The Varieties of Religious Experience — William James

p. 436from personal caprice and waywardness ? This perfectly definite practical test of the pretensions of philosophy to found religion on universal reason simplifies my procedure to-day. I need not discredit philosophy by laborious criticism of its arguments. It will suffice if I show that as a matter of history it fails to prove its pretension to be * objectively ' convincing.

In fact, philosophy does so fail. It does not banish differences ; it founds schools and sects just as feeling does. I believe, in fact, that the logical reason of man operates in this field of divinity exactly as it has always operated in love, or in patriotism, or in politics, or in any other of the wider affairs of life, in which our passions or our mystical intuitions fix our beliefs beforehand.

It finds arguments for our conviction, for indeed it has to find them. It amplifies and defines our faith, and dignifies it and lends it words and plausibility. It hardly ever engenders it ; it cannot now secure it.^ Lend me your attention while I run through some of the points of the older systematic theology.

You find them in both Protestant and Catholic manuals, best of all in the innumerable text-books published since Pope Leo's Encyclical recommending the study of Saint Thomas. I glance first at the arguments by which dogmatic the- ' As regards the secondary character of intellectual constructions, and the primacy of feeling and instinct in founding religious beliefs, see the striking work of H.

Fielding, The Hearts of Men, London, 1902, which came into my hands after my text was written. " Creeds," says the author, "are the grammar of religion, they are to religion what grammar is to ^ speech. Words are the expression of our wants ; grammar is the theory formed afterwards. Speech never proceeded from grammar, but the reverse. As speech progresses and changes from unknown causes, grammar must follow " (p. 313). The whole book, which keeps unusually close to concrete facts, is little more than an amplification of this text.

p. 437ology establishes God's existence, after that at those by which it establishes his nature.^ The arofuments for God's existence have stood for hundreds of years with the waves of unbelieving criticism breaking against them, never totally discrediting them in the ears of the faithful, but on the whole slowly and surely washing out the mortar from between their joints. If you have a God ah*eady whom you believe in, these arguments confirm you. If you are atheistic, they fail to set you right. The proofs are various. The ' cosmological ' one, so-called, reasons from the contingence of the world to a First Cause which must contain whatever perfections the world itself contains. The ' argument from design ' reasons, from the fact that Nature's laws are mathematical, and her parts benevolently adapted to each other, that this cause is both intellectual and benevolent. ^^ The ' moral argument ' is that the moral law presupposes a ^^ lawgiver. The ' argument ex consensu gentium ' is that ^ the behef in God is so widespread as to be grounded in the rational nature of man, and should therefore carry ^ authority with it. ^< As I just said, I will not discuss these arguments tech- | > nically. The bare fact that all ideaHsts since Kant have k< felt entitled either to scout or to neglect them shows that they are not solid enough to serve as religion's all-suf&- vj cient foundation. Absolutely impersonal reasons would be in duty bound to show more general convincingness. Causation is indeed too obscure a principle to bear the weight of the whole structure of theology. As for the si

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^ For convenience' sake, I follow the order of A. Stockl's Lehrbuch der Philosophie, 5te Auflage, Mainz, 1881, Band ii. B.

Boedder's Natural Theology, London, 1891, is a handy English Catholic Manual ; but an ,i. almost identical doctrine is given by such Protestant theologians as C. t*«. Hodge : Systematic Theology, New York, 1873, or A. H. Strong : Syste- "vl^^ matic Theology, 5th edition, New York, 1896. \