Let me proceed at once to the first of these three undertakings. I am
further to illustrate, on the one hand, the unity and the naturalness
of the religious motives; on the other hand, I am to emphasise the
mysterious seeming of the religious objects. And I am thus to show the
reason why the faiths of men are so diverse but their religious needs
so nearly common.
At the last time I tried to define for you, in my own terms, what the
supreme purpose of human life is, or, in other words, what that
highest good is which we are all in such peril of missing that we need
salvation from this peril. My definition was this: We are naturally
creatures of wavering and conflicting motives, passions, desires. The
supreme aim of life is to triumph over this natural chaos, to set some
one plan of life above all the others, to give {45} unity to our
desires, to organise our activities, to win, not, indeed, the
passionless peace of Nirvana, but the strength of spirit which is
above the narrowness of each one of our separate passions. We need to
conceive of such a triumphant and unified life, and successfully to
live it. That is our goal: Self-possession, unity, peace, and
spiritual power through and yet beyond all the turmoil of life--the
victory that overcometh in the world.
Now this definition of the ideal life will have seemed to some of you
too much a merely philosophical formula. You will say that this is not
what plain men have in mind when they ask God's help, or lament their
sins, or look to religion for consolation.
I grant you that, since I am here concerned with philosophy and not
with preaching, I, of course, prefer, for my present purpose, a
formulation of the ideal of life in reflective, in thoughtful terms.
But I cannot admit that plain men, in their religious moods, are not
concerned with the ideal of life which I thus reflectively formulate.
I am trying to formulate the ideal of life that seems to me to
underlie all the higher religions. It is one thing, however, to feel
an interest and another thing to become conscious of the meaning of
the interest. No matter how inarticulate may be a man's sense of his
need, that sense, if deep and genuine, may imply a view of life which
a whole system of ethics and of metaphysics may be needed to expound.
{46} Philosophy ought to be considerate, and to use more or less
technical speech, but it need not be on that account inhuman. Its
concern is with what common-sense means but does not express in
clearly conscious terms. It does not want to substitute its formulas
for life. It does desire to add its thoughtfulness to the intensity of
life's great concerns and to enlighten us regarding what aims life has
always really intended to pursue.
My own effort to formulate the supreme end of life does not seem to me
to be foreign to common-sense. I think that this way of stating the
purpose of life may help us to see through many of the apparently
hopeless diversities of human opinion regarding what the highest good
is.
It is customary to describe that longing for salvation which is, from
the point of view of these lectures, the foundation of religion, by
saying that the man who begins to get religious interest discovers
that when left to himself he is out of harmony with what James calls
"the higher powers," that is, with what a Christian calls God. In
other words, as a customary formula states the case, the religiously
disposed man begins by learning that the chief end of his existence is
to come into harmony with God's will. And this discovery, as such a
view supposes, teaches him, for the first time, what his ideal of life
ought to be. And therefore, as many say, something that is of the
nature of a mysterious revelation from without is needed to {47}
initiate the religious process and to show us our goal. On the other
hand, writers like James, who insist upon interpreting religion, so
far as that is possible, in terms of personal experience rather than
in terms of external revelation, have nevertheless been led to agree
with many of the partisans of revelation in regarding this sense of
our disharmony with the "higher powers" as something that must have an
essentially superhuman source. For James, our sense of religious need
is an experience which mysteriously wells up from the subliminal self,
from the soundless depths of our own subconsciousness. James,
therefore, conceives it probable that, through the subliminal or
subconscious self, we are actually aroused to religious interest by
spiritual beings whose level is higher than our own, and whose will,
expressed to us through the vague but often intense sense of need
which the religiously minded feel, does set for us an ideal task which
is of greater worth than our natural desires, and which, when we can
get into harmony with these powers through the aid of their subliminal
influences, does give a new sense to life.
