350THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
“Oneness of mind and will with the divine mind and will is not the
future hope and aim of religion, but its very beginning and birth in
the soul. To enter on the religious life is to terminate the struggle. In that
act which constitutes the beginning of the religious life — call it faith, or
trust, or self-surrender, or by whatever name you will — there is involved
the identification of the finite with a life which is eternally realized. It is
true indeed that the religious life is progressive; but understood in the
light of the foregoing idea, religions progress is not progress towards, but
within the sphere of the Infinite. It is not the vain attempt by endless
finite additions or increments to become possessed of infinite wealth, but
it is the endeavor, by the constant exercise of spiritual activity, to appro-
priate that infinite inheritance of which we are already in possession. The
whole future of the religious life is given in its beginning, but it is given
implicitly. The position of the man who has entered on the religious
life is that evil, error, imperfection, do not really belong to him: they are
excrescences which have no organic relation to his true nature: they are
already virtually, as they will be actually, suppressed and annulled, and
in the very process of being annulled they become the means of spiritual
progress. Though he is not exempt from temptation and conflict, [yet]
in that inner sphere in which his true life lies, the struggle is over, the
victory already achieved. It is not a finite but an infinite life which the
spirit lives. Every pulse-beat of its [existence] is the expression and realiza-
tion of the life of God.”
1
You will readily admit that no description of the phenomena of
the religious consciousness could be better than these words of your
lamented preacher and philosopher. They reproduce the very rapture
of those crises of conversion of which we have been hearing; they
utter what the mystic felt but was unable to communicate; and the
saint, in hearing them, recognizes his own experience. It is indeed
gratifying to find the content of religion reported so unanimously.
But when all is said and done, has Principal Caird — and I only use
him as an example of that whole mode of thinking — transcended
the sphere of feeling and of the direct experience of the individual,
and laid the foundations of religion in impartial reason? Has he
made religion universal by coercive reasoning, transformed it from
a private faith into a public certainty? Has he rescued its affirmations
from obscurity and mystery?
1
John Caird: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, London and New York,
1880, pp. 243–250, and 291–299, much abridged.
PHILOSOPHY
351
I believe that he has done nothing of the kind, but that he has
simply reaffirmed the individual’s experiences in a more generalized
vocabulary. And again, I can be excused from proving technic-
ally that the transcendentalist reasonings fail to make religion
universal, for I can point to the plain fact that a majority of scholars,
even religiously disposed ones, stubbornly refuse to treat them as
convincing. The whole of Germany, one may say, has positively
rejected the Hegelian argumentation. As for Scotland, I need only
mention Professor Fraser’s and Professor Pringle-Pattison’s memor-
able criticisms, with which so many of you are familiar.
1
Once more,
I ask, if transcendental idealism were as objectively and absolutely
rational as it pretends to be, could it possibly fail so egregiously to
be persuasive?
What religion reports, you must remember, always purports to
be a fact of experience: the divine is actually present, religion says,
and between it and ourselves relations of give and take are actual.
If definite perceptions of fact like this cannot stand upon their own
feet, surely abstract reasoning cannot give them the support they are
in need of. Conceptual processes can class facts, define them, inter-
pret them; but they do not produce them, nor can they reproduce
their individuality. There is always a plus, a thisness, which feeling
alone can answer for. Philosophy in this sphere is thus a secondary
function, unable to warrant faith’s veracity, and so I revert to the
thesis which I announced at the beginning of this lecture.
1
A. C. F
RASER
: Philosophy of Theism, second edition, Edinburgh and London, 1899,
especially part ii. chaps. vii. and viii.; A. S
ETH
[P
RINGLE
-P
ATTISON
]: Hegelianism and Person-
ality, Ibid., 1890, passim.
The most persuasive arguments in favor of a concrete individual Soul of the world, with
which I am acquainted, are those of my colleague, Josiah Royce, in his Religious Aspect of
Philosophy, Boston, 1885; in his Conception of God, New York and London, 1897; and
lately in his Aberdeen Gifford Lectures, The World and the Individual, 2 vols., New York
and London, 1901–02. I doubtless seem to some of my readers to evade the philosophic duty
which my thesis in this lecture imposes on me, by not even attempting to meet Professor
Royce’s arguments articulately. I admit the momentary evasion. In the present lectures,
which are cast throughout in a popular mould, there seemed no room for subtle metaphysical
discussion, and for tactical purposes it was sufficient, the contention of philosophy being
what it is (namely, that religion can be transformed into a universally convincing science),
to point to the fact that no religious philosophy has actually convinced the mass of thinkers.
Meanwhile let me say that I hope that the present volume may be followed by another, if I
am spared to write it, in which not only Professor Royce’s arguments, but others for monistic
absolutism shall be considered with all the technical fullness which their great importance
calls for. At present I resign myself to lying passive under the reproach of superficiality.