IV
THE WORLD AND THE WILL
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.