THE VALIDITY OF THE 
 RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 A PRELIMINARY STUDY IN THE 
 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 
 
 BY 
 GEORGE A. BARROW, PH.D. (HAEV.) 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 SHERMAN, FRENCH & COMPANY 
 1917 
 

 COPYHIGHT, 1917 
 
 SHERMAN, FRENCH & COMPANY 
 
TO 
 
 MY MOTHER 
 
NOTE 
 
 Acknowledgment is due the Journal of Religious 
 Psychology for kind permission to reprint as the lat- 
 ter part of Lecture II an article which appeared in 
 the Journal under the title of " The Reality of the 
 Religious Experience." 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 LECTURE I 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF A PHILOSOPHY OF 
 RELIGION 
 
 SECTION PAOH 
 
 I THE NEED OF ANALYSIS .... 1 
 
 A. Official Christianity does not study 
 the experience as such B. Science only 
 describes it C. Among philosophers lack 
 of agreement forces a new analysis. 
 
 II DEFINITION OF TERMS 4 
 
 A. There is a consciousness of religion 
 B. Our problem is with the form or con- - 
 cept C. Experience (1) Experience is 
 something which is in consciousness and not 
 completely controlled (2) First question 
 is whether religion can be focal in con- 
 sciousness (3) And whether it is com- 
 pletely controllable by man D. Validity 
 (1) It is a question of a true indication 
 of the source of the experience (2) Ques- 
 tion first the existence of an indication as 
 to source (3) Second question is of the 
 truth of this indication. 
 
 Ill THE POSSIBLE RANGE OF THE EX- 
 PERIENCE 20 
 
 A. As to objective detail (1) Is there 
 detail, and how much may be true (2) 
 i 
 
ii CONTENTS 
 
 SECTION PAGE 
 
 That is, can the religious consciousness give 
 objective detail (3) And how does it 
 give it. 
 
 IV THE TEST OF THE EXPERIENCE . . 23 
 
 A. Test determines method B. What 
 is the test (1) Is there any (2) It 
 must be sufficient to yield the maximum re- 
 sults (3) It must bring an explanation 
 C. The effect of limitation (1) In 
 general, forces us to a conceptual construc- 
 tion (2) In religion, is God only a logical 
 necessity. 
 
 ? V THE PLACE OF THE RELIGIOUS EX- 
 PERIENCE IN GENERAL EXPERI- 
 ENCE .32 
 
 A. Analysis of the exterior relations of 
 the experience (l) Necessary to tell the 
 relative place of the source (2) In re- 
 ligion, ask what methods to use B. Is it 
 limited to humanity (1) Is the source in- 
 dividual (2) If so, no revelation of a 
 God beyond is possible C. If not limited 
 to humanity (1) A recourse must be had 
 to powers beyond (2) Only so can God's 
 existence be proven. 
 
 VI THE RELATION OF THIS EXPERI- 
 ENCE TO THE WILL 41 
 
 A. Experience normative or passive 
 (1) Definition of the difference (2) 
 Must ask which applies to religion B. 
 Result of the passive category (1) The 
 passive experiences are not central in inter- 
 
CONTENTS iii 
 
 SECTION PAGE 
 
 est (2) It would mean God was a blind 
 force C. Is religion normative (1) Is 
 from a personality (2) That is, God is a 
 person. 
 
 VII SUMMARY The Philosophy of Religion 
 
 a distinct critique 51 
 
 LECTURE II t>^C 
 RELIGION REAL AND UNIQUE 
 I IN CONSCIOUSNESS 53 
 
 A. Definiteness (1) At times very 
 definite (2) So open to, and must be 
 tested B. As conscious impulse (1) 
 There are conscious religious impulses 
 (2) So religion is so far real C. Can 
 be dated (1) When mean cessation of in- 
 ner turmoil (2) Or its beginning (3) 
 So has a real place in time D. As emo- 
 tion (1) Emotions are in consciousness 
 (2) So in these four categories some- 
 where is included religion as an experience. 
 
 II INDEFINITENESS 61 
 
 A. Of content (l) Very variable 
 (2) So not perception of objects B. Of 
 direction (l) Often directly opposed 
 (2) So not the same as morality C. Of 
 date (l) The more normal the more un- 
 dated (2) So not a perception of time 
 D. So non-perceptual (l) Always in pos- 
 sibility consciously real (2) More than 
 perception. 
 
iv CONTENTS 
 
 SECTION PAGE 
 
 III SUBJECT TO MAN 70 
 
 A. Can seek it (1) To define it as an 
 experience must question control (2) 
 Man can change and bring about in himself 
 the religious experience (3) So like other 
 experiences B. Can reject it (1) By 
 putting other interests first (2) So like 
 other experiences C. Can modify (1) 
 By effort and habit (2) So real as ob- 
 ject of will. 
 
 IV NOT COMPLETELY CONTROLLABLE 78 
 
 A. It comes often without seeking 
 
 (1) As in the family, or in conversion 
 
 (2) So, different from morality B. Felt 
 even when rejected (l) It requires force 
 to reject it (2) So a real experience 
 C. Can modify man (1) Change often 
 marks it (2) So religion a true experi- 
 ence and therefore real. 
 
 V AN UNIQUE EXPERIENCE .... 83 
 
 A. In consciousness but very change- 
 able in form, so stands by itself B. So 
 with relation to the will, simply say, it is 
 real. 
 
 LECTURE III 
 
 THE SOURCE OF RELIGION 
 I AN UNIQUE SOURCE 88 
 
 A. Need of a guide (1) As first in- 
 dications fail (2) Should seek an unique 
 source B. Need of further analysis 
 (l) As the experience may not be pure. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 SECTION 
 
 II ALWAYS CLAIM A SOURCE OUTSIDE 92 
 
 A. Analyze the types which vary B. 
 In contents (l) Mystic denial of con- 
 sciousness assert something behind (2) 
 Definite experiences only called religious if 
 thought to be from an outside source C. 
 In direction (1) Mystic passivity im- 
 plies direction by a power beyond (2) 
 Active impulses imply as source a common 
 ground outside D. In time (1) When 
 uneventful and vague, not from the crea- 
 tive will (2) When date uncertain, so 
 from its gradual coming into conscious- 
 ness E. When subject to man (1) 
 Consider in three forms (2) Rejectance 
 implies objectivity (3) Modification im- 
 plies previous existence (4) Searching 
 implies inability to create. 
 
 III THIS CLAIM SHOWS THE EXPERI- 
 
 ENCE INCOMPLETE IN ITSELF . 104 
 
 A. It does not explain itself to itself 
 
 (1) Religious state always implies some- 
 thing beyond (2) And realizes its impli- 
 cation B. So source not in conscious- 
 ness (l) Not given in consciousness 
 
 (2) So not in consciousness C. So must 
 look beyond (1) For it is incomplete in 
 itself (2) So source is outside. 
 
 IV A 'FORMAL' SOURCE Ill 
 
 A. Known by its effect (1) An un- 
 known factor (2) Known by its effect 
 B. So its existence formal (1) Its na- 
 
vi CONTENTS 
 
 SECTION PAGE 
 
 ture unknown but adequate to explain the 
 religious experience (2) So, formal C. 
 As formal, logically necessary. 
 
 V SOURCE REAL 116 
 
 A. The experience an incomplete real 
 
 (1) Incomplete in itself (2) Yet real 
 B. The source then real (1) Necessary 
 to the experience (2) So real. 
 
 VI RELIGIOUS CONSCIOUSNESS THEN 
 REVEALS NATURE OF SOME- 
 THING REAL 120 
 
 A. Religion then can reveal the source 
 (l) We have one side of, the relation 
 
 (2) And know there is something real at 
 the other (3) So what is true of the re- 
 lation applies to both terms B. As the 
 religious consciousness reveals something 
 of this source (l) Can study the experi- 
 ence to find nature of the source or object 
 (2) The experience is in general valid. 
 
 LECTURE IV 
 / 
 
 THE TEST OF RELIGION 
 I NO OBJECTIVE DETAIL .... 125 
 
 A. Object as focus of experience (1) 
 Validity implies some test (2) Objectiv- 
 ity mean a focus of the social conscious- 
 ness B. Source not given as objective 
 (l) No focus of agreement (2) So no 
 basis for a test. 
 
CONTENTS vii 
 
 SECTION PAGE 
 
 II CERTAIN NECESSARY QUALITIES . 130 
 
 A. The source, as source, definite (1) 
 Has determinate character (2) So, defin- 
 ite qualities B. Other qualities definitely 
 excluded (l) Determination implies its 
 denial untrue (2) So qualities which 
 will deny it, to be excluded C. Neces- 
 sary qualities (1) As necessary, basis 
 for true statements (2) Test then inde- 
 pendent of method of discovery. 
 
 III TEST WITHIN THE EXPERIENCE . 136 
 
 A. Truth known as truth by reason 
 (1) Test of perception is agreement (2) 
 As no agreement objectively in religion no 
 objective validity (3) Only test is by 
 reason B. No a priori truth revealed 
 (l) A priori mean universally agreed on, 
 so not in religion (2) Hence dogma- 
 tism useless as a guarantee. 
 
 IV NO EXTERIOR STANDARD .... 142 
 
 A. No test of conformity (l) Agree- 
 ment of numbers valid for objective truth 
 (2) But not for derived truth B. So 
 no exterior test (l) The test is within 
 the individual experience. 
 
 V THE TEST IS THE TEST OF SOUND 
 
 REASONING 147 
 
 A. Test of logical adequacy (l) As 
 test scientific theory (2) So doctrine 
 must explain religious phenomena B. A 
 test, not a proof C. But a way to fuller 
 knowledge. 
 
viii CONTENTS 
 
 LECTURE V 
 HUMAN AND SUPERHUMAN 
 
 SECTION PAGE 
 
 I RELIGION ASSERTS SOURCE OUT- 
 SIDE HUMANITY 152 
 
 A. Claim in outline B. Animism C. 
 Totemism D. Primitive prayer and sac- 
 rifice E. Buddhism -- F. Theism (l) 
 Deis tic (2) Mystical. 
 
 II DEFINITION OF INDIVIDUAL . . 160 
 
 A. Concrete (1) The logical individ- 
 ual (2) The human individual B. De- 
 termined (1) Logically (2) For the 
 human individual C. Limited (1) 
 Logically (2) In the human individual 
 D. Temporal (l) Individual experi- 
 ence temporal (2) Also experience of an- 
 other human individual. 
 
 III. DEFINITION OF SUPERINDIVIDUAL 168 
 
 A. General B. Determining C. Par- 
 tially unlimited D. Non-temporal. 
 
 IV DEFINITION OF "HUMAN" ... 173 
 
 A. Means what is restricted to human be- 
 ings B. Physical characters depend on 
 his social life C. Intellectual characters 
 depend on the conflict and the struggle to 
 control emotions D. Intellect limited by 
 physical world E. Only when limitations 
 present is assurance of human character. 
 
 V DEFINITION OF SUPERHUMAN . . 179 
 
 A. Non-physical (1) Without human 
 physical limitations (2) Or limitations 
 
CONTENTS ix 
 
 SECTION PAGE 
 
 of human society B. No inner struggle 
 of will and emotion C. Intellect super- 
 physical. 
 
 VI SOURCE OF RELIGION SUPERINDI- 
 
 VIDUAL 184 
 
 A. General B. Logically determina- 
 tive C. Not completely determined 
 D. Non-temporal. 
 
 VII SOURCE OF RELIGION SUPERHUMAN 189 
 
 A. Super-physical (l) As perceptive 
 (2) As social B. Lessens human in- 
 ner conflict C. Refers to a superhuman 
 realm. 
 
 LECTURE VI 
 PERSONALITY 
 
 I THE HIDDEN TERM 196 
 
 A. Object (1) The alternatives (2) 
 Definition B. Source C. Personality 
 (l) Interaction in general (2) Inter- 
 action in human will. 
 
 II AS OBJECT ......... 202 
 
 A. Passive (1) Not exclusive of all 
 activity (2) But as object, passive- 
 B. Without influence on the will C. So 
 not a sufficient explanation. 
 
 Ill AS SOURCE 207 
 
 A. Active B. Affects the will C. 
 Sufficient explanation. 
 
x CONTENTS 
 
 SECTION 
 
 IV THE SOURCE OF RELIGION . . .211 
 
 A. As object (1) Object, yet active 
 (2) So more than object B. As 
 source (1) A source, yet passive (2) 
 Both source and object. 
 
 V PERSONALITY 219 
 
 A. Mutual activity (1) On religious 
 object (2) On the will B. Direct in- 
 teraction. 
 
 LECTURE VII 
 A FOUNDATION FOR THEOLOGY 
 
 I FOR A SCIENCE THERE IS NECES- 
 SARY .221 
 
 A. A field (1) Distinct (2) Real 
 
 B. A method (1) Distinct (2) Valid 
 
 C. Limits (l) Presuppositions (2) 
 Purpose. 
 
 II THE FIELD OF THEOLOGY ... 228 
 
 A. Definite (l) Not the expression 
 (2) But the experience itself B. Real 
 (1) Existent (2) Valid. 
 
 Ill THE METHOD OF THEOLOGY ... 233 
 
 A. Distinct (1) Formal (2) A 
 postiori (3) Explanatory B. Valid 
 (1) Because the object has personality. 
 
 IV THE LIMITS OF THEOLOGY ... 238 
 
 A. Presuppositions (1) A religious life 
 (2) A moral life B. Purposes (1) 
 Teaching (2) Devotional. 
 
CONTENTS xi 
 
 SECTION PAGE 
 
 V CONCLUSION 242 
 
 A. Building from the foundation (1) 
 No assumptions (2) Valid conclusions 
 B. A foundation for further study (1) 
 Definition of the science (2) Proof of its 
 validity. 
 
LECTURE I 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF A PHILOSOPHY OF 
 RELIGION 
 
 The problem of the validity of the religious ex- 
 perience is essentially modern and recent. Problems 
 connected with what we call the religious life there 
 have always been, both as to its practice and its im- 
 plications. Men have questioned whether it was an 
 experience of God or the Devil, and have sought to 
 regulate it. Others have claimed their inspiration 
 from their possession of an abnormal religious life, 
 and asserted that peculiar knowledge of God or of 
 life was given to them in that experience. Being 
 practical^ men, the leaders of religious life have 
 Bought to restrainjthis phenomena TyitfrinJimit.fr, nnc\ 
 "those limits havejbeen laid 
 
 of" the timeT Mystics, perhaps the only ones who 
 Tiaverealised religion as an experience different from 
 the other experiences of life, have never won a large 
 following. Quakers remain few, even though their 
 first quietism has been largely lost. The effort to 
 keep the contemplative orders true to their first ideal 
 has often seemed impossible of success. The normal 
 life which does not recognise sharp distinctions be- 
 tween the experience of religion and other experiences 
 has dominated the Church. Hence the practical 
 spirit of the Church has expressed itself in restrain- 
 
2 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 ing the expression of religion as a thing distinct from 
 life's other activities. On the theoretical side theolo- 
 gians have been much more concerned with the 
 revelations made and the ideas drawn from the re- 
 ligious experience than they have been with that ex- 
 perience itself. The official teachers and leaders of 
 Christianity have therefore paid little attention to 
 the religious phenomena for its own sake. The terms 
 used in describing it are not drawn from an analysis 
 of the phenomena, but from assumptions, many of 
 them crude and carelessly used. 
 
 Outside of official Christianity there has been, of 
 recent years, considerable study of religious phe- 
 nomena. The history of religions, comparative re- 
 ligion, together with the science and the psychology 
 of religion, though naming fields whose boundaries are 
 only very roughly defined, outline the modern inter- 
 est in the subject. By contact with differing forms 
 of religious expression, and especially by contact with 
 the East, where attention has for centuries been cen- 
 tered on these phenomena, our western world has been 
 aroused to a careful objective study of religion. This 
 has not yet gone far enough to give us new terms, 
 since it has hardly yet formulated clearly even the 
 principal problems. We cannot look to this objec- 
 tive study for clear definitions of our terms, or for 
 unambiguous terms. Nor would they serve us for 
 more than a start. Valuable as the results of the sci- 
 entific study of religion will be for the future theolo- 
 gian, these studies will be, even for him, merely de- 
 scriptive. The determination of the normal age of 
 conversion, or the solution of the relative consist- 
 ency of differing forms of religious expression, can 
 
A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 3 
 
 give to the theologian only more material and new 
 problems. N<one of these modern studies concerns 
 itself with the meaning of the religious experience. 
 If it is proved that there is no distinct experience of 
 this type, then its only meaning will lie in its rela- 
 tions to the physical life of the race, but the deter- 
 mination of this point can not be found in the sci- 
 ence of religion, whether genetic or descriptive. 
 Only a philosophic study of the implications of the 
 normal religious life can even point the way to a so- 
 lution of such a problem. 
 
 The philosophical study of the expression of the 
 religious life is newer even than its scientific study. 
 By philosophy of religion in even recent times has 
 been meant the application to religion of the meta- 
 physical concepts. While this is valid, and means 
 much for theology, it can not take the place of a 
 study based on the experience itself. Independent 
 studies of this latter kind have been very few. Many 
 semi-popular adaptations of modern theology to 
 modern religious needs there have been, and it is 
 significant that men like Eucken and Royce have at- 
 tempted this. Yet this is not a philosophical study 
 of the experience itself. It has its relation rather 
 with the practical problems of the Christian leader, 
 than with the logical analysis of the Christian phi- 
 losopher. Besides the present condition of religious 
 thought, there is such a complex situation in philo- 
 sophic thought generally that we are to-day unable 
 to reach any general agreement on terms. Each 
 thinker must define for himself and his readers the 
 meaning he gives to his words, else only confusion 
 results. When the students of philosophy dispute as 
 
4 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 fiercely as they do over the definition of conscious- 
 ness, it is useless to attempt to assume an agreement 
 on the definition of the religious consciousness. Some 
 agreement, however, is necessary, and this present 
 attempt will be justified if the religious experience can 
 be so defined that in the further study of it, whether 
 for the practical churchman or for the scientific 
 worker in the history or the philosophy of religion, 
 there may be some basis of agreement as to what is 
 the religious problem. 
 
 In defining the problem of the religious experience 
 we cannot assume agreement even on the terms which 
 we have been using. To say that the problem is 
 concerning the validity of the religious experience is 
 to beg the question in each word of our statement. 
 Men are not agreed in what sense they shall use the 
 word experience. So in dealing with the experience 
 of something which is unlike any other experience in 
 the world if we are to take the word of those who 
 claim to have that experience in its fullest form 
 then the first question is whether this is an experience 
 or an hallucination. We must begin at the beginning. 
 The beginning is with this word experience. If any- 
 thing that is in our consciousness is an experience, 
 then a man who has any religious ideas has a religious 
 experience. To use the word in this sense would not 
 imply anything further about the experience than 
 that there was some meaning to the word religion; 
 there was a state of consciousness which we could 
 identify as the consciousness of religion. That men 
 do mean something when they speak of religion we 
 may take for granted. Whether the religious state 
 or feelings or consciousness is the same as other con- 
 
A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 5 
 
 scious states is a debatable question, but the existence, 
 and material success, of religious organisations 
 proves that men believe in them enough to support 
 them, and they would not give as largely as they do 
 of their means unless that meaning existed for them. 
 Whether we call it fear or love, men do think they 
 accomplish something by their support and pursuit 
 of religion. Even if it is merely the effort to live 
 a moral life, then that effort is what we call religion. 
 The very fact that religion is to-day the object of 
 such widespread serious study shows that men have 
 a consciousness of some meaning to the word " re- 
 ligion." 
 
 The fact of the existence of a religious conscious- 
 ness does no more than make possible the various 
 problems. To define the terms of these problems we 
 must analyse this consciousness. Anything may be 
 analysed in many different ways. With differing 
 motives the directions of the cuts which separate the 
 resulting parts will be different. The scientific and 
 historical analysis of the consciousness of religion 
 has been often undertaken in these days. The result 
 of the historical analysis is to define what men have 
 meant by this term " religious." The contents of 
 the religious concept become more and more definite 
 as this history of religion portrays what men have 
 thought that religion meant. What it does mean is, 
 however, not the province of history to inquire. 
 That is left to science and to philosophy. The recent 
 modern development of the scientific study of religiori 
 has done much towards the description of the reli- 
 gious phenomena. We have a far clearer idea to- 
 day than ever before what the psychological and 
 
6 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 physiological elements of the religious consciousness 
 are. This scientific analysis, however, must content 
 itself with the objective side of consciousness. It 
 can tell what a man is thinking about when he prays, 
 or it can correlate his desire to pray with certain 
 physiological conditions. What it cannot do, so 
 long as it remains a science, is to consider the impli- 
 cations of the experience. It can test the questions 
 of fact, as in perception it can decide whether the 
 perception has relation to something we call the ob- 
 ject of perception; it can distinguish in terms of the 
 knowledge relation between true perception and false, 
 between vision and hallucination; but as it cannot 
 decide whether the object is real or conceptual, 
 whether the test is one of knowledge or logic, but 
 must leave that to metaphysics, so the science of 
 religion cannot decide whether the religious con- 
 sciousness has objective validity or is purely sub- 
 jective. The consideration, even, of the application 
 of these terms to the religious consciousness belongs 
 not to the science but to the philosophy of religion. 
 The analysis which we have to make is therefore the 
 philosophical analysis. We are concerned not with 
 questions of fact, but of meaning. It would not 
 serve our purpose, therefore, to define religion in 
 terms of its content. We need neither to make a 
 parallel to the scientific analysis, nor do we need, ex- 
 cept incidentally, to take over its results. In raising 
 the question of validity, whatever we may mean, we 
 do not mean to question the fact of its existence or 
 what its existence includes. We do not ask whether 
 any given case of religion is or is not a true religious 
 experience. We are concerned only with the form of 
 
A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 7 
 
 the religious experience and the questions we ask are 
 questions of possibility and of implication. Our 
 analysis is therefore to be an analysis of concepts. 
 Given the existence of something we conceive to be 
 the religious consciousness or religious state, we seek 
 to analyse our conception of it. 
 
 In this analysis, the first term to be questioned is 
 the last of our titles. So far a number of terms have 
 been used in speaking of the religious phenomena in 
 order to avoid the implications of any one of them. 
 The concept which we will find ourselves forced to 
 consider most is brought to us in the word " experi- 
 ence." To assume it in any one sense would be 
 dangerous, so we must ask first what is meant by the 
 term as applied to religion. At the start, and from 
 whatever point we make our start, the application to 
 religion must be carefully examined. The widest 
 meaning is therefore the best to bring out the most 
 general implications. The widest use is that already 
 referred to, when anything which may be the object 
 of a man's consciousness is called his experience. 
 Dreams, insight into artistic activities or values, as 
 well as the perceptual facts of everyday life, are in 
 a man's experience. Even in this widest use, how- 
 ever, there are limits. It is a question whether a 
 man experiences his own purposes, or his own will. 
 The question might be put in the form as to whether 
 there can be a subjective experience. Ordinarily 
 the assumption would be that there could not. What 
 a man experiences, though it may come to him from 
 his own body or even his " subconscious life," is 
 usually assumed to be something over whose coming, 
 or at least over the complete determination of whose 
 
8 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 coming, he does not have control. Even the artist, 
 in seeking to realise and make possible the experience 
 of his ideal of beauty, must discover, at least in part, 
 rather than create, that beauty. He deals with a 
 world not completely under his power. The experi- 
 ence of the moral struggle leads to the same discovery 
 of weakness in the will to do right. The experience 
 comes because the action is governed by other forces 
 besides and in addition to the ideal. The problem as 
 to whether the God of ordinary theology can have 
 a moral experience, since his omnipotence can feel no 
 limits, illustrates the ordinary use of the term. A 
 man experiences that which in some way or other is 
 not subject to his will. Our ordinary activity, the 
 direct result of our will, can, however, and does be- 
 come the object of knowledge and of subsequent will 
 activity. Just as we speak of a man experiencing 
 anger, when we refer primarily to the presence of 
 the angry feelings in his consciousness, so we can and 
 sometimes do speak of his experience of an ideal. 
 Especially is this true of religion. In the popular 
 devotional literature, whether of revivalist or mystic, 
 the effort is made to concentrate attention on the 
 active side of a man's nature. He is asked to pay 
 attention to his motives, or, with the Indian mystic, 
 to ignore his desires. In either case motives or 
 desires are treated as something in his consciousness 
 which may be objects of attention. The philosophic 
 use of the word " object " as opposed to " subject " 
 has led to the danger of ignoring the fact that in 
 ordinary usage the same consciousness often has ap- 
 plied to it both words. When a man becomes con- 
 scious of any purpose, whether " the will to believe " 
 
A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 9 
 
 or the will to do right, or the will to seek the abolition 
 of desire, in so far as he is conscious of what he is 
 seeking, in ordinary language we say that he experi- 
 ences that desire. In the very nature of self-con- 
 sciousness the experience of the self is involved. The 
 metaphysical difficulties which surround the problem 
 as to how the subjective will can be objective need 
 not, however, concern us here. As we are now deal- 
 ing with the meaning of terms, it is enough to point 
 out the implication of applying to religion the word 
 " experience," used in this most general sense. The 
 two elements we have been discussing may be brought 
 together in the statement that a man experiences any- 
 thing which is the object of attention, and so far as 
 it is, he does not have it completely under his con- 
 trol. This is true of the very case of self-conscious- 
 ness, a man by no means controls his consciousness 
 of his own will. Often he will seek very earnestly in 
 some direction, only to some day awake to the con- 
 sciousness that that was not really what he wanted, 
 or that what he did want was not consistent with 
 this other thing for which he was equally anxious. A 
 man, in the common use of words, may be said to find 
 out what it is he wants. He experiences his will 
 when it comes to consciousness in his mind, and that 
 will may be one that his whole self does not control. 
 This is, as I understand it, the attitude of the Budd- 
 hist toward desire. There are purposes that the 
 true self must cast off if it is to be true to itself. So 
 long as they exist, they are not subject to the true 
 self. Whether or not correct as a hasty statement 
 of the Buddhist position, such a statement illustrates 
 the possibility of the union of the two ideas in the 
 
10 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 use of the word experience. To say that a man ex- 
 periences something is to say that he is conscious 
 of something over which he has not complete control. 
 When this meaning of experience is applied to re- 
 ligion the religious phenomena are described as ob- 
 jects of consciousness over which the man experi- 
 encing them has not complete control. Taking the 
 first half of this statement first, when religion is 
 spoken of as the object of consciousness something 
 more is meant than that it is studied as we are now 
 studying it. Any concept may be the object of in- 
 quiry, even though that concept has no content. 
 The concept of a round-square, though it has proper- 
 ties that can be studied can never be an experience, 
 for since a round-square can never exist, it cannot 
 be the object of consciousness. A study of the con- 
 ception of a thing is not the study of the thing. To 
 be object of consciousness religion must exist. There 
 must be states of men's minds which can be studied 
 and known under the concepts of religion. Grant- 
 ing that this is the case, since the material devotion 
 proves that men, as we have already said, mean 
 something when they speak of religion, the asser- 
 tion comes to the form that religion, assuming it 
 to exist, exists as an object of consciousness. Re- 
 membering in what sense we used the term object as 
 applied to experience, including in it experience of 
 will and value, we come to the assertion that religion 
 is a possible content of consciousness and the sub- 
 ject or focus of the attentive consciousness. This is 
 by no means self evident. If we should follow many 
 of the mystics in their statements of the impossi- 
 bility of describing or adequately coming to con- 
 
A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 11 
 
 sciousness of the religious experience we should have 
 to conclude that it is not a possible focal center for 
 clear consciousness. The fact that Buddhists are 
 by no means agreed as to what terms are applicable 
 to Nirvana proves that to assert that in this sense 
 of " object of consciousness " religion is an experi- 
 ence is not accepted by many who call themselves 
 religious. Accepting experience as conscious ex- 
 perience, and religion as existent, the whole char- 
 acter of the relation between them remains to be 
 examined. Therefore for this first meaning of ex- 
 perience we have the problem of the possibility of 
 the religious state being in any sense focal and 
 clear. In this it shares in the present condition of 
 any problem which seeks to define the consciousness 
 of the subject of knowledge, or to describe in logical 
 terms self-consciousness. To a certain extent it 
 must share the fate of the outcome of such attempts, 
 yet a negative view here is conceivably possible what- 
 ever be the conclusion as to self-consciousness. If 
 self-consciousness is agreed upon as something 
 existent which cannot itself be focal in consciousness, 
 but only a condition behind consciousness, then there 
 is the possibility, if religion is also in its nature non- 
 focal, that religion and self-consciousness may be 
 closely related. Undoubtedly there is a certain 
 tendency in this direction observable in the work of 
 the absolute idealists. The religious union with 
 God, for the Hindoo as well as for many of our own 
 thinkers, is often spoken of as the true self. On 
 the other hand, if the student of philosophy does 
 allow the focal nature of self-consciousness, he may 
 still, whether by relegating religion to the subcon- 
 
12 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 scious realm, or by exalting it to the ineffable re- 
 gions beyond even self-consciousness, conceive it as 
 not possibly an experience of our conscious life, and 
 therefore in this case very different from self-con- 
 sciousness. This question must be met, therefore, 
 by -the student of religious concepts. He must ask 
 whether from their nature they are or are not possi- 
 ble focal centers in consciousness. 
 
 If with this question of presence in consciousness 
 we come into deep waters, we must swim in even 
 deeper when we consider the latter half of our pre- 
 liminary definition of experience. If experience is 
 something over which a man has not complete con- 
 trol, then we are met at the very outset by conflict- 
 ing ideas among those who profess to have the re- 
 ligious life. Whatever religion may be, this ques- 
 tion is as fundamental as the issue between Augustine 
 and Pelagius. It is really this that was the issue 
 between them. If we are to call or acknowledge the 
 possibility of an experience of religion, we must face 
 the problem they faced. If man can by his own 
 will and in his own strength attain to the condition 
 of union with God which is another name for what 
 we have called the religious phenomena, then, in the 
 extreme case where that union remains completely 
 under his control, it cannot be called in our sense 
 an experience. If that religious state comes to him 
 even partially as the result of forces outside his own 
 will and not subject to him, then it may be an ex- 
 perience. The whole theology which must be the 
 result for a believer in religion from the study of 
 his religion will differ according to the answer given 
 this question. It is not merely, however, the prob- 
 
A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 13 
 
 lem which faced Augustine. Taking the religious 
 state apart from its relation to morality, the prob- 
 lem is just as acute. To a certain extent the Yogi, 
 in laying out for himself definite exercises, assumes 
 that he can control that which will result from 
 the course he is taking. While he may not assert 
 that when it comes he has complete control over it, 
 still he tends in this direction. The acme of the 
 religious state, as it occurs in the consciousness of 
 Brahma, would seem always to be conceived in terms 
 which do not allow of the application to it of the 
 word " experience." Brahma or the Christian God, 
 if described in the terms which are often used, can- 
 not be said to have in consciousness anything over 
 which he has not complete control. Absorption in 
 him, therefore, would be union with a being who has 
 no experience. In this the Indian thinker is often 
 more consistent than the Christian. If religion is 
 something which a man can ideally consider as under 
 his complete will and control, then ideally, and as 
 he conceives its nature, it is not an experience, what- 
 ever else we may call it. If it is thus conceived as 
 not an experience, the whole question again arises of 
 its relation to self-consciousness and takes corre- 
 sponding forms to the results that we have seen 
 were possible in the consideration of the first half 
 of our definition. Another result of the assertion 
 that religion may be experienced must be noted. 
 Whether or not the result of man's will, as against 
 God's, it may be conceived as the result of physical 
 forces over which, as we know in other departments 
 of life, a man never has complete control. If re- 
 ligion is physiological or subject to " natural law," 
 
14 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 it must, if it can come into consciousness, be an ex- 
 perience. This is true whether the contents of re- 
 ligion be more than emotions or not. As we have 
 seen, ideals and values, which are not mere emotions, 
 because they are often the result of physical condi- 
 tions and therefore not completely subject to man, 
 are for that reason possible experiences. To con- 
 clude that religion may be experienced leaves the way 
 open for the physiological and psychological studies 
 which are the fashion to-day. A negative answer 
 means that what these men are studying is not re- 
 ligion. If religion is what a man wills then those 
 states and actions which are the result of material 
 or natural forces cannot be called religion. Our 
 present problem, therefore, is logically prior to any 
 scientific study of religion. If religion is to be 
 studied as an experience, it must first be shown to be 
 by its very nature not completely controllable by the 
 will of the man experiencing it. 
 
 The general definition of experience with which 
 we have been working so far cannot lead into the 
 heart of the problem. In what we have been con- 
 sidering questions of validity have not entered. 
 However we may answer the questions as to the posi- 
 tion in consciousness and of control of religion by 
 the will, we have not defined any implications of the 
 experience. At the most we have merely defined 
 something of its nature. Our description may be 
 true or untrue, but the experience itself, if it be an 
 experience, cannot be said to be either. Before the 
 question of validity is raised, there should be some- 
 thing recognised as implying connections beyond 
 itself. As long as the religious experience is defined 
 
A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 15 
 
 in terms that, even though objects of conscious 
 thought do not imply relations with obj ects or beings 
 outside consciousness, we cannot say that the experi- 
 ence is true or false. A dream may be consistent or 
 inconsistent, but it cannot, unless used for divination, 
 be true or false. No question of validity can logic- 
 ally be raised by the modern man in regard to even a 
 consistent dream. It is to further definition or 
 limitation of the idea of experience that we must 
 look for a clearer idea of the limits of our problem. 
 The next step in such a description is the question of 
 the source of the experience. Here again ordinary 
 language is a guide. It differentiates two kinds 
 of experience, inner and outer. A man experiences 
 within him whatever comes from his own body ; he 
 experiences objects outside of him by perceiving 
 them through some one or more of his sense organs. 
 This distinction between inner and outer which 
 causes the philosopher so much trouble causes none 
 in the world of ordinary conversation. A man's ex- 
 perience of an illness is assumed to be different from 
 his experience in seeing or hearing a horse. The 
 ordinary mind jumps at once over the intermediate 
 steps, which may be somewhat alike in the two cases, 
 to the question of source, and because the source of 
 the sickness is to be found within the body and the 
 cause of the perception of a horse outside, in the 
 horse, the two experiences are held sharply apart. 
 Both are experiences, and the word is used of both, 
 but they are different. A clearer illustration of the 
 difference is given in the difference between the sen- 
 sation of heat resulting from or accompanying a 
 fever, and that of drawing near some heated object. 
 
16 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 The sensation may be much alike in the two cases, 
 but because the cause is different the two are dis- 
 tinguished. One, the latter, is perception, the other 
 we may call a physiological experience. In this dis- 
 tinction we are no longer concerned with the rela- 
 tion of the experience to the simple facts of atten- 
 tion or control, that is, to its relation to the sub- 
 ject of consciousness (using the philosophical terms 
 without defining them) but with the relation of the 
 experience to the world of which it is part. The 
 subject or will is ignored in the ordinary differenti- 
 ation of inner and outer experience and the differ- 
 ence thought of in terms of the physical world. 
 The relation between the body and its parts, and the 
 relation between our body and other material ob- 
 jects are the objects of concern. The terms of the 
 experience-relation are now of the same kind, both 
 clearly objective if not always so clearly material. 
 As long as the only question was whether a given pos- 
 sibility could or could not be in consciousness, and 
 whether it was controllable by the individual will, no 
 false implication was possible, for with the first part 
 of the definition, either the religious state is in con- 
 sciousness or it is not. The state itself considered 
 simply as experience does not point to any other ex- 
 perience or object. The same is true of the question 
 of control by the will. From this point of view the re- 
 ligious state does not lead to any inference to things 
 beyond itself, the question is simply one of (logical) 
 fact. When we deal with relation within the same 
 world, however, inference is at once possible. " Is 
 the sensation of heat due to fever or a hot object " 
 is a question as to what the sensation or conscious- 
 
A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 17 
 
 ness implies. The experience is conceived as point- 
 ing out from itself, and the thing or act to which 
 it points may or may not be the real cause of the 
 experience. Any experience may be said to be valid 
 when the object to which it points is the real or in 
 a general sense the sufficient cause of its existence. 
 The validity of an experience involves therefore two 
 things, an implication as to the cause, and the ,truth 
 of the implication. In examining any experience as 
 to its validity, we examine the implication in the 
 case of the fever patient we make sure that it is 
 heat and not cold that he feels and then examine 
 the truth of the implication in the case above, the 
 feeling that the room has become hot. These two 
 things, the existence of an indication as to the 
 source of the experience, and the truth of the indi- 
 cation, are the essential factors in this present phase 
 of the question. 
 
 The first of these problems as it applies to the 
 religious consciousness may be defined as the discus- 
 sion as to the physiological or non-physiological 
 origin of the religious experience. The first ques- 
 tion would be whether there is an indication of 
 source. In putting it this way we must remember 
 that what the crux is, is not what is the source, but 
 what indications as to source are there in the ex- 
 perience itself. If here are no such indications, 
 then whatever the cause of the experience may be 
 concluded to be, the question of validity is not raised, 
 for the experience made no assertion or implication 
 whose validity could be judged. The confusion on 
 this point has led to fruitless controversy as to the 
 relation of emotion to religion. Unless the religious 
 
18 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 state implies that it is not a matter of emotion, then 
 religion's validity or truth is not impugned by the 
 assertion that it is merely emotion. If, on the other 
 hand, religion seems to imply that it has emotion as 
 its starting point, as some revivalists' methods seem 
 to assume that it does, then the denial of emotion as 
 its cause is a denial of its validity. Again we must 
 remember that our examination is an examination of 
 the concept or form of the experience. Not what 
 the contents of religion, or the assertions of the re- 
 ligious man are, but what the form or conception 
 of the possibility of the experience whose possession 
 he asserts implies, is the question. The experience 
 must be examined to find if it gives any indication 
 of its source. An occurrence always at the age of 
 adolescence, and at no other time, would point to 
 some connection with the physiological conditions of 
 that period as its cause. There would then be pos- 
 sible an examination of the truth of that indication. 
 Indications of an exterior will power, such as the 
 description, if it always came in that form, of ex- 
 periences like that of St. Paul or St. Augustine 
 would be plain indications, which again would have 
 to be examined, of origin in some supra-personal 
 power. These are crude illustrations of the prob- 
 lems as to the existence of implications in the ex- 
 perience. An examination as to the presence of such 
 implications is the first step in the consideration of 
 the validity of the religious experience. 
 
 The second, and main question, in regard to valid- 
 ity is the question of the validity or truth of the 
 indications. The chief danger here is that we shall 
 regard this phase as including the whole question. 
 
A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 19 
 
 This it does not do. Unless the indications are so 
 clear and full that they include every question that 
 might be asked in regard to the experience and its 
 source, agreement that the indications so far as they 
 go are true does not carry us the whole way. What 
 it does do is to give a firm basis on which to stand. 
 In any case, even were the indications of source un- 
 mistakable, so that the examination of their correct- 
 ness became a mere form, what would be known would 
 simply be the relation of the experience to its source. 
 Referring again to the illustration of the fever, the 
 indication of the experience, even if it is clear enough 
 to convince the sufferer that it is he and not the 
 room that is hot, yet no deductions from that fact 
 can be assumed. The physician may be at a loss 
 to know what is the cause, or he may see in the indi- 
 cations or symptoms which the patient has told him 
 evidences of further and more remote complications. 
 Yet the question of the validity of the conclusion 
 that the source is bodily and not perceptual is not 
 involved in these further questions. The relation of 
 the sensation of heat to the blood vessels is clear. 
 In the same way, the present phase of our problem 
 applies only to the first step, to the immediate im- 
 plications of the experience, not to what may be de- 
 duced from them. Only when this step is clear can 
 the next be taken without danger. The indica- 
 tions of the experience must be judged as to their 
 truth in their primary significance. It is the dis- 
 regard of this that has made theology, in the eyes of 
 philosopher and scientist, seem to be walking on air, 
 and erecting its building without first constructing a 
 strong foundation on the earth. An assumption 
 
20 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 that because the religious experience or the asser- 
 tions of religious men assert the presence in them of 
 the power of God, so long as it remains an assump- 
 tion and unexamined, does not warrant even the 
 raising of the question as to the truth of God's pres- 
 ence in that man's life. The deduction is usually 
 taken step by step from the idea of God to that of 
 his revelation in man. It is just as necessary to 
 take step by step the deduction from the analysis 
 of the experience. The question at this point, there- 
 fore, is to be limited to the primary indications of 
 the form of the religious experience as to its source. 
 It is, as was said once before, almost reducible to the 
 question as to the perceptual or physiological origin 
 of the religious state. Is that experience the ex- 
 perience of perceiving something outside the body, 
 or is it due to causes within the body, is the general 
 form of the question. If there is an answer to this 
 preliminary question, it must be obtained before we 
 can go very far. 
 
 One important difference between the sensations 
 which arise from causes within the body and those 
 which are the results of the excitation of the sense 
 end organs, is that the former are vaguer than the 
 latter. Pain or pleasure may be definitely referred 
 to the body, or even to some definite part of the 
 body, and this localisation may be entirely correct 
 yet nothing more be given in the pleasure or pain 
 than this. If nothing more were given in ordinary 
 perception than this vague localisation we should 
 have little knowledge of the world beyond. Our 
 sensations of sight, especially, are very definite in 
 what they tell us in regard to the source to which 
 
A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 21 
 
 we refer them. Not merely what is the source, but 
 what it is like, is given in the sensation. An in- 
 quiry into the validity of an experience, if that ex- 
 perience is a sensation or based on a sensation, 
 must therefore ask not merely whether the source is 
 correctly pointed out, but also whether what is said 
 about it is true. As the question of origin of the 
 sensation may be said to be the problem of psychol- 
 ogy, so this present one is the problem of science, 
 or if psychology is a science, the difference is be- 
 tween the psychological and the natural sciences. 
 Even if the experience is not of the type of sensa- 
 tion, but is emotional, the same questions confront 
 us. If the sight of some one man arouses in me 
 anger, the feeling of anger is not merely referred 
 to him as the exciting cause, but it is recognised that 
 it is anger and not affection that he inspires. The 
 question of the validity of the anger at the sight of 
 this man is not merely whether the sight of him 
 does arouse the angry feelings, but also whether 
 there is sufficient reason in the sight of him to ex- 
 plain and justify the hostile feeling. The question 
 of validity here takes, then, two forms : first, is there 
 any indication as to what the source is like, and 
 second, is the indication correct or true. 
 
 In applying this question to the religious experi- 
 ence we have to remember again that it is not the 
 implication or statement itself that we have to con- 
 sider, but the form of the experience and the possi- 
 bility of the statement being correct. The religious 
 experience is not ordinary perception, else it would 
 not have a separate name and be studied as it is as a 
 separate phenomenon. The first question therefore 
 
22 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 becomes, is it so different that no direct indication of 
 the nature and qualities of the source is given. The 
 answer of primitive religions to this, with their vivid 
 and detailed descriptions of their gods, would seem 
 to be that detailed knowledge is possible, while the 
 theologians, from the time of the rise of scholasticism, 
 certainly, have, in basing their description of God 
 on abstract arguments, seemed to assume that the 
 experience of God gives little or no direct knowledge 
 of his nature. On the answer as to this possibility 
 depends the form of theology. If there is a possi- 
 bility of direct knowledge, much like that of ordinary 
 perception, then theology becomes a science, and the 
 religious experience is to be studied as or nearly as 
 we study natural or psychological phenomena. To 
 assume, however, that theology is a science akin to 
 psychology is to assume the answer, not to prove it. 
 There is also the possibility that the form of the 
 experience does not make possible any assurance as 
 to its truth. The indications or seeming assertions 
 may, though caused by events or objects outside the 
 body, not be at all representative of the objects 
 which gave rise to them. The thunder may impress 
 upon the religious mind the sense of awe, and then 
 the worshiper imagine that he experiences the pres- 
 ence of some aweful or awe-inspiring being. We are 
 too familiar with attacks of this kind made upon 
 ordinary religious ideas to need any insistence on the 
 necessity of meeting the issue. Yet we cannot say 
 that modern theology has met it. Probably because 
 it has not seen that this question of the possibility 
 of direct information coming under the form of the 
 religious experience is so fundamental, it has not 
 
A PHILOSOPHY OP RELIGION 23 
 
 met the resulting problem of the possibility of the 
 exciting cause being different from the report of it 
 in the experience. This problem as to the per- 
 ceptual or non-perceptual form of the religious ex- 
 perience is so central that it cannot be passed over. 
 The approach, though, to a solution is not easy. 
 Not only must we distinguish the assertions made by 
 religious men from the ground on which they make 
 them, but also in examining the form of their experi- 
 ence, we must hew out a path that will lead us clear 
 of the ambush of modern philosophical warfare. As 
 we are not constructing an all inclusive metaphysical 
 system, the more we can avoid conflict the stronger 
 and more useful the results of our work will be for 
 any system that can use them. This means that we 
 cannot start with idea of knowledge and ask how 
 the subject-object relation applies to this relation of 
 a worshiper to his God. We must start from the 
 other side. In examining religion we have to trace 
 the possibility of the conveyance through the re- 
 ligious consciousness of facts about the outside 
 world, and reach some conclusion as to what kind of 
 fact can be known in this consciousness. 
 
