate to
important matters, they bring us into more or less serious conflict
with at least some of the opinions of other men. Conflict is one mark
that your opinions are worth having. When the conflict arises, we are
usually led to consider how fallible other men are. They are fallible,
we say, because they are human. How little any poor man knows! Yes,
but if this principle holds true, how doubtful are my own opinions!
Yet if I fill my mind with that reflection, to the exclusion of all
other reasonable considerations, I condemn myself not to mere
fallibility, but to certain failure.
The paradox is universal. It pervades all forms and activities of
human inquiry. That is the first synthetic observation of the reason,
when it surveys the field of human opinion. Everywhere we live by
undertaking to transcend in opinion what the {107} evidence before us,
at any one moment, directly and infallibly warrants. But is it
rational to do this? And if so, _why_ is it rational?
The answer is that while there is much irrational presumption and
overconfidence in our human world, there is also a perfectly rational
principle which warrants certain forms and methods of thus
transcending in our opinions the immediately presented evidence of the
moment when we judge. This principle is as universal as it is
generally neglected. Rightly understood, it simply transforms for you
your whole view of the real universe in which you live.
An opinion of yours may be true or false. But when you form an
opinion, what are you trying to do? You are trying to anticipate, in
some fashion, what a wider view, a larger experience of your present
situation, a fuller insight into your present ideas, and into what
they mean, would show you, if you now had that wider view and larger
experience. Such an effort to anticipate what the wider view would
even now show, if you were possessed of that view, involves both what
are usually called theoretical interests and what pragmatists, such as
James himself, have often characterised as practical interests. One
can express the matter by saying, that you are trying, through your
opinions, to predict what a larger insight, if it were present to you,
would show or would find, that is, would experience. You can also say
that you are trying to define what {108} a fuller apprehension and a
fairer estimate of your present purposes, and intentions, and
interests, and deeds, and of their outcome, and of their place in
life, would bring before your vision. In brief (whether you lay more
stress upon deeds and their outcome, or upon experiences and their
contents), any expression of opinion, made at any time, is an appeal
of the self of the moment to the verdict, to the estimate, to the
experience of a larger and better informed insight, in the light of
which the self of the moment proposes to be judged. The special
criteria by which your momentary opinion is tested, at the time when
you form that opinion, vary endlessly with your mood and your training
and your feelings, and with the topics and tasks in which you happen
to be interested. But the universal form in which any opinion comes to
your consciousness, and gets its definition for your own mind, is this
form of an appeal to an insight that is superior in grasp, in unity,
in coherence, in reasonableness to your momentary insight.
Now you can indeed say: "When I form and express an opinion, I appeal
from my present experiences to some wider insight that I view _as if
it were_ possible. My opinion asserts that _if I were_ permitted to
see what I just now do not directly experience, I should find the
facts to be so and so." But no such account of the matter is quite
complete. Everything that you regard as possible has to be conceived
as somehow based upon what you regard {109} as actual. And so, in
fact, your opinions are always appeals to some form of wider or larger
or deeper or richer insight that, in the act of appealing to it, you
regard as a present or as a past or as a future reality--in brief, as
a live and perfectly concrete insight to whose verdict you appeal.
Philosophers often express this by saying that all opinions are
nothing but efforts to formulate the real contents of experience. This
view I accept.
So then, as I insist, whatever your opinions, your expression of them
is an appeal to some wider insight that you regard as real, and that
you view as a live insight which comprehends your ideas, and which
sees how they are related to genuine experience. This, I affirm, is
the universal form which all opinion takes. A true opinion is true,
because in fact it expresses what the wider insight confirms. A false
opinion is false, because it is refuted by the light of this same
wider view. Apart from such a confirmation or refutation in the light
of such a larger view, the very concepts of truth and error, as
applied to opinions which are not wholly confirmed or set aside by the
instantaneous evidence of the moment when the opinions are formed or
uttered, have no meaning. True is the judgment that is confirmed by
the larger view to which it appeals. False is the assertion that is
not thus confirmed. _Upon such a conception the very ideas of truth
and error depend. Without such a conception truth and error have no
sense_. If such a conception is not itself {110} a true view of our
situation, that is, if there is no wider insight, our opinions have
neither truth nor error, and are all of them alike merely meaningless.
