CHAPTER TWELVE THE RELIGION OF EXPERIENCE AND EXPERIMENT
IN current writings on the subject, “experimental” or “experimentalist” religion seems to mean little more than that type of religion in which the human individual falls back entirely upon his own observation and experience. Instead of accepting the claims of supernatural revelation, or conforming to the usages of established religious institutions like churches, he shapes his religious beliefs in accordance with the facts of his own experience and the exigencies of his own behaviour. And such beliefs in the matter of religion as he finds helpful in meeting the complex and changing situations of the modern world, as seem to aid in adjusting him
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to his social and cosmical environment, he will be inclined to accept. It is true that Professor Kirsopp Lake, who has recently called our attention to the importance of experimentalism in religion and has written in an illuminating way of fundamentalism, institutionalism, and experimentalism as the real divisions of Protestant Christianity, does give to experimentalism a somewhat more definite meaning. The experimentalist holds, he says, that there are two great experiments in life which are the basis of religion.1 Both depend upon individual choice. The &st is when a man chooses to become the servant of a great and inclusive purpose which he believes that he discovers in life. The second is made when such an individual, conscious of the impending failure of the first experiment on account of his own
1 Lake, The Religions of Yesterday and Tomorrow, pp. 65, 66.
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weakness, turns to the Source Of life for strength and comfort and purification. But as to the procedure followed in these two experiments, Professor Lake evidently believes that no general statements can be made; it is entirely an individual matter. “Each of these experiments can be made in many different ways; no one way is the way any more than any one kind of test-tube is the test-tube. No conclusion can be valid which ignores the results obtained by any one of these ways.”2
Unless experimentation can be given some more precise meaning in the field of religion there is little reason to recommend it as a method of investigation or a basis of belief. Certainly experimental procedure as it is fruitfully employed in the natural sciences signifies something much more definite than this. The student of a science like physics who is to follow the approved method of
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experimental procedure in his study of the subject is not simply turned loose in the physics laboratory with instructions to do what he can with the apparatus and to observe and record the results of his “experimentation.”
Such a method would not take him far toward a mastery of the subject. Authorities would generally agree, I think, that there are three requirements for fruitful experimentation in any scientific field. First, the student must have some clear notion of the aim and scope of his science; second, he must have some preliminary acquaintance with technical methods of experimentation appropriate to the field; and, third, he must have some knowledge of the results which previous investigators in the field have gained by use of these methods.
Are not these three requirements mandatory if the experimental procedure is to be followed in religion? To be sure, religious
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inquiry is different from scientific investigation. The values whose reality religion affirms are values at once social and personal; they presuppose the community of social intelligence, without doubt, but they imply the distinctness of individual personality as well. Religion is an intimately individual and, in this sense, a subjective concern; it is the response of the human individual with outlook and aspirations altogether unique and his own, to the total scheme of things. Hence we must admit, I think, that private judgment will always hold its place as a final court of appeal in religion; each individual must make his own reckoning with the ultimate issues of life and the cosmic powers which control his final destiny.
Is a truly experimental procedure therefore impossible in religion? Certainly if experimental religion can mean nothing more than trusting to one's own observation and
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the results of one's own dealings with the situations of daily life, it promises little or nothing in the way of objective results.
The approach to the problem of religion outlined in the foregoing chapters indicates, I believe) that the three requirements of experimental procedure just mentioned may be fully met in the religious field and a genuinely experimental method adopted in religious inquiry. The aim of religion, we have found reason to believe, is the realization of the objective system of personal and social values through communication with the Cosmic Intelligence. The means of realization are predetermined for us human beings by the fact that we possess three psycho-physical agencies of personal communication: articulate speech, practical invention and construction, and aesthetic perception and expression. Applied in the field of religion these methods of intercommunication take the forms of
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prayer, devoted service, and worship. in each of these methods the human individual has the advantage of being able to check and corroborate the results he has gained by the experiences of other inquirers who have used the same method of communication. He can turn for purpose of guidance and confirmation to the literature of religious thought and meditation, to the characters and careers of those great leaders who are shining examples of heroic devotion to the good of humanity and the cause of the world, and to those symbols and rituals, that music and architecture, which persist through the ages because they have been felt by countless thousands to embody and express the feeling of unity with, and completeness in, the Divine.
