I could not discuss, in my last lecture, the office of the reason as a
source of religious insight without sketching for you what insight I
personally regard as the most important result of the right use of
reason. This sketch was of course, in my own mind, a part of an
extended body of philosophical doctrine. It does not lie within the
intent of these lectures to present a system of philosophy. I ought,
nevertheless, to begin this lecture by saying a few words about the
relation of my last discussion to certain religious and philosophical
opinions of which you have all heard, and by indicating why it has
seemed to me worth while to call your attention to the mere hint of a
philosophy with which the last discussion closed. Having thus
indicated the setting in which I want you to see the brief exposition
of a general theory which I find to be indispensable for our main
purpose, I shall devote the rest of this lecture to the task of
connecting the insight which reason gives to us with the main purpose
of our inquiry, namely, with the undertaking to know the nature and
the way of salvation. Reason is of importance in so {120} far as what
it shows us enables us to direct our will and to come into closer
touch with truths which are not only theoretical, but also practical.
We shall therefore discuss at some length the relation of our rational
knowledge to our active life, and the relation of our rational will to
the world in which we are to work out our salvation if we can.
I
The nature and the teachings of the human reason have interested
philosophers from very nearly the beginning of philosophical inquiry.
What I told you about the subject in our former discussion reports a
decidedly modern version of a very old opinion--an opinion which has
been repeatedly examined, revised, assailed, and defended. Let me say
a word as to its history.
Plato held that, through our reason, we are able to rise beyond the
world of sense and to hold communion with a realm of ideally
significant and eternal being. What Plato really meant by his ideal
realm, and in what sense the world of what Plato called the eternal
realities, the forms or ideas, could be, as Plato held it to be, a
divine world, in its worth and dignity, later philosophy repeatedly
attempted to grasp.
The results of such philosophical thinking have deeply affected the
history of religion and still influence the religious interest of all
of you. One {121} version of that philosophical tradition whose origin
is in the thought of Plato--a late version, and also one greatly
transformed by motives of which Plato had known in his day nothing, is
the familiar version to which, in the last lecture, I in passing
alluded--the prologue to our Fourth Gospel. You will all agree that
this prologue attempts to state a religious insight. The relation of
this New Testament view of the world of the reason to the doctrine
which still later came to be formulated by the theologians of the
Christian Church I have here not time to discuss. It is enough now to
say that an opinion according to which our articulate reason, as well
as the more inarticulate intuition of faith, has some sort of access
to the world of the "Logos," and some sort of participation in a
genuine apprehension of the divine life, has come to form part of the
religion in which you all have been trained. In so far, then, it is
surely right to say that the reason, as the philosophers have defined
it, has been an actual source of religious opinion and experience.
In modern times, and especially since Kant, philosophy has been led to
see the older doctrines of the human reason, and of its knowledge of
the divine, from various decidedly novel points of view. The sketch of
a theory of the reason as a source of insight, which I gave, was
influenced by Kant's famous teaching about the nature and unity of
human experience. Kant stated this theory as the doctrine that all our
human knowledge involves an {122} interpretation of the data of our
senses in the light of what he called the "unity of apperception." In
less technical terms, Kant's meaning is that all facts of which a
human experience can obtain knowledge are known to us as the possible
objects of an insight which we conceive to be virtually one, as the
insight of our own truly knowing Self, and as the insight without
reference to which no opinion of ours has any sense whatever. This one
cognitive Self is, according to Kant, the conceived virtual subject or
possessor of all that we view as our experience. And this presupposed
unity is the condition of all our knowledge.
But Kant's doctrine, as he stated it, is in many ways problematic and
dissatisfying. The form of philosophical idealism which I myself
defend goes in certain respects far beyond Kant's position. The "one
experience," in which, according to him, we find a place for any fact
which we conceive as knowable at all, is defined by Kant as a virtual
insight, not, so to speak, a live and concrete consciousness. He
regards it also as purely human, as a knowledge of appearances--not of
any ultimate realities. The form of philosophical idealism which, at
the last time, I outlined depends, however, upon simply
universalising, and rendering live and concrete, Kant's conception of
the Self, of the united experience, to which we appeal, and in the
light of which our opinions get all their sense--all their character
and value as true or as false opinions. {123} This one Self, this
unity of experience, to which we always appeal, cannot consistently be
viewed by us as merely our own individual or private self, or as
merely human; and its insight cannot rationally be interpreted merely
as an insight into what is apparent, that is into what is not really
real. Nor can it be viewed merely as something virtual--a possible
unity of experience, to which we would appeal if we could. In my
opinion it must be conceived as more live and real and concrete and
conscious and genuine than are any of our passing moments of fleeting
human experience. It must be viewed as an actual and inclusive and
divinely rational knowledge of all facts in their unity. And the very
nature of facts, their very being as facts, must be determined by
their presence as objects in the experience of this world-embracing
insight. This was the philosophical theory that I sketched in my
former lecture. This is my view of what reason teaches.
Now this thesis, this somewhat remote descendant of the Platonic
doctrine of the function of reason, this modern version of the concept
of the "Logos" as the light that "shineth in the darkness" of our
ordinary human experience, this revision and transformation of the
Kantian theory of knowledge, has, by virtue of the long history of the
doctrine in question, and by virtue of the difficult considerations
upon which, as a philosophical thesis, it rests, a highly technical
character. This technical aspect of the teaching in question forbids,
in these lectures. {124} any adequate exposition, or criticism, or
defence of its problems and of its merits as a basis for a system of
philosophy. And you will surely not find unnatural the fact that a
study of the function of the reason should indeed involve such
technical and complex issues. I mention these issues only to say at
once how and how far, in the present lectures, we are concerned with
them.