 The problem then takes the form of laying down 
 the method of the test as to truth of those indica- 
 tions or revelations that are judged possible. We 
 leave to one side the problem of fact. But as this 
 would only be the question about a given experience, 
 whether it is true or false, it does not concern a phi- 
 losophy of religion. The inquiry into the details 
 of the revelation made in the experience is the prob- 
 lem of a scientific theology. Such a science would 
 test and judge the differing experiences and ask 
 
24 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 which is true, and what the resulting truth is. Be- 
 fore such a science can be accepted, however, we must 
 ask whether it is possible. So it is not the scientific 
 criteria that we seek here, but the broader problems 
 which must give some result, even if but temporary, 
 before a science can be logically established. On the 
 result of this question as to method depends also the 
 character of such a theology. If the indications of 
 the experience are best studied by methods akin to 
 those of psychology, our theology will be of one 
 form, a form which has hardly yet been to any ex- 
 tent developed ; while if the method must come nearer 
 to that of the historical sciences, we have, only now 
 accepting it with a clear understanding of its nature, 
 something nearly like the method of traditional 
 theology. In such a case the line is not over well 
 marked between the science and the history of re- 
 ligion. There remains the third possibility, more 
 largely present in primitive religions than elsewhere, 
 that theology is much like the natural sciences. 
 Here the god and the natural phenomena are to be 
 studied by methods closely alike. Perhaps the ap- 
 plication of the theory of evolution to religion marks 
 the growth of such a system of theology. Each of 
 these three tendencies is represented by conflicting 
 claims to exclusive right over the field of religion, 
 yet few of the schools of thought have made the 
 preliminary inquiry. Not till we know the method, 
 can we know what the science is to be. The religious 
 experience must be studied to see what form the 
 indication of the world beyond it takes. 
 
 In studying any experience, after we have reached 
 some conclusion as to how the information about its 
 
A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 25 
 
 source is conveyed, we have still, before the inquiry 
 has a firm basis, to ask whether these indications can 
 be tested. It is the argument of the agnostic that 
 confronts us. We must realise that it is just at 
 this point, and in connection with the arguments for 
 God's existence, and concerning the divine attributes, 
 that the agnostic position presents its strongest 
 front. The problem is not for us, however, the 
 epistemological one, not the problem of knowledge, 
 but that of scientific method. In examining the 
 general concept of experience this comes out more 
 clearly. While the question of knowledge centers 
 around the conception and office of consciousness, 
 and the subject's relation to the thing known, we are 
 here at one with science in ignoring the conscious 
 and subjective side as far as we can, and in putting 
 the question in the objective form. That is, we are 
 not asking what is the possibility of knowing God or 
 man, but only what is the possibility of knowledge 
 coming through the religious experience. The terms 
 in which religious people often describe their experi- 
 ence present what is perhaps the strongest argu- 
 ment for the philosophical agnostic. When the ex- 
 perience of religion is conceived and explained as a 
 miracle, the scientist tends to reject its claim along 
 with those of all miracles. If God reveals himself 
 always in sudden wonderful moments, whose genesis 
 none can trace, a scientific test can not be worked 
 out. The phenomena may be catalogued and studied 
 as, for instance, the varieties of insanity are, but no 
 more than is true of mental aberrations could they 
 be used as a pathway to knowledge. There have 
 been times when the miracle of God's appearance in 
 
26 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 a human soul has been judged almost to need no 
 other argument than the suddenness of the conver- 
 sion or realisation of his presence. To faith the 
 source is clear, but unless that faith allows of the 
 pathway over which it came being known, we cannot, 
 to use the language of religion itself, know whether 
 the experience is from God or the devil. The test of 
 this has been sought outside of the experience itself. 
 " By their fruits ye shall know them." To conclude 
 that this must be so is to assume that the religious 
 experience does not furnish a test by which we may 
 judge of the accuracy of its revelations. To this 
 conclusion, largely held though not always recog- 
 nised, is due the depreciation in many quarters of un- 
 due devotion, especially among the " sane " men of 
 all ages. The mystics have seldom been the leaders 
 of the church. Yet if we are to gain knowledge 
 through the religious experience, and not rest in a 
 semi-Christian agnosticism, the issue must be 
 squarely faced. We must inquire whether the ex- 
 perience can be tested by some sure method. 
 
 Whatever comes unexpectedly, must, if the scien- 
 tist is to make use of it, be so related to what has 
 gone before that it is seen to be the inevitable out- 
 come of the preceding events. This is true of 
 psychological, natural, and historical science equally, 
 as far as ideal goes. The whole purpose of the 
 parallelistic theories in psychology is to make possi- 
 ble some connection, if not between, at least in- 
 volving, the successive parts of the stream of con- 
 sciousness. The main effort of modern historical 
 study is to work out the underlying movements in 
 order to connect what seems at first to be unrelated 
 
A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 27 
 
 events . With the natural sciences this has been 
 practically completely successful, each event or ex- 
 perience is so related to every other, that for science 
 there remains no chance, no single element of the 
 universe which is not at least claimed as acting under 
 some general principle. Everything is related to 
 everything else. When an experience presents itself, 
 therefore, for scientific study, the effort is made to 
 bring it under these general laws. If no law at 
 present exists, a new one is formulated, but some 
 general principle there must be. Every experience 
 can be studied scientifically, that is not questioned, 
 but not every experience can be brought under any 
 one set of natural laws. Insanity is to-day being 
 very largely the subject of scientific inquiry, but 
 not in the same way that the normal brain is studied. 
 One relates itself to changes in the brain centers, the 
 latter, while it may be studied in its relation to the 
 brain, has also relations to the objective material 
 world. This is not the difference between historical 
 or psychological and natural sciences, but is a dif- 
 ference in the way in which any one of these sciences 
 would approach the given experience. In addition, 
 therefore, to asking to what scientific method the 
 scientific study of religion is to be akin, we have the 
 harder question to answer of what point of view 
 shall be used in any study of the experience. 
 Knowledge will be attained, generally speaking, by 
 any method, but the chief value and results are at- 
 tained from any experience when it is taken at its 
 highest possible value. The experience of the in- 
 sane is exhausted when the causes for the difference 
 from the normal are explained, but the normal ex- 
 
28 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 perience is used to its fullest extent only when the 
 knowledge that comes in it is tested. A study of a 
 dream is ended when the psychology of it is com- 
 plete, while the real vision of man's waking hours 
 is completely studied only when the things seen are 
 examined. If agnosticism is to be overthrown in 
 any science, it can only be by the working out of the 
 full value of the experience. 
 
 In the case of the religious experience this be- 
 comes very important. If we take the valid or real 
 experiences which form the basis of spiritualistic 
 claims, orthodox religion rejects them, though 
 again the reason is not always recognised, for this 
 reason, that the inferences drawn from them are not 
 justified. The experience is held not to reach to 
 the revelation of such things as are asserted. No 
 amount of argument as to special instances of seem- 
 ingly otherwise unexplainable predictions or knowl- 
 edge can shake this rejection. If we believe that 
 the experience can not give the knowledge, then what 
 may come, even if it turns out to be true, will not be 
 called knowledge. Before we can ask what revela- 
 tions from the realm of the dead are true, we have 
 to ask whether the experience does not reach its full 
 value without including this kind of knowledge. This 
 is the scientific principle that the simplest theory 
 that will explain the facts is the one to be adopted. 
 Unless the experience is not sufficiently explained by 
 the theory that denies validity to its assertions, we 
 must reject its claims. The burden of proof against 
 the agnostic, in the religious as in every other field, 
 rests on the students of that science. In the case of 
 the religious experience, we have to be sure that 
 
A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 29 
 
 studies such as are now frequent, from both the 
 historical and the psychological side, do not exhaust 
 the problems of this experience. If it does, then a 
 theology such as has been based on it becomes im- 
 possible. If, however, we find that religion can be 
 reduced neither to the resolution of interior crises 
 within a man, nor to that and a combination of 
 emotion and ethics, we will have to attack directly 
 the question of knowledge. On the result of this 
 will depend the course of our inquiry. If we should 
 find that prediction, as our forefathers thought 
 possible by inspired prophets, is a possibility, we 
 should have to trace the method by which such fore- 
 knowledge could come to the individual. It is 
 logically possible that we could trace it. If so, we 
 could build up a critique of prophecy. If we should 
 come to the conclusion that in the religious ex- 
 perience there is nothing to warrant foreknowledge, 
 but that it does point to influences from beyond the 
 life of the individual, and we find that we can trace 
 the path of such influences into the consciousness of 
 the believer, we should have a firm basis for our 
 theology. 
 
 As in many fields, so probably in this, we shall find 
 limits to our method. The knowledge that comes 
 may very likely be only partial. In that case agnos- 
 ticism is partially justified. It becomes necessary, 
 therefore, to examine the logical outcome of agnos- 
 ticism whether complete or partial. To take an 
 illustration apart from our field, skepticism as to the 
 possible knowledge of the other side of the moon does 
 not deny the existence of that other side. It only 
 points out the limits of truthful assertion. Study 
 
30 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 can go on, and the attempt be made, by indirect 
 means, to reach some degree of probability. The 
 logic of such cases will therefore yield a positive re- 
 sult for our critical method. Agnosticism applies 
 to those cases where existence is possible, or 
 suspected, or even proven, but where all else is un- 
 certain. It is evident that the arguments for such 
 bare existence are different from the scientific meas- 
 ure of direct perception. A physicist tests directly 
 colors and sounds, but the atoms or the electro- 
 magnetic ether he can never see or touch. Their 
 existence for him is the result of inference. Certain 
 happenings are explainable only by the existence of 
 something unseen and otherwise unknown. This un- 
 known cause or basis has neither shape or size. It 
 is purely conceptual. Avoiding the questions of 
 the nature of conceptual reality, we may say that 
 such ideas as to the atoms or irons are formal. All 
 we know of them is the form under which their pres- 
 ence is made known to us, but we also have strong 
 reason to believe that they are themselves different 
 from that form. In such cases a partial agnos- 
 ticism is the necessary scientific attitude. So long 
 as the unknowable is the necessary result of impli- 
 cations in what is knowable and known, agnosticism 
 only points out to us our method. Our problem be- 
 comes limited to the form of the unknowable reality. 
 That this does not by any means stop our work is 
 shown in the case of space and time, the greatest, 
 perhaps, of these conceptual realities. Some ex- 
 planation of spacial and temporal relations there 
 must be, so in some sense we must conceive the exis- 
 tence of something to give the explanation. Yet in 
 
A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 31 
 
 themselves and apart from these relations which they 
 help to explain, we can know nothing of space and 
 time. This does not stop the development of the 
 geometrical sciences, nor even their application to 
 practical problems, even though they deal with a 
 purely " formal " subject, one with no material con- 
 tent. If the result of our conclusion in any field be 
 a complete or partial agnosticism, it may mean 
 merely that we are dealing with one of these formal 
 or conceptual forms of necessary existence. 
 
 This is not so remote from the ordinary position 
 of orthodox theology as it at first seems. When the 
 Trinity is spoken of as a mystery, and we are told 
 not to question but to accept all on faith, it is on the 
 ground that certainty can not be won by question- 
 ing. To the request to see God much the same re- 
 ply must be made as to the request to be shown 
 empty space. God is, for orthodox theology, to be 
 known in his manifestations, especially in Jesus of 
 Nazareth, just as space is to be seen in its mani- 
 festations as the space you and I and each part of 
 the world occupies. We cannot say, though, that 
 orthodox theology has held this position consistently. 
 At the same time that it asserted the inadequacy 
 of " natural religion " it made other assertions on 
 the basis of " revealed religion " which it required 
 men to accept as completely known and certain. 
 This inconsistency we must carefully avoid. If the 
 religious experience is found to yield valid conclu- 
 sions only as to the conceptual truths about God, 
 then the theological method must so use the concep- 
 tion of faith as not to include in it assertions of 
 direct knowledge. This much becomes evident. So 
 
32 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 far as the limitation on the religious experience 
 holds, theology is not a science but a philosophy, 
 basing its assertions on deductions from experience, 
 but unable to put them to the test of experiment. 
 The result of the complete refusal of scientific 
 method to theology is however not particularly 
 pleasing to the modern theologian. It would shut 
 him off from the whole field of direct contact with 
 God, so far as the study of God is concerned. He 
 could not appeal, for instance, to the presence in 
 Jesus of the love of mankind, as a proof of the 
 nature of God as love. If Jesus reveals God to men 
 so that seeing him they see God, then that knowledge 
 is direct, not a matter of inference. If no direct 
 knowledge is possible, then not even from Jesus can 
 that direct knowledge come. The love of God would 
 have to be, if we completely distrust the religious 
 consciousness, a deduction from the conceptual 
 nature of God, not an induction from our direct 
 knowledge of him. Orthodox theology, therefore, 
 must face clearly this question, as to the extent of 
 the limitation of religious knowledge. We cannot 
 rightly at the same time limit and assert the exist- 
 ence of no limits. So far as there is a limit, direct 
 knowledge is impossible, and God a result purely of 
 conceptual and logical necessity. 
 
 In analysing any type of experience, we have next 
 to go into more detail in regard to the source. This 
 time it is not so much a question of the type of 
 knowledge, as of the objective status of the source 
 of the experience. To relate this experience to 
 other experiences, we have to find out the relative 
 place of the source of this to the sources or objects 
 
A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 33 
 
 of the rest of our conscious life. In the effort to 
 place rightly our sensation of heat, physicists teach 
 that the sources of heat and light are identical. 
 The relation is purely in the objective world, but 
 every point refers itself to the experience. So far 
 as the cause does lie outside of the consciousness 
 which experiences it, we must seek this source also 
 outside. The connection of red and heat is not 
 explained until it is referred outside the conscious- 
 ness to a fire either seen or remembered. The im- 
 portance of the experience for knowledge depends 
 on this proper placing of its source. So long as 
 heat and light are unconnected, knowledge of one 
 gives no knowledge of the other, but the moment we 
 connect the two, each increase of knowledge about 
 heat gives us some new information, even though 
 small, on the problems of light. In answering any 
 such problem, we are concerned still with the experi- 
 ence, though not as an isolated bit of consciousness. 
 We are still analysing, but now it is the relation be- 
 tween the varying sensations that is central in our 
 thought. Account is taken of the rest of our con- 
 scious life. So long as the relation which is being 
 studied is spacial and temporal, and nothing more, 
 the source or relation in the objective world which is 
 the origin of the related experiences will be found to 
 be of the type of natural science. If the relation is 
 purely temporal, it may prove to belong to psychol- 
 ogy, while if it is connected with questions of past 
 time, whether spacial or not, it will be history. 
 This is the necessary result of the fact that we are 
 dealing with analysis of relations. The result of the 
 analysis merely brings out what is already in the 
 
34 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 consciousness. We are dealing, therefore, in such 
 a case, not with facts as we generally understand 
 the word, but with scientific relations. The deter- 
 mination of the general place of a given experience 
 in the whole field of life is a " normal " matter, in 
 the sense in which we have been using the word. It 
 does not affect the correctness of the analysis of 
 the relation of light and heat if some one case of 
 supposed light be found to be an hallucination. Once 
 established, the relations within the field of experi- 
 ence are independent of whether special cases of 
 them are found or not. What men mean by light 
 and heat are related in the way physicists assert, 
 and the deduction resting on scientific experimenta- 
 tion gives general information about the nature of 
 the thing or process which causes or produces the 
 sensations and the experience. It is to analysis of 
 this type that we must turn for further information 
 about any experience. 
 
 With the religious experience, such an analysis 
 cannot be immediately undertaken. This results 
 from the fact that we are really dealing with a whole 
 group of related experiences rather than with one 
 narrowly limited type. Within a narrowly limited 
 group of relations, the place is to be found, of any 
 one of them, by certain limited methods. Where 
 we are dealing with sensations such as light and 
 heat, their interrelation is to be studied by the 
 method we know in physics. Where, however, the 
 group itself is uncertain, the methods are equally un- 
 certain. If we could say offhand with any assur- 
 ance that the religious experience was of the psycho- 
 logical type, then the psychological methods would 
 
A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 35 
 
 be used, and only such results obtained as they per- 
 mitted. If instead, it is an historical experience, 
 only the result that historical methods allow would 
 be reached. To the failure clearly to see this is due 
 the jumble of methods that one often finds used in 
 theology. As we are not making what might be 
 called theological experiments, but only considering 
 what those methods should be, the important prob- 
 lem before us is to define the issue, and find what 
 kind of results the methods which can be used will 
 bring. If we are limited to the microscope and the 
 telescope, then the only God we shall be able to find 
 will be one in material form. If we can use only 
 psychological experiments, then our deity will in- 
 evitably be one related solely to the realm of con- 
 sciousness. If our methods are those of ethics, then 
 our God will be the source of morality. On the 
 method depends the results. 
 
 While leaving the detailed study of possible 
 methods for fuller consideration later, one general 
 question stands so plainly at the outset that it 
 should be indicated here. With an experience whose 
 source is unknown to us, the first question is, is it 
 real? By this is usually meant, is it the product of 
 man's brain or does it represent and reflect and give 
 us knowledge of something outside of man? This is 
 not quite the same as the question we considered a 
 while ago, as to whether there were in the experience 
 any indications of its source. We are now asking 
 whether, when the source is indicated as outside of 
 the particular experience, it is also outside of the 
 whole consciousness. This is also not the problem 
 of idealism against realism. By either idealism or 
 
36 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 realism, there must be recognised the difference be- 
 tween dreams and real vision. Each is in conscious- 
 ness, but while the former points only to a former 
 experience, as does memory the latter points to re- 
 lations outside the present field of consciousness, to 
 what we ordinarily call the real world. It is a 
 question of the independence of the source. Is it 
 subject to the laws of the individual experience, or 
 is it, partially at least, free from them? If free, 
 the interrelations to be studied are those of the 
 world outside the individual consciousness. If not 
 free, the methods used must be those which are ap- 
 plicable within the individual life. This is true of 
 any experience. Ethics is to-day fighting out the 
 question of its method along this line. So far as it 
 is a matter of individual choice, as with the Utilitar- 
 ians, the methods used can give no other result than 
 a dependence on the individual will. The moment 
 we appeal to the history of the race, however, we 
 allow the use of historical methods, and wider re- 
 sults are possible. It is the experience itself that 
 must decide what methods are possible. As color- 
 blindness can not be studied as are the atoms, so one 
 experience can not be assumed to allow the use of 
 methods fitted to another. The questions must be 
 raised for each, what relations it has to things out- 
 side of the individual consciousness, and on the an- 
 swer to this will depend largely the methods to be 
 used. 
 
 With the religious experience, this is not so much 
 the question between the material and the dream 
 world, as between the limitations of humanity, and 
 the more general relations of the universe. On a 
 
A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 37 
 
 first glance the religious experience is seen not to be 
 of the type that natural science studies. It is more 
 like ethics, and the science of morals. Limitation 
 in a case like this means something different from 
 what it does with sensations. If my sensation of 
 sight does not bear the test of relation to the flower 
 I think I see, but which is not there, I call it a 
 memory or an hallucination, and no more need be 
 said. When we deal with forces of more general 
 character, such as influence the whole life of man, 
 the consequences of limitation are more important. 
 If the religious experience has no relation outside of 
 individual human life, then the source is human, and 
 the experience brings no new power into human life. 
 It could then be described only as we describe the 
 successful outcome of an inner struggle, purely hu- 
 man. Something like this it often seems to be. St. 
 Paul and St. Augustine are familiar examples of 
 this type of experience. If the incentive or impulse 
 to such an experience came only from their individ- 
 ual life, or only from the individual life of some other 
 man, and gives no indication of a source further 
 back, then no theories as to God's nature or powers 
 can be deduced from it, or if there are such deduc- 
 tions, it must be of a God limited to human capacity. 
 This is the Comptean position, so far as it is con- 
 sistent with itself. It is evident that we cannot go on 
 and ask about the validity of the revelation of God 
 to man, of a revelation of an outer realm, if in that 
 inner experience there is no indication that it comes 
 from any higher source than itself. This becomes 
 very important for the relation of religion to ethics. 
 If ethics has to deal, as modern ethics does deal, 
 
38 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 with such questions as the working out in man of the 
 great natural laws of the survival of the fittest, it 
 can have little concern with an experience which goes 
 no deeper than limited human life. Unless the re- 
 ligious experience points also to a root in the great 
 underlying universe, the connection of religion and 
 ethics is very slight. Ethics, dealing with general 
 laws, relations which include all existence, and a lim- 
 ited experience such as religion would then be, could 
 have little in common in methods or results. The 
 problem is therefore important, as to the indications 
 in the religious experience as to the human or super- 
 human nature of its origin. 
 
 The consequences of the other possible result to 
 this particular problem need to be noted if we are 
 to understand the place of our problem in current 
 thought. If the source of any experience is outside 
 the individual, the explanation of the experience in- 
 volves other than individual phases of existence. If 
 the source is also beyond what we may call human 
 limitations, then the explanation must also go be- 
 yond. An explanation of physical life in terms of 
 inorganic matter and energy, if it ever is satisfac- 
 torily done, will involve in its explanation all exist- 
 ence. Once pass the bounds of organic life, and we 
 can stop only with those principles which are at the 
 basis of both organic and inorganic. So an inor- 
 ganic theory of organic life in order to explain the 
 relations between the experiences of an organism and 
 of " dead " matter involves the recourse to a world 
 outside of organisms. This involves also the rela- 
 tion between the organism and the matter which com- 
 poses it. The analysis of the total experience, and 
 
A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 39 
 
 the part which the limited experience under discus- 
 sion has to the whole, therefore involves the assump- 
 tion, or rather, proves the existence, of forces which 
 are superhuman, or perhaps we might say, more 
 fundamental than humanity. Proof of this sort is 
 still " formal." It is not a deduction from asser- 
 tions in the experience. The material principles to 
 be used need not be clearly defined. It is only that 
 some principles beyond what we call human life 
 would be logically necessary. 
 
 If a result of this kind becomes necessary to ex- 
 plain the place of the religious experience in life, then 
 the existence of some superhuman power becomes 
 necessary for thought. This is the place, valid to 
 this extent, of the arguments of a " natural " religion 
 for God's existence. To a certain extent the con- 
 ception of God has always been used to contain the 
 unexplainable remnant from the constructive work 
 of systematic philosophy. So far as there is such a 
 remnant, instead of saying that recourse is to be had 
 to a deus ex machina, we would rather say that the 
 thinker has realised, even though but very imper- 
 fectly, that some recourse to powers or principles 
 beyond man was necessary. If his system could not 
 explain everything in human terms, then the criticism 
 should be of that system, not of the logical conclu- 
 sion that something unexplained must be referred to 
 another source. We cannot, however, afford to fail 
 to distinguish between the arguments from the reli- 
 gious experience itself and those from its place in life. 
 The first concern the definite statements or intima- 
 tions in the experience. These must be tested as sci- 
 ence tests any statements. The second deal with re- 
 
40 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 lations, and are to be judged as propositions about 
 relations. It is therefore not a question of what any 
 man's experience is, whether heathen or Christian, 
 but what is the relation of that experience whether 
 Christian or heathen to the man's other experi- 
 ences. The difference between revealed and natural 
 religion, if the terms apply here, is not the distinction 
 between man's unaided discoveries about God and 
 those things which God reveals about himself, but it 
 is the difference between a study of definite experi- 
 ences and assertions, and the study of the form of 
 the experience. In this particular problem, of the 
 existence of the superhuman, we have to do entirely 
 with the form. However God may be known in the 
 life, a study simply of the moments in which his pres- 
 ence is most strongly felt can not yield any conclu- 
 sion as to the inclusion or exclusion of this experi- 
 ence from our ordinary life. We must examine the 
 relation between the two classes of experience, and 
 the moment we do so we are dealing with form, not 
 content. This removes from the science of theology 
 the whole question of the proofs of God's transcend- 
 ence. Not, however, from theology as we know it to- 
 day, for our modern theology is an inconsistent mix- 
 ture of science and philosophy. The two must, for 
 clearness, be sharply distinguished, and the argu- 
 ments for the existence and presence in man of a 
 superhuman power be kept strictly to questions of 
 form and logical necessity. The relation of such a 
 course to the problems of a living faith can not be 
 rightly judged until our constructive work is com- 
 plete. It needs only be said here, however, that in 
 the problem of the experience, faith or conviction as 
 
A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 41 
 
 to the relation between itself and life must be taken 
 carefully into account, and judged as valid or invalid. 
 We are therefore not slighting faith in making this 
 distinction. The religious experience must be care- 
 fully studied, if we are to regard the faith which it 
 contains or expresses in a superhuman being as valid. 
 The next and final problem of the religious experi- 
 ence which we must define before we proceed is that 
 of the relation of the religious experience to the will. 
 In general our experiences may be divided into two 
 types, the normative and the passive. Where the will 
 is involved the will or desire seeks to control. Anger, 
 for instance, can not be experienced without affect- 
 ing the motor system. A man can not be passively 
 angry. Any emotion, even one such as melancholy, 
 is in this class, for they all either increase or diminish 
 action. The motor element is present. The best 
 example of the other type of experience is ordinary 
 perception. While we are more or less active in per- 
 ception, it is rather in order to prepare for the re- 
 ception of an experience which we realise as coming 
 from outside of ourselves than as being conscious or 
 experiencing the motor forces at work. This is the 
 vital difference. The motor side of our life is always 
 active, but with the normative experiences we are 
 conscious of its activity, while in perception and the 
 passive experiences our attention is focused on the 
 results of the activity. In the one case the experi- 
 ence points or gives knowledge of the activity, in the 
 other of the inciting cause of the activity. This dis- 
 tinction, of course, means a large difference in an 
 inquiry into the validity of the experience. If the 
 function of the experience is centered around the 
 
42 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 source, the questions we are asking must be as to the 
 validity of the information which is given of the 
 source. If the experience is involved mainly with 
 the activity of the organism, then the main question, 
 at least of validity, is that of yielding a valid knowl- 
 edge of human motor activities, and also, in the eth- 
 ical field, the problems of how efficiently the experi- 
 ence helps or hinders those activities. The experi- 
 ences of the insane may yield true information of 
 the state of the insane mind, give us valid knowledge 
 of this, but still not be valid in the ethical sense as 
 not allowing the normal activities of life full play. 
 We have come upon another meaning of the word 
 validity. We must raise the question, in consider- 
 ing any experience, as to what is really the meaning 
 in the special case, is it the effect on the normal 
 activity or on normal knowledge which is under ex- 
 amination ? 
 
 In applying this problem to religion we reach the 
 statement of what for the modern man is perhaps the 
 most debated problem of religion. In these days we 
 are willing to admit the presence in man of forces 
 which are superhuman, but what we do not admit, ex- 
 cept under compulsion, is the presence of a moral 
 element outside of humanity. We conceive the basic 
 forces of existence just as far as we can in non- 
 moral terms. Any problem which connects itself 
 with this issue is bound to be of interest. From the 
 arguments of the past generation to prove God right- 
 eous in spite of natural catastrophes, to the present 
 day questions of the moral element in economic con- 
 ditions, the same general problem is present. In our 
 study of the religious experience we do not need to 
 
A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 43 
 
 deal with this question in its wider aspects. Only as 
 regards the relation of the religious experience to 
 the will to do right must we be clear. Applying the 
 distinction between normative and passive experi- 
 ences, we have to classify the religious life under one 
 of these heads. It is sometimes assumed in these 
 days that the religious and the moral experiences are 
 the same. The fact that in name they are distinct 
 forces us to accept such an identification only after 
 very careful scrutiny. The problem demands the 
 examination of religion as to its effect on the will. 
 The identification in some religions and in other ages 
 of knowledge and goodness would lead us in paths 
 contrary to the modern trend. If the religious ex- 
 perience is mainly passive, and is the revelation of 
 knowledge, then it can not at the same time be mainly 
 normative and powerful in directing the will. The 
 old conception of revelation led to the definition of a 
 type of experience which was preeminently passive, 
 else it could not receive and transmit the revealed 
 truths which God gave in and through it. If this 
 was its function, then for the individual it had little 
 directive force. It might have results eventually, 
 but in itself it left him passive. Very different from 
 this is the modern conception of religion as a power 
 that makes for righteousness, a moral dynamic. If 
 the older view was a necessary consequence of the 
 belief in the revelation of abstract dogmas direct 
 from God, the new is often an equally unthinking re- 
 sult of the reaction against such " revealed truths." 
 The correctness of either view can be established only 
 after a careful study of the experience with reference 
 to this distinction of passive or normative. 
 
44 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 To understand the issue, it will help if we draw out 
 some of the consequences of defining an experience 
 by either of these terms. With the passive experi- 
 ences, the source must be outside the individual. If 
 the immediate excitation comes from the body, then 
 the source behind that must be the one which is out- 
 side. We have to remember that in some of his bod- 
 ily experiences man is passive. Perception itself is 
 one of these. Heat and cold, pain, and many of the 
 organic sensations are passive so far as the result on 
 the will is concerned. On the other hand, pleasure 
 and dislike, which are essentially motor, are often 
 referred outside and placed in the pleasant object. 
 The cause seems to be outside. Yet, after all, it is 
 the effect of the pleasurable object on us which con- 
 stitutes the pleasure, while with the perception of, for 
 instance, the beating of our own heart, it is the fact 
 of perceiving, and not the result of perceiving, which 
 is focal. If we have thought that we had heart trou- 
 ble, and are pleased to find our organ working regu- 
 larly, then the experience changes. The change is 
 due to the change in the function of the experience. 
 In the latter case the experience calls attention to it- 
 self, in the former to something outside of itself. It 
 is therefore not to the source being inside or outside 
 of the body, but to its being contained or ijot con- 
 tained in the experience, that the distinction arises. 
 What we mean by the self is really the will. So long 
 as the body is simply physical it is simply mechan- 
 ical. Those things which affect only the body do not 
 affect the self. This is well illustrated in certain 
 cases of fear. Fear may be felt in the presence of 
 harmless reptiles. The reason rejects the fear, and 
 
A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 45 
 
 if necessary may overcome it. In one sense the fear 
 is motor, yet as long as it is instinctive it is really 
 passive. The man is led to avoid the snake by a 
 force of which he is not conscious. It is only when 
 he makes the effort to go nearer, that is only when 
 some other experience constrains him, that he be- 
 comes conscious of the instinctive repulsion. The 
 motor activity before this was purely reflex or with- 
 out consciousness except that it occurred. It was 
 only when something else brought to him the con- 
 sciousness of a will or desire to draw near the snake 
 that the avoidance came to be seen and felt as op- 
 posing the approach. This is closely allied to the 
 Pauline doctrine that except for the law there would 
 be no sin. Except for the presence of a motor con- 
 sciousness or normative experience action is not 
 realised as the result of will or desire. We can not 
 well say, on the other hand, that it is the conflict 
 that brings the consciousness of desire. It may pos- 
 sibly be true that the first awaking of the conscious- 
 ness of normative experiences is due to the strong 
 shock of opposition, as the child finds its will 
 thwarted by the will of those around it. However 
 this may be, in after life the experience of the desire 
 to serve some one in distress is clear as a desire or 
 normative experience even without opposition. An 
 experience which is not normative, even though it 
 may affect action, does not affect the desires. It 
 does not come into the sphere of man's interest. 
 The fear in the presence of harmless snakes is of no 
 interest except to be overcome. The sound of one's 
 heart beating is of interest when connected with the 
 desire to be or find one's self well, and not otherwise. 
 
46 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 It is not a question of how fundamental and neces- 
 sary the experience may be to the physical life, but 
 of how it may enter into the interests of human life. 
 To say that an experience is mainly passive is there- 
 fore to say that it is not one that in itself is central 
 in human life. The work of our internal organs 
 becomes of interest only when they are out of order. 
 The normal experience of them is not central in our 
 life. To classify an experience as passive is there- 
 fore to classify it as outside the direct field of influ- 
 ence on human life. This is true of perception. It 
 is not the sensations that are important, but our 
 reason for attending to them. If religion is passive, 
 it is the object, not the incentive, to desire. It may 
 be studied, but it does not, if this be true, affect our 
 life interests. 
 
 The consequences of this for religion would be, if 
 proven, very great. If the religious experience is 
 as some theologians and perhaps all of the Buddhist 
 thinkers have taught, essentially passive, the inpour- 
 ing into man of truths about God, then that experi- 
 ence does not itself enter vitally and immediately into 
 man's life. According to their tendency on this 
 point mystics have differed among themselves. So 
 far as the experience is the abolition of desire, then 
 the true self or self of ordinary life is lost. Ortho- 
 dox Christian theology, in differing with the mystics 
 on this point, yet keeping their idea of a passive 
 experience, has not been consistent. Emotion would 
 have no place in such an experience. If God is known 
 only through the reason and through what the rea- 
 son may deduce from a passive perception of God, 
 then action can follow only because of the will to live 
 
A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 47 
 
 up to what is thus made known. This will, if it does 
 not enter into the experience, and it can not if the 
 individual desires are destroyed, can not be part of 
 the experience or a direct result of it. This experi- 
 ence will be on a par with the logical experiences of 
 the theologian. He may believe a God exists, but 
 not will to serve him. So long as the religious ex- 
 perience is a revelation of the being and existence of 
 God, and no more, the man, as the devils are said to, 
 may still believe, but not will to serve. The experi- 
 ence will have no coercive force. If this is true, the 
 appeal to the emotion and to the sense of the pres- 
 ence of God, in the effort to arouse men to their 
 duty, becomes useless. The more use there was of 
 religion, only more knowledge of God would result, 
 not more will to obey him. This would put God on 
 the same footing as the natural laws. We experience 
 the laws of nature, and know that to live we must 
 follow them, but those laws or this knowledge of their 
 existence does not inspire a desire to act. Fir'e 
 burns, but so long as it does not burn us our knowl- 
 edge of a fire elsewhere does not rouse us to any 
 action or desire. If we want to use the fire, or learn 
 more about it, desire exists, but the experience is 
 then not simply of the fire, but of our desire to cook, 
 or for more knowledge. To make the religious ex- 
 perience entirely passive is thus to make whatever 
 force and power there may be in religion something 
 akin to natural forces, not entering into man's life, 
 controlling man, yet not human because not arous- 
 ing human desire and will. Whatever God there 
 would be would be a blind force, indifferent to man. 
 The normative experiences touch directly the cen- 
 
48 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 ter of human life. The experience of loyalty, which 
 Royce stretches to include the whole religious ex- 
 perience, in its narrower manifestations can fill the 
 whole of life. The patriot, whether a soldier or a 
 statesman or reformer, can be so under the sway of 
 the desire to serve his country that no obstacles will 
 stop him. The desire to gain knowledge, which is 
 not the experience of knowing, but the preliminary 
 to it, may so fill and envelop a man that he gives his 
 whole life to it. On lower planes the desire for social 
 recognition, which is truly an experience, the realis- 
 ing of the want, and the conscious striving for social 
 advancement, does affect for many every act of their 
 lives. The personality is vitally changed by the en- 
 trance of the consciousness of any one of these needs 
 into a man's life. These experiences affect us so 
 closely that, once experienced, they become part of 
 our nature. A man's nature may be defined in terms 
 of the influences which mold his actions. The con- 
 scious striving for wealth is such an experience, a 
 power within which seeks to control action. Any 
 such influence must by its nature be personal. This 
 is recognised in our modern use of the word " social 
 will." Society, many would argue, is even more per- 
 sonal than the individual. It is super-individual, 
 and, as such, more intensely human than the indi- 
 vidual. As the source of many of these influences 
 which make man what he is, this social will enters 
 closely into every part of human life. For good or 
 ill a man is a social creature, hence the social will is 
 essentially, in its result and operation, closely con- 
 nected with human life. In no true sense can it be 
 said to be blind to the individual. Instead of acting 
 
A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 49 
 
 equally for man and matter it concerns itself directly 
 with man, and exists in consciousness only as it suc- 
 ceeds in entering men. To these normative experi- 
 ences, since they do seek to affect action, man can 
 never be indifferent, as he is to the natural forces. 
 To a power which seeks to rule him he must either 
 yield or offer all the resistance of which he is capa- 
 ble. Another feature of these experiences is that 
 they come without individual incentive. A man may 
 see in life something unexplainable and seek a gen- 
 eral principle to account for it, and so come to know 
 and be conscious of some general law, but a nor- 
 mative experience does not make itself known except 
 by influencing him ; hence until it does touch him he 
 can not know of it even enough to seek it. He may 
 seek to learn something about it, as a physician may 
 study some mental disease of which he himself can 
 not be conscious so long as he is sane, but the experi- 
 ence itself can come to the student of a normative 
 experience only when it influences him, only when he 
 is subject to its sway. Out of the sphere of its in- 
 fluence he can not come to consciousness of it, and 
 within its influence, once conscious of it, he must 
 either accept or oppose it ; he can not be indifferent. 
 Hence the normative experience may be said to have 
 a will of its own. It comes when it will, and not 
 when we will. A man can not make himself patri- 
 otic, or create in himself the desire for artistic ex- 
 pression. The experience of that desire, so far as 
 he is concerned, just comes. It is a law unto him- 
 self. In this sense any such experience is the experi- 
 ence of a personal power. 
 
 To conclude that the religious experience is to be 
 
50 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 described in terms of the normative experience is to 
 conclude that the source of the experience is a per- 
 sonal power. It is the result sought by theists. We 
 must remember that this is independent of the results 
 of our attempts at classification under other sets of 
 terms. To classify God as personal, that is as the 
 source of a conscious personal power in human life, 
 is not to say that he either is or is not almighty. 
 It only asserts that he is revealed as one who con- 
 cerns himself with affecting human action. Examin- 
 ing, as we are, the form of the religious experience, 
 such a conclusion would not involve the determina- 
 tion of what the influence on morality was. As we 
 might say, it would not reveal what kind of a God 
 we have. Only one thing would be certain, that God 
 acted directly. Whatever might be the channel 
 through which the influence came, church or sacra- 
 ments or human society, in the experience which the 
 believer has, he would feel immediately that power. 
 Any revelation of what God is like, as far as defini- 
 tion of intellectual truths go, would not be given. 
 When we see a nation tending unduly to seek ex- 
 pansion by force of arms, the knowledge in its formu- 
 lated aspect is not given in our experience of hostil- 
 ity to their designs on us, but is the later result, in 
 our quieter moments, of reflection on our experience. 
 This is especially true if we are members of such a 
 nation. The influence sways us ; then later we reflect 
 on its meaning. The knowledge that comes may well 
 be true and valid, but it is not immediate. So if 
 the religious experience is mainly normative, the 
 truths about God, though based on the experience, 
 are the product of constructive tnought. Not the 
 
A HlLosoPirsr of RELIGION #i 
 
 dogmas, nor the formulas about God, but the very 
 personality or nature of God would be given in the 
 experience. Such an examination, which must pre- 
 cede any sure and firm confidence in the methods o 
 theology has rarely been even thought of by theo < - 
 logians. In their arguments in behalf of God's per- 
 sonality they have at times attempted to use imme- 
 diate revelation. Such revelation there is in a nor- 
 mative experience, an intimate revelation of what the 
 personal influence which is in the man's life is, but 
 any revelation of this kind must be of the type of 
 the consciousness of God as love, or as a fearful 
 being, of him as helping or opposing man's natural 
 desires, or whether he influences toward or from as- 
 ceticism. Such revelations would be made just as 
 clearly, however, if the examination of the source, as 
 we have pointed out in our earlier classifications, 
 should show that the religious experience has no ori- 
 gin outside of the individual. In that case the reve- 
 lation of personality goes for nothing. Or even if 
 the source, that is God, is proven to be outside the 
 individual, he may still be known in a passive experi- 
 ence as punishing certain acts of man, as natural 
 law does, and yet not be a personal being. The 
 fact of our conviction that if we do right he will 
 help us no more proves that God cares for us than 
 does the fact that if we keep on firm ground we will 
 not fall proves that the earth is friendly. It is_pj 
 if in the religious experience God is revealed to us as 
 a power striving to bring men to do certain things 
 that we can call him personal. 
 
 To examine the full validity of the conclusions of 
 Christian theology we must ask whether the Christian 
 
52 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 religious experience or the religious experience in its 
 full meaning is exhausted in the experience or points 
 to a source outside, whether it allows of the truth of 
 its implications about such a source being tested, 
 whether what it does give is objective detail, and 
 whether the test can be completely applied to all that 
 is implied. Besides this, we must examine the place 
 of this experience in general experience, especially 
 with reference to the question whether it goes beyond 
 human limitations, and, finally, whether it affects 
 the will or is a passive revelation of knowledge. This 
 is an outline of the task belonging to a philosophy 
 of religion. Far reaching in each result attained, it 
 has an important place in philosophy. Not merely 
 the application to religion of an already completed 
 system, it is rather the pioneer toward such a sys- 
 tem, examining one of man's experiences as all must 
 be examined, independently, to give a valid metaphys- 
 ical system. The philosophy of Religion is thus a 
 distinct critique. 
 
LECTURE II 
 RELIGION REAL AND UNIQUE 
 
 If we are to experience religion, it must be possible 
 for religion to be in consciousness. It must be pos- 
 sible for us to be conscious of the contents of the 
 experience. In very many cases there is no doubt in 
 the believer's mind about his perception and knowl- 
 edge of what he has experienced. In the visions of 
 the Jewish prophets, so far as we can take the ac- 
 counts as truly representing the personal experience 
 of the prophets; in the accounts of the experience 
 of St. Paul on the road to Damascus ; in the story 
 of the conversion of St. Augustine; and in our own 
 day the many instances that might be brought to 
 mind of strong belief in definite revelations, there can 
 be no doubt of the existence of the religious con- 
 sciousness. Into this category must be brought 
 those cases of " divine call," where the assertion is 
 made that God has given definite assurance or definite 
 command about some detailed matter. It is not, 
 however, merely those cases which can be adequately 
 described in simple terms that show the religious ex- 
 perience often to be very definite. The mystic who 
 asserts that the experience " passeth knowledge " or 
 description is very certain about that experience. 
 It is so definitely in his consciousness that he has no 
 doubt that ordinary words and ideas do not ade- 
 
 53 
 
54 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 quately portray or define it. It is a very definite 
 experience which makes him so certain about this. 
 At those times when language seems so very insuffi- 
 cient that paradox becomes the only possible figure 
 of speech, as frequently happens with St. Paul, it is 
 the definiteness of the experience that makes the be- 
 liever so sure that the seeming paradox, which at 
 other times would be meaningless, is now the best 
 statement of the fact. 
 
 To say that at times the experience is thus plainly 
 in consciousness is not to conclude immediately that 
 always the religious man is sure of what he experi- 
 ences. It does, however, prove that religion can be 
 experienced, and in very definite forms. Whether we 
 should call those things which can not thus be in 
 consciousness true religion is another question. 
 Taking for the moment only the definite forms, we 
 can here be sure that, whatever else they may be, 
 there is such a thing as a definite religious experi- 
 ence. Such an experience may have very definite 
 content. St. Paul spoke of his experience on the 
 Damascus Road as the appearance of the risen Jesus, 
 and as a proof of the Resurrection. Though it may 
 be that not the whole of religion can be experienced, 
 yet a part can enter into consciousness. It is this 
 part which becomes our study. At this point we do 
 no more than draw out the consequences of this 
 experience so far as we find it to exist. So far as it 
 comes into consciousness it opens to us the possi- 
 bility of study. Even the mystic experience, since it 
 asserts that ordinary language can not describe it, 
 challenges us to try the impossible, and it must in 
 turn meet our challenge to it to prove its assertion. 
 
RELIGION REAL AND UNIQUE 55 
 
 Being in experience in any of these ways, and becom- 
 ing an object of study, at once it must yield its claim 
 of exemption from criticism. If it were not in con- 
 sciousness, we could not put it to the test, but being 
 there, at least in those cases where definite assertions 
 concerning it are made, we can test it. Even re- 
 vealed truth, therefore, subjects itself to test. On 
 the other hand, we have put religion in the world of 
 reality. What kind of reality it may prove to have 
 is a further question, but when it is an experience 
 that can be tested it is no longer possible to put it 
 aside as something imaginary. 
 
