ncern them. Many very learned people have attained almost
no insight into anything. Insight is no peculiar possession of the
students of any technical specialty or of any one calling. Men of
science aim to reach insight into {7} the objects of their researches;
men of affairs, or men of practical efficiency, however plain or
humble their calling, may show insight of a very high type, whenever
they possess knowledge that bears the marks indicated, knowledge that
is intimate and personal and that involves a wide survey of the unity
of many things.

Such, then, is insight in general. But I am to speak of Religious
Insight. Religious insight must be distinguished from other sorts of
insight by its object, or by its various characteristic objects. Now,
I have no time to undertake, in this opening discourse, any adequate
definition of the term Religion or of the features that make an object
a religious object. Religion has a long and complex history, and a
tragic variety of forms and of objects of belief. And so religion
varies prodigiously in its characteristics from age to age, from one
portion of the human race to another, from one individual to another.
If we permitted ourselves to define religion so as merely to insist
upon what is common to all its forms, civilised and savage, our
definition would tend to become so inclusive and so attenuated as to
be almost useless for the purposes of the present brief inquiry. If,
on the other hand, we defined religion so as to make the term denote
merely what the believer in this or in that creed thinks of as his own
religion, we should from the start cut ourselves off from the very
breadth of view which I myself suppose to be essential to the highest
sort of {8} religious Insight. Nobody fully comprehends what religion
is who imagines that his own religion is the only genuine religion. As
a fact, I shall therefore abandon at present the effort to give a
technically finished definition of what constitutes religion, or of
the nature of the religious objects. I shall here limit myself to a
practically useful preliminary mention of a certain feature that, for
my present purpose, shall be viewed as the essential characteristic of
religion, and of religious objects, so far as these lectures propose
to discuss religion.

The higher religions of mankind--religions such as Buddhism and
Christianity--have had in common this notable feature, namely, that
they have been concerned with the pro