Now in contrast with such views regarding the origin of that deeper
sense of need which is indeed the beginning of religion, I have to
insist that the basis of the religious interest is something much less
mysterious than James's supposed workings of the "higher powers"
through our subliminal selves, and is also something much more
universally human {48} than is the opportunity to come under the
influence of any one revelation. Men who never heard of Christianity,
and men who have never felt conscious of any external revelation from
above, as well as men who have had no such sudden uprushes from their
own subconscious natures as James's "religious geniuses" have
reported, are able to win a genuine religious interest, to be aware of
an intense need for salvation, and to set before themselves, in
however inarticulate a fashion, the very ideal of life which I have
been trying in my own way to formulate. The need and the ideal can
come into sight in a manner that indeed does not in the least either
exclude or require a belief in one or in another reported revelation,
but that links both the need and the ideal to our ordinary personal
experience by ties which are not at all mysterious. Let me show you,
then, better than my time permitted in the former lecture, how an
individual may naturally experience what I have called his need of
salvation.
Nothing is more obvious about the natural course of our lives than is
the _narrowness_ of view to which we are usually subject. We are not
only the victims of conflicting motives, but we are often too narrow
to know that this is true. For we see our various life interests, so
to speak, one at a time. We forget one while we are living out
another. And so we are prone to live many lives, seldom noting how ill
harmonised they are. Home life, for instance, may {49} be one thing;
business life in principle another; sport or social ambition another.
And these various lives may be lived upon mutually inconsistent
plans. We forget one part of ourselves in our temporary absorption in
some other part. And if, as our naturally complex and often
conflicting motives determine, these our various lives are out of
harmony with one another, we constantly do irrevocable deeds that
emphasise and perpetuate the results of this disharmony. And as we
grow older our motives alter; yet because of our natural narrowness of
interest, we often do not recognise the change. Our youth consequently
lays a poor foundation for our age; or perhaps our mature life makes
naught of the aspirations of our youth. We thus come to spend a great
part of our days thwarting ourselves through the results of our
fickleness, yet without knowing who it is that thwarts us. We love,
and, like Siegfried, forget our former beloved, and perhaps live to
feel the fatal spear-thrust that avenges our treason to our own past.
The deeper tragedies of life largely result from this our narrowness
of view.
But over against this narrowness of our ordinary activities there,
indeed, stand certain moments when we get a wider vision of ourselves,
when we review life, or foresee it with a broad outlook. These are,
indeed, moments of insight. We all know how tragic they often are,
because they show us at a glance how with the left hand we have undone
the {50} right hand's work, how we have loved and forgotten, how we
have sworn fealty to many masters, and have cheated one while we
served another, how absorption in business has made us unworthy of
home, or how we have wantonly sacrificed a friend in order to win a
game, or gained our bit of the world through what, upon review, we
have to call the loss of our souls. Such moments of insight come to us
sometimes when our friends die, and when memory reminds us of our
neglected debts of love or of gratitude to them, or when worldly
defeat reawakens the long-forgotten unworldly aspirations that we
abandoned in order to do what has ended in earning the defeat. These
are, I repeat, often tragic moments. But they enlighten. And they show
us our need. And they arise as naturally as does any other incident of
a reasonable life.
What need do they show? I answer, the need to possess what by mere
nature we never come to possess, namely, the power to "see life
steadily and see it whole," and then to live triumphantly in the light
of this vision. Can a plain man who is no philosopher feel this need?
I answer, Yes, whenever he has his moments of vision; whenever he
feels the longing for the clean, straight, unswerving will, for the
hearty whole life; whenever he sees and regrets his fickleness, just
because it means self-defeat; whenever he seeks to be true to himself.
At such moment his highest aim is the aim that there should be a
highest aim in life, and that {51} this aim should win what it seeks.
He has the longing, however inarticulate, for integrity of spirit and
for success in winning the fruits of integrity.
When the plain man feels what I venture thus to formulate, how will he
express his longing? He will, of course, not use my present formulas.