 However wide may be the variety of cases where 
 definite assertions about the contents of the religious 
 experience are possible, there are undoubtedly many 
 cases where no such definiteness exists. For the 
 " modern man," especially the man of our western 
 civilisation, religion takes usually neither the mystical 
 nor prophetic forms. Cases of the type of conver- 
 sion which James has used in his " Varieties of Re- 
 ligious Experience " are rather rare and exceptional. 
 Yet the modern religious man is by no means uncon- 
 scious of his religion. We are inclined to call re- 
 ligious those great common impulses which, whether 
 the same as the moral movements or not, are to-day 
 more in the fore front of consciousness than perhaps 
 ever before. Great movements there have always 
 been, but we understand better where we are being 
 led than did our forefathers. To take movements 
 which are not clearly moral the present efforts, 
 widespread and growing, to convert the world to 
 Christianity and to bring about Church unity, are 
 each of them definite, and brought forward as the re- 
 
56 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 suit of religious experience. Whether they should 
 properly be called religion might be questioned, but 
 so long as they are in consciousness religion is also. 
 When a man is on fire, as we say, with missionary 
 enthusiasm, his religion seems to most people to be 
 very real. In his own mind at least, and this is the 
 test, it is his religion which gave him the impulse. 
 This is even clearer with the great moral reform 
 movements where they are connected in consciousness 
 with religion. The man gives his life to destroying 
 injustice with the full conviction that it is his re- 
 ligion which is impelling him to do this. What he 
 calls his consciousness of religion is his consciousness 
 of this impulse. And because he is conscious of the 
 impulse he is conscious of what he takes to be his 
 religion. It is not a valid objection that the con- 
 sciousness has no clear content. Neither has the 
 consciousness of desire. We often long for we know 
 not what, and we know that the desire is vague. 
 There may be a very distinct consciousness of a very 
 vague thing, and the experience be very definite just 
 on this fact of vagueness. This type of religion, 
 which is largely in men's minds to-day because it is 
 in consciousness, is an experience, and because it is 
 connected in its nature and in men's minds with re- 
 ligion it should be accepted as a type of the religious 
 experience. 
 
 The definiteness here is not in the object, but in the 
 direction of the impulse. The experience is of the 
 active type. What that may mean and how far it 
 can be shown to be true of all types of religion will 
 be our last task. At this point we need only to note 
 that this type can be studied and tested equally well 
 
RELIGION REAL AND UNIQUE 57 
 
 with the preceding. An impulse of this type is even 
 more real than the command to St. Augustine if we 
 are to judge by modern standards. To what is 
 active we tend to give a higher place than to the 
 passive. So to these conscious religious impulses, 
 and so to religion we must assign a place in the real 
 world. 
 
 There are instances of religion where neither does 
 there seem to be any definite object nor any great 
 impulse. In many of these cases, as in some of the 
 preceding, we find that the religious feeling, or what- 
 ever it was, came at a definite time. A man may be 
 distressed and torn by conflicting desires, and while 
 thus in turmoil a sudden peace come upon him. Not 
 always is this peace ascribed to God, but often it is, 
 and spoken of as true evidence of God's peace in the 
 soul. At some definite time, perhaps a moment or 
 just as likely a day or even a week, the inconsistent 
 and warring impulses are quieted, and discord ceases. 
 This is not a case of impulse coming from the re- 
 ligious experience, for the incentives to action are 
 here limited, not increased. The man looks back on 
 that day or hour as the point at which the internal 
 warfare of impulses ceased. He is sure that that 
 time does mark a dividing point in his conscious life. 
 He is conscious of the discord that preceded and of 
 the peace that followed the coming of the religious 
 experience. The contrast here is what marks his 
 consciousness. There may be nothing additional in 
 his life except just this realisation, that he is at 
 peace. This is not to be put aside on the ground 
 that it is negative, and that we can not call it con- 
 scious. When a man is conscious of a lack, that 
 
58 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 lack is in his mind. If religion at times is to him the 
 absence of something, then that consciousness, though 
 consciousness of something negative, is itself positive 
 and real. 
 
 At other times religion comes under just the oppo- 
 site form. With the awaking of what Christians call 
 the sense of sin, there results an inner conflict. 
 Where there had been self-complacency there now ex- 
 ists the realisation of this struggle, conflict between 
 ideal and performance, and between one's own ideals 
 and those of society or of God. In many cases the 
 necessary effort of one who is seeking to convert an- 
 other is to make that person conscious of his sins. 
 This occurs often just as suddenly and just as defi- 
 nitely as does the cessation of struggle. The man 
 may later come to feel that the struggle against sin 
 was only a passing phase of the religious experience, 
 yet still it was a true phase. The struggle por- 
 trayed in " Pilgrim's Progress " is proof enough 
 that, for many, religion consists just in such a strug- 
 gle. That struggle often can be dated in its begin- 
 ning as accurately as any other event of life. This, 
 as before, requires that the experience be in con- 
 sciousness. That the struggle in each separate case 
 takes a different form is no objection. It might even 
 be that men grouped under the religious experience 
 moments of quite different and irreconcilable char- 
 acter. Still our problem would not be solved until 
 we found out what it is that such moments have in 
 common. For our present purpose we are pointing 
 out that however else different they may be, they 
 all alike involve consciousness. We are dealing with 
 conscious experiences. When we date a mental ex- 
 
RELIGION REAL AND UNIQUE 59 
 
 perience, we imply that we are conscious of it. Defi- 
 nite dates for the beginning of conversion, and of its 
 ending or completion, prove that at times religion 
 can be very definitely in consciousness. 
 
 To date an experience is to give it a very real 
 place in existence. It is, however, not necessary al- 
 ways to know its exact date. If we can say that this 
 month we realise our sin, and last month we did not, 
 we date the experience, even though not to the exact 
 moment. We assign it a place among the real and 
 vital things of our life. As such it must be reckoned 
 with. Even those who declare that religion is either 
 ineffable or purely subjective can not pass by this 
 consciousness of time. Whether or not religion re- 
 veals anything about the objective world of space 
 outside of our bodies, so long as it has a place in the 
 stream of time it is real. Being real, it is open to 
 questions of the accuracy of the time element, but 
 unless it has its definite place in the stream 1 of time 
 it could not be said to be in consciousness. In show- 
 ing that at least in many cases it may be dated we 
 have therefore made possible the assertion that it is 
 a conscious experience, and so a real experience. 
 
 There is still another large group of religious ex- 
 periences which comes under none of the types we 
 have mentioned. Where emotion enters largely into 
 religion it comes to consciousness neither because of 
 its definite assertions about something outside of it- 
 self, nor is it always to be grouped as a moral or 
 religious impulse, and not always is there any clear 
 consciousness of its date or place in time. Emotion 
 has its own laws, and comes into consciousness for its 
 own reasons. A man who is lifted up into the high- 
 
60 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 est realm by great church music, or finds his devotion 
 to religion strengthened by gorgeous ceremonial, as 
 well as by the crude emotion of the back country re- 
 vivalist, is conscious of something^ It is true that 
 not always does he recognise that it is emotion which 
 is chief in his experience. Always, however, he knows 
 that he is pleased with religion. The actions which 
 follow from his experience are not always conscious, 
 and very often he does not realise the direction in 
 which his emotion is leading him. Yet the emotion 
 itself is in consciousness. The controversy about the 
 function of the organism in emotion has no place 
 here. Whatever may be the relative priority of body 
 or mind, what he is conscious of is the emotion. It 
 is true that such experiences are not so clearly seen 
 to be distinctively religious as those we have been 
 discussing. Yet that too does not concern us. If 
 religion should prove to be simply emotion, then 
 what we find to be true of religion will still be true, 
 though applicable also to emotion. Since emotions 
 are in consciousness, so far as religion includes or 
 unites with emotion, it too is in consciousness. 
 
 As we are not arguing that religion must be sub- 
 sumed under any one of these heads, we do not need 
 to make our classification exhaustive. All that we 
 have done is to show that under the forms it usually 
 takes religion is in consciousness, and hence is a con- 
 scious experience. Being an experience, it is sub- 
 ject to study. So we have a basis for the rest of 
 our work. The differing types of consciousness show 
 us that the kind of reality this gives to religion is 
 either different from that of any one of these types 
 or differs according to the type. An emotion is not 
 
RELIGION REAL AND UNIQUE 61 
 
 in consciousness in the same way or same sense that 
 the perception of a tree is, nor do we know or study 
 our impulses as we study the tree or the perception 
 of the tree. There is the possibility that underneath 
 these differing forms lies something which is common 
 to them all, and that this constitutes religion. It is 
 evident that we have not yet come to any definition 
 of the experience which we are studying. To say 
 that it is real and is a conscious experience is there- 
 fore not to define what type of reality it has. It 
 has simply met the first test. We have a clearer 
 idea of what we mean by the religious consciousness. 
 When we said that men must mean something by the 
 word religion we had to act on faith. Now we have 
 certain experiences before us which include nearly all 
 that men do mean by religion. They may* include 
 more than just the religious elements, but if we are 
 to study religion we shall find it somewhere in these 
 experiences. 
 
 As we look more carefully at the different types, we 
 find each one constantly changing. While some reve- 
 lations from God seem at times to be very distinct, 
 yet often one which may be just the opposite is just 
 as distinct. The multitude of gods is as great al- 
 most as the number of men. With savage tribes each 
 clan has its own religious experience. They are con- 
 sistent in assuming that this means that there exist 
 various gods. In higher religions they are fre- 
 quently able to distinguish which god it is which ap- 
 pears to them by the form of the appearance. This 
 is still a difference in consciousness even in cases 
 where we may suppose the form is influenced by what 
 others have told of their experience. The stories of 
 
62 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 the god constantly change, and this points to a 
 changing experience. The gods of one race are very 
 different from those of another. Even where their 
 functions have come to be similar their form remains 
 distinct. What holds true of visual or other ap- 
 pearances of the gods is still more true in regard to 
 their utterances. In all ages there have been false 
 prophets, men whose experience of the god has not 
 met the approval of the best religious tests. In the 
 experience itself there is given no test by which these 
 may be ruled out of religion. The reported wariness 
 of the Delphic oracle is not more suggestive on this 
 point than this disagreement as to what is revealed 
 truth. Theologians have recognised this and sought 
 outside of the experience their arguments to support 
 their views. The fanaticism of the Mohammedan, 
 which leads him to believe that God commands a holy 
 war, must be equally included as religion with the 
 passive resistance which the Quaker offers to being 
 drafted for military service. It is equally a sense of 
 divine command which leads the Indian fanatic to seek 
 death under the wheels of Juggernaut and the Eng- 
 lish authorities to prevent it. The experiences of 
 each must be included under the head of the religious 
 experience. From these examples it is evident that 
 the content of the religious experience is not 
 constant. Forever varying, the revelations given 
 through that experience can not define religion. 
 
 This varying content means that the religious ex- 
 perience is far different from the types of ordinary 
 perception. Men see material objects slightly differ- 
 ently, but never, if they really see them, so differently 
 that we can not identify the common object. When 
 
RELIGION REAL AND UNIQUE 63 
 
 words are spoken, though they may be heard slightly 
 inaccurately, yet it is possible, if they were " really " 
 heard, to find what the words were. A chance of 
 agreement on the basis of the experience exists. 
 When in theology the defenders of religion or of or- 
 thodoxy must defend their views, not by an appeal 
 to Christian experience as direct evidence of the 
 truth, but to analogy and deduction, it is evident that 
 we are dealing with an experience whose own evidence 
 is not sufficient proof. With perception there can be 
 no evidence outside of itself. If a man tells us that 
 he sees something, the only way of disproving his 
 statement is for some one to assert that he sees in 
 that place something else which is not the thing the 
 first man sees. The test lies within the experience 
 or at least within the type. With the varying forms 
 of religious consciousness where those forms are most 
 definite there is no such test. To tell the man who 
 asserts that a god is speaking to him, that I see no 
 god, makes no difference to him. Or if I tell him 
 that the god spoke to me in a different way and with 
 a different command, he may either doubt my ex- 
 perience, or he may, by referring it to another god 
 or to a devil, give it equal validity with his. Even 
 self-consistency does not seem, necessary. The 
 gods, especially those of primitive tribes, are often 
 very willful in their commands. Yet we must include 
 these experiences among the evidences of the religious 
 life. To say that they are not the highest type of 
 that life is only to erect a division within the field; 
 it is not to exclude any experience as unreligious. 
 This is evident with the passive experiences of the 
 true mystics. Never are these experiences described 
 
64 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 twice alike, and the definite assertion is often made 
 that they are not of the type of the perception of 
 physical tilings. Words which describe material ob- 
 jects will not apply to this experience. We have 
 come practically to this conclusion independently of 
 the mystic. Whatever it may be, religion does not 
 consist in the perception of definite objects. 
 
 In reviewing carefully the second type of religious 
 experiences we see that the same indefiniteness or 
 variability exists. Great common impulses such as 
 the movements toward church unity or the missionary 
 movement were taken as types. Yet for many peo- 
 ple, especially at the time of the Reformation, re- 
 ligion consisted in the destruction of church unity, 
 and for others to-day in the at least passive opposi- 
 tion to foreign missions in order to work at the social 
 problems of our great cities. If we had taken other 
 impulses, just as truly religious, but not so wide- 
 spread, this would be more evident. For one man 
 the religious impulse requires self-denial, while for 
 another such denial is foolishness, not religion, and 
 he teaches the satisfaction of every normal desire. 
 Celibate or married, the religious leader is equally 
 strongly convinced that religion impels him to do the 
 thing he is doing. The religious element is recog- 
 nised by St. Paul in his treatment of those who be- 
 lieved and those who did not believe in keeping the 
 Mosaic law. Though the religious impulse led in just 
 opposite directions, both were religious impulses. 
 The conception and conviction that God is behind 
 our present social order, and against lawlessness is 
 met by the equally strong conviction that this order 
 must be destroyed. Each in his determination is 
 
RELIGION REAL AND UNIQUE 65 
 
 partly at least religious, so far as the idea of divine 
 sanction enters in. That neither will grant this to 
 the other is no reason for our refusing to see the re- 
 ligious element in both. Whatever they may mean 
 by God, they both assert that their experience of him 
 is such that they are convinced that he wants and 
 impels them to act as they are acting. The impulses 
 are antagonistic, yet both are to be classed as reli- 
 gious. 
 
 If for any reason we take some one line of action 
 as moral, and all that opposes it as immoral, it is 
 evident that religion is neither. If it is right to at- 
 tack the present economic order, then religion, which 
 seems equally to sanction such attack and to con- 
 demn it, is not identical with morality. Again we 
 may say that the test of morality is within the ex- 
 perience, and for religion outside of it. The reli- 
 gious leader, in defending one or the other conviction 
 does not, at least not in these days, appeal to that 
 conviction, but to moral arguments, or arguments 
 from ethics or some conception of divine law or man's 
 destiny. With the moral experience that test is 
 within. Not attempting to define morality, we only 
 need to point out that social morality is a test in 
 itself. So far as a man is moral he shares the ex- 
 perience of his fellows. He can test his ideas of 
 right by theirs. Again, -the experience is one that 
 can be communicated, or at least described in unam- 
 biguous terms. With religion, while the direction of 
 the impulses may be evident, there is no such test. A 
 man will not accept his neighbor's word that his re- 
 ligious impulse is not as fundamental as his neighbor's 
 religion. The impulse itself he feels whether he al- 
 
66 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 lows it to act or not, and argument or comparison 
 does not destroy this first character. Again and 
 again, when uniformity has been decreed in religion, 
 has a great mass of men broken over the bounds. 
 Dissent in England is a standing protest against ap- 
 plying coercive measures to the religious experience. 
 It will not run for all in the same channel. Men will 
 not accept another's experience as the guide and 
 measure of theirs. It is clear, therefore, that reli- 
 gion and morality are not identical. One is social, 
 allowing and seeking a test at the hands of society, 
 the other rejects such a test, and goes its own way. 
 Yet that way is itself constantly changing, for the 
 individual as well as between individuals. A man 
 may to-day believe religion to be impelling him in 
 one direction, and to-morrow become convinced that 
 it is impelling him in another. Religion cannot be 
 defined in terms of direction. 
 
 We find this same negative result in the last of the 
 types of religious experience which we examined. 
 While very often the experience can be dated, this is 
 by no means always true. While Protestantism 
 seems often to assume that religion is to be aroused 
 at some definite time, the Catholic churches, Roman 
 and Anglican and Eastern, base their whole scheme 
 of sacramental life on the opposing assumption that 
 religion has no special time as its beginning, nor is it 
 normally marked by crises which can be easily dated. 
 In a certain sense it has a date if we have the experi- 
 ence now, but the dating does not come into con- 
 sciousness unless something explicitly calls it here. 
 For those for whom no such datable crises exist, the 
 religious experience is as it has always been, and no 
 
RELIGION REAL AND UNIQUE 67 
 
 changes have been so sudden as to force a conscious- 
 ness of date. Any experience which consists or may 
 consist of a gradual development shares this feature. 
 Life itself, the consciousness of physical existence, 
 since we have always had it, can have no date in our 
 life. The man who is always well is hardly conscious 
 that he is alive. Where the consciousness of a given 
 type permeates the whole stream of time it cannot 
 be given a special place within that stream. The 
 more natural and all pervading, therefore, that re- 
 ligion becomes in the individual life, the less can it 
 be dated. The more gradual and inevitable the 
 growth in the religious life, the less will it consciously 
 assume definite dates. 
 
 This does not invalidate our former argument. In 
 those cases where the consciousness of date does ap- 
 pear, religion thereby becomes, in some sense or other, 
 real, but there may be equally clear cases of religion 
 which do not thus win reality. What religion is in 
 its essence remains therefore unanswered. It is, how- 
 ever, something that may be dated. At times it in- 
 volves very plainly the consciousness of change. 
 These particular experiences are in so far, then, ex- 
 periences, that is, focal in consciousness. The other 
 cases of which we have spoken are instances which 
 usually come under one of the other heads. When a 
 man has a religious experience, or, to avoid the word 
 " experience," recognises that he has a religious 
 nature, and that nature grows as any other part of 
 him does, he is conscious either of the impulses that 
 come from it, the habits in which the church and 
 Christian society have trained him, or he thinks of 
 the definite teachings of God and His work which 
 
68 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 have been told him since before he could remember. 
 Hence these cases get their recognition as real with- 
 out the need of the consciousness of date. No one of 
 these classifications, however, fits the whole of the 
 religious phenomena in consciousness. It might be 
 said that this means that there is not possible any one 
 definition of religion, but that its reality is of many 
 irreconcilable types ; that in reality there are many 
 religions. This is not a valid conclusion from our 
 discussion. At any time any religious experience 
 can be dated. Let it cease, or change abruptly, and 
 the consciousness of that change takes its place in the 
 stream of time. Or if it does not change, and the 
 question of date is raised, we can always come to 
 a consciousness, if that be the truth, that we have 
 always been religious. It is true that in these cases 
 it is some other interest which brings the conscious- 
 ness of time, but when it is once brought, that be- 
 comes part of the religious consciousness. We have 
 therefore not two types, mutually exclusive, of re- 
 ligious life, but only a varying degree of temporal 
 consciousness. By union with this time conscious- 
 ness religion may be proven to be real, but the union 
 is not a vital part of religion. Religion is there- 
 fore not something of the type of the perception of 
 time. We can not rightly define it as the perception 
 of the incoming into man of God's grace. Such a 
 definition would imply that there was in conscious- 
 ness always a sense of a time when we did not have 
 that grace, and then a sense of a time when we did 
 have. Since this is not always true, the definition is 
 not adequate. Religion does not depend on the sense 
 of time. 
 
RELIGION REAL AND UNIQUE 69 
 
 In each of the cases we have examined we have 
 found similar results. While often the religious ex- 
 perience is proven real by its definiteness in content, 
 in direction, and in date, just as often it does not 
 possess these characteristics. It is possible, even, 
 that at times, as in some of the mystic trances, it 
 possesses none of them. Since it can possess them, 
 it is real, for if it was not real, it could not have this 
 definiteness in consciousness. It can be focal, hence 
 it is an experience, yet the definiteness may remain 
 only a possibility. This possibility consists in its 
 relation to other experiences. For no one, however 
 much they assert that religion should fill the whole 
 of life, does the consciousness of religion ever do 
 this. By this consciousness we mean something dis- 
 tinct from the general consciousness of life. Man 
 may be always religious, but he certainly is not al- 
 ways conscious of it. Therefore there are other 
 things or experiences irTour conscious life. The mo- 
 ment that these other experiences touch and mingle 
 with the religious consciousness, it takes on the same 
 reality they have. When a man seeks to make asser- 
 tions about that experience, he is able not only to 
 make the assertion definite, he can test its truth, at 
 least for himself. If his assertion is that the religious 
 consciousness is vague in definite commands, then 
 that vagueness can be tested by him the next time he 
 comes into this religious mood. Because it can be 
 tested, it has a hold on reality. In the same way, 
 we have seen that although it does not always involve 
 a consciousness of time, yet it may always be dated, 
 at least as existent now. In relation with these other 
 experiences it appears equally real, for it takes them 
 
70 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 into itself. The possibility consists therefore in this 
 relation of possible inclusion. It is always possible 
 to give this reality to religion, therefore always pos- 
 sible, at least, to find it to be a true experience, which 
 may be focal in consciousness. 
 
 To define it in these terms is to say that it is very 
 different from perception. Perception is or it is not 
 real. We either perceive or we do not perceive. At 
 times that perception may be on the fringe of con- 
 sciousness, but if we are not at least dimly conscious 
 of it before, when our attention turns to it, then the 
 perception comes for the first time. A perception is 
 the consciousness of something, not the possibility of 
 that consciousness. A sensation may be defined as 
 the permanent possibility of perception, but percep- 
 tion itself, if unconscious, is non-existent. There is 
 nothing left to it, if we take away consciousness. 
 Nothing mental remains, only organic movements and 
 states of which the mind knows nothing. With re- 
 ligion we have found this to be reversed. While it 
 may have the reality that perception has, such 
 reality is not necessary to it. There remains some- 
 thing to our conception of religion even when we take 
 away all that there is in our idea of perception. 
 Whether perception of things, of truths, of moral 
 movements, or of time, religion is something more 
 than any one of these, or all of these put together. 
 It satisfies our test as to consciousness, for it may be 
 in consciousness, but it does more than this. Hence 
 it is very distinctly different from perception. 
 
 Around the second part of our definition of experi- 
 ence centers more important, because more disputed, 
 questions than around the part we have considered. 
 
RELIGION REAL AND UNIQUE 71 
 
 We here approach the first of the controversies which 
 yield or deny to religion some form of objectivity. 
 In the case before us, it is rather simply the question 
 of control by man. If not controllable at all, it can 
 hardly be called a normal human experience, as we 
 have defined experience. We have, therefore, to ask 
 how far it is, and how far it is not, controllable by 
 man. 
 
 The existence of religious phenomena few or none 
 dispute. A classification in broad terms makes prac- 
 ticable studies from various points of view upon this 
 data. Not so many, however, have gone into the 
 question of the reality of the experience as a distinct 
 experience, having a place of its own in reality. As 
 a contribution toward this, an analytic study of the 
 religious consciousness is necessary. Such a study is 
 that which follows. 
 
 The first question which arises is that of the re- 
 lation of religion to the will. Can man control it? 
 As a preliminary answer, man can control religion 
 to the extent of being able to seek or not to seek it. 
 Religious influences, as they lie about us from in- 
 fancy, are not here in question, for these influences 
 do not constitute our experience of religion. When 
 a boy grows up, it only too frequently happens that 
 he deliberately rejects and turns from those influ- 
 ences, and ceases to have the experiences that he 
 would if he remained true to the teaching of his child- 
 hood. He can shut those influences out of his life. 
 By the influence of the companions whose company 
 he seeks, a new set of influences and experiences take 
 the place of the old. On the other side, a man 
 brought up with one type of Christian teaching, and 
 
72 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 knowing 1 religion through some one type of religious 
 experience, may deliberately, because of some feeling 
 of inadequacy or unrest, seek a fuller or different ex- 
 perience. He may not have clearly in mind just what 
 it is he seeks, and he may never find rest, but he will 
 by his own will change his religious experience. All 
 these cases are cases where the experience is known 
 in some form to the man who seeks to change it. The 
 question might be raised whether a man who knew 
 nothing of the experience, except by hearsay, could 
 by seeking find it. The teaching that no man by 
 searching can find out God seems to deny this. 
 Whatever the correct exegesis of that text may be, 
 we have to bear in mind that we are not at this point 
 saying that in the religious experience man does find 
 out God. That problem will trouble us enough when 
 we are ready for it. Now we are asking the ques- 
 tion without regard to its consequences, seeking only 
 the correct answer, whatever it may be. Yet seeing 
 its possible importance, we must consider it. As far 
 as we can define terms, a man can deliberately seek 
 and find this experience. To one who has seen the 
 devotion, especially in public worship, of some loyal 
 church member, or has seen some evidence of loyal 
 service to man which seems to come from the religious 
 experience of the one under observation, then it is 
 possible for the observer, wishing to induce in himself 
 the same spirit of worship or of service, to seek and 
 to put himself under influences that will bring to him 
 the same experience. It is as possible as the effort, 
 which may be crowned with success, of an admirer of 
 art to attain some appreciation of true artistic spirit. 
 
RELIGION REAL AND UNIQUE 7.3 
 
 Consequently, man can, by effort, at least partly 
 change and control his religious experience. 
 
 The consequences of this may be stated in the form 
 that man can induce the religious experience, or can 
 bring about a new form of the experience as he wishes. 
 In so far he can create the experience. It is not 
 something that will hide from him, and come to 
 light only of its own accord. Not all religion, there- 
 fore, is of the type of sudden conversion, or what a 
 surface reading of the New Testament seems to give 
 as St. Paul's experience. Religion takes normally 
 and as a possibility its place among the other ex- 
 periences of life, whose lack we can correct by seeing 
 the experience. As we can seek to gain the experi- 
 ence of heat or cold, so we can seek religion. To 
 this extent it is like ordinary perception. 
 
 The case to which we referred, of a boy turning 
 from home influences and with that, from religion, 
 might really fall under our next heading. As man 
 can change, so he can reject religion. Yet as this 
 problem is so much wider than this particular in- 
 stance, it will be well not to dwell on this one case. 
 The real point at issue is whether religion is so all- 
 powerful that whether a man will or no he must sub- 
 mit to it. It is to be conceded that he may not act 
 according to its impulses, and yet he may have the ex- 
 perience. The boy leaving home can not take out of 
 his life that home experience, even though he prevent 
 any return of it in the future. If the conception of 
 the religious experience is that of the incoming into 
 man of God's all powerful grace, which a man may 
 disobey, but which he can not reject as an experience, 
 
74 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 then he is not free to reject it. A man may shut his 
 eyes and refuse to see, and be able under ordinary 
 conditions to refuse to look at the scene before him. 
 If he cannot do this in religion, then religion is a dif- 
 ferent sort of experience. We must remember that it 
 is not necessary to claim that when once the experi- 
 ence is upon a man, that then he can not avoid it. 
 When a man's eyes are open, very frequently he can- 
 not help seeing. Yetj if his attention is distracted, and 
 he is thinking of something else, he may not perceive 
 the scene before him in any conscious way. It would 
 seem that at times, at least, religion is like this. While 
 if a man lets himself go, his religious consciousness 
 may become more acute, whether emotionally or in- 
 tellectually, he may ordinarily, by turning the current 
 of his thoughts in other directions, prevent the com- 
 ing into consciousness of this experience. In a crowd 
 a man may remain impervious to the mob spirit if his 
 interests are centered elsewhere, while if he lets him- 
 self be swayed by the mob, he may go the full distance 
 of approval of their acts, and share in their experi- 
 ences. Such is the case with religion. The spirit 
 which a man brings to worship, all devotional writers 
 recognise, is crucial for the experience of worship. 
 If he comes in a prayerful spirit, the full experience 
 may come to him, but if he is distraught, the words of 
 the familiar prayers fall meaningless on his ears. So 
 by rejecting the religious experience we mean that its 
 entrance into consciousness is dependent on what is 
 already there. The man may, by allowing other in- 
 terests to precede, shut out religion. 
 
 Religion is therefore not always so compelling that 
 it can force its way into consciousness against a 
 
RELIGION REAL AND UNIQUE 75 
 
 man's will. Whatever bearing the doctrine of elec- 
 tion may have on this point, if it means that GocI 
 forces those whom he elects to salvation to have sense 
 of assurance of his presence, we must question it 
 closely. It may not mean this, but if it does, the 
 doctrine must be changed to allow for the rejection 
 by man of the religious experience. The arguments 
 on which predestination is based start from the idea 
 of God. Since we are trying to arrive at the idea 
 of God as he may prove to make himself known in ex- 
 perience, our discussion must take logical precedence, 
 and if we are wrong we must be met on our own 
 ground. If we find, as we have, evidence that man 
 may refuse and succeed in the refusal, by staying 
 away from religious influences, or by opposing other 
 interests, then any doctrine of God's nature must 
 be made to explain this. It can not succeed by 
 dogmatically denying facts. If God is made known 
 to man in an experience which man may reject, then 
 we can not define the religious experience as always 
 prevailing. There is this to be said, though, that 
 we are not seeking to prove that man may always be 
 able to reject religion. Just as there are times when 
 a man may not refuse to see what is before him, under 
 the impulse of surprise, perhaps, so there may be 
 moments when, taken by surprise, a great wave of re- 
 ligious consciousness may sweep over him before he 
 can make the attempt to shut it out. Still this does 
 not make religion any different from vision. Again, 
 religion takes its place in this regard among normal 
 experiences. 
 
 As man can by seeking find religion, and as he can 
 reject it when it comes to him unsought, so when he 
 
76 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 is conscious of religion he is able to modify it. Even 
 St. Paul, whose experience we have been taking as a 
 type of the irresistible religious experience, tells us 
 that he was not disobedient to the heavenly vision. 
 (Acts 26: 19.) He also tells us that the expression 
 of the religious state, such as " speaking with 
 tongues " should be controlled. (I Cor. 14.) This is 
 not merely a matter of the expression of religion. Just 
 as religion may be shut out if what is already in con- 
 sciousness holds the attention too strongly, so it can 
 be obscured in consciousness by other ideas and ex- 
 periences. As a man grows older those things which 
 enshrined for him religion come either to mean more 
 to him, or else gradually lose their meaning. The 
 tendency, which many have pointed out, for conver- 
 sion to occur near or at the age of adolescence shows 
 the very considerable influence of a man's nature and 
 surroundings upon his religious experience. That it 
 may also be modified by direct effort of the will is 
 true in at least some cases. A man who deliberately 
 makes the effort by prayer to increase and build up 
 in himself a sense of God's presence, is changing his 
 consciousness of religion. Whatever truth there may 
 be in the emphasis on sacraments and outward forms 
 made by the great mass of Christendom rests on 
 this possibility. The church teaching insists that 
 through the outward form man can change the inner 
 experience. Men set apart one day out of seven in 
 the belief that only by forming deliberate habits can 
 one continue, ordinarily, in touch with divine forces. 
 Only so will most men continue to have any con- 
 sciousness of religion that is at all definite. Man 
 
RELIGION REAL AND UNIQUE 77 
 
 may, therefore, if he will, modify his consciousness of 
 religion. 
 
 The results of this possibility of modification are 
 to differentiate religion somewhat from perception. 
 What a man sees he sees, and while he can be indiffer- 
 ent to some details, he can not really change those 
 details. Blue remains blue, if he sees it at all, or if 
 it changes, the change is not due to his willing it. 
 It is evident that we are dealing with something more 
 like insight, or artistic perception. As a man may 
 increase his ability to perceive beauty, so he may, we 
 have found, increase his consciousness of religion. 
 This results in the conclusion that religion is more 
 a matter of internal mental life, and perhaps has to 
 do, as art does, with values, rather than with material 
 objects. It at least opens the way to this result. It 
 does not prove that such a result shuts out the possi- 
 bility that in the religious experience it may be some 
 new type of objects that are perceived. The im- 
 portance of the possibility of modification lies rather 
 in the question of the relation to the will. We are 
 plainly dealing with something that is man's own ex- 
 perience, over which he exercises some control. It is 
 not an entirely passive experience which comes to him 
 like a dream, going its own way independently of his 
 will, but something which claims from him the neces- 
 sity of exercising on it his will power. It thus comes 
 into the real world of action. Not merely real be- 
 cause it is in consciousness, it is also real be- 
 cause man may make it the object of desire. In this 
 it does not stand alone among human experiences. 
 As a man may desire and work to gain a conscious- 
 
78 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 ness of history or science, so he may desire and work 
 to gain a consciousness of religion. We are dealing 
 with an experience which is vital, which seems to many 
 among men something to be striven for with all their 
 strength. The anchorite in the desert felt religion to 
 be very real when he gave up all for it. Not only, 
 then, do we find it really in consciousness, we also 
 find it known and real in so far that men consciously 
 seek to bring it to fuller focus in their lives. 
 
 These three points that we made are arguments 
 only for the possibility for control by man's will. In 
 many cases we find religion proving itself above such 
 control. In human life religion came so early both 
 for the race and the individual that we are not con- 
 scious of any will to receive or reject it. It is a 
 part of our life. This is very often true also of those 
 sudden crises which to many are the main examples 
 to be studied. Whatever may have been the under- 
 lying train of events when St. Paul was struck blind 
 on the Damascus road, it came to him as a totally 
 unexpected experience. The same is true of St. 
 Augustine, and many who could be mentioned. 
 Every conversion, even if it has been long desired, 
 comes with this shock of surprise. Frequently also, 
 on the emotional side, there arises in man's mind dur- 
 ing worship a type of consciousness of which he has 
 had no forewarning, and which often it is difficult to 
 keep under control, much less to put out of his mind. 
 The revival spirit sweeps one away sometimes even 
 when the sober will is somewhat opposed. The 
 quieter influences of religion, too, affect a man with- 
 out his effort. The solemn service often at the most 
 unexpected times brings to the worshiper a greater 
 
RELIGION REAL AND UNIQUE 79 
 
 depth of feeling than he has known before. Also, 
 at times, when he seeks that feeling, he can not find 
 it. All other things may seem as usual, yet the ex- 
 perience does not come. Whether it be sin, or lack 
 of faith does not matter, man can not always, by 
 simply willing it, get religion. In both ways, there- 
 fore, in coming without man's will, and at times in 
 eluding that will, religion proves itself above com- 
 plete control by man. 
 
 So far this gives to religion the right by the sec- 
 ond of our tests to be called an experience. It is not 
 simply a creature of man's will. This also differenti- 
 ates religion from morality. Morality concerns en- 
 tirely man's will to act. If it came upon him without 
 his will, his action would not be free, and so, not 
 moral. But religion, in coming or staying independ- 
 ently of man, is shown to be different. It is there- 
 fore not dealing with values as morality deals with 
 them. This point is of importance because it leaves 
 open the question of the origin of the experience. 
 If it were a product of man's own will, then it could 
 not possibly reveal objects beyond man. As it is not, 
 in its origin, man's creation, we may find that it does 
 come from a source outside of man. It may be more 
 like perception than fantasy. 
 
 A man may reject religion, but reckon with it he 
 must. In rejecting it he must recognise it as a force 
 which he can keep out of his life, but not one which 
 he can destroy by the mere fiat of his will. The 
 methods by which he succeeds in thus barring it 
 show this. When he turns from religious associ- 
 ations, and avoids church going, or refuses to go to 
 the church where the experience which he shuns holds 
 
80 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 sway, he recognises the impulse to the experience as 
 something exterior to himself. When he shuts it out 
 of his life by centering his attention and energy on 
 other and conflicting things, he does not control it 
 as he does his desires, but as he does the view of a 
 scene he does not wish to see. He erects barriers 
 against it, so that it can not enter. There are times 
 when a man deliberately stifles any appearance of re- 
 ligion within him by sheer force of will. He forces 
 his attention away from it, and sees that no expres- 
 sion of its presence goes forth into action. Yet even 
 here, the most that can be said for will power is that 
 it called forth something which requires the utmost 
 power to destroy. Man may, at times, if the experi- 
 ence is not strong, turn from it as he does from a 
 dream. This proves only that religion may not al- 
 ways be a real experience, that it shades over into 
 something else. Yet we have to notice that even here 
 we use the expression, " he turns from: religion." 
 What he does, in our ordinary idea, is to refuse to 
 give religion a place. It is not that he refuses to 
 create it. He may turn from it as from a dream, 
 but we do not usually think of him as putting it aside 
 as he does a possible action. A dream is in some 
 sense, as not completely controllable by man, an ex- 
 perience. So our analogy has not hurt the claim of 
 religion to be an experience. There is still the pos- 
 sibility that it is more like a waking dream, called 
 forth or not as man wills. This may be true in some 
 cases, and rejection not involve giving to religion any 
 other reality than that of a rejected possibility. 
 This does not, however, affect those other cases where 
 its rejection implies that it is something to be strug- 
 
RELIGION REAL AND UNIQUE 81 
 
 gled against, if it is to be destroyed. It is possible 
 that religion may not always be what we have de- 
 scribed as an experience. But those cases where it is 
 not, where it remains a rejected possibility, are not 
 cases of the presence of religion but of its absence. 
 Where we have religion, frequently even in rejecting 
 it, a man finds it to be real, and that it makes its 
 effect on him despite his will. When a man who has 
 fought against all " tenderness," and sought to im- 
 merse himself in the struggle for self-betterment, finds 
 that sometimes, in spite of his growing coldness, he is 
 tempted to do some act of kindness, when he realises, 
 as Dickens' Christmas story portrays, that he has 
 not conquered, he knows that in rejecting religion he 
 has not destroyed it. In spite of him it has proved 
 its claim to existence. 
 
 Because it can not be blotted from existence by the 
 mere arbitrary will of a man, religion may at times, 
 even if not always, be a real experience. It is real 
 in the sense of exerting, whether passively or actively 
 does not matter here, some force in opposition to 
 being willed out of existence. This does not mean 
 that it is necessarily of the type of the will, nor does 
 it prove at once that it is identical with the social 
 will. For perception gives cases where, especially if 
 they are painful, we find an experience persisting in 
 spite of all attempts to ignore it. As this quality of 
 opposition to control is a characteristic of any real 
 experience, we have not proved more than that re- 
 ligion is such, by showing that at times it resists the 
 individual will. Again, it does not necessarily imply 
 that we are dealing with a power in man alien to his 
 nature, and therefore of divine origin. All that we 
 
82 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 have done is to find the way still open to discover the 
 source of the experience. 
 
 The last of the three points which we examined in 
 regard to the power of the individual over his re- 
 ligious experience was that of the ability of the be- 
 liever to modify his experience. We need not dis- 
 cuss the fact that not always can he so modify it. 
 That is really included in our conclusion that he can 
 not always reject it. If he can not always reject it, 
 then there are limits to his power of modifying it. 
 The more important thing is to realise that religion 
 can modify the rest of life, or change the will itself. 
 Of this we need little proof. The story of the life 
 of John Bunyan, to take a classic instance, illustrates 
 the great power of religion to change the whole course 
 of life. The Inasmuch mission in Philadelphia, 
 founded to help men who have fallen into evil so far 
 that only despair remains, by men who have them- 
 selves been in that state, and who attribute the change 
 to religion, is a modern instance. Again and again, 
 though by no means always, has conversion, the com- 
 ing into man of religion for what he regards as the 
 first time, meant a turning point in his life. To say 
 that while the change is attributed to religion, yet it 
 was really due to something else, is not a valid ob- 
 jection. What is in consciousness is that the reli- 
 gious state and the change are related as cause and 
 effect. It might be shown that the religious state 
 was only itself the result of a third something which 
 produced the change. This is to go behind the ex- 
 perience in a way which we have not as yet attempted. 
 As we are not attempting to say how the experience 
 has its effect, one theory here is as useful as another, 
 
RELIGION REAL AND UNIQUE 83 
 
 and no theory of how it works takes away the fact 
 that some change is effected in connection with the 
 religious experience. Religion has taken this definite 
 place in the real world. The consciousness of re-" 
 Hgion is a consciousness of something that is able to 
 affect and change man's life. It can exercise power 
 over him as well as he over it. 
 
 This gives us the complete result necessary to as- 
 serting that the religious experience is a real experi- 
 ence. As the experience of pleasure or pain from 
 the perception of some object can affect us, so can re- 
 ligion. It therefore takes its place alongside of per- 
 ception as a mode of experience. It can be focal in 
 consciousness, and by its power to change conscious- 
 ness can claim that focus for itself, often suddenly, 
 as in conversion, sometimes in the quiet power of re- 
 ligious habit. It is an experience that can affect and 
 hold its place in consciousness. Yet in all this it re- 
 mains possible to man to control it. It is his experi- 
 ence. It is therefore real by any test that we can 
 apply. Real because it is in consciousness, as a pos- 
 sible object to man's will, as bringing power to bear 
 on man, and, in the combination of these qualities, 
 being as truly an experience as any experience of life. 
 Religion therefore is real. It is not the idle cre- 
 ation of man, nor the by-product of some powerless 
 unimportant nook, to be disregarded as of little 
 moment. Experience itself, since this is also truly 
 an experience, can not be adequately described with- 
 out reference to this. Religion must be explained be- 
 fore we can rest satisfied with our understanding of 
 life or reality. 
 
 In thus giving religion a place in the real world, we 
 
8* THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 have also made possible a definition of that place. 
 We find that at times the consciousness of religion 
 can be very definite, that it has often definite direc- 
 tion in that it moves men to definite things, and that 
 it very frequently can be dated ; also, that it has very 
 often very distinct emotional color. Yet we also 
 find that at other times what we call equally exactly 
 u the consciousness of religion " is indefinite as to 
 its object, has no one direction to the resulting im- 
 pulse, or works out in conflicting directions, that with 
 great bodies of men the time element does not enter 
 into the experience, and that the emotional tone is 
 variable, sometimes religion being passive, and some- 
 times active. It has however further become evident 
 that, while some of the categories which apply to 
 perception apply here also, many do not. The chief 
 difference is found in the fact that definiteness does 
 not seem to be a characteristic of religion. From a 
 survey of the field no clew is given us by which we 
 may be entitled to conclude that the indefinite forms 
 are less typical. As far as ordinary presumption 
 goes, it is equally the indefinite, especially some of the 
 mystical experiences, which give us the typical forms. 
 Perception must be definite in all its clearer forms. 
 Man strives, if his perception is indistinct, to obtain 
 clearer and more certain knowledge. If we see in- 
 distinctly, we approach nearer to the object, or con- 
 sult an eye specialist. With religion, not only is 
 such an attempt not usually made, but we have from 
 many the idea that to make it distinct would destroy 
 the religious element. Such would seem to be valid 
 interpretation of the Buddhist doctrine of the aboli- 
 tion of desire. This applies, it is to be noted, not 
 
RELIGION REAL AND UNIQUE 85 
 
 only to definiteness as to the content perceived more 
 or less passively, but also to the emotional content. 
 It is therefore evident that if we are to do justice to 
 religion in all its forms we can not define it as we 
 would perception. Definiteness cannot enter as a 
 term in our description. Religion therefore stands 
 apart not only from perception, but from the moral 
 forces, and also from emotion. It may be connected 
 with any or all of these, but not necessarily so, so far 
 as our study has thus far shown. We have to be 
 careful, therefore, as we go on, that we do not carry 
 over into our study of religion ideas and presupposi- 
 tions based on our conception of any of these other 
 kinds of experience. Religion must be judged by it- 
 self, for it is unlike the other ordinary type of con- 
 sciousness. 
 
 Our discussion has had to do with the relation of 
 religion to man's will. Again we found a great in- 
 definiteness. At times found when sought, rejected 
 at man's pleasure, and modified by him as he willed, 
 within certain limits; in other and no less typical 
 cases, it came without being sought, or when sought 
 did not come, it came even when the man sought to 
 exclude it, and it resisted change by man's will, but 
 instead changed him according to its own working. 
 Again it does not fall under the usual categories, as 
 it refused to be found within the limits set percep- 
 tion, morality, and emotion. In coming to this con- 
 clusion, in view of the fact that it has a certain in- 
 dependence over against man's will, it was difficult 
 not to use language that would imply that in the reli- 
 gious experience we have to deal with another will. 
 As we were careful to point out, the bare fact of a 
 
86 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 certain independence of the will was common to any 
 real experience. Yet such experiences also point, 
 usually, to some source outside of the individual will. 
 What a man perceives is either his will, or something 
 that is not his will. Religion is very evidently, since 
 it resists his will, not identical with it. It therefore 
 takes its place in the other class of experiences. Its 
 likeness to perception differentiates it from the pro- 
 ducts purely of men's desires. In passing, it might 
 be interesting to note that this would seem to discour- 
 age attempts to get men to desire religion, and the 
 description of heaven, etc., in terms to awaken de- 
 sire. So far as the desire is met by religion, and no 
 more, religion is not religion. It is not what we have 
 found people to mean by the term. It is an experi- 
 ence which opens to man a realm which he can not 
 completely control. Since, however, it is not a per- 
 ception of that realm, for it is not in its nature the 
 same as perception, we can take it as an ordinary 
 way of gaining knowledge about a new field. We can 
 not go to religion as we would to our sense of hear- 
 ing, or our knowledge of emotion to learn of this new 
 region of life. We have to go in another direction. 
 It is this difference not likeness to perception, that 
 makes our present inquiry into the form of the ex- 
 perience necessary. The primary object of a study 
 of any experience must be to gain more knowledge of 
 that experience. The fact that on the very thresh- 
 old we are balked by the seeming inconsistencies of 
 religion forces us to avoid the direct attack. Before 
 we can adequately describe this experience, much less 
 answer any question as to its value, we have to further 
 examine it in order to find in what its possible value* 
 
RELIGION REAL AND UNIQUE 87 
 
 may consist. We have to gain fuller knowledge of 
 the experience. Our result so far has had this value, 
 that it has given to religion a place in real experi- 
 ence, and has raised problems beyond what might at 
 first appear. 
 