Let us then direct our attention to these three forms of religious response--prayer, devoted service, and worship--which we interpret as methods of realizing the objective
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system of values through intercommunication with the Universal Intelligence. “Prayer,” says William James, “is the very soul and essence of religion.”3 Prayer, from the standpoint we have been led to adopt, is a mode of intercommunication. It is intercommunication with the Cosmic Intelligence by articulate speech, which helps us to realize the personal meaning of the world and the larger significance of the events and situations of our own life in relation to the whole. Obviously it is not the prayer of petition we are discussing, but rather the prayer of communion. Again quoting from James: “Notwithstanding the recency of the opposite belief, everyone now knows that droughts and storms follow from physical antecedents and that moral appeals cannot avert them. But petitional prayer is only one department of prayer; and if we take the word in the wider
3 James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 464.
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sense as meaning every kind of inward communion or conversation with the power recognized as divine, we can easily see that scientific criticism leaves it untouched.”4
We shall not have to ask, it is needless to say, what language God speaks or to consider (as the psychologists of religion do) whether verbal “inspiration” and automatic writing
have a supernatural source. Such questions are bound to appear to us irrelevant and, in the light of the larger issues involved, somewhat trivial. The conditions of the genuine
prayer of communion, as we understand them, are simple but fundamental. The human individual perplexed and baffled, perhaps by incongruous and incomprehensible happenings of recent experience, perhaps by the more general inconsequence of natural events and the perversity of human fortune, perhaps by the still deeper-lying conflict between his
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own personal hopes and ideals and the ruthless forces of physical nature working without and within his organism, yearns after the inclusive and reconciling view. He formulates his problems and perplexities in words; he addresses them to the Supreme Intelligence; he waits earnestly and expectantly for light. And light does come: an illuminating change of perspective occurs; he sees things in altered proportions which he recognizes as true proportions because now they fit together; implications and interdependencies previously hidden begin to appear as he views his own experience and ideals in the
larger setting of human relationships and world-order. He is ready to return with renewed hope and interest to his daily tasks and face courageously their confusing detail, their apparent futilities, their inevitable disappointments. When this occurs, prayer of communion has taken place.
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The effect of the prayer of communion is evidently to give reality and increased motive force to our personal and social ideals. Of such prayer can be said what Hocking says of worship: it “recovers the worth of life by recovering the natural vigor of the whole idea.”5 Emphatically it is not a way of taking a “moral holiday,” of resting our harassed and weary souls by soothing visions of an eternally perfect order which we accept for the nonce as a substitute for the actual world. It is true that such mystical contemplation is often paralyzing to moral effort. But it is strange that minds which see this very clearly do not also see that it is equally paralyzing to moral effort to begin to doubt whether our ideals have sufficient foundation in the real nature of the world to be capable of fulfillment in any event. Let it be granted that we need to believe that our efforts in behalf of
5 Hocking, The Meaning of God in Human Experience, p. 419.
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moral righteousness really count, and there is work for us to do which has not already been done and which will remain undone unless we do it. But we need just as well to believe that there is work which can possibly be done. And the work of realizing the ideals of personal and social intelligence is capable of human accomplishment only if there is sufficient coherence of character, sufficient possibilities of adaptation and development, sufficient order and harmony, in the actual world to afford increasing scope and satisfaction to the activities of intelligent community. Now the prayer of communion helps to convince us that there are such “significant structures”6 (to use Professor Adams' pregnant phrase), such valuable meanings and potencies and harmonies, inherent in the world for us to realize. Consequently it is not simply compensatory and consoling; it is also inspiring
6 Cf. G. P. Adams, Idealism and the Modern Age.
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and invigorating. It renews our conviction of the value of our ideals and it strengthens our faith in the possibilities of their realization.
