Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2019 with funding from 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 https://archive.org/details/somereligiousimpOOgeig 
 
Some Religious Impli¬ 
 cations of Pragmatism 
 
 JOSEPH ROY GEIGER 
 
 PHILOSOPHIC STUDIES 
 
 ISSUED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE DEPARTMENT OF 
 PHILOSOPHY OF THE UNIVERSITY OFCHICAGO 
 
 NUMBER 9 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 
 CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 
 
 THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY, New York 
 THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, London and Edinburgh 
 THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA, Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Fukuoka, Sendai 
 THE MISSION BOOK COMPANY, Shanghai 
 
The Department of Philosophy of the University of Chicago issues 
 a series of monographs in philosophy, including ethics, logic and meta¬ 
 physics, aesthetics, and the history of philosophy. The successive mono¬ 
 graphs are numbered consecutively with a view to their subsequent 
 publication in volumes. These studies are similar to the series of 
 Contributions to Philosophy , but do not contain psychological papers or 
 reprints of articles previously published. 
 
SOME RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF 
 
 PRAGMATISM 
 
SOME RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF 
 
 PRAGMATISM 
 
 JOSEPH ROY GEIGER 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 
 CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 
 
Copyright 1919 By 
 The University of Chicago 
 
 All Rights Reserved 
 
 Published November, 1919 
 
 Composed and Printed By 
 The University of Chicago Press 
 Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. 
 
1 
 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. Introduction .. i 
 
 II. The Religious Problem in Its Historical Setting ... 4 
 
 III. The Pragmatic Doctrines of Reality, Knowledge, and 
 
 Truth.10 
 
 IV. Religious Realities .17 
 
 V. Religious Knowledge.29 
 
 VI. Religion and Theology.36 
 
 VII. God .43 
 
 VIII. Religious Worship and Social Control.50 
 
 V 
 

 
CHAPTER I 
 
 INTRODUCTION 
 
 Two things there are, said Kant, which are worthy of man’s rever¬ 
 ence, “the starry heavens above and the moral law within.” This out¬ 
 burst of scientific enthusiasm and moral fervor may be fairly said to 
 epitomize the spirit and the motif of modern philosophy. Whenever 
 and wherever our modern life has presented its problems or vouchsafed • 
 its satisfactions one or the other, or both, of these interests have been 
 implicated. And philosophic thought has taken its cues accordingly. 
 Not every thinker has been as catholic in his interests as was Kant. To 
 some the “starry heavens above” have seemed all-important, while to 
 others the “moral law within” has made the strongest appeal. But 
 few thinkers, no matter how great their bias in one direction, have been 
 insensible to the problems lying in the other direction. And the pro- 
 foundest systems of philosophy have come from those men who, like 
 Kant, have been concerned with both the natural and the spiritual, the 
 real and the ideal, the “is” and the “ought,” have felt these to be incom¬ 
 patible and have sought to penetrate to some deeper principle of unity. 
 
 This more fundamental principle of unity, however, has not been 
 forthcoming. Spinoza’s “God or Nature,” Kant’s “Thing in Itself,” 
 Hegel’s “Absolute,” and Spencer’s “Unknowable”—all are but grim 
 testimonies of the persistence of the problem. It is as urgent today as 
 it was in an earlier and more metaphysical age. To be sure, we have 
 become suspicious of the possibility or the worth of “ultimate” principles 
 and impatient with any philosophy which attempts to formulate such 
 principles. With the development of scientific methods, our practical 
 problems have so multiplied and our immediate experience has become 
 so engaging as to leave us little time or inclination for the consideration 
 of problems of a more strictly philosophic character. Furthermore, as 
 knowledge has become more and more specialized, a sort of division of 
 labor has served to isolate the various fields of human interests and 
 activities, and to obscure the fact of their connections. But, while this 
 specialization of knowledge has its advantages, it likewise has its dangers. 
 The quality of the work done by the particular sciences is apt to be 
 impaired by too rigid an isolation of their respective fields. Life 
 itself is not made up of clearly marked off fields of interest and activities. 
 
2 
 
 SOME RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF PRAGMATISM 
 
 Its areas overlap. Of course, it is profitable for certain purposes and 
 within certain limits to treat some particular group of phenomena 
 without regard to the relation of these to other phenomena. But the 
 reason for this relative isolation of various groups of phenomena are 
 precisely those which look toward the enrichment of life and toward 
 establishing and maintaining its organic character. To the extent that 
 specialization furthers these ends it is legitimate. But there is no prac¬ 
 tical or scientific virtue in mere specialization of knowledge and isolation 
 of the sciences, as such. The very considerations which demand a divi¬ 
 sion of labor among the sciences likewise demand a more general science 
 or discipline whose task it is to serve as a sort of clearing house for the 
 adjustment of conflicts arising out of such an artificial way of conceiving 
 life. “Every science,” says Professor Dewey, “in its final standpoint 
 and working aims is controlled by conditions lying outside of itself— 
 conditions which subsist in the practical life of the time .” 1 But the 
 conditions with reference to which the standpoint and working aims 
 of a given science are to be determined must themselves be criticized 
 and evaluated from the point of view of other and broader areas of 
 experience. Such a criticism and evaluation can be accomplished only 
 by the sort of discipline indicated above. This discipline, to be sure, 
 cannot be a science of “first principles” in any ultimate or metaphysical 
 sense. It will not have access to realms of reality inaccessible to the 
 particular sciences. It must rely on the general method of procedure 
 employed by the particular sciences. That is to say, it must proceed 
 by means of hypothesis and experimentation. But it will construct 
 hypotheses which are relevant to its own data and problems and execute 
 its experiments accordingly. 
 
 And thus, in spite of the fact that the aims and the methods of 
 modern science would seem to leave no place for a philosophic dis¬ 
 cipline—indeed, because of this very fact, the demand for just such a 
 discipline is the most persistent and most vital scientific problem of our 
 day. In the words of a contemporary writer, “the demand (for a syn¬ 
 thesis of experience) remains, and with every new discovery of science, 
 every advance in the ideals of art and of the conduct of life, every 
 development in religious faiths, comes anew the task of philosophy—to 
 criticize and through criticism, to make a fresh attempt to interpret, 
 from the unity of reason, the manifold of life .” 2 
 
 x John Dewey, “Logical Conditions of a Scientific Treatment of Morality,” 
 Decennial Publications of the University of Chicago , III. 
 
 2 J. H. Tufts, The Teleology of Kant , p. 48. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 3 
 
 Now, the most notable instance, perhaps, of the need of this type 
 of philosophic criticism and interpretation is in connection with the 
 “conflict” between theology and the natural sciences. Facts could be 
 cited to show that our modern life has suffered immeasurably by reason 
 of the ambiguity and confusion growing out of this “conflict.” The 
 natural sciences and theology do not, as is commonly held, occupy 
 independent and isolated spheres. The areas of experience with which 
 they are concerned overlap. They have common interests. The rela¬ 
 tive and abstract concepts with which they severally operate are not 
 adequate to serve as “cosmic principles,” or even to provide the foun¬ 
 dations of “independent ” systems of knowledge. Both theology and the * 
 sciences are confronted with problems for the solution of which they 
 must look beyond their own immediate data. This means that for the 
 purposes of these problems the categories which they respectively 
 employ need themselves to be made the objects of scientific scrutiny— 
 to be criticized and interpreted from the point of view of other areas 
 of experience. But there has been too little of this sort of thing. On 
 the one hand, theology, relying upon a supernatural revelation or upon 
 an equally supernatural reason, has dogmatically asserted its self- 
 sufficiency and has persistently ignored the facts of science. On the 
 other hand, science, having paid so dearly for its emancipation from 
 theological prejudice, has come to doubt that “any good thing can come 
 out of Nazareth.” It has usually explained religious phenomena by 
 explaining them away. It has measured the truth of religious ideas by 
 showing that these ideas cannot be true. 
 
 Now this dilemma of a theology which is not scientific enough and 
 a science with little or no appreciation of the religious point of view is 
 a constant challenge to any way of thinking which presumes to effect 
 by criticism and interpretation a greater unity within the several areas 
 of experience. This study is undertaken from the point of view of the 
 urgency of this challenge. It is concerned with the religious problem 
 as it has come to be formulated in the history of modern thought. It is 
 proposed to examine this problem in the light of its historical background, 
 and more particularly, to determine what implications there are for an 
 adequate treatment of it from the point of view of the current philo¬ 
 sophical movement known as “pragmatism.” 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN ITS HISTORICAL SETTING 
 
 The religious problem as it has persisted in modern philosophy is 
 but a part of the more general problem of epistemology. The epistemo¬ 
 logical point of view is the philosophic articulation of the difficulties 
 incident to the breakdown of the doctrine of supernatural revelation. 
 These difficulties were at first essentially theological. Mediaeval 
 theology was the foundation of the entire social and political super¬ 
 structure comprising the secular world of the Middle Ages. It acquired 
 the prestige and power essential to such a position through its doctrines 
 of supernatural revelation and divine authority. And the historical 
 reasons for the development of these doctrines are obvious. In the first 
 place, the Church was the source of all learning and culture throughout 
 the “Dark Ages.” It was the school wherein the western races, but 
 lately emerged from barbarism, learned the lessons of self-control and 
 self-direction. To meet the demands made upon it, the Church needed 
 to be sure of itself; it must speak in no uncertain terms; its utterances 
 must be authoritative. To this end it assimilated the doctrines of 
 Hebrew religion, the ideas of Greek philosophy and art, and the prin¬ 
 ciples of Roman law, formulated these into an elaborate system of dogmas 
 and constructed thereon a theory of the world. No method was at hand 
 for criticizing and interpreting these elements of culture, inherited from 
 the past, in the light of present conditions and needs. The prophetic 
 insight of the Hebrew seers, the speculative and creative genius of the 
 Greek philosophers and artists, the practical wisdom of the Roman 
 jurists—these belonged to a day that was dead. The best that moral 
 earnestness, unillumined by native genius and untaught by personal 
 experience, could do was to fall back on the ideas and institutions of an 
 earlier and wiser age and stamp these with the authority of a divine 
 revelation. 
 
 But the urgency of the immediately practical situation was not the 
 only motive for the dogmatism of mediaeval theology. Its ultimate 
 concern was, not to provide the foundations of the world that now is, 
 but rather to point the way to the world that is to be. It was not so 
 much concerned with establishing and maintaining the natural order 
 as with mediating to immortal souls the reality of the supernatural order. 
 
 4 
 
RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN ITS HISTORICAL SETTING 
 
 5 
 
 Thus the religious object at this time was the supernatural or the trans- 
 experiential order as over against the natural order as given in everyday 
 experience. The religious object, however, was not always so conceived. 
 An empirical study of the origin and development of religions serves 
 to eliminate certain intellectualistic presuppositions as to the essential 
 character of the religious interest. In particular, it appears that the 
 effort to describe primitive religions as involving a more or less conscious 
 attitude of worship toward supernatural beings or deities, or as involving 
 a more or less conscious sense of communion with a supernatural order, 
 is based on a false analogy growing out of an inadequate psychological 
 analysis. A more adequate analysis from the point of view of functional 
 psychology shows that primitive religion so far from being essentially 
 intellectualistic, or so far from involving supernatural factors, was bound 
 up with the vital life-giving, life-preserving activities of the social group, 
 and was in reality the expression of the group’s attitude toward these 
 activities. The origin of religion is to be sought in the origin of the 
 social consciousness. “The religious consciousness is to be identified 
 
 with the consciousness of the greatest values of life.This sense 
 
 of value is the feeling of the worth of life which expresses itself in the 
 demand for self-preservation .” 1 Whatever objects preserve and promote 
 life, such as sources of food supply, means of social organization, and 
 the like, come to have religious significance and finally get themselves 
 accepted and worshiped as deities. But these deities are not necessarily 
 supernatural. They simply represent the highest social values. And 
 this conception of the divine as the embodiment of the highest social 
 values persists throughout the history of religions. This accounts for 
 its constantly changing content. For example, in the earlier periods of 
 Hebrew history, the divine was identified with certain forms of animal 
 life which happened to be the chief source of food supply. Later on 
 when the tribes united to form one social and political organization, the 
 maintenance of the integrity of this organization against the trickery 
 and the treachery of hostile groups came to be the matter of supreme 
 concern, whereupon the divine was conceived after the fashion of a 
 mighty monarch, whose function it was to preserve the social and political 
 integrity of his people. With the downfall of the nation and the collapse 
 of the existing social order, new values were conceived and embodied 
 in the person of Yahweh. These new values were partly ethical. 
 Yahweh could no longer be a tribal or national god and retain the 
 respect of his defeated and disheartened people. He must henceforth 
 1 E. S. Ames, The Psychology of Religious Experience, p. 168. 
 
6 
 
 SOME RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF PRAGMATISM 
 
 be international. His interests must be world-wide. He could not be 
 concerned with the destiny of nations as such, but only with the manner 
 in which nations work out his righteous will and thereby serve the ends 
 of truth and justice. But this high-water mark in Hebrew religion was 
 reached by only a few of its prophets and seers. The rank and file of 
 the people continued to look forward to the restoration of their historical 
 kingdom, in a natural way, until events had gone so far and their political 
 situation had become so desperate that there could no longer be any hope 
 of a natural restoration. Then began the apocalyptic movement in 
 Hebrew religion. Yahweh was now thought of, indeed, as a world-god; 
 but he was, nevertheless, supposed to be concerned with the fortunes 
 of a “chosen’’ people. In the “fulness of time” he would terminate the 
 present order of things by a cataclysmic exercise of his power and usher 
 in a new dispensation in the interest of his followers. 
 
 The religious object thus assumes for the Hebrews an essentially 
 supernatural character. It was to be profoundly modified, however, 
 by its contact with Greek metaphysics. Not long after the final down¬ 
 fall of the Hebrew nation Greek society and civilization underwent a 
 similar disintegration. As a counterpart to the supernatural god and 
 supernatural world conceived by the Hebrews, as compensatory ideas, 
 the Greeks developed, on an immeasurably higher level of culture and 
 with thorough philosophical sophistication, the concepts of a metaphysi¬ 
 cally ultimate principle and of a realm of Perfect Being. Now in the 
 first centuries after Christ, when Christianity was finding it necessary 
 to formulate itself into a body of doctrines, both these concepts, namely, 
 the Hebrew “supernatural” and the Greek metaphysical ultimate, were 
 taken over and utilized. When they were finally assimilated by Chris¬ 
 tian theology, they came to stand for two definitely recognized traits 
 or aspects of the Divine Being, namely his personal, political, anthropo¬ 
 morphic activities and his super-personal, rational, metaphysically 
 ultimate signification. In the hands of Saint Thomas Aquinas, these 
 concepts were made to yield their full implications for the position and 
 the power of the Church. According to Saint Thomas there are to be 
 distinguished three realms of knowledge. The first of these is the realm 
 of reason, the second the realm of revelation, and the third the realm 
 of beatific vision or mystical insight. As to the first of these, it was held 
 that reason is a competent and legitimate method of knowledge in the 
 world of physical nature. By studying nature the reason will be inevi¬ 
 tably led to the notion of a divine intelligence—the metaphysical ultimate 
 of the Greeks. But a study of nature under the laws of reason will never 
 
RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN ITS HISTORICAL SETTING 
 
 7 
 
 yield any vital or personal knowledge of God. For example, reason 
 will never discover that God is a Trinity, or that he has vouchsafed to 
 redeem the world through the death of his Son and the divinely appointed 
 ordinances of the Church. These and other personal attitudes and 
 activities he chooses to acquaint man with independent of man’s 
 reason; and this he does through revelation. The third kind of knowl¬ 
 edge, that of beatific vision, is reserved for the saints and mystics in 
 this life and for all the faithful in the life to come. 
 