LECTURE III 
 THE SOURCE OF RELIGION 
 
 Having given religion a place in reality, the in- 
 evitable question faces us as to its meaning and sig- 
 nificance. This is preliminary to the question of 
 validity. Before we can examine the truth of its 
 implications and the value of its revelations of 
 reality, we have to ask how far those indications go. 
 The query comes to us first as to the source of this 
 experience. If it is an experience, we tend imme- 
 diately to assume that it must be an experience of 
 something. Our next task is to search and see 
 whether there appears to be anything beyond, which 
 can be experienced, or whether in this also religion is 
 unique, that, while satisfying the rest of the defini- 
 tion of an experience, it does not justify the phrase 
 " the object of experience." This can not be assumed 
 one way or the other, but must be carefully studied. 
 Our first impression is that the negative position is 
 nearer the truth. An experience which is infinitely 
 variable in its form, which will not submit to any 
 definition in terms of contents, would not seem to have 
 any object or fixed content. Where, with perception, 
 we look for the object, we find it in a general agree- 
 ment both between experiences of our own which 
 differ in time, but agree more or less in content, and 
 between the experiences of different people. The 
 physical object given or experienced in perception 
 
 88 
 
THE SOURCE OF RELIGION 89 
 
 is or can be described as the focus of agreement of a 
 certain group of experiences. No such focus ap- 
 pears in religion. If it exists, it is so hidden that it 
 has as yet eluded the most industrious search. The 
 most that we can say for the god in whom we believe 
 is that we are convinced that he is the one revealed 
 in what is the highest type of religion. We do not 
 attempt to claim that the great mass or even the 
 majority of religious people feel and know him as 
 the same being. Instead, we assert that wisdom rests 
 with a minority, that the individual is as likely to 
 be right as the crowd. Even where this individual- 
 ism is losing sway, we have, instead of the idea that 
 the individual experience will of itself approach the 
 norm, the idea that it needs direction by some au- 
 thority, educational or ecclesiastical. As no focus 
 appears to help us in defining the perception of the 
 source of the experience, so none is seen to indicate 
 its direction. If the source were not similar to an 
 object but to a center of energy, then the focus 
 would be in terms of direction, either carried back- 
 ward into the past, or directed forward toward some 
 one future end. Neither seems to exist. Religion 
 tends neither toward some one goal, nor does it seem 
 due to one existing cause. Hence here also, no indi- 
 cation of source appears. Yet we can not at once 
 seek refuge in the negative conclusion as proven. 
 Rather we must seek a guide and look more care- 
 fully. 
 
 The negative conclusion as to source came from the 
 attempt to apply the usual tests to this experience. 
 With an unique experience, however, we should be 
 ready to expect that either an unique source will be 
 
90 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 found, or that the exciting cause will reveal itself in 
 an unique way. As we have already plainly seen, re- 
 ligion is not like perception or morality. The 
 methods, which with those experiences give valid con- 
 clusions as to the source or object or cause, would 
 not be expected to yield valid conclusions for religion. 
 To give valid results, there must be shown to be a 
 nucleus of some kind. It is possible that what we 
 call religion is not the product of one source or ob- 
 ject, but of several, which differ among themselves. 
 In such a case the justification for a common name 
 would be that the differing sources made known their 
 presence in somewhat the same way. All perception 
 is not the perception of the same object, but because 
 the different objects come into consciousness in sim- 
 ilar ways, we put the various modes of perception 
 under one head. If this is true of religion, the di- 
 versity of content may be due to the difference in 
 source. The fact that no one focus appears would 
 therefore be no argument that there was no source 
 or existence revealed in the experience, but only that 
 different objects or sources were revealed at different 
 times. Then there is the other possibility, that 
 there may be a common source or object, (I use the 
 two words in order not to assume anything as to the 
 character of the source), a common cause which re- 
 veals itself in different ways. The diversity is then 
 due to the mode, and not to the cause. With this 
 uncertainty, we have to forsake the beaten trails. It 
 is to the failure to do this that a great deal of the 
 unprogressiveness of certain periods in theology is 
 due. The god who is revealed in religion, since uni- 
 formity of content does not exist, must be sought 
 
THE SOURCE OF RELIGION 91 
 
 by an unique method. As we do not know even to 
 what the diversity is due, whether of modes or ob- 
 jects, we must look elsewhere than to foci of ex- 
 perience to guide us to the source of the religious 
 experience. 
 
 There is one other possibility, which might be put 
 under the head of the one source manifesting itself 
 in different ways, but which deserves separate treat- 
 ment. The one source may be perfectly consistent 
 in its actions, and the appearance of differences be 
 due to our reflection on the experience. The pure 
 experience may be different from our account of it. 
 What we have been calling the contents of the ex- 
 perience, which differ so from one another, would 
 then not really belong to the experience, and we 
 should have to seek further to find the experience, 
 and even further to discover its source. With this 
 possibility, in addition to the others, we must go to 
 the bottom of the experience, and seek any indica- 
 tion that appears to point to a focus. If we can 
 find it, it will lead us out, so that we will not need 
 to take up in detail the three possibilities which we 
 have been outlining. The truth is, that our first 
 preference for the negative or agnostic conclusion as 
 to the possibility of revelation in the religious ex- 
 perience was due to the fact that our analysis has 
 not yet gone deep enough. We have yet to find the 
 first indication of anything in common in the various 
 types of the experience. Nothing that we have as 
 yet found justifies even the ascription of these vari- 
 ous types to a common class. It is in the possession 
 of a common source, in type if not numerically, that 
 we must look for this. 
 
92 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 The most convenient way to find whatever common 
 element there is in the varying types of religion is 
 to take those things in which the types differ, and 
 try to find if even in these differences there may not 
 be something which is constant. The first respect 
 in which the religious experiences differ among them- 
 selves is that of content. We found that there may 
 be felt religious states which seem to have almost 
 no content, and also those of very sharply con- 
 trasted and, if taken at their full value, irreconcil- 
 able, character. These two classes, the definite and 
 the indefinite, have to be considered apart. We take 
 up, first, therefore, the case where there seems to be 
 no definiteness to the experience, as far as its con- 
 tent is concerned. 
 
 Since the experience is in these cases indefinite, 
 the accounts which the believers give are even more 
 various than is true of the more sharply contrasted 
 cases. St. Paul many times uses paradox to de- 
 scribe his experience, and once tells us that no de- 
 scription can be given. (II Cor. 12: 4.) Yet even 
 here, he too, or the one he is describing, is spoken 
 of as caught up into the third heaven. Even though 
 he is not quite sure whether this is outside the body, 
 he is constrained to mention it as outside of man's 
 normal mental life. In some way or other it is ex- 
 terior to man, and objective to his will and conscious- 
 ness. The experience points beyond itself. It im- 
 plicitly claims to reveal things which are not to be 
 spoken of, things which do not enter sufficiently into 
 the ordinary life of the self-conscious will and ordi- 
 nary perception to be rightfully classed under the 
 same terms. The one who has the experience is by 
 
THE SOURCE OF RELIGION 93 
 
 it led beyond what he would call his usual self. 
 Another realm is opened to him. That to many 
 to-day this is easily disposed of by calling it the 
 region of the sub-conscious, of the subliminal self, 
 is no valid objection. Whatever is subconscious is 
 not in any conscious experience, and if religion has 
 its roots in the subconscious, it has a foundation 
 outside of conscious life, which means, since it is a 
 conscious state, outside of itself. In the " Theologica 
 Germanica " (ch. viii.) this mystic state is called " a 
 glance into eternity." The mystics seem to alter- 
 nate between the description of it as an insight into 
 the eternal and as the coming of the light of God, or 
 of the eternity of God, into the life of man. Always, 
 with the insistence on passivity, they claim this state 
 as one that leads beyond the individual. Man lets 
 himself be lost in God. The passivity of the Budd- 
 hist when he attains Nirvana is indignantly distin- 
 guished from annihilation. It is the realm of pure 
 being to which he has penetrated. It does not 
 matter that he or the Brahmin believes that what 
 he then sees is what in truth he always should have 
 known, for it is his true self. The conscious experi- 
 ence is not the thing known. Neither Nirvana nor 
 Brahma can be known in terms of conscious thought. 
 The conscious experience is constantly striving to 
 overpass itself. The source, the thing revealed, lies 
 behind. The very effort to escape from definiteness 
 is therefore the assertion that this experience is a 
 pathway to something beyond consciousness, and 
 therefore beyond itself. 
 
 When we come to the definite forms of religious 
 life, where the believer asserts that God has appeared 
 
94 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 in certain describable forms, or with certain definite 
 commands, or that the experience is one of a very 
 definite emotion centering around some one object, 
 we find that however much difference in the objects 
 there may be, always there is some object. There 
 has been a tendency to deny to some tribes low in 
 the scale of evolution the possession of religion, be- 
 cause like the aborigines of Australia, and in general 
 of many totemistic tribes, they seem to have no ob- 
 ject which they worship. This is due to our mis- 
 understanding, for the totem itself is a sufficient 
 object to satisfy our definition. Belief in the ap- 
 pearance of the totem in dreams, the conviction that 
 the tabu will be enforced by death, which frequently 
 is very strong, are forms of religious experience. 
 These forms clearly assert that what is present is 
 an experience, that is, that there is some reality be- 
 hind the totem. The enforcement of the tabu by 
 social custom and tribal law may from our point of 
 view be all that there is, but even this is going beyond 
 the bare experience. In the experience the believer 
 in a totem feels that he is in the presence of some- 
 thing larger and, though perhaps not universally, 
 usually, stronger than himself. The experience 
 leads beyond itself to something which he can not and 
 does not try to describe, but in whose existence he 
 believes strongly. Where the experience takes the 
 form of definite assertions or appearances, it claims 
 plainly to go beyond itself. If the man believes it 
 a dream and nothing more, he does not give it re- 
 ligious significance. It is only in those cases where 
 he attributes to it a source beyond itself that he 
 calls it religion. St. Augustine or St. Paul con- 
 
THE SOURCE OF RELIGION 95 
 
 sidered the voices that spoke to them at their con- 
 version to be the voice of God, while we, if we do 
 not consider some sound to be from God, do not call 
 it religion. The distinguishing element is the claim 
 to a source beyond itself. With the type of definite 
 as of indefinite experience, there is found the refer- 
 ence to a source beyond and outside of the conscious 
 experience. 
 
 The second characteristic which varies is that 
 which we have called direction. There are many 
 experiences, especially some of the more radically 
 mystic, where direction does not seem to exist, while 
 in others it is very prominent, but often directly 
 opposed to the direction of the impulse given in an- 
 other religious experience. These two types, the 
 passive and the active, furnish each their own prob- 
 lem. We approach first that of the passive experi- 
 ence. We are to find, if possible, something in com- 
 mon with that of the active type. The passivity of 
 the religious man is never, so far as I know, con- 
 ceived as absolute, or ideally the complete absence 
 of any movement in the universe. The man is to 
 be passive that the god may enter in. The passivity 
 is for a purpose. It is not simply the unwillingness 
 to act. Instead it is to be regarded as the most 
 difficult thing of all. To attain it he who is to be 
 Buddha must be prepared by countless ages of trial 
 and effort. A passivity which can be reached only 
 after excessive effort and strife is not sluggishness. 
 It is not the simple refusal of the normal exercise 
 of the will. Instead it is a striving after something 
 which is not within the reach of any but the ex- 
 ceptional man. It is something which lies beyond 
 
96 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 the round of material life in which we are bound. 
 The experience of him who seeks the passive state 
 is that of one who must strive as the mountain 
 climber strives. Peace and rest may come when the 
 top is reached, but the top does not now lie within 
 reach. Even when it is attained, and becomes the 
 " present state," as would be true of a Buddha when 
 he has attained enlightenment, even when it is 
 recognised as the truth of life, and all else as illusion, 
 even then it is sharply distinguished from that illu- 
 sion. The experience is one that must forever re- 
 main outside of ordinary life. It reaches beyond 
 the bounds of normal consciousness. This is true 
 also of the Christian forms of quietism. Here it is 
 plain that the state is conceived as the indwelling of 
 God. St. Paul, when he says that he no longer lives, 
 adds almost as a reason for his first statement, that 
 it is Christ that lives in him, (Gal. 2:20.) The 
 apparent lack of direction of the experience is due 
 to the fact that the human will no longer attempts to 
 direct, but lets the direction be determined by the will 
 of God. The experience looks beyond itself, or 
 rather beyond the normal will, to a power which is 
 not itself. 
 
 With the more active experiences, where the im- 
 pulse seems to be the essence of the religious state, 
 we meet a case which is not so clear. At first sight, 
 and in the minds of many to-day, the moral impulse 
 which is the truest type of religion has its roots en- 
 tirely within man. In their minds it has no refer- 
 ence to a God or power above man, who implants 
 the impulse in the heart of man. That part of this 
 objection which has to do with the relation of the 
 
THE SOURCE OF RELIGION 97 
 
 source of the experience to man, whether within or 
 without humanity, we have to consider on its own 
 merits later. Here we are only concerned with find- 
 ing whether the experience has its source in some- 
 thing, whether man or not, which is beyond its own 
 narrow conscious limits. The great modern move- 
 ments such as the missionary awakening church 
 unity, and those impulses directly related to or- 
 ganised Christianity we find referred to the voice of 
 God. This might be thought to be the result not 
 of the experience, but of the prejudice of orthodox 
 belief. But we find the same to hold with the great 
 social movements. The prophets of social justice 
 and social reform appeal, not to the authority 
 simply of their own ideas, but to the ideas of natural 
 right, or of man's right to the satisfaction of cer- 
 tain needs. Limiting strictly to the life of man the 
 source of the impulse which they seek to spread, or 
 to the material universe as it has been evolved in 
 man, they by this very claim go beyond the conscious 
 experience. Until they do ground the impulse in 
 some general principle, we regard it not as religion, 
 but as a personal vagary. If the prophet regards 
 it as religion, it is because he is convinced that it is 
 grounded on, and that it comes to him out of, the 
 secret depths of life. Whether those depths be his 
 or another's matters as little as in the case of the 
 Hindu mystic. The source, if found in the basic 
 impulses of life, is other than the experience itself. 
 Consciousness does not reveal to us all the secrets of 
 life, else those secrets would belong to all who are 
 conscious. As we are not claiming that religion is 
 unique in its reference to something beyond itself, 
 
98 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 but only that so far we have found it in all its types 
 to possess this character, we do not need to argue 
 that other experiences also do not lead the way to the 
 secrets of existence. If religion claimed to have its 
 origin just within itself, that would not be what we 
 usually call an experience, but rather an instance of 
 creative activity ; it would not assert a claim to con- 
 nection with the physical forces which have produced 
 man. The impulse would then have an origin with- 
 in that inner experience which makes religion so 
 purely individual. This not even the preachers of 
 the Inner Light claim. They assert in the strongest 
 terms the right of private judgment, but they hold 
 that that judgment is valid for all men. The Light 
 comes from something which is common to all men. 
 Since the experience is itself not common, for the 
 impulses vary and even oppose one another, the 
 common ground lies outside. In this type, too, the 
 experience points outside of itself for its source. 
 
 It might seem that the uncertainty in the dating 
 of an experience could have little relation to the 
 question of its source. The uncertainty comes, 
 however, from an element which reveals the character 
 of the experience, and hence it is of importance. 
 With many who have little of what in a general 
 sense we might call the " mystical," it is a ques- 
 tion whether religion can be called an event. It re- 
 veals itself in such cases as pervading the whole of 
 life, from the baptism as an infant, through the 
 gradual development of youth, to a calm and rather 
 uneventful course in mature life, ending in the quiet 
 of old age. There is, in such lives, nothing to mark 
 the coming or going of the religious consciousness. 
 
THE SOURCE OF RELIGION 99 
 
 At times it may be more vivid than at others, but al- 
 ways it seems to be present. Any indications of 
 source are bound to be very slight, for the conscious- 
 ness, in any form, of religion is here not very sharp. 
 Religion takes its place with the other usual things of 
 life, and is as little to the front as they. Yet so far 
 as there is consciousness, the experience goes beyond 
 itself. The will gives no indication of having cre- 
 ated the religious life. That life comes as does 
 physical life. Like physical life, religion in such 
 cases arose before the will became conscious. Its 
 source therefore is to be sought before the rise of 
 consciousness. The origin of the experience in this 
 case therefore lies somewhere outside of the con- 
 scious experience. This is not true of the will itself, 
 nor of self-consciousness ; man, when he finds no indi- 
 cation of any outside source, calls that state his 
 desire. It may be the result of the influence of others 
 upon him, but so long as he is unaware of this, he 
 looks upon it as his own creation, and the expres- 
 sion of his own will. This is not true of the religion 
 which he has carried with him from his infancy. 
 The creation of habit ground in by his parents he 
 may call it, or the result of early teaching, but not 
 the result of his own desire. Even when religion is 
 merely a pervasive uneventful element in man's life, 
 it thus keeps the character which we have found 
 elsewhere, of indicating that it has a source beyond 
 itself. 
 
 In much of the religious experience there is not 
 the pervasive character which makes it so difficult to 
 give it a place in the stream of time, but, instead, 
 a definite indefiniteness. The experience is an event, 
 
100 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 and when it is in consciousness can be given an exact 
 temporal place, but its coming, or sometimes its 
 going, can not thus be dated. The man is converted, 
 he recognises that a change has taken place, but 
 just when, it is impossible accurately to say. As 
 this is usually true also of the will, we can no longer 
 use this uncertainty to distinguish religion from the 
 creative experiences. Seldom does it come to any 
 man to know definitely just when he made up his 
 mind to do any given thing. If therefore this un- 
 certainty in religion show r s any trace of a source 
 outside of the individual will, it must be found in 
 some other aspect than the bare fact of our inability 
 to date it. A good illustration of this type is to be 
 found in the case of the confirmation and first com- 
 munion of children in those denominations where a 
 definite conversion is not emphasised. The change 
 comes, and is associated with the ceremony, but in 
 itself there is nothing to date, and for a child 
 brought up in the Sunday School and Church, there 
 is apt to be no change, but only a heightened emo- 
 tional state. The change, when it is perceived, which 
 may not be until long afterward, has in itself no inti- 
 mation of time. In fact the ceremony may not mean 
 a great deal until long after it took place. This 
 is also and especially true of infant baptism, even 
 where the child is old enough to notice and dimly 
 remember. Yet in these cases the ceremony does 
 have its effect, and the life of the child is changed. 
 The uncertainty is therefore of a different kind 
 from that of the creative will. There are other 
 cases, where men in mature life, through outward in- 
 fluences or study, come gradually to find themselves 
 
THE SOURCE OF REI^JXjIGN 
 
 changed in belief. Here again the cause is plainly 
 exterior, and the uncertainty due only to the gradual 
 nature of the change. The impossibility in certain 
 cases of dating the coming into the life of the believer 
 of religion does not by any means, therefore, prove 
 that it has come in from outside. 
 
 The variation in the religious experience does not 
 prevent every case considered from indicating a 
 claim to have something outside of itself as its 
 source. These claims would all be invalidated, how- 
 ever, if the objection would hold that because re- 
 ligion is in part subject to man, we can not postu- 
 late a source outside of the individual. This ob- 
 jection we may consider in each of the three cases 
 of control which we found, the possibility of man's 
 rejecting religion, the possibility of his modifying 
 it, and even of searching for it. 
 
 In the assertion of the power on man to reject 
 the religious experience we acknowledge that it is 
 outside of man. If it were his own will, and entirely 
 rejected, it could never come into being. What a 
 man rejects, or refuses to do, comes to him from out- 
 side. His dreams or ideals which he creates he may 
 not be able to objectify, but at least he creates them 
 as dreams or ideals. He does not entirely refuse 
 them a place in his life. If he refuses anything such 
 a place, it can not have existence unless something 
 else gives reality to it. If it has no existence what- 
 ever, it can not be a conscious, even though a nega- 
 tive, will. What the man rejects is something which 
 is presented to him from some source outside of this 
 conscious will. When we speak of his ability to re- 
 fuse to concern himself with religion, we mean to 
 
102 .THE;RELIOIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 assert that religion has been presented to him in some 
 form, and that he has willed not to allow it entrance 
 into his consciousness. The existence which is neces- 
 sary to have it brought to his notice must exist else- 
 where. To be rejected, that is, it must already have 
 objective reality. Since it is an object of will, and 
 not so by any willingness on the man's part, that 
 objectivity indicates an exterior source. 
 
 The same holds true of the power to modify it. 
 This assumes that it comes to him in one form, and 
 that he changes it. The origin is outside. Into the 
 question as to how far in most cases it is changed 
 we do not need to go. What concerns us is not the 
 contents, but the source. What should be noted is 
 that when the experience comes it has form. It is 
 something that is to be changed, not something to 
 which form has to be given. What we are here con- 
 sidering, that is, is a case of full existence coming 
 into a new environment, and there meeting and being 
 acted upon by new forces. It is not a case of the 
 reaction of man upon something which is merely the 
 exciting cause, not the real source, of the resulting 
 experience. A man in a certain sense creates his 
 day dreams. Even though roused in him by some 
 passing event, we can not rightly say that he changed 
 their form, for except in his mind they had no form. 
 The cases which we found it best to describe as in- 
 stances of modification of the religious experience 
 therefore point us to the existence of a form or of 
 the experience in some form, outside of its appear- 
 ance in the individual consciousness. 
 
 With the remaining instances of control, the prob- 
 lem is not so easily solved. When a man seeks for 
 
THE SOURCE OF RELIGION 103 
 
 something it may prove to be only the creation of 
 his own will. He may be unable to find it, or he may 
 be able to give to his inner ideal objectivity. In 
 either case no exterior source is implied. Again we 
 have to remember the specific instances which gave 
 us this classification. When a man, seeing religion 
 in others, or hearing that it exists in others, seeks 
 it, or searches for a new expression of it, he does so 
 by putting himself under religious influences, he at- 
 tends services, or converses with religious people. If 
 the experience had its source in himself, he would 
 not need to search for it, for by " himself " we mean 
 the conscious will, which would be plain without 
 search. If a man searches for his ideal, he is looking 
 for something which meets his requirements but which 
 he can not himself create. Objective existence must 
 be given to it from some other source than his will. 
 This is true of those experiences which in themselves 
 are entirely within the mind. The artist searches 
 for the realisation of his ideal of beauty. When 
 found it is entirely within his mind, so much so that 
 often no others see the beauty in it as he does, yet 
 he does not consider that he created, but only that 
 he discovered it. The ultimate cause or ground of 
 the scene is in the world outside. Man may like- 
 wise seek religion, but by seeking he acknowledges 
 that by his own unassisted will he is not able to 
 bring into existence the experience which he desires. 
 When it comes, it comes partly at least from forces 
 which he was not at first able to control. The ex- 
 perience, even when sought, finds its root in some- 
 thing which has a place in reality before the ex- 
 perience comes into being. This, at least, is the 
 
104 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 claim and implication of the experience. From the 
 typical cases of control by man, as well as the in- 
 stances of extreme variation, we find the same re- 
 sult, the religious experiences imply a source exterior 
 to themselves. 
 
 In the midst of the disagreement in many details 
 between the various instances of religion, we find one 
 constant factor. Man finds certain experiences or 
 states of consciousness which differ in most respects, 
 but, together with other likenesses with which we are 
 not concerned, all claim to have a source outside of 
 themselves. The source of this conscious state is 
 not present in the state. This is true of other con- 
 scious states, such as sense perception, but with them 
 it is accompanied by a greater uniformity in con- 
 tents. The variation is less. Yet, while the cases 
 are different, one may illustrate the other. In per- 
 ception the object, however it may be defined, is the 
 something which logically or physically explains the 
 perception. That object is not given in the per- 
 ception. The perception is itself object of con- 
 sciousness, but in so far as it refers to something 
 which is not in consciousness, a permanent material 
 object, it does not rest content in itself. It leads 
 beyond to something else, which may be defined as the 
 focus of social agreement about certain sensations 
 varying within certain narrow limits. This social 
 agreement, or logical or physical permanency, is 
 implied in the consciousness of the object which is 
 in consciousness, but meanwhile the sensation of blue 
 or the feeling of roughness is not that rough blue 
 material object. So in religion, all these states 
 which we call cases of the religious experience lead 
 
THE SOURCE OF RELIGION 105 
 
 out of themselves. There is something, they claim, 
 which is not given in full consciousness which is nec- 
 essary if we are to understand these experiences. 
 Nowhere, in what we call religion, do we find this 
 cause present in the consciousness itself. It is true 
 that it is said that the God appears to the believer 
 at times, but the very word " appears " refers that 
 bit of consciousness to a source outside. The re- 
 ligious experience always has this reference. We 
 never find it complete and self-satisfied. 
 
 It is the importance of this negative element that 
 we next need to note. In religion men realise that 
 they are not conscious of the fullness of life. It is 
 the experience which brings them to this knowledge. 
 Just in proportion as men become acutely conscious 
 of the full meaning of their religion, they become 
 restless and seek that meaning elsewhere, or seek to 
 increase the consciousness. Even if they come to 
 believe, as did Gautama, that they have discovered 
 the source, and have it in consciousness, they define 
 that source in terms which are inapplicable to the 
 conscious state, as did the Buddha. Wherever the 
 terms which imply the presence of a god or spirit are 
 used, and this includes the far greater mass of all 
 devotional literature, the experience acknowledges its 
 lack, the lack which exists even in mysticism, whether 
 eastern or western. It may be said to be stronger 
 for the mystics than for those to whom the god must 
 come in bodily form in order to be seen. Always in 
 mystic contemplation we are told that it is neces- 
 sary to rise beyond the realm of conscious life ; we 
 must empty our minds of all images, so that the true 
 light may shine undimmed. Unless we equate re- 
 
106 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 ligious experience with the final state of illumination 
 or union with true being, the mystic experience is 
 one of constant striving to destroy itself, to do away 
 with the consciousness which it has. The final state, 
 which for the mystic is true religion, consists in the 
 absorption of his narrow consciousness in something 
 wider, hence the individual is acknowledged as not 
 the source. In all other cases, where individual con- 
 sciousness still holds sway, the experience realises 
 that the source is not in the individual. Even the 
 man whose religion is a habit, and who goes to church 
 because he has been accustomed to go, is one of the 
 first to assert that it is not of his own initiative 
 that he goes this particular Sunday. Some power, 
 whether habit or Christian society, constrains him, 
 and he recognises this in the consciousness, when 
 consciousness comes at all, that really to-day he does 
 not want to go. Not only, therefore, is the re- 
 ligious consciousness incomplete in itself, and always 
 implying something beyond, it is also conscious of 
 this lack and of the implication. 
 
 This claim and this realisation by the religious 
 consciousness that it does not include its source 
 within itself bring us to the conclusion, which is the 
 same thing put in another way, that the source of 
 religion is not given in the consciousness of religion. 
 Whatever is in consciousness is consciously known. 
 If it is there it is in consciousness, and in the fore- 
 front of attention. If the attention is not laid upon 
 it, it is not in consciousness, and whatever it might 
 be does not count. When a change has come we 
 have not the same conscious state. If we adopt the 
 criticism of the followers of Bergson, and identify 
 
THE SOURCE OF RELIGION 107 
 
 the state with the changing stream of consciousness, 
 and give it another name, the matter becomes easier 
 for us, for then it is of the essence of the changing 
 stream not to be content to remain the same, but it 
 must be forever changing. Its source, therefore, 
 since it is past, and its goal, since it is to come, are 
 not the same as that which is now in consciousness. 
 This might be a very fair statement of what we have 
 been trying to state in the terms of the older philoso- 
 phy. With any such dynamic experience, the con- 
 tinuity lies not in the differing appearance of the sur- 
 face, but in something which lies beneath. The 
 source or cause may be in the subconsciousness or 
 fringe of consciousness, but if there, it is not in 
 consciousness. In this sense the religious experience 
 is essentially dynamic. It makes its source its goal, 
 for it is always realising its lack, and trying to make 
 itself complete. Acknowledging that its source is 
 outside of itself, it seeks to know it. This seeking 
 proves that the source is not now in the focus of 
 attention. 
 
 If the source is not given in the consciousness of 
 the religious experience, it is distinct from that ex- 
 perience. We have to remember that we are not dis- 
 cussing the absolute consciousness, nor even the cos- 
 mic consciousness, but are concerned with religion as 
 it comes to us in the experience of the individual. 
 If we do not find some source in that individual ex- 
 perience, but instead, when we come on any trace of 
 it, find the consciousness which we are studying al- 
 ways referring us elsewhere, we have to conclude that 
 the source is not in consciousness. It could be said 
 that although not consciously there, yet the source 
 
108 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 was really plainly known, only not known as the 
 source. The first result of such an argument is the 
 assumption that there must be several different 
 sources, if there is no one thing which is common to 
 all the cases of consciousness of religion. This 
 might be true, and our grouping of all these cases 
 under one head be a mistake. Yet when we turn to 
 the concrete experiences we find nothing which can 
 be the source. Even a dream has a source outside 
 of itself, and religion must so far be given the same 
 character. The mystic experience is again the test, 
 for here the contents are at their minimum. In such 
 an experience, as we have it from many sources, there 
 is nothing which can be seized on for any purpose. 
 As one mystic says (St. John of the Cross, "The 
 Dark Night of the Soul," bk. ii, ch. xvii, quoted in 
 James' "Varieties of Religious Experience," p. 
 4*07), " the sold finds no terms, no means, whereby 
 to render the sublimity of the wisdom and delicacy 
 of the spiritual feeling with which she is filled. . . . 
 We receive this mystical knowledge of God clothed 
 in none of the kinds of images, in none of the sensible 
 representations which our mind makes use of in other 
 circumstances." The non-mystical forms of reli- 
 gion, if we can rightly call any such, plainly give us 
 nothing. Where religion is mainly conceived as so- 
 cial service, the feeling is of a common humanity, and 
 this common humanity can not be in consciousness. 
 We can recognise it, but one individual by himself 
 cannot create it. Where religion is habit, as was 
 said before, the consciousness gives nothing which 
 will explain the state without recourse to something 
 other than itself. When the mystic state, the most 
 
THE SOURCE OF RELIGION 109 
 
 individualistic form of religion, finds no place in it- 
 self for its own source, we shall look in vain to the 
 less individualistic forms for such an individual 
 source. The individual experience gives no place in 
 its consciousness for the source of religion. 
 
 We pass now from what the experience claims 
 in itself to the result of these claims. Or rather 
 we have just passed this point. However much 
 the religious mind may or may not seek the source 
 of its own experience, and when the conscious- 
 ness of religion is dim, the source is little sought, 
 the work to which we have set ourselves is to 
 find that source if possible. The claim of religion 
 that it takes its rise in the individual from some- 
 thing beyond or beneath individuality therefore lays 
 upon us the duty of examining the truth of that 
 claim. When to the experience itself, and to the 
 outsider as he enters so far as he may into the ex- 
 perience, there can be discovered in that conscious- 
 ness no cause for its existence, one can but conclude 
 that the experience is not self-existent. It is, as has 
 been said, a dynamic experience. It is incomplete, 
 in spite of its own efforts to reach completion. Since 
 we can not force it to self-completeness which it does 
 not possess, we must take its incompleteness for one 
 of our foundation facts. As we have here gone over 
 from the field of description to that of implication, 
 we can only say that we are dealing with a kind of 
 consciousness which sets us a problem, and gives us 
 no hint of a solution within its own borders. It 
 does, however, set us very distinctly the problem. 
 In itself it warrants no explanation of its existence. 
 Taken just by itself, we can give it no meaning. 
 
110 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 Even the mystic, who declares that no meaning can 
 ever be given to it in terms that we will understand, 
 at the same time give it a meaning by relating it to a 
 larger sphere. In and by itself, even for him, it is 
 meaningless. 
 
 The result of this is that we must conclude that the 
 source of religion is not to be found within the indi- 
 vidual. The experience of religion is that it points 
 beyond itself. Without this implication of the relation 
 of which it is the mark, the experience has no signifi- 
 cance. But more than this, unless these implications 
 are correct in some way, the very existence of these 
 forms of consciousness is left unexplained and unex- 
 plainable. If we are to find an adequate cause or 
 reason for religion, it must be sought outside of the 
 individual experience. Not only can we say that we 
 must look outside, we can be sure that only outside 
 of the circle of human individual consciousness will 
 that cause or source be found. In this field we can 
 no more assume agnosticism, and say that perhaps 
 there is no explanation, and then rest content, than 
 can the student of natural science. A source and an 
 explanation we must assume, or else prove limits to 
 our reason. Since these limits can not be proven, 
 neither for religion nor for science, our conclusion 
 remains that, since the source of religion can not be 
 found within the individual consciousness, it will be 
 found outside. The whole superstructure of " re- 
 vealed theology," for this is what " revealed reli- 
 gion " really means to those who use the term, as- 
 sumes the very thing we are arguing, that the source 
 lies outside man. It can not therefore rightly in- 
 terpose the agnostic position that maybe we can not 
 
THE SOURCE OF RELIGION 111 
 
 find any source. As it assumes a source, and we do 
 not find it in one place, on the basis of its own posi- 
 tion we are bound to assume it in another. By rea- 
 son, therefore, we reach the conclusion of " revealed 
 religion," that the source of the religious experience 
 is to be found somewhere else than in the individual's 
 consciousness of religion. 
 
 The result of this, the fact that the religious expe- 
 rience does not reveal a source within itself, brings 
 into the effort to explain religion an unknown factor. 
 If the source were plainly revealed, either within the 
 experience or unmistakably placed in the exterior 
 world, our work of description and explanation would 
 be easy. As it is, there is this imperfectly known 
 something, whose existence seems necessary to ex- 
 plain the experience, yet is itself not given or indi- 
 cated by any focusing of the contents of the various 
 types of religion. If there had been such focusing, 
 a drawing or tending in one direction of the religious 
 experience of mankind sufficient to indicate where the 
 source lay, we should not have the varieties that we 
 have. Even within one religion, such as Christian- 
 ity, there is more diversity than uniformity in the 
 idea of God, so far as that idea depends on experi- 
 ence. Yet we have seen that something does enter 
 into consciousness which can not be explained by that 
 consciousness nor by our conscious life. There is 
 this unknown factor to be dealt with. It is rightly 
 described as a factor, for in no other way have we as 
 yet been able to describe it. Not objectively in the 
 consciousness of the religious man under any one 
 identifiable form, yet constantly asserted to be there 
 by varying types of religion, and in varying forms, 
 
112 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 we may rest content for the present with calling it 
 the " as yet unknown factor." 
 
 With not having in our possession even one char- 
 acter important in the description of this " factor," 
 it is evident that we learn of its presence mainly 
 through the effect it produces. The god of the sav- 
 age and of the Christian seem to differ so much that 
 we can not say that either is true to the exclusion 
 of the other. (Can not, I mean, on the basis of this 
 study.) Yet there is the similarity which we have 
 considered, of possessing in common the claim that 
 the consciousness is the result of something beyond 
 itself, and have found this claim to be true so far as 
 the fact of the presence of an unknown factor goes. 
 There is something at work here which we do not 
 understand, but we do see that it, or something, is 
 at work. To this extent, the consciousness of re- 
 ligion is dynamic; it reaches beyond and is not sat- 
 isfied in itself, and gives no ground for believing that 
 that search comes from within itself. This is not the 
 same as saying that religion is caused by a power 
 not ourselves working in us. The source may not be 
 a power, but only the occasion. Just as the flower 
 does not cause us to see, but gives the opportunity 
 for the sunlight to strike it, and when an eye is pres- 
 ent leads to the mental vision which we call the 
 flower, so the source, as we have been calling it, of 
 religion may not be the cause but the occasion ; still 
 it is the effect of the presence of this something which 
 forces us to acknowledge an unknown factor. Not 
 any definite thing, but the very indefiniteness of the 
 experience of religion has brought us to this positing 
 of a cause or source. In some way or other there 
 
THE SOURCE OF RELIGION 
 
 has entered into consciousness the result of the pres- 
 ence of this something. We want to bear in mind 
 that it is this, and not any definite revelation of the 
 character of the unknown, which has resulted from 
 our study. We are dealing so far with something 
 known only by the fact that it affects consciousness. 
 In the analysis we have so far made we have not 
 only found differing descriptions of the religious ex- 
 perience, we have also not obtained any clew as to 
 the nature of the source of it. That no conclusion 
 is readily given is evident by the varying explana-* 
 tions which we meet with in these days. More than 
 this, we can say that any indication that may be 
 given will not be through definite description. Un- 
 less we deny the name of religion to great masses of 
 what we would usually call religious phenomena, 
 and that is not a justifiable beginning, we find a 
 divergence so great, as, for instance, between the ex- 
 ponents of social or ethical and those of mystical 
 religion, that the very nature of the source of religion 
 remains indescribable in any terms common to the 
 differing types. Where definite contradiction exists, 
 we are not at liberty to accept either statement as 
 the guide to truth. Yet of one thing we may be sure. 
 The cause or occasion will be adequate. It is this 
 assurance which is the basis for our present conclu- 
 sion. Not because we know what the source is, but 
 because we know the experience, are we sure that the 
 source lies outside. Within the experience we have 
 found nothing adequate to explain it. Part, at least, 
 we conclude, of the factors entering into the coming 
 into existence of this consciousness lies beyond. The 
 total factors must be adequate to solve our problem. 
 
THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 Confronted with the lack of agreement in content, 
 this is the only path left open to us. In treading 
 it we can be sure of the adequacy of the solution 
 when found, but our assurance comes from the gen- 
 eral assumption that everything must have an ade- 
 quate cause, not from anything inherent in religion. 
 Men, in striving to prove the existence of God, have 
 sought an infallible proof. As long as human minds 
 are fallible they can not succeed. The proof for 
 God's existence must rest on the same general ground 
 as does any proof. Invoking the principle of the ex- 
 istence, necessary existence, of a sufficient cause, ade- 
 quate to explain, we say that there does exist, out- 
 side of the religious consciousness, something which 
 is an adequate cause of its existence. 
 
 That our conclusion rests on the assumption for 
 any existent thing of a sufficient cause means that 
 our argument from henceforth must be " formal." 
 This procedure is forced on us. We find it useless, 
 in a search for the source of religion, to ask what, in 
 detail, religion says of itself. Getting no agreement 
 in reply to such a question, we have had to make 
 independently our own study. This means that our 
 conclusions will and must be formal. Concerned 
 with the form, deduced from it, they become more 
 general than if they were dependent on the state- 
 ments or contents of the religious consciousness. So 
 long as we depend on such statements, there is open 
 the objection that even if in all cases agreement were 
 found, there might fee error. Modern psychology 
 tells us of the divergences, usually disregarded, in our 
 perception or even sensations of ordinary physical 
 objects. Accuracy is only a question of degree. So 
 
THE SOURCE OP RELIGION 115 
 
 long, therefore, as we seek assurance of this sort, so 
 long shall we be disappointed. We turn to a " for- 
 mal " proof to escape this uncertainty. 
 
 Certainty is in its essence logical. Practical cer- 
 tainty, which is the desire of science and ordinary 
 life, is an approximation along what we might call 
 pragmatic lines. We disregard what experience 
 shows to be the negligible error. Where the result 
 to be obtained is numerical, where an approximation 
 to within one- thousandth of an inch is just as good 
 and useful as the attainment of the exact measure- 
 ment, this practical certainty is all that common 
 sense strives for. When, however, it is a question of 
 existence the issue changes. At times we may have, 
 as always with the past, to weigh the balance of 
 probability as to the truth or falsity of existence, 
 but this is only because we are content with such 
 probability. Either Julius Caesar did or did not 
 exist. With a social agreement as to the facts, we 
 can use probability, but if the question has no gen- 
 eral agreement behind it, if we do not agree to act 
 on one or the other assumption, we must seek, whether 
 we find it or not, complete certainty. Numerical 
 approximation will not do. In disregarding, there- 
 fore, the contents of the religious experience we are 
 merely following the general procedure of philoso- 
 phy. That general procedure I will not attempt 
 here to defend. It is not necessary to do so, for 
 what we need is admitted by all students of philosoph- 
 ical method. It may be summarised for our pur- 
 pose thus: what an object appears to be is a log- 
 ically secondary matter to the fact of its existence. 
 Any conclusions which are drawn from the fact, the 
 
116 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 " formal " fact, of its existence have therefore a 
 more general application than the details of its ob- 
 jective appearance, which may vary from time to 
 time. This is true whether we establish that exist- 
 ence pragmatically or otherwise. Formal arguments 
 are merely those which are drawn from the admitted 
 existence, or non-existence, of an object. They hold 
 true through all the varying forms which that object 
 may take. They are the logically necessary conse- 
 quences of the existence of that object. If the exist- 
 ence of God is to be established at all, it must be in 
 this way. Statements about existence do not es- 
 tablish existence. Only one existence can prove an- 
 other. In using, therefore, the formal argument we 
 are on the road to the only certainty which is pos- 
 sible. 
 
 In seeking this certainty we are depending on the 
 incompleteness of the experience taken by itself. 
 Our procedure is not a mere matter of logical jug- 
 gling, for it has a distinctly practical, or pragmatic, 
 side. As a practical matter we find that the reli- 
 gious experience is not self-explanatory. Its impli- 
 cations of something beyond, the claim to reveal an- 
 other world, which we have seen to be characteristic 
 of it, is not explained by anything in it. The un- 
 known factor with which we are dealing is something 
 which prevents our dealing with this experience with 
 any assurance of being on the right road. If the 
 claim of the experience is correct, and it opens to us 
 knowledge of a realm beyond the world of sense per- 
 ception, we should treat the impulses which result 
 from it far differently from the fate which would 
 befall them if we regard religion as merely the idle 
 
THE SOURCE OF RELIGION 117 
 
 dreams of abnormal human beings, or as the insight 
 not into another world, but into the depths of the 
 world of social human life. Our treatment, there- 
 fore, of religion depends on our judgment as to this 
 unknown factor. We therefore are not able to de- 
 cide as to our attitude toward this experience on its 
 own claims. In our treatment of it, it does not stand 
 on its own feet entirely. This not only makes such 
 an inquiry as we are engaged in a matter of prac- 
 tical importance, it also brings us face to face with 
 the results of this incompleteness, or lack of clear- 
 ness in the religious experience. As incomplete, its 
 reality is defective. That is, taken by itself, it is not 
 completely determined. This is true both logically 
 and practically. 
 
 Though incomplete, the religious experience is yet 
 real. It is real in the sense which we found in the 
 early part of our analysis of it. It has a place in 
 the existent world. It is also real in the logical sense 
 of an object of study. Since for us it has a mean- 
 ing, it has some sort of reality. Finally, it is real 
 for the world of everyday affairs, since the religious 
 impulse, in some form or other, has to be reckoned 
 with by every one. It possesses this reality inde- 
 pendently of the fact of its incompleteness. Taking 
 it as it is, more or less of an enigma, it has a place 
 in the world of reality. Into this reality it carries 
 its incompleteness. The experience which comes to 
 us is one that claims to go beyond itself; it is one 
 that is unexplainable in itself. It is just this experi- 
 ence which we find to be real. Its indefiniteness, 
 therefore, can not affect its reality since it is included 
 in it. Whether it comes to reality by its own voli- 
 
118 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 tion is also of no concern. All that is important is 
 that we find here reality. Moreover, it is really ex- 
 istent. As an experience it does not hold a shadowy 
 reality dependent on its relation to the mind whose 
 experience it is. It is not in the same category with 
 day-dreams. Not simply as the object of concep- 
 tion, as the entities of pure mathematics, but in it- 
 self it is real. We remember that it possesses the 
 reality of an experience. Although in consciousness, 
 it depends on consciousness no more than does our 
 perception of the table on which we are writing. 
 Whatever reality belongs to the experience of the 
 table belongs to the experience of religion. This in- 
 complete, baffling experience is a part of the world 
 with which we must do battle. 
 