When you are ignorant, you are ignorant of what the wider view makes
clear to its own insight. If you blunder or are deluded, your blunder
is due to a defective apprehension which the wider view confirms. And
thus, whether you are ignorant or blundering, wise or foolish, whether
the truth or the falsity of your present opinion is supposed to be
actual, one actuality is equally and rationally presupposed, as the
actuality to which all your opinions refer, and in the light of which
they possess sense. _This is the actuality of some wider insight with
reference to which your own opinion gets its truth or its falsity_.
To this wider insight, to this always presupposed vision of experience
as it is, of the facts as they are, you are always appealing. Your
every act of assertion displays the genuineness of the appeal and
exemplifies the absolute rational necessity of asserting that the
appeal is made to an insight that is itself real.
Frequently you do, indeed, call this insight merely the common-sense
of mankind. But, strange to say, this common-sense of mankind is
always and inevitably conceived by you in terms that distinguish it
from the fleeting momentary views of any or of all merely individual
men. Men--if I may judge them by my own case, and by what I hear other
{111} men confess--men, when taken merely as individuals, always live
from moment to moment in a flickering way, normally confident, indeed,
but clearly seeing at any one instant very little at a time. They are
narrow in the span of the more direct insight. They grasp data bit by
bit, and comprehend, in their instantaneous flashes of insight, only
little scraps and tiny bundles of ideas. I who now speak to you cannot
hold clearly and momentarily before my mind at once even all of the
meaning that I try to express in two or three of my successive
sentences. I live looking before and after, and pining for what is
not, and grasping after unity; and I find each moment crumbling as it
flies; and each thought and each sentence of my discourse drops into
momentary forgetfulness so soon as I have carefully built up its
passing structure. In our life all thus flows. We fly from one flash
of insight to another.
But nevertheless our opinions, so we say, reflect sometimes the
common-sense of mankind. They conform to the verdict of humanity. But
who amongst us ever goes beyond thus confidently holding that he
reflects the common-sense of mankind? Who amongst us personally and
individually experiences, at any moment, the confirmation said to be
given by the verdict of humanity? The verdict of humanity? What man
ever finds immediately presented to his own personal insight that
totality of data upon which this verdict is said to depend? {112} The
common-sense of mankind? What mortal man is there who ever finds
incorporated in his flickering, fleeting, crumbling, narrow moments of
personal experience the calm and secure insight which this
common-sense of mankind, or of enlightened mankind, is said to
possess?
No, the common-sense of mankind is, for us all, a sort of
super-individual insight, to which we appeal without ourselves fully
possessing it. This "_common_"-sense of mankind is just the sense
_which no man of us all ever individually possesses_. For us all it
is, indeed, something superhuman. We spend part of our busy little
lives in somewhat pretentiously undertaking to report its dicta. But
it is simply one of the countless forms in which we conceive the wider
insight to be incorporated. _The true rational warrant for this
confidence of ours lies in the fact that whatever else is real, some
form of such a wider insight, some essentially super-individual and
superhuman insight is real_. For unless it is real our opinions,
including any opinion that we may have that doubts or questions or
denies its reality, are all equally meaningless. Thus even when we
appeal to common-sense we really appeal to a genuine but super-human
insight.
Let us not here spend time, however, upon analysing this or that
special form in which we are accustomed, for one special purpose or
another, to conceive the wider insight. What is clear is that we
constantly, and in every opinion, in every confession of {113}
ignorance appeal to such an insight. That such an insight is real,
must be presupposed even in order to assert that our present opinions
are errors. What interests us most at this point is, however, this,
that whatever else the whole real universe is, the real universe
exists only in case it is the object, and the very being, of such an
insight, of such an inclusive experience, of such a view of what is.
For, when you hold any opinions whatever about the real world, or
about any of its contents, characters, or values, your opinions are
either true or false, and are true or false by virtue of their actual
conformity to the live insight which experiences what makes them true
or false, and which therefore _ipso facto_ experiences what the real
world is. If there is no such world-possessing insight, then, once
more, your opinions about the world are neither true nor false. Or,
otherwise stated, if there is no such inclusive insight there is no
world. To the real world, then, this insight which comprehends the
world, and which knows whatever is true to be true, and whatever is
false about the world to be false--to the real world this insight, I
say, belongs. And the whole world belongs to it and is its object and
essence. Whatever is real is real for that insight, and is in its
experience, and exists as its possession, and as its well-known and
well-comprehended content, and as its image and expression and
meaning.
