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RELIGIOUS VALUES 
 
 AND 
 
 INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWARD HARTMAN BEISNER, Ph.D. 
 
 ARCHIVES OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 BDIIBD BT 
 
 FREDERICK J. E. WOODBRIDGE 
 
 No. 5, February, 1915 
 
 Columbia University Coutribatlons to Pliilosophy and Psycliology. 
 
 Vol. XIX, No. I . 
 
 NEW YORK 
 THE SCIENCE PRESS 
 1915 
 
IM 
 
RELIGIOUS VALUES 
 
 AND 
 
 INTELLECTUAL CONSISTEKCY 
 
 BT 
 
 EDWARD HARTMAN EEISNEE 
 
 V 
 
 I 
 
 t^ Submitted in Partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree 
 
 of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Philosophy 
 Columbia University 
 
 ARCHIVES OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 EDITED BT 
 
 FREDERICK J. E. WOODBRIDGE 
 
 No. 5, February, 1915 
 
 
 Columbia UnlTersity Contributions to Philosophy and Psychology. 
 
 Vol. XIX, No. 1. 
 
 NEW YORK 
 THE SCIENCE PEESS 
 1915 
 
/? 
 
 PRESS OF 
 
 THE NEW ERA PRINTING COMMNY 
 
 LANCASTER. PA. 
 
 » * h • 
 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 
 
 The author wishes to acknowledge his great indebtedness in the 
 preparation of the following dissertation to the guidance and the 
 counsel of Professor John Dewey, and in scarcely less degree to the 
 helpful criticisms offered by Dean Frederick J. E. "Woodbridge. He 
 is also greatly obliged to Professor William P. Montague and Pro- 
 fessor Dickinson S. Miller for suggestive comment. 
 
 E. S. R. 
 Manhattan, Kansas, 
 August 28, 1914 
 
 HI 
 
 I ^-ifcd-Tk/H ft^ 
 
Chapter 
 Chapter 
 
 I. 
 II. 
 
 Chapter III, 
 
 Chapter IV. 
 
 OUTLINE 
 
 Page 
 
 Religious Values and Intellectual Consistency. 1 
 
 The Origin, and the Disintegration of the Intel- 
 lectual Setting, of Classical Christianity 5 
 
 1. The Growth of the Dogma 5 
 
 2. The Disintegration of the Intellectual Set- 
 
 ting of Classical Christianity 8 
 
 Modern Values and the Religion of Idealism. . 15 
 
 1. Fichte 16 
 
 i2. Hegel 17 
 
 3. Royce 27 
 
 A Descriptive Study of Religious Experience and 
 
 the God-concept - 39 
 
 1. Religion below the Plane of the God-concept 40 
 
 2. The Various Theisms 42 
 
 3. A Religion Compatible with Modern Science 48 
 
 4. Practical Conclusions 59 
 
• » a 
 
 RELIGIOUS VALUES AND INTELLECTUAL 
 
 CONSISTENCY 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 Religious Values and Intellectual Consistency 
 
 "We are taught by modern psychology that emotion is secondary 
 to physical changes taking place in the subject. These physical 
 changes are directly dependent upon the presence of objects or ideas 
 to which the subject ascribes value in an immediate judgment. The 
 emotion of fear, for example, follows on the perception of an object 
 or the having of an idea that points to disturbed or destroyed values, 
 as the loss of life or limb, friend or fortune. The emotion of joy 
 arises in the presence of an object of desire and accompanies the 
 presence and the continuance of welfare. And so on we might run 
 through the list of emotions and find that in every case there is an 
 original perception of value in connection with an object or an idea. 
 
 No less do emotions call for a certain consistency of objective 
 experience. The play that can not present a convincing case is 
 called melodrama. The expressions of esteem that are ill-founded 
 and casual are called ' ' gush. ' ' The religion that arouses a high pitch 
 of feeling on ill-defined and vague grounds is condemned as being 
 ''hysterical" by one who demands an adequate reason for the 
 enthusiasm. 
 
 Whatever else it may be, religion is an emotional attitude toward 
 the whole of one's experience. As such, it turns upon judgments of 
 value and demands a certain amount of intellectual consistency. 
 
 To illustrate the need of intellectual consistency, Augustine re- 
 fused the proffered solace of Christianity until he came to interpret 
 the grand appeal in terms of Platonic thought. Locke, too, had to 
 qualify his acceptance of the Christian faith to the extent of reliev- 
 ing it of its unbelievable materials through positing human reason 
 as superior to revelation. Likewise, a man imbued with the spirit 
 of modern science must modify his acceptance of the Christian tra- 
 dition to an extent that is often considered fatal to the spirit of 
 that faith. 
 
 We must remember, however, that intellectual consistency in 
 
 1 
 
2 SELJGIOUS.T^ALPfS AND INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 
 
 religif'Ui< '^'ipbrieEce ^sptiij'- a relative matter, as it is in business, 
 polities; ' or literary composition. What will constitute consistency 
 for any one depends upon his type of mind and the depth of his 
 interest. A man who may exact absolute consistency in the details 
 of a building plan, will be blissfully careless in the details of a 
 political argument. Another who must find consistency to the hun- 
 dredth of one per cent, in the conditions of an international loan 
 may accept very broad discrepancies in the particulars of a religious 
 faith. A knowledge of science may well comport, if our knowledge 
 of men tells us anything, with miracles and hell-fire. Accordingly, 
 when we talk of the necessity for intellectual consistency in religious 
 matters, the term is used in the relative sense of what may constitute 
 consistency for any given individual. 
 
 For the overwhelming majority of those who are called by the 
 name of Christians to-day, the classical statement of the faith suffices, 
 and among them are those who are not to be accounted weak of 
 understanding. As a case in point, the will of the late J. Pierpont 
 Morgan begins with an unqualified statement of his acceptance of 
 the classic dogma of the Church, It is a striking tribute to the 
 simple majesty of the orthodox faith that a man of Mr. Morgan's 
 gigantic intellectual powers found solace therein. And not only 
 for the sake of this one tribute, but because of millions of lives that 
 have drawn comfort and power from that message, we must acknowl- 
 edge the fundamental appeal of the theistic world-plan. It is 
 majestic in its simplicity, its beauty, and its practical logic, and amply 
 justified in the works of many of its believers. 
 
 But we must recognize the fact that a different way of looking 
 at the problems of existence causes some men of our time to regard 
 classical Christianity as a stupendous and beautiful ruin. The facts 
 they learn in the laboratory, or through a study of history, or from a 
 pursuit of philosophy, demand a new intellectual setting for their 
 religious experiences. At its best, they regard the Christian plan of 
 sin and salvation as a remarkable poetic conception, worthy of ad- 
 miration and never to be despised, but nevertheless unable to furnish 
 the intellectual background for their free spiritual development; 
 and at its worst, as a nest of logical inconsistencies, involving a 
 barren saying of names and practise of forms and favoring maudlin 
 and ineffective sentimentality. 
 
 Certainly many men of this latter type of intellectual temper are 
 not less devoted in their lives, have no less a need for a total point 
 of view from which their own individual significance may be evalu- 
 ated, and probably have no less attained to such a point of view, 
 than those of the former. Furthermore, they no less represent the 
 
BELIGIOUS VALUES AND INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 3 
 
 historical development of our Western religious tradition. The 
 entire question of the significance of the intellectual background of 
 the religious experience, accordingly, is for us a matter of acute 
 concern, just as it has been for Christians generally during the best 
 part of two thousand years. 
 
 But not only does religion demand a certain amount of intellec- 
 tual consistency. As an emotional attitude toward the whole of one 's 
 experience, it turns upon judgments of value. To be informed as to 
 how thoroughly this is the case, one has only to turn the pages of any 
 devotional book or to attend a church service. Continued life, here 
 and hereafter, health of body and mind, material prosperity, the 
 welfare of friends, ethical purity and the furtherance of God's 
 kingdom on earth, are some of the most notable values with which 
 men are concerned. 
 
 Since religion is so largely concerned with values, it necessarily 
 follows that it contains a large amount of contingency; for values 
 are empirical in their origin. To be sure, there is almost unanimous 
 recognition of a certain group of values that are very closely related 
 to the preservation of biological integrity. These values represent 
 man's dependence on his physical environment. As the main condi- 
 tions of life are everywhere the same, we find in our own devotions 
 petitions that have made their appeal to mankind through all ages. 
 On the other hand, there are values that are highly contingent. 
 These occur in connection with the ethical life and vary with 
 economic, political, and intellectual conditions. The ethical values 
 tliat we discover in the experience of successive heroes of our reli- 
 gious history differ vastly from one another. Abraham, Moses, 
 Samuel, Elijah, Amos, Deutero-Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jesus, Paul, Benedict, 
 Luther, Fichte, to come no nearer the present day, may each be said 
 to stand for a significant change in the valuation of conduct. Among 
 them is a wide variation in regard to what is to be called good. Some 
 of the values held to directly contradict and annul others. But all 
 are parts of the same developing tradition, all are referred to God 
 for his sanction, and each, in its time and place, expressed the 
 current need. 
 
 We wish, then, to recognize two facts: that the main concern of 
 religion is with human values, and that the spontaneity and richness 
 of the religious experience depend upon an intellectual consistency 
 among the objects that carry those values. Furthermore, one who 
 is acquainted with the history of Western religious thought must see 
 that vast changes, both in values held to and in intellectual settings 
 accepted as self-consistent, have occurred. During the entire process 
 of evolution of our religion, a single concept, God, has done duty as 
 
4 BELIGIOUS VALUES AND INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 
 
 the guardian and sponsor of values; and, wliat is more, this same 
 concept has been the chief point of contention among those who have 
 demanded readjustment of intellectual foundations. The prelim- 
 inary situation that has developed indicates that a treatment of the 
 God-concept, historical in spirit, gives large promise of throwing 
 light upon its origin and meaning, and of furnishing us with a clue 
 that will go far toward clearing up many of the difficulties of reli- 
 gious philosophy that are current and that have been recurrent ever 
 since Greek philosophy threw its spell over the naturalistic faith of 
 Jesus. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 The Origin and the Disintegration of the Intellectual 
 Setting op Classical Christianity 
 
 1. The Growth of the Dogma 
 
 Classical Christianity has been produced by the fusion of the 
 religious experience of the Hebrews with the religious philosophy 
 of the Greeks. The Hebrew tradition begins with Jehovah's call of 
 Abram to leave his native land and with Abram's acceptance of 
 Jehovah as the patron divinity of his house and tribe. The relation- 
 ship between Jehovah and the tribe is strictly clannish, involves 
 mutual obligations, and reflects the crude morality of nomadic life. 
 At the time of Moses, the general relationship between Jehovah and 
 the Hebrew people is little changed from that of the earlier period, 
 but, if anything, Jehovah is more definitely recognized as the guide 
 of his people, who have developed a more specialized conception of 
 their tribal ties. The development within the tribe of a set of mores 
 that is representative of a finer sense of reciprocal social obligations 
 is reflected in the moral demands of the Jehovah of the Ten Com- 
 mandments. The exigencies of a hard struggle to win a footing in 
 the Land of Canaan, followed by a phenomenal national growth 
 under Saul, David, and Solomon, developed to a high pitch the feeling 
 of racial solidarity and of dependence upon, and love for, the God 
 who had brought national success. But the period of national pros- 
 perity was followed by crushing vicissitudes that resulted both from 
 internal dissension and from the aggressions of more powerful 
 neighbors. 
 
 The kaleidoscopic changes that took place in the political fortunes 
 of the Jews, since these changes were so closely bound up with the 
 conception of Jehovah's guidance, led to searching consideration of 
 such conduct as was consistent with the possession of his favor; and 
 the final loss of political autonomy at the hands of the Babylonian 
 Empire could lead to no other conclusion than that the sins of the 
 people and their disregard of chastity, temperance, justice, charity, 
 and humility w^ere the causes of their destruction as a nation, God's 
 chastisement of his people through the agency of foreign nations was 
 only an indication of his universal influence ; so the religious leaders 
 of the Jews set up as their ideal of life just such a character as was 
 believed to be desired by a universal God, and, accordingly, to be of 
 
 5 
 
6 EELIGIOUS VALUES AND INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 
 
 universal significance. The political ambitions of the Jews were 
 modified by their great spiritual leaders, to the expectation of the 
 establishment of God's kingdom in a world-wide order of peace and 
 good-will. 
 
 The culmination of the Hebrew tradition occurs in Jesus 's identi- 
 fication of himself with the expected messenger of this new order 
 and in his preaching of the expected coming of the new kingdom. 
 History has never told us and probably never will tell us just what 
 relation Jesus conceived himself as bearing to the new kingdom, nor 
 even just what that kingdom was to be and how and when it was to 
 be established; for the generation of Jesus distinctly exhibits the 
 influence of Greek thought on Hebrew religious tradition, and the 
 rapid changes in the intellectual setting of the religious experience 
 occurring at that time had their effect on the accounts of his life that 
 we have from his disciples. This is true to the extent that it has been 
 impossible to separate satisfactorily the beliefs and attitudes of 
 those who handed down and formulated the Christian message from 
 that message as it was delivered by the Master. 
 
 The main outlines of the Greek intellectual life with which the 
 Hebrew religious tradition fused during the cosmopolitan period of 
 the early Church may be summed up as follows : The inner essence 
 of reality is eternal, rational, creative Unity. It is the uncaused 
 cause of the phenomenal, changing world. It is the law and order 
 of the universe and the principle of reasonable, virtuous conduct in 
 men. These phases of Being were separately viewed, on the one 
 hand, as God, the principle of inner unity, of unimpeachable per- 
 fection and of causation that was unaffected by its creative office; 
 and, on the other hand, as the Logos, the begotten of God, the prin- 
 ciple of natural law and of moral excellence in humankind. 
 
 The similarity in position, function, and meaning between the 
 Jehovah of the later prophets and the God of Greek thought made 
 easy the identification of the two forms. Paul, standing on Mars 
 Hill in Athens, quotes the Hymn of the Stoic Cleanthes and claims 
 that the Perfect Beings of the two racial traditions are one and the 
 same. The peculiar position given Jesus by his disciples immediately 
 after his death, namely, as the founder of the Kingdom of God and 
 the only Son of the Father, made it easy to substitute his name and 
 office for that of the Logos. And, finally, the kingdom of the re- 
 deemed, the Church, was composed of those whose lives had been 
 touched by the purifying Spirit of God and transformed by its pres- 
 ence. Thus we have a point-for-point substitution within the Chris- 
 tian faith of the main elements in the Greek philosophy. God is pure 
 being; Jesus and the Holy Spirit in the community are the Logos, 
 viewed, firstly, as individual and, secondly, as common possession. 
 
TEE OEIGIN OF CLASSICAL CHEISTIANITT 7 
 
 The practical results of this fusion were not slow to make them- 
 selves felt. When the Logos was identified with a person, a temporal 
 succession was involved that extended back into history before that 
 person and reached forward into all time to come. The Hebrew tra- 
 dition, as pointing forward to Christ, is specialized as the embodi- 
 ment of the Spirit before Christ came ; and the Church, the Beloved 
 Community, as Royce describes it, became the custodian of grace for 
 future generations. This narrowing down of the field of operation 
 of the Logos was not without its effect upon the definition of the 
 virtuous life. Virtue became limited to the virtue acceptable within 
 the Church, which had its ideals materially influenced by the acci- 
 dents of persecution and outlawry and by the expectation of a 
 speedy coming of an eschatological kingdom. The world and all the 
 interests thereof, as untouched by the transforming influence of the 
 spirit of the community, were depraved and lost. "For all that is 
 in the world, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes, and the 
 pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world." A profound 
 distrust and condemnation of all things biological and natural was 
 the sharply defined attitude of the Christian community. All values 
 were believed to be found within the realm of Grace and were be- 
 lieved to have been created through the redemptive office of Christ. 
 Furthermore, the doctrine of an immortal life was a handy vehicle 
 for the transposition of all interests to the heavenly kingdom, for 
 which life on earth was to be regarded only as a preparation. 
 
 The detailed accommodation of the Hebrew and the Greek ele- 
 ments, while represented in the doctrines of the Church, is the work 
 of the Middle Ages and occurs in its most thoroughgoing form in the 
 work of Thomas Aquinas, the official philosopher of the Catholic 
 Church at the present day. While recognizing a difference between 
 the realms of natural reason and of faith, he subordinates the former 
 to the latter and thus finds a place for the dogmas of the church that 
 are not demonstrable by means of the natural reason. The con- 
 ception of God, however, is for Thomas a strictly demonstrable fact, 
 for there must be a first cause of the world, a final link in the other- 
 wise unending chain of natural causation. In Aristotelian terms, 
 Thomas thought of God as pure, immaterial form, as pure actuality, 
 wholly free from potentiality, the efficient and final cause of the 
 world. Other important scholastic proofs of the existence of God are 
 the ontological and the teleological. The former passes from the con- 
 ception of an absolutely perfect Being to the actual existence of that 
 Being on the grounds that perfection must include actual existence. 
 The latter concludes, from the presence of law and order and appar- 
 ent design in the world, that there must be a great architect who 
 
8 BELIGIOUS VALUES AND INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 
 
 formed the world in its perfection. A more comprehensive state- 
 ment of these proofs will be given later on in connection with Kant 's 
 criticism of their validity. 
 