Prayer we have been discussing as one of the principal modes of response by the human individual to the Cosmic Intelligence. The fact that it employs the instrumentality of articulate speech, however, precludes the possibility of its ever being merely an individual response. For articulate speech, upon whose resources the individual must depend in prayer, is a social product. The very language of prayer into which the individual can hardly help falling is socially standardized. With the prevalence and psychological influence of the conventional “language of prayer” we are not at all concerned; it is not of first importance and may be as much a hindrance as a help. But what is of utmost importance is that the fruits of this type of communication
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by men in many generations past have been preserved in an extensive literature and have thus been made available for use by any individual who cares to take them seriously. Such an inquirer may learn what insights, correlations, and interpretations have been attained by the most sensitive and appreciative minds of the past in the prayer of communion, and then he may test them for himself by using the same method and noting whether it brings him a similar illumination. If the insights and interpretations in question are in this manner verified, they will have conferred a great boon upon the individual. For they will have carried him much further toward a realization of the system of values than he could go by his own initiative and unaided effort.
The religious writings to which I refer are much more extensive than the literature of religious devotion in the narrower and
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more conventional sense. They include works of religious thought and meditation and a considerable portion of what passes for theology and philosophy as well. For in many cases the latter have importance not as intellectual formulations or logical demonstrations but as recorded insights and interpretations that have come as the fruits of religious meditation and communion with God. They are not to be judged logically by the strength of the premises and the cogency of the arguments but experimentally by the test of personal intercourse and communion with the Supreme Intelligence.
The second of the three distinctively religious responses we are describing is that of devoted service to the cause of world-betterment and human progress. In speaking of “devoted service” as a religious response I do not refer to altruistic endeavor earnestly if intermittently undertaken as a moral duty. I
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mean devoted service as a means of realizing through intercommunication the objective values of personal development and association. Such service calls for complete forgetfulness of self, the entire abandonment of self-interest and selfish ambition. It involves self-sacrifice, that characteristic note ever present in all profoundly religious experience, the losing of life in the lesser individual sense that it may be found in its larger universal reality. And inasmuch as such service brings into action our bodily powers of practical invention and adaptation, it is open to experimental use as a method of religious communication.
How can service, a mode of outward action or practical performance, be a means of inter-communication? How in particular is the kind of service we have in mind--devoted and loyal service to the cause of world-betterment-- a means of communication with the
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cosmic intelligence? We are so used to identifying all communication with verbal interchange that we are sometimes slow to see that. the term may and does have a broader signification, and that there are other methods of personal intercommunication besides that by articulate speech. In the case of the kind of practical response which religion inspires, the human individual who, in entire forgetfulness of his private wishes and self-centered ambitions, devotes himself to the whole-hearted and effectual pursuit of the values of personal and social community, experiences a working comradeship with the Universal Unifying Intelligence. In result there is communicated to him a realizing sense both of the nature and worth of those rational ideals which give meaning and value to the world and also of the prevailing power of that Cosmic Purpose which is working for their fulfillment and fruition.
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That communication of this sort is an actual possibility and not a mystic fancy is conclusively proved by the experience of thousands of men who threw themselves with complete self-abandonment into their country's service during the Great War. Many, an indefinitely large number, of these reported that the result of thus breaking over the barriers which business ambition and private interest had built up, was a tremendous enlargement of the meaning and scope of their lives. Now for the first time, as the result of their act of patriotic devotion, they realized what their country and its institutions meant
to them and, in the light of this revelation, the preservation of these institutions for their children and their children's children was the one practical purpose that absorbed all their interest and attention and energy, that became the only thing in the least worth while. And with this convincing realization of the worth
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and importance of the social cause there went, we were told) a sense of greatly increased power. individuals were no longer held back by the thought of their own disabilities and comparative impotence. They were swept up and borne along by the irresistible social forces with which they had allied themselves. Not as helpless pawns, however; for they felt themselves endowed with the might of these forces, they thrilled with the sense of a new power that had been communicated to them.
Such loyal service is what religion proposes, not to “king and country,” but to universal progress, to the “flag of the world,” in Chesterton's picturesque phrase. And when we think of the complete self-surrender, the unstinted heroic devotion which is called for) it seems to us matter-of-fact modern people as quite beyond the power of the normal human being. However this may be, it is undoubtedly the spirit which has
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characterized pre-eminently the great moral and religious leaders of mankind: Socrates the philosopher who held his own life or death as of no account if justice and virtue could be preserved among his fellow Athenians and the laws upheld which had been enacted to maintain them, Gautama the Buddha who did not hesitate to renounce all the emoluments of royal lineage and princely estate to go forth a humble wanderer in search of a way of salvation for his people, and Jesus the Christ who saw that he must suffer many things in order that the gospel of the Kingdom of Love should be preached in all the world as a witness to the nations. And it is this supreme devotion to the service of humanity and the good of the world which is the secret of the power of such personalities as these over millions of their fellow-men.