All this I say, as you may note, not because I hold in high esteem any
of our private human {114} opinions, but only because, _except in the
light of such an all-seeing comprehension of facts as they are, our
individual opinions about the world cannot even be false_. For
opinion, in all its fleeting blindness and in its human chaos of
caprices, is ceaselessly an appeal to the judge, to the seer, to the
standard experience, to the knower of facts as they are, to the wider
view, to the decisive insight. And opinions about reality in its
wholeness, about the world, about the all, are appeals to the
all-judging insight, to the all-seeing view, to the knowledge and
experience that grasps the totality of facts, to the widest outlook,
to the deepest insight, to the absolute rational decision. If this be
so, then an opinion to the effect that there exists no such widest and
deepest insight, and no such final view, is itself just such an appeal
to the final insight, simply because it is an opinion about reality.
To assert then that there is no largest view, no final insight, no
experience that is absolute, is to assert that the largest view
observes that there is no largest view, that the final insight sees
that there is no such insight, that the ultimate experience is aware
that there is no ultimate experience. And such an assertion is indeed
a self-contradiction.
This, I assert, is the only rational way of stating the nature of
opinion, of truth or error, and consequently of reality. This is the
synthesis which reason inevitably accomplishes whenever it rightly
views the nature and the implications of even our most flickering and
erroneous and uncertain {115} opinions. We can err about what you
will. But if we err, we simply come short of the insight to which we
are aiming to conform, and in the light of which our ideas get
absolutely all of their meaning. In every error, in every blunder, in
all our darkness, in all our ignorance, we are still in touch with the
eternal insight. We are always seeking to know even as we are known.
I have sought in this sketch to vindicate the general rights of
rational insight as against mere momentary or fragmentary intuition. I
have also tried to show you what synthesis of reason gives us a
genuinely religious insight.
"My first penitent," said the priest of our story, "was a murderer."
"And I," said the nobleman, "was this priest's first penitent."
"I am ignorant of the vast and mysterious real world"--thus says our
sense of human fallibility and weakness when we are first awakened to
our need of rational guidance. The saying is true. The mystery is
appalling. "I am ignorant of the real world." Yes; but reason,
reflecting upon the nature and the essential meaning of opinion, of
truth, of error, and of ignorance, points out to us this thesis: "That
of which I am ignorant is that about which I can err. But error is
failure to conform my momentary opinion to the very insight which I
mean and to which I am all the while appealing. Error is failure to
conform to the inclusive insight which {116} overarches my errors with
the heaven of its rational clearness. Error is failure to grasp the
very light which shines in my darkness, even while my darkness
comprehends it not. That of which I am ignorant is then essentially
the object of a super-human and divine insight."
"I am ignorant of the world. To be ignorant is to fail to grasp the
object of the all-inclusive and divine insight." That is the
expression of our situation. Reason easily makes the fitting synthesis
when it considers the priest and the nobleman. I ask you to make the
analogous synthesis regarding the world and the divine insight. This
synthesis here takes form in concluding that the world is the object
of an all-inclusive and divine insight, which is thus the supreme
reality.
I have but sketched for you the contribution of reason to our quest.
This contribution will seem to many of you too abstract and too
contemplative to meet vital religious needs. In fact, what I have said
will mean little to you unless you come to see how it can be
translated into an adequate expression in our active life. To this
task of such a further interpretation of the mission of the reason as
a guide of life my next lecture shall be devoted.