 The unknown source, as involved in the experience, 
 is a necessary part of it. Not now merely logically 
 necessary (if mere logical necessity exist as a thing 
 by itself apart from life), but necessary to the prac- 
 tical dealing with religion. Religion would not be 
 religion, not exist as religion, without this outside 
 source. Whatever may be what we have called the 
 source, but more accurately the unknown factor, 
 without it the experience would be non-existent. 
 Again this is not a matter of words, but of fact. 
 What the practical man meets when he has to deal 
 with religion, and what baffles him at times is just 
 this claim to a source higher or other than itself or 
 himself. Without this claim it would not be the 
 thing of impulse which confronts him. Something 
 partially like it there might be, but what for him 
 distinguishes this particular experience would not be 
 in existence. We are not, of course, saying that this 
 
THE SOURCE OF RELIGION 119 
 
 proves that the source is higher because the religious 
 man claims that it is. We are only maintaining that 
 the fact that the source is not given in the experience 
 is of the essence of the experience. Without that ele- 
 ment, of a source outside of itself, it would not be the 
 religious experience ; it would not be what it is. This 
 unknown exterior element is therefore involved in the 
 reality of the experience. In the world of everyday 
 life it has a real part to play in the religious experi- 
 ence. 
 
 This unknown element, as the important element in 
 religion, is through this fact in touch with the world 
 of reality, however we may define that world. De- 
 prive religion of this unknown quantity, and you de- 
 stroy it as religion. This lesson, which not all eth- 
 ical culturists have learned, is apart from the ques- 
 tion as to the advisability of such destruction. It is 
 apart also, for the time, from the question of the pos- 
 sibility of such annihilation. We have now, whether 
 we will have in the future or not, an experience, as 
 real a part of our life as any other experience, which 
 in its essence involves the presence of an unknown, 
 exterior factor. The experience is real; the un- 
 known factor is a very real element in the experience. 
 The unknown element is therefore real. It has this 
 reality, it is true, in its relation to the experience, 
 and we have not proven more than this. Yet in that 
 relation it is real. Through that relation to our con- 
 sciousness it enters as an important factor into hu- 
 man life. Also as logically necessary to explain 
 religion, it has a secure place in the realm of neces- 
 sary truth. This means that the religious experience 
 has given us the basis for the assertion of something 
 
120 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 not itself in the religious consciousness. In assert- 
 ing that reality has been conferred on something 
 beyond we mean only beyond the present conscious- 
 ness. We do not in this offhand way deny either the 
 presence of God in consciousness nor the possibility 
 that the source may be found to be entirely human. 
 Only we are asserting the necessary real existence of 
 the source or occasion of the religious experience 
 outside of the religious consciousness. In religion 
 God is known as real. 
 
 We have been looking toward the source of the 
 religious consciousness; it is now possible to turn 
 back again to the experience itself, and notice what 
 we have learned about its nature during our inquiry. 
 In the first place, we have one side of a relation. 
 Since this consciousness is incomplete in itself, and 
 reaches rational completion as well as practical only 
 when we take into account the unknown source, this 
 relation, of which the religious consciousness is one 
 term, becomes a way of characterising the experience. 
 This we have already done several times. We need 
 to notice here that what we have is one term and the 
 relation. These are inherent in this type of con- 
 scious life. It is a true experience, having its mean- 
 ing because of this relation to something not given 
 within it. 
 
 Not only, however, have we one term and the rela- 
 tion, the relation is such that we are sure that the 
 other term is real and exists. Religion is therefore 
 to be taken as a relation to or consciousness of real- 
 ity. This may be a truer phrase to use than the one 
 we have made use of. " Source " covers the ground 
 only because we did not want to prejudice our case 
 
THE SOURCE OF RELIGION 
 
 by speaking of the object of the religious conscious- 
 ness. Nor do we want to do so now. Making the 
 situation as general as possible, we only say that we 
 have a relation between two real and existent terms, 
 one of which, and the relation, are given to us in 
 consciousness. So far as consciousness is concerned 
 this is a one-sided or one directional relation. Our 
 work must be done from the side of the religious con- 
 sciousness, working back to the other term of the 
 relation. The relation itself, since without it the 
 consciousness is incomplete and non-typical, is essen- 
 tial and given. Its absence destroys what we call re- 
 ligion. From these we have deduced the existence of 
 a something as the other term. We have already, 
 then, been working from the experience out to the un- 
 known. From a real experience we have deduced a 
 real occasion or object of that experience. 
 
 What we have done in general may be done in de- 
 tail. So far as the religion is not one-directional, 
 what is true of its relation to one of its terms will be 
 true of the other. So far as it is one-directional, 
 that is such as the relation of the lamp to the con- 
 sciousness of the light of the lamp, we can infer di- 
 rectly from the consciousness to the object or cause. 
 What is true of the relation, whether applying in 
 both directions or in only one, has a connection with 
 both terms. We are dealing with two real existences, 
 such that they can have this relation between them. 
 This fact defines to a certain extent the nature of 
 each. Since we know the nature of the conscious- 
 ness, a certain line is open to us by which we may 
 obtain information about the unknown term. It 
 must be such that it can enter into this relation with 
 
THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 this experience or type of consciousness. The rela- 
 tion in which these terms are to each other not only 
 establishes the reality of the one not in conscious- 
 ness, but also determines or defines its character. 
 The relation, we must remember, is in consciousness 
 as well as the term. That is, the religious conscious- 
 ness is not simply one term of this relation, it is one 
 term and the relation. The term is the concrete 
 case, the mystic trance, or the voice on the road to 
 Damascus; the relation is the conviction that this 
 voice or trance came from somewhere beyond. 
 Knowing therefore the relation, we have another 
 means of reaching conclusions as to the type of 
 reality which it brings into relation to our conscious 
 life. The relation which we call religious knowledge 
 can and does define its object. 
 
 Defining its object or source, from a study of the 
 experience we can learn some, at least of the char- 
 acteristics of the object of that experience. The re- 
 lation is in some way to be defined as the determina- 
 tion of consciousness by this object or existence, 
 whatever it may be. As this is a real relation be- 
 tween real things, the consciousness shows in its 
 structure the result of this determination. This 
 turning backward of our procedure, and defining the 
 relation in terms, so to speak, of cause, makes it pos- 
 sible for us to take it in the other direction. Not 
 now, however, as a possibility, and to establish the 
 reality of the source, but to establish the reality of 
 some detailed characteristics of the source. The 
 same procedure that gave us general results will give 
 us more detailed ones. We can use the religious ex- 
 perience as the ground from which to quarry the 
 
THE SOURCE OF RELIGION 
 
 foundations on which we may build up our idea of the 
 nature of this source of religion. Taking our stand 
 in the world of reality, we can not too strongly in- 
 sist that in thus deducing the nature of the object of 
 the religious consciousness we are not building in the 
 air. Indeed we must make the attempt to give to 
 this something which we conceive as real a body of 
 flesh and bones. If real, it is concrete, for it is real 
 as a cause or occasion, as revealed by concrete indi- 
 cations of consciousness. The relation may be gen- 
 eral, but it is a relation between terms of the same 
 class. What leads us to give reality to this source 
 is that the reality of the consciousness is incomplete 
 without it. The consciousness becomes concrete and 
 really existent only when the source makes it possible 
 for it. In this sense, therefore, the source is concrete. 
 It expresses itself in definite instances, and, since it 
 is not present in all our minds all the time, it is not 
 present universally. As concrete, it must have cer- 
 tain characters. These characters it is possible to 
 discover partially by a further analysis of the relig- 
 ious consciousness. 
 
 Thus we have so far vindicated the validity of the 
 religious experience. As an experience, we have 
 found that it reveals reality. It is such that in no 
 other way can it itself be real. In general, therefore, 
 it is valid as an experience. Without maintaining 
 what we have seen to be impossible, that each implica- 
 tion of religion is to be accepted as true, yet the 
 primary implications of all the types of religion, 
 that they proceed from or to a reality beyond them- 
 selves, is a valid implication. There is a reality not 
 given in consciousness, to which they refer. They 
 
124? THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 have therefore been proved worthy by this last test to 
 be called an experience. So far as the existence of a 
 source beyond themselves is concerned, the religious 
 consciousness is a valid experience. 
 
LECTURE IV 
 THE TEST OF RELIGION 
 
 To each valid experience there corresponds a 
 proper test. The religious experience is valid, but 
 not all experiences are religious. There may well be 
 some modes of consciousness which claim or seem to 
 imply that they are what we have defined and ac- 
 cepted as religious, and yet which are due really 
 to some other cause. To distinguish such, to see 
 whether the similarity to religion is sufficient to put 
 both in the same category, some test is needed. To 
 conclude that religion is valid, and then not to have a 
 standard by which we can find out what is religion, 
 would leave to our work little value. The existence 
 of such a test of validity can not, however, be as- 
 sumed. We could very consistently conclude that if 
 there existed anything of the nature of what we have 
 defined as religion, that this was, if it existed, a valid 
 and true experience, and yet deny that we could ever 
 be sure that we had found such an experience. To 
 make our argument practical, we must find some way 
 by which to try the types of consciousness we have, 
 and see if among them is one such as we have con- 
 ceptually found religion to be. This is in spite of 
 the fact that our definition came from an analysis of 
 what men call religion. It might be that men, hav- 
 ing the idea of religion, incorrectly apply it. To the 
 
 125 
 
126 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 truth of this, only one who has some standard and 
 has applied it can reply. Historically, many stand- 
 ards have been sought. As before, we ignore dogma- 
 tism, and seek only within the experience. This is 
 not to conclude immediately that the test also is to 
 be found within religion, but only that, if it is to re- 
 veal truth to us, we must find a test that accords with 
 the religious method of revelation. 
 
 With our ordinary experiences, especially those of 
 perception, the objective contents give us the oppor- 
 tunity of judgment. A man who is color blind is 
 called abnormal and his experiences untrue because 
 what he reports as to the objects within his field of 
 consciousness does not accord with what others re- 
 port of theirs. No two persons exactly agree, but 
 for the great majority there is an approximation to- 
 ward an agreement among themselves and a disagree- 
 ment with the victim of color blindness. The object 
 is here the test. The majority say that it is not as 
 the odd man sees it. What they call the real object 
 is this social form of agreement. The test is objec- 
 tive, not because material, but because it depends on 
 the contents of experience, both as to color, and as to 
 the other persons, who are equally objective to the 
 man's will. The reason for some particular focus 
 may be best explained pragmatically, that, inde- 
 pendent of metaphysics, we can test the truth of ex- 
 perience, and do so by this social agreement or focus. 
 No object, in the ordinary sense of the word, can ex- 
 ist unless there is this focus. Ordinarily, also, we 
 mean not merely an agreement that something exists, 
 but that something on whose appearance and char- 
 acter we are all well agreed, is in our consciousness. 
 
THE TEST OF RELIGION 127 
 
 Objective detail is detail of the contents of experience. 
 Persons are objects so far as they present to any who 
 see them the same appearance so that they can be 
 recognised by their photograph, clothes, or general 
 character. In so far as they do not present common 
 features to all, we do not call them objects. It is 
 this very difference from a stone, that a man may be 
 in very different relations to different people, so that 
 he does not appear to be the same, that makes us call 
 people persons. So far as an object enters into these 
 different relations, we do not call these particular re- 
 lations part of the object. The spot to which we 
 alone are attached, by reason of some personal memo- 
 ries, is to some one else nothing out of the ordinary. 
 The world denies, in such a case, the particular in- 
 terest to that object, and says that it is due solely to 
 the man. Only those characteristics which may be 
 common property are called objective. 
 
 The religious experience we have found to be pe- 
 culiar in that there is not found any such social focus, 
 or point of approach to agreement. Outside of the 
 bare formal agreement as to an exterior source, no 
 consensus of agreement is reported. The source, 
 since all acknowledge it, is objective; it is a focus 
 common to all types of religion, but nothing more 
 than this can be concluded. There is not found any 
 approach within the field of consciousness to the as- 
 cription even of an equivalent, much less of the same 
 qualities, or to description in the same objective 
 terms. There is, therefore, no objective element 
 other than the bare externality of its source, to be 
 found in religion. The apparent willfulness of re- 
 ligion under objective standards is to be explained 
 
128 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 by this lack. When an object is assumed, whether a 
 semi-materialistic god, or an abstract yet objective 
 statement of truth, some or many, not finding such in 
 their consciousness, yet believing themselves to be re- 
 ligious, protest. The volume of such protest has, in 
 many ages, led to religious revolution. Some agree- 
 ment there is at times, but never to the extent that is 
 claimed. The more carefully the experience itself is 
 studied, and not reported in terms taken from a fixed 
 vocabulary, the less the agreement is seen to be. The 
 fact that agreement is apparently greater among the 
 uneducated, who are more influenced by one another, 
 and grows less as we advance up the scale of those 
 better able to accurately report just what is in their 
 consciousness, is proof that the apparent agreement 
 is due to imitation rather than to the experience 
 itself. The agreement we mean is agreement in exact 
 description, such as is asserted in regard to the ap- 
 pearance of the angels, not the general agreement as 
 to type. We are throughout this part of our work 
 concerned with the contents of the experience. The 
 similarity as to contents, which might be reported, 
 gives no focus. The Mormon, and the Christian, the 
 Mohammedan and the Buddhist, no one of these 
 would agree to what any other claimed to be the di- 
 vine revelation of God's nature. There is no major- 
 ity vote for any one description. Either most men 
 are defective, or there is no object given in the reli- 
 gious experience, no focus or point to which the de- 
 scriptions tend. 
 
 Since there is no agreement as to the proper con- 
 tents or revelation of religion, we can not with suc- 
 cess seek an objective test. The test as to perception 
 
THE TEST OF RELIGION 129 
 
 is based on, though not quite identical with, the agree- 
 ment of the large majority of men. The focus of 
 such agreement, studied, and brought to a point, de- 
 termined with reference to certain individual varia- 
 tions, such as the position of the spectator and the 
 source of light (in vision) gives us the test. The 
 wood is really brown because the great multitude of 
 those who take care to observe their experiences of 
 color so report it. All experiences which report it 
 as brown are therefore called normal. When, how- 
 ever, we have no such preliminary agreement as to 
 who are the experts, when there is not even any con- 
 sensus of opinion as to what direction these experts 
 should turn, when there is no common view to be 
 refined and standardised, there is no starting point. 
 It is as if in relatively equal numbers the reports came 
 in that the wood was green and red and white as well 
 as brown. The more experts studied the different 
 types of consciousness, the less would aigjreement 
 result, unless we said that none had seen the wood. 
 This is the case with religion. The experts of each 
 religion, so far as they assert objective revelation, 
 deny any validity to any of the other religions. No 
 focus exists to be brought to a point. The work of 
 the expert is to lead the lines of convergence to a 
 center, a norm. Where there is instead divergence, 
 there can exist no center. Hence there is no test. 
 An objective test, therefore, can not be found for re- 
 ligion. We are unable to test the validity of a man's 
 religious experience by what he reports of the con- 
 tents of his consciousness at that time. We can not 
 say that, because he asserts that a voice proclaimed 
 many wives or one wife, he is not truly religious. 
 
130 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 We must remember that this is all that the test 
 means. It is a test of the truth of the experience, 
 whether it is what it claims to be, that is religious, 
 not a test of what it claims to reveal. Such a test, of 
 revealed truth, so far as religion is concerned, we 
 have just seen to be impossible. Since there is no 
 focus to the objective side of religion, no agreement, 
 there can be no test which we can apply to its con- 
 tents. 
 
 From the contents of the religious revelation there 
 comes to us no test of its accuracy. Yet we can not 
 rightly conclude from this that the source of the re- 
 ligious experience, the object which is experienced, is 
 a formless thing, without definite nature. If it were 
 formless and structureless, it could not give birth to 
 religion. An absolutely undetermined existence can 
 not enter into any causal or source relation, for that 
 relation determines it. If it is the occasion of an ex- 
 perience, that to which the particular consciousness 
 points, it is so far determined. It is something to 
 which that consciousness can point. In the case of 
 religion it is so far determined that we can say of it 
 that it is not within the field of the religious con- 
 sciousness. It is something which does not depend 
 on that religious consciousness for its existence. 
 From the religious experience we concluded that it 
 did exist, but only because the experience was not suf- 
 ficient to give existence to itself by itself. The source 
 gives, partly, at least, existence to the experience, not 
 vice versa. Its existence, then, undetermined so far 
 as the field of religion is concerned, is nevertheless de- 
 ducible from that consciousness. The type to which 
 it gives rise, though variable in content, is of a defi- 
 
THE TEST OF RELIGION 131 
 
 nite type. The relation between the source and the 
 religious experience is such that we are conscious 
 that there is a relation. This relation, moreover, is 
 one-directional. The source bears a different rela- 
 tion to the experience from what the consciousness 
 does to the source. It is source or object, the con- 
 sciousness is subject or perception. Putting it in 
 the terms of our definition of an object, we have on 
 the one side the focus of religious agreement, and on 
 the other the lines which are converging. Since the 
 experience is not completely self -determining, in part 
 at least the determination comes from the object or 
 source. Whether by self-determination or otherwise, 
 this source has a determinate character. It acts un- 
 der these conditions in this way. 
 
 Having a certain character, the source has quali- 
 ties which may be described. Qualities are our de- 
 scription of the nature of an object. When an ex- 
 istence becomes for us an object, exterior to us, and 
 known as the focus of converging experiences, the 
 ways in which it acts or appears are described as its 
 qualities. They are the means by which we com- 
 municate our judgment as to its nature and behavior. 
 Just as soon as we conclude that there is a certain 
 type of behavior, just so soon we make the effort to 
 describe its qualities. Having determinate and defi- 
 nite modes of behavior it will therefore have qualities. 
 It is not necessary that these qualities be themselves 
 physical, or in themselves existent. Electricity is it- 
 self never perceived, hence we can not describe it in 
 terms of light or heat or sound, though it shows it- 
 self in all these ways. Its nature and qualities are 
 given in terms of its behavior, and the results which 
 
132 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 come from its presence. Electricity is just as ob- 
 jective as though we could see or feel it, and its quali- 
 ties are just as fixed. Because it has certain modes 
 of action, it has certain qualities, which we cannot 
 perceive, but which we deduce from the phenomena. 
 In so far as religion has certain definite modes of 
 action, in so far as the source reveals itself in typical 
 and recognisable forms of activity, it has certain 
 qualities, and it is possible for us to describe them. 
 This is altogether apart from the contents of the 
 experience, as the qualities of electricity are not given 
 in terms of the brilliancy of the lightning. Since 
 there is no focus of content in religion, and since 
 there is a focus of behavior, at least to the extent of 
 occasioning religion, in the behavior of the source, it 
 is to this behavior or activity that we must look for 
 our description and test of the validity of our de- 
 scription of the object of the religious conscious- 
 ness. 
 
 This definition of the character or nature of an ob- 
 ject gives us the basis for our test as to the contents. 
 Though the contents in themselves furnish no criteria 
 by which we may judge among them, there are tests 
 which we can apply which can be deduced from the 
 necessary qualities of the object, necessary to the 
 object as the occasion or source of the experience. 
 When some experience, claiming to be a true revela- 
 tion of the object of worship, reveals of that object 
 some quality which is inconsistent with its nature as 
 the object of worship, we have the right to reject the 
 claim of that experience to validity. The ground for 
 this is that determination has a negative as well as a 
 positive side. When something is determined as ex- 
 
THE TEST OF RELIGION 133 
 
 istent, something else is determined as non-existent. 
 We do not want here to be mixed up with the argu- 
 ments of the lack of determination for the meeting of 
 opposites in the Absolute Being. So far as these 
 arguments are valid, they do not concern us, for the 
 source which we are studying is the definite source of 
 religion, revealing itself in certain particular ways. 
 If in God falsehood is done away because all things 
 are equally true or equally false, that is itself a 
 quality, and its denial is untrue. So we have come 
 to the familiar reducio ad absurdam. For our pur- 
 pose, and by our definition, that would be a mode of 
 behavior, and, as found only in the Absolute, a defini- 
 tion of Absolute Being, and therefore a test of truth 
 as the revelation of ultimate reality. Whether valid 
 or not, therefore, it does not affect our argument. 
 Since if under any circumstances falsehood is true, 
 the assertion that always it is false, is itself false, 
 and our argument is upheld. Any determination im- 
 plies that its denial is untrue. It carries with it, 
 therefore, the denial of existence as well as its affirma- 
 tion. 
 
 When in any experience we find the claim to know 
 something as existent, especially if that something be 
 a quality of the object of the experience, it can be 
 put to this test. If the quality is such that, if it is 
 truly part of, or belonging to the object, that 
 object can not be the object of that experience, 
 then the claim to knowledge is untrue. If a man says 
 that he sees and knows of water flowing uphill, we re- 
 fuse to accept his statement, because water does not 
 behave in that way. To be water under any circum- 
 stances known to us, it must obey the law of grav- 
 
THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 ity. Not until it ceases to be water and becomes 
 vapor can it flow uphill. To take a plainer case, 
 if a man claims to see a round-square, we refuse to 
 believe, because the nature of a square is that it shall 
 not be round. We do not wait to examine his mind, 
 or the object he claims he sees; we are sure before- 
 hand that there is no such quality as roundness pos- 
 sible to a square. So when a man asserts that he 
 knows of a god who is unknowable, we equally quickly 
 reject his statement. If in the religious experience 
 he knows God, then the quality he claims is untrue, 
 that God is unknowable. This is not the position of 
 Agnosticism, which bases its conclusion as to the ex- 
 istence of the unknowable on other than religious 
 grounds. It does, however, come near to some of the 
 cruder statements of the mystics. For the religious 
 man to claim that God can not enter into relations, 
 that he is the infinite unrelated, is likewise untenable. 
 If God is unrelated being, then He can not be related 
 to him the worshiper as the object of worship. But 
 God is worshiped. Therefore the claim that he is 
 known as unrelated is untrue. These instances, 
 taken because they are clear, might be extended into 
 the field of more exact determination. That is not 
 needed here, but only the understanding that if we 
 find qualities that are inconsistent with the relation 
 of the source of religion to the religious experience, 
 those qualities are to be rejected. So we have a 
 valid test. 
 
 On the positive side we do not need to wait until 
 some revelation occurs. It may be psychologically 
 necessary that each idea first occur as a revelation 
 or discovery in some experience, but logically it may 
 
THE TEST OF RELIGION 135 
 
 be known by reasoning before it is ever known ob- 
 jectively in consciousness, known in the reasoning 
 about religion, before it is known in religion. Since 
 to terms in relation, as the source and the conscious- 
 ness are, there are definite qualities, so for us, once 
 given the relation, the qualities which are logically 
 involved become necessary qualities. Again we 
 parallel our reasoning as to the existence of the 
 source. Whatever may prove to be necessary to the 
 source in order that it may be in this relation, and 
 make the religious consciousness what it is, may be 
 concluded to exist. What mode of existence belongs 
 to it is not a question that needs answer here; only 
 we say it has such reality that we can say of a state- 
 ment about it that that statement is true or false. 
 For instance, the source must have the quality of ob- 
 jectivity. It must be such that it can be in the ex- 
 perience, or involved in the experience of many 
 people. The God of religion must be a God of all 
 men, or at least of all religious men, and we stamp 
 as true the assertion that He is equally approachable 
 by all, that is, by all who are religious. As religion 
 is the experience of some objective existence, then 
 that existence or being is such that it can be known 
 in this experience. The qualities which like this can 
 be deduced from the experience furnish a basis for 
 valid judgments about religion. 
 
 As they furnish a basis, they give us the chance 
 to further develop our test. When there comes be- 
 fore us the revelation or statement of the contents of 
 religion, that the qualities of God are known to be 
 of a certain type, if that type is one that is involved 
 in the religious relation to God, we are competent to 
 
136 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 judge whether that is a true religious experience, and 
 its statements valid. Since the test does not depend 
 on the statement of the religious man, but, as a good 
 test should be, is independent of it, we do not have 
 to depend on psychological analysis of the experience. 
 Psychology can not in this case take the place of 
 theology, for if the statement is true, our judgment 
 depends not on the way it gained entrance to the 
 believer's mind, but on the fact of its agreement with 
 the logical implications of his experience. Not all 
 qualities can be brought under this test, for not all 
 qualities are directly necessary or directly opposed 
 to the implications of religion. Those which are not 
 so directly involved, can not be tested. However as 
 a type they may be. If in a study of religion it 
 should be found that all imagery is from physical 
 sources, at once all imagery of God could be thrown 
 out as no true revelation. If it were found that re- 
 ligion involved always an effect on the will, all 
 claims to this effect could be at least partly accepted. 
 So could the test be broadened. It is clear, therefore, 
 that we have a means which is capable of use in the 
 discrimination of the true religion from the false. 
 
 In this, though we have constantly made use 
 of the conception of an object as a focus of social 
 agreement, our test does not bear this social char- 
 acter. There are agreements in which only the 
 weight of numbers counts. No logic can distinguish 
 between red and blue, nor between cold and heat. 
 Which is which is a matter for the social mind or com- 
 mon perception to say. Tests of perception are 
 always of this character. The value of the test is 
 the certificate it gives that the given experience agrees 
 
THE TEST OF RELIGION 137 
 
 with the normal experience. When a man finds that 
 to him two objects are alike in color, and finds that 
 to others they are also alike, he knows that he can act 
 on his perception as a guide to what his fellows' per- 
 ception will be. The validity of his perception comes 
 from the fact of this agreement. That which will not 
 stand the test is the abnormal. A man who sees no 
 color where another sees red may, if he is a railroad 
 engineer, fail to act on the danger signal. The fact 
 of his difference from others affects the validity of 
 his experience. In itself, if only the others shared 
 in the lack, the experience would be as good as any 
 other. But when the great mass of men have differ- 
 ing color vision, the test of agreement is important. 
 
 This is also true where it is not a case of percep- 
 tion, but is still the consciousness of objective truth. 
 The classic idea of revelation, that to the seer truth 
 may be revealed in terms that he fails to grasp, but 
 which nevertheless to another, rightly gifted, yields 
 its full meaning, is of this type. The truth is thought 
 of as enshrined in some formula, which the prophet 
 repeats blindly. To God who originates, and to the 
 man who understands, the meaning is the same, while 
 to the prophet, the medium of revelation, the meaning 
 does not come. The consciousness, so far as the 
 words or letters or message go, is the same, only 
 the understanding differs. The prophet has not the 
 key. Once the key is known, or agreed on, the full 
 meaning is known. The test of this sort of objective 
 revelation is the same as with perception. Only here 
 the parties to the agreement include God. As words 
 have meaning according to the agreement or use 
 common to the speaker and hearer, so truth is re- 
 
138 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 vealed in so far as God speaks in terms men may 
 understand. If there is no agreement as to the mean- 
 ing of the words used, no key common to speaker and 
 hearer, they are not words but gibberish. The test 
 of speech is the test, again, of social agreement. 
 Hearing a language which we do not understand, 
 even though we may be sure there is meaning, there 
 is no test which we can apply. So far as God speaks 
 in terms which we do not understand, there is no test 
 which we can apply to a claim to be His spokesman. 
 True and false sound alike where neither is under- 
 stood. Since there is no agreement as to the lan- 
 guage of religion, no common dialect, there can not 
 be a test. Having no test, we are unable to either 
 accept or reject objective revelation. In one sense 
 this means that there can be no objective revelation. 
 Having no agreement as to the meaning of the words 
 and images of religion, we do not have objectivity. 
 Dependent as objects are for recognition on social 
 agreement, where there is instead divergence, there 
 is nothing to be called a focus, or object. Lacking 
 any agreement as to details, we have no objective 
 qualities in religion. Neither have we, therefore, a 
 test of objectivity. Truth can not, then, be given 
 to us as an object, or if given, we can not test it, and 
 certainty is impossible. Objective validity, of truth 
 as well as of perception, does not come through 
 religion. 
 
 The test which we have outlined proceeds on an- 
 other basis. Not by agreement, but by reason. 
 Taking the experience, it is studied, and, in another 
 part of the stream of mental life, it is analysed. 
 Those qualities which are found to be necessary to 
 
THE TEST OF RELIGION 139 
 
 its existence are acknowledged as true, those destruc- 
 tive of that existence branded as false. It is not 
 an objective test, since it does not depend on 
 agreement. The man who reasons most correctly, 
 and not the majority vote, is the best guide. The 
 validity which comes to any results from the appli- 
 cation of this test are therefore due to reason, and 
 not to perception or objective comprehension. The 
 religious consciousness does not, in this case, furnish 
 its own test. The truth which it reveals is recog- 
 nised as truth, not because all agree to call it truth, 
 but because when tested by our reason it fulfills all 
 demands. It is reasoned truth. The validation 
 therefore comes only after the work of the philosopher 
 or theologian. Not due to him, but tested by him, we 
 owe to the application of this test of reason the 
 validity of our religion. Many times men have 
 sought by the weight of authority to call uniformity 
 in religion the mark and test of truth. Again and 
 again, however, they have failed. Where there is 
 no real agreement, no real objectivity, the objective 
 test of agreement must sooner or later fail. We re- 
 sort to reason in religion because in no other way is a 
 test of religion's validity possible. 
 
 This fact of the necessary use of the reason if we 
 are to give validity to the contents of our religious 
 states, results in a limitation of the field of that reve- 
 lation. The object of revelation is to assure men. 
 If they can not be assured except by use of the reason, 
 then only such things can be made sure to them as 
 can be certified to by reason. Truth may roughly 
 be classified as a priori and derived. A priori truth 
 is that which depends on nothing else, and comes to 
 
140 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 certitude of its own weight. Though it may seem 
 very far from the usual use of the term, the truths 
 of objective perception are of this type. No man 
 may question what I see, and no man, if social agree- 
 ment exist, may question the reality of any object. 
 It carries conviction by its own presence in conscious- 
 ness. The truths to which the word is usually re- 
 stricted are those which likewise make their own way. 
 They are principles on which much depends, but not 
 themselves derived from anything else. Their test 
 can only be the objective test of universality. Time 
 and space are a priori because universal. They are 
 for this same reason objective. The test which we 
 are working out can not be applied to such basic 
 principles. Derived as it is from the nature of the 
 religious experience, it is a derived test, and the 
 truths which it validates stand several, at least two, 
 removes from a priori universality. It is the lack of 
 any universal element in religion except that of hav- 
 ing an exterior source that has forced us, for any 
 description of that source, to this derived test. As 
 a test, it has no business with a priori truths. If 
 they come through religion they make their way to 
 acceptance without aid. Such a truth is the existence 
 of an exterior source. But further we can not go. 
 In religion we have found no other universal element. 
 No other a priori truth, therefore, can come to us 
 through religion. 
 
 The test of validity is therefore to be applied only 
 to derived truth. It is better to put this, that the 
 recognition of anything as true following the applica- 
 tion of this test makes it a derived truth. It is well 
 
THE TEST OF RELIGION 141 
 
 to meet the objection that this would destroy dog- 
 matic theology, and take from the church all right 
 to put forth dogmas. So far as those dogmas con- 
 cern a priori truth, they will meet, if true, no chal- 
 lenge. Such is the case with the assertion of the 
 existence of higher powers. Men are so agreed on 
 this that the assertion of it rouses no antagonism. 
 It is the insistence on doctrines which they do not 
 accept which gives to dogma its bad name. The fact 
 that any doctrine needs to be forced on men's intel- 
 lect, is proof that, if they are normal men, it is not 
 universally accepted, and hence not a priori. Rather 
 the churches have claimed to hold the key to the 
 interpretation of the utterances of the prophets. 
 Such interpretation, however, depends for its accep- 
 tance on some agreement as to the terms of that reve- 
 lation. It must be objective. But as has been 
 already pointed out, agreement on the terms of re- 
 ligion is not found. Hence objective revelation of 
 this type is impossible. Men must test the church 
 which claims infallibility, and that test must be of 
 the type we have found. The reason is the final 
 arbiter as to conflicting claims. Objective truth is 
 truth which is unopposed. The moment it meets any 
 considerable opposition it so far loses its objectivity, 
 and must submit to a test drawn from a consideration 
 of its nature and existence. Such a test is not 
 a priori, for a priori truths in the Kantian sense are 
 deducible from the necessary conditions of experience 
 in general, but not of this one in particular. Dogma 
 can not appeal to them to bolster such particular 
 deductions. As to the place of dogma as a method 
 
U2 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 of discipline and teaching within the church we have 
 of course no comment. As a guarantee of intellectual 
 certainty it is useless. 
 
 To dogmatism is usually opposed the will of the 
 majority. If truth is not the possession solely of a 
 few or of one, if the guarantee conies not from some 
 one source, then the decision as to what is true 
 would seem to be best made by a majority vote. To 
 the monarchical or aristocratic conception democ- 
 racy would seem to be the logical opposite. In some 
 respects it is. Instead of declaring that one or a 
 few only possess the key to truth, it declares that all 
 who are religious have an equal insight into that 
 truth. This is the primary assumption of any 
 democracy. The arguments for universal suffrage 
 are based on the assumption that, with the exception 
 of the criminal and abnormal classes, each man has 
 about the same insight into what is best for him. It 
 places all men on an equality in this respect. This 
 is clearly the doctrine of our Declaration of Inde- 
 pendence. The justification for the decision as to 
 religious truth by a majority or preponderating vote 
 of a free or representative assembly assumes likewise 
 that each member of that body has an equal ability in 
 judging, if not in discovering, truth. One vote 
 counts for as much as another. This means that the 
 truth is something that can be possessed equally by 
 all. It is something concerning which there is or can 
 be social agreement, and that agreement is decisive 
 with regard to it. In matters of action, a majority 
 vote means that each one voting is assumed to 
 have equal intelligence in judging of the expediency 
 of the proposal. It is something which is to have 
 
THE TEST OF RELIGION 143 
 
 objective, social existence. The judgment is made 
 on the basis of the results of former collective actions. 
 We judge of the working of some proposal for future 
 activity by the results of the carrying into action of 
 similar propositions in the past. So the majority 
 vote in this case is based on something which may be 
 equally within the knowledge of all, something ob- 
 jective. With objective truth this method is valid 
 for the same reason. Where the question at issue 
 may be equally well judged by all, substantial agree- 
 ment among those present will come nearer the truth 
 than the judgment of any one. The decision of the 
 majority is better than the judgment of one be- 
 cause its nullifies the presence of personal peculiar- 
 ities. So a court of law prefers as many witnesses 
 as is possible so far as they are of equal intelligence 
 and equal opportunity for observation, to aid in a 
 decision as to fact. So also the use in our courts of 
 the jury. The judgment of twelve men as to matters 
 of fact is thought better than the judgment of one. 
 To turn to the decision of numbers as to truth is valid 
 if all have had equal opportunities for the perception 
 of the truth under discussion. Certain truths or 
 rather facts in religion can be so decided. Whether 
 there is or is not agreement as to the contents of 
 the religious experience can only be decided by a con- 
 sensus of opinion. Whether that experience is a 
 pure matter of feeling, or purely of intelligence, or 
 purely " mystical," is a question of fact, and every 
 religious person has equal opportunity of arriving 
 at a true judgment. In these cases, therefore, agree- 
 ment among numbers of people is a guide to truth. 
 The test of truth by numbers, equally with the test 
 
144 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 by agreement with dogma, rests on the assumption 
 that the truth is given in objective terms. When the 
 truth is not so given, there is a serious question 
 whether the decision of even all but one of mankind 
 is a guide to the truth. It is just the religious man 
 who asserts that numbers do not guarantee truth, 
 and that he is justified in standing out against the 
 world. In so far as he believes the truth to be 
 a priori and objective, equally given readily to any 
 one, he is wrong in this, for what is the possession 
 of all is best judged by the voice of all; but in so far 
 as religious truth is as we have found it to be, derived 
 and not objective, he is right. The facts of gravita- 
 tion were known to all, but Newton was justified in 
 setting his judgment against the judgment of the rest 
 of the world. The facts were common property, but 
 the theory, which is derived from the facts, was due 
 to the insight of one man. The man untrained in 
 scientific methods and scientific deductions is not as 
 well qualified to judge as is the scientist. The par- 
 allel here to our courts of law still holds. While the 
 judgment of the jury as to the facts of the case is 
 taken, the interpretation of the law is made for them 
 by the judge. Since that judgment as to the law in 
 the case depends for its validity on a trained judg- 
 ment, not every man is equal in his judgment concern- 
 ing it. It is true that our highest courts decide by 
 a majority vote, but it is a vote of those thought 
 best qualified among all the nation to decide such 
 questions. The decision is by those trained in the 
 law. It is an intellectual decision, of deduction from 
 legal principles. The illustration applies to the test 
 of religious truth. In so far as that truth is de- 
 
THE TEST OF RELIGION 145 
 
 rived, we can not trust the decision of the man un- 
 skilled in the deduction of religious truth, but must 
 rest our assurance elsewhere. Even among experts, 
 however, numbers do not assure truth. Some new 
 light may come to a man outside the ranks of the pro- 
 fessional theologian, and he be found right and they 
 wrong. That is only a further proof that numbers 
 or position do not guarantee the validity of an in- 
 tellectual deduction. 
 
 Authority, whether of power or of numbers, does 
 not guarantee the truth of religion, for the religious 
 truths are those which we deduce from our expe- 
 rience, and numbers, as we have just seen, can never 
 give such a guarantee for reason. This means that 
 the test of the accuracy of our deduction is to be 
 sought elsewhere. It is not to be found in any social 
 agreement, nor in any external authority. Since 
 such social or external authority can be valid only 
 for objective truths, it is not valid for us. The test 
 must lie, therefore, within the individual experience. 
 Each judgment must meet the standard of individual 
 judgments, and it must be made by the individual. 
 This does not mean that it is necessarily capricious. 
 The individual judgment is subject to its own test of 
 validity. Science does not reject a theory because 
 it comes from one man. Each scientist as he accepts 
 it makes the same judgments as did the author of it. 
 He accepts it not because his fellow scientist proposed 
 it, but because he himself judges it to be true. There 
 comes to be a consensus of opinion among scientific 
 men, but the value of that rests on the value of each 
 individual judgment, and again and again this con- 
 sensus of opinion has been proven to be in error. The 
 
146 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 validity of the doctrine or theory rests for each in- 
 dividual on his own ability to form correct judg- 
 ments in regard to the deduction of the theory. He 
 does often submit to the superior wisdom of a master, 
 but only because he makes the judgment that the one 
 he follows is better able than he to form correct de- 
 cisions. It is not position or numbers, but personal 
 ability that is concerned. The authority still rests 
 in the individual judgment. This is the basis of the 
 freedom of religion, as it is of science. The right of 
 every man to his own opinion of God does not depend 
 on his right to a private revelation of God, for such 
 a revelation has no standing in the experience of 
 others, but in his right to make his own deductions 
 from a common objective experience. It is the free- 
 dom of science which the theologian claims, the oppor- 
 tunity to express his individual judgment that it may 
 meet the criticism of other individuals, and through 
 the mutual friction, the truth shine more clearly. It 
 is not the freedom of the individualist to disregard his 
 neighbors and go his own way. This freedom is the 
 freedom of open discussion. The man who dogmat- 
 ically asserts his right to his own opinion, and his 
 right to propagate that opinion, and refuses to stand 
 the test of meeting his fellow seekers after truth, has 
 no valid claim to that freedom. Not because every 
 man has an equal insight into truth is he free, for then 
 the majority, which is against him, would be right in 
 forcing its view on him, but because some one may 
 have a clearer insight, and a greater ability to discern 
 the truth, should each be given freedom of expression. 
 This has nothing to do with freedom of action. A 
 man may or may not have the right to act as he 
 
THE TEST OF RELIGION 147 
 
 thinks. Only he should be able to tell what he thinks. 
 Where no self-evident truth furnishes us with a sure 
 and certain test, and where agreement among some 
 great number is no guarantee of correctness, we must 
 turn to the experience itself. This is what is done 
 in the development of every scientific theory. The 
 facts are observed, and determined by the usual meth- 
 ods of objective observation. They are certified to 
 by agreement among careful observers. The deduc- 
 tions from these facts are then made by the individual 
 judgment, and checked by other individual judgments. 
 It is no longer a question of every careful observer 
 seeing exactly the same things, it is possible to have 
 several theories to account for the same facts. Each 
 theory must be a logical deduction or induction from 
 the known facts. It is often forgotten that a theory 
 is really no more than a test. Where any one of sev- 
 eral tests will equally well pass judgment on alleged 
 facts or alleged deductions from the facts, any one 
 of these tests is in so far an accepted theory. They 
 must be of use in this testing. By pointing out what 
 are the qualities necessary to account for the facts, 
 and what qualities can not be present so long as the 
 facts are as observed, the theory furnishes a test to 
 save time in future inquiries. The theory is correct 
 or incorrect according as it rightly or wrongly makes 
 this analysis of the facts, according as the reasoning 
 in the analysis is right or wrong. The accuracy of 
 the theory depends, therefore, on the correctness of 
 its logical procedure. If we have a correct theory 
 of some physical phenomena, we have the description 
 of the things whose presence or absence is necessary 
 to account to those facts. This enumeration becomes 
 
148 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 the basis for a check on observation. If energy is 
 always used up in movement, we can immediately 
 brand as incorrect an alleged observation of move- 
 ment without the expenditure of energy, as scientists 
 do reject the possibility of perpetual motion. Of 
 course if the fact should become well enough attested, 
 the theory would have to change, but until the theory 
 is proved incorrect, it serves as a test of the accuracy 
 of the observation of the facts. 
 
 It is of this type that we have seen that the doc- 
 trines or theories drawn from the religious experience 
 must be. From an examination of the agreed facts, 
 the philosopher or theologian analyses out the neces- 
 sary elements, and also finds whether there are any 
 elements whose presence would make the experience 
 impossible. The accuracy of this analysis depends 
 on the correctness of his logic. It is as untrue in 
 religion as in science to say that one man's opinion 
 is as good as another's, and for the same reason. All 
 are not equally trained in logical analysis. But the 
 theory of religion depends no more on insight than 
 does science. So far as insight plays a part in all 
 theory and massing of facts it has a place in the 
 forming of religious doctrines, but no more. The 
 test must therefore follow this analysis. When made, 
 when the elements in the experience are seen in their 
 right relation, then it is possible to judge which of 
 the differing forms of the experience is nearer normal. 
 To a certain extent it will be possible to accept cer- 
 tain forms as showing or revealing more clearly than 
 others the true relationship of the various elements. 
 Thus we shall have a test by which we may advance to 
 a fuller knowledge than is possible from a survey of 
 
THE TEST OF RELIGION 149 
 
 the whole of the religious phenomena. It has been 
 objected that we should not make our deductions as 
 to religious truth from the lower and more primitive 
 forms. This is true, but before we have the right to 
 label one form as primitive and another as advanced, 
 we must, if we are to have any assurance of cor- 
 rectness in our results, work out and use a test by 
 which we can discern with some certainty between the 
 fuller and the more elementary forms. If we merely 
 assume that Christianity reveals more of the truth 
 than does Mohammedanism, there can be no intel- 
 lectual assurance of the correctness of our theology. 
 To find such assurance we must make of theology a 
 science, and use scientific methods. 
 
 To a certain extent we are thus forced to logic for 
 our theology. A test, however, can never give abso- 
 lute assurance of truth. It is always a test. It is 
 dependent first on correct observation, and second on 
 correct reasoning. The first may be practically, 
 through long continued correction and checking by 
 many observers, rendered reliable. The second, the 
 process of reasoning, since it is always individual, can 
 not be so certified. The methods may be checked, but 
 at most it is only a guide to the truth. Certain 
 things in science as in religion must always remain 
 matters of theory, not because we have any reason 
 to doubt their truth, but because of the possibility 
 of incorrect reasoning which some future generation 
 may detect. Proof in the absolute sense does not 
 belong to scientific theory. Facts, objective truth 
 as we have called it, may be proven, and certainty be 
 reached. To keep these two distinct we shall not at- 
 tempt to go over into the field of theory. What the 
 
150 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 test is and what forms of religion it would call the 
 truer, we shall therefore not attempt to say. Limit- 
 ing ourselves to the task of proving the necessity of 
 a scientific test for religion, we leave to others the use 
 of such a test. We are thus kept outside the whole 
 realm of theory, and so outside of the science of re- 
 ligion, and have to deal only with those things which 
 may be proven. This latter field is by no means un- 
 important even for the science of religion, for until 
 a basis such as we are striving to give to that science 
 is reached, the results of its work will have no more 
 validity than the dogmatic pronouncements of ec- 
 clesiastical authority. Except where dealing with 
 facts, as in the history of religion, scientific study in 
 the religious field has not met with the recognition 
 among church people that it has deserved, because of 
 this apparent opposing of dogma to dogma. When 
 it is seen that the scientific theory of religion has a 
 valid and a necessary place in theology, we shall find 
 theology making more use of it. 
 