Certainly their lives and their characters have had a marvelous, in the case of the last
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an almost miraculous, influence upon their own and subsequent generations. Probably the most of the honest, unselfish effort which has been put forth by men to serve their fellows and to contribute to world-welfare has been inspired by the words and deeds of these historic personalities, and effectively carried on through their continuing influence. Perhaps this is because in the case of outward action, and particularly action of this type which must be co-operative in order to serve its social purpose, individual example and personal demonstration are more potent and necessary than in affairs of thought or sentiment. At any rate it is a fact that a large proportion of those who by responding with loyal devotion to world-welfare realize through communication with the World- Spirit the system of universal values, do so through the influence and intermediation of some outstanding historic person whom they
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accept as the incarnation or unique revelation of the Divine. The Christian accepts the invitation which Jesus issues to all the children of men to follow him in the path of human service and to see whether they do not share in his convincing realization of divine fellowship and eternal life.
We are wrong, it then seems, to suppose that this second type of religious response by devoted service requires such exceptional capacities as to be necessarily limited to a few outstanding individuals. Quite possibly the average man may require the inspiration, the guidance, the encouragement, which can only come from the example of a great religious leader. But while he may be aroused to action by the appeal which such a character makes to his feelings and imagination, still the experiment is his own and the resulting experience his own. Furthermore, there is no reason to doubt that those who loyally
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devote themselves to human service in any walk of life whatever do realize by communication the worth and the meaning of those personal and social values which are being realized in the world, whether it be the toiler who labours faithfully in loyal devotion to his job and the future prospects of his family and the welfare of the community as he understands it, or the housewife and mother who works incessantly and patiently to maintain the requisite conditions, material and social, of a wholesome family life) or the professional man who strives with unswerving loyalty to realize the social ideals of his profession.
It is no accident or idiosyncrasy that Josiah Royce, one of the great philosophers of the last generation, distinguished by the depth of his insight into the moral and religious experience of mankind, found the key to this side of human life in loyalty. And
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loyalty, when all its implications are realized, he understood to be the practical service of the conscious superhuman unity of life.7 All lesser loyalties, all serving of imperfect and even of evil causes, he held to be but the fragmentary form of the service of the cause of universal loyalty.8 “Through our actual human loyalty,” he says, “we come like Moses face to face with the true will of the world, as a man speaks to his friend.”9 Worship, the third of the responses of religious communion, may be given a very general meaning or may be taken in a more restricted way. In its larger reference it certainly includes prayer and might include some forms of practical service as well. But taken more specifically, as we shall understand it in the present connection, it means a response
7 Royce, Philosophy of Loyalty, p. 374.
8 Op. Cit., p. 375.
9 Op. Cit., p. 390.
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of emotion and imagination to certain perceived objects principally of sight and hearing which have a symbolic import and significance. With these objects we are well acquainted: religious ritual and ceremonial, religious music and ecclesiastical architecture, decorations and furniture,, including of course a variety of religious emblems such as the cross, the crescent, and the lotus flower.
Sensory stimuli of the sort mentioned, in the place of worship, call forth from worshipers responses of perception, emotion, imagination, and motor readjustment. They watch together the appointed course of the “service” or the orderly procedure of ritual performance, they listen together to the words pronounced from the pulpit or before the altar and to the chanting of the choir, they rise in unison and join in singing and verbal recitation. Their faces and bodily postures express reverential and sympathetic feeling.
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Now these overt responses have an intelligible meaning. They mean a reassuring common realization of the final fulfillment of personal hopes and ideals, of the ultimate harmony between man's highest interests and the nature of the existing world. They have this meaning because of the feeling they arouse of sympathetic accord with the World-Spirit, of reconciling love between the worshiper and God. Thus through the emotional rapport which it brings about between the worshipers and the Cosmic Intelligence, worship realizes by intercommunication the values of universal spiritual community.