{117}
IV
THE WORLD AND THE WILL
{118}
{119}
IV
THE WORLD AND THE WILL
I could not discuss, in my last lecture, the office of the reason as a
source of religious insight without sketching for you what insight I
personally regard as the most important result of the right use of
reason. This sketch was of course, in my own mind, a part of an
extended body of philosophical doctrine. It does not lie within the
intent of these lectures to present a system of philosophy. I ought,
nevertheless, to begin this lecture by saying a few words about the
relation of my last discussion to certain religious and philosophical
opinions of which you have all heard, and by indicating why it has
seemed to me worth while to call your attention to the mere hint of a
philosophy with which the last discussion closed. Having thus
indicated the setting in which I want you to see the brief exposition
of a general theory which I find to be indispensable for our main
purpose, I shall devote the rest of this lecture to the task of
connecting the insight which reason gives to us with the main purpose
of our inquiry, namely, with the undertaking to know the nature and
the way of salvation. Reason is of importance in so {120} far as what
it shows us enables us to direct our will and to come into closer
touch with truths which are not only theoretical, but also practical.
We shall therefore discuss at some length the relation of our rational
knowledge to our active life, and the relation of our rational will to
the world in which we are to work out our salvation if we can.
I
The nature and the teachings of the human reason have interested
philosophers from very nearly the beginning of philosophical inquiry.
What I told you about the subject in our former discussion reports a
decidedly modern version of a very old opinion--an opinion which has
been repeatedly examined, revised, assailed, and defended. Let me say
a word as to its history.
Plato held that, through our reason, we are able to rise beyond the
world of sense and to hold communion with a realm of ideally
significant and eternal being. What Plato really meant by his ideal
realm, and in what sense the world of what Plato called the eternal
realities, the forms or ideas, could be, as Plato held it to be, a
divine world, in its worth and dignity, later philosophy repeatedly
attempted to grasp.
The results of such philosophical thinking have deeply affected the
history of religion and still influence the religious interest of all
of you. One {121} version of that philosophical tradition whose origin
is in the thought of Plato--a late version, and also one greatly
transformed by motives of which Plato had known in his day nothing, is
the familiar version to which, in the last lecture, I in passing
alluded--the prologue to our Fourth Gospel. You will all agree that
this prologue attempts to state a religious insight. The relation of
this New Testament view of the world of the reason to the doctrine
which still later came to be formulated by the theologians of the
Christian Church I have here not time to discuss. It is enough now to
say that an opinion according to which our articulate reason, as well
as the more inarticulate intuition of faith, has some sort of access
to the world of the "Logos," and some sort of participation in a
genuine apprehension of the divine life, has come to form part of the
religion in which you all have been trained. In so far, then, it is
surely right to say that the reason, as the philosophers have defined
it, has been an actual source of religious opinion and experience.
In modern times, and especially since Kant, philosophy has been led to
see the older doctrines of the human reason, and of its knowledge of
the divine, from various decidedly novel points of view. The sketch of
a theory of the reason as a source of insight, which I gave, was
influenced by Kant's famous teaching about the nature and unity of
human experience. Kant stated this theory as the doctrine that all our
human knowledge involves an {122} interpretation of the data of our
senses in the light of what he called the "unity of apperception." In
less technical terms, Kant's meaning is that all facts of which a
human experience can obtain knowledge are known to us as the possible
objects of an insight which we conceive to be virtually one, as the
insight of our own truly knowing Self, and as the insight without
reference to which no opinion of ours has any sense whatever. This one
cognitive Self is, according to Kant, the conceived virtual subject or
possessor of all that we view as our experience. And this presupposed
unity is the condition of all our knowledge.
But Kant's doctrine, as he stated it, is in many ways problematic and
dissatisfying. The form of philosophical idealism which I myself
defend goes in certain respects far beyond Kant's position. The "one
experience," in which, according to him, we find a place for any fact
which we conceive as knowable at all, is defined by Kant as a virtual
insight, not, so to speak, a live and concrete consciousness. He
regards it also as purely human, as a knowledge of appearances--not of
any ultimate realities. The form of philosophical idealism which, at
the last time, I outlined depends, however, upon simply
universalising, and rendering live and concrete, Kant's conception of
the Self, of the united experience, to which we appeal, and in the
light of which our opinions get all their sense--all their character
and value as true or as false opinions. {123} This one Self, this
unity of experience, to which we always appeal, cannot consistently be
viewed by us as merely our own individual or private self, or as
merely human; and its insight cannot rationally be interpreted merely
as an insight into what is apparent, that is into what is not really
real. Nor can it be viewed merely as something virtual--a possible
unity of experience, to which we would appeal if we could. In my
opinion it must be conceived as more live and real and concrete and
conscious and genuine than are any of our passing moments of fleeting
human experience. It must be viewed as an actual and inclusive and
divinely rational knowledge of all facts in their unity. And the very
nature of facts, their very being as facts, must be determined by
their presence as objects in the experience of this world-embracing
insight. This was the philosophical theory that I sketched in my
former lecture. This is my view of what reason teaches.