 2. The Disintegration of the Intellectual Setting of 
 Classical Christianity - 
 
 The foregoing description of the elements that came together to 
 form classical Christianity is intended to present, in sufficiently de- 
 tailed fashion for our purpose, the setting of the stupendous struggle 
 in regard to both the intellectual elements of religion and the values 
 concerned therein, that has been going on in Western Europe for the 
 last two hundred years and the end of which is not yet. This con- 
 flict has often been described as being between Christianity and sci- 
 ence, but it might better be spoken of as being between Greek meta- 
 physics and modern empirical science. A second factor that enters 
 into the situation is the development and the acceptance of a new set 
 of values, which, however close they may be in the main to the values 
 of classical Christianity, are quite independent of the traditional 
 realm of grace and, in some particulars, directly opposed to the 
 accepted values of the Church. 
 
 We must recognize the fact, however, that the reconstruction of 
 the intellectual setting of religious values that is mentioned above 
 has not taken place in the whole of society taken in cross-section, * 
 but only within a very limited part. Classical Christianity still 
 survives in the Catholic Church! without acknowledged change ; and 
 for the orthodox Protestant, which means practically every member 
 of the sects of the present day, the intellectual setting of the religious 
 life remains to all intents and purposes the same as it was in the 
 flowering period of the Church. But there has taken place among 
 certain elements of the intellectual class a change of attitude that 
 is profound, and it is with the experiences of this portion of society 
 that we shall be primarily concerned in the discussion to follow. 
 
 As was said above, the developing influence of modern empirical 
 science has been responsible, more than any other agency, for the 
 overthrow of the authoritative position of Greek metaphysics in our 
 intellectual life and, consequently, for the discrediting of a creed 
 representative of Greek thought. When men had only Hellenic 
 philosophy to turn to, they found their way ordinarily to some sort 
 of belief in the dogma ; but when they gained independent intellectual 
 interests that were in no sense related to the dogma, their allegiance 
 to the doctrines of the Church was seriously disturbed. 
 
 The first notable influence of modern science on the Christian 
 
THE ORIGIN OF CLASSICAL CHBISTIANITT 9 
 
 faith came in connection with a criticism of the scientific conceptions 
 of the Bible. The Copernican system of astronomy (1543), for ex- 
 ample, ran counter to all the astronomical references of the sacred 
 writings. With a new cosmologieal theory in vogue, proved by the 
 highest sort of intellectual authority known to the times, a book 
 that set forth an inconsistent and disproved theory necessarily lost 
 prestige. Furthermore, the narratives of miraculous events, as given, 
 both in the Old and in the New Testaments, were distasteful to the 
 newly-awakened scientific sense. When the claim of divine revela- 
 tion stood opposed by these inconsistencies, the choice was between 
 a retreat from the position gained by the progressive learning and 
 the denial of the divine character of the Bible and its literal revela- 
 tion. As it turned out, the explanation of the physical universe 
 begun by the pioneers Copernicus, Kepler, and GaUleo and completed 
 by Newton, was too convincing, too real, too authoritative, to allow 
 the less strongly substantiated biblical conceptions to stand before it. 
 
 The disintegration of the classical intellectual setting of the 
 Christian religion had thus begun in the attack upon the divinely 
 inspired character of the Bible. So far the classical conception of 
 God had not been disturbed except in so far as God had been con- 
 sidered as the inspirer of Holy Writ. The quarrel of science had so 
 far been only with the book and the idea of revelation. In proof of 
 this, Descartes 's God is that of St. Anselm and he uses the same 
 proofs of his existence. Locke uses the teleological proof to demon- 
 strate the existence of the identical omniscient, eternal, omnipotent 
 Being that his times accepted as a legacy from medieval thought. 
 Leibnitz began his "Metaphysics" with the following: "The con- 
 ception of God which is the most common and the most full of mean- 
 ing is expressed well enough in the words, — God is an absolutely 
 perfect Being." He did not criticize the concept on his own account, 
 but accepted it in toto from tradition and common opinion. English 
 Deism might reject the doctrine of the Trinity and deny the media- 
 tion of the Christ between an angry God and the sinner; but it re- 
 tained its confidence in the power of reason, unaided by any mirac- 
 ulous means, to prove the existence of the single, all-wise, all-perfect 
 Creator of the universe. Voltaire might rage against "Vlnfame," 
 proclaiming unceasingly against priestcraft and fanaticism, but he 
 never denied God's existence. The God of the Enlightenment may 
 be defined in the terms used in the Westminster Shorter Catechism, 
 as "a spirit infinite, eternal and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, 
 power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth." 
 
 The beginning of the critical overthrow of the above conception 
 of God occurred in Locke's statement about substance, namely, that 
 
10 EELIGIOUS VALUES AND INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 
 
 he had **no other idea of it at all except a supposition of he knows 
 not what support of such qualities which are capable of producing 
 simple ideas in us."^ Again he defines it as ''nothing but the sup- 
 posed, but unknown support of those qualities we find existing, which 
 we imagine can not subsist without sometliing to support them," 
 Locke did not work out the implications of his definition, but used 
 his position to defend his belief in spirits, and hence in the Abso- 
 lute Spirit, on the ground that it was no harder to conceive the 
 existence of a spirit than of a body. 
 
 The forcing in of the wedge planted by Locke, which takes place 
 in the work of Berkeley and Hume, is known to all. Berkeley devel- 
 oped the position that matter is not an entity and that its existence 
 is limited to the sensations that are referred to it for support. To be 
 is to be perceived. Spirits and their ideas comprise all of reality. 
 But as Berkeley was pleading the special cause of spirit, and therein 
 of the God of religion, he failed to see that the same criticism that 
 he had so well applied to matter was no less cogent in its reference 
 to spirit. This point was developed in the philosophy of Hume, who 
 insists that if one is to be truly empirical in his procedure, as becomes 
 your true scientist, he will accept nothing except what he gains 
 through his experience. Under such drastic conditions, Berkeley's 
 recognition of spirits as substantial entities is unwarranted, for one 
 never so much as perceives his own self, or spirit. What one gains 
 from looking into his experience consists of some isolated and par- 
 ticular sensation or feeling. He can perceive that one idea follows 
 another, but he is altogether unable to discover or to prove the pres- 
 ence of connections and causal linkages between them. If the direct 
 perception of spirit is as impossible as the direct perception of 
 matter, then on the basis of experience as the warrant of belief, we 
 have as little ground for belief in spirit substance as we have for 
 belief in matter substance. But not only are we unable to gain a 
 direct knowledge of substance ; we are not able to gain an inferential 
 knowledge of it, because the linkages of experience that might lead to 
 the proof of such a unity are undiscoverable. Take for example the 
 conception of cause and effect. We see the motion of a ball and its 
 contact with another, and we say that the first ball's motion caused 
 the motion of the second. But all we know is that the second ball 
 moved after it was struck by the first. We do not know why it moved 
 and the only warrant for our expecting the same phenomenon to be 
 repeated is force of habit. We are acquainted with the fact of 
 succession, but not with the fact of necessary connection. 
 
 Hume's criticism may be seen to have set a number of problems 
 
 1 "Essay," II, Ch. 23, Sect. 2. 
 
THE OBIGIN OF CLASSICAL CHBISTIANITY 11 
 
 for philosophy. If spirit substance does not exist, then what of God 
 and what of the finite ego, both of which had up to that time been 
 defined as substances? If there are no discoverably valid linkages 
 between the individual facts and perceptions that we discover in 
 consciousness, then what can be the ground of a unified and law- 
 abiding experience of a natural order and of our own personal 
 selves ? But his skeptical attitude toward the constitution of experi- 
 ence went so far as to contradict the actual conditions of an experi- 
 ence that might be shown as already possessed. For our experience 
 does hold together as a unity. Every item of it has for each of us a 
 personal reference and its relationship to other items within the 
 same experience. The objective world holds together in cause and 
 effect series. No object is perceived except in space, which is dis- 
 coverable as a precondition of any objective experience whatever. 
 No variety of experience is possible except on the condition of tem- 
 poral succession, which is equally recognizable as an ineradicable 
 inner quality of experience. 
 
 On such grounds as the above, Kant is led to consider experience 
 as the product of reason acting upon the raw materials of sensation. 
 Experience must exhibit spatial and temporal quality, cause and 
 effect relations, unity and continuity, for these are of its inner con- 
 stitution. However, if Kant is thus able to validate experience and 
 thereby the possibility of mathematical and physical science, he is 
 compelled to limit judgments that are to pass as matter of fact to 
 the field of verifiability. The judgments of mathematics and physics 
 are justifiable because they can be tested. If they are proved and 
 not found wanting in a fruitful manipulation of experience and a 
 control of further fact, they are to be accepted. Otherwise, not. ' 
 
 This result of the Kantian criticism substantiated Hume's scep- 
 ticism regarding the possibility of discovering the substantial ego 
 and of demonstrating God's existence as a spiritual substance. For, 
 if Kant proved to his own satisfaction that there is a unity of experi- 
 ence, a central reference and practical connection and continuity that 
 establishes empirical selfhood, he was no less urgent in his contention 
 that to posit a substantial, immaterial, imperishable ego from the 
 presence of experience in its empirically knowable form, was an 
 induction entirely beyond the facts. ''I think, therefore I am," had 
 been expanded without warrant into "I think, therefore I am 
 spiritual substance and substantial ego." 
 
 Not less unjustifiable than the attempt to verify by theoretical 
 reason the existence of the pure ego, was the attempt to describe a 
 completed cosmos. Kant showed that it was equally possible to 
 prove that the world has had a beginning in time and has a limit in 
 
12 EELIGIOUS VALUES AND INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 
 
 space, and to show that such a temporal beginning and such a spatial 
 limit are unthinkable; to prove that the world is composed of indi- 
 visible atoms and to prove that there can be no limit set to the divis- 
 ibility of things in space; to prove that there must be a free first 
 cause of the finite series of cause and effect, and to show that such 
 examples of free causation can never exist in the natural order ; and, 
 finally, to prove that the world as a whole must depend on a neces- 
 sarily existent Being, and to show that there is no support for belief 
 in the existence of such a Being. Such contradictions arise from the 
 attempt to consider a constantly developing experience as at some one 
 time completed and static, and to apply to that experience, viewed as 
 a connected whole, conceptions that occur only within the network 
 of its living and expanding unity. For example, the principle of 
 cause and effect is one of the established relations of experience. 
 Unless its elements were bound together in cause and effect series, 
 experience would not be what it is. But it is a confusion of terms 
 to attempt to apply a conception that is valid within experience to 
 the same experience viewed as a whole, for "the whole of experi- 
 ence" is really e'xifm-experiential. The conceptions of a finished 
 cause and effect series and of a necessarily existent Being are pre- 
 cisely such conceptions as we can find no empirical warrant for, be- 
 cause they lie outside the jurisdiction of experience. In general, we 
 may say that Kant establishes, through his discussion of the Antin- 
 omies of Pure Reason, the necessary limitation of legitimate cosmo- 
 logical speculation to the field of empirical fact and to hypotheses 
 that represent only an extension of such expectations as are verifiable 
 within known experience. 
 
 A further negative result of the Kantian criticism is its dis- 
 crediting of both the methods and the findings of dogmatic theology. 
 As has been said before in this paper, the traditional proofs of the 
 existence of God were three: the Cosmological, the Teleological, and 
 the Ontological. Of these, the Cosmological is based upon the theses 
 of the third and fourth antinomies discussed above. God exists be- 
 cause there must be free causation to explain the beginnings of 
 causal series, and the existence of the contingent world of fact must 
 be based upon an absolute and unchanging reality. The same argu- 
 ment that was used by Kant in opposition to these theses, namely, 
 that experience gives us no possible link of a series of causation that 
 can be possibly conceived of as independent of a like causal relation 
 to that which it maintains with the rest of the series, is applicable 
 in connection with the Cosmological proof of God's existence. It is 
 simply impossible to reconcile the demands of experience with the 
 conception of a Being that lies quite outside the conditions of that 
 experience. 
 
TEE ORIGIN OF CLASSICAL CHRISTIANITY 13 
 
 The Teleologieal proof argues from the presence of order and 
 design in nature to the existence of a great architect who planned the 
 perfection of things. But could such design be substantiated it would 
 only point to the existence of a very powerful and very wise manipu- 
 lator of given materials and would still necessitate proof of the 
 existence of a creator as well as of a builder. And, at all events, 
 neither the Teleologieal argument nor the Cosmological could prove 
 that the First Cause was the Perfect Being that is the conception of 
 theology and the object of religious worship. 
 
 The last prop of dogmatism is, accordingly, the Ontological argu- 
 ment, in which proof is brought that existence is necessarily an 
 attribute of the most perfect Being. Existence, it is said, is the final 
 badge of perfection, without which our conception of God would be 
 a self-contradiction. Much has been said about the validity of the 
 Ontological argument, and Kant has been accused of failing alto- 
 gether to see its real significance. Most baldly stated, as in Falcken- 
 berg's ''History of Philosophy, "^ Kant attacks the argument on the 
 grounds of "the impossibility of dragging out of an idea the exist- 
 ence of the object corresponding to it." Just as a dream of one 
 hundred dollars does not increase my purchasing capacity, just so 
 my idea of a Perfect Being, no matter what its attributes, does not 
 give that Being existential reality independent of my idea. Accord- 
 ing to Kant, then, the Ontological argument is an absurd tautology. 
 
 There is, however, a certain sense in which Kant's critics may 
 accuse him, not of misunderstanding the ontological argument as it 
 existed at his time, but of failing to take into account the enlarged 
 significance of the argument for post-Kantian Idealism, for which 
 his own philosophy was the propaedeutic. To say that in every 
 triangle the sum of the angles is equal to two right angles, is to posit 
 the existence of the triangle as a conception. It does not imply the 
 existence of any triangular plot of ground or any triangular outline 
 upon the blackboard or triangular anything whatsoever. But, it is 
 said in truth, the exemplification of the triangle is not, after all, its 
 reality; when you have stated the conditions of its existence, you 
 have ipso facto posited that existence. The same application may be 
 made on a larger scale to the Reality of Absolute Idealism, and is 
 made, in fact, by Hegel. But for Kant's day and in the spirit of 
 Anselm, certainly there was had in mind to correspond to the 
 existence of God, a kind of existence that was quite independent of 
 experience. 
 
 By way of summary, we may say that Kant's critical philosophy 
 undermined the intellectual foundations of classical Christianity. It 
 
 2Tr., p. 380. 
 
14 BELIGIOUS VALUES AND INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 
 
 disproved the existence of a scientific proof of a substantial ego that 
 could be saved to immortal life; it showed the impossibility of a 
 scientific proof of a creative act by means of which God would be seen 
 as responsible for the initiation of the physical cosmos and the human 
 race; and, finally, it exhibited the futility of ever trying to make 
 consistent Math the facts of science, the conception of a perfect 
 spiritual Being outside the realm of human experience. 
 
 It would be interesting to follow Kant in his attempt to rebuild 
 the religious structure, that he had so badly shattered, on the new 
 foundations of active moral purpose and "practical" autonomy that 
 he described as actually experienced. But to do so would be to 
 follow Kant back into the spirit of the very philosophy that his 
 critical efforts had discredited. The forward movement of modem 
 philosophy leads beyond Kant into forms of speculation that are 
 hardly less subversive of the principles of science than the dogmatism 
 that he so vigorously and successfully attacked. We expect, however, 
 in the course of our argument to return to the spirit of the Gx'eater 
 Critique and to the methods of scientific description. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 Modern Values and the Religion of Idealism 
 
 In turning away from the discredited intellectual structure of 
 Classical Christianity to a new formulation of beliefs about God, it 
 is necessary to take into account the development of a fundamentally 
 different set of values, according to which man and his natural 
 interests and proclivities are appraised at a very different rating 
 than under the conception of the realm of grace. It will be obvi- 
 ously impossible, in such a treatment as this, to do justice to the his- 
 torical evolution of the new spirit as it has developed in Europe 
 since the fourteenth century, so we shall be content with indicating 
 some of the earlier results. By the eighteenth century, a voice was 
 found to speak out the belief in the dignity and worth of humanity ; 
 and from that day to this it has never been stilled, but is gaining in 
 force and power of speech. It has moved giant arms to do its bidding 
 and is so moving them to-day. 
 
 The Enlightenment in almost all its aspects and through most of 
 its representatives is a strong statement of man's independence and 
 power as a thinking being. It also sounds the note of human worth, 
 of the intrinsic value of the individual as an individual. To Rous- 
 seau, however, we are indebted for embodying in language this new 
 sense of the instrumental character of institutions and their real 
 mission of ministering to the larger life of the man, whose happiness, 
 welfare, and self-expression become thereby the end and object of 
 states and laws. Rosseau calls upon his nation to take up again the 
 power w^hich resides within the citizenship and make of the forms 
 of social organization just what they should be and what they ideally 
 are, ministrants to human welfare and the embodiments of mutual 
 rights and obligations. The French Revolution is the great response 
 to the growing conviction among the people of France of the funda- 
 mental truth of the propositions voiced by Rousseau and others. 
 It is the great practical demonstration in Europe of the existence of 
 a new sense of values and of the widespread and emphatic conviction 
 of the worth of man and the importance of his earthly existence. The 
 American Declaration of Independence and American democratic 
 institution indicate the same trend of ideas. The appeal of Bentham 
 in England for social forms and conditions that would insure *'the 
 greatest good of the greatest number" is a theoretical formulation 
 
 2 15 
 
16 EELIGIOUS VALUES AND INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 
 
 of the same spirit. The general impulse of the times was felt also by 
 Kant, who lends content to his rationalistic ethics through his state- 
 ment that every man should be considered as an end in himself and 
 never as a mere means to some one else 's end. For him, conduct uni- 
 versally rationalized turns upon individual rights and individual 
 worth as its center. But it is when we come to the philosophy of 
 Fichte that this conviction of the truth of social democracy as the 
 larger setting of man 's entire ethical life, gets its most elaborate and 
 emphatic presentation and is taken up as the value element of a 
 religion. 
 
