The Sources Of Religious Insight - free ebook by Josiah Royce

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The Sources Of Religious Insight

Josiah Royce

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THE SOURCES OF RELIGIOUS INSIGHT

THE SOURCES OF RELIGIOUS INSIGHT

LECTURES DELIVERED BEFORE LAKE FOREST COLLEGE ON THE FOUNDATION OF THE LATE WILLIAM BROSS BY JOSIAH ROYCE, Ph.D., LL.D. PROFESSOR OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS NEW YORK .... 1912 Copyright, 1912, by THE TRUSTEES OF LAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY Published April. 1912 {v} THE BROSS FOUNDATION The Bross Lectures are an outgrowth of a fund established in 1879 by the late William Bross, Lieutenant-Governor of Illinois from 1866 to 1870. Desiring some memorial of

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I THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM AND THE HUMAN INDIVIDUAL

I THE RELIGIOUS PROBLEM AND THE HUMAN INDIVIDUAL

{2} {3} My first task must be to forestall possible disappointments regarding the scope of our inquiry. In seven lectures upon a vast topic very little can at best be accomplished. I want to tell you at the outset what are some of the limitations to which I propose to subject my undertakings. I come before you as a philosophical inquirer addressing a general audience of thoughtful people. This definition of my office implies from the outset very notable limitations. As a philosophical inquirer I

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I

I

The limitations of my task, thus indicated, will become still clearer if I next try to define the term Religious Insight as I intend it to be here understood. And first I must speak briefly of the word Insight. By insight, whatever the object of insight may be, one means some kind of knowledge. But the word insight has a certain richness of significance whereby we distinguish what we call insight from knowledge in general. A man knows the way to the office where he does his business. But if he i

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II

II

The word salvation naturally first suggests to your own mind certain familiar traditions which have played a great part in the history of Christianity. I do not mean to make light of those traditions nor yet of the significance of the historical Christianity to which they belong. Yet, as I have already told you, these lectures will have no dogmatic religious system to expound, and, for that very reason, will not attempt the grave task of any extended discussion of Christianity. I propose at {10}

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III

III

Religious Insight means then, for my present purposes, insight into the need and into the way of salvation . If the problem of human salvation has never come home to your mind, as a genuine problem of life and of experience, you will feel no interest in religion in the sense to which the present lectures will arbitrarily confine the term. If, on the other hand, your live personal experience has made you intimate with any form or phase of this problem of the pathetic need and cry of man for salva

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IV

IV

I can best undertake my brief initial study of the way in which the experience of the individual human being is a source of religious insight by meeting an objection that a reading of my printed programme may have aroused in the minds of some of you. My list of the sources of religious insight, as contained in the titles of these lectures, makes no express reference to a source which some of you will be disposed to regard as the principal source, namely, Revelation. Here, some of you will alread

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V

V

I have stated what I call the religious paradox. The whole of what I have hereafter to tell you is needed in order to throw such light as I can here attempt to throw upon the solution of the paradox. You will not expect, then, an immediate answer to the question thus brought before you. Yet you see our present situation: Unless there is something in our individual experience which at least begins to bring us into a genuine touch, both with the fact that we need salvation and with the marks where

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II INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE AND SOCIAL EXPERIENCE

II INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE AND SOCIAL EXPERIENCE

{36} {37} The results of our first lecture appear to have brought the religious problems, so far as we shall attempt to consider them, into a position which in one respect simplifies, in another respect greatly complicates our undertaking....

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I

I

In one way, I say, our undertaking is simplified. For, as we have defined religion, the main concern of any religion that we are to recognise is with the salvation of man, and with whatever objects or truths it is important to know if we are to find the way of salvation. Now the experiences which teach us that we need what I have ventured to call by the traditional name salvation, are, from my point of view, experiences common to a very large portion of mankind. They are great and, in certain re

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II

II

Our present lecture will be devoted to three tasks. First, we shall try to show that the religious consciousness of mankind, when it is concerned with the need and with the way of salvation, must needs appear in many various and apparently conflicting forms, but that, nevertheless, these conflicts need not discourage us. For, as we shall attempt still further to explain, the underlying motives of the higher religions are, after all, much more in agreement than the diversities of creeds and the a

