334
THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
philosophic and theological formulas are secondary products, like
translations of a text into another tongue. But all such statements
are misleading from their brevity, and it will take the whole hour
for me to explain to you exactly what I mean.
When I call theological formulas secondary products, I mean that
in a world in which no religious feeling had ever existed, I doubt
whether any philosophic theology could ever have been framed.
I doubt if dispassionate intellectual contemplation of the universe,
apart from inner unhappiness and need of deliverance on the one
hand and mystical emotion on the other, would ever have resulted
in religious philosophies such as we now possess. Men would have
begun with animistic explanations of natural fact, and criticised
these away into scientific ones, as they actually have done. In
the science they would have left a certain amount of “psychical
research,” even as they now will probably have to re-admit a certain
amount. But high-flying speculations like those of either dog-
matic or idealistic theology, these they would have had no motive
to venture on, feeling no need of commerce with such deities.
These speculations must, it seems to me, be classed as over-beliefs,
buildings-out performed by the intellect into directions of which
feeling originally supplied the hint.
But even if religious philosophy had to have its first hint supplied
by feeling, may it not have dealt in a superior way with the matter
which feeling suggested? Feeling is private and dumb, and unable
to give an account of itself. It allows that its results are mysteries
and enigmas, declines to justify them rationally, and on occasion
is willing that they should even pass for paradoxical and absurd.
Philosophy takes just the opposite attitude. Her aspiration is to
reclaim from mystery and paradox whatever territory she touches.
To find an escape from obscure and wayward personal persuasion
to truth objectively valid for all thinking men has ever been the
intellect’s most cherished ideal. To redeem religion from unwhole-
some privacy, and to give public status and universal right of way
to its deliverances, has been reason’s task.
I believe that philosophy will always have opportunity to labor
at this task.
1
We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the
1
Compare Professor W. W
ALLACE
’
S
Gifford Lectures, in Lectures and Essays, Oxford,
1898, pp. 17 ff.
PHILOSOPHY
335
intellect from participating in any of our functions. Even in solilo-
quizing with ourselves, we construe our feelings intellectually. Both
our personal ideals and our religious and mystical experiences must
be interpreted congruously with the kind of scenery which our think-
ing mind inhabits. The philosophic climate of our time inevitably
forces its own clothing on us. Moreover, we must exchange our
feelings with one another, and in doing so we have to speak, and to
use general and abstract verbal formulas. Conceptions and con-
structions are thus a necessary part of our religion; and as modera-
tor amid the clash of hypotheses, and mediator among the criticisms
of one man’s constructions by another, philosophy will always have
much to do. It would be strange if I disputed this, when these very
lectures which I am giving are (as you will see more clearly from
now onwards) a laborious attempt to extract from the privacies of
religious experience some general facts which can be defined in
formulas upon which everybody may agree.
Religious experience, in other words, spontaneously and inevitably
engenders myths, superstitions, dogmas, creeds, and metaphysical
theologies, and criticisms of one set of these by the adherents of
another. Of late, impartial classifications and comparisons have
become possible, alongside of the denunciations and anathemas by
which the commerce between creeds used exclusively to be carried
on. We have the beginnings of a “Science of Religions,” so-called;
and if these lectures could ever be accounted a crumb-like contribu-
tion to such a science, I should be made very happy.
But all these intellectual operations, whether they be constructive
or comparative and critical, presuppose immediate experiences as their
subject-matter. They are interpretative and inductive operations,
operations after the fact, consequent upon religious feeling, not
coördinate with it, not independent of what it ascertains.
The intellectualism in religion which I wish to discredit pre-
tends to be something altogether different from this. It assumes to
construct religious objects out of the resources of logical reason
alone, or of logical reason drawing rigorous inference from non-
subjective facts. It calls its conclusions dogmatic theology, or
philosophy of the absolute, as the case may be; it does not call
them science of religions. It reaches them in an a priori way, and
warrants their veracity.
336
THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
Warranted systems have ever been the idols of aspiring souls.
All-inclusive, yet simple; noble, clean, luminous, stable, rigorous,
true; — what more ideal refuge could there be than such a system
would offer to spirits vexed by the muddiness and accidentality
of the world of sensible things? Accordingly, we find inculcated
in the theological schools of to-day, almost as much as in those
of the fore-time, a disdain for merely possible or probable truth,
and of results that only private assurance can grasp. Scholastics
and idealists both express this disdain. Principal John Caird, for
example, writes as follows in his Introduction to the Philosophy
of Religion: —
“Religion must indeed be a thing of the heart; but in order to elevate it
from the region of subjective caprice and waywardness, and to distinguish
between that which is true and false in religion, we must appeal to an
objective standard. That which enters the heart must first be discerned by
the intelligence to be true. It must be seen as having in its own nature a
right to dominate feeling, and as constituting the principle by which feel-
ing must be judged.
1
In estimating the religious character of individuals,
nations, or races, the first question is, not how they feel, but what they
think and believe — not whether their religion is one which manifests
itself in emotions, more or less vehement and enthusiastic, but what are
the conceptions of God and divine things by which these emotions are
called forth. Feeling is necessary in religion, but it is by the content or
intelligent basis of a religion, and not by feeling, that its character and
worth are to be determined.”
2
Cardinal Newman, in his work, The Idea of a University, gives
more emphatic expression still to this disdain for sentiment.
3
Theology, he says, is a science in the strictest sense of the word.
I will tell you, he says, what it is not — not “physical evidences”
for God, not “natural religion,” for these are but vague subjective
interpretations: —
“If,” he continues, “the Supreme Being is powerful or skillful, just so
far as the telescope shows power, or the microscope shows skill, if his
moral law is to be ascertained simply by the physical processes of the
animal frame, or his will gathered from the immediate issues of human
affairs, if his Essence is just as high and deep and broad as the universe
1
Op. cit., p. 174, abridged.
2
Ibid., p. 186, abridged and italicized.
3
Discourse II. § 7.
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