 At this point we may briefly indicate the general characteristics of 
 the new intellectual life that furnishes a setting for the conception 
 of values outlined above. The philosophical movement may be de- 
 scribed as post-Kantian Idealism, and it may be said to build upon 
 the foundations of the "Critique of Pure Reason." But the things- 
 in-themselves, last relics of a philosophy that Kant discredited, are 
 banished into the limbo of speculative antiques, and the world of ex- 
 perience, the world of the Esthetic and the Analytic, is accepted as 
 the realm within which philosophy may work or dream or upon which 
 it may erect superstructures of invention. The conditions of mental 
 life that Kant describes as the guarantee of safety and sanity, are 
 magnified into world-large forms and made the indwelling and 
 active soul of the world of phenomena. Instead of going beyond phe- 
 nomena, and explaining them by means of independent noumenal 
 substances, post-Kantian Idealism links together the facts of experi- 
 ence and makes of them a unity, just as Kant represented the experi- 
 ence of an individual as holding together by means of the transcen- 
 dental unity of apperception. The universe was regarded as a devel- 
 oping, purposeful consciousness. 
 
 1. Fichte 
 
 The initial development of Idealism, as exhibited in Fichte 's 
 philosophy, was one-sided and incomplete. Fichte saw in the phe- 
 nomena of experience only the necessary raw material for the devel- 
 opment of a moral World-Self. This World-Self finds its expression 
 in the individual lives of men, coming to self-consciousness only upon 
 the recognition of a duty to be performed. Action, effort, conquest, 
 are the price of selfhood. Reality is a process of moral evolution. 
 The aim of the World-Self, realized through the individuals that 
 represent its own particularization, is the production of values. 
 The religious implications of this philosophy are that God lives in 
 the lives of men. His reality is the net sum of their moral worth. He 
 is in the world of action, not outside it. His existence is in the ideals 
 
MODEBN VALUES AND THE BELIGION OF IDEALISM 17 
 
 and moral strivings of men. The story of his life is in the develop- 
 ment of humanity out of slavery to natural, sensuous impulses and 
 into the life of reason as revealed in the stern call of social duty. 
 
 It is needless to say that spiritual pantheism of this sort is a new 
 kind of philosophical religion. It is new because it represents God 
 as being inside the world instead of outside it, and because it identifies 
 God with the spiritual life of man instead of separating him in ab- 
 stract, lonely grandeur, from any concerns of humankind. We 
 recognize it as pJiilosophical religion because it is the result of specu- 
 lation and stands or falls with the intellectualistic postulates upon 
 which it rests. Just as the validity of theism and deism depends 
 upon the autonomy of the mind in dealing with ideas that lie beyond 
 the possibility of experiential testing, just so the religion of post- 
 Kantian Idealism depends upon the justification of the mind's read- 
 ing into the sum-total of the phenomena of experience, a conception 
 of unity and purpose that equally lies beyond the possibility of ex- 
 periential testing. And, finally, it is religion because it represents a 
 formulation of the current sense of values — human, social, democratic 
 values — as set into the matrix of a consistent intellectual background. 
 
 The story of German Idealism shows that Fichte's system was 
 not satisfactory on the grounds of intellectual consistency, as it did 
 not take sufficient account of that order of experience which is obvi- 
 ously independent of human wishes and notoriously unresponsive to 
 human efforts. In Hegel we get the first full flowering of the ideal- 
 istic movement, and it is to him that we turn for a more complete 
 exposition. 
 
 2. Hegel 
 
 The groundwork and the limit of Hegel 's speculation is the realm 
 of experience; by the adoption of which conditions, he shows him- 
 self the lineal descendant of Kant. But in the life that he reads into 
 experience, he is far enough removed from the spirit of the Critical 
 Philosophy. "Whereas Kant sets up a realm of potential experience, 
 Hegel posits an Absolute experience: the world for him is a living 
 Spirit. 
 
 Kant describes the world of possible experience as created through 
 the cooperation of human individuals, and the categories were for 
 him the inner constitution of human, individual experience. Hegel 
 uses the same world as Kant's world of possible experience, but it has 
 its life and existence prior to the point where the experience of human 
 individuals collaborates in the development of self-consciousness. 
 Taking the universe over all, according to Hegel it exhibits the char- 
 acteristics of a living, conscious, and self-conscious experience. It 
 
18 BELIGIOUS VALUES AND INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 
 
 possesses constituent relations, or categories, ready-formed within it ; 
 it finds content in the sense objects of a physical order, and it pos- 
 sesses self-consciousness of the inner unity of the apparently diverse 
 aspects of form and content. This conception of the nature of the 
 spirit-life of the universe takes account of a triangular framework 
 within w^hich there is exercised continual activity and initiative. 
 The three sides of the triangle are Being, Nature, and Spirit. Being 
 may be described as the original life of the world-self. It has a devel- 
 opment of its own and a variety and wealth of self-expression. 
 Hegel's Philosophy of Being presents the constituent character of 
 the spirit-life of the Universe, which may be said to correspond to 
 the Kantian categories; but, whereas for Kant the categories are 
 discoverable upon analysis of experience, for Hegel they possess an 
 independent and necessary life of their own. The life of Being 
 begins in the simplest and most abstract category, Being, and develops 
 successively into the categories of Becoming, Quantity, Quality, and 
 so forth, up to the richest and most inclusive category, the Absolute 
 Idea. 
 
 The second side of the triangle is Nature, which represents a 
 continuation of the self-development of Absolute Spirit. Nature is 
 the necessary complement of the categories, for without objectifica- 
 tion in a concrete experience, the framework of that experience 
 would be null and empty. Nature, as well as Being, possesses a rich 
 and self-connected life that is in process of development. 
 
 The third side of the triangle is Spirit, as exhibited in the con- 
 sciou>sness of human beings. It is at once a culmination of the life of 
 the Absolute Self and a return upon itself of the entire process of 
 self-development of the Idea. For in the self -consciousness of 
 humanity the process becomes known for what it is, and thereby 
 alone is made what it really is, namely, the absolute and indivisible 
 unity of a spiritual life. 
 
 With the appearance of consciousness in the human individual, 
 the World-Spirit has produced a being which approximates its own 
 nature. Man is self-conscious and free. At first concerned only with 
 the recognition and assertion of its own individuality, the life of the 
 Spirit is Subjective ; but with the recognition of the rights of others 
 and the appearance of the social bond, Spirit has entered into a 
 higher plane, that of Objectivity. Rights of others come to be re- 
 garded as the personal concern of the individual, and these rights are 
 secured by means of law. Still higher stages of the development of 
 the Idea in Objective Spirit are found in the self-motivation to good 
 on the part of the individual, irrespective of law, and in the reduc- 
 tion of social-minded action to group habit, or custom. Objective 
 
MODEEN VALUES AND THE RELIGION OF IDEALISM 19 
 
 Spirit has run its full course when men live together in peace and 
 harmony under institutions that guarantee the free development of 
 the individual and are only the codification and objective statement 
 of what the needs of the individual demand. 
 
 The third and final phase of Idea within the stage of Spirit repre- 
 sents the complete return of the Absolute upon itself in the experi- 
 ence of individual men. There are three phases of Absolute Spirit, 
 namely, art, religion, and philosophy. In art, Spirit is striving for 
 self-expression in material forms, — in rock and mortar, clay, marble, 
 colors, sounds, letters. Art is always conscious of its failure to embody 
 its conception : the outer reality is obstinate and ultimately victori- 
 ous. In religion, the strivings of the human spirit win their own, 
 for the religious experience passes immediately over the material 
 obstacles lying between it and its self-expression and posits spirit as 
 superior to things. And, finally. Spirit Absolute, through the insight 
 of philosophy, combines the reach of art with the grasp of religion 
 and sees things and ideals as mutually complementary. Both are 
 necessary aspects of an Absolute Idea that expresses itself in the 
 dual role of conception and fact. 
 
 In our attempt to describe the general form of Hegel's philos- 
 ophy, it has been impossible to ignore the principle of movement 
 that is exhibited throughout. If realit y_ is a triangle whose sides 
 are Being, Nature, and Spirit, it is a self -tracing and living triangle. 
 Eeality is a development, and its three aspects are moments within 
 a process. In this day when evolution is a commonplace conception, 
 it is necessary to understand clearly the kind of evolution of the 
 Absolute Life that Hegel had in mind. In defiance of the danger of 
 repetition, we may say that Hegel conceives of Being as the first 
 stage in the development of the Absolute Life, the world of Nature as 
 the second, and the life of Spirit as the third and last. Yet he does 
 not think of Being as causing Nature, nor of Nature as causing 
 Spirit. While Being is prior in existence to Nature, and Nature to 
 Spirit, these relations of priority and succession are only the exi- 
 gencies of the inner life of the Absolute. As long as Hegel is work- 
 ing with Pure Being, there is a natural relationship of necessity in 
 the way in which one conception passes over into its opposite and 
 combines with it on a higher plane of self-expression. But when he 
 passes out of the realm of Pure Being into the world of physical 
 nature and human beings, the causal leadings between successive 
 manifestations of t^e Absolute are lacking. The development, while 
 recognized as progress, is from within. It takes place in the private 
 subjective life of the Absolute; and the successive forms are only 
 the laying bare to human eyes of its inner urge and necessity of 
 seeking self-expression. 
 
20 BELIGIOUS VALUES AND INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 
 
 Hegel's philosophy is meant to serve as a religion. To be sure, 
 he makes a distinction between philosophy and religion, saying that 
 religion is reason thinking naively. But he continually leaves the 
 religious expression behind and speaks in terms of his philosophy. 
 And, after all, it is his philosophy that is his religion, for it is only 
 after one has comprehended the figurative language of religion in its 
 philosophical meaning that it can be acceptable to him. He says: 
 * ' God exists only for the man who thinks, who keeps within the quiet 
 of his own mind. The ancients called this enthusiasm; it is pure 
 theoretic contemplation, the supreme repose of thought, but at the 
 same time its highest activity manifested in grasping the pure Idea 
 of God and becoming conscious of this Idea."^ This preference for 
 the rigorously philosophical point of view is further illustrated in 
 the discussion to follow, 
 
 Hegel believed that religion was essentially a knowing relation, 
 and that, as such, an object of knowledge was required. He says: 
 "If something objective is to be really recognized, it is requisite that 
 I should be determined as universal, and should maintain myself as 
 universal only. Now this is none other than the point of view of 
 thinking reason, and of the man who thinks rationally, — who as indi- 
 vidual posits himself as Universal, and annulling himself as indi- 
 vidual, finds his true self to be the Universal. Philosophy is in like 
 manner thinking reason, only that this action in which religion con- 
 sists appears in philosophy in the form of thought, while religion as, 
 so to speak, reason thinking naively, stops short in the sphere of 
 general ideas, or ordinary thought."^ "The standpoint of religion 
 is this, that the true, to which consciousness relates itself, has all 
 content in itself, and consequently this condition of relation is what 
 is highest of all in it, is its Absolute standpoint. "^ " The true home 
 of religion is absolute consciousness, and this implies that God is 
 himself all content, all tnith and reality."* 
 
 Most comprehensively taken, religion for Hegel is no more nor I 
 less than the finite individual's recognition of his own participation 
 in the life of the Absolute. The finite individual is nothing in him- 
 self, for his reality is indissolubly joined with that of the Absolute ; 
 hut he is something in himself because he represents the particulariza- j 
 tion of the Absolute and is essential to its self-realization, Hegel 
 says, * ' Religion is therefore a relation of the spirit to absolute Spirit : 
 thus only is spirit as that which knows also that which is known. 
 
 1" Philosophy of Eeligion," tr. Speira and Sanderson, III., p. 11. 
 
 2 Id., 193-94, 
 
 3 Id., 204. 
 
 4 Id., 205. 
 
 il. 
 
MODEBN VALUES AND THE BELIGION OF IDEALISM 21 
 
 This is not merely an attitude of the spirit towards absolute Spirit, 
 but absolute Spirit itself is that which is the self-relating element, 
 which brings itself into relation with that which we posited on the 
 other side as the element of difference. Thus when we rise higher, 
 religion is the Idea of the Spirit which relates itself to its own self — 
 it is the self-consciousness of absolute Spirit."^ Or again, "Reli- 
 gion is the Divine Spirit's knowledge of itself through the mediation 
 of finite spirit. Accordingly, in its highest form, religion is not a 
 transaction of man, but it is essentially the highest determination of 
 the absolute Idea itself. ' '^ The emphasis is thus seen to be put upon , 
 the fact that God is not a Being, independent of human experience, ' 
 as is the God of dogmatic theology. On the contrary, God is always 
 produced through the medium of individual minds and only so. He 
 is spirit, at once human and divine. 
 
 In the act of worship, the finite spirit is lifted up, says Hegel, 
 to a conscious recognition of his oneness with the absolute Spirit, 
 while retaining his sense of individuality, "The finite in relation to 
 the Infinite is posited as the negative, the dependent, that which 
 melts away in relation to the Infinite. When the two are brought 
 together, a unity comes into existence through the abolition and 
 absorption of the finite in fact, which can not maintain itself against 
 the Infinite. . . . On the one hand, I determine myself as the finite ; 
 on the other, I am not annihilated in the relation, — I relate myself 
 to myself. I am, I subsist ; I am also the Affirmative. On the one 
 side I know myself as having no real existence; on the other, as 
 affirmative, as having a valid existence, so that the infinite leaves me 
 my own life."^ "If I now go further and begin to consider the 
 matter from a spiritually higher standpoint of consciousness, I find 
 myself no longer observing, but I forget myself in entering into the 
 object; I bury myself in it, while I strive to know, to understand 
 God ; I yield myself up to it, and if I do this I am no longer in the 
 attitude of empirical consciousness, of observation. If God is no 
 longer to me a something above and beyond me, I am no longer a pure 
 observer."^ "All particularity belongs to it (the Universal Object) ; 
 as universal it overlaps or includes me in itself, and thus I look upon 
 myself as finite, as being a moment in this life, as that which has its 
 particidar being, its permanent existence, in this substance only, and 
 in its essential moments."^ To recapitulate, as I worship, I recog- 
 nize both my separate individuality and my unity with God, while my 
 sense of weakness, finitude, and unworthiness is swallowed up in the 
 realization of my oneness with the infinite selfhood known as God. 
 
 5 Id., 1., 205. 7 Id., 174. 
 
 6 Id., 206. 8 Id., I., 176. 
 9 Id., I., 197. 
 
22 BELIGIOUS VALUES AND INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 
 
 It is easily seen from the foregoing that Hegel's philosophy of 
 religion is only a reduplication of the main outlines of his entire? 
 philosophy. Indeed, his interpretation of the dogma of the Trinity, 
 which he recognizes as fundamental in Christianity, the Absolute 
 Religion, is only a restatement of the divisions of the great triad, 
 Being, Nature, and Spirit. We may, accordingly, sum up Hegel's . 
 understanding of religion in saying that the individual, who is at ^ 
 once the embodiment and the self-expression of the Absolute, is in a 
 religious frame of mind and takes on an attitude of worship, when 
 he recognizes himself in his absolute and universal capacity. The 
 valjies that Hegel takes account of are those of the modem Western 
 world. He puts a positive valuation upon life and effort and self- 
 expression. His ethical ideals are social, for he says that only as man 
 coerces his impulsive, self-aggrandizing tendencies in the interest of 
 the social whole, is he truly good. Institutions and laws are the 
 embodiment of the principles of most advantageous self-expression in 
 community and national existence; and the philosophy of history is 
 just the record of successive development of the Absolute into more 
 and more adequate forms, culminating in such institutions as repre- 
 sent wholly and perfectly the balance between the rights and the 
 obligations of the citizens of the state. 
 
 If the philosophy of Hegel is a satisfactory intellectual setting 
 for the accepted values of his experience, and represents those values 
 as a consistent part of the reality which his philosophy describes, we 
 must say that it is, in the truest sense of the word a religion. 
 
 Does Hegel's Philosophy Exhibit Intellectual Consistency? 
 
 We have endeavored to maintain throughout this paper that 
 there must be self-consistency in the intellectual description of reality 
 if it is to be competent to bear the treasure of human values. In our 
 study of Hegel, we have witnessed his deliberate attempt to set forth 
 an interpretation of reality that is intellectually consistent in all its 
 parts and that, at the same time, embodies the values of our Western 
 life. It is our present purpose to consider his system from the stand- 
 point of its success in giving us an account of reality that is 
 sufficiently satisfying intellectually to enable it to support the ele- 
 ment of value. 
 
 At the expense of some repetition, we may say that Hegel's 
 philosophy takes account of three positions. The first of these is 
 equivalent to the Kantian ego-machinery, the categories. The second 
 is concrete, objective experience, living nature. The third is the self- 
 conscious awareness of the reciprocity that exists between the first 
 
MODERN VALVES AND THE RELIGION OF IDEALISM 23 
 
 two positions, or the self-realization of the Idea in human con- 
 sciousnesses. 
 
