es into
intuitive and non-intuitive. If I rightly understand Mr. Spencer, when
he says of the subject matter of Religion that it "passes the sphere of
experience," he means that the content of Religion results from the
action of the non-intuitive faculties upon material furnished by the
intuitive faculties, and not from the immediate action of the latter
upon environment. For the sake of the argument, I will grant this
position. In order that mankind may build up sciences in which it
reposes such confidence, the action of the non-intuitive faculties must
be trusted, for it is only through such action that sciences can ever be
constructed from the materials of experience. Granting, then, the
general trustworthiness of mental operations, the mind cannot abstract
_out of_ human experiences what was not already in them; cannot evolve
what was not involved. The separation of the true from the false in
Religion, then, must be accomplished, as in the case of Science, by
verifying the intuitions and going repeatedly over the chains of
reasoning which lead to the conclusions farthest removed from
intuitions, to guard as much as possible against error. Thus, because
drawn out from given data, certain conclusions will embody to-day what
is true in Religion, and later, with an enlarged experience, more or
less modified conclusions will express what will then be seen to be
true. This is in accord with the general law of evolution which holds
for Science. From the present point of view, Mr. Spencer seems to concur
in the above, since he says of religious ideas, that "to suppose these
multiform conceptions" to "be one and all _absolutely_ groundless,
discredits too profoundly that average human intelligence from which all
our individual intelligences are inherited."

To the statement that the mind cannot abstract _out of_ human
experiences what was not already in them, Mr. Spencer could make, I
think, but one answer, to wit: that while the operations of the mind are
generally reliable, and while there has been an element in human
experience which seemed to warrant conclusions derived from them,
nevertheless, mankind has egregiously erred in thinking that it had the
power to build up a valid content to Religion, since the very nature of
Religion is such, that the mental operations which are reliable in the
realm of Science cannot be so in the realm of Religion. To answer this,
we must consider the argument for conceivability as the tou