The power of religious ritual over human feeling is, no doubt, due in large measure to the meaning which its successive acts and symbolic objects have acquired through the influence of tradition and associated ideas. At their best they are visible symbols, sensuous embodiments, of what is noblest in human
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aspiration and attainment of unswerving fidelity, unsullied purity, Perfect justice, heroic devotion, sacrificial service, and conquering love. As such, they help to give reality to the highest personal and social values by clothing them in sensuous imagery which supplies food for imagination and stimulus for feeling. Indeed, to the sceptically-minded we may seem to have here the whole explanation of the rational meaning which the response of religious worship was said to have for the worshiper. Customary rites and ceremonies performed in a conventionally ecclesiastical atmosphere and setting acquire (so it may appear), through long association dating back to childhood, a hypnotic power over the human individual, throwing him into a submissive and credulous attitude of mind and preparing him to accept without question whatever vague ideas of personal security and final fulfillment may be
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suggested. This explanation has some plausibility and contains more than a grain of truth. Yet there are many persons who would accept it without hesitation and still continue to believe that when they were enjoying natural beauty they were “communing” with nature, i.e., realizing through the feeling of aesthetic appreciation which had been engendered in them, an essential kinship of the outer world with their own personal nature and longings. The parallel thus drawn is assuredly relevant and valid. The response of religious worship is intimately related to that of aesthetic intuition. It calls into play the same psycho-physical processes of perceptual co-ordination, associative linking, emotional reverberation, and motor adjustment. Like the aesthetic perception it is called forth by the objects of present perception and it looks for, and depends upon, social confirmation. It is indeed hard to see why if objective significance
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and real meaning should be granted to the response of aesthetic perception, it should be altogether denied to religious worship, and any meaning that seems to attach to this latter should be lightly dismissed as subjective and illusory.
Beauty and the effects of beauty upon the human mind and spirit play an important part in religious worship. Not merely as an external aid and embellishment, however; although it is often introduced in this way and proves to be a somewhat distracting influence. Rather because the two responses of aesthetic ,enjoyment and religious worship are intimately related and have much in common. Both are responses of feeling and imagination evoked by sense-objects perceived in a symbolic significance. Aesthetic enjoyment finds in the pattern and harmonies of sense-qualities a revelation of permanent meaning in the changing events of nature and the dissolving
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panorama of human life. It is, moreover, essentially communicative. It expresses itself in changes of facial expression and bodily attitude which register in external movement the emotion which has been engendered. The artistic impulse has its root in this tendency of aesthetic intuition to express itself externally so that the meaning it has found may be appreciated by others and the feeling aroused may be enhanced by their sympathetic enjoyment. Thus aesthetic appreciation is a veritable form of intercommunication among men, uniting them in a sympathetic apprehension of significant features of our common human experience.
In religious worship the factor of intercommunication is, if anything, still more prominent. All the resources of sense-imagery seem to be utilized in an appropriate and impressive architecture, in pictures and mural ,decorations, in the pomp and pageantry of
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ritual, in instrumental music and vocal intonation, in poetry and song. But in actual fact the sense-symbols employed are the result of a long-continued and thoroughgoing selection. Such imagery has been chosen (consistent with the ruling purpose, a large place being given to imaginative biography, legendary history, and folk-myth) as will arouse in the consciousness of the worshiper a feeling of unity with the Universal Spirit, of love between himself and God. And such feeling of love which links the worshiper and his fellow worshipers with God of course carries a meaning. It conveys assurance that the values of intelligent community in the universal sense will be finally and fully realized.
Whether the response of religious worship, does thus realize the system of personal and social values can only be ascertained by personal experiment. No one can demonstrate that in the nature of the case it must do so.
