The Varieties of Religious Experience - Penn State University

The Varieties of Religious Experiencethemselves along with them; and this other, at first only ideal orpotential, presently proves itself also to be actual. It supersedes thething at first supposed, and both verifies and corrects it, in developingthe fullness of its meaning.The program is excellent; the universe is a place where things arefollowed by other things that both correct and fulfill them; and alogic which gave us something like this movement of fact wouldexpress truth far better than the traditional school-logic, which nevergets of its own accord from anything to anything else, and registersonly predictions and subsumptions, or static resemblances and differences.Nothing could be more unlike the methods of dogmatictheology than those of this new logic. Let me quote in illustrationsome passages from the Scottish transcendentalist whom I have alreadynamed.“How are we to conceive,” Principal Caird writes, “of the realityin which all intelligence rests?” He replies: “Two things may withoutdifficulty be proved, viz., that this reality is an absolute Spirit,and conversely that it is only in communion with this absolute Spiritor Intelligence that the finite Spirit can realize itself. It is absolute;for the faintest movement of human intelligence would be arrested,if it did not presuppose the absolute reality of intelligence, of thoughtitself. Doubt or denial themselves presuppose and indirectly affirmit. When I pronounce anything to be true, I pronounce it, indeed,to be relative to thought, but not to be relative to my thought, or tothe thought of any other individual mind. From the existence of allindividual minds as such I can abstract; I can think them away. Butthat which I cannot think away is thought or self-consciousnessitself, in its independence and absoluteness, or, in other words, anAbsolute Thought or Self-Consciousness.”Here, you see, Principal Caird makes the transition which Kantdid not make: he converts the omnipresence of consciousness ingeneral as a condition of “truth” being anywhere possible, into anomnipresent universal consciousness, which he identifies with Godin his concreteness. He next proceeds to use the principle that toacknowledge your limits is in essence to be beyond them; and makesthe transition to the religious experience of individuals in the followingwords:—400