 The network of relations, or categories, that Hegel develops, con- 
 stitutes the nature and substance of Being, and in all the particular- 
 ity of its inner life represents the first stage of the life of the World- 
 Self. Furthermore it is said to exist logically prior to the diversity 
 and the particularity that constitute its Other-of Self, the world of 
 nature and living things. But if one accepts a fact basis and utilizes 
 the most authoritative knowledge available in the present generation, 
 he must recognize consciousness as a development, as something that 
 came into existence as consciousness from non-existence as con- 
 sciousness. Granted the presence of experience, it may be analyzed 
 and its subjective and objective phases may be exhibited as the 
 opposite and complementary aspects of reality. For example, I 
 recognize cause and effect as one of the never-absent conditions of 
 the experience I possess. We may call it, to be consistent with his- 
 torical usage, a category of our experience. We further recognize 
 cause and effect as an aspect of objective reality, or experience as 
 viewed from an opposite and external standpoint. Now, if Hegel's 
 classification of the categories as given in the "Logic," means 
 anything, it means that he is pointing out the universal, underlying 
 characteristics of experience. As such, his work is analagous to 
 that of the grammarian who exhibits the forms or principles under- 
 lying speech, or that of the logician who exhibits the possible com- 
 binations used in practical and concrete thinking. Ostensibly, 
 Hegel found his categories of Being before a true self appeared and 
 quite independent of experience as had in and by a human self. 
 Actually, he was analyzing out the general relations that are dis- 
 coverable in concrete experience. Granted that his analysis is cor- 
 rect, it means no more than that he has reduced to definite and 
 nameable form an abstruse phase of experience. The categories are 
 implicit in experience, and it is a task of investigation to make them 
 explicit. As such, the procedure is scientific and subject to revision 
 after more satisfactory analysis. 
 
 However, Hegel claims much more for his work in connection 
 with the categories than the facts seem to warrant. He thinks df 
 his results as going beyond experience ; the categories are the consti- 
 tution and make-up of Being prior to the existence of the only kind 
 of experience that we are able to find. The stage of Being, with all 
 its show of life, depends for its existence upon a condition to which, 
 for him, it is logically prior. Hegel 's Being is the shadow of experi- 
 ence; but in his system, the shadow exists before the thing it 
 shadows. If one proceeds with a due regard for experience and at- 
 
24 BELIGIOUS VALUES AND INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 
 
 tempts to find its prius, he encounters a nexus of biolo^eal forces 
 and a sum of chemical equations, which in turn possess meaning 
 only in terms of the same experience that was to be explained. 
 Accordingly, it does not seem too much to say that Hegel has nx) 
 basis of fact for his forcible disjunction of the categories of Being 
 from that actual experience in which they are discoverable. And, 
 furthermore, if he is not justified in his diremption of what he calls 
 Being from its natural and necessary objective counterpart, then his 
 treatment of the latter, under the heading of the Philosophy of 
 Nature, suffers equally from the fault of " abstractness, " in the sense 
 of his own pet aversion. And, finally, the third phase of his system, 
 the Philosophy of Spirit, with its work of connecting the first two, 
 is left without any moments to fuse and conjoin, and consequently 
 becomes functionless. 
 
 Not less slow to exhibit its limitations than the place of the cate- 
 gories in Hegel's system, is his speculative, unempirical formula of 
 evolution when strictly applied to the facts of history. It is, of 
 course, not to be considered a condemnation of Hegel to say and to 
 prove that his conception of the evolution of Idea is hypothetical. 
 Science lives by hypotheses, and philosophy may find a use for them 
 as well. But the temper of the intellectual life changes from time to 
 time, and what was once a satisfactory sort of hypothesis is no 
 longer regarded as such. Kepler might think, in his early years, 
 of angels as responsible for the orderly movements of the planets, 
 but such an hypothesis is laughed at to-day. The same change of 
 attitude has affected Hegel's hypothesis. It was the product of a 
 romantic age, and had its fellow in Goethe 's Zeitgeist. Even to-day 
 it has its value when we recognize its poetic origin and quality ; for 
 it is undeniably a stirring conception to think of the changes of 
 nature and human institutions as the life of a World-Spirit. But 
 we recognize the figure as a figure ; and when we use it we know that 
 we are dealing in terms of poetry and not in terms of fact. As 
 poetry, even though rather crabbed and pedantic poetry, we must 
 recognize the worth of Hegel's world-conception; for its scope and 
 sweep are universal; it is epic in its subject-matter and in its pro- 
 portions. But as scientific hypothesis, demanding respect and belief, 
 it simply no longer makes an appeal. 
 
 Hegel's conception of evolution is in reality not an evolution in 
 the sense in which we have come to use the term. It is rather a series 
 of aspects of a changing subject-matter. The unity is conceived from 
 without and externally imposed. The development is not develop- 
 ment within the subject-matter, but of the schema. 
 
 It is essential to the development of a drama that the characters 
 
MODEBN VALUES AND THE BELIGION OF IDEALISM 25 
 
 exhibit development either in their circumstances or in their atti- 
 tudes. The same individuals must be continued through succeeding 
 acts. It would hardly be called a play if each scene or act should 
 introduce new characters, allowing the old characters to continue 
 side by side with them, altogether indifferent to the actions and the 
 attitudes of the new company of players. A drama must be more 
 than a mere succession of unrelated panoramas. And yet, Hegel's 
 drama of the Idea is simply that, — a succession of panoramas. The 
 stages of Nature, namely. Mechanics, Chemism and Organics, do not 
 develop into one another, but exist side by side. Subjective, Objec- 
 tive, and Absolute Spirit do not successively disappear into one 
 another: there is no reciprocity, no give and take among them, but 
 only the exhibition of succeeding phases along with the continuance 
 of the older. For example, the religion of sorcery (China) does not 
 develop into the religion of phantasy (Brahminism), nor does 
 Brahminism change gradually into the religion of inner contempla- 
 tion (Buddhism). The religions of Nature in general do not develop 
 into the religions of Freedom. The former were and even now are, 
 after these thousands of years. Nothing about them is taken up and 
 modified into that which succeeds them. They exist and are evaluated 
 by Hegel, and other religions in turn come into being and are 
 evaluated; and when the course of history has been traversed, the 
 catalogue of religions is susceptible of arrangement and classification 
 according to Hegel's preconceived principle. Of evolution, meaning 
 transformation and development of a given conception, or organiza- 
 tion, or institution, there is none. 
 
 What is more, Hegel's schema does violence to the facts, omitting 
 details that do not fit in and supplying others to fill out the arbitrary 
 diagram. A good example of Hegel's partiality in choosing facts is 
 his failure to take any account of the Mohammedan religion. His 
 classification of religions falls into three heads: the Oriental objec- 
 tive religions, in which God in Nature stands over against the human 
 individual; the Religions of Freedom, in which man reads his sub- 
 jective nature into the Godhood; and the Absolute Religion of 
 Christian revelation, where God as object expresses himself in human 
 spirit, thereby combining and synthesizing objectivity and subjectiv- 
 ity in an indivisible unity of self-experience. In the course of 
 development as historically exhibited, Mohammedanism should be the 
 cope-stone of the structure, but this stone which should be the head 
 of the corner is never noticed by Hegel. 
 
 A further example of what the writer regards as partiality in 
 arranging his facts on the part of Hegel, occurs in his classification 
 of the religions. It seems evident that the Hebrew religion of the 
 
26 SELIGIOUS VALUES AND INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 
 
 prophetic period is the nearest approach to the religion of Jesus, 
 called by Hegel the Absolute Religion, of any that we have record of. 
 Indeed, Jesus builds upon the Hebrew religion, using it as his founda- 
 tion. He averred that it was his intention and purpose to bring new 
 life into the "law" of his day by infusing into it the true spirit of 
 prophetic religion. Hegel, however, tracing a line of historical 
 development, interposed both the Greek and the Roman religions 
 between the Hebrew and the Christian. Rather would it seem that 
 the frank naturalism of the Greek mythology, with its immature 
 ethics, and the formalism of the Roman pantheon, are in no sense 
 logical forerunners of the exalted spirituality of Christ's teachings 
 about the nature of God. 
 
 Hegel may be said to have tried to use an evolutionary hypoth- 
 esis in the interests of a perfectionist plan of reality. He has put 
 a descriptive instrument of modern science to work as a teleological 
 agency. It is no wonder, then, that the philosophy of Hegel en- 
 counters difficulty and exhibits ambiguity and inconsistency when it 
 undertakes to force contingently developing circumstances into the 
 rigid moulds of a preconceived logical schema. For evolution, as a 
 descriptive formula, is quite independent of final causes ; and changes 
 occur both for the worse and for the better, as we express our judg- 
 ment from a given and prejudiced standpoint. Furthermore, quite 
 apart from the question of moral purpose, Hegel considers the evolu- 
 tion taking place in the physical, organic, and social world, as the out- 
 ward expression of the changes of the internal, subjective volition of 
 the Absolute, which, in the hidden depths of its life, evolves accord- 
 ing to its perfect character. But evolution, as science can under- 
 stand it, always takes place on the fact plane, the plane of phenomena. 
 There is true evolution in the preparation, by means of mechanical 
 and physical forces, for organic life, and the passing over of mechan- 
 ical and chemical forms into organic existence. But it is the phe- 
 nomenal materials that register and undergo the changes. There is 
 development from Brahminism into Buddhism, but it is the exi- 
 gencies of experience that bring about the new adjustment. There 
 is evolution of the Hebrew religion, but it takes place on the plane of 
 experience as seen in economic, or political, or ethical, or intellectual 
 changes, or in all four together. But such evolution is not of an inner 
 core of reality ; rather is it of human experience facing incomplete- 
 ness and dissatisfaction and going on to something new and different 
 that fills up the lack. 
 
 In conclusion of our discussion of the philosophical religion of 
 Hegel, we may say that the intellectual setting for the system of 
 values that we believe in with him, is unsatisfactory. He has tran- 
 
MODERN VALVES AND THE RELIGION OF IDEALISM 27 
 
 scended the fact-world to find an interpreter of reality, and, as a 
 result, his interpreter does not speak the sober language of fact. 
 Where Hegel raises the characteristics of phenomenal human experi- 
 ence to Absolute heights, those characteristics fall to their proper 
 level because they have no support of fact; and where he attempts 
 to confine the infinitely rich and waywardly contingent life of phe- 
 nomenal experience to his preconceived, Absolute forms, it over- 
 flows his schema. 
 
 3. Royce 
 
 In the philosophy of Hegel, we have seen the logical completion 
 of a movement of thought that considered reality in its physical, 
 psychical, and social aspects as the expression and the embodiment of 
 a single life striving for fullness of truth, goodness, and beauty. 
 Hegel's method was to try to embody within his system the concrete 
 life of nature and man and nations; and we have been at some 
 pains to show why we believe that the concrete reality he was de- 
 scribing does not fit into his logical forms except with a very large 
 remainder. It was at once the strength and the weakness of his 
 philosophy that it attempted to be specifically concrete. Its strength, 
 because in making of the drama of cosmic and human history the 
 developing selfhood of the Absolute Life, it invested with eternal and 
 absolute significance the daily actions of finite beings and showed the 
 meaning of each finite aspect of reality to be connected with its true 
 existence in the living whole. Its weakness, because, on the one hand, 
 the facts of our experience of men and nature are too diverse and 
 contradictory to fall into the pattern of a single developing self- 
 consciousness, and, because, on the other hand, in order to keep in 
 touch with facts, the schema intended to include them is made 
 purely hypothetical and fails to exhibit any analogy with seKhood 
 as we can understand that concept. 
 
 The development of Hegelianism at the hands of Hegel's fol- 
 lowers has been in the direction of inner self-consistency with the 
 analogy of selfhood. Finding it impossible to account for the vari- 
 ety of human experience in all its concrete beauty and ugliness, 
 goodness and evil, truth and error, and to arrange the facts of experi- 
 ence in accordance with a logical schema such as Hegel's, they have 
 emphasized the rational necessity of a certain Absolute constitution 
 of experience and have let concrete details shift for themselves. 
 We may say with reference to this philosophical tendency that we 
 believe that the distortion of fact necessary to meet an idealistic pro- 
 gramme is so pronounced as to vitiate the logical advantages it pos- 
 sesses, through its reduction of all experience to a dead and mean- 
 
28 BELIGIOUS VALUES AND INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 
 
 ingless formalism. As an example of this later form of Absolute 
 Idealism, we have chosen the philosophy of Josiah Royce. 
 
 Royce describes reality in terms of experience, and his dialectic 
 in opposition to realism and mysticism is certainly in the interests of 
 true philosophy. For objects that can be known at all are in experi- 
 ence and can never be considered understandingly as outside of 
 experience. This, of course, implies that there is an inner and 
 indivisible bond between the object known and the experience for 
 which it is an object at all. Likewise, the direct intuition of the 
 mystic is a complete negation, for it pretends to be independent of 
 the experience series. If Realism represents an aggressive denial of 
 the original and necessary setting of objects within experience^ 
 mysticism represents an elusive escape from such an enmeshment. 
 The true object of knowledge, for the mystic, lies beneath the 
 troubled waters of experience. The whorls and the bubbles that 
 mark the spot of its disappearance are the only evidence of its 
 existence; but who, then, shall say that the object is at all? For 
 the whorls are naught and the bubbles are naught : indeed, the whole 
 wide sea is nothingness. Certainly, philosophy can not deal with a 
 reality that is always just beyond the vanishing point and denies 
 the evidence of its own disappearance. 
 
 But if reality is not to be defined either in terms of realism 
 or in terms of mysticism on the grounds that both these forms of 
 speculation deny the fundamental conditions of our experience of 
 objects, we must find a means of representing reality that will have 
 due regard for the matrix of experience out of which and into 
 which the object is born. The most obvious method to follow at 
 this point is just to postulate the object as a form of experience and 
 nothing more. The sun is just as warming, just as large, occupies 
 just the same position with regard to the earth and the other planets 
 and heavenly bodies, wheels through space just as unerringly, and 
 meets our astronomical expectations just as satisfactorily, if we think 
 of its reality as summed up in these empirical manifestations, as it 
 would if it had a different sort of reality that could not be made 
 consistent with the conditions of knowledge. And so with all the 
 realm that we describe in terms of physical science and the world of 
 sociology and history. That the facts we know are more than our 
 facts; that experience implies more than experience; that reality as 
 it is known and reality as it exists are possibly two different things, — 
 philosophy is simply content to leave on one side as irrelevant ques- 
 tions. For what does it profit the philosopher to go beyond the mate- 
 rials that are amply sufficient to give him an orderly, regular world, 
 in which scientific laws reign, in which experiences are put together 
 
MODEBN VALUES AND THE BELIGION OF IDEALISM 29 
 
 precisely and inevitably, in which hypotheses may be verified and 
 questions asked and answered, and in which the whole realm of 
 human values is discoverable? 
 
 When reality is defined as above in terms of validity, we have to 
 all intents and purposes the world of Kant's critical philosophy, 
 leaving out of account the realistic elements provided in the things- 
 in-themselves. But Royce recognizes the incompleteness of such a 
 philosophy as defines reality as merely validity of experience. He 
 endeavors to supply a lack by so filling out experience as to give it 
 independence, autonomy, and substantial reality. He takes Kant's 
 world of experience and binds it together into a purposeful con- 
 sciousness. Kant's substratum to experience is ignored, because 
 Eoyce finds no need of taking it into account. Reality is reality in 
 terms of knowledge. The world is a self-conscious Being, a Person, 
 an Individual. It is the external representation of an internal mean- 
 ing, just as the song you sing or the tune you pick out upon the 
 piano is the outward expression of the melody that haunts your inner 
 consciousness. The world of suns and Milky Ways, of inorganic and 
 organic evolution, of states and religions and art, of private struggle, 
 hidden grief, and personal triumph, is the song of the Infinite Being. 
 Or, to change the metaphor, the World is the game which the Abso- 
 lute is playing out as his objectified purpose. As a corollary of 
 this main theorem, space, in its absolute sense, contains no here 
 and beyond, for all space is present in the conscious glance of the 
 All-knower. Time rolls up like a scroll, and the Absolute knows all 
 things, past, present, future, in one indivisible and undivided time- 
 span. Cause and effect are simply the before and after in a series 
 and the relations are absolutely reversible. The effect that follows — 
 as an element in an absolutely fixed and certain reality — is to be 
 viewed teleologically as the cause, for both cause and effect are 
 subordinate to the reality in which they are elements. Each indi- 
 vidual thing is so called because it is a unique and essential expres- 
 sion of the life of the Absolute ; and because it is just so a unique and 
 necessary aspect of the self-expression of the Absolute, each finite 
 act, viewed in the light of all Reality, is a free and purposeful repre- 
 sentation of that Absolute purpose. Viewed from the standpoint of 
 the finite individuals, they, in all their uniqueness and freedom, are 
 the active agencies of the World Individual. The stars that clash 
 headlong in sidereal space are thus freely and uniquely expressing 
 their own and the World Individual's purpose that new heavenly 
 bodies be formed; the atoms at work in the hidden recesses of the 
 mountain, here or in other solar systems, are thereby living their 
 own purposeful lives and thereby performing the will of God; the 
 
30 EELIGIOUS VALUES AND INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 
 
 races of men that have struggled up to social democracy or have 
 slipped down to savagery, the individual man that slays his fellow 
 or devotes himself to a righteous cause, — are all doing the will of the 
 Absolute, finding their own reality and asserting their own precious 
 freedom. The evil that men experience, singly and collectively, not 
 to mention the hypothetical heart-burns of atoms and animals, is 
 self-elected and self -borne by the Absolute. Evil exists, truly enough, 
 but only as an element in the larger reality that means well and has 
 in advance secured a positive result. The World is one and infinite, 
 but present here; eternal, but present now; indivisible, but self- 
 broken into an infinitude of elements that are not meaningless 
 fragments, but comprehensible and fitting parts. The World is 
 conscious ; it is active ; it is purposeful. What is, is known as neces- 
 sary and as good in a vast experience of "the whole, all at once." 
 "By the absolute reality we can only mean either that which is pres- 
 ent to an absolutely organized experience inclusive of all possible 
 experience, or that which would be presented as the content of such 
 an experience if there were one."^'' "The terms Reality and Organ- 
 ized Experience are correlative terms. The one can be defined as the 
 object, the content of the other. "^^ 
 
 The dialectic by means of which Royce clinches his argument for 
 the existence of the Absolute experience is given concisely in his 
 "Conception of God." Therein^- he reduces the possible alternative 
 considerations to two. "The first alternative to saying that there is 
 no such real unity of experience is the assertion that such a unity 
 is a bare and ideal possibility. But there can be no such thing as a 
 merely possible truth, definable apart from actual experience." 
 The second consideration "appears when we ask our finite experience 
 whereabouts is in any wise even suggested the actually experienced 
 fact of w^hich that hypothetical proposition relating to the ideal or 
 absolute experience, is the expression. What in finite experience 
 suggests the truth that if there were an absolute experience it would 
 find a certain unity of facts?" And the answer to this question is 
 as follows: "Any finite experience must regard itself as suggesting 
 some sort of truth. To do so, an experience must indicate what a 
 higher or inclusive — i. e., a more organized experience would 
 find presented thus or thus to itself. . . . Granted that there 
 is no absolute experience as a concrete fact, but only the will 
 to have it; then this absolute erroneousness of the real experience 
 will be the absolute truth. , . . The very effort to assert that the 
 
 10 "Conception of God," p. 24. 
 