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On the other hand, neither can anyone prove on grounds of scientific psychology that it does not and cannot;
for such pretended scientific proof is always found to rest on unproved philosophical assumptions. Individual observation and experience are therefore the final court of appeal. But a definite method of experimentation has been worked out and in a broad sense has been socially standardized. Furthermore, a considerable literature embodying the recorded results of previous experimentation in this line exists for the guidance of the investigator. To be sure, despite agreement so far as the general nature of the response is concerned, he will find the widest diversity in the modes and forms of worship among different religions and among different sects of the same religion. These differences are frequently supposed to symbolize and reflect ,differences in theological conception and doctrinal
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belief. But in their supposed theological significance he will not, if he is wise, take them very seriously. These differences do also reflect, however, differences in temperament and mental outlook as between different races and different types of mind within the same race and, so far as they do, they deserve thoughtful attention. The individual who wishes to make the fairest and most fruitful investigation should take pains to choose the form of worship most suited to his own taste and temperament.
To many minds it is bound to seem in the highest sense improbable that a response like that of religious worship should throw any light upon the nature of the ultimate cosmic reality. Is it at all likely, they will ask, that a response, admittedly of feeling and imagination rather than reason, to a set of sense stimuli selected for their influence upon human emotion, has any objective import and
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validity? While such doubts are natural and not altogether unreasonable, it is well to remember two things. One is that natural science, to whose methods and authority we rightly defer, limits itself to investigating the order of events in nature, to describing in ,exact terms the processes of nature, and never attempts to discover the character of the force or reality which manifests itself in the orderly processes of the natural world. The other is that in aesthetic enjoyment, a response which has much in common with religious worship, we seem to come into most intimate and satisfying contact with the reality of the world. In this connection, I think of the view of the late Bernard Bosanquet, eminent as a philosopher. In seeking for some illustration of the “Absolute,” i.e., reality in its unity and value, he turns not to a masterpiece of scientific reasoning like Newton's Principia or
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Darwin's Origin of Species, nor to a notable achievement in mechanical construction or social organization, but to a work of art. He chooses a poem, Dante's Divine Comedy. For purposes of the illustration he has in mind, it does not greatly matter, he says, whether a poem is purely imaginative or, like Dante's, semi-historical. “For here we have actual persons shown as moving freely, and obviously themselves and self-determined, while no less obviously, though merely through a deeper insight into their selves, exhibited as elements within an embracing spiritual universe. And this spiritual world we feel on the whole--with immense reservations--not to be an arbitrary and artificial comment on the imagined factual history as lying outside it, but to be of the nature of a revelation of the true appearance which such histories might yield under intense illumination
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without detriment to its factual objectivity for the common eye.”10
Reviewing the three distinctively religious responses, prayer, devoted service, and worship, we see that all of them, as responses of intercommunication with the Cosmic Intelligence, involve a constant interchange between the individual and society. On the one side we have the original insights, achievements,, and intuitions of individuals; on the other side we have the socially accumulated fruits of human communion and devotion preserved in the literature of prayer and meditation, in historical and legendary narrative, and in rituals of worship. For the individual of our day to turn his back on the religious experiences of previous generations, sifted and organized for his appropriation, and to rely entirely upon his own initiative and
10 Bosanquet, Principle of Individuality and of Value, p. 385.
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observation in religion, is of course the sheerest intellectual and practical folly. He compels himself to go slowly and haltingly, with much fumbling and many false starts, over ground that he could cover in a fraction of the time with the illuminating suggestions and expert guidance of the great religious leaders of the past.
Unfortunately, however, the results of experience and inquiry in religion as in other ,departments of human culture tend to become stereotyped into a body of fixed doctrine resistive to change and growth, and the institutions established to propagate and foster them become narrow and hidebound in their principles and their practice. Hence, instead of encouraging free inquiry and facilitating individual experiment, they stifle original insight, suppress freedom of thought, and discourage individual experiment. When this is the case, it is the right, it is the duty, of the
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individual to defend and to maintain his own freedom of opinion, his own originality of outlook, his own initiative in observation and experiment. In so doing he will not only preserve his own integrity of mind and spirit, he will serve the best interests of his fellows as well. For only under such conditions of complete personal freedom can he make any original contribution in thought or action which will enrich the religious experience of humanity. I cannot do better than quote in this connection the words of Hoffding, whose Philosophy of Religion11 has been a source of light to many students of religion during, the past quarter-century.
