If my interpretation of the reason thus gets its worth from the fact that it attempts by a formula simply to illustrate the view which the servants of the divine reason actually and practically translate into life, and express through their spirit and through their deeds, you may hereupon object that my view of the reason as a source of religious insight still seems to you to be one which it is not easy to translate into life at all. What does it profit a man, you will say, to view the whole world as the object present to an all-embracing and divine insight? How does such a view give a man the power to live more reasonably than he otherwise would live? Is a world-embracing reason that sees all things in their unity really that master of life whom our simpler religious intuitions call upon us to seek as our Deliverer from our natural chaos of desires? I have just asserted that there are people who devote their lives to the service of such a divine reason. But if the divine reason is eternal and perfect, and if it sees all reality as an unity, and if this is its only function, how can any one serve it at all? The eternal needs no help, you may insist, and apparently has no concern for us. We need, for our [{130}] salvation, something, or some personal deliverer, that can teach us not merely to utter true assertions, but to live worthy lives. How does the insight of the reason enlighten us in this respect? What would one do for a divine Logos, for an all-observant and all-comprehending seer? Could one love such a being, or devoutly commune with his perfect but motionless wisdom? Is it true then, as I have just maintained it to be true, that the insight of the reason, as I have expounded it in my sketch of a philosophy, does really inspire the earnest and devoted souls whose spirit I have attempted to express? Whatever they may think of my philosophy, have I been just to their practical fervour and to their energetic devotion? Do they merely say: God is omniscient, therefore our life has its purpose defined, and we are saved?
In brief, the insight of the reason, as I have been stating its dicta, may seem to you, at best, to show us a sort of heaven which, as I said, overarches our unwisdom with its starry clearness, but which as you may now add we can neither reach, nor use, nor regard as a rational inspiration of our active life. If it is real, it can observe us, as it observes all reality. But can it save us? It can rise above us. But can it enter into our will and give us a plan of life? Granting the validity of the argument sketched in our last lecture, what has the all-wise knower of truth to do with our salvation?
These are familiar objections to such a view as [{131}] mine. James repeatedly urged them in his comment upon what he regarded as not merely the fallibility, but the futility, or, as he said, the "thinness" of the idealistic interpretation of the world of the reason. Similar objections have been urged by many of the critics of any doctrine similar to mine. Are these objections just?
III
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.
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.