 11 Id., p. 27. ^ 
 
 12 Pp. 27-30. ' 
 
MODEBN VALUES AND TEE RELIGION OF IDEALISM 31 
 
 whole world of experience is a world of fragmentary and finite ex- 
 perience is an effort involving- a contradiction. Experience must 
 constitute, in its entirety, one self-determined and consequently 
 absolute and organized whole. For truth is, so far as it is known. 
 Now this proposition applies as well to the totality of the world of 
 finite experience as it does to the parts of that world. There must 
 then be an experience to which is present the constitution {i. e., the 
 actual limitation and narrowness) of all finit.e experience, just as 
 surely as there is such a constitution. But this fact that the world 
 of finite experience has no experience beyond it could not be present, 
 as a fact, to any but an absolute experience, which knew all that is 
 or that genuinely can be known." 
 
 As is to be expected, Royce identifies God with his Absolute. In 
 the work quoted above^^ he says that in advance of any proofs of 
 God's existence he will mean by the word God a being who is con- 
 ceived as possessing to the full all logically possible knowledge, in- 
 sight, and wisdom. His final description of God is as follows:^* 
 **God is thought that sees its own fulfilment in the world of self- 
 possessed life — in other words, a thought whose ideas are not mere 
 shadows, but have an aspect in which they are felt as well as meant, 
 appreciated as well as described, — yes, I should unhesitatingly say, 
 loved as well as conceived, willed as well as viewed. Such a thought 
 you can also call in its wholeness a Self ; for it beholds the fulfilment 
 of its own thinking, and views the determined character of its living 
 experience as identical with what its universal conceptions mean. 
 . . . God is known as thought fulfilled, as Experience absolutely 
 organized, so as to have one ideal unity of meaning; as Truth trans- 
 parent to itself; as Life in absolute accordance with idea; as Self- 
 hood eternally obtained." 
 
 Obviously, the implication of Royce 's philosophy as finally formu- 
 lated in "The World and the Individual" is that religion consists in 
 the conscious acceptance on the part of the finite individual of his 
 part in the life of the Absolute. His little life is to be viewed as 
 secure and meaningful in its universal setting. He is a part of a 
 purposeful plan, and thereby does his finite effort receive value and 
 are his finite failures and weaknesses swallowed up in the guaranteed 
 success of the infinite reality of which he is a significant element. 
 The evil that life brings him he will suffer bravely, for does not God 
 agonize with him ? His sword may snap in the conflict ; he may even 
 die in the heat of it ; but even so he has a share in the glory of the 
 victory, for he is a known and valued compatriot of the great Leader, 
 and he is sure that the battle is the Lord's. 
 
 13 p. 9. 14 P. 22. 
 
32 EELIGIOUS VALUES AND INTELLECTUAL CON^ISTENCT 
 
 The Conception of Individuality 
 
 As has been said above, Eoyce conceives of reality as a self- 
 conscious, purposeful Individual. All reality is comprised within 
 its grasp and there is no other individual in the world beyond itself. 
 Our first objection to such a conception is this : If there be only one 
 individual in the universe, then it can have no individuality, for 
 individuality depends for its existence upon alternatives, upon 
 choice, upon clash of wills and purposes; in short, to use Eoyce 's 
 own phrase, as it occurs in "The Problem of Christianity," indi- 
 viduality depends upon "the possibility of interpretation." Royce 
 says:^^ "Metaphysically considered, the world of interpretation is 
 the world in which, if indeed we are able to interpret at all, we learn 
 to acknowledge the being and the inner life of our f ellowmen ; and to 
 understand the constitution of temporal existence, with its endlessly 
 accumulating sequence of significant deeds. In this world of inter- 
 pretation, of whose most general structure we have now obtained 
 a glimpse, selves and communities may exist, past and future can be 
 defined, and the realms of the spirit may find a place which neither 
 barren conception nor the chaotic flow of interpenetrating percep- 
 tions could ever render significant." If I understand Royce 's 
 meaning of the world of interpretation, it seems to be a most valu- 
 able contribution to a true philosophy of experience; for it insists 
 upon the existence of the linkages that make a world of experience 
 possible. Experience is a social product that depends upon mean- 
 ings, upon interpretations, for its being. It is not constituted by a 
 set of eternal concepts, nor by myriad direct perceptions or intui- 
 tions. Rather it is a complex composed of direct and immediate 
 data, which are at once known and described and modified and used 
 in the light of such past experience as we possess. Conceptualism ab- 
 stracts the linkages of experience and elevates them to a lonely 
 grandeur of especial distinction. Intuitionalism denies the linkages 
 and sets up a world of fragments. The true philosophy of experience 
 must recognize both these elements as functionally fused into an 
 instrumental product that means acquaintanceship and understand- 
 ing and the possibility of manipulation. 
 
 Returning to Royce 's conception of the Absolute Experience, we 
 may well ask how, if the world of experience is a world of interpre- 
 tation, any single individual can have meaningful experience. Royce 
 frequently implies his own answer to the question. The world may 
 be an individual because it possesses its own infinite variety for its 
 content. But we may further ask what is the need of interpretation 
 
 15 IL, p. 160. 
 
MODEBN VALUES AND THE EELIGION OF IDEALISM 33 
 
 and where is its possibility if the life of the Absolute is present before 
 it as a totum simul, involving an immediate knowledge of all time, all 
 space, all purpose, and all fulfilment. Interpretation is a triadic 
 relation, as Koyce defines it, involving the knowing individual, the 
 object to be interpreted and the body of social experience in the light 
 of which the object has meaning and through which the interpreta- 
 tion may be justified. How then can an experience which is essen- 
 tially an immediate knowledge have room for any interpretation 
 whatsoever? It might be said that the interpretation lies in the con- 
 scious life of finite individuals, and that, as the Absolute is ulti- 
 mately within its parts, interpretation is truly the process by means 
 of which its own life is built up. But on such a basis, the Absolute 
 recedes to the vanishing point and ceases to possess an independent 
 life of its own. Needless to say it would be impossible to arrive at an 
 Absolute experience through a process of summation. 
 
 Granted, however, that the Absolute exists, then what of the finite 
 individual ? Royce believes that the finite being has his own rights, 
 his own purposes and his own freedom in conception and in perform- 
 ance. The true status of absolute and finite individuality is expressed 
 in the following alternatives : Either the Absolute exists and the finite 
 selves are only his objects of self-realization ; or the finite selves exist 
 in a unique and purposeful way and the Absolute is only a name. 
 In other words, either the finite variety of the world is only the 
 objectification of a unified inner purpose that requires just that 
 variety of objects and no other for the Absolute's self-realization, in 
 which event the finite elements or selves are controlled by a power 
 beyond them; or the finite selves engaged in living their own lives; 
 and fulfilling their own ends, represent an incalculable element ini 
 reality that breaks through and evades any attempt to coerce and 
 control it in the interest of a preconceived end. In the former event, 
 the term individuality is inapplicable to the finite selves, for they are 
 thus made puppets of a larger will ; in the latter event, the term indi- 
 viduality is inapplicable to the Absolute, for the sum of purposes 
 represents no single purpose and seeks no single goal. Eoyee's 
 philosophy can meet neither alternative and stand. 
 
 Royce identifies freedom with uniqueness of self-expression. 
 Certainly such a definition of freedom is empirically satisfactory ; for 
 what greater freedom a man could ask than the freedom to act un- 
 eonstrainedly in the pursuit of an end that is representative of his 
 whole selfhood, is hard to conceive. If we accept Royce 's Absolute, 
 then every act that takes place in the world may be regarded as 
 unique and necessary for the complete expression of the Absolute 
 purpose — an act that completely fulfils the purpose and for which no 
 
34 BELIGIOUS VALUES AND INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 
 
 other could be substituted. But even that is only to say that the 
 Absolute is free and not that the finite individual is so, for the given 
 quantity in the case is made to serve at the same time in an active and 
 a passive role. It is passive as the embodiment of an Absolute will; 
 it is active as the expression of a unique meaning for itself. The dual 
 role of finite individuality, each phase of which is incompatible with 
 the other, presents an insuperable difficulty. 
 
 Individuality and Time 
 
 We have so far criticized Royce's conception of the Absolute Indi- 
 vidual on the grounds of his own description of the World of Inter- 
 pretation, in which it was said to be essential to the existence of 
 experience that it represent functional linkages within a triadic 
 community of interest. From another point of view, his conception 
 of Absolute Individuality seems to be vitiated by his treatment of 
 the element of time, for we believe that, to treat the conception of 
 time as Royce does, is to eliminate from your philosophy all con- 
 sideration of values. As we know, Royce reduces all time to the 
 present experience of the Absolute, whose time-span is coequal with 
 the entire series of total reality. In the life of the Absolute, there 
 is no past, no future, but one eternal now. The primeval nebula and 
 the last clash of frozen suns are even now present in his knowledge, 
 while the little play of human races upon the planet Earth is at 
 once begun and ended. 
 
 Royce makes a vigorous effort in his philosophy to take account 
 of the presence of evil in the world. His treatment consists of show- 
 ing that all evils that finite individuals suffer are ipso facto suffered 
 by the Absolute as well, and that in his divine insight these evils, 
 while recognized as such, are viewed and known as necessary for the 
 fullness and the perfection of divine life. But, manoeuver as he may, 
 Royce can not bring upon the field of his Absolute Experience any- 
 thing that can be called an evil. For even as an event is called evil, 
 it is at the same time known as good in the larger vision. There is 
 no evil, for there is no real disturbance or destruction of values. 
 Whatever is, is right and desired. This Triangle Fire, this Titanic 
 Disaster, this system of industrial economy that results in poor pay 
 and long hours and frightful accidents to the workmen, yes, this 
 very human existence where Love and Death keep watch together, — • 
 are all to be viewed in their ultimate reality as good, for they are all 
 part of the divine will and pvirpose and their final significance is even 
 now consciously present to the Absolute. 
 
 But it is just the strain of expectancy, the horror of destroyed 
 
MODEEN VALUES AND THE RELIGION OF IDEALISM 35 
 
 values, the slow and sometimes never-accomplished process of heal- 
 ing life, that constitute the evil of finite experience. If we could 
 know in advance the fate of the life that is hanging in the balance, 
 if we could discount our dead losses at some universal clearing house, 
 and could experience here and now the ministry of healing days 
 and months and years, then we, too, might understand the Absolute 
 economy that Royce speaks of. But life is lived in time; and time 
 means waiting, strain, expectancy, endurance. Time, in its human 
 sense, is necessary for the production, the enjoyment, and the dis- 
 appearance of values. Satisfaction in possession is closely linked 
 up with the joys of expectation and the pangs of regret. If we pould 
 know in one conscious present the uncertainty of anticipation, the 
 fact of possession, and the ultimate gain that comes from loss, 
 wherein would be the significance of what we now describe as the 
 value element of experience ? 
 
 The conception of time is likewise closely bound up with the 
 significance of action and purpose. Since Royce describes his own 
 philosophy as Absolute Voluntarism, it is to be expected that the 
 system make adequate provision for just these elements of action 
 and purpose, but an Absolute philosophy of the type of Royce 's 
 is unable to do this. His world is a finished world. There can be 
 no action, for everything is already done. There can be no pur- 
 pose, for nothing remains to be done for which a purpose might 
 be formed. The time-span is present; the world is here and now 
 spread out before the Absolute consciousness with the divine purpose 
 eternally fulfilled. But it is just the looking forward to the consum- 
 mation of a purpose not now fulfilled that constitutes what we call 
 by that name. When we say that a certain end was my purpose, and 
 that it was realized or given up, then it is a dead purpose. It is in 
 the pickling solution of retrospect. "When I say, here and now my 
 purpose is fulfilled, I thereby give myself the cue for the formation of 
 new and unfulfilled purposes. Purposes look to the future. They 
 represent potential existence. They may come to realization or they 
 may not, and there is always connected with them an element of con- 
 tingency, as they must await the passage of time. Ideally, the result 
 is present; but if ideal presence were a guarantee of actual occur- 
 rence, one would never go to the trouble of forming plans and setting 
 up ^nds at all. For it is just the fact that the coming to pass of the 
 thing hoped for, the realization of the evidence of things unseen, 
 depends on what I may do, upon my skill, my persistency, my in- 
 genuity, or even upon aleatory elements over which I have no control, 
 that causes my purpose to have a definite relation to my actions and 
 to be a significant aspect of my self-expression. Purpose possesses 
 
36 BELIGIOUS VALUES AND INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 
 
 meaning only in the light of future contingency; and if for the 
 Absolute there is no future and no contingency, he can not be said to 
 have the power of setting up purposes. 
 
 The Incompatibility of Absolute Inclusiveness and Individuality 
 
 A final objection to Royce's conception of the Absolute Individual 
 arises in connection with the infinite catholicity in accepting moral 
 standards that such an individual must exhibit. Inconsistency of 
 action is, of course, a common enough phenomenon. We say that no 
 one is all bad or all good. But we do classify persons with reference 
 to their common tendencies to action of different sorts in given situa- 
 tions. We say that a person has a strong individuality when he com- 
 monly acts decisively and consistently with standards that he clearly 
 recognizes. He who is lacking in decision, or who fails to recognize 
 any standard or plan of life that he may call his own, is described 
 as being deficient in individuality; and when an extreme form of 
 chameleon-like propensity is developed, we say of a man that he is 
 a nobody, a nonentity. 
 
 If, now, we view the Absolute from the standpoint of the contra- 
 dictory actions of the finite individuals that constitute his self-ex- 
 pression, he appears to be a moral nonentity. From the point of 
 view of the preceding section, the Absolute has no choice of ends be- 
 cause the result is already accomplished. From the present point 
 of view, he makes no choice of ends because he is both alternatives. 
 He is the natural order that decreed the Titanic disaster, while at 
 the same time he is the heroism of the dying, the heartache of the 
 living, and the moral purpose of the investigations that followed the 
 event. He is the stem economic order that decrees hard conditions of 
 life and labor, while at the same time he is the suffering humanity, 
 either wise or foolish, self -destroying or fate destroyed, that labors 
 under the hated yoke. He is, furthermore, the spirit of philanthropy 
 that strives for better conditions, the spirit of the Beloved Community 
 that endeavors to link all men together in the embrace of a humane 
 and other-regarding social regime. The love of the Absolute for the 
 finite individual is compatible with any amount of cruelty; his 
 wisdom, with any excess of stupid folly ; his warfare on the side of 
 right, with any victory for the party of evil. His ultimate triumph 
 is consistent with infinite delay in bringing the triumph to pass. He 
 is not "the fairest among ten thousand," for in his person he bears 
 the blots and blemishes, the disfigurements and deformities, of every 
 one of the ten thousand, along with their beauty and their strength. 
 Such a conception as Royce's may be called an Individual; but in 
 
MODERN VALVES AND TEE RELIGION OF IDEALISM 37 
 
 the moral sense it can never mean what we are trying to express when 
 we use the word in ordinary speech. 
 
 The implication of the incompatibility between individuality and 
 all-inclusiveness for ethical and religious concerns is just this: the 
 Absolute is neither the object of moral endeavor nor of religious fer- 
 vor, for it is impossible to make a definitive statement of moral and 
 religious purpose except in terms of selected ends which carry their 
 own empirical values. It is of no small significance that Royce 
 frames his ethical ideal, that of loyalty to loyalty, in empirical terms, 
 and his religious ideal in the very practical, unmetaphysical concep- 
 tion of a Beloved Community. To be loyal to loyalty means, be 
 loyal to such causes as can command your allegiance and to respect 
 a like devotion on the part of others. The formula, indeed, seems to 
 be needlessly abstract and to have its edge dulled by being compelled 
 to include too much. For loyalty to B's loyalty on the part of A 
 quite possibly cuts across the boundary line of their separate causes. 
 A serves his flag and B, his, of a different nation. A's loyalty to B's 
 loyalty is than a rather empty matter, for A is hacking might and 
 main at B's cause. Except for the sound of the thing, they might as 
 well be enemies. But both A and B may justly be supposed to be 
 interested in furthering justice and equity upon the earth, and thus 
 their common cause is large enough to include both their lesser 
 loyalties. On the 'other hand, B may be consciously devoted to a 
 cause that is in every sense incompatible with that of A. He may be 
 engaged in an iniquitous traffic that opposes in spirit the promotion 
 of happiness among men. In that case, A would seem to have no 
 alternative except both to oppose B's cause and to attempt to break 
 down his loyalty to that cause. 
 
