Thus far we have dealt with sources of religious insight which are
indispensable, but which confess their own inadequacy so soon as you
question them closely. Individual experience can show us, in its
moments of wider vision, our ideal, and its times of despair, of
aspiration, or of self-examination, our need. But whenever it attempts
to acquaint us with the way of salvation, its deliveries are clouded
by the mists of private caprice and of personal emotion. Social
experience, in its religious aspects, helps the individual to win the
wider outlook, helps him also to find his way out of the loneliness of
guilt and of failure toward wholeness of life, and promises salvation
through love. But, like individual experience, it is beset by what we
have called the religious paradox. And it does not solve that paradox.
Confessing its own defects, it still undertakes to discern how to
overcome them. In so far as it is merely social experience it deals
with the world of weak mortals, of futile bickerings, and of love
that, in this world, deifies but never quite finds its true beloved.
By virtue of this transforming love it indeed gives {80} us the hint
that our social world may be an apparition or an incarnation of some
diviner life than any mortal now experiences. Yet how can mortals thus
ignorant pretend to get insight into anything that is divinely
exalted?
Thus, both the sources of insight that we have thus far consulted
point beyond themselves. Each says, "If salvation is possible, then
human life must be able to come into touch with a life whose meaning
is superhuman." Our question is: "Is there, indeed, such a diviner
life?" In order to deal with this question, we have resolved to
consult still another source of insight, namely, our Reason. The
present lecture must deal with this source of insight.
I
"What does one mean by the Reason?" As I attempt to answer this
question, with an especial effort to show the relations of reason and
religion, I shall be aided by reminding you at the outset that, at the
present time, there is a widespread tendency to discredit the reason
as a source of any notable insight into life or into the universe. And
this tendency depends upon so defining the business of the reason as
sharply to oppose, on the one hand, intuition and reason, and, on the
other hand, reason and common-sense experience. That is, some of our
recent teachers tell us that the only sort of insight which can be of
any use in religion must be {81} won by intuitions and cannot be
obtained by what these teachers call the abstract reason. By
intuition, at least in the religious field, such men mean some sort of
direct feeling of the nature of things, some experience such as the
mystics have reported, or such as many religious people, whether
technical mystics or not, call illumination through faith. Intuitions
of this sort, they say, are our only guides in the religious field. As
opposed to such direct apprehension, the use of reason would mean the
effort to be guided by formulas, by explicitly stated abstract
principles, by processes of inference, by calculations, or by logical
demonstrations. James is prominent amongst those who thus oppose the
abstract reason to the revelations of intuition; and, especially in
his later works, he is never weary of emphasising the inarticulate
character of all our deepest sources of religious insight. When we get
true religious insight, so he teaches, we simply feel convinced that
these things are so. If we try to give reasons for our beliefs, James
holds that the reasons are inapt afterthoughts, the outcome of
sophistication, or are at best useful only in putting our convictions
into convenient order for purposes of record or of teaching. James's
favourite statement of the contrast here in question identifies the
partisans of reason with the defenders of what he calls "barren
intellectualism." He maintains that religion is hindered rather than
helped by such people. You attain conviction by processes of {82}
which the "barren intellect" can give no adequate account. Conviction,
in religious matters, emanates, according to James, from those
mysterious depths of the subconscious about which I said something in
the last lecture. And convictions thus resulting feel overwhelming to
the persons who have them. Such convictions are what many denote by
the word "intuitions." The effort to define abstract principles, as
grounds for holding your convictions to be true, constitutes the only
effort of the reason in religious matters which James recognises.
According to James, such reasoning processes are inevitably bad. And
as a fact, so he insists, nobody seriously believes in God because
some theologian or philosopher pretends to have demonstrated his
existence. On the contrary, he says, belief in God is intuitive or is
nothing of value. And reason is employed in such matters merely
because of a frequent overfondness for abstract conceptions, or at
best because formulas are useful for the teachers of religious
traditions.
Another form of contrast, and one upon which James also often insists,
while many other recent writers, whose interests are not those of
James, emphasise the same matter, depends upon opposing reason to
experience in general, including under the latter term not only the
intuitions of the devout, but whatever goes by the name experience in
ordinary speech. We see and hear and touch, and by such means get
experience. But we make hypotheses and {83} deduce their consequences;
we assume premises and demonstrate conclusions; and, according to such
writers, what we then do constitutes the typical work of our reason.
The characteristic of the reason is that it attempts either to
elucidate the meaning of an assertion, or to prove some proposition to
be true, without appealing to experience to verify the proposition in
question. And such work of the reason, as these writers tell us, is of
very limited use, in comparison to the use of our direct experience as
a guide. What is found to be true through empirical tests is rightly
tested. What is supposed to be proved true by abstract reasoning is
thus at best made dependent for its explicit warrant upon the
presupposed truth of the premises used in the reasoning process. Or,
as is sometimes said, the reason can discover nothing essentially new.
It turns its premises over and over, and gets out of them only what
has already been put into them. Experience, on the other hand, is full
of countless novelties; for what you can find through observation and
experiment depends not upon previous assumptions, but upon the skill
and the good fortune of the inquirer, and upon the wealth of life and
of the real world.
In brief, for those who look at reason in this way, to use your reason
is simply to draw necessary inferences from assumed premises. And no
premises, as such writers insist, can warrant any inference except the
inference of a conclusion which is already hidden away, so to speak,
in the premises themselves. {84} Thus reasoning, as they tell us, is a
process which, in the conclusion inferred, merely lets out of the bag
the cat which was concealed in that bag, namely, in the premises.
Reason, therefore, is indeed (so such writers assert) barren wherever
novelty is sought. It is useful only for purposes of formulation, and
in certain parts of the abstract sciences, where deduction has a
technical place, as a means for preparing the way for experimental
tests. In life, experience is the guide to true novelty. And
therefore, if religious insight can be attained at all, it must be due
not to the reason, but to some sort of religious experience.
Such objections to the use of reason in the religious field depend, as
you see, upon identifying the reasoning process with the combination
of two well-known mental processes; first, the process of forming and
using abstract conceptions; secondly, the process of analysing
assertions, or combinations of assertions, to make more explicit what
is already contained in their meaning. Our next question may well be
this: Is such an account of the work of reason just to the actual
usage that common-sense is accustomed to make of this familiar name?