I can answer such questions only through a certain gradual approach to
their complications. I want to show you how the insight of the reason
not only points out a heaven that overarches us, but also reveals an
influence that can inwardly transform us. To this end I shall next
illustrate, by instances taken from life, how some people actually
view their own personal relations to what they take to be the divine
reason. I shall thus indicate in what way such people connect this
divine reason with personal needs of their own which they regard as
vital. Then I shall show why this not only is so in the lives of some
people, but ought to be so for all of us. As a result we shall soon
find that, just as our first statement of the insight of reason, if
indeed it is a true statement, transforms our view of the sense in
which the world is real, so a deeper study of the relations of insight
to action transforms our first cruder notion of the reason itself, of
its office in life, and of the truth that it reveals.
{132}
I begin with illustrations taken from life. A former college student
of mine, some of whose papers upon his own religious experience I was
not very long ago privileged to read, undertook, in one of these
papers, to explain how, at the time, he viewed the place of prayer in
his own life. He was a man capable, upon the one hand, of deep emotion
and of rich inner life, but on the other hand highly self-critical and
disposed to doubt. After a somewhat plentiful early interest in
religion, the result of home training and of personal experience, he
had come, as he studied more, and looked about his world more
critically, to part company almost altogether with positive faiths
about religious matters. His childhood beliefs had dropped away.
Doubts and disbeliefs had taken their place. In opinion, when he wrote
his papers for me, he was mainly disposed to a pure naturalism. The
gods of the past had vanished from his life almost altogether.
"But," said he, in his account (I follow not his exact words but their
general sense), "one old religious exercise I have never quite given
up. That was and is prayer. A good while ago I dropped all
conventional forms of prayer. I did not say my prayers in the old way.
And when I prayed I no longer fancied that the course of nature or of
my luck was going to be altered for my sake, or that my prayers would
help me to avoid any consequences of my folly or my ignorance. I did
not pray to get anybody to mix in my affairs, so as to get me things
{133} that I wanted. But this was, and is, my feeling about prayer:
When things are too much for me, and I am down on my luck, and
everything is dark, I go alone by myself, and I bury my head in my
hands, and I think hard that God must know it all and will see how
matters really are, and understands me, and in just that way alone, by
understanding me, will help me. And so I try to get myself together.
And that, for me, is prayer."
I cannot repeat my student's precise form of expression. I think that
I express to you the spirit of what he wrote. In any case, this form
of prayer is not peculiar to that man. You see in what way the thought
of the divine wisdom became a practical thought for him--a thought at
once rational and, as far as it went, saving. When life shattered his
little human plans--well, he lifted up his eyes unto the hills. He won
a sort of conscious and reasonable union with the all-seeing life. He
did not ask its aid as a giver of good fortunes. He waited patiently
for the light. Now I do not think that to be an expression of the
whole insight of reason; but, so far as it went, that sort of prayer
was an essentially religious act. And for that youth it was also a
very practical act.
Let me turn to another case. Many years ago I well knew a man, much
older than myself, who has long since died. A highly intelligent man,
ambitious for the things of the spirit, he was also beset with some
defects of health and with many worldly {134} cares. His defects of
health made him sensitive to the sort of observation that his physical
weaknesses often attracted. In addition, he had enemies, and once had
to endure the long-continued trial of a public attack upon his
reputation--an attack from which he at length came forth triumphant,
but not without long suffering. Once I heard him telling about his own
religion, which was the faith of a highly independent mind. "What I
most value about my thought of God," he in effect said, "is that I
conceive God as the one who knows us through and through, and who
estimates us not as we seem, but as we are, and who is absolutely fair
in his judgment of us." My friend had no concern for future rewards
and punishments. The judgment of God to which he appealed, and in
which, without any vanity, he delighted, was simply the fair and true
judgment, the divine knowing of us all just as we are.
Now do you not know people whose religion is of this sort? And are not
all such forms of religion, as far as they go, practical? Is the
recognition of an all-seeing insight, as something real, not in itself
calming, sustaining, rationalising? Does it not at the very least
awaken in us the ideal which I repeatedly mentioned in our last
lecture, the ideal of knowing ourselves even as we are known, and of
guiding our lives in the light of such a view of ourselves? Can such
an ideal remain wholly a matter of theory? Is it not from its very
essence an appeal to the will? {135} Was not my elder friend finding a
guiding principle of action in a world where he was often
misunderstood? Could one steadily conceive God in these terms without
constantly renewing one's power to face the world with courage?
Surely you all know many people who value the divine as they define
the divine, mainly because they conceive God as what they call the
Great Companion. And, for many such, it is the intimately perfect
insight of this companion that they seem to themselves most to value.
The ways of this companion are to them mysterious. But he knows them.
They repeat the word: "He knoweth the way that I take." He sees them.
He is close to them. He estimates them. So they view the matter. Is
not such a conception a vitally important spring of action for those
who possess it?
These illustrations suggest that one ill appreciates the insight of
reason, even as so imperfectly and one-sidedly sketched by me at the
last lecture, who does not see that this insight has an extremely
close connection with the will.