 Thus mediaeval theology was concerned with just those attributes 
 of the divine nature which were admittedly inaccessible to the reason. 
 Hence the doctrines of a revealed truth and of divine authority. Now, 
 with the breakdown of these doctrines at the time of the Renaissance 
 religious philosophy fell back upon the “inner light” of the individual 
 and by means of rational speculation rehabilitated theology. But as 
 soon as philosophy had time to criticize the work of its hands, it dis¬ 
 covered that its God was not the finite, personal God of the Hebrews 
 and of traditional theology, but rather the metaphysical ultimate of the 
 Greeks. This discovery was made in connection with the elimination of 
 miracles. Man’s reason demanded a perfect God, but a perfect God 
 would not need to resort to miracles to carry on the world-order. If a 
 perfect God made the world, the world must of necessity be the “best 
 of all possible worlds.” And there was obviously no occasion, in such a 
 world, for a personal, finite God. 
 
 But even the metaphysical God of deism and natural religion was 
 soon to be called in question. It was John Locke who took the first 
 step in this direction. When he declared that prior to all metaphysical 
 speculation an inquiry should be made into the nature, limits, and worth 
 of human knowledge, he set in motion a movement of epistemological 
 criticism, culminating in the philosophy of Hume and Kant, which put 
 an end once for all to the theological pretensions of dogmatic rationalism. 
 
 The critical philosophy of Hume and Kant stimulated the most 
 fruitful period of modern philosophy. The tendencies growing directly 
 out of the penetrating criticisms and the profoundly constructive sug¬ 
 gestions of these two systems fixed the main outlines of philosophic 
 thought throughout the nineteenth century and down to our own time. 
 It was in connection with these tendencies that the religious problem 
 assumed its most crucial form. We must indicate in a word what these 
 tendencies were. 
 
 In the first place there was a reaction against all theological pre¬ 
 tensions of philosophy and an emotional and pietistic reinstatement of 
 
8 
 
 SOME RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF PRAGMATISM 
 
 orthodox doctrines, including those of revelation and authority. This 
 movement assumed a vigorous and aggressive form and enjoyed an 
 extensive following during the first half of the century. After that it 
 was forced to make a number of far-reaching concessions to science and 
 to critical thought in general, so that today it can hardly be said to be 
 holding its own. As a counterpart of the revival of orthodox theology 
 there was a feeling of scientific emancipation from any sort of obligation 
 on the part of philosophy to theology. This new sense of scientific 
 freedom and intellectual daring came to be generalized into such phi¬ 
 losophic tendencies or movements as the materialism or “mechanism” 
 of C. Vogt and L. Buchner; the positivism of Auguste Comte and 
 J. S. Mill; the mystical agnosticism of Herbert Spencer; and the evolu¬ 
 tionistic monism of Haeckel and Ostwald. All these movements are 
 generally characterized by the one term, naturalism. A third tendency, 
 one having its roots in the transcendental idealism of Kant, and known 
 as the “new” or “objective” idealism, reached its climax in the system 
 of Hegel. During the last two or three decades this movement has been 
 given new life and vigor in England and America in the writings of such 
 men as the Cairds, T. H. Green, Bradley, Bosanquet, and Royce. A 
 fourth tendency was an attempt to develop the implications of the 
 Kantian dualism and thus to conceive reality from two perfectly inde¬ 
 pendent points of view, namely, from the point of view of the theoretical 
 reason and the practical reason, or moral intuition, respectively. The 
 most influential exponents of this type of doctrine are the theologian, 
 Ritschl, and the spiritualistic idealist, Rudolph Eucken. Finally, there 
 are two contemporary movements which have their roots partly in the 
 voluntaristic tendencies in the philosophy of Kant, but chiefly in the 
 more general movements of which the Kantian philosophy was but one 
 expression. These are the creative evolution of Henri Bergson and the 
 pragmatism of William James and John Dewey. Both of these move¬ 
 ments represent a reaction against intellectualism. But whereas the 
 former urges its criticisms in behalf of certain ultimate metaphysical 
 interests, the latter is concerned all the while with the practical interests 
 constituted by immediate experience. 
 
 Now it is with this last-named movement, namely, pragmatism, 
 that we are concerned in the study which we propose to undertake. All 
 the other types of doctrine indicated are implicated in the religious 
 problem, to be sure, and any adequate treatment of the problem must 
 take some account of them. We shall find it necessary, however, to 
 restrict our consideration of their bearing upon our problem to the fact 
 
RELIGIOUS PROBLEM IN ITS HISTORICAL SETTING 
 
 9 
 
 that they have fixed the form in which the problem presents itself. 
 More particularly, these types of doctrine have approached the religious 
 problem with certain presuppositions which predetermined the form 
 in which the problem must be recognized and treated. These presupposi¬ 
 tions have as a rule been concerned with epistemological and metaphysi¬ 
 cal considerations and have posed the question of the nature of religious 
 reality, the possibility of religious knowledge, and the truth of religious 
 ideas. The limits of our study will not permit an exposition of the 
 actual historical movements tending to fix the religious problem in these 
 forms. And, as a matter of fact, the purposes of our study do not require 
 it. It is sufficient to note that the sort of study we propose to make 
 must face the type of questions indicated above and must be prepared 
 to examine and criticize the metaphysical and epistemological presuppo¬ 
 sitions lying back of them. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 THE PRAGMATIC DOCTRINES OF REALITY, KNOWL¬ 
 EDGE, AND TRUTH 
 
 We come, then, to the consideration of the pragmatic point of view: 
 what are its implications for the religious problem ? The religious 
 problem in its historical form, as we have seen, concerns the reality 
 of the religious object, the possibility of religious knowledge, and the 
 truth of religious ideas. Now it is obvious that the competency of any 
 philosophical system or point of view to deal with the problem in this 
 form in any adequate way depends for the most part on its conception 
 of reality, its theory of knowledge, and its criterion of truth. Tradi¬ 
 tional philosophies might be shown to be wanting in the matter of their 
 religious implications at one or the other or all of these points. And 
 if pragmatism is to prove more fruitful or more suggestive for the inter¬ 
 pretation of religious realities and for the criticism and evaluation of 
 religious knowledge and truth, this must be by reason of its general 
 doctrines concerning reality, knowledge, and truth. 
 
 What, then, in the first place is its general doctrine concerning 
 reality ? What is its 'conception of the real ? To begin with, it must 
 be said that pragmatism has no doctrine of reality, i.e., ultimate reality, 
 or reality at large. It conceives the real in wholly empirical terms. It 
 knows nothing of a transcendental reality, whether in the form of the hy¬ 
 pothetical entities of natural science, or in the form of trans-experiential 
 “things-in-themselves.” It insists that whatever reality there is must 
 be constituted by experience. And by “ experience,” pragmatism does 
 not mean the piecemeal, chopped-up, done-with affair conceived by 
 traditional empiricism and accepted by rationalism as a true account 
 of what experience is. When it identifies reality with experience, it 
 proposes to take experience radically, i.e., just as it is, in all its immediacy 
 and with all its multitude of diverse interests. It would attribute 
 reality to permanence as well as to change, to product as well as to 
 process, to relations as well as to terms, to continuity and organization 
 as well as to discontinuity and flux. Conceived thus, experience is 
 its own excuse for existing. It has its own values. It sets its own 
 problems. It exhibits its own realities. And these empirical realities 
 are not to be construed as being in any sense the manifestations or 
 
 IO 
 
PRAGMATIC DOCTRINES 
 
 II 
 
 appearances of a more fundamental order of existence, or as posing a 
 problem of ultimate reality. 
 
 Pragmatism, then, has no theory of reality at large. Its funda¬ 
 mental postulate is that things are what they are experienced as—that 
 a thing’s reality consists in its being experienced as this, that, or the 
 other . 1 The doctrine that things are what they are experienced as is 
 not, however, to be identified with the fundamental presupposition of 
 idealism, namely, that the reality of things consists in their being 
 known. For knowing is only one among a number of equally natural 
 modes of experiencing. 
 
 To assume that because from the standpoint of the knowledge experience, 
 things are what they are known to be, therefore metaphysically, absolutely 
 without qualification, everything in its reality (as distinct from its appearance 
 or phenomenal occurrence) is what a knower would find it to be, is, from the 
 immediatist’s standpoint, if not the root of all philosophic evil, at least one 
 of its main roots. For this leaves out of account what the knowledge stand¬ 
 point is itself experienced as . 2 
 
 Metaphysically, knowing is no more real than any other mode of ex¬ 
 perience ; and metaphysically, reality is no more constituted by the know¬ 
 ing process than it is by any other process within experience. Pure 
 or immediate experience, to be sure, has its cognitive aspects. But 
 these aspects as being cognitive do not fix the character of other aspects 
 as being real. They have no inherently distinctive character elevating 
 them to a higher plane of reality. They are only things or events like 
 other experienced things or events, which, for the time being, and within 
 the limits of a given situation, have acquired significance and value 
 by reason of their being capable of standing for or referring to certain 
 other items of experience. So that their function is not that of mediating 
 a knowledge of realities which would otherwise remain outside of experi¬ 
 ence, or of representing existences which get their status in reality by 
 thus being known. Their function is rather that of serving as instru¬ 
 mentalities for referring to and anticipating, and thereby controlling, 
 future experience. 
 
 But the identification of reality with experience implies in the next 
 place that it is dynamic. It is all the while moving, changing, growing. 
 It exhibits spontaneity and novelty. Its future is undetermined. It 
 is still in the making. It is not the absolute flux of Heraclitus, to be 
 
 1 Dewey, Influence of Darwin on Philosophy , and Other Essays , p. 227. 
 
 2 Ibid., pp. 229-30. 
 
12 
 
 SOME RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF PRAGMATISM 
 
 sure. It has its continuities, its stable areas, its finished aspects. But 
 these do not make reality any the less dynamic. They do not have their 
 being apart from the process in which they were produced. They are 
 not out of the running. They are functions within the process. They 
 are the connecting links between the old and the new—the means of 
 controlling and directing the future course of events. Only a non- 
 empirical empiricism or a transcendental idealism could miss the moving, 
 changing, growing character of reality. Only a rationalism, hardened 
 to the desperate urgency of immediate experience, having no regard 
 for the practical issues of life, could overlook the fact that reality is not 
 in a state of equilibrium; that it is divided against itself, has its tensions 
 and conflicts; and that in readjusting itself at these points, it is acquir¬ 
 ing new momentum, giving itself new directions, effecting new realities. 
 In a world like this, equilibrium is the one thing impossible. There is 
 an ever recurrent conflict of tendencies. The course of things is con¬ 
 stantly meeting with obstacles, constantly being turned aside. And 
 these obstacles and conflicts furnish the conditions of change and 
 development; they are the occasion of readjustment and expansion. 
 
 Reality, then, for pragmatism is empirical; it is dynamic; and 
 finally, it is practical. In calling reality “practical” the pragmatist 
 means to assert that man’s interests and needs, his endeavors and 
 achievements, are all implicated in its structure and in its development. 
 Experience as the general mode of reality has, as we have seen, its 
 tensions and conflicts which prove to be the occasions of readjustment 
 and expansion. But these are not tensions and conflicts in general. 
 They are tensions and conflicts for someone at sometime. They con¬ 
 stitute specific situations. They imply the interaction of an organism 
 with certain other natural energies within an environing medium . 1 
 Their issue involves some participation on the part of the organism in 
 the course of things. If this participation is by way of direct response, 
 if it is a matter of blind submission, of brute acquiescence, the issue may 
 be said to have been mechanically determined. In that case reality 
 has readjusted itself, but not freely and prosperously. But the participa¬ 
 tion of the organism in the course of things may be indirect. Its response 
 may be suspended. The light of previous experience may be brought 
 to bear on the present situation, making it possible to anticipate future 
 consequences. If this be the case, the stimulus finally reacted to will 
 not be the brute fact of immediate experience, but this fact plus its 
 anticipated consequences. Participation will thus be intelligent, free, 
 
 1 Dewey, Creative Intelligence , p. n. 
 
PRAGMATIC DOCTRINES 
 
 13 
 
 prosperous. It will be a matter of controlling the course of things, 
 giving them direction and fixing their character as being good or bad . 1 
 
 In conceiving reality to be practical in the sense that human needs • 
 and aspirations and efforts are implicated in its structure and develop¬ 
 ment, pragmatism is but applying in a thorough going way the principle 
 insisted upon long ago by Kant . 2 The world, said Kant, grows up— 
 comes to be—within our experience. We help to make it. By the 
 operation of the laws of thought upon the raw material of sensation we 
 construct the only reality we know anything about. Furthermore, the 
 dominating principle of this creative process, the interest which is always * 
 present guiding and determining the constructive operations of thought, 
 is that of unity, that is, continuity and adjustment. It is true Kant 
 thinks of these constructive principles of thought, as having their origin 
 apart from the only function they can possibly perform, namely, the 
 organization of experience. And he likewise thinks of the end or the 
 ideal with reference to which the categories operate as having its origin 
 and sanction outside of experience and yet as making certain demands 
 upon thought in relation to experience. In these matters the prag¬ 
 matist has left Kant behind. He sees in the shift which Kant is forced 
 to make from a transcendental to a functional use of the categories of 
 thought, from a constitutive to a regulative use of the ideas of reason, 
 further evidence of the practical character of reality. The organizing 
 functions of experience and, the ideal and hypothetical principles or 
 ends, on the presupposition of which these functions operate, are them¬ 
 selves practical. They have their roots in experience. They have 
 formed themselves in the presence of and in contact with the subject- 
 matter which furnishes the occasions for their operations; have wrought 
 themselves out under the stress of human needs and wants and purposes. 
 