Now this thesis, this somewhat remote descendant of the Platonic
doctrine of the function of reason, this modern version of the concept
of the "Logos" as the light that "shineth in the darkness" of our
ordinary human experience, this revision and transformation of the
Kantian theory of knowledge, has, by virtue of the long history of the
doctrine in question, and by virtue of the difficult considerations
upon which, as a philosophical thesis, it rests, a highly technical
character. This technical aspect of the teaching in question forbids,
in these lectures. {124} any adequate exposition, or criticism, or
defence of its problems and of its merits as a basis for a system of
philosophy. And you will surely not find unnatural the fact that a
study of the function of the reason should indeed involve such
technical and complex issues. I mention these issues only to say at
once how and how far, in the present lectures, we are concerned with
them.
We are seeking a way of salvation. And in these discussions we are
mainly concerned with the sources of insight into what that way is. I
am not attempting to work out, in your presence, a systematic
philosophy. Why, then, have I introduced this mere sketch of
philosophical idealism into our inevitably crowded programme? I
answer: I have done so because I have wanted to illustrate the office
of reason by telling you in my own way how I view the matter. The
reason is, in fact, a source of religious insight to many people who
do not reflect upon its deliverances as philosophers seek to reflect,
and who may not agree with me in what little I have time to expound of
my own philosophical opinions. My effort has been to tell in
philosophical terms what such people really mean.
In such people reason very often shows itself indirectly and
concretely, by its fruits, through their deeds, through their purpose,
in a word, through their will. We shall ere long see how this can be
and is the case. Reason is present in such lives and inspires them. A
genuine relation to some {125} spirit of all truth, a perfectly
sincere touch with an articulate and universal insight, a translation
of the lesson and the meaning of the synthetic reason into a definite
practical postulate that life shall be and is an essentially
reasonable and therefore an essentially divine enterprise--such I find
to be the essence of the religious insight of many serious minds.
Beside the earnest devotion of such people to the business which life
assigns to them, the mere theories of a philosopher may seem shadowy
enough. And if such people comment upon what they hear of my
philosophy by saying that they do not understand it, and doubt whether
they agree with it, I am not on that account at all disposed to
complain of them, or to assert that reason is to them no source of
religious insight. I take pleasure, however, in observing that, in my
opinion, they agree with my doctrine in the concrete, and express it
in their religious life far better than I can express it in my
technical terms, however much these people may fail to grasp what my
terms mean or to accept my formulations. The best expression of your
reason is your life, if you live as one enlightened from above ought
to live. You are not obliged to accept a technical formula in order to
embody the spirit of that formula in your daily work. I know many men
who are far more the servants and ministers of the true rational
insight than, in my present human life, I shall ever succeed in
becoming, and who, nevertheless, either are impatient of every {126}
philosophical theory, or, if philosophically trained, are opposed to
me in my philosophy.
Nevertheless, I need to express, in my own way, what is the insight
that is really at the heart of the lives of just such people. What I
am first interested in emphasising is of course this, that, in my
opinion, my interpretation of the insight of which reason is the
source, actually expresses one important aspect of the spirit in which
those live whom I regard as the true servants of the divine reason.
But my interest in the matter does not cease here. I can, of course,
express my opinions only in the terms that appeal to me. But whatever
you think of my formulas, I am very anxious to have you see that, as
the life of such people convincingly shows, reason has been, and is, a
source of religious insight to them, and that our philosophical
differences relate simply to the way in which we formulate our
interpretation of the meaning of this source.
