intensity of
life's great concerns and to enlighten us regarding what aims life has
always really intended to pursue.

My own effort to formulate the supreme end of life does not seem to me
to be foreign to common-sense. I think that this way of stating the
purpose of life may help us to see through many of the apparently
hopeless diversities of human opinion regarding what the highest good
is.

It is customary to describe that longing for salvation which is, from
the point of view of these lectures, the foundation of religion, by
saying that the man who begins to get religious interest discovers
that when left to himself he is out of harmony with what James calls
"the higher powers," that is, with what a Christian calls God. In
other words, as a customary formula states the case, the religiously
disposed man begins by learning that the chief end of his existence is
to come into harmony with God's will. And this discovery, as such a
view supposes, teaches him, for the first time, what his ideal of life
ought to be. And therefore, as many say, something that is of the
nature of a mysterious revelation from without is needed to {47}
initiate the religious process and to show us our goal. On the other
hand, writers like James, who insist upon interpreting religion, so
far as that is possible, in terms of personal experience rather than
in terms of external revelation, have nevertheless been led to agree
with many of the partisans of revelation in regarding this sense of
our disharmony with the "higher powers" as something that must have an
essentially superhuman source. For James, our sense of religious need
is an experience which mysteriously wells up from the subliminal self,
from the soundless depths of our own subconsciousness. James,
therefore, conceives it probable that, through the subliminal or
subconscious self, we are actually aroused to religious interest by
spiritual beings whose level is higher than our own, and whose will,
expressed to us through the vague but often intense sense of need
which the religiously minded feel, does set for us an ideal task which
is of greater worth than our natural desires, and which, when we can
get into harmony with these powers through the aid of their subliminal
influences, does give a new sense to life.

Now in contrast with such views regarding the origin of that deeper
sense of need which is indeed the beginning of religion, I have to
insist that the basis of the religi