 So much for pragmatism’s doctrine concerning reality. How about 
 its theory of knowledge and its criterion of truth ? It is obvious that 
 with the conception of reality which has been indicated above, it must 
 have a radically different view of the function of knowledge and of the 
 nature of truth from those held in traditional circles. More particularly, 
 knowledge cannot be regarded as an “ external relation ” existing between 
 the organism and its environment. Nor can it be regarded as an act 
 whereby the mind of a knower becomes aware of an external and given 
 world. Nor, once more, can it be thought of as a process of constructing 
 and sustaining in ideal form the whole of reality as it may present itself 
 in momentary sensation. For pragmatism, the antitheses implied in 
 
 1 Ibid., p. 22. 3 Witter, Pragmatic Elements in Kant, pp. 16-17. 
 
14 
 
 SOME RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF PRAGMATISM 
 
 such statements of the knowledge process simply do not exist except 
 at the problematic moment when, by reason of the tension and conflict, 
 reality loses for the time being its immediate character and passes into 
 certain mediate phases, that is, assumes certain cognitive aspects. At 
 such a time, and with reference to the problem presented, the immediacy 
 of experience breaks up into a subject-object relationship; the individual 
 stands over against reality or the world; a process of analysis differ¬ 
 entiates certain elements or factors as constituting the situation and 
 these are articulated in certain series of connections. But these are 
 all abstract ways of taking reality. They have no significance outside 
 the problematic moment. If they facilitate a treatment of the problem 
 and thereby effect a readjustment of reality with itself, they give way 
 once more, as mediate phases of experience, to further immediate phases. 
 
 The pragmatist, then, has no problem of knowledge in general just 
 as he has no object of knowledge in general. He does not, like the ideal¬ 
 ist, generalize the subject-object relationship, appearing at the moment 
 of his problem, into a cosmic situation in which the individual, as a 
 knower in general, is set over against reality at large, and then proceed 
 to evoke a mysterious and miraculous knowledge to bring the individual 
 and reality together. Nor does he, like the realist, elevate the hypo¬ 
 thetical and trans-experiential elements into which natural science 
 analyzes the bit of reality directly implicated in its problem into meta¬ 
 physical entities and then assign to ideas the dubious task of repre¬ 
 senting or copying the world thus conceived. Knowledge, for the 
 pragmatist, is a function within experience. It has no transcendental 
 reference. It does not bring the individual into an awareness of an 
 object in general, or a reality at large. It refers to particular objects, 
 to concretely experienced things and events. But its reference to these 
 is not that of representing or copying existences which are given and 
 done with, but rather that of indicating the use to which these may 
 be put. 
 
 As a function within experience, as the characteristic instrument 
 through which reality, at its moments of tension and conflict, readjusts 
 and expands itself, knowledge is to be regarded as but one natural factor 
 or energy among other such factors or energies. It operates in a per¬ 
 fectly natural way. It does not effect a wholesale and instantaneous 
 change in things by merely bringing them within its scope. Its reaction 
 upon the course of events, the difference it makes in future experience, 
 is indirect. It does not annihilate “unwelcome facts”; it anticipates 
 them and thereby either controls them or avoids them. It does not 
 
PRAGMATIC DOCTRINES 
 
 15 
 
 evoke a prosperous turn of events by any mysterious, sleight-of-hand 
 trick; it secures the co-operation and support of natural energies by 
 the manner in which it enables the individual, as knower, to participate 
 in these processes, namely with foresight and purpose. 
 
 The only problems of knowledge when knowledge is thus conceived 
 are problems of specific structure and function. Precisely what sort 
 of an experience is the knowledge-experience ? How do natural energies 
 combine to produce it ? What are its occasions ? What consequences 
 may be expected to flow from it ? What differences will it make in future 
 experience? What is to determine its worth or validity? These are 
 the only legitimate problems of knowledge. They have a more-than- 
 particular reference, to be sure. And when solved, the conclusions 
 reached have a more-than-particular validity. But while such questions 
 most certainly constitute general problems respecting knowledge, they 
 are not problems of knowledge in general apart from the concrete 
 subject-matter furnishing its occasions and verifications. They do not 
 arise out of the epistemological predicament at all, and are not to be 
 solved with reference to epistemological considerations. 
 
 Now just as the pragmatist has no problem of reality at large, and 
 no problem of knowledge in general, so he has no problem of absolute 
 truth. For the pragmatist, truth is always concrete; it always has 
 specific reference. In talking about it he prefers to use the adjective 
 rather than the abstract noun. Certain aspects of experience, i.e., ideas, 
 are said to be true on occasion with reference to certain other aspects. 
 That is to say, there are no particular things or realities set off by 
 themselves as constituting a realm of truth. Truth, as Professor James 
 remarks, is something which happens to realities by reason of their 
 standing in a certain relation to other realities . 1 
 
 Truth is predicated of an idea with reference to its symbolic or repre¬ 
 sentative character, i.e., with reference to the fact that it stands for 
 and points to something else. But as was pointed out in the case of 
 knowledge, this reference or representation is not a matter of copying 
 or mirroring an external world, or of constructing in ideal form the whole 
 of reality. For in these cases truth would seem to be either impossible 
 or meaningless. The truth of ideas so employed would consist in the 
 degree of faithfulness with which the copying, or the reconstructing, as 
 the case might be, should be accomplished. But note the ambiguity 
 of such a criterion. On the one hand, if the external world or ultimate 
 reality were not present to consciousness so that the idea in question 
 
 1 James, Pragmatism, p. 201. 
 
i6 
 
 SOME RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF PRAGMATISM 
 
 might be referred to it for comparison, how would the comparison take 
 place and the relative faithfulness of the ideal copy or construction be 
 determined ? On the other hand, if reality were present to conscious¬ 
 ness, why must the mind resort to representing or reconstructing it in 
 ideas ? Ideas represent other realities in the sense that they express in 
 symbolic form the meaning and value of those realities in terms of the 
 consequences which may be expected to flow from them. 
 
 Sometimes the meaning and value so represented are well established 
 and are used simply as instruments or tools, ready-made, as it were, for 
 organizing and controlling further experience. At other times the idea 
 may be tentative. The context into which it is brought continues to 
 be ambiguous and problematic. It is uncertain whether the meaning 
 and value represented by the “concept” or “universal” is adequate for 
 interpreting the situation into which it is projected, or not. And it is 
 this uncertainty which raises the question of the truth, or the lack of 
 truth, attaching to the idea. If the meaning and value represented in 
 the idea is adequate for the interpretation of the ambiguous situation; 
 that is, if it actually succeeds in anticipating consequences and enables 
 the pent-up processes to move forward, thereby restoring the immediacy 
 of experience at that point, the idea is said to be true. If, on the other 
 hand, the readjustment of reality with itself is not thus facilitated, the 
 idea is said not to be true, in which case it must either be modified or, 
 if this prove impossible, be given up and another idea tried out. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 RELIGIOUS REALITIES 
 
 We are now in a position to indicate precisely what the religious 
 implications of pragmatism are. The type of questions which prag¬ 
 matism must face if it treats the religious problem in its traditional 
 form is, as we have seen, somewhat as follows: Does the religious object 
 exist ? Is it real ? How can we know its reality ? What is to be the 
 criterion of the truth of our ideas concerning it ? But the fundamental 
 presupposition implied in such statements of the problem is that there is 
 a problem of religious reality, of religious knowledge, and of religious 
 truth in general, or at large. And it is just this presupposition that 
 pragmatism denies. Like all other problems, religious problems must be 
 specific; they must have their origin and their termination within the 
 limits of a concrete situation. Pragmatism recognizes, to be sure, that 
 there are problems of a general nature concerning the particular realities 
 constituted by religious experience and concerning the nature and 
 function of religious ideas. But such problems, it thinks, must have 
 specific reference, and must be solved from the point of view of such 
 reference. 
 
 In the first place, then, pragmatism recognizes no problem of religious 
 reality in general. If the religious object may be said to exist at all, 
 it must exist as a part of experience; if it is real, its reality must be 
 empirical. Any statement of the religious problem which implies that 
 religious reality stands over against or is external to the individual, 
 would seem to have missed the whole point of modern epistemological 
 criticism and to hark back to the mediaeval dualism of God and the 
 world. If the epistemological movement had any significance at all it 
 was that no such dualism characterizes reality; that the natural and the 
 supernatural, the human and the divine, the world and God, are dis¬ 
 tinctions which fall within experience. To use any of these categories, 
 therefore, as if they contained a trans-experiential reference, is to revert 
 to pre-Kantian dogmatism. And this has, of course, come to be accepted 
 in critical circles as a commonplace—a truism. No one since the time of 
 Hume and Kant has presumed to hold philosophic converse with trans- 
 experiential realities. Empiricism and rationalism, naturalism and 
 idealism, alike insist that God, if God there be at all, must be immanent— 
 
 17 
 
18 SOME RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF PRAGMATISM 
 
 must belong to the world of our experience. Why, then, it may be urged, 
 does pragmatism raise the question of the possibility of a religious object 
 conceived in trans-experiential terms ? If in all philosophic quarters it 
 is agreed that reality (religious or otherwise) must be accessible to knowl¬ 
 edge, that it must be present in experience, either as immediate value and 
 meaning, or as rational and necessary implications, is not pragmatism’s 
 insistence that the religious problem must not be so stated as to imply 
 a trans-experiential God beside the mark—a case of putting up a man of 
 straw ? The pragmatist does not think so. It is precisely a part of his 
 thesis that the naturalist, or the idealist, in so far as he has a problem of 
 knowledge in general, and in so far as he professes to effect such a solution 
 of this problem as to enable him to hold converse with a reality at large, 
 ignores the principle on which he claims to stand, namely, that knowl¬ 
 edge is of things which we experience. Experience implies no ultimate 
 reality and poses no problem of knowledge in general. The philosopher 
 who says that it does has a preconceived and non-empirical notion of 
 what experience is, or a preconceived and intellectualistic notion of 
 what reality is, or both. And in any case, he has committed the unpar¬ 
 donable sin, philosophically speaking: he has reinstated the discredited 
 and disreputable ding en sich. And it does not help matters any that 
 religious interests are the supposed beneficiaries of this illicit transaction. 
 Reality at large, even though postulated in behalf of religious interests 
 or conceived as the object of the religious consciousness, is an abstraction. 
 It cannot be given any intelligible content. It lies outside the range of 
 experience and is of no practical significance in morality or religion. 
 
 And so the pragmatist feels called upon to insist on the empirical 
 character of religious reality. It is not to be appropriated all at once in 
 a sort of spasm of moral earnestness. The values and meanings which 
 it constitutes are hard won. They are not to be had for the asking. 
 Their achievement involves aspiration and struggle and manifold prob¬ 
 lems. 
 
 Whatever peculiar characteristics religious realities may exhibit, then, 
 they exhibit the general characteristics of other empirical realities. 
 They are constituted by experience. They do not get their status as 
 being real from any prerogative which they may be conceived to have 
 as objects-to-be-known. Ordinarily, they do not come within the scope 
 of knowledge at all. They are immediately experienced meanings and 
 values. They serve as stimuli to wholesome and prosperous reactions 
 in the life-process. So long as they perform this function, they are not 
 objects-to-be-known; it is only when they are implicated in some prob- 
 
RELIGIOUS REALITIES 
 
 19 
 
 lematic situation that they become such. And even then the problem is 
 not that of knowing them as existences which are finished and done with, 
 but rather that of anticipating the actual consequences which may be 
 expected to flow from them. 
 
 So much for the general characteristics of religious realities. What¬ 
 ever else they are, they share the characteristics common to all realities. 
 That is to say, they are empirical, dynamic, and practical. What, then, 
 are their characteristics qua religious ? How are they to be differentiated 
 from other realities? To answer this question in an adequate way 
 requires some reference to the matter of the origin and development of 
 religion. A true account of what a thing now is involves some insight ’ 
 into its history. Let it be understood, however, that we do not here 
 confuse the categories of genesis and value. We quite agree with 
 Professor Tufts when he says: 
 
 We cannot test our truth by the “experience” of the child or savage. We 
 have moved on and found new evidence in the life of the Spirit. If the human¬ 
 ity of a later time is to have a larger vision, a larger and richer revelation, it 
 must test this by its own higher life . 1 
 
 And yet we must reiterate that present value can only disclose itself, 
 can only get itself accepted, in the light of a historical prospective. 
 Values do not come to us ready-made. They grow up. They have a 
 history. Their authority is that of a process serving a function and 
 exhibiting a continuity and development. And this is precisely why 
 Professor Tufts adds to the lines quoted above that humanity “will 
 never outgrow the need of studying the profound and priceless deeds 
 through which the divine has been revealed. ” 
 
 We have said that an empirical study of the origin and development 
 of religion serves to eliminate certain intellectualistic presuppositions as 
 to the essential character of the religious interest; that so far from being 
 intellectualistic (involving a more or less conscious attitude of worship 
 toward supernatural beings or deities), primitive religion was bound 
 up with the vital, life-giving, life-preserving activities of the group, 
 and was, in reality, the expression of the group’s attitudes toward 
 these activities. We have said that the origin of religion is to be sought 
 in the social consciousness, and that the social consciousness is itself, 
 in part, the feeling of the supreme worth of life, a sense of life’s high 
 values, which expresses itself in the demand for self-preservation. We 
 must now pursue these considerations a step farther. 
 
 1 Tufts, “The Ultimate Test of Religious Truth,” American Journal of Theology , 
 XIV, 24. 
 
20 
 
 SOME RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF PRAGMATISM 
 
 In the first place, it is to be noted that the vital, life-giving, life¬ 
 preserving activities of the social group, with which primitive religion is 
 bound up, have their origin in the most elementary instincts of the race. 
 Just what these instincts were must be largely a matter of conjecture. 
 It is as impossible to get back to absolute beginnings as it is to anticipate 
 ultimate endings. Certainly the consciousness of primitive man must 
 have been of a much simpler character than the consciousness of a civi¬ 
 lized man of today. And the interests of a primitive social group must 
 have been correspondingly less complex. It would not seem to be 
 unreasonable, therefore, to attempt to describe the impulses and interests 
 of early group life in some such simple terms as, for example, food, sex, 
 self-protection, gregariousness, and the like. But whether the earliest 
 activities of man centered about just these interests, and whether there 
 were two or three or a dozen such interests, would seem to be impossible 
 to determine. At any rate, we leave the question to those whose concern 
 it is to speculate about it. For, as a matter of fact, we are not concerned 
 to trace the religious consciousness back to its absolute beginnings. 
 The study which we have undertaken does not pretend to be a history of 
 the origin and development of religion. Neither does it presume to be 
 a theory of the “essence” or ultimate nature of religious realities. We 
 are trying to point out some of the implications for religion in the 
 pragmatic doctrines. In the nature of the case, these implications would 
 not be historical or metaphysical. Pragmatism is primarily a theory of 
 methods. Whatever it will have to say with respect to religious realities 
 will be said from the point of view of the possibility of scientific control 
 with respect to religious problems. Its religious implications will not 
 be in the nature of a criticism and evaluation of the theological ideas 
 and doctrines that have come to be accepted as constituting the meaning 
 of religion. It is true that pragmatism has been so construed as to seem 
 to afford a sort of sanction to certain religious dogmas . 1 But such a 
 use, or misuse, of the pragmatic method is to lose sight of its real import 
 and to render it academic and formal. Pragmatism is not so much 
 concerned with already constituted meanings as with meanings that are 
 yet to be constituted. Its program is not so much that of testing the 
 truth of already existing doctrines in the light of a changing experience 
 as that of formulating new doctrines which will interpret and thereby 
 control this experience . 2 So that it will be essential to the study we have 
 in mind to make to conceive religion in its origin and development from 
 
 1 James, Pragmatism , pp. 73, 115. 
 
 2 Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic, p. 313. 
 