Reason has been such a source of insight. That is true as an
historical fact. If you can find anything in the Platonic dialogues
which appeals to you as involving an insight that has religious value,
you must recognise this truth. It is a mere matter of history that
Christian doctrine as it has come down to us is, in one aspect,
profoundly affected by Plato's influence. The myth of the men in the
cave, in the "Platonic Republic," the myth in Plato's "Phaedrus,"
which tells about the banishment of the soul from its heavenly life
and from its intercourse with the {127} ideal world, and which
interprets all our loftier human loves as a longing of the soul for
its divine home land--these myths are allegories which Plato intended
to illustrate his own view of what reason teaches us. These myths
express in figurative speech a philosophy that actually affects to-day
your own religious interests. For instance, this philosophy influences
your traditional conception of God, and your ideas about the immortal
life of the soul. And if the prologue of the Fourth Gospel seems to
you to contain any truth, your religious ideas are again moulded by a
form of ancient philosophy which dealt with the nature and with the
insight of the reason. My own sketch of modern philosophy is but a
reinterpretation of the very truth which that ancient doctrine
attempted to portray. Historically, then, some of your religious
opinions are actually due to the work of the reason. My philosophy
simply tries to interpret to you this work.
And reason not only has been, but now is, such a source of insight.
And this is the case whenever you try to apply the "rule of reason" to
any problem of your life, and hereby gain a confidence that, by being
as reasonable and fair as you can, you are learning to conform your
life to the view which, as you suppose, an all-wise God takes of its
meaning. My philosophy simply tries to tell you why you have a right
to hold that an all-wise being is real.
I am anxious, I say, to have such facts about the {128} office of
reason recognised, whatever you may think of my philosophy. And this
is my purpose when I use my philosophy merely to illustrate the office
of reason. For indispensable as individual religious experience is, in
all the capriciousness of its feelings--indispensable also as social
religious experience is, with all its insistence upon human love and
also upon human religious convention--the synthetic use of the reason,
that is, the systematic effort "to see life steadily and see it
whole," is also indispensable. The recent efforts to make light of the
work of reason--efforts to which, at the last lecture, I directed
your attention, would tend, if taken by themselves, to result in
basing religion upon an inarticulate occultism, upon a sort of
psychical research that would regard whatever witch may peep and
mutter, whatever mystic may be unable to tell what he means, whatever
dumb cry of the soul may remain stubbornly inarticulate, as a _more_
promising religious guide than is any form of serious and far-seeing
devotion to the wider insight, which ought to survey life and to light
our path.
Let my own appeal to philosophy, then, even if you do not agree with
my formulas, stand as my protest against occultism and against the
exclusive devotion to the inarticulate sources of religious insight.
That I also prize the perfectly indispensable office of the more
child-like intuitions, when they occupy their true place, you already
know from my first two lectures. We cannot in our present life {129}
do without these child-like intuitions. We cannot be just to them
without aiming to live beyond them and to put away childish things.
II
If my interpretation of the reason thus gets its worth from the fact
that it attempts by a formula simply to illustrate the view which the
servants of the divine reason actually and practically translate into
life, and express through their spirit and through their deeds, you
may hereupon object that my view of the reason as a source of
religious insight still seems to you to be one which it is not easy to
translate into life at all. What does it profit a man, you will say,
to view the whole world as the object present to an all-embracing and
divine insight? How does such a view give a man the power to live more
reasonably than he otherwise would live? Is a world-embracing reason
that sees all things in their unity really that master of life whom
our simpler religious intuitions call upon us to seek as our Deliverer
from our natural chaos of desires? I have just asserted that there are
people who devote their lives to the service of such a divine reason.
But if the divine reason is eternal and perfect, and if it sees all
reality as an unity, and if this is its only function, how can any one
serve it at all? The eternal needs no help, you may insist, and
apparently has no concern for us. We need, for our {130} salvation,
something, or some personal deliverer, that can teach us not merely to
utter true assertions, but to live worthy lives. How does the insight
of the reason enlighten us in this respect? What would one do for a
divine Logos, for an all-observant and all-comprehending seer? Could
one love such a being, or devoutly commune with his perfect but
motionless wisdom? Is it true then, as I have just maintained it to be
true, that the insight of the reason, as I have expounded it in my
sketch of a philosophy, does really inspire the earnest and devoted
souls whose spirit I have attempted to express? Whatever they may
think of my philosophy, have I been just to their practical fervour
and to their energetic devotion? Do they merely say: God is
omniscient, therefore our life has its purpose defined, and we are
saved?