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III

III

Let me proceed at once to the first of these three undertakings. I am further to illustrate, on the one hand, the unity and the naturalness of the religious motives; on the other hand, I am to emphasise the mysterious seeming of the religious objects. And I am thus to show the reason why the faiths of men are so diverse but their religious needs so nearly common. At the last time I tried to define for you, in my own terms, what the supreme purpose of human life is, or, in other words, what that

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IV

IV

The foregoing discussion may seem to have led us far from the study of our social experience as a source of religious insight. But in fact it is a necessary preliminary to that study and leads us very near to it. If one principal source of our need of salvation is the natural narrowness of our view of the meaning {55} of our own purposes and motives, and the consequent fickleness and the forgetful inconsistency with which we usually live out our days, it seems right, in searching for a way that

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V

V

We cannot answer this question without taking account of the views of those of our recent teachers to whom this purely social theory of the religious {59} objects and values is indeed profoundly unsatisfactory. That such opponents of the adequacy of the interpretation of religion just suggested are to be found amongst the believers in familiar religious traditions, we need not at any length set forth. The traditions of the great religions of the world do not interpret the old faiths in this way,

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VI

VI

The answer to this question involves, I think, two considerations, both of them exemplified by the various views here in question, both of them familiar, both of them easily misinterpreted. The first is the very consideration upon which our popular teachers of salvation through love most insist. We ourselves came upon that consideration at the close of our first lecture. Man is, indeed, a being who cannot be saved alone, however much solitude may help him, at times, toward insight. For he is bou

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III THE OFFICE OF THE REASON

III THE OFFICE OF THE REASON

Thus far we have dealt with sources of religious insight which are indispensable, but which confess their own inadequacy so soon as you question them closely. Individual experience can show us, in its moments of wider vision, our ideal, and its times of despair, of aspiration, or of self-examination, our need. But whenever it attempts to acquaint us with the way of salvation, its deliveries are clouded by the mists of private caprice and of personal emotion. Social experience, in its religious a

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I

I

"What does one mean by the Reason?" As I attempt to answer this question, with an especial effort to show the relations of reason and religion, I shall be aided by reminding you at the outset that, at the present time, there is a widespread tendency to discredit the reason as a source of any notable insight into life or into the universe. And this tendency depends upon so defining the business of the reason as sharply to oppose, on the one hand, intuition and reason, and, on the other hand, reas

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II

II

To this question I must at once answer that we all of us daily use the word reason as the name for a process, or a set of processes, which certainly {85} cannot be reduced to the mere power to form and to use abstract ideas, and to analyse the already predetermined meaning of statements. When we speak of an ill-tempered or of a prejudiced man as "unreasonable," we do not merely mean that he is unable to form or to define abstract ideas, or that he cannot analyse the meaning of his own statements

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II

II

All such considerations will seem to many of you hopelessly general. You will have missed, thus far in my account, concrete instances to illustrate how what I have now called the reason actually works, how it is related to experience, how it helps us toward the broader view of things, how it makes the connections of life more obvious, how it raises our intuitions to higher levels. And unfortunately, since I have no time to discourse to you upon the science called Logic--the science part of whose

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IV

IV

Our lengthy effort to define the work and the place of the reason has brought us to the threshold of an appreciation of its relation to the religious insight which we are seeking. In looking for salvation, we discover that our task is defined for us by those aspects of individual and social experience upon which our two previous lectures have dwelt. We have learned from the study of these two sorts of experience that, whatever else we need for our salvation, one of our needs is to come into touc

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IV THE WORLD AND THE WILL

IV THE WORLD AND THE WILL

{118} {119} 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

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I

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 si

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II

II

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 wor

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III

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 p

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IV

IV

Our illustrations have now prepared the way for a general review of the relations between our reason and our will. We are ready at length to ask whether any insight of reason, whether any general view of the nature and of the unity of the world or of life, {136} could possibly be a merely theoretical insight. And if we rightly answer this question, we shall be prepared to reply to the objection that, according to the doctrine of the last lecture, the divine insight which overarches our ignorance

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V

V

Now in what way can I hope, you may ask, to answer these impressive and to many recent writers decisive considerations of the pragmatists? My answer, like my foregoing statement of my own form of idealism, depends upon extremely simple considerations. Their interest for our discussion lies in the fact that they have to do with the relation between reason and action, and between the real world and the human will. As a fact, the will as well as the reason is a source of religious insight. No truth