 The use of scientific methods in the study of re- 
 ligion must be based on correct observation. Yet the 
 process of analysis is not derived from that observa- 
 tion, though the analysis itself is. The process is 
 that worked out through long ages as the correct 
 logical method. The process is thus independent of 
 religion. Its validity depends on something else than 
 on the religious experience, and would be valid even 
 though there were no religion. To call such a science 
 merely the application of a theoretical test is there- 
 fore not to do it justice. The test which is applied 
 is the result of the same methods which have made 
 possible our great advance in the control of the forces 
 
THE TEST OF RELIGION 151 
 
 of nature. Similar methods are giving us, at least 
 so it seems to the optimist, control of the social and 
 economic forces in the world. It is because of this 
 general validity that the application of such a test to 
 religion opens the way to a practical development. 
 It is theory that has led the way in the advance in 
 these other fields of natural and economic science. It 
 is to theory, scientific theory, that the religious world 
 is turning more and more in search of a solution to 
 its problems. The very part of the process which is 
 least subject to guarantee, the mental process of 
 reasoning, is the means, in these other fields, of our 
 modern advance. It is evident, therefore, that ad- 
 vance can be attained in religion, if the analogy with 
 the other fields of human endeavor has any value, by 
 the use of theories and tests' which are not absolutely 
 beyond error, but which can be used until greater 
 certainty comes. By their use greater knowledge is 
 attained, and thus greater certainty made possible. 
 Just as the search for the process that would trans- 
 mute the baser metals into gold has led to modern 
 chemistry, so even an incorrect theory, if used, may 
 result in a greater and fuller knowledge of the re- 
 ligious experience, and of its revelations. 
 
LECTURE V 
 HUMAN AND SUPERHUMAN 
 
 In a survey of the different types of religion we 
 find that they all agree in placing the source of the 
 religious experience outside of that experience. In 
 approaching our problem we have to attempt a nar- 
 rower definition of that agreement. The whole out- 
 side is a large field. To place more carefully the 
 source of religion, we need to know its relation to 
 other divisions of life. The chief of these fields of 
 life is human life. So we have to find out whether 
 there is agreement as to the position of the source 
 of religion within or outside of human nature. To 
 do this most easily, it is well to have a brief outline 
 of the position of the various religious types on this 
 point. To make a beginning where religion is least 
 clear, we shall start with animism. 
 
 Animism could not well be used in an effort to prove 
 directly the existence of God. It is probably to 
 some animistic religions that reference is sometimes 
 made in the statement that some tribes have no con- 
 ception of superhuman powers in the universe. It is 
 true that neither that nor the next highest religion, 
 totemism, gives us clear ideas on this subject. One 
 thing they and especially animism do present, how- 
 ever, is the belief in forces, if not superhuman, at 
 
 least not inherent in man. The belief in sacred 
 
 152 > 
 
HUMAN AND SUPERHUMAN 153 
 
 stones or trees points to the attribution to these 
 things of some power. The savage knew as well as 
 we that the stone was not a man, and in his fear or 
 worship of it he differentiated it from himself. It is 
 true he did not understand its inorganic nature as we 
 do, but neither did he have any clear idea of human 
 nature. He did, however, believe very strongly that 
 there was something in that particular stone which 
 could affect him in some very practical and important 
 way. He was convinced that it was not merely with 
 men that he had to deal, but with powers beyond. 
 Whether he identified these powers with the physical 
 tree or stone he himself could not say. But his at- 
 titude toward them, the attitude of primitive religion, 
 shows that his experience had reference to something 
 which was not like his fellow men. It is true that at 
 times he may have held this same attitude toward a 
 fellow man, as shown by the tabu which often sur- 
 rounded king and priest. At such times he regarded 
 them as different from the rest of mankind; some- 
 thing had entered or been born in them which was not 
 the common lot of man. In this case too, he dif- 
 ferentiated between his nature and the nature of the 
 being he worshiped or feared. The very center of 
 his attitude was that the priest-king, the tree or the 
 stone, was different from himself. The source or 
 object of his experience of these objects and of his 
 relation to them is therefore, in his belief, to be found 
 outside of ordinary human nature. The religious 
 object is conceived as superhuman. 
 
 At times it has seemed that the result of our study 
 of totemism would be to conclude that it was not re- 
 ligion at all, if we define religion as worship. The 
 
154 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 totem hardly, according to some views, seems to be 
 worshiped, so much as coerced by formulae, or bar- 
 gained with by the performance of the proper rites. 
 With the definition of worship in the narrow sense 
 we are not here concerned. Whether the totem is 
 worshiped or bargained with equally proves it some- 
 thing apart from the normal idea of the clan or tribe. 
 While it may be thought of as the ancestor of the 
 clan, and said to have initiated the ceremonies which 
 the clan performs now as worship, yet the totem is 
 different from the clan. The totem is in relation to 
 the clan, but even when most personified, it is through 
 that relation that it has a part in the clan life. The 
 lion or the corn does not cease to be non-human when 
 it becomes a human totem. Perhaps it is the quali- 
 ties of physical power in the lion or of nourishment 
 in the corn which is the purpose or practical effect 
 of the relationship for the clan. It is because the 
 connection with the totem brings something that the 
 clan can not get through its own human power that 
 the totemic ceremonies are so carefully continued and 
 so exactly performed. In all ages, especially where 
 the struggle for the first necessaries of existence 
 presses as hard as it does upon the savage, not much 
 time is put on things which could be attained more 
 easily in other ways. If the savage believed that he 
 got nothing from his totem except what he could get 
 from himself, his totem would no longer be of interest 
 to him. But because he is convinced that from the 
 totem come powers which he himself does not have, 
 he prizes his relationship to it. The object of his 
 religious attention is in his mind clearly outside of 
 humanity. 
 
HUMAN AND SUPERHUMAN 155 
 
 Taking its beginning from the formulae of animism 
 or the practices of totemism, prayer and especially 
 sacrifice is common to all the higher forms of religion. 
 As mankind advanced, the sacrifice, mainly at first 
 in its form of the offering of the god in the sacrificial 
 meal, and invocations to the god, came more and 
 more to take the form of petitions. Probably there 
 always remained some element of the magic idea that 
 the god, if the proper words were uttered, his true 
 name spoken, must answer. Still, in the earliest 
 hymns of the Aryan invaders of India, as in the 
 worship of Babylon and Egypt, and even more clearly 
 in that of Greece and Rome, it is a power beyond man 
 which is addressed. Sacrifice, which had been the 
 offering of the god, came to be an offering to the 
 god, as we have it in the prevailing idea of the Old 
 Testament teaching of sacrifice, so prevalent that it 
 almost hides the earlier idea of the sacrificial meal. 
 The primitive worshiper may have thought that he 
 could compel or constrain the god, but to do this re- 
 quired methods which were not the ordinary methods 
 of human intercourse. It was not as he constrained 
 men in daily life, but in a far different way, that the 
 priest sought to obtain from the god his request. 
 The god was in closer relation to that ordinary life 
 than many to-day believe God to be to us, but still 
 the god was not the same as man. So easily was any 
 deviation from normal or ordinary manhood looked 
 on as divine, that those men whose exploits made them 
 seem different from other men were called the off- 
 spring of gods. It is the deviation and not the like- 
 ness to men that characterises the god. For all 
 " natural religions," therefore, we may be sure that 
 
156 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 the object of religious pursuit was conceived as super- 
 human. 
 
 Among the more advanced religions Buddhism may 
 seem to offer an exception to this agreement. With 
 its teaching that god and man are alike caught in the 
 round of rebirth, the distance and distinction between 
 them is reduced very low. If, however, we look, not 
 on the worship of the gods, but on the pursuit of 
 Nirvana, or of enlightenment, as the special religious 
 experience of the true Buddhist, for around this their 
 whole doctrine of the Buddha centers, then this Way 
 or Path becomes the object of their religion. What- 
 ever it may be that constitutes Nirvana, the Buddhist 
 asserts strongly that there is something. And he as 
 strongly asserts that that something is to be attained 
 by the annihilation of all human desires. Only by 
 ceasing from those activities which we of the west 
 call the essence of human life can this enlightenment 
 be attained. It is therefore not what we would call 
 human. The power of this Way therefore takes its 
 rise not in humanity, for to tread it we must leave 
 our humanity behind, but it comes from something 
 or is something which is not our seeming and ordinary 
 self. The Buddhist religion therefore claims to be 
 a relation to something even more different from 
 human nature than are the gods. They share some 
 human characters, they are creatures of time but true 
 religion and true salvation are to be found in a some- 
 thing having about it still less of this world of time, 
 still less human. It is true that for some forms of 
 Brahminism allied to Buddhistic reasoning this which 
 is found by self-abnegation is the true self. That is 
 only to say, as the Christian often does, that the 
 
HUMAN AND SUPERHUMAN 157 
 
 ordinary man, the man as he lives in the world, is not 
 true to his calling. It is however, this ordinary man 
 from whom we take our category of " human." The 
 abnegation of this normal manhood which is necessary 
 for these forms of Brahminism and for Buddhism 
 points clearly to the fact that the goal of endeavor 
 is something beyond the normal manifestations of 
 humanity. 
 
 The remaining type of religion, under which may 
 be grouped all the forms which we have not considered 
 separately, is theistic religion. This might not seem 
 to require more than passing notice, since the very 
 thing that gives to these religions their character is 
 that the theist believes in a god. The problem is not 
 quite so simple as this, for it is not belief that we 
 are concerned with, but the religious experience, so 
 that what we care about is whether the theist at- 
 tributes to the god the origin of his religious attitude, 
 or regards the god as the object or end of that atti- 
 tude. It is possible to believe in a god and do neither 
 of these two things. The man of to-day who is in- 
 tellectually willing to believe in God as a primal force 
 or essence, but who feels no religious emotion or will 
 centering around that belief, is a theist, but not re- 
 ligious. With him and with that type of intellectual 
 theism we are therefore not concerned. Religious 
 theism takes two forms, which we may conveniently 
 call deistic and mystical. The deistic, as most clearly 
 theistic, confronts us first. To the deist, and that 
 term probably includes the mass of people who have 
 an interest in the churches, yet could not be called 
 devout, the occasional attendants, to them God is a 
 power, rather removed from their everyday life, with 
 
158 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 whom it is well to keep on good terms. At times he 
 interferes in their life and must be taken account of. 
 I do not mean that they necessarily believe in 
 miracles, but they believe that at least at great crises 
 God touches the lives of men, and is more or less 
 present in the social and moral movements of the 
 age. Yet because they do not feel that power in any 
 direct way, they tend to ignore it. They may at- 
 tribute the social reforms to some spirit of progress 
 in humanity, and so put the source of their religious 
 experience elsewhere than in God. With these it is 
 not so much, however, that they deny the presence of 
 God in religion, as that they have little religion. 
 The pursuit of other ideals, even though those ideals 
 are tenement or labor reform, leaves little energy or 
 time for them to develop the religious side of their 
 nature. Little time is found in which to ask the 
 question as to whence came the impulse that led them 
 into this reform movement. In a certain way they 
 are religious, but their religion, their consciousness 
 of some power outside of momentary experience sel- 
 dom comes to consciousness. They seldom have, 
 therefore, that conscious experience which we are 
 studying. Yet with all there are moments when they 
 feel that the power that sweeps over them is more 
 than their ordinary limited will could accomplish. 
 They come to feel that they are the spokesmen for the 
 fundamental powers of existence. So far as the reli- 
 gious Socialist claims that his activity, his social ex- 
 perience, is the result of his awakening to the fact 
 that such principles are fundamental to existence, 
 are larger than the mere will of man, he attributes his 
 experience to something beyond man. The few indi- 
 
HUMAN AND SUPERHUMAN 159 
 
 viduals who directly deny this do so, probably, in 
 the heat of conflict against the pressure of orthodoxy 
 and the " rich man's " religion, and do not call their 
 experience religious. For the deist, so far as he is 
 religious, his religion is a relation to a power which 
 is not limited to man. 
 
 The other type of theism and of religion is the 
 mystic. For the man who experiences the mystic 
 trance there can be no doubt that he has a religious 
 experience. The question comes as to his belief in 
 regard to that experience. At times we seem to 
 have the practice of Buddhism without its positive 
 teaching of a goal. To outsiders at least, devotion 
 to a religious object seems to be more for the emotion 
 or trance than for the good of the object worshiped. 
 The ecstasy seems, whether in trance or in the stress 
 of emotion, to be an end in itself. To a certain ex- 
 tent the mystic does seek to induce the trance, as the 
 revivalist seeks to rouse the emotions in order to reach 
 the religious experience desired. It is the negative 
 aspect of mysticism which proves to the mind of the 
 mystic that the outsider is wrong. The more the 
 mystic state is sought as an end in itself, we are no 
 longer speaking of revivals, the more is the insist- 
 ence on self surrender. The mind must be emptied. 
 It is not even a question as with Buddhism of enlight- 
 enment. The way may be similar, but the Christian 
 mystic sometimes has even less of a goal in sight than 
 has his eastern brother. Equally though, does he in- 
 sist on the abolition of desire. To reach the desired 
 state, the world must be left behind. With the 
 Quaker it is the Inner Light which points the way. 
 Here too, then, a power or object beyond normal 
 
160 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 humanity is sought. That not always is this object 
 clearly identified with God need not bother us, for 
 " God " is usually in such a case thought of in non- 
 mystical terms, due to the pressure of orthodoxy. 
 As the mystic is not very much interested in the in- 
 tellectual outcome, not at all if the mystic state be 
 his sole concern, he does not stop to correct the ordi- 
 nary idea of God. The object of his religious en- 
 deavors, however, is not the God of the populace 
 around him, but the power, superhuman, which he 
 finds by divesting himself of his humanity in the mys- 
 tic state. For the mystic too, then, the source or 
 object of religion is believed to lie beyond the limits 
 of human personality. 
 
 Such is the claim of religion in all its forms. It is, 
 in the minds of those who experience it, a relation to 
 something beyond their individual life, and beyond the 
 sphere of human limitation. In understanding this 
 claim we must have a clear idea of what we mean by 
 individual and supra-individual, of human and super- 
 human. We can most easily start with the idea of 
 individual. And first the logical concept. Our first 
 understanding of a thing when we think of it as an 
 individual thing is that it is concrete. In some way 
 it is unique. Even if there are thousands of other 
 pins so near like this one that we can not tell them 
 apart, still they do not have the same relation to 
 space, to you and to me and to one another as this 
 one has. Though alike, they are not this one. 
 Whatever may be in common, this pin is itself not 
 shared by any other pin. In its tin no other pin 
 has any concern, though the other pin be tinned from 
 the same piece of ore. Concreteness is not synony- 
 
HUMAN AND SUPERHUMAN 161 
 
 mous with "given." The shape of these pins is 
 equally " given," but being the same for many pins, 
 it is, in relation to the pins, not concrete, because it 
 is something which two distinct individuals possess in 
 common. In relation to other shapes, however, it is 
 concrete, because it is just itself, and is not in com- 
 mon shared by itself and something else. So far as 
 it is concrete it is not shared. It must be recognised 
 also that concreteness is equally with its opposite a 
 concept. It is something which is common to those 
 objects we call individuals. Concreteness is there- 
 fore not itself an individual, except in the world of 
 concepts. Whether a given fact or thing is an in- 
 dividual depends therefore on our point of view. If 
 we find in it, and emphasise, its complete unlikeness 
 in some particular to anything else in the world, then 
 it is concrete, and in so far is an individual. 
 
 A human individual as a concrete being is in so far 
 unlike any other human being. He is an individual 
 by reason of this partial unlikeness. Whatever he 
 may share with others is not concrete and individual. 
 The detective uses the thumb prints to prove the 
 identity of the individual because they are never just 
 the same for any two persons. The individual char- 
 acteristics are those which a person does not share 
 with others. Breathing does not make a man an in- 
 dividual, because there are other beings who breathe, 
 but being in this part of space at this time does mark 
 him off, for no other material object is here at this 
 time. In a given assemblage, if the one is seated and 
 all the rest standing, that one has an individual char- 
 acter. From this point of view an individual experi- 
 ence is one which is not shared with any other being. 
 
162 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 A concrete experience is by its concreteness different 
 in some respect from all other experiences. Whether 
 there are any but concrete experiences we need not 
 ask at this point. If when some other person looks 
 at an object it is seen differently, with a slightly dif- 
 ferent color, and from a different angle, then we have 
 an individual experience of that object. Each of the 
 two differing perceptions is concrete and individual 
 because of the difference. The individuality is shown 
 in the contribution which is made to the experience 
 by the perceiver. Each experience, since it is never 
 in just the same relation to the object or to the other 
 perceptions within the same field of consciousness, is 
 so far unique. Its concreteness and individuality 
 consist in the quality of not-to-be-repeated. The 
 human individual, then, is that existence whose parts 
 will never be found in exactly the same way in any 
 other human being. He is concrete and individual 
 because of this unlikeness to all else. 
 
 Concreteness is sufficient to define individuality, 
 but there are other characteristics which are impor- 
 tant. In a sense they are the result of the indi- 
 vidual's concreteness, but it is easier to draw out 
 their meaning independently. Chief among these is 
 the determination of the individual. What is in- 
 dividual is fixed and unchangeable. The things about 
 an individual which may be changed are not what 
 constitute him an individual, for when changed, the 
 resulting being is different from the preceding, and 
 so is another individual. We then have two concrete 
 beings, not one. We say that the individual persists 
 in spite of change, and that his individuality shows 
 itself in his persistence. A typical case is that of the 
 
HUMAN AND SUPERHUMAN 163 
 
 number series (1, , 3, etc.). The terms of the series, 
 if given one by one in successive moments of time, are 
 in constant change, yet the series remains constant, 
 and would not be a series without the change. In so 
 far, however, as the series is something common to its 
 terms, it is their common law, it is not concrete and 
 individual. It is only when regarded as differing 
 from other series that it becomes concrete, as from the 
 series 1, 4, 16, etc. Any one member of a class is an 
 individual in respect to the class. The law of the 
 series persists and shows itself as individual even 
 though the terms change, but only as individual com- 
 pared to other changing systems. In relation to 
 them it is determined by whatever is the difference 
 between them. If we define a concrete series, we have 
 a series which will not satisfy the requirements of the 
 definition of another concrete series. The series of 
 even numbers can not be so defined as to be identical 
 in all respects with the series of odd numbers. Their 
 concreteness, their individuality, shows itself in this 
 fixedness or determination. It is not subject to our 
 will. Not because it is a fact, but because it is a 
 fact held in by limitations so as to be always partially 
 unlike anything else, is it an individual. 
 
 Applied to the human individual we see that his 
 limitation is important. It is the persistence of the 
 unlikeness of one man to another throughout life that 
 marks the individual man. Because there is this 
 fixedness, there is limitation. One individual can not 
 completely transcend the limitation and enter into 
 another's experience. 
 
 Especially, however, is the logical limitation im- 
 portant. Because he is an individual, the definition 
 
164 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 which will completely designate him can not be the 
 definition of any other man. An individual experi- 
 ence can not be defined adequately by a definition 
 which will also adequately define another experience. 
 Because of this determination, the individual is logi- 
 cally a fixed quantity. Whatever causes him to be 
 regarded as an individual fixes him in some one qual- 
 ity, at least. Because he is unique the thing which 
 constitutes that uniqueness can not be lost and he 
 remain an individual. A grain of sand on the sea- 
 shore can remain an individual grain of sand only so 
 long as it is not dissolved in water and its shape and 
 position lost. Since its individuality consists in 
 shape and position, once these are gone, though 
 chemically it may be the same, it is not a concrete 
 individual grain of sand. So with the human indi- 
 vidual. He must keep certain things which no one 
 else has, and the more of these limitations he possesses 
 the more individual we call him. Individuality there- 
 fore shows itself in limitation and definiteness. 
 
 The individual is concrete, and determined or 
 definite. Because of this definiteness he is also lim- 
 ited. In whatever constitutes his individuality he 
 not only can not change that, but also he can not take 
 on other qualities inconsistent with it. While this is 
 an evident consequence of the idea of the persistence 
 of definiteness in the individual, it needs consideration 
 by itself. As an individual I am not free to go on 
 expanding and seeking larger experience wherever I 
 desire. As a member of the individual race called 
 man I can not see the ultra-violet rays of light. As 
 a Caucasian I can not have the experience of a negro. 
 As one sitting in this room I can not have the experi- 
 
HUMAN AND SUPERHUMAN 165 
 
 ence of one sitting in the next room. I may go into 
 the next room, but I can not know just what is hap- 
 pening there now. A series is concrete because it can 
 develop only in certain ways. The number series 
 can not include fractions so long as it is an individual 
 series and concrete. This logical limitation becomes 
 actual the moment the individual tries to perpetuate 
 himself. When he tries to keep his particular pecu- 
 liarities, and at the same time accomplish something 
 which will destroy those peculiarities, one of two 
 things must happen, either the larger experience does 
 not come, or he becomes more like other men, and less 
 of an individual. When we are dealing with logical 
 individuals, as in a number series, the limitation is 
 also actual. So long as according to the rules % and 
 are 4, we can not in truth make their sum any dif- 
 ferent. We are limited in power over what may be 
 called our own creation because we have created in- 
 dividuals. Individuality, so long as it is preserved, 
 gives fixedness, and this fixedness means limitation. 
 Instead therefore of calling the logical individual free, 
 he is in a certain sense self limited. In some direc- 
 tion, whatever it may be that constitutes him an in- 
 dividual, he can not seek change. He has not ab- 
 solute freedom. 
 
 So far as the human being is an individual he is 
 thus not free. This means that his individual ex- 
 periences are limited. Because of their individuality 
 they can not go on indefinitely expanding in any and 
 all directions. If I have an individual experience of 
 an object, unless that experience can cease to be indi- 
 vidual and be shared by someone else, it is called an 
 hallucination or imagination. All objects which are 
 
166 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 social experiences, common to many people, are ob- 
 jects whose experience for different individuals has 
 not much individuality. Only when many people see 
 some object in very nearly the same form and with the 
 same qualities do we call it a material reality. So 
 far as an experience is individual it is limited in its 
 scope. Of this the social agreement is the opposite. 
 So far as we agree in our experience with others we 
 are not having individual experiences. So long as 
 our experiences remain individual, they can not 
 change in a way that will destroy these differences. 
 The logical limitation is here an actual one if the 
 individual is striving to perpetuate these differences. 
 By striving to be distinct from others, he must work 
 against those things which he has in common with 
 them. His experience will thus be limited by his own 
 will. 
 
 The field of limitation will vary . as the qualities 
 which mark the individual vary. All individuals will 
 be concrete, determined and limited in part. With 
 reference to any of the categories of experience which 
 are not included among these limitations, no general 
 rule can be laid down. A whole number has no fixed 
 or limited place in space, but only in the number 
 series. Partial limitation does not prevent indefinite- 
 ness in every other direction but the one. For 
 further definition of the individual experience we have 
 therefore to turn to the closer study of experience 
 itself. The one point which, in view of the contro- 
 versies about the existence of God, is important for 
 Us, is the relation of individual experience to time. 
 Experience comes to us so far as other categories are 
 concerned, and so far as the present is involved, in one 
 
HUMAN AND SUPERHUMAN 167 
 
 mass. So we speak of the field of experience. When 
 taken with reference to the flow of time, it is not so 
 continuous. There is the time span, or specious 
 present. Though the boundary lines may be dim, we 
 experience a difference between our past and our 
 future. The individual experience has a fixed place 
 in this stream of time. It may entirely fill our con- 
 sciousness, or it may share our attention with other 
 experiences, but as an experience it must occur now, 
 at this particular hour and day, or have occurred at 
 a definite time. It is the experience of last week or 
 of to-day. When the waning or waxing is gradual, 
 we may not be able to put definite limits to it, but 
 at its maximum, if it was clearly in consciousness, 
 it has a definite time place. That is to say that ex- 
 perience is a stream, and an individual experience is 
 some definite part of that stream. Just as the num- 
 ber 3 has a fixed place in its series of whole numbers, 
 so my present experience of this room has a fixed 
 place in its series, the stream of my mental life. As 
 this stream is a temporal series, experience to be in- 
 dividual must be limited in time. It may extend 
 over all time, if it is the experience of an eternal 
 being, but it does so by being his experience at each 
 moment of time. It is like a series of 1, 11, 111, etc. 
 Each term is composed of ones, which form the series, 
 but they do so only by forming each term. So each 
 individual experience has a definite time place. This 
 definiteness in time is not always prominent, but if 
 our memory is good, looking back on it, we can date 
 it, or in any case we can partially date it as past or 
 present. A thing to be given in individual experience 
 must therefore be given definitely in time. 
 
168 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 What is true of our perception of our own experi- 
 ence holds true of our experience of another indi- 
 vidual. For us a human being is not a logical indi- 
 vidual simply, such as a number or a star, but a being 
 with whose experience we may come in touch. That 
 experience, like any experience, has a fixed place in 
 time. Not in our time series is it to be found, it is 
 true, but it may be correlated with ours. To-day 
 you are having such and such experiences and I such 
 and such others. Both have place to-day. To 
 realise an experience as belonging to another indi- 
 vidual, we must recognise it first as being an indi- 
 vidual experience. There must be something in it 
 to distinguish it from our own experiences. As an 
 individual experience partly in our consciousness, it 
 has a definite place there in the stream of time. We 
 know when we first met or heard that individual. So 
 in the perception of another human individual we give 
 or find that individual in a definite place in the stream 
 of time. So far as human individuality goes, indi- 
 viduality means definiteness in time. Those experi- 
 ences which bring most clearly another personality 
 to our attention thereby fix themselves definitely in 
 our life at a definite point. 
 
 In general, that which is extra-individual is the 
 logical opposite of the individual. Yet, because the 
 same thing may be both individual and extra-indi- 
 vidual, a careful definition is necessary from the basic 
 point of view ; that is, we will approach the definition 
 of the extra-individual without reference to our defini- 
 tion of individuality, except as that may guide us to 
 the prominent points. First, what is extra-individual 
 is what is general or common. The general is usually 
 
HUMAN AND SUPERHUMAN 169 
 
 defined so as to be the logical opposite of the indi- 
 vidual. In one sense extra-individual and general 
 are synonymous, but there are other qualities in the 
 extra-individual which the word " general " does not 
 bring out. But that word is important. The gen- 
 eral is to be found in more than one experience. It is 
 something held in common by two or more individ- 
 uals. It is thus a tie between them. By it we may 
 form those particular individuals into a class. The 
 general character of man, his upright attitude, and 
 so forth, make it possible for us to distinguish be- 
 tween mankind and the lower animals. That which 
 is extra-individual is so because it is thus common to 
 more than one individual. Logically the general ex- 
 periences are the basis of all advance. The common 
 tie, if contrasted with other general experiences, be- 
 comes itself an individual. Man is one individual 
 race among the higher animals. The animal king- 
 dom itself is an individual part of the universe. So 
 the extra-individual may become individual. It is 
 general, however, only so long as it is recognised as 
 something found in common in several experiences. 
 In relation to these it is not an individual experience. 
 The extra-individual is therefore that which is com- 
 mon to two or more individuals. As the individuals 
 which interest us are experiences, we may say that 
 what is common or general in experience is extra- 
 individual. It is the common tie or bond. 
 
 As a tie between individuals, the " general " partly 
 defines those individuals. If their individuality con- 
 sists simply in what general terms apply, and what 
 their arrangement is, these general terms or qualities 
 taken together will completely describe the individual. 
 
170 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 In any case they partly describe it. Logically they 
 partly determine it. It is on the basis of these com- 
 mon qualities that we group individuals into classes. 
 On this account the general or class terms form the 
 basis, and give us the possibility of conception, and 
 so, of reasoning. So far as it is general, the class 
 term is free. It is the limiting common factor in 
 the group. By use of it all that do not come under 
 its sway are not influenced by it. That is, those in- 
 dividuals which do not have this character are not re- 
 lated to other individuals by it. Its influence is this 
 relating of one to the other. The limiting is not 
 merely static, but logically determinative. Without 
 this common quality, there would be no class group- 
 ing and without the class conception we would have 
 no relation. The forming of the relation is a result, 
 since the relation appears in the mind, of the recog- 
 nition of this common factor. Or we may regard the 
 relation as existing before recognition of it by the 
 mind, then the relation determines the perception by 
 us of its existence, as we recognise this common 
 factor. Whether we start with the relation or with 
 our experience of it, at the end with which we start 
 we find logical determination. Either the relation 
 brings to pass the form of perception as a general 
 quality, or the common quality forces us to conceive 
 the relation. In either case there is a one-directional 
 relation. One term to this relation is the logical 
 explanation or gives that explanation for the other 
 term. A general experience is related to the indi- 
 vidual experience in this way. It is the string which 
 binds them together. One such string is the self, the 
 human individual taken as a whole. The common 
 
HUMAN AND SUPERHUMAN 171 
 
 quality rests here perhaps in the body, but wherever 
 it is, it shows itself as a determining factor. Our 
 idea of the individual is built upon those experiences, 
 it is those experiences bound together. The type of 
 the individual therefore depends on the common char- 
 acter. To our perception it is determined by that 
 character. General concepts are thus the reverse of 
 static. Taken in a static form, the individual is 
 fixed, he is determined as different from other indi- 
 viduals. Taken as dynamic, the character of the 
 individual is the result or cause, whichever way we 
 read the relation, of the inclusion of some, and the 
 exclusion of other, experiences from that group which 
 we call the individual man. The presence of some 
 determining factor marks our conception of general 
 qualities or terms. 
 
 To be determinative, the general can not be en- 
 tirely limited. This we find is the case. A general 
 term, while as one of a class inclusive of itself it may 
 be partially limited, as regards the terms which com- 
 pose it, can not be so limited. If in a line the thing 
 which marks off one individual from another is posi- 
 tion, or distance from the starting point of the line, 
 then the line itself must be unlimited in direction. As 
 a quality common to all the individual points in the 
 line, it can not itself have any individual position so 
 far as distance from the start is concerned. It must 
 include all such distances. The general or extra- 
 individual term must be unlimited in just those di- 
 rections where the individual is limited. For those 
 qualities which are common to all human individuals, 
 there can not be limits formed by the individual 
 characters of men. Walking can not rightly be lim- 
 
172 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 ited in conception to any one kind of walking, but 
 must include all the differing individual gaits. Being 
 thus partially unlimited, the general characters of 
 men must be somewhat indefinite. In the direction 
 where the common qualities must be all inclusive, there 
 can be no boundaries. We must remember that as 
 regards the concrete and distinct experiences that 
 make up our personal life, personality or character 
 is a general term. It is the common factor in all 
 these various types and instances of mental content 
 and mental experience. It is, therefore, as regards 
 these smaller bits of experience, unlimited. While 
 vision must relate itself to material facts, and has to 
 do with experience of the physical world, and muscle 
 sensation has to do with a feeling of activity in that 
 world, the personality has no such necessity laid upon 
 it of relation to a world found only in space. Be- 
 cause it is general, it is not bound by those limitations 
 of partial human experience. So of those things 
 which are common to all human individuals. What 
 is human can not be limited to any one type of hu- 
 manity. A human being as such is neither black nor 
 white nor brown, and a picture of him can not be 
 made. In these directions the concept of humanity 
 is unlimited and hence indefinite. 
 
 The mark of the human concrete experience is its 
 place in the stream of time. Each individual or dis- 
 tinct experience is such largely, if not entirely, by 
 its having its particular place in the stream of our 
 consciousness. The individual personality, since it 
 is the common element in each moment of that stream, 
 can not have any definite place in it. Human per- 
 sonality as such is therefore not datable. Since 
 
HUMAN AND SUPERHUMAN 173 
 
 this is true as regards the individual experience it is 
 even more evident when we take into account all 
 human individuals. A man can not bring to his 
 mind himself as non-existent just because he does not 
 give to his self, that is to his personality, any place 
 in the series of time. Having no place, it can not 
 lose that place. It is an element common to all of 
 his experience. Only by reference to things outside 
 his experience, found in the experience of other in- 
 dividuals, can he date his own experience. But as re- 
 gards his own knowledge, he has always existed and 
 always will exist. The same is true of his concep- 
 tion of personality in general. Since for him per- 
 sonality has no time character, but is to be found 
 in all time, so for all, for human personality in gen- 
 eral, he makes the same deduction. We do not need 
 to be reminded that this is the basis for many of the 
 stronger arguments for immortality. Whether justi- 
 fied or not depends on how far our ideas of per- 
 sonality hold true in the world of fact. Of the fact 
 that we do conceive personality to be thus timeless 
 there can be no dispute. If we are to set limits to 
 humanity, it can only be by giving human person- 
 ality a place in another series in which it will be an 
 individual episode. As general and not individual, it 
 has no definite place in time. The logically supra or 
 extra and inclusive individuality must have this in- 
 definiteness as to date. To include experiences of 
 various dates, it must itself be indefinite in tem- 
 poral place. The source of religion, or God, can 
 only be conceived as eternal. 
 
 In discussing individuality, we have referred to the 
 human individual, but have not considered humanity 
 
174 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 as a whole. This we must now do, because an experi- 
 ence might be supra-individual, found in many indi- 
 viduals, and yet not be found outside of humanity. 
 In defining our meaning of human, we have to define 
 this particular one among the individual types of 
 being. Any individual existence, whether of what 
 we call one being or of an individual class, is regarded 
 as individual because of the possession of certain 
 qualities which other individuals do not possess. 
 Man has to be defined in accordance with this, in 
 terms of those characteristics which are peculiar to 
 humanity. Not every quality that man possesses 
 enters into this definition. He has existence, but so 
 has every real thing, so existence is not a thing we 
 can use in our definition. It is not a mark of human 
 nature, though always present in human beings. In 
 this sense it is not to be classed as human. There 
 may be other qualities, which, though not known to be 
 found in other beings, yet may be. We have there- 
 fore no right to be dogmatic in limiting the sphere of 
 some quality found among men, unless that quality 
 is essential to our understanding of humanity. 
 Where its absence would give us a creature unlike 
 man, and its presence in other beings would make 
 them practically men, we have a right to call that 
 quality an essential mark of humanity. There may 
 also be some quality whose absence is necessary to 
 our understanding of human characters. Its pres- 
 ence is therefore a mark of the non-human. In this 
 case, its absence would not make us regard other 
 beings as men, unless again the quality was so promi- 
 nent that its absence is almost sufficient by itself as 
 a mark of humanity. It is evident that all the ex- 
 
HUMAN AND SUPERHUMAN 175 
 
 perience which falls to a man is not in this sense 
 human experience. Human qualities are those which 
 mark off mankind from other beings. This use of 
 the term is necessary if we are not to be misled by 
 it, and simply because an experience is found among 
 men claim that therefore it can be found and have 
 its source nowhere else. We shall restrict our use 
 of the word human to those qualities which are lim- 
 ited to human beings. 
 
 On the physical side the features of mankind are 
 such as to plainly distinguish him from the other 
 types of animal life. Among the various kinds of 
 physical beings known to us, there is none at all like 
 man. His nearest kin, the apes, are plainly dis- 
 tinguished. Even the lowest forms of man have the 
 upright gait, and the physical characters we call 
 human. Where there comes a nearer likeness to the 
 ape we are so fixed in our usage of the word, that 
 what we dispute is whether these are or are not 
 really human beings. Even if the borderland is 
 vague, human characteristics are so definite that for 
 the mass of mankind there can be no doubt that 
 human beings are distinct in looks from all other 
 animal life. In the social life of civilised man, which 
 we recognise as the normal life, normal even for what 
 we call savages, as shown in some form of clan or- 
 ganisation, in the use of weapons, and in social co- 
 operation, we find features as distinctly belonging 
 to man as does the form of his body. The rudi- 
 ments may be found among the lower animals, but 
 not as they are found in and mark off man. The 
 ability to recognise and use other beings, whether a 
 stone or piece of wood as a weapon, or a man as an 
 
176 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 assistant in accomplishing what he wants, is dis- 
 tinctive of man. This holds only with the general 
 class of physical beings. Cooperation among angels, 
 if they exist, is not in question, for such cooperation 
 is not physical. The human being is thus one among 
 physical beings, and marked off from them by this 
 social cooperation. We may perhaps condense the 
 statement to the form that one distinguishing mark 
 of humanity is its social life. Not by gifts of sight 
 or hearing, or scent, has man won his rule over the 
 animal world, but by this willingness and ability to 
 have assistance in the contest. The human experi- 
 ence, as distinct from what is not especially human, 
 is therefore preeminently a social experience. 
 
 This social life is to be attributed to man's in- 
 telligence, so that intelligence may be said to dis- 
 tinguish man from all other physical beings. Bear- 
 ing in mind our purpose to reach some conclusion as 
 to the justice of the claim of religion that it pro- 
 ceeds from an intelligence beyond man, our princi- 
 pal concern must be with the distinctive features of 
 the human intelligence as compared with the intelli- 
 gence of possible higher and non-physical beings. 
 Man's intelligence on its positive side is marked by 
 what may be called the power of self-control. Some 
 have argued that intelligence and consciousness arise 
 only when action is halted by some inner conflict, 
 and that consciousness and intelligence come in to 
 solve the problem and allow action. The human 
 being is able to weigh results, and we call that man 
 the highest type of man who does exactly what he 
 intends to do. There is a use of the word human, to 
 excuse the yielding to emotion, as when we say that 
 
HUMAN AND SUPERHUMAN 177 
 
 some act is wrong, but " human," which seems to 
 contradict this. Such a use, however, does not mean 
 that weakness is a distinguishing mark of men, but 
 only that it is usually found among men. That use 
 may be allowable, but it is not what we are after. 
 So, restricting the word human to mean that which 
 marks man off from other beings, we find this mark 
 in the intelligent will, the conscious judging and fore- 
 casting of results, and then the execution of what is 
 planned. Even our emotions we seek to bring under 
 control, and the more man advances, the more he 
 is taught to control his failings. The American 
 Indian was taught to suffer in silence, and we Ameri- 
 cans do not weep in public. Man is forced to con- 
 trol his desire for blood vengeance, and moderate 
 his anger. This means that the subjection of the 
 emotions is human. A being without emotions is 
 something that we can not call human. And those 
 experiences where we have no emotions to subdue, 
 are not the ones we call typical. Any intelligence 
 can solve, even more easily than we, our scientific 
 problems and our business worries, but only a being 
 with emotions and with the desire to subdue them can 
 have the typically human conflicts. The human in- 
 telligence in its positive work thus rests on this con- 
 flict. The absence of the conflict would leave us 
 with something else than a human being. 
 
 The positive side of intelligence is this struggle. 
 On the negative side we find the limitations of sense 
 perception. This is expressed by the psychologist 
 by saying that every idea has as content only what 
 we have experienced. The human intelligence is the 
 intelligence of a physical being. As compared with 
 
178 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 possible non-physical beings, this gives it its dis- 
 tinguishing character. Let the conceptual form be 
 what it will, the material of human experience must 
 be from the field of sense perception, that is, from the 
 material world. So far as he transcends that world, 
 man is no longer a physical being. To be human he 
 must be physical. Man is primarily known as one 
 among the types of physical life. If he transcends 
 the physical world, therefore, man transcends his 
 own humanity. The human intelligence is the intelli- 
 gence which is concerned and is in touch with the 
 physical world. This is true both as regards the 
 lower animals and as regards higher beings. Man's 
 intelligence makes it possible for him to use fire arms 
 and drive off the wild animals, and also to build 
 houses and live with a comfort those animals do not 
 know. As regards higher beings, man is limited to 
 this physical world for his positive experience. Hu- 
 man life is a life lived in the midst of the effort to 
 maintain physical life. If at times men have seemed 
 to put their whole energy into the effort to forget 
 that life, the mass of men has never followed. 
 Asceticism has remained a counsel of perfection, for 
 to the great majority of men, and even to the ascetic, 
 human life is physical. The limitations of that in- 
 telligence which is distinctive of human life is there- 
 fore that it is bound to the physical world. 
 
 The typical man must therefore be one in whom 
 the social life is evident, one whose life contains 
 physical emotions together with the will to control 
 them, and whose intellectual life is centered on the 
 physical existence. To be able to make the assertion 
 
HUMAN AND SUPERHUMAN 179 
 
 that a given experience must be limited to the bounds 
 of human experience and human life, that experience 
 must show these qualities. There may be other char- 
 acteristics which mark humanity, but these there 
 surely are. No experiences which do not show these 
 marks can be with any assurance limited to man. If 
 it is not social, it may be an experience of something 
 kin to the spirit of the lower animals, or what we 
 sometimes conceive to be the impersonal attitude of 
 the universe. As the rain falls on the just and on 
 the unjust, so disregard of our fellow human beings 
 may be more fundamental than our social attitude. 
 In any case it can well occur in other beings than 
 in men. If some experience touches a world which 
 is not physical, it may be real, but it can not be re- 
 garded as distinctive of humanity. Whatever non- 
 physical powers there may be, share in such an ex- 
 perience. Because man has it is no reason to assume 
 that no other than man is in touch with such a world. 
 But the human individual or typical superman limits 
 his attention to physical life. Perhaps this is wrong, 
 and mankind will grow into something different from 
 what it is now. But now, even for the religious man, 
 it is eat or starve. So we start our religious work 
 in the slums with the giving of physical comfort, and 
 our missions abroad with medical work. If we find 
 some experience limited to the physical world, yet 
 social in its character, and involving a conflict of the 
 emotion and the will, we then would be justified 
 in asserting that its origin must be within human- 
 ity. 
 
 When we come to the ideal of the super-human, 
 
180 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 or extra-human, we have to remember that we are 
 concerned not with what has no place in human ex- 
 perience, the unhuman, but with those experiences 
 which do not bear the distinguishing human stamp. 
 They may have a place in every human being, but 
 since they are or may be found also in other beings, 
 we can not rightly designate them as simply and 
 typically human. The first result of this is that 
 they will not have a necessary connection with the 
 human body. Anything that can apply only to man 
 as a physical being, distinct from other physical 
 beings, is inevitably limited to humanity ; but what is 
 not so limited may apply to other beings. This pos- 
 sibility of superhuman experiences by man may, at 
 the outset, be called an impossibility if we interpret 
 the psychological theory that the contents of every 
 experience can come only from the sense world, that 
 we can know only what we see, hear, taste, and 
 touch, to mean that we are thereby shut up to what is 
 limited to man. But it is possible, and a fact, that 
 we do experience through our senses other beings 
 than men. The fact that within our world we make 
 a distinction, as we have, of the human and super- or 
 extra-human, shows that there is some difference, 
 some line of distinction, which we recognise. What- 
 ever is found to be in common to man and the lower 
 animals, such as the possession of a heart, can not 
 rightly be claimed as distinctly human. What is 
 in man, then, but does not refer to his body and 
 physical nature, falls under this other category. As 
 in man and also in other beings we can call it super- 
 human. It is logically a larger class than humanity, 
 since other types of being are included within it. 
 
HUMAN AND SUPERHUMAN 181 
 
 The superhuman, then, will be without reference to 
 man's physical limitations. 
 
 The superhuman will also not be limited to man's 
 social life. That was, as we have seen, the distin- 
 guishing feature of man as compared with the lower 
 animals. Also, since the social life in question is a 
 physical life, it can not apply to any non-physical 
 beings. We must not intrude here the religious idea 
 of a divine society. What we meant was simply 
 human cooperation. What is superhuman can not 
 bear the marks of this physical cooperation. If the 
 superhuman is of such a character that we must call 
 it a social concept, we must carefully distinguish be- 
 tween a physical society and one based on some other 
 principle. The superhuman must have the negative 
 characteristic of not being bound to man's physical 
 life as a man among men. Again it is true that the 
 superhuman may be found in the midst of this life, 
 but in itself it can bear no marks of being limited to 
 that life. Human government, since it seeks and 
 seeks only to regulate this physical life, is neces- 
 sarily human, but the world of scientific theory, since 
 it includes the world outside man, is not to be classed 
 as human. The theory is of human origin, but the 
 material which is involved forces the theory to pass 
 the bounds of humanity. So far as that theory is 
 the result of forces outside of man dictating the 
 form of the theory, it is superhuman. Physical life, 
 as common to all physical beings, is superhuman. 
 In beings of a higher order, if they exist, and have 
 a social existence, it is this reference and limitation 
 to the physical life of human society that will be 
 absent. The spiritually or logically superhuman, 
 
182 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 so far as revealed in humanity and in human experi- 
 ence, is not subject to the limitations of human physi- 
 cal life or social existence. 
 
 The superhuman will also lack the other dis- 
 tinctively human characteristic of the inner struggle 
 between the will and the emotions. There may exist 
 this struggle in those beings which are not human, 
 but if that struggle is absent, we know then that we 
 are not dealing with human individuals. This strug- 
 gle is a character whose presence makes a man what 
 he is. It is positive and not due to the absence of 
 anything. Devils or angels may equally well be 
 caught in a similar struggle. Only we know that if 
 we find a being who does not bear the marks of this 
 contest within himself, we have passed the bounds of 
 humanity. Again we must guard against the reli- 
 gious conception of the true man as the man at peace 
 in himself. For human nature as we know it, and 
 this only can furnish us our data, no such peace is 
 found. Man may win a peace after struggle, but 
 struggle there must be. If, then, we find some 
 sphere of existence, whether within man or not makes 
 no difference, which is of such a character that this 
 struggle with the emotions is absent, we are dealing 
 with something which may be superhuman. It is not 
 born of that which is distinctive of man. In itself it 
 is superhuman, that is, it belongs to that larger world 
 outside of and free from the limitations of human ex- 
 istence. " Larger " is here meant, as also the pre- 
 fix " super-," in the logical sense. Where we have 
 a peace without conflict we have something which 
 is not the possession solely of mankind. Such a 
 being or experience brings into man something which 
 
HUMAN AND SUPERHUMAN 183 
 
 had its origin elsewhere than under human limita- 
 tions. When we find in man an experience which is 
 free from this conflict, we know that we are in touch 
 with this free world of the superhuman. 
 