RELIGIOUS REALITIES 
 
 21 
 
 an empirical and practical point of view rather than from a historical 
 or metaphysical point of view. 
 
 Adopting, as it does, an empirical definition of reality, pragmatism 
 cannot, with any consistency, concern itself with constructing a meta¬ 
 physic of religion. And if it is said that in adopting a definition of 
 reality at all, it is committing itself to a presupposition, the import of 
 which is metaphysical, the reply must be that to say that a thing is 
 what it is, that the reality of a thing consists in its being experienced as 
 this, that, or the other, can scarcely be classed as a presupposition. 
 That things are what they are experienced as would seem to be a datum. 
 We must start with it, it is true. But we do not have to presuppose it 
 or assume it. Such a definition of the real can be called a presupposition 
 only by making a further presupposition, namely, that experience as 
 constituting the real, or as giving intimations thereof, cannot speak for 
 itself and cannot disclose its own real nature. But it is just this pre¬ 
 supposition that the pragmatist refuses to make. He insists on taking 
 experience at its word, on taking the meanings or existences exhibited 
 by it at their face value. In defining religious realities in empirical 
 terms he does not think that he has thereby fixed their nature meta¬ 
 physically. The nature of religious realities, along with other realities, 
 is fixed by experience. Defining them, or making any sort of intellec¬ 
 tual statements about them neither adds to nor detracts from their 
 nature as being real. They are just what they are experienced as. 
 Their content is doubtless too rich and meaningful to be expressed in 
 any set of categories, however comprehensive such categories may be. 
 Certain intellectual statements may be formulated with reference to 
 them to be sure. And such intellectual statements, while they do not 
 fix their ontological status as being real, may become instruments for 
 modifying their empirical character. 
 
 It is just such a set of intellectual statements that the purposes of 
 our study demand. We must so conceive the origin and development 
 of religion as to exhibit therein certain elements which may be articu¬ 
 lated in a series of significant connections. Just what these elements 
 will be and just how many of them there will be must obviously be 
 determined by the specific demands of our problem. Our problem is 
 to make such an analysis of religious experience as will enable us to 
 utilize the elements thereby obtained for suggesting what we regard as 
 a fruitful point of view and method of treatment with respect to religious 
 problems. The purposes of our problem do not require that the elements 
 into which we propose to analyze religious experience shall represent the 
 
22 
 
 SOME RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF PRAGMATISM 
 
 absolute beginnings of religion. All that is required is that these ele¬ 
 ments shall be typical, that is, stand for important and relevant aspects 
 of religious experience as it has appeared at various levels of culture. 
 
 When we say, then, that primitive religion was bound up with the 
 vital life-giving, life-preserving activities of the primitive social group, 
 and that these activities had their origin in the most elementary instincts 
 of the race, let it be understood that we do not feel called upon to enu¬ 
 merate and identify all these instincts. And when we say that we take 
 the food and sex impulses as being typical of those instincts out of which 
 all religions have developed, let it be understood that we are not asserting 
 that the food and sex impulses constitute the essence of religious interests 
 and values. The gregarious instinct, the instinct of self-preservation, 
 and other instinctive interests and tendencies are undoubtedly reflected 
 in the religions of primitive peoples. Some of these are doubtless sig¬ 
 nificant as explaining the more individualistic and mystical aspects of 
 religious experience. But we must reiterate that we are concerned with 
 religion primarily from the point of view of the possibility of scientific 
 control with respect to the problems it presents today. These problems 
 are not theological or metaphysical primarily; they are social and 
 ethical. For this reason we propose to view the development of religion 
 and to analyze present-day religious realities with reference to the unfold¬ 
 ing of the food and sex impulses. We believe that these have been the 
 most important factors in fixing the character of present-day religious 
 values and problems. 
 
 The earliest religious ideas and activities were undoubtedly connected 
 in the most direct fashion with man’s efforts to get food and to satisfy 
 his sexual desires. Furthermore, the influence of the food and sex factors 
 has been no less marked in the development of religion than in its origin. 
 Every change in the economic and social factors conditioning the vital 
 attitudes and activities of society has been followed by a corresponding 
 change in religious ideas. The elaboration and refinement of the food 
 and sex factors which we call economic and social organization has at 
 the present time culminated in the methods of science and in the spirit 
 of democracy; and there are reasons for seeing in the scientific and 
 democratic movements the very highest expression of religious interests 
 and religious values . 1 
 
 It appears, then, that primitive religion must be thought of in relation 
 to the vital processes exhibited in the life of a group or community. It 
 is functional. It measures the earnestness and insight and efficacy of 
 
 1 Ames, The Psychology of Religious Experience , p. 396. 
 
RELIGIOUS REALITIES 
 
 23 
 
 social attitudes toward the values of life. Religious ideas or systems of 
 theology, when studied in the light of their historical background, turn 
 out to be the expressions of attitudes and activities deemed to be effi¬ 
 cacious for establishing and maintaining satisfactory relations with what 
 is regarded as a foreign and hostile environment. Similarly, the historic 
 conceptions of God or the divine turn out to be the ideal embodiments of 
 the highest values in the way of social organization and control. Finally, 
 the scientific and democratic tendencies, conditioning, as they do in so 
 vital a way, the welfare of the individual and of society, are already 
 influencing religious practices and being reflected in religious ideas. 
 
 Thus, the development of religion has been a natural process, serving 
 vital functions and exhibiting certain continuities. The present sig¬ 
 nificance and value of religion cannot be understood unless the history 
 of this process be taken into account. Nevertheless, the two things are 
 not to be confused. The present stage of religious development has 
 significance and value clearly defined and peculiar to itself. The history 
 of religions reveals something more than just a process of development: 
 this process must be viewed as involving change; the movements 
 exhibited in it are truly creative. There are religious interests, religious 
 problems, religious values, today which did not and could not exist at 
 an earlier time. And yet there has been no break in the movement 
 culminating in these new elements of tension, adjustment, and satis¬ 
 faction which characterize present-day religion. As in the case of every 
 true evolutionary process, the evolution of religion produces the new only 
 on the basis of the old. Certain continuities persist throughout the 
 process. Elements of change and variation arise, to be sure, but they 
 always arise within the process itself and are, in fact, the results of some 
 arrangement or organization of factors previously realized. Religion has 
 always been functional. It has always been bound up with the vital 
 activities of the race. And these vital activities have always been con¬ 
 nected, directly or indirectly, with the food and sex impulses. With the 
 elaboration and refinement of the interests and activities growing out of 
 these impulses there has been a corresponding elaboration and refine¬ 
 ment of the motif and technique of religion. We have insisted that this 
 vital relationship between life and religion has persisted even down to 
 our own time. We have said that the foremost movements of our 
 modern life, namely, the movements of science and democracy, are 
 influencing religious practices and being reflected in religious ideas. 
 If we are right in adopting such a view of the origin and development of 
 religion, we are in a position to do full justice to the distinctive character 
 
24 
 
 SOME RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF PRAGMATISM 
 
 of present-day religious interests, problems, and values, and at the same 
 time to regard them as having a history, as having arisen in a natural 
 process, as being the outcome of natural factors. 
 
 Wherein, then, consists the distinctive character of present-day 
 religion? It consists, we take it, in the fact that its interests and 
 problems and values are ethical and spiritual. That is to say, while 
 religion is still primarily concerned with preserving and promoting life, 
 its motif has been socialized and its technique has been rationalized. 
 
 On the one hand, the elemental instincts of the race, the “ground 
 patterns” of human life, have been so elaborated, social and economic 
 institutions have become so complex, that the preservation and pro¬ 
 motion of life as it now is involves a new type of attitudes and activi¬ 
 ties, new methods of co-operation, new standards of value, new capacities 
 for appreciating the things which conduce to the general welfare. With 
 the rise of democracy as a form of social organization, there was a tend¬ 
 ency to translate the political values so achieved into theological terms. 
 For example, the notion of kinship was substituted for that of sovereignty 
 (the notion indigenous to the Hebraic conception of God and to mediaeval 
 theology) in conceiving the divine. This tendency culminated in the 
 last century in the doctrine of the “fatherhood of God and the brother¬ 
 hood of man. ” A new type of religious experience followed this change 
 of imagery; humanitarianism, altruism, philanthropy, of which we 
 have heard so much in recent years, would seem to be its natural expres¬ 
 sion. And while there can be no doubt that these religious attitudes 
 have, for the most part, been wholesome and beneficent, yet they seem 
 to have run their course, to have performed their function. They do 
 not exactly square with the psychological conditions nor express the 
 vital interests of present-day life . 1 A new type of democracy is required 
 as the basis of social co-operation and organization, one based, not on 
 a metaphysical theory of natural rights, but on a new sense of personal 
 worth and personal need. This demand for a new type of democracy 
 is intimately related to certain tendencies and problems exhibited in 
 present industrial movements . 2 The effectiveness of our present indus¬ 
 trial system to produce the necessities of life is patent enough. What is 
 
 \ 
 
 less obvious, but of far greater moment, is that this system, with its 
 machine-like organization and its one-sided method of distribution, 
 presents a fearful peril to the masses of ordinary workmen on whose 
 shoulders its burdens rest. What is required to avert this peril, to 
 
 1 Tufts, “The Adjustment of the Church to the Psychological Conditions of the 
 Present,” American Journal of Theology , XII, 119. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 179. 
 
RELIGIOUS REALITIES 
 
 25 
 
 preserve to the workman his personal freedom and individuality, and to 
 secure to him his just deserts in the way of goods produced, is not an 
 a priori theory of natural rights, not an abstract doctrine of the father¬ 
 hood of God and the brotherhood of man, not a sentimental charity or 
 a degrading philanthropy. These things we have in abundance. They 
 have given us our libraries, built our hospitals, endowed our colleges, 
 and subsidized our churches. But as social remedies they have all 
 failed. And they have failed because they are based upon a false diag¬ 
 nosis of our social ills. What we need*and what we must have, if a 
 cure is to be effected, is a new type of social justice, based on a deep sense 
 of personal worth and personal need. The sacredness of human life, 
 the worth of human character, the right of a human being to realize 
 himself, and the obligation on the part of society to furnish him with the 
 means necessary to this end, these are the supreme interests of our day. 
 They must become a part of our social consciousness; they must mold 
 our religious attitudes, comprise the objects of our devotion, impart to 
 us our sense of the divine. 
 
 But the problems and values of present-day religion are not only 
 social and ethical, they are spiritual. We have said that the interests 
 of religion have been socialized and that its technique has been ration¬ 
 alized. Now it is the conscious use of rational methods that makes 
 religious problems and values spiritual . 1 Religious aspiration and 
 struggle have always had for their counterpart some effort to get into 
 contact with and to control the forces felt to be responsible for weal or 
 for woe. But in times past there was no consistent connection between 
 the values conceived and the practices resorted to for the achievement 
 of these values. The time was when religion practiced magic, or per¬ 
 formed rituals, or gave blind credence to abstract theologies. But 
 things have changed. Religion has come to itself. It has gained some 
 insight into its proper technique. It now employs methods which are 
 wrought out in the presence of and with reference to its particular 
 tasks and problems. And to the extent that this insight into the relation 
 between end and means, value and technique, reacts upon and modifies 
 the content of the end or value, the end or value involved may be said 
 to be spiritual. 
 
 The conscious use of scientific methods, then, is as important in 
 fixing the distinctive character of present-day religious problems and 
 values as is the social idealism of which we have spoken . 2 Social 
 
 1 A. W. Moore, Philosophical Review , XXIV, 633. 
 
 3 Tufts, op. cit., p. 185. 
 
I 
 
 26 SOME RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF PRAGMATISM 
 
 idealism, apart from the promotion and application of science and edu¬ 
 cation, would be worth very little. Fortunately, the new sense of per¬ 
 sonal worth and the persistent demand for social justice are everywhere 
 accompanied by a demand for the ways and means of determining pre¬ 
 cisely how personal worth shall be preserved and enriched; what social 
 justice shall mean in concrete cases, and how this shall be realized. In 
 view of the growing complexity of modern life, and in view of the expand¬ 
 ing possibilities of meeting life’s issues and solving its problems by the 
 application of scientific methbds, we need to cultivate an attitude of 
 open-mindedness, a spirit of inquiry, a willingness to participate in the 
 efforts of science and education, and to utilize the results of these for 
 moral and religious purposes. It is impossible to estimate how life 
 would be enriched, how human welfare would be enhanced, under the 
 influence of such a spirit. Certainly it is destined to be a dominant factor 
 in the future progress of humanity; and surely its cultivation and assidu¬ 
 ous practice is destined to be—and is even now—a matter of our chief 
 concern. It must be reckoned among our moral assets. It must be 
 associated with our highest values. It must enter into our conception 
 of the divine. 
 
