n certain fundamental
questions concerning the functioning of our minds, feelings, wills. I
will next attempt short, vivid descriptions of the chief stages in the
Jewish and Christian Religions, with a view to tracing here what may
concern their progress; and will very shortly illustrate the main
results attained by the corresponding main peculiarities of
Confucianism, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism. And I will finally strive to
elucidate and to estimate, as clearly as possible, the main facts in
past and present Religion which concern the question of religious
'Progressiveness'.

I

I begin with insisting upon some seven discriminations which, even only
forty years ago, would have appeared largely preposterous to the then
fashionable philosophy.

First, then, our Knowledge is always wider and deeper than is our
Science. I know my mother, I know my dog, I know my favourite rose-tree;
and this, although I am quite ignorant of the anatomical differences
between woman and man; of the psychological limits between dog and human
being; or of the natural or artificial botanical order to which my
rose-plant belongs. Any kind or degree of consciousness on my part as to
these three realities is a knowledge of their content. 'Knowledge is not
simply the reduction of phenomena to law and their resolution into
abstract elements; since thus the unknowable would be found well within
the facts of experience itself, in so far as these possess a concrete
character which refuses translation into abstract relations.' So
Professor Aliotta urges with unanswerable truth.[32]

And next, this spontaneous awareness of other realities by myself, the
reality Man, contains always, from the first, both matter and form, and
sense, reason, feeling, volition, all more or less in action. Sir Henry
Jones insists finely: 'The difference between the primary and elementary
data of thought on the one hand, and the highest forms of systematized
knowledge on the other, is no difference in kind, analogous to a mere
particular and a mere universal; but it is a difference of
articulation.'[33]

Thirdly, direct, unchallengeable Experience is always only experience of
a particular moment; only by means of Thought, and trust in Thought, can
such Experience be extended, communicated, utilized. The sceptic, to be
at all effective, practises this trust as really as does his opponent.
Thought, taken apart from Experience, is indeed artificial and arid; but
Experie