He will seize upon whatever expressions the creed or the language of
his tribe may suggest to him. He may say, and perhaps truthfully:
"This is the ideal that God sets before me. This is the divine will
regarding my life." For at such times he conceives of God as the being
who has widest vision and who knows him best. Therefore he conceives
of God's plan as the fulfilment of his own rational plan. But the
interior source of the plain man's view regarding the divine will is
simply his better vision of the meaning of his life, the vision that
comes at moments when he is not forgetful of the whole; when he does
not want to swear fidelity to one beloved, and then, like Siegfried,
pursue and win another; when he wants to be true to the whole of
himself. No wonder that he, indeed, conceives this supreme goal of
life as the goal set for him by some will higher than his own private
will. He is right. For, as we shall see, throughout our later study,
we are, indeed, helpless either to hold before us this our personal
vision of the triumphant life and of the unity of the spirit, or to
turn the vision into a practical reality, unless we come into touch
and keep in touch with an order of spiritual existence which is {52}
in a perfectly genuine sense superhuman, and in the same sense
supernatural, and which certainly is not our natural selves.
But in any case the plain man must needs interpret his vision of the
ideal in terms of whatever conception of God, or of the triumphant
life, or of spiritual power, his traditions and his stage of personal
development may suggest to him. Hence the endless varieties in the
formulation of the religious ideal. Whatever is suggested to a man, at
his moments of wider vision, as a law or as a motive which, _if_ it
were the ruling motive or the supreme law would make life a consistent
whole--this he takes to be God's will, or the truth that is to save
him if, indeed, salvation is possible.
If this account of the sources of the religious motive is right, we
need not view the religious interest as the result of an arbitrary
intrusion from above--as if the gods loved to disturb us and to
trouble our peace. Nor need we, with James, speak of a marvellous and
capricious uprush from below the level of our natural consciousness.
Yet just as little need we think of religion as having no concern with
what is, indeed, superhuman. Religion is, indeed, our own affair; for
it grows out of our personal vision of the transformation that a
divinely enlarged power to comprehend, to survey, to harmonise, to
triumph over our natural life would give. This vision comes to us at
moments, in glimpses--and is seen through a glass darkly. Our {53}
need is to see face to face and to live in the light thus to be
discovered. And so to live would be salvation. The word salvation is
fitting, because the need is so great and because the transformation
would be so profound. The endlessly various interpretations of this
one ideal and of the nature of the saving process are due to the
wealth of life and to the imposing multitude of motives and of
experiences that the religious consciousness has to consider. But
beneath and above all the varieties of religious experience lies the
effort to win in reality what the vision of the harmonious and
triumphant life suggests to us in our moments of clearness. Since our
own natures leave us hopelessly remote from this goal, while our
glimpses of spiritual harmony and power reveal to us its preciousness,
our religious need is supreme, and is accompanied with the perfectly
well-warranted assurance that we cannot attain the goal unless we can
get into some sort of communion with a real life infinitely richer
than our own--a life that is guided by a perfect and unwavering
vision, and that somehow conquers and annuls all fickleness, conflict,
and estrangement. Such a life rightly seems to us to be superhuman in
its breadth of view and in its spiritual power, if indeed there be
such a life at all. If there is no such life, none the less we need
it, and so need salvation. If salvation is possible, then there is in
the universe some being that knows us, and that is the master of life.
And we seek ourselves to know {54} even as we are known and to live as
the wise one would have us live.
Thus simple and, for all to whom even the occasional moments of wider
vision come, universal are the religious motives. James was wrong when
he sought them in any capricious interference of the subliminal self,
or of its superhuman controls, with our natural selves. It is we who
in our natural lives are capricious and narrowly interfere with our
own freedom. It is we who are the disturbers of our own peace. The
religious ideal grows out of the vision of a spiritual freedom and
peace which are not naturally ours. No two of us get that vision in
quite the same way. But all its forms show us the same far-off shining
light. The problem of religious insight is the problem whether that
light is a mirage.
No wonder, then, that men differ as to their special efforts to solve
such a problem. But it is now our task to seek for further sources of
insight.