 Now it is important to note that the socializing of religious interests 
 and ideals and the rationalizing of religious methods have by no means 
 come about as separate and independent tendencies; on the contrary, 
 they have been inextricably bound up in the one process of preserving 
 and promoting life, and eadh tendency has reacted upon and modified 
 the other. On the one hand, the conscious use of rational methods 
 in controlling natural forces in behalf of human interests was the immedi¬ 
 ate outcome of a demand for present and first-hand contact with reality. 
 The most distinctive characteristic of the period introducing our modern 
 era was man’s unwillingness to forego all sense of present reality, even in 
 the interest of an inheritance incorruptible and eternal. The world 
 that now is had been conceived to be imperfect, finite, “ infected with 
 non-being.” All human interests and values had been transferred to 
 the world that is to be. Present existence was transitory and unreal, 
 and was to be despised. On such terms, life was nothing short of a 
 tragedy, unless indeed some compensation could be conceived in the 
 form of another and better mode of existence. And this was precisely 
 the remedy resorted to. But the rediscovery of the secular world of 
 the Greeks with all its beauty and wonder stimulated man’s natural 
 self anew, and made him strangely indifferent to his erstwhile interest 
 in the supernatural and eternal. So that, when the modern spirit, first 
 
RELIGIOUS REALITIES 
 
 27 
 
 expressing itself in the intellectual daring and spiritual optimism of the 
 Renaissance, revelled in its new sense of reality, “from heaven to 
 earth come down,” it was not so much the result of a skepticism with 
 reference to theological dogmas as the inevitable demand of human 
 nature that it be permitted here and now to come to terms with reality. 
 This demand, however, was at first ambiguous. For although there was 
 a hungering and thirsting after the real, no adequate method was at 
 hand for determining just how the real was to be defined and appro¬ 
 priated. And it was this demand for the ways and means for defining 
 and appropriating reality that posed the first problems of modern science. 
 Furthermore, these problems required the construction of bold and 
 unique hypotheses, which, in the very nature of the case, could not be 
 immediately verified. Here the scientist’s attitude was more than a 
 curious speculation about the world as being already rational or moral; 
 it was the expression of the deepest demand of human nature, the demand 
 for rationalizing and controlling the world of experience and the determi¬ 
 nation to satisfy this demand. And this is still the attitude of the scien¬ 
 tist in so far as the solution of his problems requires insight and ingenuity 
 and patience. The scientist is and must be an idealist. Combined 
 with his idealism, he must have courage and patience and perseverance 
 of the most heroic type. This is the sort of attitude, the quality of 
 faith, the type of idealism, that has created all our values and made our 
 civilization possible. It is essentially religious. For religion, at least 
 as we know it today, is not a “private, personal relation between a man 
 and some supernatural source of character and power.” It does not 
 exhaust itself in hairsplitting speculations about the attributes of God 
 or the depravity of man. It is not a short-cut method for settling, once 
 for all, the problems of life. It is an attitude of faith, a moral venture¬ 
 someness, a working hypothesis by which the religionist means to have a 
 share in the solution of these problems. Religion expresses man’s 
 deepest needs and highest aspirations; at the same time it strives to 
 objectify these aspirations, to impose these needs upon an environ¬ 
 ment and make it answer to them. Such has always been the spirit 
 of true religion. It has ever been a venture, a faith, an effort to 
 come to terms with the “powers that be.” And if it is only in late 
 years that it has come to realize its true function and its proper 
 technique, nevertheless its attitude of desperate concern, its willing¬ 
 ness to stake its all on a hope and then to work for the realization 
 of that hope, with whatever methods it may devise, has been back of 
 all of man’s efforts to better himself (science included), to propitiate 
 
28 
 
 SOME RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF PRAGMATISM 
 
 the hostile forces in his environment, and to gain the support of the 
 forces felt to be friendly. 
 
 But if the religious attitude furnished science with its motive, it 
 must be said that science has repaid the debt with interest. It has 
 been the methods and the achievements of modern science very largely 
 that have socialized the interests and ideals of religion and paved the 
 way for a genuinely social and moral order. 
 
 The recognition that natural energy can be systematically applied through 
 experimental observation to the satisfaction and multiplication of concrete 
 wants—that is doubtless the greatest single discovery ever imported into the 
 life of man, save perhaps the discovery of language. Science has made the 
 control of natural forces for the aims of life so inevitable that for the first time 
 man is relieved from overhanging fear, with its wolf-like scramble to possess 
 and accumulate, and is freed to consider the more gracious question of securing 
 to all an ample and liberal life . 1 
 
 Science has made the “experimental or applied habit of mind” 
 current coin in the realm of social and economic values. Through 
 the multiplication of human wants and needs, it has made men more and 
 more dependent upon each other, and has thereby stimulated commerce 
 with its socializing and civilizing influences. By developing an elaborate 
 system of methods for intercommunication between all parts of the world 
 and all levels of culture it has laid the foundation for a type of social 
 consciousness which may well be expected to exercise a controlling 
 influence in the future affairs of humanity. And finally, by increasing 
 men’s capacities for creating and conserving values, thereby freeing 
 them from a bondage to dire need and relentless struggle and competition, 
 it has placed human existence upon an immeasurably higher level where 
 intelligence and foresight and co-operation are destined to reign 
 supreme. 
 
 1 Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy , and Other Essays , p. 58. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE 
 
 Now the reciprocal character of the tendencies culminating in what 
 we have described as the socializing of religious interests and ideals and 
 the rationalizing of religious methods, is itself of profound religious sig¬ 
 nificance. Its immediate import is, of course, as we have seen, with 
 reference to the distinctive character of present-day religious problems 
 and values. But this is not all. In addition to fixing the character of 
 these problems and values as being ethical and spiritual, it fixes very 
 definitely the status of religious knowledge and truth. We have seen 
 that all knowledge is concerned directly or indirectly with creating 
 values. It follows that of the judgments constituting the knowl¬ 
 edge process, some are descriptive judgments and some are judg¬ 
 ments of practice, but that both of these are essential to the final 
 purpose of all knowledge, namely, the creation of values . 1 If, now, we 
 bear in mind that this reciprocity between the component factors of 
 knowledge, namely, evaluation and description, is actually implicated in 
 the problems and values of present-day religion, we shall be in a position 
 to discount some of the more or less popular and erroneous notions about 
 the essential character of religious knowledge. More particularly, it 
 must appear that religious knowledge is not a process of representing 
 or copying, as accurately as possible, the true nature of religious reality 
 or realities. It is not a matter of scaling the abysmal depths of doubt in 
 order finally to establish the character of the world as being good or 
 rational. It is not a method for getting into satisfactory relations in 
 any wholesale, mechanical fashion with the “powers that be,” or for 
 appropriating, once for all, the reality of a religious object. It is not 
 concerned with existences, as such, at all. It has to do with values and 
 meanings in terms of implied future consequences. It is concerned with 
 already existing and finished values only as data in a process of realizing 
 or creating new values; that is, only when these values become implicated 
 in a problematic situation and thereby assume cognitive significance or 
 reference. At other times religious realities or values do not come within 
 the scope of the knowledge process at all. So that there is no problem of 
 knowing them in the sense in which such a problem is commonly urged. 
 
 1 Cf. Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic , chap. xiv. 
 
 29 
 
30 
 
 SOME RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF PRAGMATISM 
 
 The so-called problem of religious knowledge, in general, is an aspect of 
 the epistemological predicament. It is a generalization of the subject- 
 object relationship which emerges at moments of specific, concrete re¬ 
 ligious problems. In this connection, it is important to note that even in 
 the case of the philosophic movements centering about the general prob¬ 
 lem of knowledge, these movements had their occasions within the limits 
 of concrete, practical situations, when social values were being weighed 
 in the balance and found wanting . 1 The reconstructions effected at 
 such times of moral crisis, together with the methods employed therein, 
 were hypostasized—given cosmic significance. The reconstructed 
 values were conceived to constitute ultimate reality or reality in general, 
 and the dialectic involved in the process of reconstruction was thought of 
 as conditioning all possible contact with this reality. The problem of 
 knowledge then became the problem of traversing the successive steps 
 in this dialectical process. But we have seen that the problems of reli¬ 
 gion, like all other problems, are concrete and specific. They are the 
 problems of some individual, or of some community, or of some nation, 
 at some particular time. There is no dialectical process for solving them 
 all at once. Any philosophy which assumes that they are already eter¬ 
 nally solved, already eternally transcended in a higher and better order 
 of reality, contributes nothing whatever to their actual solution. The 
 only solution of religious problems that can satisfy living, striving, suffer¬ 
 ing human beings is one which involves the use of resources and energies 
 co-ordinate with the problems themselves. And so we insist that reli¬ 
 gious knowledge must be specific. It must refer to particular problems. 
 It must involve natural factors. It must be a matter of anticipating 
 and controlling future experience by reference to values and meanings 
 experienced in the past. 
 
 Religious knowledge, then, is not different in kind from any other 
 sort of knowledge. It is instrumental or functional. It is primarily 
 concerned with creating values. To this end it employs descriptive 
 judgments as well as judgments of practice. But this is not all. If 
 motif and technique, end and means, evaluation and description, are 
 truly reciprocal, the formation of religious motives and ends, the actual 
 process of judging religious values, must itself be capable of scientific 
 control. 
 
 Now the possibility of a scientific control of judgments of religious 
 value would seem to follow from what we have said as to the con¬ 
 tinuity of experience, the general nature and function of knowledge, and 
 
 1 Moore, Pragmatism and Its Critics , pp. 31-33. 
 
RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE 
 
 31 
 
 the reciprocal character of its component elements, i.e., evaluation and 
 description. Certain objections, however, are urged against the propo¬ 
 sition that religious judgments can be so controlled. For example, it is 
 said that any attempt to determine religious values by scientific pro¬ 
 cedure is to eliminate from these values all that makes them religious, 
 and indeed, to reduce them to physical or mechanical terms. But such 
 an objection labors under a too narrow interpretation of what “scientific 
 procedure ” means. “ Scientific ” as applied to a process of investigation, 
 does not refer to the particular form or type of the results obtained, but 
 rather to the essentially logical character of the technique employed in 
 the process . 1 The particular form of the results of any scientific inquiry 
 will depend upon the character of the subject matter with which the 
 inquiry is concerned, or upon the specific purpose with reference to which 
 the subject-matter is treated. So that it is entirely possible to employ 
 scientific procedure in an inquiry respecting religious values without 
 thereby reducing these values to a physical or mechanical basis. 
 
 A more typical objection, however, to our contention that judgments 
 of religious value must lend themselves to scientific control is that scien¬ 
 tific control of judgments is possible only where the judgments constitute 
 statements of general conditions which, although they are capable of 
 complete logical determination, are, as a matter of fact, hypothetical 
 and therefore contain no reference to individual acts; and that reli¬ 
 gious judgments, since they do refer to individual acts and are therefore 
 categorical rather than hypothetical in character, will not lend themselves 
 to such control, but must find their source and sanction in some tran¬ 
 scendental faculty such as intuition or conscience . 2 But the assumption 
 implied in this objection cannot be sustained. It is not true, in the first 
 place, that scientific judgments are concerned wholly, or even primarily, 
 with general or universal propositions in and for themselves. On the 
 contrary, they are always made in the interest of, or with reference to, 
 individual judgments of practice. 
 
 The scientific judgment, the formulation of a connection of conditions, 
 has its origin in and is developed for the specific and sole purpose of freeing and 
 reinforcing acts of judgments that apply to unique and individual cases . 3 
 
 That is to say, there is nothing about religious judgments, in the way of 
 specific, practical reference, which does not also characterize scientific 
 judgments. Furthermore, it is not true that religious judgments would 
 
 1 Dewey, “The Logical Conditions of a Scientific Treatment of Morality,” 
 Decennial Publications of the University of Chicago , III, 116. 
 
 3 Ibid. 3 Ibid., p. 118. 
 
32 
 
 SOME RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF PRAGMATISM 
 
 lose their distinctively religious character by thus being assimilated to 
 the type of logical treatment accorded to judgments of science. For, 
 as we have seen, judgments of science have precisely those logical features 
 in the way of specific, practical reference that characterize religious 
 judgments. So that the scientific control of the latter type of judgments 
 would simply be a matter of taking advantage of possibilities of logical 
 treatment already employed in the control of a fundamentally similar 
 type of judgment. 
 
 But assuming the possibility of scientific control of religious judg¬ 
 ments, what are the conditions of such control ? How is it to be effected ? 
 It is obvious, in the first place, that a scientific control of any sort of 
 judgment requires a set of limiting terms or ultimate intellectual stand¬ 
 points, such as the general concepts or categories which operate in the 
 several sciences and serve as instruments or tools in particular acts of 
 judgments . 1 If religious judgments are to lend themselves to scientific 
 control, such a set of limiting terms or ultimate intellectual stand¬ 
 points, appropriate to the particular subject-matter with which these 
 judgments are concerned, and to the specific purpose with reference to 
 which the subject-matter is judged, must be available. And, as a matter 
 of fact, there are such religious concepts or categories at hand. When we 
 speak of faith, or freedom, or goodness, or God, we mean to give expres¬ 
 sion, however vaguely and ambiguously, to certain standpoints and 
 standards felt to be authoritative in religious experience. And if the 
 content of these terms is not as specific as the content embodied in the 
 categories of the physical or biological sciences, if the terms themselves 
 do not operate as readily and as precisely as scientific categories operate, 
 this is not because they have had any other than an empirical origin or 
 can have any other than a functional significance. Their content is 
 indefinite and their operation is uncertain because their empirical and 
 functional character is not generally recognized. They are thought of 
 as having their origin and sanction in transcendental sources. So that 
 at times of moral decision, in situations requiring religious insight and 
 judgment, they are employed without conscious reference to the fact 
 that they are functions within a process, and that they are to be checked 
 up and modified by the exigencies of that process. The result is that 
 religious experience is capricious and unstable. It is determined from 
 without, in an external and mechanical fashion. It is made to depend 
 upon supernatural power and direction. Its values are donations vouch¬ 
 safed by a divine grace. Prosperous changes and events are of the nature 
 
 1 Dewey, op. tit., p. 129. 
 
RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE 
 
 33 
 
 of miracles, the conditions of whose occurrence are not subject to human 
 control. That they have occurred once is no guarantee that they can 
 be made to persist, or that they can be made the bases for inducing other 
 prosperous and beneficent changes. It is small wonder that the decisions 
 and judgments by which religious experience is actually constructed and 
 sustained are said to be subjective or unreal. They are subject to no 
 general conditions of control. They are discontinuous and unconnected; 
 each is a law unto itself. Therefore they have little or no objective 
 significance or validity. What is required to give them objectivity and 
 thus to render religious experience stable and coherent is an insight into 
 the empirical and functional character of the standpoints and-stand¬ 
 ards with reference to which they are formed. It must be recognized 
 that these general concepts or categories, since they are empirical and 
 functional, are subject to constant change and modification, and that 
 they must be constantly criticized and reinterpreted in the light of new 
 conditions and needs. And this recognition must become articulate in 
 a systematic attempt at such criticism and reinterpretation. There must 
 be a “ logic of conduct, ” a science of the meaning and value of fundamen¬ 
 tal religious ideas. It is obvious that a historical-scientific treatment 
 of such general ideas as knowledge, faith, freedom, salvation, the divine, 
 etc., would give to these ideas new content, endow them new working 
 value, and thus make them potent instruments in the process of organiz¬ 
 ing and expanding experience. 
 