In brief, the insight of the reason, as I have been stating its dicta,
may seem to you, at best, to show us a sort of heaven which, as I
said, overarches our unwisdom with its starry clearness, but which as
you may now add we can neither reach, nor use, nor regard as a
rational inspiration of our active life. If it is real, it can observe
us, as it observes all reality. But can it save us? It can rise above
us. But can it enter into our will and give us a plan of life?
Granting the validity of the argument sketched in our last lecture,
what has the all-wise knower of truth to do with our salvation?
These are familiar objections to such a view as {131} mine. James
repeatedly urged them in his comment upon what he regarded as not
merely the fallibility, but the futility, or, as he said, the
"thinness" of the idealistic interpretation of the world of the
reason. Similar objections have been urged by many of the critics of
any doctrine similar to mine. Are these objections just?
III
I can answer such questions only through a certain gradual approach to
their complications. I want to show you how the insight of the reason
not only points out a heaven that overarches us, but also reveals an
influence that can inwardly transform us. To this end I shall next
illustrate, by instances taken from life, how some people actually
view their own personal relations to what they take to be the divine
reason. I shall thus indicate in what way such people connect this
divine reason with personal needs of their own which they regard as
vital. Then I shall show why this not only is so in the lives of some
people, but ought to be so for all of us. As a result we shall soon
find that, just as our first statement of the insight of reason, if
indeed it is a true statement, transforms our view of the sense in
which the world is real, so a deeper study of the relations of insight
to action transforms our first cruder notion of the reason itself, of
its office in life, and of the truth that it reveals.
{132}
I begin with illustrations taken from life. A former college student
of mine, some of whose papers upon his own religious experience I was
not very long ago privileged to read, undertook, in one of these
papers, to explain how, at the time, he viewed the place of prayer in
his own life. He was a man capable, upon the one hand, of deep emotion
and of rich inner life, but on the other hand highly self-critical and
disposed to doubt. After a somewhat plentiful early interest in
religion, the result of home training and of personal experience, he
had come, as he studied more, and looked about his world more
critically, to part company almost altogether with positive faiths
about religious matters. His childhood beliefs had dropped away.
Doubts and disbeliefs had taken their place. In opinion, when he wrote
his papers for me, he was mainly disposed to a pure naturalism. The
gods of the past had vanished from his life almost altogether.
"But," said he, in his account (I follow not his exact words but their
general sense), "one old religious exercise I have never quite given
up. That was and is prayer. A good while ago I dropped all
conventional forms of prayer. I did not say my prayers in the old way.
And when I prayed I no longer fancied that the course of nature or of
my luck was going to be altered for my sake, or that my prayers would
help me to avoid any consequences of my folly or my ignorance. I did
not pray to get anybody to mix in my affairs, so as to get me things
{133} that I wanted. But this was, and is, my feeling about prayer:
When things are too much for me, and I am down on my luck, and
everything is dark, I go alone by myself, and I bury my head in my
hands, and I think hard that God must know it all and will see how
matters really are, and understands me, and in just that way alone, by
understanding me, will help me. And so I try to get myself together.
And that, for me, is prayer."
I cannot repeat my student's precise form of expression. I think that
I express to you the spirit of what he wrote. In any case, this form
of prayer is not peculiar to that man. You see in what way the thought
of the divine wisdom became a practical thought for him--a thought at
once rational and, as far as it went, saving. When life shattered his
little human plans--well, he lifted up his eyes unto the hills. He won
a sort of conscious and reasonable union with the all-seeing life. He
did not ask its aid as a giver of good fortunes. He waited patiently
for the light. Now I do not think that to be an expression of the
whole insight of reason; but, so far as it went, that sort of prayer
was an essentially religious act. And for that youth it was also a
very practical act.
Let me turn to another case. Many years ago I well knew a man, much
older than myself, who has long since died. A highly intelligent man,
ambitious for the things of the spirit, he was also beset with some
defects of health and with many worldly {134} cares. His defects of
health made him sensitive to the sort of observation that his physical
weaknesses often attracted. In addition, he had enemies, and once had
to endure the long-continued trial of a public attack upon his
reputation--an attack from which he at length came forth triumphant,
but not without long suffering. On
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