What religion reports, you must remember, always purports to be a fact
of experience: the divine is actually present, religion says, and
between it and ourselves relations of give and take are actual. If
definite perceptions of fact like this cannot stand upon their own
feet, surely abstract reasoning cannot give them the support they are
in need of. Conceptual processes can class facts, define them,
interpret them; but they do not produce them, nor can they reproduce
their individuality. There is always a PLUS, a THISNESS, which feeling
alone can answer for. Philosophy in this sphere is thus a secondary
function, unable to warrant faith's veracity, and so I revert to the
thesis which I announced at the beginning of this lecture.

In all sad sincerity I think we must conclude that the attempt to
demonstrate by purely intellectual processes the truth of the
deliverances of direct religious experience is absolutely hopeless.

It would be unfair to philosophy, however, to leave her under this
negative sentence. Let me close, then, by briefly enumerating what she
CAN do for religion. If she will abandon metaphysics and deduction for
criticism and induction, and frankly transform herself from theology
into science of religions, she can make herself enormously useful.

The spontaneous intellect of man always defines the divine which it
feels in ways that harmonize with its temporary intellectual
prepossessions. Philosophy can by comparison eliminate the local and
the accidental from these definitions. Both from dogma and from
worship she can remove historic incrustations. By confronting the
spontaneous religious constructions with the results of natural
science, philosophy can also eliminate doctrines that are now known to
be scientifically absurd or incongruous.

Sifting out in this way unworthy formulations, she can leave a residuum
of conceptions that at least are possible. With these she can deal as
HYPOTHESES, testing them in all the manners, whether negative or
positive, by which hypotheses are ever tested. She can reduce their
number, as some are found more open to objection. She can perhaps
become the champion of one which she picks out as being the most
closely verified or verifiable. She can refine upon the definition of
this hypothesis, distinguishing between what is innocent over-belief
and symbolism in the expression of it, and what is to be literally
taken. As a result, she can offer mediatio