My first task must be to forestall possible disappointments regarding
the scope of our inquiry. In seven lectures upon a vast topic very
little can at best be accomplished. I want to tell you at the outset
what are some of the limitations to which I propose to subject my
undertakings.
I come before you as a philosophical inquirer addressing a general
audience of thoughtful people. This definition of my office implies
from the outset very notable limitations. As a philosophical inquirer
I am not here to preach to you, but to appeal to your own
thoughtfulness. Again, since my inquiry concerns the Sources of
Religious Insight, you will understand, I hope, that I shall not
undertake to present to you any extended system of religious doctrine.
Upon sources of insight we are to concentrate our attention. What
insight may be obtained from those sources we shall only attempt to
indicate in the most general way, not at length to expound. What
theologians would call a system of dogmas, I shall not undertake to
define. What {4} philosophers would regard as a comprehensive
philosophy of religion I shall have no time to develop within our
limits. I am to make some comments upon the ways in which religious
truths can become accessible to men. What truths thus become
accessible you must in large measure discover by your own appeal to
the sources of which I shall try to tell you.
These somewhat narrow limitations may have, as I hope, their
correlative advantages. Since I am to speak of sources, rather than of
creeds or of philosophies, I may be able to appeal to people of
decidedly various opinions without directing undue attention to the
motives that divide them. I need not presuppose that my hearers are of
the company of believers or of the company of doubters; and if they
are believers, it matters little, for my present purpose, to what
household of the faith they belong. I am not here to set people right
as to matters of doctrine, but rather to point out the way that, if
patiently followed, may tend to lead us all toward light and unity of
doctrine. If you listen to my later lectures you may, indeed, be led
to ask various questions about my own creed, which, in these lectures,
I shall not attempt to answer. But I shall be content if what I say
helps any of you, however little, toward finding for yourselves
answers to your own religious questions.
{5}
The limitations of my task, thus indicated, will become still clearer
if I next try to define the term Religious Insight as I intend it to
be here understood.
And first I must speak briefly of the word Insight. By insight,
whatever the object of insight may be, one means some kind of
knowledge. But the word insight has a certain richness of significance
whereby we distinguish what we call insight from knowledge in general.
A man knows the way to the office where he does his business. But if
he is a successful man, he has insight into the nature and rules of
his business and into the means whereby success is attained. A man
knows the names and the faces of his acquaintances. But he has some
sort of insight into the characters of his familiar friends. As these
examples suggest, insight is a name for a special sort and degree of
knowledge. Insight is knowledge that unites a certain breadth of
range, a certain wealth of acquaintance together with a certain unity
and coherence of grasp, and with a certain closeness of intimacy
whereby the one who has insight is brought into near touch with the
objects of his insight. To repeat: Insight is knowledge that makes us
aware of the unity of many facts in one whole, and that at the same
time brings us into intimate personal contact with these facts {6} and
with the whole wherein they are united. The three marks of insight are
breadth of range, coherence and unity of view, and closeness of
personal touch. A man may get some sort of _sight_ of as many things
as you please. But if we have insight, we view some connected whole of
things, be this whole a landscape as an artist sees it, or as a
wanderer surveys it from a mountain top, or be this whole an organic
process as a student of the sciences of life aims to comprehend it, or
a human character as an appreciative biographer tries to portray it.
Again, we have insight when, as I insist, our acquaintance with our
object is not only coherent but close and personal. Insight you cannot
obtain at second hand. You can learn by rote and by hearsay many
things; but if you have won insight, you have won it not without the
aid of your own individual experience. Yet experience is not by itself
sufficient to produce insight unless the coherence and the breadth of
range which I have just mentioned be added.
Insight may belong to the most various sorts of people and may be
concerned with the most diverse kinds of objects. Many very unlearned
people have won a great deal of insight into the matters that
intimately concern them. Many very learned people have attained almost
no insight into anything. Insight is no peculiar possession of the
students of any technical specialty or of any one calling. Men of
science aim to reach insight into {7} the objects of their researches;
men of affairs, or men of practical efficiency, however plain or
humble their calling, may show insight of a very high type, whenever
they possess knowledge that bears the marks indicated, knowledge that
is intimate and personal and that involves a wide survey of the unity
of many things.
Such, then, is insight in general. But I am to speak of Religious
Insight. Religious insight must be distinguished from other sorts of
insight by its object, or by its various characteristic objects. Now,
I have no time to undertake, in this opening discourse, any adequate
definition of the term Religion or of the features that make an object
a religious object. Religion has a long and complex history, and a
tragic variety of forms and of objects of belief. And so religion
varies prodigiously in its characteristics from age to age, from one
portion of the human race to another, from one individual to another.
If we permitted ourselves to define religion so as merely to insist
upon what is common to all its forms, civilised and savage, our
definition would tend to become so inclusive and so attenuated as to
be almost useless for the purposes of the present brief inquiry. If,
on the other hand, we defined religion so as to make the term denote
merely what the believer in this or in that creed thinks of as his own
religion, we should from the start cut ourselves off from the very
breadth of view which I myself suppose to be essential to the highest
sort of {8} religious Insight. Nobody fully comprehends what religion
is who imagines that his own religion is the only genuine religion. As
a fact, I shall therefore abandon at present the effort to give a
technically finished definition of what constitutes religion, or of
the nature of the religious objects. I shall here limit myself to a
practically useful preliminary mention of a certain feature that, for
my present purpose, shall be viewed as the essential characteristic of
religion, and of religious objects, so far as these lectures propose
to discuss religion.
The higher religions of mankind--religions such as Buddhism and
Christianity--have had in common this notable feature, namely, that
they have been concerned with the problem of the Salvation of Man.
This is sometimes expressed by saying that they are redemptive
religions--religions interested in freeing mankind from some vast and
universal burden, of imperfection, of unreasonableness, of evil, of
misery, of fate, of unworthiness, or of sin. Now, for my present
purposes, this _interest in the salvation of man_ shall be made, in
these lectures, the essential feature of religion in so far as
religion shall here be dealt with. The religious objects, whatever
they otherwise may prove to be, shall be defined as objects such that,
when we know them, and in case we can know them, this knowledge of
them helps to show us the way of salvation. The central and essential
postulate of whatever religion we, in these lectures, are to consider,
is _the postulate that man {9} needs to be saved_. And religious
insight shall for us mean insight into the way of salvation and into
those objects whereof the knowledge conduces to salvation.
This preliminary definition, thus somewhat abruptly stated, will
arouse in the minds of many of you serious doubts and questions. And
only the whole course of our study can serve to furnish such answer to
these doubts and questions as I can hope to supply to you. Yet a
further word or two of purely preliminary explanation may help to
prevent your thoughts, at this point, from being turned in a wrong
direction. I have defined religious insight as insight into the way of
salvation. But what, you may ask, do I mean by the salvation of man or
by man's need of salvation? To this question I still owe you a brief
preliminary answer.