 On the intellectual side the superhuman may be 
 marked by the absence of the limitation to the phys- 
 ical world. Man has a distinctively human intelli- 
 gence. So far as his mind is free from human limita- 
 tions, he has something which as before we may call 
 superhuman. So far as the physical world goes, the 
 intelligence which he shares with the lower animals 
 is thus superhuman, or something which is not limited 
 to mankind. As physical intelligence, or intelligence 
 centered on physical objects, shows itself by this free- 
 dom from human characteristics, so an intelligence 
 of a possible non-physical being would show itself in 
 a similar non-reference to the physical world. What 
 is distinctively human in man's mental life as com- 
 pared with that of the dog is found to be involved 
 in man's social life, which distinguishes man from 
 the dog. We shall find the dividing line in intelli- 
 gence between physical and non-physical beings like- 
 wise in what marks their differences as beings, that 
 is, in the presence or absence of the physical life. 
 If the experience we are studying proves to have 
 reference to a non-material world, then we can be 
 sure that it is not the product of forces which are 
 distinctively human. Those forces may not at pres- 
 ent be evident outside of human life and experience; 
 if they were we would not know it, but still they are 
 directed towards something, and are the result of 
 something, which we do not recognise as human. 
 Something which is essential to human life is lacking. 
 
184 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 If that experience has no necessary relation to the 
 other experiences of our life, if it can occur by itself, 
 then it is not the necessary product of our human 
 life. It may be human and normal to have this 
 experience of a non-material world, but we can not 
 call that experience distinctively or peculiarly hu- 
 man. That experience which refers itself to a non- 
 physical realm must be explained in other terms than 
 those of our human life. 
 
 With these definitions of individuality and human- 
 ity, we are more ready to examine the claim of re- 
 ligion that it is a relation to a superhuman object or 
 world. As we examine the religious experience we 
 have to bear in mind what we find to be the marks of 
 individuality and of the super-individual, and also of 
 the human and superhuman, and by this result de- 
 termine in which category the object of the religious 
 experience falls. Applying this test first in the case 
 of individuality, we have the contrasting characters 
 of concreteness and generality. At first it would 
 seem that many of the religious experiences are as 
 concrete as any which men have. The definite and 
 unmistakable commands which come at times to the 
 religious devotee, the distinctness of the moment of 
 conversion, are surely concrete. Not all religion, 
 however, as we saw in our first analysis, has this 
 definiteness. Not every religious experience is con- 
 crete. Whatever it is therefore that gives to re- 
 ligion its character as religion, it is not the necessity 
 for concreteness. The religious element may rein- 
 force or show itself in connection with definite mo- 
 ments, but if those experiences which are not con- 
 crete are equally religious, and we have assumed 
 
HUMAN AND SUPERHUMAN 185 
 
 that they are, then the religious element is independ- 
 ent of whether the experience is or is not concrete. 
 We have found that the religious element is of a 
 general type, that it refers to a source outside of 
 itself. It is this, and not occurrence at definite 
 times, that marks religion. But even in the concrete 
 experiences there is a general element. St. Augustine 
 experienced the command that came to him, and so 
 did St. Paul before him, as the command of God. It 
 was not the occurrence of the definite idea, but with 
 that idea that a voice was heard, the conviction that 
 it was God speaking, which brought in the religious 
 element. It was the presence in the experience of 
 this general element of something beyond the con- 
 crete moment which makes the moment of value. 
 The experience as religious, as referring to some- 
 thing beyond itself, is therefore general. As gen- 
 eral, it is super-individual. In it the individual ex- 
 periences something which he recognises and calls 
 not-himself. To him it is not an experience of his 
 individual self, but very distinctly of something else. 
 As surely as he gives any meaning to the word in- 
 dividual, he denies that meaning to this experience 
 which opens another phase of life. By its posses- 
 sion of this general character, of having value be- 
 yond the concrete moment in which it occurs, the 
 claim of religion to have its meaning in a relation 
 to something beyond the individual experience is re- 
 inforced. The whole significance of the experience 
 lies in the fact that it brings an experience which 
 whenever it occurs refers beyond itself. The reli- 
 gious element is this reference, hence the experience 
 of religion is so far general, and not concrete. 
 
186 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 The next two terms which define the individual and 
 the general, are that the individual is determined or 
 passive, and the general determining or active. Re- 
 membering that we have in mind here logical determi- 
 nation, we find religion coming more plainly than was 
 the case with concreteness under the less individual 
 category. It is the religious experience, the rela- 
 tion of the individual experiences to something which 
 explains them, that marks religion. It is therefore 
 experienced as something which determines or ex- 
 plains concrete experiences. The vision of Paul on 
 the Damascus Road is felt to be brought about by 
 God, that is, it is explained as the touching of the 
 individual life by a power outside of it. What 
 makes this experience differ from those in which the 
 individual is completely determined is that it is this 
 relation to a something beyond which brings to pass 
 the experience. This relation is therefore logically 
 determinative of the concrete expression of it. The 
 concrete experience is referred to this relation to the 
 outside, not this relation to the experience or to 
 something else. In so far the experience of this re- 
 lation is an experience of something which is not an 
 individual. As we study this type of experience it 
 becomes an individual type, but in relation to the 
 momentary experiences it is general, and is so ex- 
 perienced. We have here then the experience of a 
 relation, not to a physical concrete object. A rela- 
 tion is very distinctly not an individual completely 
 determined. Again, then, we find the claim of re- 
 ligion to be so far justified. Since religion is ex- 
 perienced as a relation, it is something which is 
 different from an individual experience, and its ex- 
 
HUMAN AND SUPERHUMAN 187 
 
 planation must be sought elsewhere than within itself. 
 That is, there must be two terms and not merely one, 
 which must be known. As regards this point, then, 
 religion is the experience of a superindividual world. 
 In regard to the next point our first analysis leaves 
 but one answer possible. Religion takes so many 
 forms that we can not call it limited. It preserves 
 its character as religion in spite of all these differ- 
 ences. Hence it is not so limited in form that it will 
 exclude this difference. A concrete individual ob- 
 ject, which is individual from every point of view, 
 can not thus take on forms inconsistent with one an- 
 other. But religion, varying as it does, is equally 
 readily given the name of religion whether definite or 
 indefinite in time, whether with or without the emo- 
 tional color. In these respects it is unlimited. In 
 any given moment it must be with or must be without, 
 a consciousness of time or of emotion, but experi- 
 ences of both types are equally religious. The re- 
 ligious element is one which is not definite on these 
 points. In so far, again, it is not completely fixed 
 and determined as an individual would be. In that 
 first analysis we made we came to the conclusion that 
 we were dealing with something different from the 
 experiences which come to us from our senses. This 
 difference lies in the fact that religion is not, as the 
 senses are, concerned with a completely determined 
 and limited individual, but is a general and partially 
 unlimited relation. Fixed within its limits, so that 
 we can fairly easily decide whether a given experi- 
 ence is or is not religious, yet in these other ways 
 it is very indefinite. Therefore again we have the 
 marks rather of a general than of an individual ex- 
 
188 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 perience. This means that there is another term 
 to the relation somewhere which must be taken into 
 account. 
 
 One of the marks which we found in that first 
 analysis to which we have been referring, was that 
 the religious experience had no necessary or fixed 
 temporal character. There are experiences in all 
 of us, and in some types of religion no others, in 
 which this experience carries with it no fixed place in 
 time. There is with some a conception of the ideally 
 religious man as the man whose whole life is so filled 
 with religion that it marks the whole stream of his 
 life and consciousness and has no more a fixed place 
 in that stream than that stream has within itself. 
 All may not accept this as an ideal, but when we find 
 the religious experience as it occurs in one of its 
 types coming rather as an added character to at 
 least a part of the mental stream than as an experi- 
 ence filling, or focusing at, some one moment of that 
 stream, we find that again we are dealing not with the 
 perception or consciousness of something which is 
 fixed in time, but of a general character or relation 
 which may be independent of time. In the various 
 forms of mysticism this is very evident. Time and 
 change seem to fall away, and eternity opens before 
 the devotee. As the Buddhist attains Nirvana, he 
 is freed from the recurring round of rebirth. The 
 world of Nirvana is not the world subject to time. 
 The temporal element is therefore no necessary part 
 of religion. In time, as in other respects, it may be 
 unlimited. It is therefore not the experience which 
 has a fixed place and a necessary place in time. It 
 is not an individual experience, as it is not the con- 
 
HUMAN AND SUPERHUMAN 189 
 
 sciousness of any individual moment of time. It has 
 its character apart from any necessity of referring 
 to concrete moments. It does not bear the marks of 
 individuality, but, instead, of the supra-individual. 
 So far we have found that religion is not entirely 
 of an individual type, but, in certain respects, of 
 a supra-individual type. This superindividuality, 
 however, is logical, so that we still have before us 
 the question whether the religious experience is ex- 
 plainable as human, or whether it transcends the 
 limitations of humanity. As before, we have to find 
 which of the opposing terms of our definitions rightly 
 includes this experience. The first two terms were 
 " physical '* and " non-physical." The answer here 
 is plain. Even though of necessity appearing in the 
 terms of material life, religion has always as an ex- 
 perience meant something more than the form in 
 which it has appeared. The stone which the savage 
 worships means far more than a stone. The experi- 
 ence is not explicable as the perception of the mate- 
 rial object. Also, as before, the differing forms 
 show that the religious element is independent of its 
 material presentation. For great masses of people 
 its significance consists in the fact that it is not a 
 revelation of this physical world, but of something 
 beyond. For the mystic, the fact that his experi- 
 ence is supra-individual carries with it the lack of 
 reference to individual material objects. The whole 
 effort of this great type of religion is to attain to 
 an experience which is not limited by the material 
 world. Whatever it is that for the mystic consti- 
 tutes his experience, even if he does not completely 
 rid himself of material imagery, consists in something 
 
190 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 which the material form does not explain. That par- 
 ticular imagery means more than the same imagery 
 when occurring in connection with physical events. 
 Hence the experience brings in an element which does 
 not yield to the limitations of those experiences 
 which we call distinctively human. It is of a more 
 general type. 
 
 The second distinctively human category which we 
 found was that of reference to man's social life. At 
 first it would seem that religion came closely into con- 
 tact with this, and so, was human. For the savage, 
 religion is inextricably interwoven with his social life. 
 It is difficult if not impossible to say whether his 
 religion is the foundation of his family and tribal 
 life, or the tribal life the explanation for the social 
 form of his religion. The forms of Western religion, 
 especially Christianity, with its emphasis on the 
 Kingdom of God as coming on earth, in the hands 
 of many to-day bear almost exclusive reference to 
 our social life. It is to be noted that in each case 
 it comes into relation with man's life with a tone of 
 authority. For the savage who continues the reli- 
 gious customs of his ancestors because they did it, 
 that is, feels the weight of custom, and for the 
 modern social reformer who seeks to reconstruct our 
 world in terms of some social ideal, we have equally 
 an experience which seeks to transform the physical 
 world. The savage who seeks aid from his religion 
 to bring rain, and the modern man who from a sense 
 of duty to God and right enters into the effort to 
 change the sanitary conditions in our slums, are 
 equally bringing to bear on physical conditions a 
 force which they believe is stronger than the physical 
 
HUMAN AND SUPERHUMAN 191 
 
 forces. They are appealing to an experience which 
 opens to them the idea of another world in addition 
 to that in which the sole forces are the forces and 
 results of man's physical life. It is this limitation 
 to the physical life which is the marked character- 
 istic of humanity. Religion appears, when it 
 touches that physical life, as a force free from that 
 limitation, and one which is called on to change and 
 even destroy certain of the physical influences at 
 work on mankind. Religion clearly, even more 
 clearly here than elsewhere, bears the marks of the 
 superhuman world. It belongs with those experi- 
 ences which are without the limitations of our life 
 as a human being. They are human experiences, 
 but they are the experiences which man has of some- 
 thing which is beyond humanity. Those experiences 
 which are man's experiences of himself, or of human- 
 ity, do not include religion. 
 
 What distinguishes humanity perhaps above all 
 else, in its inner life where real differences are most 
 evident, is the conflict of will and emotion. Man's 
 desires and passions draw him one way, while sober 
 sense and his intelligence beckon him another. Man 
 is a being in whom intelligence has by no means won 
 a complete victory. Hence the conflict is typical of 
 the appearance of intellect, and also of the fact that 
 it is not yet completely dominant. Into this world 
 of stress religion comes as another disturbing force. 
 With the saying of Jesus in mind that he came not 
 to bring peace but a sword, (Mt. 10:34.) we might 
 conclude that religion only added to the conflict, and 
 hence was typically human. The religious devotee 
 again and again brings conflict and physical strife 
 
THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 into the world as a consequence of his religious be- 
 lief, but in so doing he is sure of himself. It is the 
 fanatic who is so sure of the agreement of his will 
 and his desire that he will force it on others at the 
 point of the sword. For him the inner conflict is 
 gone. His desires agree with his conception of duty. 
 This may occur by the training of the desires. 
 Then the devotee becomes a man who desires only 
 what is right. This may force him into conflict 
 with the forces of evil, but the conflict is an exterior 
 one. Within himself, even though he die a martyr 
 in the conflict, there is peace. For the savage who 
 has this conflict, even though he is not able to realise 
 it, religion with its insistence on the wisdom of the 
 elders of the tribe and of his ancestors, with the com- 
 pulsion of custom, half or more than half, unrealised, 
 his desires are trained to wish what is good for him 
 and for his tribe. Whether by nature a warrior or 
 not, he can not live from childhood in an atmosphere 
 where every tribal influence centers on war without 
 desiring to rival his fellows in warlike deeds. When 
 the demand comes from his religion for him to be a 
 warrior, his desires and his will are so far at one 
 that he will submit readily to often extreme tests of 
 his fitness to fight. So on a higher plane religion 
 trains the desires to agree with the idea of right. 
 Its influence where it touches this conflict is there- 
 fore to minimise or destroy it. It tends therefore 
 against this human characteristic. In some form, 
 wherever men seek in the religious experience a sense 
 of peace, of freedom from this conflict, it is plainly 
 an experience directly contrary in its character to 
 man's ordinary life. Because it promises an end to 
 
HUMAN AND SUPERHUMAN 193 
 
 the inward struggle, men turn to it. In this it is 
 evident as an experience that is superhuman in its 
 character. It tells of a world which is not the world 
 of human struggle. 
 
 The last test which we have to apply is that of the 
 relation of the religious intelligence to the material 
 world. It touches that world in many places; the 
 most important the one we have just mentioned, its 
 effect on man's inner conflict. To touch, and to be 
 partly in relation with a physical world is, however, 
 no proof that religion's main concern is with that 
 world. It must touch it, for we live in it, and reli- 
 gion is our experience. That this is necessary pre- 
 vents it being a possible criterion of the experience. 
 All experiences are ours, and so all come into touch 
 with our physical life, the life which we lead. That 
 does not, however, prevent them also being in touch 
 with a life which is different from ours. When we 
 find that the experience is not explainable as simply 
 human, when there remains, after we have applied all 
 possible explanations derived from human life, still 
 some qualities which are not explained, we are forced 
 to the conclusion that there is a relation to another 
 world which will explain this experience of ours. 
 This is our procedure with the physical world. Our 
 memories we can largely or entirely control; we can 
 keep an idea before us, or banish it, but with our 
 back turned we can not see an object behind us. In 
 general, with our eyes open, we have to see what is to 
 be seen. At least in normal health, we can not see 
 what is not to be seen, what is not there. The phys- 
 ical world as we conceive it is the result of this lack 
 of control. It is not due to a formal reasoning, but 
 
194 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 to the practical necessity of distinguishing between 
 those experiences which are individual and can be 
 controlled and those experiences of the individual 
 which, because they refer to a world beyond the in- 
 dividual, can not be so ruled. The solecism, and 
 subjectivism, and the ego-centric predicament may 
 be problems for the theory of knowledge, but they 
 do not concern us more than any other inquiry after 
 knowledge. Whatever justification there is for pos- 
 iting a physical and a human world, there is the same 
 justification for positing a non-physical and super- 
 human realm. Thus religion has the same rights as 
 the natural sciences. More we do not need to claim, 
 for, once free from dogmatic denial of its right to 
 accept a revelation of a superphysical world, religion 
 is free to develop its scientific account of that world. 
 Religion coming into human life in a form which is 
 not the form of that human life points to a world 
 outside, to which we must refer it. Free from the 
 limitations of any necessary physical form, inde- 
 pendent of the social forces of man's physical life, a 
 pacifier of the inner conflict, its final difference is 
 marked by the fact of its reference to something be- 
 yond. Whether it takes its origin from dreams or 
 from imagination (deceit we need not consider) it 
 refers always to something outside of human life. 
 We do not need to accept all or any of the descrip- 
 tions of that realm, only, from the savage to the 
 mystic, it is referred to a world over which the human 
 spirit has no control. So by rites of one sort or 
 another, or by prayer, he seeks to influence the spir- 
 its. As we for practical reasons differentiate our 
 experiences of the outer world and our ideas about 
 
HUMAN AND SUPERHUMAN 195 
 
 it, so likewise for practical reasons we differentiate 
 our experiences of the physical and of the super- 
 physical world. Physical laws do not hold in reli- 
 gion, man can not control it as he controls his own 
 life or as he rules over the material universe. Hence 
 it is practical experience and not a theory which 
 forces on him the one claim which we found a com- 
 mon element in all religions, that this is an experi- 
 ence of a superhuman world. Because this experi- 
 ence falls under the type, and has the marks of the 
 superhuman, and lacks those of the human, we must 
 acknowledge that the claim is just. So far the reli- 
 gious experience is valid. Whatever it is that men 
 worship, it is at least superhuman. 
 
LECTURE VI 
 PERSONALITY 
 
 Throughout much of the discussion of to-day we 
 speak of the source or object of religion without 
 making any effort to define these terms. Before we 
 reach our end we must make our definition of this 
 source-object more exact, or else make sure that we 
 can know no more about it than the vague fact that 
 it exists. This existence which is bound to us by the 
 religious experience may be in that relation either 
 active or passive, and we in that experience may be 
 active or passive. Since no experience can be an 
 experience and stand still, both terms of the relation 
 can not be passive. The alternatives which confront 
 us are, therefore, that we may be active, and religion 
 be an active pursuit of a passive object; or else we 
 may be passive, and religion be the active influence 
 of a power beyond man working on a passive human- 
 ity; or, finally, both man and the superhuman 
 may be active, and a mutual interchange occur. 
 As we take these up in order, we have to consider 
 the unseen term as object, as source, and as person- 
 ality. 
 
 First, then, we have to ask in what sense we can 
 call this existence behind the religious experience an 
 object. In attempting to define the word object its 
 uncertain and general use is confusing ; hence we can 
 
 196 
 
PERSONALITY 197 
 
 not assume, but must work out, a definition. When 
 we speak of an object we think first of material ob- 
 jects, things we can see and feel. The stone upon 
 which we tread is felt and seen, not because it forces 
 itself on us, but because by our activity we come into 
 contact with it. Though not under our control to 
 the extent of allowing us to put it out of existence 
 or lift it without effort, still, unless some force acts 
 on it, it will not be lifted. It can oppose but not 
 originate motion. In our visual world it has a cer- 
 tain fixity of form. Here too it opposes change. 
 These characteristics of an object we may take as 
 the primary meaning of the word. We mean, when 
 we call anything an object, that it is relatively in- 
 active, and also that it does not seek to move, but 
 that it opposes motion. We find other things in ex- 
 istence which meet this definition besides material 
 objects; hence we extend the use of the word. Our 
 imagination brings us images over which we have 
 some control, but yet which, once in our mind, tend 
 to go their own way. As imagined they take a fixed 
 form. In themselves they are the result of mental 
 activity, not its movement. So far as they do take 
 a fixed static form, we come to call them objects of 
 imagination. Also we find that the definition applies 
 in the conceptual world. A square is a fixed form. 
 Never even brought into existence by itself, content 
 to remain always a conceptual entity, yet whether 
 merely conceived or found in some real form, it is 
 fixed, and while it can be used, as it is in geometry, 
 it can not be changed. It is even more fixed than 
 the material object. In addition to this conceptual 
 object, there is one further class which in ordinary 
 
198 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 speech also is called objective. While to the man 
 himself his will is the source of activity, yet to an- 
 other who seeks to modify that activity it is static 
 and resisting. So far, too, as another man sees in 
 the will of his fellow man something constant, a 
 thread of character through the activities of life, 
 that character becomes an object. Something is 
 there which is not the cause of movement in the life of 
 the observer, but which yet resists his efforts in cer- 
 tain directions. The will may thus itself, for another, 
 become an object. When we come to apply to reli- 
 gion the word object, we have to ask how far these 
 passive elements predominate. 
 
 The term which immediately contrasts with object 
 is source. As object implies rest, so source implies 
 motion. We speak of the source of a river while 
 the river is flowing, but if the river dries up, or be- 
 comes a series of stagnant pools, the first pool is 
 merely the first pool, not a source. The unicellular 
 organisms are spoken of as the source of physical 
 life only by those who believe that there has been a 
 development upward from them. If there has been 
 no development, then the unicellular forms are merely 
 the lowest in a static series, not the source of the 
 rest. The cloud may be called the source of the rain 
 only if the rain is falling, or regarded as likely to 
 fall. In the material world the principal significance 
 of the term is thus to denote the presence in some 
 object of a force which is active. In the conceptual 
 world of modern geometry we find this idea used in 
 a peculiar way. A line is said in some definitions to 
 be generated by a moving point. The point itself 
 is an object, but the moving point is the source of the 
 
PERSONALITY 199 
 
 line. The same idea occurs in the conception of a 
 series of numbers related in certain definite ways, 
 such as the whole number series, as generated by the 
 relation. This relation, or law of the series, becomes 
 for mathematics the source of the series. It is evi- 
 dent that we here enter into the world of logic. 
 The law of the series is the relation that explains 
 why certain numbers are included and certain others 
 excluded from the series. This logical conception is 
 spoken of here in order to bring out the fact that 
 this element is involved in any use of the word. The 
 cloud is the source of the rain because the presence 
 of the cloud explains, at least partially, the presence 
 of the rain. So the small lake or spring is a source 
 of the river because by its overflow it explains why 
 we have a river there. The ultimate type to which 
 some refer all ideas of motion from one source is the 
 human will. It is not only the willful person who 
 does a thing simply because he wants to. To a 
 certain extent the will is always its own only justifi- 
 cation. There is energy there which must seek vent 
 in action. So the will becomes a source of activity. 
 The source here is the thing which explains why the 
 activity took that particular direction. The motive 
 for the murder is the source of the murder when it 
 is sufficient to account for the commission of the 
 crime. When we come to apply this to religion, 
 therefore, we have to keep in mind these two ele- 
 ments. The source of religion will be that which is 
 sufficient to account for the activity which results in 
 the experience. 
 
 There remains the third alternative to be defined. 
 It is not so clearly named in one word. Since we are 
 
200 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 concerned with will action, we may provisionally call 
 it the idea of personality. Here the material world 
 fails us, except by analogy. We can observe the 
 effect of the presence of more than one force in some 
 physical event, but the forces themselves remain be- 
 yond our reach. Whether they move each other, or 
 whether they obstruct each other, or reinforce, only 
 through the object on which they act is it possible 
 to say. Still we can, in the conceptual world, get a 
 start. Where two forces are active each is modified 
 by the other. So far as we know, the deflection of 
 certain electric vibrations by magnetic influence may 
 be such a direct mutual action. Whether it is such 
 or not, it will illustrate the idea. Before either force 
 reaches expression in motion, there is a combination, 
 and a motion different from what either of the forces 
 alone would produce is the result. Neither force 
 alone is the source of the motion, since neither taken 
 alone will satisfactorily explain it. Neither is either 
 force or even the combination an object, for the char- 
 acter which the combination has exists only for the 
 moment of the conjunction of the two. We really 
 have an object only with some such relation as that 
 of the mechanical couple, where two forces are re- 
 lated by the constant character of being equal and 
 tending in opposite directions. Since we have with 
 two interacting forces neither source nor object, 
 there is need of a third term. What that should be 
 in the physical world is not our concern. Our best 
 example of such interaction comes to us in human 
 experience. Here we know it as the mutual effect 
 of different wills or purposes. For our limited pur- 
 pose, therefore, we may call this third possibility 
 
PERSONALITY 201 
 
 " personality." If the exterior term of the religious 
 relation is neither source nor object, but an active 
 force, interacting on the human will, we may call it 
 the force of personality. 
 
 To the possible objection that such interaction of 
 two wills is impossible, because we can know the will 
 of another only by inference, we would say that we 
 do not need to cross the limits of human individual- 
 ity. Although I do not feel the force of the objec- 
 tion, for reasons which may have become apparent in 
 the definition we used of the word individual, yet we 
 can well pass by the matter here. Within the human 
 individual there is sufficient evidence of the inter- 
 action of will forces or separate purposes to serve us 
 for our illustration. When a man is torn by con- 
 flicting desires, and no action, or an act unforeseen, 
 results, the explanation is in the conflict. Within 
 the mind two forces have been in partial conflict, and 
 the resulting purpose, if one emerges, is the result 
 of this inner conflict. In many cases there is no such 
 conflict, and one motive quietly influences another, 
 and again the resulting determination must be ex- 
 plained by the presence of both. When a man plans 
 to go straight to a store, and then, because of his 
 desire to go also to another, goes to the first by a 
 roundabout way which will lead him by the other, his 
 course is explainable only by the presence of both 
 desires. The combination of the two was the source 
 of his roundabout path. As conflict of desires is one 
 of the marks of human personality, it seems proper 
 to call this conflict, or in the more general case, con- 
 junction and interaction of forces, by the name of 
 personality. Only we have to remember that we do 
 
202 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 not include under the term all the overbeliefs which 
 sometimes accompany that word. 
 
 In a certain sense anything may be an object. 
 The will, or the individual personality, may be the 
 object of our study. This does not prevent its ac- 
 tivity. Activity itself, as motion in any of its forms, 
 may also be an object of interest. We may study 
 its direction and the energy involved. The religious 
 experience, and the source of it, are the object of 
 our present inquiry. Hence the terms " object," 
 " source," and " personality " are not mutually ex- 
 clusive. Our interest lies in the question how far 
 any one of these terms exhausts the meaning or na- 
 ture of the object we seek to describe. Bearing this 
 in mind, we may ask for the fullest meaning which 
 we can give to the word object as applied to an ex- 
 istence like the object revealed in the religious experi- 
 ence. It may, as we have already said, be active. 
 The fact that we see an object does not prevent us 
 seeing that object in motion. We need concern our- 
 selves neither with the old logical objections, nor 
 with possible psychological proofs to the contrary. 
 Whether able to arrive at a logical conception of a 
 moving arrow or not, we do have such an idea, and 
 are able to tell when the arrow is at rest and when 
 in motion. The moving arrow is different as a per- 
 ceived object from the arrow at rest in the target. 
 Also it does not matter whether our perception is 
 made up of successive junks of time strung together 
 or the motion perceived by a stream of intelligence 
 which is itself in constant flux. Again our concern 
 is only that we have such a perception, and that the 
 motion of the arrow may so far become an object 
 
PERSONALITY 203 
 
 that we can calculate its energy, and, as in mechanics, 
 build up a science entirely on the basis of motion. 
 Whatever God may be found to be the object of re- 
 ligious perception, need not, in order to be the object 
 of that perception, become a static, unchanging some- 
 thing unlike all else we know. A God who enters 
 into active relations to man can as well as one who 
 does not act be the object of study and perception. 
 
 We may take as our subject motion in some form, 
 or activity, but, as object, that motion is not itself 
 an active element in our mind. What is objective is 
 by definition passive. The motion which is the ob- 
 ject of study in a system of mechanics is held as a 
 static idea within our mind. To be objectively real 
 it must be thus held. To a possible Bergsonian ob- 
 jection that this is not reality we have only the reply 
 that whether it is or not is just the problem under 
 discussion. In relation to one small part of our total 
 experience, that part which we call the religious ex- 
 perience, we are asking whether the conception of its 
 source as an object completely describes that source. 
 Just at this moment we are only seeking to draw out 
 just what it is to be an object. That the course of 
 centuries can be presented to us within the page or 
 single paragraph no one can deny. It is such pres- 
 entation which makes those centuries of the past an 
 object to be studied without influence upon us. 
 Whatever influence they may have had, they do not 
 exert it while being studied. Or if they do, they 
 are then no longer simply objects of study, but 
 sources of experience. The artist is in a different 
 mood when he draws out the technique of the master 
 by patient analysis from what he is when he lets the 
 
204? THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 influence of that master sink in upon him and lead 
 him in new paths, careless often of the old technique. 
 This is more evident in the case of the historian. 
 There is a far stretch from the American who chroni- 
 cles the doings of an Alexander in order to trace his 
 military methods to the same man when he exults in 
 the valor of his race and his own time. His curiosity 
 or interest in ancient things leads him in the one 
 case, while in the other the influence is exerted by the 
 deeds themselves. The two are more or less inter- 
 mixed, except perhaps for the school boy who studies 
 under compulsion. For him Caesar and Cicero are 
 purely objects, without influence or molding power 
 in his life. In themselves they are indifferent to him, 
 and it is only when forced to spend time in studying 
 them that they become distasteful to him. The mo- 
 ment he begins to feel an influence from the life of 
 these men of old they have ceased to be simply ob- 
 jects. The difference is more plainly marked in the 
 differing attitudes of the scientist and the farmer 
 toward plants. To one interested in the theories and 
 the problems of plant life the plant themselves are 
 merely objects in which these problems arise. For 
 the farmer they are still objects, but embodying an 
 entirely new set of problems. The plants themselves 
 do not influence this study. They are, as objects, 
 passive. 
 
 To be passive means that an object is without in- 
 fluence on our will. When the astronomer spends 
 long hours in the study of the stars, at which the 
 poet looks awhile, and at which most men never look 
 but merely glance, the difference is not to be found 
 in the stars but in the men. The astrologist was led 
 
PERSONALITY 205 
 
 to the study of the heavens by a far different motive 
 from that of the modern astronomer. Yet the heav- 
 ens are the same to all. When some object arouses 
 our curiosity, it is our curiosity and not the object 
 which is active. At other times the same object has 
 no effect upon us. When the need of food forces a 
 man to devise new sources of nourishment, it is this 
 need, and not the fruit hanging in view, which impels 
 him to seize it. When well fed, other fruits of the 
 same kind would not win more than a glance. The 
 mathematical objects are plainly passive. It is not 
 the square or ideal circle, nor even, as in mechanics, 
 motion itself, which impels one towards the forming 
 of the mathematical systems. First, in the history 
 of mankind, some practical need, and now the desire 
 for knowledge, is the motive. Those centuries past, 
 so far as they merely are objects of study, have no 
 influence on us to-day. It requires a great effort to 
 make them live once more even in imagination. They 
 come to the mind with no motive, nothing in them- 
 selves to move us to action. That means that they 
 are without influence on the will. Man seeks them, 
 not they him. As objects of perception, they are 
 what is seen, not our motive in looking; as objects of 
 conception, they are the results of study, not the 
 explanation of it; as objects of will, they are acted 
 on, and not themselves active. This is true even of 
 will itself when it becomes an object. If I seek to 
 change the purpose of another man, I study it, find 
 out what its weak points are, and I attack it. As 
 an object, it may resist, but not itself influence me. 
 So long as it is merely an object, it remains outside 
 of my will. To be more than this it must enter into 
 
206 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 my life, and as a motive or influence change my 
 actions. But then it is no longer an object. I may 
 study my purposes and motives, but so long as they 
 are studied as objects they are not influencing me. 
 This accounts for the difficulty of this study of our 
 own intentions. The moment the intention or pur- 
 pose becomes strong and active it rules, and, ruling, 
 no longer is passive and an object. Whatever can 
 be called an object is so called because it is passive, 
 and, being passive, without influence on the will. 
 
 It might be regarded as axiomatic that what was 
 passive could not explain action. Since our ordi- 
 nary speech, however, does not recognise experience 
 as active, we must make clear the consequences of the 
 restrictions of the objective idea. Passive resistance 
 may explain the limitations of some experiences. 
 We find we can not go straight ahead because of 
 some object, a tree or a rock, in our path. But the 
 tree which changes our path does not explain why 
 we took that path. Explanation, in this as in crim- 
 inal trials, must be found in the motive. An object 
 is not a motive. As object, as passive, it does not 
 originate anything, and therefore can not be ap- 
 pealed to in explanation of any activity. Experi- 
 ence is due to motion of some sort. To bring an ob- 
 ject into the focus of our attention there must be 
 change. No one object is forever in that focus, so 
 that to bring it to focus there must be this change, 
 this coming of the new object into prominence, which 
 we are trying to bring into relation with the rest of 
 life. So in the phrase " explanation of an experi- 
 ence," we really mean explanation of the coming of 
 this particular object into the center of conscious- 
 
PERSONALITY 207 
 
 ness. This may be by some power in the experience 
 itself, as when an explosion startles us into instant 
 attention, or it may be as the result of our desire, as 
 when we yield ourselves to day dreams. Both the 
 explosion and the day dream are objects, but neither 
 as object explains its own occurrence. The sudden- 
 ness of the explosion, due to change somewhere, gives 
 the scientific explanation of the one, and our desire 
 the explanation of the other. The explosion can not 
 be explained unless we know the conditions which pre- 
 ceded it, so our dreams need to be related to the de- 
 sire which allowed them life. The object, which is 
 passive, and can only obstruct change, does not con- 
 tain within itself its own explanation. The one ex- 
 ception to this is when some experience is itself an 
 object. In such a case, however, as with our will, 
 both the explanation and the experience are objects. 
 Neither explain why we now bring them into ques- 
 tion. As objects they are not motives. So far as 
 the religious experience brings us face to face only 
 with an object, we have no explanation of its reason 
 for existence. The object of religious devotion, if 
 merely object, passive recipient of worship, can not 
 give us an explanation of why we seek or serve. 
 
 The alternative directly opposed to that indicated 
 by the word object is what we have meant to suggest 
 by the word source. In an object we ignore all ac- 
 tivity so far as any influence on us is concerned. In 
 a source we are interested only in the activity. A 
 source may be an object when that object is regarded 
 as the explanation of something exterior to us, and 
 source and result are together in our mind. The 
 source is then an object because of its lack of effect 
 
208 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 on us. As source, however, even when objective, it 
 does affect something. Our interest here is in the 
 sequence of source and result. Source is a general 
 word, including mere sequence, as when we speak of 
 the source of a river meaning simply the start of it, 
 or causal, as when we conceive of the desire as the 
 source of activity, or avoiding the theories of paral- 
 lelism, when we attribute the explosion to the intro- 
 duction of some new element not present before. In 
 each case the change is referred back to what we call 
 the source. Whether the source itself is regarded as 
 active, or whether the motion simply starts from the 
 source, and has been potentially present in it, the 
 source may be regarded as the origin of the motion. 
 In the physical world the source may not be the 
 cause of motion, but only the object in which or on 
 which the cause operated. The source of an electric 
 shock may be the broken electric light wire, while the 
 cause is the electricity in the wire. The real source 
 is then the electric energy, while the wire is only 
 apparently the source. In this use of the word, 
 source and cause become coincident, except that the 
 word source implies change, and cause may apply to 
 some static condition. Also the source may always 
 be the object of study, and the energy resident in it 
 observable only in its results. To describe some- 
 thing as source, then, means that it is either active or 
 the residing place of activity. 
 
 When it is the source of an experience that we are 
 considering this definition becomes more important 
 than when material objects alone are considered. 
 In the physical world the source is the object in 
 which the activity resides, while in the mental world, 
 
PERSONALITY 209 
 
 where we meet activity face to face, the source is the 
 activity or is more closely bound up with it than in 
 the material universe. The source of my experience 
 of speaking is my desire to speak. The desire is the 
 expression and not merely the residence of the will 
 power which results in the spoken words. Taking it 
 roughly, the desire is the cause of the speech, if we 
 accept the view that every real desire is an effort to 
 do something, and if it remains mere unaccomplished 
 desire, it is only because some other desire proves 
 stronger. Whether this is true or not, the source of 
 an experience is the desire which leads to it. This 
 desire, when carried into action, is what we call our 
 will. I have the experience of being in this room be- 
 cause I willed to come into it and to stay in it. The 
 object of the experience and the source are in this 
 case different. The object is the room. When my 
 desire or will leads me here I find it as it is. The 
 will or desire may be forgotten once I am here, or it 
 may never have been a conscious desire, but in either 
 case the cause of the change, the reason for the 
 change from the perception of the hall to that of the 
 room, is found in the will, whether above or below the 
 threshold of consciousness. When the source is 
 plainly outside of the will it must be one that can 
 control the will. Were I brought into this room tied 
 hand and foot, it would still be will that brought me 
 here, but this time the will of another. Under the 
 constraint of natural forces the same holds true. 
 An earthquake forces itself on my notice only because 
 it is more powerful than I. I can not escape it if I 
 would. For the time being my body refuses to obey 
 my will, because of the presence of a stronger force. 
 
THE &ELt6iou 
 
 To be the source of experience is to be a force which 
 controls the will of man. 
 
 In the source of an experience, since it is the occa- 
 sion for that experience, is to be sought the explana- 
 tion of that mental state. If nothing opposes me 
 "strongly enough to affect my action, whatever I will 
 to do is done. The will is a sufficient explanation of 
 the action. When I am passively the object of an- 
 other's will, then the explanation of the action is to 
 be found solely in his will and purpose. When the 
 experience is forced on us solely by some natural 
 force, then it can be explained only by that force, 
 and that force gives us a sufficient explanation. It 
 is not necessary that we explain the source or its 
 existence. All that is now in question is that the 
 source, whatever may be its reason for existence, fur- 
 nishes the reason for the experience. When we find 
 an experience which does not yield to this test we can 
 be sure that what we have thought to be its source 
 was not truly or adequately so. It may be like the 
 source of a river, which accounts only for its start, 
 but ignores the fact that each tributary has also a 
 source. In such a case the entire explanation of the 
 volume of the river is to be found only by a study 
 of all its sources. Taken together, they will furnish 
 a sufficient explanation for the volume of water. In 
 dealing with our experience we turn to the source to 
 give us such an explanation. As the source of the 
 river does not explain its course later, when rocky 
 or gravelly banks impede it, so the source of an ex- 
 perience does not explain the objects which are found 
 in it. My purpose which led me to this room does 
 not guarantee the nature of the room. It may, in- 
 
PERSONALITY 
 
 deed will, if the trip is a voyage of discovery, be 
 equally well satisfied by any object. The distinction 
 between source and object holds very clearly. What 
 I find, if before entering I had no idea of what was 
 in here, can not account for my coming in. Only 
 my curiosity can do that. Thus the source and the 
 object may be very distinct. They also may be iden- 
 tical. When I focus attention on my purposes, and 
 strive to bolster up my courage, the object and the 
 source are for the moment identical. The desire to 
 fight, for instance, is the explanation for my desire 
 to have more physical courage, that is, to have a 
 stronger desire to fight. The source of one moment 
 may be the object of the next, or the object of this 
 moment the source of the experience of the next, but 
 it is the same purpose which is alternately source 
 and object. The purpose or desire is the explana- 
 tion of its making itself its own object. When we 
 describe any influence as the source of an experience 
 we therefore mean that we find in that influence or 
 will a sufficient explanation for the existence of the 
 experience. It accounts for the activity. While a 
 thing merely object can account for nothing but the 
 contents of that experience, the source accounts for 
 the having an experience at all. 
 
 When we turn to religion and seek to apply these 
 terms which we have defined so as to seem exclusive 
 we find that the application is difficult. From the 
 ordinary point of view, God is both the object and 
 the source of religion. He is known, and also only 
 in Him can be found the explanation of that knowl- 
 edge. This use of the two terms forces us to ask in 
 some detail how far religion allows the use, and how 
 
THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 far it is completely described, by either or both of 
 the contrasting terms, " object " and " source." 
 
 That the unseen term of the religious relation is 
 rightly called an object is evident at first sight. 
 This unseen existence is the goal of all religious 
 striving. Whether by the primitive savage with his 
 magical rites, or by the mystic's destruction of de- 
 sire, as well as by the obedience yielded to the moral 
 code as divine, the unseen is here reckoned with as 
 an object. It is something which can be sought. It 
 is something which can be in some degree known. 
 More than this, in our very first analysis of religion, 
 we found that the experience was largely subject to 
 man's will. Within limits he could change or de- 
 stroy it. It was object of his will, as well as of his 
 knowledge. To know the will of God, so that it may 
 be reckoned with, may be set forth as the purpose of 
 religion. The savage wishes to know how to influ- 
 ence the god so that he will bring good hunting or 
 good crops. The modern Christian seeks to know 
 God that he may attain perfect peace. However the 
 satisfaction of religion may be conceived, man does 
 put into it his human will. The unseen becomes the 
 object of desire. When, however, we try to com- 
 pletely describe religion as a relation between the 
 human will and an object outside, the difficulties be- 
 gin. The phenomena of conversion, where a man's 
 will is changed as it seems at times in spite of himself, 
 points in another direction. This object, which, 
 when his will is directed toward it, lends itself to his 
 desires, when his will is not set on the right road, re- 
 fuses to answer to the summons. Very frequently 
 the man who seeks God believes that he has not found 
 
PERSONALITY 213 
 
 Him, and while he is regarded by others as very de- 
 vout, himself deplores his inability to reach the object 
 of his desires. These two facts point in the same 
 direction. As at times the religious experience comes 
 without being sought, so at others when sought it is 
 not reached. In the one case it appears as more than 
 the man willed or desired, and in the second as less. 
 It gives or withdraws itself, at times at least, with- 
 out reference to man's will. In this connection we 
 must also take into account the fact that when the 
 object of the religious search is attained there comes 
 a renewed activity. The religious fanatic will do 
 deeds of exertion or of self-denial which before his 
 religious mood came upon him he would not have at- 
 tempted. The Moslem fanatic who hurls himself to 
 death against modern rifles, or the reformed seeker 
 after pleasure who now undergoes many privations 
 under the bidding of his new faith, are sufficient proof 
 that this object, if merely an object, is one whose 
 possession has a very active influence. That this is 
 true of some other objects is no valid objection. The 
 conversion to the search for knowledge may bring 
 similar self-denial in the life of the scientist. The 
 pursuit of knowledge is thereby put in the same class 
 with religion, and we have another illustration of an 
 object whose possession brings new power. 
 
 Since we found that objectivity meant passivity, it 
 is evident that with an experience of the religious 
 type we must either broaden our definition of objec- 
 tivity, or admit that the word does not completely 
 describe the religious object. In the interest of 
 clearness, the latter is the better course. So far as 
 it is the object of desire, or of knowledge, the object 
 
214. THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 of the religious experience is rightly so described. 
 It has, however, as we have seen, other aspects. As 
 the man who catches a wild animal and attempts to 
 keep him in activity discovers that he has to deal 
 with something different from a stone, something 
 which can do more than passively resist, so the stu- 
 dent of religion finds that the object of religion pos- 
 sesses a certain activity and energy of its own. As 
 in the one case we say that we have to do with some- 
 thing alive, so in the case of religion we must make 
 use of some other category to complete the descrip- 
 tion. The unseen term of the religious experience is 
 something more than a mere object. 
 
 In applying the second of our two terms we find a 
 term adequate for the description of those character- 
 istics of religion which do not fall within the meaning 
 of the word object. As source, the unseen term of 
 the religious relation is recognised as active. It 
 gives full value to the phenomena of conversion. 
 Recognising that from the unknown comes into man's 
 life at times those influences and forces which we call 
 spiritual and religious, it has its place in a proper 
 and full definition of religion. By the energy and 
 activity which come from this something outside of 
 the human individual is to be explained the vigor of 
 the fanatic and the self-devotion of the martyr dying 
 at the stake. To one to whom the power of reli- 
 gion comes, unlocking a new source of strength which 
 makes it possible to endure life whatever that life 
 may be, no other way is open than to ascribe to this 
 unseen power the new life. As an explanation of this 
 force in human life, and also as an explanation of its 
 lack at times even when sought, we can turn only to 
 
ttiis unseen term itself. It is a source of the experi- 
 ence. Yet, as from the beginning of our enquiry, 
 the contradictory nature of the religious facts stands 
 in the way of our yielding ourselves completely to 
 this line of approach, the unseen term can not 
 entirely explain all the facts. Man, in the early 
 stages, worships what god he will. Even in the midst 
 of the dominance of clan worship among primitive 
 tribes there are those who seek to worship in another 
 way. than the orthodox. The power of religion at 
 times seems to express itself rather in disunion than 
 in union. The modern histories of religion, in their 
 effort to explain the varying forms by the differing 
 influences at work on religion at different times, move 
 along the same line. Religion, to their view, is modi- 
 fied by its environment. The facts which we men- 
 tioned of the ability of a man to reject religion or 
 to change its character point to the will of man as a 
 partial explanation for the phenomena of religion. 
 So far as religion may be an object, a thing sought 
 or known, it is not a source. Whether there exists 
 or can exist a source which is not an object is no con- 
 cern of ours, for we are dealing with a source which 
 is object. The whole effort to cultivate the devo- 
 tional life or the mystic state shows that in religion 
 men exercise their wills. In their wills, then, is to be 
 sought a partial explanation of religion. So far as 
 this is true, the source of religion is something wait- 
 ing to be found and known. It is an object and 
 passive. 
 