 But clearly defined categories are not sufficient for a scientific control 
 of religious judgments. In addition to these, there must be formulated 
 a set of statements regarding the general conditions and relations obtain¬ 
 ing in the subject-matter to be judged . 1 Now the subject-matter of 
 religious judgments, like that of all judgments of practice, includes as 
 one of its elements the motive, or attitude, or disposition, of the judger. 
 That is to say, in judging that this or that is good, or ought to be done, 
 the judger is in reality judging his own character; he is putting himself 
 on record, as being, at the moment of his judgment, of some particular 
 disposition rather than of some other. 
 
 The judger (in an ethical judgment) is engaged in judging himself; and 
 thereby in so far is fixing the conditions of all further judgments of all further 
 types whatsoever. Put in more psychological terms, we may say that the 
 judgment realizes, through conscious deliberation and choice, a certain motive 
 heretofore vague and impulsive; or it expresses a habit in such a way as not 
 merely to strengthen it practically, but as to bring to consciousness both its 
 emotional worth and its significance in terms of certain kinds of consequences. 2 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 128. 
 
 1 Ibid., p. 131. 
 
34 
 
 SOME RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF PRAGMATISM 
 
 But if the subject-matter to be judged is constituted in part by 
 motives or dispositions, as the momentary expressions of the character 
 of the judger, it follows that any attempt to formulate a connection of 
 the conditions and relations obtaining in the subject-matter must have as 
 a part of its task a thorough psychological analysis of the processes 
 implicated in choice or judgment. There can be no doubt that these 
 processes are as definite as the series of events conditioning some occur¬ 
 rence in the physical world if only we knew what they are. And 
 precisely what they are must be made the subject of psychological 
 analyses. They must be made objective. It must be determined what 
 psychical conditions are implicated in a given motive or attitude, and 
 what the relations of these are to the motive or attitude and to one 
 another. It must be possible to single out those conditions which are 
 connected with the judgment in a logically necessary way, and those 
 which are connected with it in a merely incidental or superficial way. 
 This will make it possible to treat the subjective element in judgments 
 of practice objectively. It will lay the foundations for the sort of con¬ 
 trol to which religious judgments must lend themselves if they are to 
 have objective significance and validity. 
 
 But the subject-matter of religious judgments is much more compre¬ 
 hensive than that which is constituted by the motives, dispositions, and 
 the like, of the individual who is judging. We have said that religious 
 judgments are concerned with creating religious values and that these 
 values consist, for the most part, of certain prosperous and beneficent 
 types of social organization and economic control. It is obvious, there¬ 
 fore, that the attempt to furnish the general conditions of a scientific 
 control of religious judgments must likewise include as a part of its task 
 an analysis of these social and economic institutions which may enter 
 into the process of reconstructing and expanding religious values. 
 
 For the purposes of such an analysis, advantage must be taken of 
 all types of scientific investigations whatsoever which tend to establish 
 in objective form the connections of conditions obtaining in social situ¬ 
 ations. From the point of view of the scientific control of religious 
 judgments, there is no hard and fast distinction between the analyses 
 effected by the social sciences and those effected by the physical or bio¬ 
 logical sciences. All sorts of physical and biological factors are impli¬ 
 cated in the social and moral betterment of any community. These 
 implications must be made objective; they must be articulated in a 
 system of connections. There is no question here of “ mechanizing ” 
 religious values or of reducing them to a physical basis. Whatever 
 
RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE 
 
 35 
 
 statements are effected concerning the connections of conditions obtain¬ 
 ing within the subject-matter of judgments of religious value have the 
 same import as is contained in all scientific “universals, ” namely, that 
 of releasing and reinforcing individual acts of judgments. So far from 
 implying the reduction of religious values to a physical or mechanical 
 basis, the possibility of a scientific control of religious judgments implies 
 that there is such a continuity within the several areas of experience 
 as makes it possible to utilize the statements effected with reference to 
 conditions obtaining in one area of experience in effecting statements of 
 conditions obtaining in another area, without thereby reducing the one • 
 kind of experience to the other. Hence the task of establishing universal 
 connections of conditions within the subject-matter of religious judg¬ 
 ments may include as many types of analysis as are necessary to make 
 these universals thoroughly objective. And, indeed, nothing short of 
 this will render the scientific control of religious judgments possible. 
 
 i 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 RELIGION AND THEOLOGY 
 
 The discussion of religious knowledge contained in the preceding 
 chapter hinted at the possibility and the necessity of an empirical and 
 experimental theology. Now the idea of a theology that will be at 
 once empirical and experimental is common enough in philosophical 
 circles. But the idea has not been sufficiently emphasized or ade¬ 
 quately developed. The present chapter will be devoted to these 
 ends. An effort will be made to indicate in a very general way the 
 program to be pursued and the methodology to be employed by such 
 an empirical and experimental study and to justify the use of the term 
 “theology” in connection with a science thus defined. 
 
 To begin with, it will be important to bear in mind the commonly 
 recognized distinction between theology and religion. The religious 
 mode of experiencing is primarily appreciative. Only during excep¬ 
 tional periods and in the experience of exceptional peoples does it 
 become reflective and deliberately set about to make itself intelligible. 
 Ordinarily it is an immediate sense or a direct appreciation of life’s 
 high values which passes over into habits, dispositions, and character 
 appropriate thereto. Sometimes the habits, dispositions, and character 
 thus formed and relied upon as being appropriate to religious interests 
 turn out to be inappropriate and inadequate. At such times, religion 
 is thrown back upon itself; it becomes reflective. It is confronted 
 with the problem of the character of the divine and of the attitudes 
 and activities appropriate to a fruitful contact with it. The articula¬ 
 tion and solution of this problem is what we mean by “theology.” 
 Theology, then, is not to be confused with religion; it is the result of 
 religion’s effort to explain itself for purposes of control. It is thus a 
 science. But as a science, it has been rendered more or less unique 
 by the circumstance that its method as well as its motive was furnished 
 by religion. That is to say, theology was precluded by the peculiar 
 sanctity attaching to its subject-matter from adopting and developing 
 empirical and experimental methods. Like other sciences, it was 
 “born in partiality,” but unlike other sciences, it failed to achieve that 
 degree of detached impartiality that is the prime condition of fruitful 
 methods in any science. This of course accounts for its traditionally 
 
 36 
 
RELIGION AND THEOLOGY 
 
 37 
 
 dogmatic and non-empirical character. It also serves to indicate the 
 true nature of the so-called conflict between religion and science. This 
 conflict has in reality involved, not religion and science in general, 
 but certain of the natural sciences and the science of theology. It 
 arose out of the fact that at first both the natural sciences and theology 
 were dominated by metaphysical points of view. Neither had as yet 
 learned to regard its explanations as instruments of control. The 
 analyses and generalizations made by each were supposed to be ontologi- 
 cally exhaustive and exclusive. And as the points of view from which 
 these respective analyses and generalizations were made represented ' 
 empirically distinct types of interest, they came to be regarded as meta¬ 
 physically incompatible, and gave rise to a conflict which continued to 
 scandalize our modern life even after the natural sciences became 
 positivistic and pragmatic. For theology has persisted in holding itself 
 out as a metaphysic and, in that role, has continued to discount the 
 investigations and deliverances of the natural sciences. 
 
 But the metaphysical pretensions of theology are without any theo- 
 Tetical or practical warrant. For, in the first place, it is not essential 
 to the religious mode of experiencing to regard it as a reaction to the 
 world as a whole as being rational or moral. Whenever religion has 
 conceived its own attitude in terms of such a wholesale reaction to the 
 world, it has done so under the stress of demands made upon it by 
 some absolutistic type of philosophy. Left to work out its own atti¬ 
 tudes and activities, it has been concerned with the realization, preser¬ 
 vation, and promotion of concrete human values. Furthermore, it 
 is not essential to the reality of the religious mode of experiencing to 
 demonstrate its ontological status by any sort of dialectical proofs or 
 apologetics. Religious realities are their own best, and only, evidence. 
 There is, then, no occasion for vouching for or for vindicating their 
 ontological integrity. There is of course a need of defining their empiri¬ 
 cal character and of exhibiting their practical value. But this is 
 quite a different matter. It does not imply a metaphysical point of 
 departure, nor does it involve the use of dialectical methods. 
 
 Theology must forego its erstwhile metaphysical pretensions, but 
 it may, however, take a new lease of life by adopting once for all an 
 empirical point of view and developing experimental methods. Thus 
 will it become a science in the sense which first defined its purpose and 
 its task. It will assume the reality of its subject-matter, take for 
 granted the existence of the divine, precisely as physics and chemistry 
 assume the existence of matter, or biology the existence of living 
 
38 
 
 SOME RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF PRAGMATISM 
 
 organisms. If such an assumption appears to be somewhat bold in view 
 of the unintelligible character of what we mean to imply by the divine, 
 this but shows the greater need of an empirical and experimental treat¬ 
 ment of religious realities such as we are urging. It is small wonder 
 that the content of the divine is vague; the sort of intellectual treat¬ 
 ment accorded it by the methods of theology has not been calculated 
 to bestow upon it any great signification in the way of practical, con¬ 
 crete meaning. And even so, the case is no worse with theology than 
 with natural philosophy in its prescientific stage; the scholastic con¬ 
 ception of substance or matter was scarcely more intelligible than the 
 traditional conception of the divine. But when theology acts on the 
 positivistic cue furnished by the natural sciences; when it leaves off fol¬ 
 lowing the will-o’-the-wisp of “design” and “special creation” and “provi¬ 
 dence” and “attributes”; when it assumes once for all the reality of its 
 subject-matter as embodied in practical, concrete experience and con¬ 
 cerns itself with constructing such a set of intellectual statements 
 about this subject-matter as will facilitate its control, we may expect 
 the content of the divine to begin to assume an empirical and practical 
 character approaching in definiteness and fruitfulness the great concep¬ 
 tions wrought out by the physical and biological sciences. 
 
 The program which is here contemplated for the new theology, 
 then, would amount to nothing more nor less than the definition of 
 fundamental social values, and the methodology to be employed would 
 of course develop in accordance with empirical and experimental canons. 
 This would involve, in the first place, a criticism of traditional and 
 contemporary standards of value in the bearing that these have on the 
 several areas of social practice. And such a criticism would, in turn, 
 lead up to the construction, under carefully worked out conditions of 
 control, of new standards of value such as might be shown to be 
 demanded for the present time. 
 
 Now an objection will undoubtedly be urged to the use of the term 
 theology to distinguish such a science of social values. The position 
 taken in this study is that there is no impropriety in such a usage. 
 In support of this contention, it is to be noted, in the first place, that 
 the particular concepts in which religious values have been embodied 
 at the several levels of culture where the God-idea has appeared are 
 not to be thought of as so many efforts to cognize one eternal divine 
 object, transcending experience, but must be regarded as instruments 
 for mediating and controlling experience. A give)n idea of the divine 
 owes its content, then, not to any transcendent object to which it is 
 
RELIGION AND THEOLOGY 
 
 39 
 
 supposed to refer by way of representation, but to the social context 
 in which it functions. That certain traits or features have persisted 
 in the evolution of the concept of the divine and have, indeed, fixed 
 the main outlines of the mediaeval and modern God, but points to the 
 tremendous importance of the historical conditions which gave this 
 idea of the divine its setting; it does not at all determine the content 
 of future conceptions of the divine, nor does it commit theology once 
 for all to the consideration of the traditional God as its subject-matter, 
 or to the use of methods appropriate thereto. It was an accident that 
 the science of theology arose at a time when men’s ideas of the divine 
 centered in the supernatural. Or, if it is better to say that theology 
 arose because of a disintegration of human \values and the subsequent 
 transfer of men’s interests and hopes to the superhuman, at least it 
 may be said that the problem articulated bji' theology and the methods 
 employed by it were determined by this dualism between the natural 
 and the supernatural, the human and the divine. And this dualism 
 was itself the accident of certain obvious social conditions. There 
 was a breaking down of human values and standards with no methods 
 at hand for effecting a reconstruction of these at the level of social 
 practice. So that it comes to the same thing: theology is not to be 
 committed forever to the consideration of a subject-matter or to the 
 use of methods whose content and character were incidental to social 
 conditions long since left behind. 
 
 Again, it is to be noted that the history of the sciences affords 
 ample warrant for the use of the term theology in connection with a 
 science of social values. The history of psychology is the most notable 
 case in point. And here again we have an instance of the sort of thing 
 noted in connection with the beginnings of theology: a dualism reflect¬ 
 ing social conditions of the time fixes the content of the subject-matter 
 and the character of the methods of the science. The soul was regarded 
 as immaterial entity, which of course was not to be apprehended 
 through the medium of ordinary experience. The consideration of this 
 immaterial soul through non-empirical methods was known as rational 
 psychology. In time the immaterial soul gave way to mental faculties 
 as the subject-matter of psychology; and mental faculties in turn 
 gave way to states of consciousness; and states of consciousness to 
 behavior, until now we have a psychology as different from the rational 
 psychology of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the sort of 
 theology contemplated by this discussion differs from the dogmatic 
 and speculative theology of earlier times. 
 
40 
 
 SOME RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF PRAGMATISM 
 
 Just what the content of the new theology’s conceptions of the 
 divine will turn out to be is of course a matter to be settled by present- 
 day experience. The writer has no theological axes to grind nor any 
 preconceived notions of the divine to defend. The point to be made 
 is that there is no a priori reason why theology should not now concern 
 itself with problems and conceive its subject-matter in terms other 
 than those which have to do with the traditional God. To be sure 
 it would be a part of the task of the new theology to work out some 
 way or ways of conceiving God which would render this conception of 
 the divine a more effective instrument of social control. But it goes 
 without saying that any conception thus worked out would not be 
 exhaustive or exclusive. It must also be plain that the task just 
 referred to, namely, the definition of God, would not comprise the entire 
 task of theology. Theology is to be a science of the divine; but the 
 divine as the subject-matter of theology will have a broader connota¬ 
 tion than is contained in the notion of God. Only an absolutistic 
 philosophy can restrict the concern of theology to that of God. And 
 it can do this only by articulating an ultimate aim for all the sciences, 
 or for science in general, and by so defining this aim as to exclude from 
 it any concern for the concrete problems of practical life. 
 
