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Reason and Religion 129remote understanding, because it moves in the relative and, itselflimited and definite, it can act only by definition, division andlimitation. These three powers of being, the suprarational, rationaland infrarational are present, but with an infinitely varyingprominence in all our activities.The limitations of the reason become very strikingly, verycharacteristically, very nakedly apparent when it is confrontedwith that great order of psychological truths and experienceswhich we have hitherto kept in the background — the religiousbeing of man and his religious life. Here is a realm at whichthe intellectual reason gazes with the bewildered mind of a foreignerwho hears a language of which the words and the spiritare unintelligible to him and sees everywhere forms of life andprinciples of thought and action which are absolutely strange tohis experience. He may try to learn this speech and understandthis strange and alien life; but it is with pain and difficulty, andhe cannot succeed unless he has, so to speak, unlearned himselfand become one in spirit and nature with the natives of thiscelestial empire. Till then his efforts to understand and interpretthem in his own language and according to his own notions endat the worst in a gross misunderstanding and deformation. Theattempts of the positive critical reason to dissect the phenomenaof the religious life sound to men of spiritual experience likethe prattle of a child who is trying to shape into the mould ofhis own habitual notions the life of adults or the blunders ofan ignorant mind which thinks fit to criticise patronisingly oradversely the labours of a profound thinker or a great scientist.At the best even this futile labour can extract, can account foronly the externals of the things it attempts to explain; the spiritis missed, the inner matter is left out, and as a result of thatcapital omission even the account of the externals is left withoutreal truth and has only an apparent correctness.The unaided intellectual reason faced with the phenomenaof the religious life is naturally apt to adopt one of two attitudes,both of them shallow in the extreme, hastily presumptuousand erroneous. Either it views the whole thing as a mass ofsuperstition, a mystical nonsense, a farrago of ignorant barbaric