 Thus neither of the two terms taken alone is ade- 
 quate to describe the religious object. It is both 
 source and object. Yet we do not therefore need to 
 
216 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 reject either. Both these elements, passivity and ac- 
 tivity, enter into religion. The source is something 
 which may be sought, and, when found, modified, so 
 far as man is concerned, by man's will. On the 
 theological side this is the doctrine of the possibility 
 of sin. Yet this object is itself active, at times forc- 
 ing itself on man, and at other times even found as 
 the result of effort, enfusing new energy into the 
 weary and flagging will. Again referring to theol- 
 ogy, we have in this a certain approximation to the 
 doctrine of God's grace. Both these elements are 
 present, and both must enter into any final descrip- 
 tion of religion. 
 
 Any description of religion which is at all com- 
 plete must be in terms which allow for activity both 
 by the human will and by the religious object. It is 
 not, however, a case of two forces working on the 
 same object, for the existence which is the partial 
 source is also the object of religion. In the experi- 
 ence we have an object which partly explains itself, 
 that is, is a source, and is partly the object on which 
 another force acts. So far the description of this 
 object is not different from that of a physical object 
 which is the source of energy. The electric wire 
 may be handled, and cut, and moved where we will, 
 yet it is also the source or bearer of the electric en- 
 ergy. The difference lies in the fact that our object 
 is not an object of perception. The force is known 
 by its results, and the object is an object as regards 
 our will; we take it into account and will to change 
 or destroy its power over us, but we do not see it as 
 we see the wire. In this case, then, of religion, the 
 term object implies just the opposite of source. 
 
PERSONALITY 217 
 
 Both terms are within the realm of will activity. So 
 far, then, this situation satisfies our third possibil- 
 ity, that the religious object may be a personality. 
 We have an object which is not an object of percep- 
 tion, which is a source of energy, and which is an ob- 
 ject of desire or repulsion. In applying this term 
 we need to notice that the fact that we are not deal- 
 ing with an object of perception renders some cate- 
 gories which are applicable to physical objects of no 
 use to us here. The problem as to whether the ob- 
 ject is simple or complex, one or many, is not a 
 question to be decided by observation. The unity, 
 or lack of it, to be found within those existences 
 which are objects of the will is of a different type 
 from that which marks physical unity. To develop 
 this is another task. Only we do not want to con- 
 clude that by saying that our object satisfies the 
 definition of personality we thereby shelve the prob- 
 lem of the oneness or multiplicity of gods. The will 
 can and does include as one object things which are 
 themselves multiple. An army is the object in the 
 general's mind when he issues his commands, yet it is 
 composed of many persons. So we can call the re- 
 ligious object a personality, without jumping to 
 hasty conclusions. We mean only that this non- 
 perceptual object is also a source of energy. 
 
 The other half of our definition of personality is 
 that to completely satisfy our third alternative the 
 action must be mutual. The will must be affected by 
 as well as affect the religious object. The will must 
 also be object as well as source. This is true, if it 
 holds at all, in a different sense from that in which 
 it is correct to speak of the will, as being influenced 
 
218 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 by physical objects. A tool affects us if, when we 
 seek to use it, we find it dull. It also wakens in us 
 desire when its bright edge suggests its use, and we 
 try it. In each of these cases the desire already ex- 
 ists. The activity is there, and is only thwarted or 
 awakened, as the case may be, by the object. To me, 
 or to a tired mechanic, the tool suggests no use. To 
 me, because I have had no former skill in working 
 with it, and to the mechanic because he has seen all 
 of it that he wants. Whether or not the appeal 
 comes depends on the man. With religion the case 
 is different. The man who in the crisis of conversion 
 feels his will and desires overborne, and his will 
 changed, is always insistent that the change came 
 not from within but from an exterior source. The 
 will itself is changed. The artist remains an artist 
 whether or not the sight of a picture or of a brush 
 impels him to paint, but the religious man who has 
 experienced conversion is not the same; his will and 
 desires are not the same as if the conversion had not 
 occurred. The same is true of the slower processes 
 of religious training. A child trained to pray is not 
 the same as the child brought up with no desire to 
 pray. That this is true also of secular education 
 only puts education of whatever kind in the same 
 class as religion in respect to this matter. Educa- 
 tion as conversion consists in training, that is, chang- 
 ing, the will. The will feels the effect of a force and 
 influence outside of itself. It is the object of that 
 force. Just as in education the child feels the effect 
 of the influences brought to bear on him, so in reli- 
 gion he feels the effect of forces which act on him. 
 This direct effect of social forces is not the same as 
 
PERSONALITY 219 
 
 " education by experience," though in some sense it 
 is true that a man may be educated by opposition. 
 A man may, in the presence of difficulties presented 
 by nature, conquer, and in conquering learn. Yet to 
 do this there must be the will to conquer. Occasions 
 can bring to the front such a will. Many of us have 
 been in a fog on a mountain and found our way 
 safely, and felt only pleasure in the difficulties, on the 
 same ground where a man without the will to perse- 
 vere lost heart and was lost. So opposition may 
 bring out what there is in a man ; it can not put 
 something new into him. The mountain doesn't cre- 
 ate but only rouses in us the desire to climb it. But 
 what religion brings is new life. Thus it differs 
 from the physical object. Religion brings to bear 
 power upon the will. We have thus a mutual inter- 
 action. As the religious object both acts and is 
 acted on by the human will, so the will acts and is 
 acted on. 
 
 This mutual interaction which we have been using 
 as the definition of personality does not complete 
 that description. We did not need to define further 
 at the time, but now that we are seen plainly to be 
 dealing with a force acting on and acted on by our 
 personality it becomes important to be more definite. 
 If the personality which is behind religion is mu- 
 tually interactive with our personality, then it must 
 be of the same general type. There is a meeting 
 point which is common to the two, or else they have 
 everything in common, for, since they interact, they 
 must meet. Having one point in common, they can 
 be brought under one head. They can be compared 
 within the same universe of discourse. In the case 
 
220 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 of religion, however, we find that the meeting point 
 is the experience. What we call the religious experi- 
 ence is just the consciousness of this meeting of the 
 force of our will and personality and of the other 
 force. These two do not act on some third object, 
 but on each other. In the experience the two con- 
 scious forces come into direct relation, or we may 
 put it that in coming into relation these two forces 
 come into consciousness. The relation is essentially 
 personal. Only because it is distinguished as an- 
 other will, an inner force yet not our own personality, 
 is the religious object referred to a separate source. 
 It is the special mark of personality that it can thus 
 come into immediate relation to our will. Nature 
 acts on us by rousing in us certain emotions, of fear 
 or curiosity. Another man acts on us by the direct 
 effect of his personality. Disregarding the epistemo- 
 logical difficulties of knowing how his will exists, 
 because after all we are convinced that it does exist, 
 in our practical dealings with our fellows we are 
 conscious that their will affects and is affected by our 
 will. Of a stone this is not true, nor even of natural 
 forces such as electricity. We may use electricity, 
 but we can not change it. We may throw a stone, 
 but we can not direct its course once it has left us. 
 A man, though, by the written word, or even only by 
 our thought of what he might say, can influence us 
 though he be far distant, or even dead. By the 
 great leader new desires are created and others killed. 
 Will acts on will. So it is with religion. The re- 
 ligious force is one exercised directly upon our will. 
 The only thing in human life to which it bears com- 
 parison is personality and will. 
 
LECTURE VII 
 A FOUNDATION FOR THEOLOGY 
 
 Other characteristics of that personality which is 
 behind religion could perhaps be deduced from the 
 religious experience, but it is not necessary for us to 
 consider them here. The main points which we out- 
 lined as the most important for the proper study of 
 religion have been considered. It remains for us to 
 indicate the relation of our conclusions to other 
 methods of study. As our method has been the philo- 
 sophical, the one contrasting with it is the scientific. 
 We have therefore to ask how far our results affect 
 a scientific study of the religious experience. 
 
 Before attempting to bring our work into connec- 
 tion with that of a science of religion it will be well 
 to indicate what it is that makes a particular method 
 or study scientific. The first mark of a science is 
 that it has reference to some distinct field. While 
 philosophy may analyse the meaning of existence as 
 found in all existent things, or of knowledge as ap- 
 plying to all things known, science limits its en- 
 quiries to some definite part of experience and of 
 knowledge. Physics deals with those experiences 
 which are the result of mechanical forces, chemistry 
 with those of a chemical nature. Astronomy deals 
 with the stars, and although it makes use of both 
 physics and chemistry, it is a distinct science because 
 
 221 
 
222 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 its field is distinct. A science takes a concrete ex- 
 perience, one that is distinctly individual, and seeks 
 to explain it. It takes typical individuals, it is true, 
 but only because they are near the average or 
 norm. The abnormal must also be explained if the 
 science is to reach its full extent, but as variations 
 from the type. Each individual case must be ac- 
 counted for. To do this, a narrow study of a small 
 field is necessary. General laws are the result of 
 such a study, as well as of the general deductions of 
 philosophy, but they are of a different type. Such a 
 method as that which we used in proving the reality 
 of the religious experience would be out of place in 
 the science of religion. Science studies the phenom- 
 ena, not what people think of it or name it. While 
 for philosophy we must take into account the one 
 who has the experience, science so far as possible 
 ignores him and sees only the field which it is study- 
 ing. One science is therefore divided from another 
 by the field in which it is working. That field must 
 be distinct. 
 
 Since it is the field of study which marks off one 
 science from another, and science disregards the 
 problems of knowledge, it must be certified in some 
 other way that what the scientist is studying has 
 some reality. The type or kind of reality which it 
 possesses must be made clearer, that we may know 
 how far the scientist's work affects the rest of ex- 
 perience. The student of dreams who to-day would 
 treat them as Joseph treated the dreams of Pharaoh 
 would not receive much consideration. Such an in- 
 terpretation of dreams ascribes to them a reality 
 which we are not willing to grant. The same is true 
 
A FOUNDATION FOR THEOLOGY 228 
 
 of astrology. The stars are undoubtedly real, but 
 the connection which astrology presupposes and the 
 experience which it studies have not the same reality. 
 So we reject that science, not because the field of its 
 work is not definite, but because we deny validity to 
 that study. The relation which it assumes is un- 
 real. No science can decide this reality for itself, 
 for its attention is bent entirely on the field of its 
 work, and hence it can not decide how that field is 
 related to other fields. The fields may overlap, as 
 with physics and chemistry or astronomy, but as 
 each of these fields is real, each science pursues its 
 work in the field of reality. Where one was unreal, 
 as with the mediaeval search for something to trans- 
 mute baser metals into gold, no overlapping could 
 give validity to the combination. It is also not a 
 question of the discovery of new instances of the 
 type. A science may discover new electrical phe- 
 nomena, but only the same reality is given to these 
 as to those previously known. When the experiences 
 are of a new type, or of one previously unstudied, 
 such as the alleged instances of telepathy, the in- 
 stances must be proven real before the bar of general 
 experience if the student is to be allowed unre- 
 strained to claim validity for his conclusions. So 
 long as we deny, or the world denies, reality to 
 telepathy, so long will the science of telepathy be an 
 outcast. Once granted the reality of the experi- 
 ences it studies, then its conclusions are at least 
 credible. Since anything which is studied thereby 
 acquires a certain reality, if only in the mind of the 
 student, the question becomes one of the kind of 
 reality it possesses. Whether telepathy depends on 
 
2*4 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 the imagination of the man who tells us of it, or 
 whether it occurs as he says it does, is the question. 
 Reality thus becomes an attribute of relations be- 
 tween experiences, varying in its meaning with our 
 use. The modern student of dreams, who tries to 
 account for their occurrence in the terms of modern 
 psychology is awarded sufficient reality for his pur- 
 pose, while the Joseph-like interpreter of dreams is 
 denied it. In the latter case the relation to events 
 is denied, in the former it is granted. Before a sci- 
 ence can be accepted it must have this seal of ap- 
 proval. In the acceptance of a science this grant of 
 reality is included. 
 
 Granted to a science a distinct field and a real 
 experience, the scientific results will depend for their 
 truth on the correctness and value of the method 
 used. For a science to be distinct, this method must 
 be distinct. Where there seem to be distinctions and 
 yet the same method we really have the same science 
 with subdivisions. The science of history is one sci- 
 ence, even though it may for convenience be divided 
 into military and economic. The method is the 
 same. On the similarity or the dissimilarity of the 
 method depends the place of the science in the gen- 
 eral field of scientific knowledge. On this depends 
 also the degree of acceptance to be given to its re- 
 sults. The conclusions of the historical sciences are 
 not accepted in the field of biology, but are of value 
 to the student of economics. The method is not one 
 chosen arbitrarily by the science, but one forced on 
 it by the phenomena which it studies. What the 
 method is can not be determined therefore by the 
 science itself, for a method, like a man, is unable to 
 
A FOUNDATION FOR THEOLOGY 
 
 see its own faults. To this is to be ascribed the long 
 time necessary to draw men away from astrology 
 and necromancy, and the vogue of spiritualism even 
 in our own day. Unless one studies the method in 
 relation to the whole of experience, no one can be 
 certain that it is the right one. To have this assur- 
 ance, philosophy must indicate for each science ita 
 general method. 
 
 The correctness of a method depends on its valid- 
 ity. Not only must it be distinct, it must also be 
 true. It is evident that a science can not examine 
 into this validity. A method which is proper for 
 studying rocks or metals is not also the method for 
 studying truth. We must have some way of getting 
 the opinion of a third person or principle. We must 
 appeal to the whole field of truth. Such a study of 
 validity is made or implied before we accept the con- 
 clusions of any science. The experimental method 
 of physics is granted validity because the phenomena 
 are such that by comparison and trial and error we 
 can arrive at the truth. Astronomy we accept be- 
 cause we have faith in the methods of celestial me- 
 chanics, which in turn depends on our belief in mathe- 
 matics. The methods of the modern experimental 
 psychology have been doubted because some have 
 maintained that physiological experiment did not re- 
 veal truth in relation to the mental life, that the re- 
 lations between mental phenomena were not to be 
 discovered by any apparatus. Only the philosoph- 
 ical study of consciousness can decide such a ques- 
 tion. If a science is to be firmly established, its 
 method must have the seal of approval. 
 
 Besides these limitations of field and method which 
 
226 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 define logically the science, there are limits, less plain 
 but perhaps even more strongly set. The first of 
 these is the presuppositions of the science. As in 
 mathematics certain principles are taken as axio- 
 matic, so in any science certain truths about its field 
 of work are assumed to be true. Any proof of them 
 lies outside of the science. Not always clearly ex- 
 pressed or even consciously in mind, these yet set 
 limits to the extension of that method of study. 
 Any natural science assumes that the world is an or- 
 dered whole, that for every happening there is an 
 adequate explanation. The historical sciences as- 
 sume the general trustworthiness of mankind. Only 
 when there is an explanation of a deviation from the 
 truth or very good evidence of it does the historian 
 doubt. The modern experimental psychologist, so 
 far as he is simply a scientist, assumes that the 
 theory of psycho-physical parallelism is true. He 
 takes this over from philosophy, even if only as 
 a working hypothesis. The science of psychology 
 comes by this to have certain limits which he does 
 not dream, or does nothing more than dream, of 
 crossing. Political economy assumes that men's ac- 
 tions can be explained in terms of their industrial 
 life. Any other explanation lies beyond the reach 
 of that science. These presuppositions thus lay 
 down practical limits beyond which the scientist does 
 not seek to go. The assumptions may be wrong, and 
 it may be that he should go beyond, but so long as 
 he believes in these ideas he will not try to cross the 
 boundary. These over-beliefs of the scientist thus 
 have a large part to play. They must therefore be 
 
A FOUNDATION FOR THEOLOGY 
 
 examined if we are to be sure of what are to be the 
 practical limits of any scientific enquiry. 
 
 There is another limit of the same kind which must 
 be taken into account. In a certain sense every 
 science is a practical matter. Men go into it with 
 some purpose in view. That purpose may not be 
 very closely associated with the production of food, 
 or the search for new luxuries to ease the burden of 
 life, but even the most detached scientist intends in 
 some way to realise a purpose. He does not simply 
 go out with his eyes open, and wait for truth to fall 
 into his mind unsought. Instead he seeks the truth 
 by the aid of certain methods, and he seeks it in cer- 
 tain fairly definite directions. At the least he is 
 satisfying his curiosity about some special set of 
 phenomena. For the mass of men, however, some- 
 thing more than curiosity is necessary. Those in- 
 quiries which we call the great sciences, which are the 
 serious work of men's life, and whose results are 
 taught in our universities, have behind them much 
 more than the satisfying of an idle curiosity. Men 
 put time and energy and wealth into them because 
 they believe that there will be some substantial re- 
 sult, some knowledge which will affect life. Man 
 comes into contact with the mechanical and elec- 
 trical forces, and seeks to know how they affect him, 
 or can be used by him. He seeks by a knowledge of 
 geology to understand the history of the world, as 
 well as to plan accurately where mines should be dug. 
 But if curiosity were the only purpose, this would 
 limit inquiry to what was new. The old familiar 
 lines of work would be neglected. So whatever 
 
THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 might be the purpose, it would determine what would 
 be the study of the scientist. In determining there- 
 fore what should be the problems of a science, we 
 have to determine what should be the purpose of the 
 student in entering on that field. By a comparison 
 with other sciences, by a study of the meaning of the 
 experience which the science is to observe, we can 
 determine in advance something as to what purpose 
 is likely to be met in the course of the study, and 
 what idea it is that leads one to undertake it. These 
 points make more clear what the actual work is to be. 
 In our study of the religious experience the first 
 point that had a bearing on this question of the 
 science of religion, or to give it its traditional name, 
 theology, is that there is a definite and real field for 
 this science. It must have become evident in our 
 inquiry that there is a very large field open, which 
 has no reference to history as such or to the organi- 
 sation and support of religion as a financial or 
 organisation problem. The data of religion may be 
 the subject matter of many sciences. The sacred 
 writings of any people may be studied with all the 
 resources of literary study or of philology. That 
 there is a religious literature does not, however, 
 make this a distinct science. The writings are ex- 
 amined and judged as to their history and meaning 
 as we would judge any great piece of literature. As 
 a history may be judged as to its literary quality, 
 and as to its value and significance as prose, so a 
 religious narrative can be similarly judged. In 
 neither case have we a new science. Only here the 
 religious data are in their expression the subject 
 matter of the science of literature. Whether the 
 
A FOUNDATION FOR THEOLOGY 229 
 
 given writing is true or not can not be decided by the 
 literary critic, nor even whether this particular 
 form is normal or not. The results of the critic's 
 work are of value only for his own science of literary 
 criticism. It is only the literary problem he has 
 solved. An appreciation of this would have pre- 
 vented much of the uneasiness over the higher criti- 
 cism. Religion may also be made the subject matter 
 of historical study. The forms and ceremonies of 
 religion may be traced in their development and 
 spread. This they share with the history of any 
 great influence or organisation among mankind. 
 The problems met here are historical, questions of 
 origin and type, of historical cause and effect. 
 Again the question of whether the given religion is 
 the true religion or not is not considered. If each 
 succeeding form is explained historically, the his- 
 torian has done his work. The results are of value 
 for the theologian, but they are valuable not as 
 theology but as history. The history of religion is 
 not a science of religion, in spite of some current 
 usage, any more than a history of the development 
 of physics is the same as the science of physics. A 
 man may be a student of physics without knowing 
 any history, and so a theologian might be ignorant 
 of the development of religion, and yet have the in- 
 sight to make him a great teacher of the science of 
 religion. To the Church Fathers in general no 
 knowledge such as we have of the history of religion 
 was given, and yet their theology is of great value 
 to us. Only confusion can result unless we dis- 
 tinguish as carefully between the history and the 
 science of religion as we are coming to do between 
 
230 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 the literary study of religion and theology. Neither 
 literary criticism nor history constitute the pecu- 
 liar field of a science of religion. 
 
 Each of these studies which we have considered, 
 and also the psychology of religion, deal with the 
 expression of religion. Following the analogy of 
 the natural sciences, there remains another field of 
 effort. Not only the expression of what we have 
 called the source-object of religion, but that object 
 itself can be studied. Physics disregards the prob- 
 lems of psychology, and centers its efforts not on how 
 we know mechanical motion in varying forms, but 
 on what we know. The expression of that knowl- 
 edge in practical life may be the basis of an economic 
 study, or perused by literary critics, but to the 
 physicist the only things of importance are the 
 known facts. The object which is experienced is 
 his sole concern. So in religion, it is possible to dis- 
 regard the historical or literary or economic ex- 
 pression of the knowledge of the religious object, 
 and concern ourselves solely with that object. 
 Though we have not been making a scientific study, 
 we have been studying the object which will be 
 studied by a science of religion. We found that that 
 object, while not completely given, was yet defin- 
 able in certain ways. It acted on the human will in 
 a manner which we call the action of personality. 
 We can say very definitely what things are not this 
 object. It can not be material, for its varying 
 forms are contrary to the nature of matter, as is also 
 its activity. It can not be held within the bounds of 
 the limited human categories, hence what is dis- 
 tinctly human can not belong to or be this object. 
 
A FOUNDATION FOR THEOLOGY 
 
 Whatever is revealed through the religious experi- 
 ence which corresponds to this definition thus fur- 
 nishes a definite field for study. If there is no such 
 object, then there can be no science of religion. 
 There may be psychology or history or literary or 
 economic study of the religious experience, but none 
 of these are a science of that experience, for none 
 of these ask what it is that the experience is an ex- 
 perience of. Consequently no psychology, to take 
 one of the possible lines of approach, can say 
 whether religion is true or false. Only a science 
 which studies the object, and ignores the mode of 
 revelation of that object, can answer such a question. 
 Where the object is ignored, as it is in psychology 
 and the other studies of religion, we can not say 
 whether a given form of expression is true or false. 
 Thus there remains a necessary place for a study 
 of the object of religion. This is the field of the 
 science of religion, ordinarily called theology. 
 
 It is not enough to define a field. If our science is 
 to be real, the field must be real, else our conclusions 
 will have no place in the real world. Real means, in 
 the first place, existence. This we have seen is true 
 of the object of religion. The religious experience 
 is incomplete in itself. Always referring for its 
 origin and character to something beyond itself, 
 it can be explained only by reference to that unseen 
 object. Hence, as the experience undoubtedly exists, 
 we were forced to ascribe a logical existence to the 
 object. Logically, it must exist. Practically, also, 
 this holds true, for we find the object, or asserted 
 object, independent, in part, of the individual will, 
 and so far as agreement exists as to its existence, a 
 
THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 focusing of the social will upon it. As our definition 
 of the existence of objects was that they were the 
 foci of individual perceptions, the religious object, 
 meeting this definition, wins its right to be called an 
 existent object. If there are not one but many ob- 
 jects, a possibility which we have not considered, as 
 it falls within the limits of the science, and not of the 
 philosophy of religion, then each object, as sharing 
 in this social focus, becomes and has the right to be 
 regarded as existent. The relations between these 
 objects and with the individual perception become 
 the field of study for our science. This field, since 
 each term, the object and the individual knower, is 
 real, is itself real, so far as existence is concerned. 
 By a process similar to those which have given rise 
 to the conception of physical objects, and forced on 
 mankind recognition of their existence, so is the 
 recognition of the spiritual object forced on us. As 
 the material object, the result of this process of con- 
 ception, is regarded as existent, so we term the ob- 
 ject of the religious experience to be an existent 
 reality, and the science which studies it a study of 
 reality. 
 
 The relation which gives the problems to a science 
 must not only be between existent terms, it must also 
 be valid. There might be a science of magic, the 
 rain charm and the rain which by coincidence follows 
 are both real, yet the science would not deal with 
 reality, for the relation with which it would work 
 is not a valid relation. There is no necessary con- 
 nection between the charm and the rain. Our science 
 of religion must therefore be shown to deal with a 
 valid relation if it is to be fully established as a 
 
A FOUNDATION FOR THEOLOGY 
 
 science. This is the significance of our proof of the 
 validity of the religious experience. In showing that 
 it is really an experience of something beyond itself, 
 we have established a necessary connection such as 
 does not exist between the rain charm and the rain. 
 Because the claim of religion to a source outside of 
 itself and therefore to a connection with such a 
 source is valid, our science is dealing with a real, 
 and not merely an asserted relation. The field of 
 its study is the world of real relations as well as of 
 real objects. An inquiry into the nature of reality 
 is no more required of theology than it is of physics. 
 Whatever we may mean by reality, it applies to this 
 spirit world as it does to the material world. What- 
 ever may be the inner meaning of validity, and of 
 value in general, it applies here. The field of the- 
 ology is this definite part of the real and valid world 
 of knowledge. 
 
 Though possessing a distinct field for work, a 
 science does not stand on its own foundation unless 
 it has a distinct method. While we have not devel- 
 oped a method proper to the science of religion, we 
 have indicated some of its necessary characters. In 
 the first place we found that it must be a formal 
 method. We are not dealing with an object which 
 can be handled as can a rock or even a man. We 
 know of it only through its relation to man in the 
 religious experience. Its existence, even, is a matter 
 of logical deduction. Thus to study it there is 
 necessary a method which will be able to treat with 
 such a formal object. The ways of the sciences 
 which deal with matter are not ours. Instead of 
 experiment, which may be called the typical method 
 
234 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 of natural science, we are able to use only logical 
 analysis. Theology thus stands with the sciences of 
 history and ethics, rather than with the sciences of 
 nature. As history by its methods studies the great 
 movements of human life in their development, and 
 ethics and economics, from different points of view, 
 study those movements in their inner relations, so 
 religion is the province of the theologian. No more 
 than with history or economics is a method of experi- 
 ment or microscopic examination possible. The 
 principles which are being studied can not be ex- 
 amined directly, but only through their results. As 
 history with the facts before it, tries to relate these 
 facts one to the other, so the theologian, with the 
 facts of religion before him, has to point out the 
 underlying relation to the source of the experience, 
 and explain the experience in terms of the unseen 
 source. In this sense the science of religion is a 
 formal science. 
 
 Theology is a formal science, but it is not an 
 a priori science. Again like history, and unlike the 
 normative sciences, or mathematics, it does not study 
 what should be, but what is. Historically this has 
 not always been true of theology. In many ages 
 men have simply deduced from their idea of God 
 what must be his relation to man, and then explained 
 the religious experience in these terms. Such an 
 a priori method we have discarded. Theology must 
 be built up from a study of the facts, not brought 
 down from heaven to rule those facts. The test of 
 any asserted revelation is our revelation from God, 
 that is, the expression of God in us. To study his 
 character we must study the revelation which we have. 
 
A FOUNDATION FOR THEOLOGY 235 
 
 Our conception of God is then the result of our 
 study of the facts as known to us, a study not of 
 what should be, but of what is. In this its work is 
 not philosophic. In asking the meaning of an ex- 
 perience as we have been doing, we have been laying 
 down necessary conclusions. In a sense we are ask- 
 ing what must be, and so, what should be to make this 
 experience have the reality and validity which it 
 claims. There might be some argument in favor 
 of calling such a study theology, and of giving to the 
 science of religion another name. It is true that 
 the usual conception of theology is that of a phi- 
 losophy. Since, however, theology has always, 
 sought to know God, to give all the information 
 about him which is possible, and it is evident that 
 we have nearly exhausted the possibilities of a method 
 which depends on universal agreement, we should 
 call theology that which gives more information. 
 To go further on the way to the truth, we need a 
 science which will pick out the truth from the false- 
 hood, and be a more exact guide. This is the work 
 of the science of religion, which therefore has more 
 right to the name of theology. This study does not 
 ask what the relation to God involves, but what kind 
 of a God will explain the revelation which we have. 
 Theology then takes its place among the a postiori 
 sciences. 
 
 There is one final characteristic of our science 
 which marks it off from history or ethics. Each of 
 these is in some part descriptive. History has to 
 describe the great underlying principles of develop- 
 ment so that we may be able to recognise them. 
 Ethics, so far as it includes morals, must describe 
 
236 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 the principles of morality. The same is true of 
 economics, which has largely to do with a description 
 of the principles which actuate mankind in industrial 
 life. These historical, ethical, or economic princi- 
 ples when rightly described are recognisable. We 
 can see the law of supply and demand at work, once 
 it is shown to us. In religion, however, we can never 
 be shown the object we seek. No description can be 
 given which will be accepted by any one else. As 
 we may say, there is no objectivity to this object, 
 nothing which makes it possible to describe it. Our 
 study would have to be entirely explanatory. What 
 we have is an experience which does not explain itself. 
 We find a conceptual object which explains it in its 
 varying forms. But we also find that we have no 
 description of this object. We are in the world of 
 logic, but not as mathematicians, saying what should 
 be, but in a world of concepts saying what must be 
 if what we see to be real is real. Mathematics, while 
 applied to the material universe, has in itself no 
 necessary connection with it. God, on the other 
 hand, as studied in theology, is known only through 
 his connection with a part of that material universe 
 that is, with man. The methods of the theologian 
 are thus distinct ; unlike the natural sciences because 
 not experimental, unlike the normative sciences be- 
 cause deductions from facts not from ideals, and 
 unlike mathematics, in having an origin in the mate- 
 rial world. 
 
 The validity of such a method depends on the 
 existence of a relation which does thus take its rise in 
 the material universe, or is known through that 
 
A FOUNDATION FOR THEOLOGY 237 
 
 universe, yet is not describable in material terms, 
 and lies in the field of concepts, where it is known 
 only by its expression or relation to a part of the 
 material world. Such a condition is satisfied in the 
 case of personality. Individual human personality 
 can not be described in terms of objective life, and 
 yet has its expression and value for knowledge only 
 in relation to this realm of matter. My will to 
 throw a stone can not be really described, but it is 
 expressed only when the stone is thrown. We have 
 come to the conclusion for other reasons than the 
 creation of a method for theology, that the object 
 and source of religion is to be found in some super- 
 human personality. Such a personality can not be 
 really or fully described in objective terms an} 7 more 
 than can our limited human personality. Yet we 
 know this personality as we know one another only 
 through its expression in human life. Hence, again, 
 as with our knowledge of one another, our ideas as 
 to the character of this personality must be the con- 
 scious or unconscious result of the relation of that 
 personality to us. Since we are dealing with the 
 only type of reality which can be studied by such a 
 method as we have outlined, that method is valid. 
 Because we are dealing with personality, the proper 
 and valid method is based on that fact. Since, 
 moreover, it is a superhuman or formal personality, 
 it can not be described as can man. Theology thus 
 is distinct in method even from those sciences which 
 study human personality, for it must have a more 
 general method. They can be in part descriptive, 
 as concrete, but since we know of no class to which 
 
238 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 we may refer this superhuman person, we can not 
 use description. Theology thus stands entirely by 
 itself with a method purely its own. 
 
 No science fills entirely the whole of its field, nor 
 uses to the full extent its methods. Something is 
 neglected that something else may be more fully de- 
 veloped. Within its field of work, too, it is not only 
 the formal logical presuppositions which set limits. 
 There is, besides, the pressure of practical life. 
 Chemistry turns to those problems which have most 
 relation to the practical problems of life. In the 
 same way theology is not completely described in 
 the formal terms we^have been using. The religious 
 experience does not stand by itself, isolated from the 
 other interests of life. The rich variety of that life 
 finds its echo in the manifold forms of religion. 
 Theology has to guide it not only its own historic 
 development, but the expression of the religious 
 emotions and will, as well as of religious knowledge. 
 The background of any theological study must be 
 this varying and changing religious life. For the 
 Church, taking it as a whole, the main interest of 
 the religious experience is not any increased knowl- 
 edge of God, this it feels it has already, but a 
 deepening and strengthening of God's influence on 
 man. As back of the interest in theology thus 
 stands the interests of the practical religious life, 
 theology feels this influence, and turns to problems 
 which arise from the complexities of the world of re- 
 ligion. The emphasis of the western world for cen- 
 turies on the doctrine or problem of human salvation 
 was due to this pressure of man's anxiety as to his 
 fate. The scientific spirit of our own age has re- 
 
A FOUNDATION FOR THEOLOGY 239 
 
 suited in an emphasis on the life of God in himself 
 as that life is revealed to man. The search for 
 knowledge, as in the Greek world, has come to its 
 own. Whether from a belief that man's fate is not 
 as important as he thought, or for some other 
 reason, the problems which confront the theologian 
 have changed, and this change is the result of the 
 change in the problems of the religious life. 
 
 Besides the religious life, theology, since it deals 
 with man's will as well as with his emotions, has to 
 face the realm of man's will acts, that is, of morality. 
 While it does not have to explain morality, and is 
 thus distinct from ethics, it can not ignore the moral 
 nature of man. Where religion leads to what ethics 
 concludes to be a low standard of morality, theology 
 must take this into account. Here again problems 
 are set, and emphasis given, not by the science itself, 
 but by the world with part of which it has to do. 
 The effort is sometimes made, as we have done, to 
 define religion in terms which are independent of 
 morality. This, in the practical development of the 
 science, does not mean that we would ignore morality. 
 The formal limits of the science do not include the 
 moral codes, it is true, but no explanation of re- 
 ligion can be true which would render untrue or un- 
 real the moral development of the race. Those 
 things which man has won by great struggle he will 
 not lightly let go. A theology thus can not repre- 
 sent its god as immoral, as urging men to licentious- 
 ness or murder, and be regarded as true. Theology 
 can not hope to stand if pitted against truths which 
 man is determined to hold fast. Therefore, though 
 it might conceivably be that theology could teach 
 
240 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 that religion is best explained by an immoral deity, 
 practically this could not happen. Such a theology 
 would be immediately rejected, and if it gave the 
 only explanation of religion, that is if religion was 
 proven to be immoral in its tendency, religion and 
 theology would be rejected together. The only 
 theology which men seek or will have is one which 
 does not teach immorality. It might not be possible 
 to have a theology which is moral, but a moral the- 
 ology or no theology at all is what mankind requires. 
 Because of this, theology has to justify religion to 
 man, by showing that the power behind it is moral. 
 Unless this can be done, religion is not justified in 
 the minds of the human race. Theology is therefore 
 held within the limits of morality by this presuppo- 
 sition. 
 
 More plainly than by the background of religion 
 and morality is theology influenced by the motives of 
 those who center their attention on it. The histori- 
 cal development has been mainly in response to the 
 demands of a system by which the Christian doctrine 
 might be easily taught. The lack of a theology in 
 many religions may be due to the absence of this 
 motive. Where the teaching is mainly concerned 
 with the ritual acts, and the learning of the correct 
 formulae, no system of explanation of the religious 
 experience is required and so none is evolved. So 
 far as the need is felt, it is met by the use of myths 
 or fables or stories. Where the need of real ex- 
 planation is felt, as among the Hindus and Budd- 
 hists, we find a theology. There the things to be 
 taught are the experiences of the religious life, hence 
 those experiences must be systematised. From this 
 
A FOUNDATION FOR THEOLOGY 
 
 comes the analysis and explanation which we have 
 called the science of religion. With Christian the- 
 ology, from the time of Origen, and the great cate- 
 chetical schools, down to our own day, where theology 
 is the possession almost entirely of the official 
 teachers of religion, it has been the teachers of re- 
 ligion who have been the theologians. This need 
 and desire is still powerful. The effort to explain 
 religion arises from the desire to instruct others. 
 Whether the instruction is intended to increase or 
 decrease religion or some particular form of it, does 
 not matter. The effort to influence others by in- 
 struction as to the true nature of the religious life 
 is the mainspring of the interest in theology. This 
 search for a system which may be easily taught has 
 its effect on the science. The problems considered, 
 and the results aimed at, are those which the teacher 
 needs. The nature of God is defined as loving, as 
 perfect justice, as omnipotent, because these are the 
 qualities which concern man, and which the teacher 
 desires to impress on man. In an outline of the- 
 ology this element must be recognised. The direc- 
 tion of the development of the science will be deter- 
 mined very largely by the needs of religious instruc- 
 tion. 
 
 Another element not so evident, but even more 
 powerful, is the direct influence of the religious ex- 
 perience itself. The devotional spirit, as we call it, 
 constantly interferes with the course of theological 
 argument. The man who takes most interest in a 
 theory of religion is apt to be a religious man. He 
 is then not merely examining an experience as an 
 impartial judge, but he is constructing a theory for 
 
THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 an experience of his own life. He knows that ex- 
 perience better than he does any theory, even though 
 that theory be his own deduction. The reality and 
 the coloring come to the theory from the devotional 
 life. The interests of that life will largely deter- 
 mine, therefore, the development of the theory. Men 
 tend to turn from a theology which would put God 
 far off, because that idea arouses no devotional en- 
 thusiasm. If such a theology results, then it is 
 neglected, and search is made for some explanation 
 of religion which will more nearly touch the de- 
 votional life. Even if false, a theory of immanence 
 has more weight than one which would put a myriad 
 beings between the devotee and his god. The victory 
 of monotheism over polytheism, is not entirely because 
 of its logical correctness, but because it gives more 
 assurance to the individual believer that his relation 
 to God is worth while. Where there are many gods, 
 the service of one may not bring any reward, for 
 another may be stronger. So in times of crisis we 
 find Rome importing a foreign worship in the effort 
 to gain assurance of help. Where there is only one 
 God, the faithful worshiper is assured of help, be- 
 cause none can defeat the will of the god. We have 
 to recognise these influences in theology. They do 
 not determine any one theory to be true, but they do 
 fix the line of development, for they point the way 
 along which the search is to be made. The interests 
 of the religious life thus play a large part in the 
 development of a science of religion. 
 
 We have brought to an end the task to which we 
 set ourselves. There was needed, we said in the be- 
 
A FOUNDATION FOR THEOLOGY 243 
 
 ginning, a study of religion which would have no pre- 
 suppositions and nnjjhflnrjps at the start except the 
 .fact of the existence of t% phpjmrppna called the re- 
 ligious experience. We may not have seemed to ac- 
 complish much. No system of theology has resulted, 
 and the great differences between the various religions 
 have not been even considered. Yet something has 
 been done. The conclusions we have reached are at 
 least as free as we could make them from assump- 
 tions, unconscious or conscious. We took the ex- 
 perience which men call religion, and examining it, 
 found that there was enough agreement amid all 
 the differences to justify the gmn^^f_the_qne_name 
 religion to these various experiences. From this 
 agreement we found those elements which were com- 
 mon to all experiences of religion^ If there were any 
 unnoticed assumptions, they were in our use of the 
 general ideas of truth and reality, as well as of 
 knowledge. As however religion is only one among 
 man's experiences such a use is justifiable. So far 
 as religion itself is concerned, we did not assume that 
 one type was above another, or that one religion was 
 at a higher stage in its evolution than some other. 
 Within the field of our study, all religions have stood 
 on an equality. Also we have not sought to either 
 exalt or depress religion above or below in impor- 
 tance man's other activities. Any conclusion 
 reached depends therefore on the standing of the 
 experience itself, and its character. JThe definition 
 ofjhe source of religion as personal does not assume 
 that God must be personal because personality is the 
 
 rse. Our result, not de- 
 
 pending on any such evaluation either of personality 
 
THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 or of the source of religion, has a validity which 
 such popular arguments can not have. Because of 
 the freedom from assumptions, and the adoption 
 only of such conclusions as the facts warrant, what 
 we have stands on a firm basis. 
 
 Our method, the study and analysis of the ex- 
 perience, and the deduction from these facts, gives a 
 reality to our conclusions which does not belong to 
 results which are based on deduction purely from 
 some other theory. The analysis which precedes 
 gives to the method a foundation. We know that 
 we are talking about the real world, and not about 
 a world that might be. We did not deduce, for in- 
 stance, the idea of God's personality from the con- 
 ception of God's perfection. This "is as much a 
 matter of method as of presupposition, for it has a 
 certain validity which comes to it from the concep- 
 tion of the ideal of human existence, even when not 
 assumed. Yet it is then an idea as to what a per- 
 fect being must be if he exists, not a description from 
 expeTienceT" The 1>eing or beings whom we have de- 
 fined as personal are such because an analysis of ex- 
 perience reveals them to be such. The being whom 
 we have described and defined may not be known ab- 
 solutely to be perfect and omnipotent, but what we 
 do know is a valid knowledge. Using only an 
 analysis of facts, and not an a priori method, we 
 give to our conclusions a certainty of a place and 
 importance in the actual world. Since after all the 
 main irnpnrta.nrp of >ligirm in nren's minds is not 
 that it gives knowledge of God^ but that it helps 
 them_to live, now or Jxereafter^ any knowledge which 
 results, if it is to have value, must connect itself 
 
A FOUNDATION FOR THEOLOGY 245 
 
 closely to this life. Validity thus becomes not 
 merejvjajpatter of logicaj^accuracy, but oijpracti^ 
 gal value. This value, because we have kept our 
 feet on the ground, belongs to our results. 
 
 This value of the conclusions we have reached, 
 though the actual results are meager, has enabled us 
 to point out the line of a further scientific enquiry. 
 In the first place we have been able to /define^ the 
 science of religion. In this we have divided the field 
 which theology has traditionally claimed for itself, 
 and may have seemed to take from it its ancient 
 proud preeminence. Such preeminence as belongs to 
 a jtudy of the ideal it does to a certain extent lose. 
 Instead it comes to have value, as indicating the goal 
 toward which man is looking and moving. The God 
 who is now its concern is a God known to man, and 
 in close relation to man, not^ being so far ojf, and 
 so much in the world of what might be, that the main 
 problem is how could he come into contact with man. 
 In our study we start from that contact, hence it 
 is not a problem for this science as we have defined 
 it. Monotheism^ and God's perfection, usually as- 
 sumed, are, however, serious problems^ They have 
 been such in the history of the development of 
 religion, and it indicates that our science comes 
 nearer to reality when for it too they become im- 
 portant problems. Theology as thus more accu- 
 rately defined represents the interests of the reli- 
 gious life. Unconsciously to themselves, theologians 
 have always been influenced by their religious ex- 
 perience. We have now made this influence explicit, 
 and given it a rightful place. This being taken into 
 account, errors which were due to its being ignored 
 
246 THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE 
 
 can now be avoided. Thus, while perhaps we have 
 defined theology in terms less lofty than those to 
 which it has been accustomed, so defined, it becomes 
 a study whose importance to man is evident. J3ased 
 on man's experience it tries to solve the problems of 
 this human life. 
 
 To this source of religion there is given a valid 
 method of study. Valid not only in the conceptual 
 world of perfection, but also in the world of actual 
 experience, any loss in logical certainty is more than 
 made up by a gain in concreteness. The recogni- 
 tion of the fact that many of the conclusions of his- 
 toric theology have not the value and certainty 
 which is ascribed to them is of an importance which 
 religious people can not afford to neglect. A senti- 
 mental regret at the loss of a false sense of security 
 should not blind us to a very real gain in the know- 
 ledge of our limitations. In general, one of two 
 contrasting methods must be chosen. If God is an 
 ideal, then we may deduce from our ideal certain 
 qualities necessary to that conception, or we may 
 take our experience as it is, and ask not what should 
 be, but what is. While in the second method we lose 
 the ideal so far as it is merely conceived, in the first 
 and traditional method we lose the assurance that 
 what we conceive has actual existence. The two 
 unite to a certain extent in the conception which we 
 defined as that of personality. The ideal is here 
 that which is man's will or which influences man's 
 will. The method which makes this conclusion valid 
 takes its stand in the experience, which it finds is that 
 of a personality. The ideal thus has a basis and 
 a part in reality which the mere conception of the 
 
A FOUNDATION FOR THEOLOGY 247 
 
 perfect can not give it. The idea of Godjremains 
 an idea, unless it can be shown to affect, not as an 
 ideal, but as a personal power, the_jtctuaT worldT 
 This, since we have been asking the meaning and im- 
 plications only of this real or actual world, this 
 the method which we have used makes possible. 
 Whether God be one or many, perfect or partial, 
 remains for further study, but whatever the results 
 of that study may be, they will relate to a being 
 whose existence is already known and assured. 
 

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