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VI

VI

In order fairly to estimate aright our relation to this larger life, we must briefly review the further thesis upon which recent pragmatism lays so much stress--the thesis that, since the truth of an opinion consists in the agreement or disagreement of its empirical workings with their anticipated consequences, all truth is both temporal and relative and cannot be either eternal or absolute. Let me then say a word as to the absoluteness of truth. The thesis of pragmatism as to the active nature

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VII

VII

If, with such a view of the nature of absolute truth, we turn back to estimate the sense in which our opinions about the world as a whole can be true or false, we now see that our account both of the insight of the reason, and of the nature of the world, {159} has become enriched by this whole analysis of the nature of opinion. Opinions about the universe are counsels as to how to adjust your deeds to the purposes and requirements which a survey of the whole of the life whereto your life belongs

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V THE RELIGION OF LOYALTY

V THE RELIGION OF LOYALTY

{164} {165} Our first two lectures dealt with sources of religious insight well known to all of you, however unsatisfactory you may have found them. Our third and fourth lectures have led us into philosophical discussions which many of you will have found neither satisfactory nor familiar. And so, in imagination, I can hear you declaring that, if the foregoing sources of insight are indeed all that we have, religious truth seems still very far away. "The saints," I hear you saying, "may comfort

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I

I

Thus some of you may at this point express your discontent. If you do, I find this discontent justified. If the foregoing lectures had indeed exhausted the account of the accessible sources of religious insight, we should be hopeless of finding any religion that could satisfy at once the individual need for salvation, the social requirement that we should seek for salvation through union with our brethren, the rational demand for a coherent view of truth, and the aim of the will to conform itsel

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II

II

There is an obvious contrast between the points of view from which morality and religion consider the problem of life. Whatever may be your views as to what your duty is, it is plain that the moral interest centres about this idea of duty. That is, the moral interest seeks to define right deeds and to insist that they shall be done. It estimates the rightness of deeds with reference to some ideal of life. But however it conceives this ideal, it makes its main appeal to the active individual. It

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III

III

I can best show you what I mean by next very briefly reviewing the motives upon which the idea of duty itself rests, and by then showing to what, upon the noblest level of human effort, these motives lead. Our moral interests have a development which, in all its higher phases, runs at least parallel to the development of our religious interests, even in cases where the two sorts of interests seem to clash. The moral problems arise through certain interactions that take place between our individu

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IV

IV

You already know, from our former discussion, how our reason views the situation thus created by this chaos of social and of individual interests. How real and how confused this chaos is, the daily record of certain aspects of the ordinary social life of men which you see in each morning's newspaper {187} may serve to illustrate. These princes and peoples, these rebels and executioners, these strikers and employers, these lovers and murderers, these traders and bankrupts, these who seem for the

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V

V

Here at length let life itself answer the question. As I was preparing these very words, and thinking what new instance to choose, in order to illustrate afresh the very principle that I have in mind, the newspaper of the day, side by side with its usual chronicle of unreason and of disaster, reported the approaching end of a public servant. This public servant was Ida Lewis, who for fifty years was the official keeper of the Lime Rock lighthouse in Narragansett Bay. She had been known for more

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VI

VI

If we consider carefully any such faithful lives as I have just exemplified, we see that, however simple-minded and unreflective some of the people may be who learn to live in this way, the motives that guide them are such as will bear a great deal of thoughtful reflection. The people whom I have in mind, and of whom such instances teach us something, are, in the first place, individuals of considerable wealth and strength of personal character. They certainly are resolute. They have a will of t

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VI THE RELIGIOUS MISSION OF SORROW

VI THE RELIGIOUS MISSION OF SORROW

It very often happens to us that to reach any notable result, either in life or in insight, is even thereby to introduce ourselves to a new problem. In the present state of the undertaking of these lectures such is our experience. The religious insight whose source is the loyal spirit was our topic in the foregoing lecture. If my own view is correct, this source is by far the most important that we have yet considered. It unites the spirit and the meaning of all the foregoing sources. Rightly in

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I

I

We approach our problem fully mindful of the limitations to which the purpose of these lectures confines us. The problem of evil has many metaphysical, theological, moral, and common-sense aspects upon which I can say nothing whatever in the present context. Human sorrow appears in our pathway in these lectures as a topic for us to consider, first, because whatever source of religious insight we have thus far consulted has shown us man struggling with some sort of ill, and, secondly, because the