“There is no doubt that we live in an age which must be described as 'critical,' not organizing. But this is not an admission that the only forces in operation are disintegrating forces. There is nothing to prevent
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smaller groups of persons forming round a common tendency of thought and spirit, or a common symbol. And such union is often deeper and freer than one in which traditional authority is the uniting bond. Moreover, the principle of personality, itself the expression of a great truth, may be regarded as one of the highest spiritual values. Whatever faith a man has or will have, the fact that he puts his whole soul into it, and that in the discovery and appropriation of that which he believes, his individuality finds scope to develop, invests it with a value which not even the best guaranteed ready-made system could ever command. This is a point at which all men may arrive at mutual understanding, however widely they may differ in respect to the content of their faith. As the appreciation of personal nuances increases, the personal accent will be less and less sacrificed to the integrity of positive and negative dogmas.
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Here we catch a glimpse of an extension of the spiritual world which is certainly no less important than the extension of the material world in its time. The finest flower of all culture blossoms in the sympathetic understanding of the personalities of other men and it may perhaps follow, as a result of these personalities, that they will regard essential questions from a point of view very different from that which we ourselves occupy. Up to the present, few steps have been taken along this path. But the principle of personality is a positive and fertile principle, precisely because it points us to this path, and in so doing opens up the possibility of a feeling of solidarity deeper than any which is conditioned by adhesion to the same dogmas.”
Personality is indeed, as our own argument has conclusively shown, the “positive and fertile principle” which gives to human life such permanent meaning and value as it possesses.
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Personality is the source both of man's moral achievements and his religious aspirations. As living individuals we are born, pass rapidly to the end of a succession of changing experiences and our lives have no more meaning than any other sequence of events in nature, the formation and disappearance of a cloudlet in the summer sky or the sweep, of the little whirlwind which stirs the dust for a few hundred feet on the city pavement. But, as we have seen, the words and the actions, the looks and the gestures, of human individuals may have a personal and communicable meaning. And when they do it is because they realize in some manner or degree the value which is inherent in the actual world. This value consists in the positive
contribution which the varied objects and successive events of the natural world are capable of making to the enduring, developing community of associated intelligence.
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It is quite possible that in emphasizing the personal and communicable meaning which attaches to the discoveries and inventions, the aesthetic perceptions and artistic productions, of individuals in relation to the achievements of others in these different fields of social culture, we have neglected the personal meaning and value of human individuality itself. For personality, be it remembered, is individual, uniquely individual, in outlook, as well as inclusively social in reference. Human individuality embodies and expresses, in varying proportions and interrelations, the objective values which give personal meaning to human life and link the individual with his fellows in a community of thought and feeling and achievement. The behaviour of each individual includes modes of speaking and writing, practical ways of dealing with people and things, changing shades of facial expression and characteristic bodily postures,
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all combined in a unique whole. Hence each is capable of communicating, and to some extent does communicate, a distinctive and interesting point of view, new and valuable methods of physical control and social adjustment, original intuitions of beauty in the natural world and the social scene.
Of course, the degree in which individuals actually realize the personal meaning of their own individuality varies widely, from near zero at the one extreme to the few individuals at the other who are outstanding because of the fullness with which they express in conversation, demeanor and action, the system of value, in its entirety.
The claim may be justly made on behalf of Christianity that alone among universal religions it has ascribed absolute value to personality, that it has indeed valued human life and character solely on account of its personal meaning. And this personal meaning it has
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understood in terms of functional contribution to the universal social community. If this is true, then the Christian religion has a message for a period like our own when civilized social life is increasingly dominated by a machinery of physical control and social interaction which, while it multiplies our social connections, to a like extent depersonalizes our social relations. If we are to save our personal lives and human associations from complete mechanization, we must turn the greatly increased range of social contact and influence which machinery has made possible, into a means for realizing the personal and communicable values of mutual understanding, co-operation in productive endeavor, and intelligent sympathy. Such effort to realize the values of personal and social community will scarcely be made by any considerable portion of civilized mankind without faith in the “reality” of these values, faith,
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that is to say, in the possibility of converting the objects and events of the natural world into means for their realization. This faith inevitably seeks verification and fulfillment in the present realization through intercommunication with the Universal Intelligence of the values of spiritual insight, loyal service, and discerning love. And it is the peculiar distinction of Christianity that it exalts in the person of its Founder a life and character which perfectly exemplifies and effectively communicates these values in their complete and convincing unity.