 But it may be said that however appropriate the term theology is 
 to a science whose task it is to define fundamental social values, there 
 is, as a matter of fact, no need for such a science, inasmuch as the task 
 assigned to it is already receiving full recognition and adequate treat¬ 
 ment at the hands of one of the oldest and best established of the philo¬ 
 sophical sciences, namely, ethics. It must be admitted that the task 
 of theology as it is here conceived will be identical in important respects 
 with that of ethics. Certainly no hard and fast distinction can be made 
 between the two. And yet traditional ethics has suffered from certain 
 defects or limitations which have precluded its preforming in an 
 adequate manner the task here assigned to theology. For one thing, 
 its interests and methods have been so largely historical and contro¬ 
 versial as to leave little or no opportunity for the treatment of issues 
 and problems presented in the actual life of the times. And even where 
 such a treatment has been attempted the problems involved have been 
 conceived and stated in too great isolation from the specific context 
 in which they appear. Or, in the absence of these defects, another one, 
 equally grave, has been present to vitiate the services rendered by ethi¬ 
 cal studies; these studies have been marked by too little of the imagi¬ 
 native and constructive experimentation that has proved so fruitful 
 
RELIGION AND THEOLOGY 
 
 4i 
 
 in other fields of scientific endeavor. Their point of view and method 
 have been too formal. They have been too much occupied with trying 
 to square our present experience with old standpoints and standards 
 and too little concerned with constructing new standpoints and stand¬ 
 ards for mediating a larger and richer experience. 
 
 It must be said there is considerable work being done in ethics to 
 which the above criticisms do not at all apply. There are a number 
 of ethicists who have frankly adopted a biological and social point of 
 view and are making of ethics an experimental science in the truest 
 sense of the word. Between the program being pursued by such 
 thinkers and writers and the task here assigned to theology no distinc¬ 
 tion whatever can be made. It would seem, however, that the motive 
 actuating the new ethics and the method being employed by it are so 
 important as to mark it off once for all from ethics of the traditional 
 types. And it would seem that the development of an empirical and 
 experimental theology would afford a practicable means for effecting 
 this distinction or separation. 
 
 But whether the new ethics is assimilated to the new theology or 
 the two sciences find it advantageous to develop side by side, there are 
 other considerations of a more practical nature which demand an 
 independent science of theology such as is here suggested. These 
 considerations have to do with the utilization of all the physical and 
 moral resources represented by institutions of religious culture and 
 inspiration for purpose of scientific control in religious experience. 
 Such considerations do not of course constitute a ground for any ulti¬ 
 mate distinction between ethics and theology. They are incidental 
 to social conditions and arrangements which have their roots in a 
 more or less remote past. The church, the Bible school, the theological 
 seminary of the future, must no doubt undergo radical changes both 
 as to structure and as to function. But for all that, they are at the 
 present time the controlling factors in determining the content or qual¬ 
 ity of religious experience. They are the media through which the 
 new theory of values is to be assimilated to religious practice. And 
 this process of assimilation will be facilitated by a reconstruction of 
 traditional theology. Much of the best work being done in the criti¬ 
 cism and construction of social values is ineffective because its benefits 
 are not available to the rank and file of the people. This circumstance 
 must be overcome if the new theory of values is to adequately affect 
 social practice. The institutions of conventional religion must be 
 enlisted in behalf of the social and scientific point of view in religious 
 
42 
 
 SOME RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF PRAGMATISM 
 
 reconstruction. The physical and moral resources of the church must 
 be utilized. The “higher criticism” of religious documents, the “modern” 
 point of view in theology, the “progressive” movement in church organ¬ 
 ization and activity are all means to this end. With all the hostility 
 aroused and opposition encountered by these tendencies, they give 
 promise of larger and more immediate results than can be looked for 
 from a science of ethics whose traditional status as a philosophical 
 discipline renders its investigations and deliverances more or less inac¬ 
 cessible to religious practice. But these tendencies must go the whole 
 length. They must look toward and culminate in a reconstruction of 
 theology. 
 
 x 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 GOD 1 
 
 Our problem in the present chapter is to work out a definition of 
 God. But first we must reiterate what was said at the beginning of 
 chapter iii with reference to the point of view from which we are 
 concerned to treat religious realities. We are concerned with religious 
 realities, we said, primarily as being implicated in certain social and 
 ethical problems. The purposes of our study require that we shall so 
 analyze religious realities, that is, formulate such a set of intellectual 
 statements about religious meanings and values 1 , as to constitute a 
 basis for the solution of religious problems and for the control of reli¬ 
 gious experience. This point of view is fundamental to what we shall 
 have to say as to the existence and character of God. All the while 
 we shall be thinking in terms of the problematic situation and with a 
 view to the possibility of scientific control. We shall not be concerned 
 to catalogue the various historical significations that have attached to 
 the God-idea; nor shall we utilize such historical data as are essential 
 to the demands of our study as a basis for constructing any sort of 
 metaphysic of the divine. Again, we shall not be concerned to estimate 
 the relative truth or validity of the several historical conceptions of 
 God. We shall rather aim at effecting such a reinterpretation of the 
 divine as will render it a meaningful concept in the light of present 
 psychological conditions. 
 
 Pursuant to this aim, we take as our point of departure a fact on 
 which we have already dwelt, namely, that in the present democratic 
 and scientific movements we have the foundations for a new type of 
 social organization, which is destined to be the determining factor in 
 future conceptions of the divine. We have said that at every level of 
 culture the God-idea, where it is present at all, is the ideal embodiment 
 of the highest social values peculiar to that level and reflects social 
 attitudes and activities appropriate to the realization and maintenence 
 of those values. We have also said that the highest social values have 
 
 1 Certain sections of the material included in this chapter appeared in an article 
 in the International Journal of Ethics , Vol. XXIX (October, 1918), under the title 
 “Religious Worship and Social Control,” and are reproduced here with the consent of 
 that Journal. 
 
 43 
 
44 
 
 SOME RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF PRAGMATISM 
 
 usually assumed the form of certain prosperous and beneficent types 
 of social organization. What we have now to point out is that the 
 evolution of the God-idea has gone hand in hand with the development 
 or expansion of methods of organizing and controlling life in social 
 groups. It will be convenient to conceive of this process of social and 
 political development with the corresponding development of the con¬ 
 cept of the divine as exhibiting three general stages. The first stage 
 may be said to begin with the earliest Hebrew notions of Yahweh as a 
 tribal god and to continue until the rise of democracy among European 
 peoples in the latter half of the eighteenth century. In this stage the 
 most characteristic conception of God or the divine was that of a mighty 
 monarch ruling and protecting his people . 1 At a time when one social 
 group was constantly subjected to the trickery and treachery of hostile 
 groups, social life was best preserved and promoted by patriarchal and 
 monarchal forms of government. The patriarch or king, as the case 
 might be, was the actual embodiment of the highest social values. 
 It was natural, then, that the social consciousness of the group, the 
 consciousness arising from pursuing common interests, from meeting 
 common difficulties, and from achieving common values, should em¬ 
 body itself in some analogous form. 
 
 With the rise of democracy, there was a change in the imagery 
 employed in conceiving God. He was no longer thought of solely in 
 terms of sovereignty and protection; he came to be conceived in terms 
 of fatherhood . 2 He was the father of all men and all men were brothers. 
 And this tendency to conceive God in terms of a father who was to 
 be trusted and obeyed betrays the metaphysical presuppositions of the 
 new democratic ideals. These ideals were rooted in an a priori theory 
 of natural rights. The rights of man on the basis of which it was pro¬ 
 posed to construct all possible forms of government were deduced from 
 what was conceived to have been man’s natural state before he was 
 brought under the authority of social and political institutions. That 
 is to say, these rights were given; they were donations to man from an 
 inherent and inalienable humanity. Man was as dependent as ever. 
 He had achieved no rights, and could claim no rights except in the name 
 of his innate humanity. And these natural rights were given once 
 
 1 The notion of kinship was, of course, also present as an element in primitive 
 conceptions of God. 
 
 2 Jesus’ conception of God as father was projected into a social context which 
 rendered it for the most part unintelligible and sterile until the rise of humanitarian 
 sentiments and democratic institutions. 
 
GOD 
 
 45 
 
 for all. Men might come and men might go, but their rights went on 
 forever. Nothing could change them; nothing could happen to give 
 them new content or meaning. It is not to be wondered that a type 
 of democracy based on such a conception of man and his metaphysi¬ 
 cally fixed and finished nature proved inadequate to meet the demands 
 made upon it by the expanding life of subsequent times. It was pre¬ 
 cluded by its very presuppositions from keeping pace with the move¬ 
 ment of things. The changes in economic and industrial conditions 
 throughout the nineteenth century literally made man over again so 
 that he was a new being with new capacities and needs and obligations. 
 But from the point of view of the doctrine of natural rights, there are 
 no capacities or needs or obligations other than those implied in the 
 nature of man. If man has seemed to change, so much the worse for 
 man. The conditions which may seem to create new capacitites or 
 to impose new obligations or to require new standpoints and standards 
 are abnormal; they are to be ignored; the measure of what can be 
 done by man and for man is determined by his nature; all efforts at 
 economic and industrial betterment must prove their validity by refer¬ 
 ence to what man everlastingly is, independent of the exigencies of 
 time and place. 
 
 So much for the social and political theory characteristic of the second 
 stage of the process of social and religious development. The religious ex¬ 
 perience and theological imagery appropriate to this type of theory, as we 
 have seen, centered in the doctrine of the “ fatherhood of God and the 
 brotherhood of man.” Now there can be no doubt that this conception of 
 God as father and man as brother marked a decided advance in religious 
 attitudes and activities, just as the doctrine of natural rights expressed 
 a higher level of social and political theory and introduced beneficent 
 innovations in the actual life of the times. But, theologically speak¬ 
 ing, men were still dependent on a power not themselves. Whatever 
 new there was in their religious experience in the way of emotional 
 satisfaction as a result of conceiving God as their father and mankind 
 as their brethren was given. The new religious values were donations 
 vouchsafed by a divine paternalism or a human fraternalism. They 
 were once for all the sort of things to be expected from such relation¬ 
 ships. If other things seemed good and desirable in the way of social 
 justice and industrial co-operation, calling for attitudes and activities 
 other than those growing out of the relation of man to God as his father, 
 or to humanity as his brethren, these other good and desirable things, 
 together with the attitudes and activities appropriate to them, lay 
 
46 
 
 SOME RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF PRAGMATISM 
 
 outside the scope of religion . 1 Religion need not, indeed, exhaust itself 
 in the emotional satisfactions to be realized from the relation sustained 
 to God and to humanity. It might give concrete expression to its 
 doctrines if occasion seemed to warrant it. It might practice charity, 
 philanthropy, humanitarianism; these are the things that are to be 
 expected in a world where all men are dependent on God and where 
 some are more highly blessed than others. But as for inquiring into 
 the whys and wherefores of a social order in which certain classes are 
 dependent on certain other classes and in which all classes are dependent 
 on a power not themselves, whose favors are to be had by petition and 
 faith and childlike obedience, with such an inquiry religion would have 
 nothing to do. 
 
 It must be obvious that any conception of the divine merely in 
 terms of sovereignty and kinship are hopelessly inadequate to express 
 the interests and ideals of present-day life, which are felt to be 
 supremely worth while. The economic and industrial conditions today 
 are demanding a new type of social organization, a new democracy, 
 handicapped by no preconceptions as to the natural rights of man, 
 nor by any preconceptions as to his natural needs, capacities, or obliga¬ 
 tions. To meet this demand there is the ever-growing conviction that 
 social life and social development are not guided from without or 
 directed from above; that these constitute a process that is self- 
 determined and creative; and that the rights that are natural to man 
 are those which have proved themselves in terms of social worth within 
 this process. “We are coming to the new thought that society is 
 guided—if we may still use that word—not by king or class, but by the 
 infinite action and reaction of all its members . 2 In a genuinely demo¬ 
 cratic society there are no privileged classes. The differentiation of 
 classes, characteristic of the older orders of society, must give way to 
 a differentiation of persons. But if the differentiation of persons is 
 the goal of a democratic society, this is not to be accomplished by any 
 a priori recognition of personality as something which is already given 
 and which needs only to be recognized. Personality is never given as 
 a natural and inalienable endowment; it has to be achieved. And it 
 is the task of a democratic society to achieve it or create it in the persons 
 
 1 It is important to recall that the great movements in the direction of social 
 and industrial reforms that characterized the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries 
 had their origins outside the pale of orthodox religion. 
 
 2 H. A. Overstreet, “The Democratic Conception of God,” Hibbert Journal , 
 XI, 402. 
 
GOD 
 
 47 
 
 of its members. To this end, the members of such a society must share 
 in full the social and moral responsibilities involved. If the govern¬ 
 ment is to be for the people, it must be of the people and by the people. 
 And it is the spectacle of a people leading themselves and thereby 
 achieving larger capacities for leadership, realizing new qualities of 
 of personality, that presents the goal and poses the problems of true 
 democracy. 
 
 Now the assurance with which the democracy of today looks toward 
 this goal and undertakes the solution of these problems is not the senti¬ 
 mental optimism or the dogmatic certainty of eighteenth-century 
 society. Democracy has learned by bitter experience that men may 
 have rights and yet be victims of injustice a'nd oppression. The posses¬ 
 sion of rights, fulminated for mankind before society with its moving, 
 changing, growing life began, somehow has not availed to secure to men 
 actual well-being in concrete social situations. Democracy has found 
 that the only rights worth having are those which are achieved within 
 the process and with reference to the situations in which they are to 
 operate; that rights are functions which articulate themselves in con¬ 
 nection with a social dialectic and always imply certain counterparts 
 in the way of capacities, needs, obligations, and the like. And what¬ 
 ever assurance democracy has with reference to its future is grounded 
 in the fact that no rights ever are given; that these must be achieved, 
 and achieved in a competition with other possible rights such as is calcu¬ 
 lated to carry the life of society along, to raise it to higher and higher 
 levels. In the process of achieving their rights, men have learned the 
 art of living together and have come to realize all their satisfactions 
 and values in so living. The successful issues of social intercourse, 
 with all the ways and means devised for making these possible, have 
 given rise to a freer spirit, a social idealism, a moral venturesomeness, 
 which is ever devising new ways and means for effecting other pros¬ 
 perous issues of social life, for realizing new social values. And it is 
 this social idealism, this moral venturesomeness, objectifying itself 
 through the methods and achievements of science, that furnishes the 
 new democracy with its motive power and fills it with hope for the 
 future. 
 
 Now it is obvious that this new type of social organization, this 
 new democracy, “making itself, lifting itself through its very imper¬ 
 fections—through the struggle of these with one another—to planes 
 of more effective realization /’ 1 must have a profound bearing on our 
 
 1 Robert A. Woods, “Democracy, a New Unfolding of Human Powers,” Studies 
 in Philosophy and Psychology by Former Students of Charles Edward Garman, p. 128. 
 