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II

II

But if you grant the general principle thus stated, the presence of evil in this world, in the forms that we all recognise, and in the degree of importance that it attains in all our lives, seems, indeed, a very serious hindrance in the way of religious insight. {220} And the reason is plain. Religion, as we have said, in seeking salvation, seeks some form of communion with the master of life. That is, it seeks to come into touch with a power, a principle, or a mind, or a heart, that, on the one

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III

III

I believe that there is some advantage in stating in this somewhat crabbed and dialectical fashion, a problem which most of us usually approach through much more direct and pathetic experience. One advantage in crabbedness and in fondness for dialectic is that it sometimes tends to clear away the clouds {228} with which emotion from moment to moment surrounds certain great problems of life. As I said earlier, in speaking of the office of the reason, abstract ideas are but means to an end. Their

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IV

IV

This new source of insight begins to come to us when we observe, as we can often observe if we listen with closer attention to the voices of our own hearts, that the general principle, "Evil ought simply to be put out of existence," does not express our whole attitude toward all evils, and gives only an imperfect account either of our more common-place and elemental or of our more elevated, heroic, and reasonable estimates of life. The principle: "Evil ought to be simply abolished," is, indeed,

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V

V

Because I am here not stating for you a merely speculative doctrine concerning the place of evil in a good and rational spiritual world, I once more need, at this point, to appeal as directly as I can to life. Let me present to you, from recent literature, a noteworthy instance of the use of our present source of insight. The instance is confessedly one where no complete and determinate religious creed is defended as the result of the use of the insight in question. And an actually eternal truth

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VI

VI

Now this, I insist, is insight. It is no "soft" doctrine. It is far beyond the sort of pragmatism that accepts the test of momentary results. As far as it goes, it is religious insight. It is insight, moreover, into the nature of certain ills which cannot, yes, which in principle, and even by omnipotence, {251} could not, be simply removed from existence without abolishing the conditions which are logically necessary to the very highest good that we know. Life in the spirit simply presupposes th

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VII THE UNITY OF THE SPIRIT AND THE INVISIBLE CHURCH

VII THE UNITY OF THE SPIRIT AND THE INVISIBLE CHURCH

{256} {257} My present and concluding lecture must begin with some explanations of what I mean by the term "The Unity of the Spirit." Then I shall have to define my use of the term "The Invisible Church." Thereafter, we shall be free to devote ourselves to the consideration of a source of religious insight as omnipresent as it is variously interpreted by those who, throughout all the religious world, daily appeal to its guidance. The outcome of our discussion may help some of you, as I hope, to

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I

I

In these lectures I have repeatedly called the religious objects, that is, the objects whereof the knowledge tends to the salvation of man, "superhuman" and "supernatural" objects. I have more or less fully explained, as I went, the sense in which {258} I hold these objects to be both superhuman and supernatural. But every use of familiar traditional terms is likely to arouse misunderstandings. I have perfectly definite reasons for my choice of the traditional words in question as adjectives whe

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II

II

Amongst the sources of insight which bring us into definite and practical relations with that spiritual world whose nature has now been again defined, one of the most effective is the life and the word of other men who are minded to be loyal to genuine causes, and who are already, through the service of their common causes, brought together in some form of spiritual brotherhood. The real unity of the life of such fellow-servants of the Spirit is itself an instance of a superhuman conscious reali

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III

III

And first let me speak of its membership. We have now repeatedly defined the test of such membership. The invisible church is the spiritual brotherhood of the loyal. Only a searcher of hearts can quite certainly know who are the really loyal. We can be sure regarding the nature of loyalty. That loyalty itself should come to men's consciousness in the most various forms and degrees, and clouded by the most tragic misunderstandings, the narrow form of human consciousness, and the blindness and var

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IV

IV

The invisible church is to be to us a source of insight. This means that we must enter into some sort of communion with the faithful if we are to enjoy the fruits of their insight. And, apart from one's own life of loyal service itself, the principal means of grace--that is, the principal means of attaining instruction in the spirit of loyalty, encouragement in its toils, solace in its sorrows, and power to endure and to triumph--the principal means of grace, I say, which is open to any man lies

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V

V

I cannot close this extremely imperfect sketch of our crowning source of insight without applying to our present doctrine of the invisible church, the eternally true teaching of St. Paul regarding spiritual gifts. As Paul's Corinthians, in their little community, faced the problem of the diversity of the gifts and powers whereby their various members undertook to serve the common cause--as this diversity of gifts tended from the outset to doctrinal differences of opinion, as the differences thre

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