 Eoyce's latest formulation of the object of the moral and the 
 religious life represents the adoption of just some such universal 
 <feuse, some such ideal of the spread of human values, as has been 
 indicated above. In the "Problem of Christianity," he describes the 
 object of Christian loyalty as the Beloved Community, in which all 
 members are devoted to the upbuilding and the extension of a life of 
 mutual forbearance, affection, and helpfulness. "Loyalty, in the 
 individual, is his love for an united community, expressed in a life 
 of devotion to that community. "^^ "The realm of grace (synon- 
 ymous with the Beloved Community) is the realm of the powers and 
 the gifts that save, by thus originating and sustaining and inform- 
 ing the loyal life. The realm contains, at the very least, three 
 essentially necessary constituent members: First, the ideally lovable 
 community of many individuals in one spiritual bond ; secondly, the 
 
 16 I., p. 178. 
 
38 BELIGIOUS VALUES AND INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 
 
 spirit of this community, which is present both as the human indi- 
 vidual whose power originated and whose example, whose life and 
 death, have led and still guide the community, and as the united 
 spiritual activity of the whole community; thirdly, Charity itself, 
 the love of the community by all its members, and of the members 
 by the community. "^^ Royce, of course, does not identify the Be- 
 loved Community with the Universal Community of the Absolute 
 Life, but rather regards it as a type of the latter. In so far as the 
 Beloved Community exhibits the ideal of loyalty and is engaged in 
 furthering the coming of the Absolute Community, it is consistent 
 with his philosophy. Assimilate and apply the creed of loyalty ''and 
 you have grasped the principle of Christian institutional life in the 
 past, and the principle which will develop countless neAV institutions 
 in the future, and which will survive them."^^ We may sum up the 
 religious bearings of the work in Royce 's own words: "Aid toward 
 the coming of the universal community by helping to make the work 
 of religion not only as catholic as is already the true spirit of loyalty, 
 but as inventive of new social arts, as progressive as is now natural 
 science. So you shall help in making, not merely happy individuals 
 (for no power can render detached individuals permanently happy, 
 or save them from death or from woe). You shall aid towards the 
 unity of spirit of those who shall be at once free and loyal. "^^ 
 
 Royce has herein very acceptably described a most important 
 aspect of true religion ; but the arguments we have brought forward 
 in this section lead us to consider it a mistake to suppose that the 
 Universal Community that Royce would have us aid in bringing to 
 pass, is in any sense identifiable with his Absolute. The finite indi- 
 viduals that are known as mankind, do not comprise any such com- 
 munity to-day, and it is problematical if they ever will. But man- 
 kind has made vast strides in that direction and we accept the 
 working ideal that some day a true universal community may be 
 realized. It is just such an ideal that we adopt as the great cause to 
 which we are loyal. To posit this ideal as certain of' realization, is 
 simply to say that ^our faith is so strong that you must believe in 
 the final outcome so firmly as to set it up as at present, here and now, 
 assured. But as far as the logical consistency of Royce 's Absolute is 
 concerned, every man's hand might as well be lifted against his 
 brother, and human ethical values might disappear from the face of 
 the earth. 
 
 17 I., p. 192. 18 II., p. 429. 19 II., pp. 431-32. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 A Descriptive Study of Religious Experience and the 
 
 God-Concept 
 
 In a previous chapter of this paper we have followed the dis- 
 integration of the intellectual supports of Classical Christianity 
 under the criticisms of modern science and philosophy. It is our 
 belief that Kant has totally discredited the possible existence of the 
 central figure of the Theistic and Deistic world-plans as a Being 
 independent of the cosmos and human experience. He did this by 
 placing such a conception outside the boundaries of scientific demon- 
 stration and making it unacceptable to the scientific sense. In addi- 
 tion, we have described the attempt of Absolute Idealism to estab- 
 lish the existence of God through a philosophy of religion. And as 
 we have examined such systems as those of Hegel and Royce, we have 
 been compelled to deny on the very basis of intellectual inconsistency 
 the success of these efforts to manufacture a God out of whole cloth. 
 
 It is our belief that any attempt to elaborate a God through 
 philosophy will fail. God must first exist to be discovered and 
 described, or he does not exist at all. The work of science, and of 
 philosophy as science, is to analyze, classify, delineate, explain ; never 
 to produce, except as better understanding is real production. Philos- 
 ophy as applied in the study of religion must abide by the same 
 rules of procedure. It can not produce a religion; it can only de- 
 scribe one as given. If it can be shown that God and religion have 
 empirical sources, and if these sources can be laid bare, then we 
 shall feel that a methodology will have been established that may be 
 applied as well to the religion of Caliban as to that of Jesus or Paul, 
 To this end, the writer will rehearse the anthropological common- 
 places that go to show that religion was present in the life of man- 
 kind before the conception of any God arose; he will try to show 
 that the conception of God has been very variable and has under- 
 gone, in our Western religion at least, continual change, and, finally, 
 that just as religion has existed before the God-concept arose, 
 just so it may exist at the present time after the demands of 
 science have reduced the meaning of God to a name representative 
 of certain values, that is adopted and used as a convenient and 
 historically significant means of self-expression. In other words, our 
 last point means that the conception of God as a Being represents an 
 
 39 
 
40 BELIGIOUS VALVES AND INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 
 
 historical phase of religion that modern scientific knowledge finds no 
 place for ; and that the religious man who is at the same time scientific 
 adopts this name only as a convenient vehicle of self -representation. 
 
 1. Beligion heloiu the Plane of the God-Concept 
 
 Anthropologists have differed largely among themselves as to 
 the meaning that should be conveyed by the term religion. Tylor, 
 one of the pioneers in this field, would have the minimum definition 
 of religion imply "the belief in spiritual beings." J. G. Frazer in- 
 sists that the word religion should be limited to apply only to "a 
 propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are be- 
 lieved to direct and control the course of nature and of human life." 
 This definition aimed to make a distinction between primitive scien- 
 tific control and the worship of spiritual beings. Primitive men have 
 been found to believe very generally "that the course of nature is 
 determined, not by the passions or caprice of personal beings, but 
 by the operation of immutable laws acting mechanically. ' ' Personal 
 beings were to be propitiated by worship; the impersonal forces of 
 nature were to be controlled by the possession of the proper charm or 
 the performance of the proper ceremony, before which there was no 
 denial. 
 
 This clear-cut distinction between religion and magic that Frazer 
 made, has, however, been denied in the more recent anthropological 
 literature. Eather, it seems that there is no division line between 
 the two. Shotwell, in an article entitled ' ' The Role of Magic ' '^ says : 
 "Religion was no special creation midway along the centuries of 
 human groping ; it was but the intenser action of that mystic power 
 which lay at the heart of magic," And again, "For mana (the 
 mysterious power behind contagion) does not die out when animism 
 appears, nor when animism grows into anthropomorphism, nor even 
 when polytheism passes away before monotheism. Its maleficent ele- 
 ment grows less and less apparent and its beneficence more, until, as 
 divine grace, it nourishes the faith and strengthens the moral purpose 
 of the Christian world. In the sacraments of the Church it still 
 works by the laws of sympathetic- magic. In the realm of faith it 
 has at last left the material media of its long prehistoric phase. "^ 
 The point made by Professor Shotwell is well illustrated in our 
 Western religious tradition by the automatically communicable magic 
 of the ark, or pork, or of manna collected in quantity, as related of 
 that phase of Hebrew religious evolution when Jehovah was as yet a 
 polytheistic deity. 
 
 1 Am. Jour, of Soc, Vol. 15, p. 791. 
 
 2 7d., p. 791. 
 
RELIGIOUS EXPEEIENCE AND THE GOD-CONCEPT 41 
 
 More recent attempts to define religion make it conterminous with 
 the range of objects to be described by such words as sacra, hiera, 
 mana, manitou, etc. Certain experiences of the primitive man seem 
 to be more highly charged with the essence of life than others. It is 
 as if the all-pervading current of reality produced sparks at certain 
 given points, which thereafter represent par excellence the force 
 behind life. Such places, persons, or things are set apart as different, 
 exceptional. They are to be employed carefully, for, while rightly 
 used they are powerful aids, wrongly used or carelessly approached, 
 they are extremely dangerous. Hence the meaning of sacra, mana, etc. 
 
 The conception of mana appears in the religions of Melanesia. It 
 means psychic energy of all kinds and is, essentially, created by 
 human beings. It may, however, act through the medium of water, 
 or a stone, or other natural object. The chief point in Melanesian 
 religion is to get this mana for oneself or to get it used in one's behalf. 
 "Whatever has come to be regarded as mana exerts an extraordinary 
 power. 
 
 The Algonkin conception of manitou is described by William 
 Jones in the Journal of American Folk-Lore,^ in part as follows: 
 * ' In the first place the term manitou is a religious word ; it carries 
 with it the idea of solemnity ; and whatever the association it always 
 expresses a serious attitude, and kindles an emotional sense of 
 mystery. The conception involved in its use can best be shown by 
 taking up some features of Algonkin religion. 
 
 "The essential character of Algonkin religion is a pure, naive 
 worship of nature. In one way or another associations cluster about 
 an object and give it a certain potential value; and because of this 
 supposed potentiality, the object becomes the recipient of an adora- 
 tion. The degree of the adoration depends in some measure upon 
 the extent of confidence reposed in the object, and upon its supposed 
 power of bringing pleasure or inflicting pain. The important thing 
 with the individual is the emotional effect experienced while in the 
 presence of the object, or with an interpreted manifestation of the 
 object. The individual keeps watch for the effect, and it is the effect 
 that fills the mind with a vague sense of something strange, some- 
 thing mysterious, something intangible. One feels it as the result 
 of an active substance, and one 's attitude toward it is purely passive. 
 
 ' * To experience a thrill is authority enough of the existence of the 
 substance. The sentiment of its reality is made known by the fact 
 that something has happened. It is futile to ask an Algonkin for an 
 articulate definition of the substance, partly because it would be 
 something about which he does not concern himself, and partly be- 
 
 8 18: 183-90. 
 
42 RELIGIOUS VALUES AND INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 
 
 cause he is quite satisfied with the sentiment of its existence. He feels 
 that the property is everywhere, is omnipresent, . . . 
 
 "The ceremonial lodare is a holy symbol; it means a place where 
 one can enter into communication with higher powers, where with 
 sacrifice and offering, with music and dance one obtains audience 
 and can ask for things beyond human control; it means a place 
 where one can forget the material world and enjoy the experience of 
 that magic spell which one feels is the sign that not only is one in 
 the presence of the supernatural property, but in that of the beings 
 who hold it in high degree. It is a function with a very definite 
 purpose. It is to invoke the presence of an objective reality; the 
 objectified ideal may be animate or inanimate. And the ejffect is in 
 the nature of a pleasing thrill, a sense of resignation, a consolation. 
 This effect is the proof of the presence of the manitou." 
 
 In summing up the meaning of primitive religion, R. R. Marett, 
 in the article "Primitive Religion," Encyclopedia Britannica, says 
 it is "the consecration of life, the stimulation of the will to live and 
 to do." He adds that "this bracing of the vital feeling takes place 
 by means of imaginative appeal to the great forces man perceives 
 stirring within him and about him, such appeal proving effective 
 doubtless by reason of the psychological law that to conceive strongly 
 is to imitate." The general effect of contact with the sacred objects 
 or "churinga," is said by Spencer and Gillen in their works on the 
 Central Australian tribes, to be to make the tribesman "glad." It 
 likewise makes him "good," so that he is no longer greedy and 
 selfish. It endows him with second sight, gives him success and con- 
 fidence in war, and strengthens him in unlimited ways. 
 
 2. The Various Theisms 
 
 Anthropology has as yet been unable to furnish a thoroughly 
 satisfactory classification of religions in an ascending series. But it 
 seems enough to say that religion begins in the primitive forms dis- 
 cussed in the preceding section and exhibits development until it 
 reaches the plane of monotheism. The worship of sacred objects 
 develops into animism, the worship of spirits. The savage, tripping^ 
 over the vine that lay concealed in his path, feels that he has had a 
 contact with an evil spirit. Returning from a bootless hunt, he 
 blames his ill-fortune upon an unfriendly genius of the woods; or, 
 staggering homeward under the heavy weight of spoils, he is careful 
 to offer up to his good spirit the choicest morsel of the quarry. He 
 lives in a world that is peopled with spirits. The river, the tree, the 
 thunder-cloud, the fruitful field, the shining crystal, the peaceful 
 moon, the life-giving rain, the grateful sunlight, — all are more than 
 
BELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE AND THE GOD-CONCEPT 43 
 
 just river, crystal, and sun : they are living spirits and have an atti- 
 tude of praise or blame toward him. There are spirits of earth and 
 sky and air; spirits of the nation, of the province, of the district, 
 of the hills, of the lakes, of the grains : spirits that guard the crafts 
 and guilds of the industries and agriculture; spirits for the house- 
 hold operations, for the kitchen range and the sauce-pot ; spirits pro- 
 tecting the threshold, the door, the hinge ; spirits fertilizing the land 
 with water-springs, the givers of corn and wine and oil ; spirits that 
 guard the mores of the tribe and punish transgressions against the 
 established ways of acting. 
 
 Group life, with its institution of common worship, tends to 
 reduce to common possession all those values that represent the wel- 
 fare of its members. Such aspects of their experience as appertain 
 to all, — the group-ancestor, the arching sky, the broad river, the 
 moon, the sun, or the storm-cloud, are celebrated in chant and dance 
 and sacrifice. As any or all of these objects of experience become 
 matters of common knowledge and regard, the culture of the group 
 ministers to the perpetuation, the enlargement and the coordination 
 of the tradition that concerns them. As one or other object of wor- 
 ship becomes preeminent within the group, a special cult arises and 
 the deity gains in definiteness and distinctness of conception. Thus 
 there develop gods of nature, such as Varuna, Dyaus, Neptune, 
 Apollo, and Zeus ; plant and animal deities ; ancestral gods ; gods of 
 social institutions and national feeling, such as the hearth-fire gods, 
 city gods and national deities; and gods that represent the senti- 
 ments and affections of men and consecrate their moral energies; as 
 well as others too numerous to mention. 
 
 It is difficult to believe that religion is other than a natural 
 psychological product. It begins with the conception of sacred ob- 
 jects that foster or decrease human values ; it continues in the attribu- 
 tion of particular values to the control of certain spirits, and ends 
 with the attribution of all, or at least much more numerous values to 
 the disposal of a divinity or a group of divinities. No one is likely to 
 question the subjective element in the process of god-making if the 
 reference is to the phenomena of animism, for that is to be regarded 
 as akin to a belief in ghosts. Nor is there likely to be any objection 
 to one's saying that gods are subjective creations, arising out of the 
 poetic impulse, if the term god is applied to the divinities of the 
 Greek or Roman pantheon, the mythology of the Aryans or the 
 Norse Saga. But when one attempts to show that God, the God we 
 worship, was originally just such an autochthonic divinity, there is 
 likely to be considerable demurring and frequently flat denial. To be 
 sure, the God of the present-day Western tradition is not the same 
 
44 BELIGIOUS VALUES AND INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 
 
 as the God that brought the Children of Israel out of the land of 
 Egypt; but he is the lineal descendant of that God, Jehovah, who 
 was one God out of many that arose among the Semites, just as Zeus 
 and Apollo did among the Greeks, and was no more than the sub- 
 jectively originated divinity who represented the values held dear 
 to the descendants of Abraham, 
 
 One can ask for no better illustration of the elements that enter 
 into the conception of a god, and of the progress through polytheism 
 to monotheism, than the naturalistic, poetic creation of God at the 
 hands of the Hebrew prophets and teachers, as represented in the 
 course of the history of the Jewish people. Hebrew literature 
 abounds in examples of the way in which those values that relate 
 most directly to man's biological continuance and enjoymnet were 
 attributed to Jehovah. It was he that gave or withheld fertility of 
 soil, sunshine, rain, increase of flocks and herds, many children, long 
 life and protection from enemies, disease and the violence of nature. 
 He is the sublime and worshipful one, whom the psalmist apostro- 
 phizes and whose glories he sings. 
 
 The ethical values that Jehovah favors originate in the moral 
 practises and ideals of the Hebrew tribe or nation, and are easily and 
 spontaneously transferred to him. The beginning of the Hebrew 
 tradition occurs when "Jehovah said unto Abram, get thee out of thy 
 country and from thy kindred and from thy father's house, unto 
 the land that I will show unto thee. ' ' Jehovah was then not even a 
 tribal god, but the patron divinity of a single family. He met with 
 his proteges at springs of water, in clumps of trees, and upon high 
 places, appearing in apparitions and dreams and talking with them 
 in the most open and democratic way. He was no less approachable 
 for Hagar, the servant in the tent of Abraham, than he was for the 
 patriarch himself. His protection was over the members of the 
 family, and he brought them peace and plenty. They worshipped 
 him at the sacrificial meal, pouring out his portion upon the sacred 
 rock or smearing the sacred pillar with fat and oil. In morals, he 
 was as easy-going as they, and accepted the crude nomadic code. 
 Abraham's harsh treatment of Hagar and his willingness to offer up 
 his first-bom son, Isaac, are imputed to him for righteousness. 
 Jacob's deception of Isaac, aided and abetted by his mother Rebecca, 
 a heroine of the early story, is related only as a tale worth the telling. 
 Evidently, Jacob's moral obliquity (from our point of view) had 
 no fatal consequences to his peace of mind, for on his journey from 
 home to escape the wrath of Esau, he had reassuring heavenly visions. 
 Lying, drunkenness, adultery, and incest are unrebuked elements in 
 the moral life of the patriarchs. 
 