We are seeking a way of salvation. And in these discussions we are
mainly concerned with the sources of insight into what that way is. I
am not attempting to work out, in your presence, a systematic
philosophy. Why, then, have I introduced this mere sketch of
philosophical idealism into our inevitably crowded programme? I
answer: I have done so because I have wanted to illustrate the office
of reason by telling you in my own way how I view the matter. The
reason is, in fact, a source of religious insight to many people who
do not reflect upon its deliverances as philosophers seek to reflect,
and who may not agree with me in what little I have time to expound of
my own philosophical opinions. My effort has been to tell in
philosophical terms what such people really mean.
In such people reason very often shows itself indirectly and
concretely, by its fruits, through their deeds, through their purpose,
in a word, through their will. We shall ere long see how this can be
and is the case. Reason is present in such lives and inspires them. A
genuine relation to some {125} spirit of all truth, a perfectly
sincere touch with an articulate and universal insight, a translation
of the lesson and the meaning of the synthetic reason into a definite
practical postulate that life shall be and is an essentially
reasonable and therefore an essentially divine enterprise--such I find
to be the essence of the religious insight of many serious minds.
Beside the earnest devotion of such people to the business which life
assigns to them, the mere theories of a philosopher may seem shadowy
enough. And if such people comment upon what they hear of my
philosophy by saying that they do not understand it, and doubt whether
they agree with it, I am not on that account at all disposed to
complain of them, or to assert that reason is to them no source of
religious insight. I take pleasure, however, in observing that, in my
opinion, they agree with my doctrine in the concrete, and express it
in their religious life far better than I can express it in my
technical terms, however much these people may fail to grasp what my
terms mean or to accept my formulations. The best expression of your
reason is your life, if you live as one enlightened from above ought
to live. You are not obliged to accept a technical formula in order to
embody the spirit of that formula in your daily work. I know many men
who are far more the servants and ministers of the true rational
insight than, in my present human life, I shall ever succeed in
becoming, and who, nevertheless, either are impatient of every {126}
philosophical theory, or, if philosophically trained, are opposed to
me in my philosophy.
Nevertheless, I need to express, in my own way, what is the insight
that is really at the heart of the lives of just such people. What I
am first interested in emphasising is of course this, that, in my
opinion, my interpretation of the insight of which reason is the
source, actually expresses one important aspect of the spirit in which
those live whom I regard as the true servants of the divine reason.
But my interest in the matter does not cease here. I can, of course,
express my opinions only in the terms that appeal to me. But whatever
you think of my formulas, I am very anxious to have you see that, as
the life of such people convincingly shows, reason has been, and is, a
source of religious insight to them, and that our philosophical
differences relate simply to the way in which we formulate our
interpretation of the meaning of this source.
Reason has been such a source of insight. That is true as an
historical fact. If you can find anything in the Platonic dialogues
which appeals to you as involving an insight that has religious value,
you must recognise this truth. It is a mere matter of history that
Christian doctrine as it has come down to us is, in one aspect,
profoundly affected by Plato's influence. The myth of the men in the
cave, in the "Platonic Republic," the myth in Plato's "Phaedrus,"
which tells about the banishment of the soul from its heavenly life
and from its intercourse with the {127} ideal world, and which
interprets all our loftier human loves as a longing of the soul for
its divine home land--these myths are allegories which Plato intended
to illustrate his own view of what reason teaches us. These myths
express in figurative speech a philosophy that actually affects to-day
your own religious interests. For instance, this philosophy influences
your traditional conception of God, and your ideas about the immortal
life of the soul. And if the prologue of the Fourth Gospel seems to
you to contain any truth, your religious ideas are again moulded by a
form of ancient philosophy which dealt with the nature and with the
insight of the reason. My own sketch of modern philosophy is but a
reinterpretation of the very truth which that ancient doctrine
attempted to portray. Historically, then, some of your religious
opinions are actually due to the work of the reason. My philosophy
simply tries to interpret to you this work.
And reason not only has been, but now is, such a source of insight.
And this is the case whenever you try to apply the "rule of reason" to
any problem of your life, and hereby gain a confidence that, by being
as reasonable and fair as you can, you are learning to conform your
life to the view which, as you suppose, an all-wise God takes of its
meaning. My philosophy simply tries to tell you why you have a right
to hold that an all-wise being is real.
I am anxious, I say, to have such facts about the {128} office of
reason recognised, whatever you may think of my philosophy. And this
is my purpose when I use my philosophy merely to illustrate the office
of reason. For indispensable as individual religious experience is, in
all the capriciousness of its feelings--indispensable also as social
religious experience is, with all its insistence upon human love and
also upon human religious convention--the synthetic use of the reason,
that is, the systematic effort "to see life steadily and see it
whole," is also indispensable. The recent efforts to make light of the
work of reason--efforts to which, at the last lecture, I directed
your attention, would tend, if taken by themselves, to result in
basing religion upon an inarticulate occultism, upon a sort of
psychical research that would regard whatever witch may peep and
mutter, whatever mystic may be unable to tell what he means, whatever
dumb cry of the soul may remain stubbornly inarticulate, as a _more_
promising religious guide than is any form of serious and far-seeing
devotion to the wider insight, which ought to survey life and to light
our path.
Let my own appeal to philosophy, then, even if you do not agree with
my formulas, stand as my protest against occultism and against the
exclusive devotion to the inarticulate sources of religious insight.
That I also prize the perfectly indispensable office of the more
child-like intuitions, when they occupy their true place, you already
know from my first two lectures. We cannot in our present life {129}
do without these child-like intuitions. We cannot be just to them
without aiming to live beyond them and to put away childish things.