48 
 
 SOME RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF PRAGMATISM 
 
 future conceptions of the divine. If we are justified in our contention 
 that dominant types of social or political organization have been the 
 determining factor in fixing the content of the God-idea at the several 
 levels of culture where this concept has appeared, we may say that the 
 God of the future must be a democratic God; that whatever else we 
 mean by the divine as it is now constituted, we must mean a power, 
 that is, in a very fundamental sense, we ourselves. The most effectively 
 divine power or agency in the world today is the social consciousness 
 of a genuinely democratic community. It is the social consciousness as 
 the ideal embodiment of the hard-won values of mankind that is effect¬ 
 ing whatever of good there is in our present-day life and civilization. 
 And this effectiveness of the social consciousness in controlling and 
 directing the movement of things is nothing more than is to be expected 
 in view of the increasingly effective methods for creating and conserv¬ 
 ing social values and for bringing these to the consciousness of the 
 community. Progress in the life of the community as in the life of the 
 individual is conditioned by the availability of the meaningful aspects 
 of past experience for the solution of present problems. But this 
 condition is fulfilled only as the meaningful aspects of experience are 
 idealized, that is, taken up into consciousness as permanent ideas and 
 attitudes. And it is obvious that in the case of the community these 
 ideal embodiments of life’s meanings and values must be socialized. 
 They must be available to the community in its corporate capacities; 
 they must become permanent and effective parts of the social conscious¬ 
 ness. To this end, there must be such methods of social control and 
 such devices for social intercommunication as are calculated to create 
 and sustain a social consciousness, a corporate sense of common inter¬ 
 ests and common values. And as we have had occasion to observe in 
 another connection, this is precisely the significance of the scientific 
 and educational movements of today. We have seen how important 
 these movements have been in socializing men; in creating for them a 
 common life, and in making them conscious of this common life. But 
 science and education are only in their infancy. It is impossible to 
 estimate what they are destined to accomplish in the way of social 
 control. It has been only in the last few years that they have had 
 anything like a free hand and an open field in directing human affairs. 
 Until recently the ideals of education and the methods of science were 
 for the most part academic and devoid of social significance. They 
 were confined almost exclusively to classrooms and laboratories. What¬ 
 ever they effected in the way of social control accrued to the benefit 
 
GOD 
 
 49 
 
 of a favored few who happened to be within the radius of their influ¬ 
 ence. They served to promote a sort of intellectual aristocracy which 
 had its counterpart in certain social arrangements and economic prefer¬ 
 ments based on class differentiation. The most lamentable result of 
 such an isolation of science and education was that these movements 
 were thereby precluded from fulfilling their true functions as instru¬ 
 ments of control. In spite of the institutions of learning that had been 
 founded from time to time through the munificence of philanthropic 
 individuals, ignorance, vice, and misery continued to prevail throughout 
 the land. It was not merely that the majority of the people were 
 prevented by physical circumstances from utilizing instruments of 
 culture; the real difficulty lay in the fact that there was no proper 
 appreciation of the social significance of these instruments. And this 
 difficulty was overcome (in so far as it has been overcome) not so much 
 through the channels of formal education, as through the liberalizing 
 effects of industry and commerce. The inventions of science, furnishing 
 as they did the implements of industry and the instruments of social 
 intercourse, placed men in the midst of an immeasurably more inti¬ 
 mate and intricate life than they had known before and, what is of 
 greater moment, made them conscious of their common life thus created 
 and sustained. Growing out of this new social consciousness, this 
 new sense of the intimacy and intricacy of life’s relationships, was an 
 intense moral earnestness, an anxiety for the general welfare, a so¬ 
 cial idealism, that demanded to be informed as to the ways and 
 means of social control. Responding to this demand, science and 
 education have at last come into their own. Everywhere there is a new 
 appreciation of the institutions of culture, a new insight into their 
 real significance and their full possibilities. This is what we mean 
 by the social and scientific point of view. It is the most hopeful sign 
 of the times and is destined to become increasingly effective in defining 
 social ends, in creating social values, and in bringing the community 
 to a full consciousness of these ends and values. 
 
 So we insist upon a democratic conception of God, as an instrument 
 of control in religious experience. And we await with confidence the 
 development of a type of imagery and a set of symbols appropriate to 
 such a conception. Furthermore, we believe that many of the aesthetic 
 and emotional values embodied in traditional conceptions of the divine 
 will be carried over and will find suitable vehicles of expressions in the 
 new imagery and symbols. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 RELIGIOUS WORSHIP AND SOCIAL CONTROL 1 
 
 It is possible to distinguish at least two aspects of religion. In 
 the first place, there are the immediate appreciative experiences which 
 constitute direct and first-hand contact with the divine. From this 
 point of view religion is a mode of experiencing which exists in its own 
 right. It is controlled by a type of interest as definite and as engaging 
 as that controlling any other of the outstanding pursuits of human 
 life, however complex it may prove to be. Like other human interests 
 it has its roots in certain instinctive needs and desires. Its affective 
 quality is a feeling of worth or a sense of value. But there is another 
 aspect of religion, namely, the reaction of the immediate appreciative 
 experiences constituting the religionist’s sense of the divine upon the 
 other areas of his experience. From this point of view, the function 
 of religion in its relation to social practice in general may be said to be 
 the maintenance of such a direct and vital contact with the divine as 
 to induce the acceptance and practice of the standards of value 
 embodied therein. The specific character of the reaction of religious 
 experience upon other areas of experience in any given period depends 
 upon the character of the values or ideals constituting the divine in 
 that period and at that level of culture. For example, in the Middle 
 Ages religious values were otherworldly, and the appreciation of these 
 values worked itself out in a manner of life that was ascetic and mo¬ 
 nastic. In striking contrast, the religious values of our modern period 
 have to do with the world that now is; and the reaction of the experi¬ 
 ence controlled by these values has been in the direction of a practical 
 humanitarianism. The mystic and the saint have been replaced by 
 the reformer and the social worker. And indeed, it must be said that 
 the church is fast losing sight of the devotional or appreciative aspect 
 of its life, and is becoming more and more a center of social service. 
 
 Now this tendency on the part of conventional religion to shift its 
 center of gravity to extra-mural activities to the neglect of the appre¬ 
 ciative or devotional aspect of its life is regarded by many with entire 
 
 1 The substance of this chapter appeared in an article in the International Journal 
 of Ethics , Vol. XXIX (October, 1918), under the same title and is reproduced here 
 with the permission of that Journal. 
 
 50 
 
RELIGIOUS WORSHIP AND SOCIAL CONTROL 
 
 51 
 
 satisfaction. To others, however, it has its dubious aspects. It 
 denotes a dearth of religious ideas and ideals. It bespeaks an impov¬ 
 erished type of religious experience. It harks back to an order of 
 religious values belonging to the past. The church’s program of social 
 service has back of it the doctrine of the “fatherhood of God and the 
 brotherhood of man.” This doctrine is not an adequate statement of 
 our present-day religious values. It reflects a social order which we 
 have left behind. It represents the hypostization of conditions of 
 dependence and limitation which we today refuse to recognize as belong¬ 
 ing to the nature of things, much less to set up as religious ideals. The 
 time was when it was an adequate statement of important qualities in 
 religious experience. Reference is made to the rise of democracy in 
 the eighteenth century. We have seen in the preceding chapter that 
 the conception of God as Father, announced by Jesus nearly two thou¬ 
 sand years before, only came into its own with the development of dem¬ 
 ocratic sentiments and institutions in Western Europe. But we have 
 seen that the democratic ideals on which the eighteenth-century democ¬ 
 racy rested had their roots in a wholly undemocratic conception of man’s 
 nature. The rights of man were given; they were donations to man 
 from an inherent and inalienable humanity. Metaphysically speaking, 
 man was as dependent as ever. And however adequate the ideas 
 embodied in the traditional conception of God the Father were for a 
 religious experience having such a social context, these ideas are not 
 entirely adequate for the religious of today. The social context in 
 which religion now functions gives promise of a new type of social 
 organization, a new democracy which, as was pointed out in the pre¬ 
 ceding chapter, must have a profound influence on our future concep¬ 
 tions of the divine, so much so that the God of the future will be a 
 “democratic God.” 
 
 Now the function of religion with reference to the democratic God 
 must be obvious. The empirical and practical values constituting the 
 divine as it exists today must, in the first place, become the actual 
 sources of religious satisfaction; and in thus serving the ends of reli¬ 
 gious aspiration and worship they will in turn become the instruments 
 of moral control. But it must be just as obvious that conventional 
 religion is not prepared to function adequately in either of these direc¬ 
 tions. Its channels of approach to God, its means of contact with 
 the divine, too often turn out to be but blind alleys, ending in disil¬ 
 lusionment. Its forms of worship, its technique of praise and prayer, 
 do not appeal to many, at least, of the most sincerely disposed. 
 
52 
 
 SOME RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF PRAGMATISM 
 
 Wrought out with reference to values long since become valueless, 
 they now serve in many cases to obstruct and distort religious experi¬ 
 ence. The religionist of today asks for bread and is given a stone. 
 He is in search of that which is morally significant and spiritually 
 worth while, and is confronted with much that once had meaning but 
 now is without moral significance or spiritual worth. In the mean¬ 
 time, disillusionment, disappointment, and despair with respect to 
 religious realities are the order of the day. 
 
 And this is not all. In thus failing to afford emotional contact 
 with the divine, conventional religion fails also to provide that inner 
 type of moral control which should define its reaction on social practice 
 in general. In consequence of this, resort must be had to various 
 means of external control. Penal systems, eugenics, social service, 
 philanthropy—these are some of the clumsy and ineffectual extremes 
 to which society has been driven in lieu of the inner control that should 
 emanate from a vital appreciation of social values. Of course, it is 
 not to be expected that such inner control shall ever be so thorough¬ 
 going as to require no supplementation by external methods. Doubt¬ 
 less, the poor—and the sick and the sinful and the dependent—we 
 have with us always. But it cannot be determined beforehand what 
 limits there are to a program dedicated to overcoming the prevailing 
 conditions of dependence and limitation. And certainly religion should 
 be satisfied with nothing less than this as an ideal. 
 
 But the forms of worship employed by conventional religion not 
 only fail to effect any appreciative contact with contemporary social 
 values with the social control that should follow therefrom; these 
 forms actually serve to inhibit the progressive and constructive tend¬ 
 encies in the experience of the worshiper, and to reinforce the conserva¬ 
 tive and non-progressive tendencies. And this is not to be wondered 
 at. As has been pointed out, these forms and ceremonies and rituals 
 speak a language that is foreign to present-day experience. They 
 reflect a social system long since left behind. They represent the 
 hypostization of conditions of dependence and limitation which we 
 now refuse to recognize as belonging to the nature of things, much 
 less to set up as religious ideals. They place a premium upon such 
 things as blind credulity, simple childlike faith, abject dependence, and 
 dumb acquiescence. They contemplate a source of good and an order 
 of values whose control is capricious and arbitrary. They presuppose 
 a moral dualism which, if accepted by the worshiper, must disrupt his 
 experience, and make it forever impossible for him to be at one with 
 
RELIGIOUS WORSHIP AND SOCIAL CONTROL 
 
 53 
 
 himself. Finally, they induce a type of righteousness that is self- 
 complacent and condescending, and whose fruits are the various forms 
 of social service. 
 
 The influence of all this on the broad-minded, forward-looking 
 religionist is unmistakable. He is a man of faith, but his faith is active 
 and creative. As a worshiper in the conventional church, however, 
 his faith becomes a matter of “simply trusting, that is all.” He has a 
 sense of dependence, knows the joy of companionship, experiences the 
 consolations of prayer. Only, his sense of dependence is a feeling of 
 interdependence, a feeling which is at once the foundation of his moral 
 character and the source of his moral well-being; the joy of companion¬ 
 ship is for him a consciousness of contact with a higher and better self, 
 a contact which expands his interests, reinforces his purposes, and 
 sustains his energies; and the consolations of prayer are to him the 
 satisfactions which come to those whose natures it is to reflect, to 
 appreciate, and to be reverent. And yet, as a conventional worshiper, 
 this feeling of interdependence reverts to a sense of a private, personal 
 relationship between himself and another Being. The companionship 
 which he experiences is fraught with a mysticism that is well-nigh 
 uncanny. And the prayers which should console him are for the most 
 part plaintive petitions for miraculous interventions which no one 
 expects to happen. 
 
 But the influence of conventional worship on the conservative, 
 non-progressive religionist is just as unmistakable. Here, however, 
 the influence is to be seen in the reaction of religious experience on the 
 other areas of experience. For example, one’s pursuit of social or 
 economic ends may be devoid of any regard for considerations of justice 
 or equal opportunity or the right to self-realization. As a conventional 
 worshiper, however, the religionist will be moved to certain acts of 
 social compensation. He will contribute his money, and perhaps his 
 time and influence, to the support of movements designed to overcome, 
 or at least, to mitigate conditions for which his soda] and economic 
 practices are partly responsible. And it is not that he is a member of 
 a religious organization which accepts his contributions by way of 
 making the best of a bad situation in whose creation it had no part. 
 It is not that the church merely acquiesces in and tacitly approves of 
 “service” and “uplift” and “reform” as forms of social and moral compen¬ 
 sation. The fundamental values embodied in the church’s conception of 
 the divine, and held out to the religionist as the sources of his emotional 
 satisfacton and the sanctions of his social practice are themselves 
 
54 
 
 SOME RELIGIOUS IMPLICATIONS OF PRAGMATISM 
 
 feudalistic; they imply a hierarchical structure of reality; they repre¬ 
 sent conditions of dependence and limitation as belonging to the very 
 nature of things. And appreciative contact with these values actually 
 serves to reinforce a type of social practice that is feudalistic. The 
 churches are full of devout communicants whose methods of conduct¬ 
 ing their business and whose standards in dealing with their competitors, 
 their employees and the public, are about as far removed from the 
 democratic ideals of justice and equal opportunity and self-realization 
 as could well be imagined. These devout religionists are not neces¬ 
 sarily hypocrites. They are the mainstays of the church. They are 
 devoted to the church’s social program. And they are possessed of 
 good consciences, withal. What manner of men are they then ? How 
 is one to account for them? One must account for them by saying 
 that they are intellectually and emotionally oblivious to the new order 
 of social values and ideals. And one of the agencies responsible for 
 their moral backwardness is the church, with its inadequate doctrines 
 and out-of-date rituals. 
 
 The church must rehabilitate the devotional or appreciative side 
 of its life. It must not content itself with being a center of social 
 service. Its true end is to be a source of emotional satisfaction and 
 moral inspiration. It must set for itself the task of creating a new 
 type of religious experience. It must concern itself with inducing the 
 acceptance and practice of standards of value which will reduce its 
 erstwhile efforts at service and uplift and reform to a desperate last 
 resort. To this end, it must revise its creeds and rituals. A new set 
 of symbols and a new type of imagery must be forthcoming. New 
 bottles must be provided for the new wine.