BELIGIOUS EXPEHIENCE AND THE GOD-CONCEPT 45 
 
 The laws promulgated by Moses at the Mount exhibit a distinct 
 advance over the earlier moral standards of the Hebrews; and, 
 accordingly, they represent God as ethicized to the same degree. 
 By this time, the exigencies of a more intricate group life have 
 compelled and brought about a more involved and definite statement 
 of mutual obligations and privileges within the tribe, although the 
 members of the out-group remain as yet without moral status. At 
 this stage of the historical development, Jehovah is thought of and 
 worshipped as the giver of just laws for the governance of his 
 chosen people. Whether or not Moses wrote the fundamental mores 
 of his tribe upon tablets of stone and presented them to the people 
 for ratification, is neither here nor there ; but that the historic con- 
 sciousness of the group recognizes the occurrence as a fact is all- 
 important. When the people of Israel accepted their obligation to 
 do the will of Jehovah, the God of Nature and the guardian of their 
 national destinies, they brought deliberately into consciousness the 
 moral demands of that divinity and took upon themselves the conse- 
 quences of failure to fulfil their part of the contract. For, in that 
 act, their relation to Jehovah became one of contract, entailing 
 mutual obligations. Service of Jehovah on the part of the people 
 was recognized as bringing national prosperity and tribal success; 
 while a falling away in service was inevitably followed by loss of 
 Jehovah's favor. And the converse was equally true; national or 
 individual calamity was the sign of sin, secret or known, and pros- 
 perity was the indication of satisfactory performance of obligation. 
 
 When wider political contacts and crushing national vicissitudes 
 in the late centuries of the Two Kingdoms had caused the religious 
 geniuses of the day to see the cosmopolitanism of virtue and the 
 world-sweep of moral movements, the religion of the Hebrews came 
 to possess its universal significance. Jehovah is recognized as the 
 guide of all national destinies and not as simply the champion of a 
 given race. His function is no longer to guarantee the success and 
 sanctity of a single set of mores, but he is recognized as the com- 
 mander-in-chief of all the forces of good everywhere in the world. 
 And if Jewish religion thus gains in universality, it gains no less in 
 intensiveness. Each individual is to know his moral independence 
 and his moral responsibility. Outward ceremonial gives way to 
 inward experience. The fat of lambs and the blood of slain beasts 
 are distasteful to a God who insists upon the sacrifice of an humble 
 and contrite spirit, Mercy and justice and humility are required of 
 man, but only such manifestations of a regenerated and purified life 
 are of worth in God's sight. 
 
 The mouthpieces and the creators of religious opinion during this 
 
46 RELIGIOUS VALUES AND INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 
 
 period were the great spiritual innovators, Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and 
 others of scarcely less power. They studied the social and ethical 
 conditions of their day and cried out against the greedy, swinish guilt 
 of the orthodox followers of the cultus. Without hesitation, they 
 ascribed to Jehovah characteristics that were called for in their own 
 application of the principles of ancient custom, but missed in the 
 formal application of law and rule, or voluntarily set aside. Of their 
 own initiative they broke through the inconsistencies connected with 
 using a tribal unit in ethical concerns and extended wide the frontiers 
 of the moral kingdom. "Are ye not as the children of the Ethiopians 
 to me, children of Israel? saith Jehovah. Have not I brought up 
 Israel out of the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor and 
 the Syrians from Kir?"* They recognized new ethical values, pro- 
 duced by changed political and social conditions, and they unhesi- 
 tatingly spoke of them as the requirements of Jehovah for his people. 
 The prophets literally remade their God to include an intensive, 
 spiritual, and universal morality. 
 
 The next phase of the developing Hebrew religion is to be re- 
 garded, from the standpoint of a later time and a more inclusive 
 retrospect, as a backward step. Israel returns from captivity with a 
 codified system of moral and religious practise, but without the polit- 
 ical freedom that had been the main source of ethical movement in 
 the earlier centuries of its history. An ecclesiastical feudalism takes 
 the place of the monarchy. A petrified legal code is substituted for 
 the free spiritual life that had fostered the insight and the influence 
 of the prophets. Regulation and systematization of the religious 
 practises, as laid down in a book of laws, supplant the former auton- 
 omy of worship. Scribes and lawyers are needed to interpret the 
 intricacies of a general code when it is to be applied to the exigencies 
 of daily practise; and their decisions come to represent precedent 
 that may never be disregarded. Hebrew religion becomes the prac- 
 tise of a legal code, and God himself is made subservient to the power 
 of the Book. As was to be expected, the spirit of life fled the reli- 
 gion of later Hebraism, and the dry bones of a static creed stultified 
 the Holy of Holies of spiritual insight and moral endeavor. 
 
 The true succession of the Hebrew prophetical tradition occurs 
 in the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, which represent the 
 revolt of a truly religious and moral nature against the death of 
 legalism and class pride. Steeped in the writings of the great 
 prophets of an earlier day, and possessed in himself of a spirituality 
 that was adequate to the work of ethical and religious innovation, 
 Jesus interpreted to his fellow-men a conception of God and of the 
 
 *Amos, 9:7. 
 
BELIGIOUS EXPEEIENCE AND THE GOD-CONCEFT 47 
 
 higher life that has not to the present day been superseded in our 
 Western world and which seems to be universal in its appeal. 
 
 Jesus primarily conceived of God as a Father of humanity, and 
 much has been made of this preference. In subsequent estimates 
 of the significance of Jesus, the figurative expression has been exalted 
 to the plane of literal fact. Our own belief is that Jesus no more 
 thought of himself as the only son than did the Psalmist who applied 
 the name father to Jehovah. Jehovah is a Father just as he is a 
 Shepherd, a Protector and Shield, a Teacher, a Judge, or a Rock in 
 a Weary Land. Jesus 's choice of the word father to express his con- 
 ception of Jehovah, is to be understood on the basis of the ethical 
 values he recognized. These values were of the inner spiritual life, 
 intimate and personal. Of utmost importance for him was the main- 
 tenance in an individual of a proper motive or attitude, which was 
 the having at heart of the interests of all men. For Jesus, the human 
 race represents a vast brotherhood, all sons of a common Father. 
 He recognized the Father as the source and preserver of all values, 
 both those that reside in the objects of the physical environment 
 and those that have their existence in moral relations. W© pray, 
 "Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy 
 kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is done in Heaven. 
 Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive us our debts" as we 
 exhibit thy spirit in our dealings with thine other children. 
 
 Jesus considered himself the lineal descendant of Jewish religious 
 tradition. He came not to destroy the Law, but that it might be 
 fulfilled in the true spirit of its underlying principles. He literally 
 preaches anew the messages of the prophets. His conception of God 
 combines the elements of universal power and absolute goodness. 
 God is all-powerful for good. His kingdom shall come upon earth 
 and is being daily furthered. To be of this kingdom necessitates a 
 state of mind of which the keynote is expansiveness of interest. If 
 your life is to be one with God, says Jesus, exemplify in your deal- 
 ings with mankind the same solicitude and love that God exhibits 
 toward you. The Universe is friendly to you; then should you also 
 be friendly to men. The call is to a great mission: Be ye perfect 
 even as God is perfect. And as a preparation for this mission, recog- 
 nize your own weakness and unfitness. Cleanse your heart of pride 
 and self-satisfaction, becoming as a little child, and thus make room 
 for the thoughts and actions that are of God's kingdom. Gain your 
 own worth from the greatness of the cause you serve. Live in the 
 lives and interests of others. Sow the seed of altruism and reap the 
 harvest of a richer, deeper soul-life for yourself. 
 
48 BELIGIOUS VALUES AND INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 
 
 3. A Religion Compatihle with Modern Science 
 
 We have watched the development of religion from its most 
 primitive forms to its manifestation in an ethical monotheism. In 
 the whole story of this spiritual evolution there has been little 
 notice taken of intellectual consistency. Certainly it was present, 
 but it operated within the easy boundaries of poetry. The point of 
 view taken is well represented by Hocking in "The Meaning of God 
 in Human Experience," when he says, "Taking religious ideas liter- 
 ally and fixedly is, in fact, a modern and Western peculiarity. The 
 Oriental mind realizes that the spiritual atmosphere that men or 
 gods may breathe, must be created; it knows nothing of empirical 
 truth in matters of religion, truth passively taken; and postulate 
 joins hands with poetry in constituting the medium in which all 
 spirituality may live. "^ 
 
 When men began to cast their observations and theories regard- 
 ing reality in the stable moulds of fact, when they left off telling 
 tales, philosophy began. The history of Greek philosophy is a 
 progressive record of the overthrow of simple faith in poetic crea- 
 tions, in favor of an intellectually consistent formulation of reality. 
 The first mature systems of Greek philosophy were the materialism 
 of Democritus and the idealism of Plato. Both may be called scien- 
 tific, but both were speculative science. The latter has been closely 
 connected with the structure of classical Christianity, for which it 
 afforded an intellectual groundwork that so perfectly corresponded 
 with the poetic religion of the Jews that for long centuries the hybrid 
 formed of their union was able to meet the spiritual needs of the 
 people of the Western world. But when a new spirit of inquiry, 
 based on the observation and the manipulation of experience came 
 into vogue in Western Europe, the speculative science of the Greeks 
 was irretrievably overthrown, dogmatic materialism as well as dog- 
 matic idealism falling before the critical philosophy of Kant. The 
 story of this disintegration of the intellectual supports of classical 
 Christianity has been told in a previous chapter and the attempts 
 of speculative philosophy to build anew the walls of a ruined temple 
 have been viewed and discarded. What we now propose is to take 
 with us the method that has, in the preceding section of this chapter, 
 described for us and made understandable the meaning and the 
 evolution of religions among men, into the experiences of a modern 
 life, with the expectation, not of creating a religion and a God, but 
 of finding a vital, inspiring, and satisfying contact with reality that 
 will prove to be the religion that we are seeking; and of then being 
 
 5 P. 149, 
 
SELIGIOUS EXPEEIENCE AND THE GOD-CONCEPT 49 
 
 able to define the meaning of God with reference to the experience 
 thus discovered. 
 
 It will be said at once by the reader and critic that the God of 
 the ages of faith described in the foregoing section was believed in 
 as an entity, a Being that had independent, personal existence, 
 whereas the man who has analyzed out the elements that enter into 
 the conception of God and has explained his existence as residing in 
 certain values, can only be practising self-deception in making an 
 appeal or voicing a hymn of praise and thanksgiving to his own 
 psychological product. It is not the writer's purpose to try to 
 underestimate the thorough-going difference in standpoint that his 
 description involves as against the attitude of an age of faith. It 
 must be admitted that science limits the grounds of faith. When the 
 lightning bolt is the missile of Jove and the thunder is the voice of 
 Jehovah, there is much greater room for religious expression than 
 when lightning is known as an electric spark that finds its point of 
 discharge according to physical laws, and when thunder is known 
 as the result of sudden heating and expansion of the atmosphere. 
 Pestilence in a scientific age does not mean the hand of God, but it 
 signifies the presence of germ-breeding filth and bad sanitary condi- 
 tions. Boils are not the special dispensation of God but are the 
 result of bad blood. The more there is of knowledge of the condi- 
 tions governing any phase of human interest and activity, the less 
 there is of mystery. Under modem conditions of scientific agricul- 
 ture it is impossible to conceive of the worship of a Baal, or soil-god. 
 A crop depends upon known or ascertainable conditions of soil, heat 
 and moisture. When a crop fails, instead of feeling that Baal has 
 been unfavorable, one knows that the land needs bone fertilizer or 
 barnyard manure ; or that his agricultural project has been hindered 
 by an unusually low temperature, or an amount of rainfall below 
 that which is known as essential. 
 
 It will be said that scientific knowledge and control have driven 
 mystery and prayer out of human experience; that science has 
 banished God. Certainly a great deal of what was included in the 
 conception of God has been removed through the prevalence of 
 rational controls, and if God were only a particular Being with a 
 particular sphere of influence, or if he were a concept with a 
 specific content, once for all given and unchangeable, it would be 
 true that God is dead and that the age of religion is past. But 
 religion existed before any god whatsoever was thought of, — before 
 mankind had developed an intellectual life capable of conceiving 
 reality in terms of gods and goddesses. If religion existed before it 
 was objectified in god-worship, it is to be presumed that it repre- 
 
50 BELIGIOUS VALUES AND INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 
 
 sents a function of experience that is present even after an intel- 
 lectual criterion has developed that refuses to allow the description 
 of the religious aspects of life in the poetical language of myth and 
 theology. The writer takes the position that religion is a function of 
 life, and that wherever men are alive to the meaning and possibilities 
 of life, it will be present. 
 
 Obviously, the next thing to be done in the development of our 
 thesis is to present, as far as possible, the religious experience of a 
 modern man who is as thoroughgoing in his intellectual life as the 
 scientific attitude compels him to be. This does not mean that every 
 modern man will have the experiences described, for religion is, like 
 many other experiences, somewhat of a specialty. But we shall hope 
 to describe some of the religious experiences of a man whom we shall 
 choose and whom you will recognize, perhaps, in your colleague and 
 neighbor, and in yourself. 
 
 The writer admits at the outset the lack of a scientific criterion of 
 the choice of experiences that he will denominate as religious. He 
 offers a tentative list, at the same time recognizing that he has prob- 
 ably erred on the side of omission, and possibly on the side of inclu- 
 sion. The list as given has been chosen with reference to four 
 criteria: first, the salient points of experience that have been taken 
 account of in so numerous religions and mythologies; second, the 
 literature of the occidental religious tradition (excepting always 
 the other-world emphasis of an eschatology based on Greek meta- 
 physics) ; third, the messages of modern prophetic agencies, partic- 
 ularly the pulpit that is in touch with modem life as seen through the 
 medium of social science; and, fourth, such introspections into his 
 own experience as seem to the writer to correspond to what others 
 call religion. The method pursued is not, to be sure, rigorously 
 scientific, but it seems to be impossible at the present writing to 
 reduce the conception in mind to more satisfactory form. 
 
 To begin with, a certain kind of mystery enters into some of the 
 experiences that are generally recognized as religious, as, for exam- 
 ple, the mystery of the cosmos, of birth and of death. The mere 
 brute presence of the universe, without beginning and without end 
 in time and without limit in space, is a matter that presents the 
 thoughtful man with characteristic feelings. It is not merely a 
 puzzle that confronts him, but a mystery of a degree of finality that 
 completely baffles him. The potency of this experience is exhibited 
 in the cosmological proof of the existence of God, for men felt them- 
 selves compelled to explain the mystery by positing God as the first 
 cause of it all. Kant's logic showed the futility of such an easy way 
 out of the dilemma, but even in the presence of his proof of the im- 
 
RELIGIOUS EXPEEIENCE AND THE GOD-CONCEPT 51 
 
 possibility of proof of a beginning, the existent fact of cosmic reality- 
 finds men in the same attitude of mysterious awe as caused them in a 
 less critical age to call the name of God. The same feeling of mystery 
 is present when one looks at a new-born babe. You may know the 
 facts of embryology, but that does not lessen the wonder of this new- 
 created life. Protoplasmic cells were transmuted from the common- 
 place materials of ordinary diet into muscular and nervous and other 
 tissue, and now it lives, a human being fraught with all the possibil- 
 ities of existence. Had it failed to wail, had it failed to breathe, it 
 had not been. That little difference between being and not-being as 
 a living organism is the point at which one always sticks and before 
 which one bows in reverence. Closely akin to the mystery that accom- 
 panies the beginning of life is that which is present when death puts 
 in its claim. Here was a man even as you and I ; a friend, a busi- 
 ness associate, who moved and talked and laughed. Now he is cold. 
 He is not here. Where has he gone? What has happened to him? 
 We are impatient when it is answered his heart stopped beating, his 
 isreathing ceased. A fool could say as much. But what has hap- 
 pened, we ask? and no answer is forthcoming. 
 
 Then, too, men find themselves worshipful in the presence of the 
 perfection of the natural world. This experience was long taken as 
 an infallible proof of the existence of God. If a thing exhibits fore- 
 sight and design, men naturally think that there is foresight and 
 design back of it. Rocks do no fall together by accident to form 
 bridges and cathedrals ; wheels and pivots do not spontaneously col- 
 lect themselves into a watch. On the same analogy, the world, a 
 larger device, does not come into existence haphazard, but by design ; 
 and, therefore, as explanatory of the perfection of nature, men have 
 posited God as its maker and builder. One may be thoroughly famil- 
 iar with the Kantian criticism of the validity of this proof, as given 
 in other pages of this paper, but the facts that led men to embark 
 upon that way of demonstration are yet present. One has but to 
 think of the precision of movement of the heavenly bodies; has but 
 to see a man and know what processes are involved in his moving 
 and thinking ; has only to observe the instinctive life of bee or bird, — 
 to feel a sense of reverent worship in the presence of the facts 
 observed. 
 
 Again, one has a feeling of personal insigpificanee as he views the 
 sublime aspects of nature. When one looks up at the starlit heavens 
 above him and has a feeling of the stupendous distances, the mighty 
 masses, the unthinkable forces, that are involved in celestial me- 
 chanics; when he tries to imagine the wealth of numbers of those 
 glowing points or to find a limit to their presence in space ; when he 
 
52 SELIGIOUS VALUES AND INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 
 
 allows the sheer beauty and majesty and peace of it all to enter his 
 mind and dwell there, he has had an experience that should be 
 named religious. 
 
