d wayward personal persuasion to truth
objectively valid for all thinking men has ever been the intellect's
most cherished ideal. To redeem religion from unwholesome privacy, and
to give public status and universal right of way to its deliverances,
has been reason's task.

I believe that philosophy will always have opportunity to labor at this
task.[288] We are thinking beings, and we cannot exclude the intellect
from participating in any of our functions. Even in soliloquizing with
ourselves, we construe our feelings intellectually. Both our personal
ideals and our religious and mystical experiences must be interpreted
congruously with the kind of scenery which our thinking mind inhabits.
The philosophic climate of our time inevitably forces its own clothing
on us. Moreover, we must exchange our feelings with one another, and
in doing so we have to speak, and to use general and abstract verbal
formulas. Conceptions and constructions are thus a necessary part of
our religion; and as moderator amid the clash of hypotheses, and
mediator among the criticisms of one man's constructions by another,
philosophy will always have much to do.

It would be strange if I disputed this, when these very lectures which
I am giving are (as you will see more clearly from now onwards) a
laborious attempt to extract from the privacies of religious experience
some general facts which can be defined in formulas upon which
everybody may agree.

[288] Compare Professor W. Wallace's Gifford Lectures, in Lectures and
Essays, Oxford, 1898, pp. 17 ff.

Religious experience, in other words, spontaneously and inevitably
engenders myths, superstitions, dogmas, creeds, and metaphysical
theologies, and criticisms of one set of these by the adherents of
another. Of late, impartial classifications and comparisons have
become possible, alongside of the denunciations and anathemas by which
the commerce between creeds used exclusively to be carried on. We have
the beginnings of a "Science of Religions," so-called; and if these
lectures could ever be accounted a crumb-like contribution to such a
science, I should be made very happy.

But all these intellectual operations, whether they be constructive or
comparative and critical, presuppose immediate experiences as their
subject-matter. They are interpretative and inductive operations,
operations after the fact, consequent upon religious feeling, not
coordinate with it, not independent of wha