 Not only does one have this feeling of personal insignificance in 
 the presence of the greatness and the vastness of the natural world, 
 but before other aspects of it as well. He is reduced to awesome fear 
 by its uncontrollable force. Rivers at flood, overflowing their banks 
 and destroying property and life ; ocean storms, with waves running 
 mountainously, tossing about as if they were corks upon a rivulet the 
 mightiest engines of war and commerce that man's ingenuity can 
 produce, and swallowing up men's hopes without feeling or remorse; 
 the devastating tornado, crumpling up the buildings of human 
 hands as if they were cardboard and exacting its toll of death and 
 destruction ; the dread terror of the thunderbolt, instantaneous and 
 incalculable, — all such meetings bring men upon their knees. 
 
 Furthermore, man is controlled, even in his most practical and 
 commonplace activities, by contingencies that beset him behind and 
 before, and render at naught his most cherished purposes. The seed 
 that one plants in the ground, after toilsome preparation and with 
 anticipation of an abundant crop, lives a precarious existence and 
 dies fruitless for want of rain. The growing cornfield, full of 
 promise of sustenance for man and beast, is stripped bare by the 
 devastating hail. The life begun with every promise of success and 
 usefulness, falls by the way, the victim of accident or disease; and 
 you say farewell to the friend of your heart when his race stops in 
 full career. Man's life, from the day of his birth to the day of his 
 death, is waylaid with contingencies. To be sure, this thought is not 
 sufficient to destroy the optimism of life, but it is certainly enough 
 to temper our happiness with sadness, to slow up our headlong pur- 
 suits, and to give a certain depth and seriousness to character, Man 
 can never be sufficient to himself ; he can not even find self-sufficiency 
 in his labors, his friendships, and his ideals. There is always a 
 residue of uncharted possibility which is present to lay him by the 
 heels ; and the man who truly knows life and is "reverent before it, 
 recognizes the limit of foresight and prediction. 
 
 One has, moreover, a religious feeling in the presence of the benev- 
 olence of nature. As one walks abroad after a rain that has drenched 
 the soil and brought renewed growth to the plant world and comfort 
 to man and beast, he feels within him the stir of elemental feelings 
 of worship that are as old as the race. The renewal of life in the 
 springtime, after the long dominion of frost is over, and the gather- 
 ing of the harvest in midsummer and autumn, no less awaken within 
 one the sense of the goodness of his station. Indeed, if there were 
 
BELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE AND THE GOD-CONCEPT 53 
 
 not more of security than of harm, of success than of failure, of life 
 than of death, our God would not be a loving God; our religion 
 would not be one of hope, but would be one of despair; our deity 
 would be a devil. To be sure, storms are comparatively few, and 
 accidents more frequent in anticipation than in realization. "We 
 pursue our cherished ends, on the whole, successfully and unafraid. 
 Life is rich, or tolerable, and always desirable. At the last analysis, 
 this positive valuation put upon life is the foundation of our occi- 
 dental religion and philosophy. The habit and the anticipation of 
 success build bridges from past enjoyments of the goodness of life 
 over the pitfalls and morasses of accident and loss and failure, to 
 the solid ground of future realization of predominant welfare. And 
 thus arises a conception of life as good, and of the universe as, on 
 the whole, friendly to our personal issues. 
 
 The religious feelings that have so far been described have re- 
 lated to man's reaction in the presence of his physical environment. 
 Others, yet to be named, are representative of experiences that he 
 has as a member of a social group. Man's ethical life has always 
 been of profound concern to himself and others, and has, with 
 equal unanimity of practise, been put under the protection of 
 divinities or has been their particular and jealous interest. As a 
 practical example of this fact, we have seen how successively widen- 
 ing ethical standards were automatically applied to Jehovah in the 
 course of Hebrew history. In attempting to single out the partic- 
 ular feelings or experiences that are related to this aspect of religion, 
 three seem to stand out as predominant, namely, a feeling of personal 
 worth and significance, a pervasive and warming expansiveness of 
 sympathy, and an invigoration of action in accordance with one's 
 standards and ideals. 
 
 We have said that there is something about man's natural envi- 
 ronment that tends to produce in him a sense of personal insignif- 
 icance. "When he views life ''sub specie aeternitatis," his selfhood 
 shrivels up. But in the ethical realm he comes into his own heritage ; 
 he is on human ground. He is a significant part of the process of 
 ethicising conduct that has gone on only through such as he. If we 
 employ figurative language, we may say that God has always spoken 
 his ethical messages through men. The prophet is as necessary to 
 the act of revelation as is the spiritual, divine source. In that way 
 the prophet takes on a divine character, too, and has personal worth. 
 Denuded of the figures of speech, such a statement as the foregoing 
 means that men from time to time have turned their attention vigor- 
 ously and undividedly to the subject of human conduct and have 
 gained insights that they have regarded as worthy, even divine, and 
 
54 JSELIGIOUS VALVES AND INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 
 
 that the call has been upon them to give to others their own light. 
 This sense of expert knowledge and of commission to speak, operates 
 in the direction of magnifying and intensifying the feeling of per- 
 sonal worth. 
 
 We have spoken of the close connection between ethical invention 
 or virtuosoship and the sense of personal worth, but it is not to be 
 implied that the condition of originality is essential to the latter 
 experience. One may gain an enlarged selfhood through mere 
 enlistment in ethical enterprises, — through a personal ratification 
 and adoption of ideals that one finds existent. Indeed, such is likely 
 to be the beginning of all ethical enthusiasm. This sense of redis- 
 covery of ethical values, this enlistment in the army of the Lord, 
 if you please, is accompanied by an experience that is unique. It 
 is one of warmth and expansiveness of affection, of the presence of a 
 general or universal sympathy. There is a feeling that one would do 
 largely and well, that he would like to remake the world to a better 
 pattern, that one would increase by one's own efforts and enthusiasm 
 the sum-total of human welfare in the world. Probably such experi- 
 ences are more frequent and more powerful in one's early life, espe- 
 cially during adolescence, but it certainly may be present on later 
 occasions as well. There will be times when one seems to be better 
 than oneself; when he would devote himself immediately and un- 
 reservedly to an ethical cause or to all ethical causes. His experi- 
 ence is catholic in its inclusiveness of good causes. Such meetings 
 as these are the mountain peaks of the ethical life. It is on such 
 occasions that one builds tabernacles and worships. One's main 
 difiiculty is that one is not able to bring all of the potentially realized 
 power down into the plane of every-day existence. One's faith is too 
 small to perform all the miracles that one had proposed. 
 
 There is a parallel to the facts above described in the history of 
 a love. There are times when mind and body conspire to make the 
 sympathy and the loyalty of two persons for one another a very 
 
 » 
 
 poignant realization. The lovers skip over the ever-present clods and 
 boulders and pitfalls of moral and mental and social differences, of 
 drudgery, of poverty, mayhap, without any realization of the exist- 
 ence of such things. But the pace will come to be less furious, and 
 obstacles will have to be reckoned with. Happy is that love which 
 finds itself able to walk and not faint, to furnish an ever-present store 
 of affection to infuse the drudgery of life with its essence, to insure 
 mutual contribution to compromise, to overlook the weakness, the 
 latent incapacity, the mistakes that most lives will furnish in 
 abundant measure. But all these things love can do and continually 
 does do. Just so, the experiences that men have upon the mountain- 
 
RELIGIOUS EXPEEIENCE AND THE GOD-CONCEPT 55 
 
 tops of ethical vision, while lost in their original freshness and 
 poignancy, follow them down into every-day, practical life, to invig- 
 orate them in the pursuit of their vocations and to strengthen them 
 in the service of their causes. This, then, is the third specific char- 
 acter that appears in the religious experience as it develops in con- 
 nection with the social life : a sense of direction, a knowledge of 
 purpose, a consciousness of satisfaction, even joy, in the doing of 
 one's every-day duty as it appears in one's vocation, in one's family 
 life, or in any other capacity that one's social setting establishes for 
 him. 
 
 The objection may be raised that the elements named herein as 
 entering into and constituting the religious experience are too few 
 and make that experience too meager. It may be said, however, 
 that the elements chosen are fundamental and far-reaching, em- 
 bracing man's reaction to the cosmic mother that brings him forth 
 and sustains him, and his self-expression as a man among men. 
 Furthermore, there is no reason to suppose that religion is a com- 
 plex matter. Many centuries ago, a religious expert made a pro- 
 nouncement upon the subj'ect to the effect that the essence of reli- 
 gion is ethical conduct and reverence before life.^ These fundamental 
 attitudes are, of course, modified and elaborated by the entire experi- 
 ence of the individual who exhibits them. The attitude toward nature 
 as shown in the primitive Bushman or Algonkin, in the theologizing 
 Greek or Jew, and in the modem man highly developed in his 
 knowledge of causes and controls, will differ according to his under- 
 standing and means of description. The invigoration of the will 
 of the Melanesian follows the line of Melanesian ethical standards. 
 So likewise of the Greek, or Jewish, or any other race. The 
 Christian of the early Middle Ages was impelled by his mystie 
 experiences of God to seek him in terms of self-denial and the casti- 
 gation of his body ; the Christian of the present day finds his activity 
 heightened in ways suggested by the prevalent social ethics. 
 
 We have described religion at the beginning of this chapter as a 
 natural psychological product, and have tried to indicate in very 
 brief fashion the development of religion as related to successively 
 higher intellectual and ethical backgrounds. We believe that the 
 term natural is correctly applied not only to the rude gropings of 
 primitive man, but to the reaction to his total environment on the 
 part of the man exhibiting the most highly developed intellectual and 
 ethical standards. Our final task has been an attempt to exhibit a 
 religion that no longer takes account of a Being called God, having 
 
 6Micah, 6: 6-8. 
 
56 BELIGIOUS VALVES AND INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 
 
 specific, individual reality independent of the sense of biological and 
 ethical values as resident in the experiences of human beings. 
 
 If it be allowed that we have described a religious experience 
 without having had recourse to the conception of God, there yet re- 
 mains the question whether such religion has any use for that con- 
 ception. The answer must be carefully stated. If by God is meant 
 a Being independent of the causal series of the given natural uni- 
 verse, and independent of those human values and human intel- 
 lectual tendencies that have, according to our description, resulted 
 in his creation at the hands of mankind, then the answer is that the 
 presumed existence of such a Being is contrary to facts supported by 
 the best intellectual standards and usages of our day. If, on the 
 other hand, by the term God is meant a name for a set of experiences 
 that are described as religious, then there is every reason for the 
 retention and use of the word. 
 
 The reality of religion is just the same as the reality of fear, 
 ambition, or the paper on which you read these lines. What is fear, 
 for example, except a name that stands for certain experiences? 
 Detach the word fear from its meaning and it is a strange, unrelated, 
 and crazy thing. Spell it, say it aloud, look at it detached from its 
 setting on the page; and what have you? Or paper! What is paper 
 but the things you do with it? the impressions you get of it? Take 
 it apart from its meaning and you have nothing. It does not seem 
 reasonable to condemn the significance of names because they are 
 only names; for they lead us up into the presence of our realities 
 and, in fact, stand so close to those realities that they are thought of 
 and used as the very realities themselves. 
 
 The writer would use the name God in the same way that he 
 uses any other name; in fact, in the same way many races have 
 used the names of their religious beings. Venus was to the Greeks 
 not merely the name of the goddess of love and beauty ; Venus was 
 love and beauty. The Greeks caught the reality in the name. The 
 reality as named was their divinity. Just so, it is not thought by the 
 writer to be in any sense derogatory to the dignity of God that he be 
 known as a named reality. God is the symbol of a set of experi- 
 ences called religious. He is not an invention of a lively brain, or 
 the mere product of a philosophical interest. God is the name for 
 the reality of religious experiences ; the religious experiences are 
 the reality of God. God and religion are synonymous, and both stand 
 for the reality of a realized or realizable experience. To say that 
 one has God in his life is to say that he is religious. Both names, 
 God and religion, are only convenient means of representing the 
 meant facts, without which both would be strange and meaningless 
 sounds. 
 
BELIGIOUS EXPEEIENCE AND THE GOD-CONCEPT 57 
 
 The objection will probably be raised that the use of the word God 
 has been preempted in favor of another conception that conveys the 
 meaning, among others, of independent, substantial existence, and 
 that it shows a lack of initiative to take an old name to cover a new 
 meaning. Outside of the fact that such is always the fate of words, 
 it might be said that the similarity between the two conceptions is 
 more important than their differences. There is the unlikeness of a 
 slightly different projection. In the one case, God is projected be- 
 yond experience; in the other, he lives within it. But both concep- 
 tions represent the same experiences and operate through the same 
 functions. If one wants to make himself understood when he talks 
 about the facts of religion, he can do so by using the name of God. 
 If he wishes to participate in the religious thoughts and feelings of 
 another, he will translate in his own way the use which that one 
 makes of God. Even if he is talking with some one of like mind with 
 himself, he will use the word God as a means of clear and concise self- 
 expression. Accordingly, there is every reason for the continued use 
 of the name God to signify our religious experiences, as it makes for 
 continuity in the religious tradition of the Western world, and fur- 
 nishes a simple and poetic method of describing a set of experiences 
 that are not too clearly defined but very generally comprehended. 
 
 It seems necessary to anticipate and try to meet a final objection 
 to our thesis. It will be said that such a God as has been described 
 is no God at all. His existence is dependent wholly upon a human 
 individual. If that individual has the experiences herein described, 
 then God is ; if he does not have them, then God is not. The prob- 
 lem as stated has at least two references. One of these is to the 
 continuity of the God experience in the life of any individual. It 
 will be said that the feelings on which the God-consciousness hinges 
 are comparatively infrequent; and where is God in the meantime? 
 In answer, it may be advanced that, although the most significant 
 meetings are occasional, they throw their influence over the intervals 
 between; they color the whole of one's experience and finally come 
 to infuse their spirit into an habitual way of conceiving reality and 
 confronting life. Neither must one lose sight of the fact that in the 
 lives of many persons who conceive of God as a Being, he sometimes 
 appears to be absent. Even in that supreme experience of courage 
 and self-sacrifice of Jesus, he had a feeling that God had forsaken 
 him ; and many lesser men have had the same experience for longer 
 periods than the momentary eclipse that the Master's faith suffered. 
 Indeed, it may be said that some men are forsaken and call in vain. 
 
 A second reference of the problem stated is to those lives that 
 never experience God, or religion, at all. It is said that God exists 
 
68 BELIGIOUS VALVES AND INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 
 
 whether wicked and callous men know him or not. But how differ- 
 ent is the position of men who do not know God under either of the 
 two conceptions of God's being? If God is worth taking account of 
 at all, to know him is of positive worth. That man who is hard and 
 unresponsive, who does not expand to the meaning of life, has already 
 had his sad reward. If the opponent is thinking of a God who will 
 clap the sinner into hell after he dies, there may be a practical ad- 
 vantage, even if an ethical loss, in the conception of God as a Being. 
 But, brought down to the level of concrete facts, the different con- 
 ceptions see the unreligious man in the same light. 
 
 4. Practical Conclusions 
 
 The practical religious situation to-day exhibits a strange medley 
 of intellectual points of view. There are men (and I am speaking 
 now of men who possess intellectual interests) who understand God's 1 
 
 nature and prove his existence in terms of the dogmatic rationalism 
 that represents the spirit of Greek thought. There are others whose 
 intellectual setting for their religious experience is some form of 
 post-Kantian Idealism. There are yet others who frankly say that they 
 do not know what God is nor how to prove his existence, but their 
 firm conviction that he is and that he is working mightily for good, 
 affords them all the assurance they require for hearty service. On 
 the other hand, we see a very fair unanimity of opinion in regard to i 
 the values that are worth preserving and propagating. Religion has 
 ceased, in a large measure, to be an other-world interest and is con- 
 cerned with the promotion of social values that represent the pro- 
 gressive ethical spirit of the times. The missionary movement, for 
 example, is not bidding for support on the grounds that heathen may 
 be saved from hell, but that an opportunity may be given to carry 
 to those lands that are socially backward, those ideas and practises 
 that make for the larger, richer life here on earth. And so, in count- 
 less lines of effort, the churches are exhibiting a concern for such 
 values as are fully abreast of the best ethical feeling of the generation. 
 
 This substantial agreement in ethical aims that is exhibited in 
 current religious life, as contrasted with the confusion of intellectual 
 formulas, is a matter for congratulation. It is hardly to be expected 
 that all men will ever reach the same plane of understanding, or that 
 they will ever attain unanimity of belief; it is a present fact that 
 they have already largely attained a unity of purpose. But if, as 
 we have said and tried to show in this paper, intellectual consistency 
 in religion is essential only to the extent of being able to free the life 
 for wholesouled action, and the really important thing is to live 
 
BELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE AND THE GOD-CONCEPT 59 
 
 consciously and steadfastly in the presence of the highest human 
 values then surely disagreements in regard to intellectual settings 
 may be discounted and largely ignored in the presence of single- 
 minded zeal for the furtherance of the universal kingdom of peace 
 and good-will. 
 
 .^atBA^M^HM^a 
 
60 BELIGIOUS VALUES AND INTELLECTUAL CONSISTENCY 
 
 VITA. 
 
 Edward Hartman Reisner, bom, Fredericksburg', Virginia, April 
 27, 1885. Student, Cumberland Valley State Normal School, Ship- 
 pensburg, Pennsylvania, 1899-1901; Ursinus College, 1903-1906; 
 Tale University, 1906-1909 ; Columbia University, 1909-1911. Pro- 
 fessor of Philosophy and Education, "Washburn College, 1911-1913. 
 Assistant Professor of Education, Kansas State Agricultural College, 
 1913-1914. Associate Professor, ihid., 1914. Previous degrees: 
 A.B., Yale, 1908; A.M., Yale, 1909. 
 
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