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fact and creating it. And then I wonder what would be a minimum of religious experience. To me so much at least seems certain, that to seek the presence of God in one's own life is only fundamentally rational; and it may illustrate my sense of the rationality of this if I point to those two seemingly very simple novels of William Hale White, "Mark Rutherford's Autobiography" and his "Deliverance", in which an evangelical sense of the presence of God seems somehow to survive a Spinozistic conviction of the bigness and hardness of the world, as literature which I have read and reread with an absorbing interest and which appeals to me as a dramatically faithful presentation of religious experience. And then I must wonder whether even Bertrand Russell's "free man", anathematizing the insensitive universe, is not the expression of a religious experience—whether even this attitude, supposed to represent the merest of mere ideas, can fail to imply some sense of a divine presence. Certainly if we found a lower animal, a dog or a monkey, thus expressing himself, we should find it hard to dissociate such an accession of self-consciousness from the idea of a divine revelation.

Accordingly, in the "logic" of the situation, it seems to me that we must take any expression of religious experience, as we would take any piece of poetry, both sceptically and expectantly, for what it will reveal of the possibilities of experience and of insight. In such judgments we are not merely expressing a taste, we are analysing realities. The Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Koran, the Book of Mormonone need not, I think, be committed to any Christian theology to grasp a real difference between the Gospel of Christ and the Koran, and a possibly greater difference between either and the dull inanities of the Book of

Mormon. And yet one might hesitate before pronouncing even the last to be absolutely meaningless, before declaring that there was no vision whatever in the mind of the prophet Joseph Smith. And this measure of criticism I would also apply to any individual religious experience. I will not reject it as simply strange. Take the following from Henry Ward Beecher (quoted by Leuba and James): "In an instant there rose up in me such a sense of God's taking care of those who put their trust in Him that for an hour all the world was crystalline, the heavens were lucid, and I sprang to my feet and began to cry and laugh." I cannot conceive of any such exaltation of my own spirit as would make this view of the world presently real to me; yet it does not pass my comprehension. At the worst I cannot make it mere words. And if real as an experience it was an experience of reality; of reality as apprehended by one temperament, one form of receptivity. And what would be reality apart from any form of receptivity, I do not know; to me this is unreality.

If, then, it be objected that the forms of receptivity are possibly infinite, and if I am then asked how are all to be included in a systematic unity of reality, the unity of God the Absolute, the reply must be (as suggested above) that to my view the conception of the Absolute is a derivation from the needs of business administration. For the needs of business I have a wholesome respect, but I will not make them a criterion of divine truth.

CHAPTER XVII

POETIC ILLUSION AND POETIC TRUTH

§ 70. Poetry and religious experience. § 71. Experience as experience of the real. § 72. Man as an animal and man as a human being.

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§ 70

ND so religion is merely poetry and piety is but one form of aestheticism among others!" Such, I fear, may be the summarizing response of many a reader to what has just been said in the last chapter. But to speak of "merely poetry" would indicate that I have failed to convey my meaning-for me mere poetry is mere words. And in thus identifying the logic of religious experience with the logic of poetry it has been my purpose not to "reduce" religion to the level of poetry but, if you please, to raise poetry to the level of religion; and thus not to simplify the problem of truth but to make it more portentous. Religious inspiration, I say, is of the same order as poetic inspiration. True, but genuine poetry as then conceived will be the expression of an experience of the same order as religious experience. And as such it will be a revelation of reality, of the presence of the divine.

On the other hand, any truly religious experience will then be the expression of a poetic nature. I have said above that no person is entitled to be called moral who is lacking in imagination; I will now add that no such person is entitled to be called religious. The language of personal

piety may very well be that of an unschooled mind (not therefore of an unreflective mind) whose experience of the great world is small, whose experience of literature and the arts is little or nothing. It is not impossible that one may thus enjoy a deeper realization of the meaning of life. Perhaps we may say that piety is only the poetry of such a mind-it is at least that; on the other hand, since poetry is at home only in a more or less personal or personified world, it may be that in the language of personal piety we have the most characteristic, even though the less developed expression of the poetic motive. Be this as it may, to me it is quite inconceivable that a genuine piety may be conjoined with a positive insensitiveness in other matters. There must be some pervasive tenderness in the nature of the man and some fineness of perception, or I cannot grasp the attitude as religious. A religion of finally hard logic, a religion of pure authority, is to me finally brutal and meaningless.

For any proper development of this theme I have had unfortunately too little "experience" of poetry. It may amuse some readers to be told that, though "acquainted with the poets" all my life like any other not illiterate person, I have only rather lately begun to be interested-only after philosophical reflection had assured me that poetry ought to be significant. But it may contribute to my question to explain in part why this has been so. First, because poetry has been commonly represented, even by lovers of poetry, in terms of "the poetic illusion". This means that poetry is a source of polite amusement and entertainment for cultivated persons. And-I do not know whether it is an excess of sophistication or a defect of imagination, but I am not amused by illusions. Nothing interests me very

much except as it promises illumination. Nothing is really amusing except as it is also serious. There is for me no humor in a jest, a pun, an epigram, except as it be subtly just; otherwise it is merely tasteless. And I seem to have noted that the smile of.a child indicates that he has grasped something, that the conventional smile of greeting is supposed to express recognition; and that the old gentleman sitting opposite me in the library who has been reading for an hour past with a facial expression of mingled perplexity, irritation, and disgust-when he breaks out intq a broad smile I know that he has got the point.

More deterrent, however, than the conventions of poets and critics of poetry have been (for a professional teacher of philosophy) the conventions of philosophers, and in particular those of the philosophical tradition in which I have lived. Philosophy, I suppose we may say, is a criticism of life; of all life; a criticism of art and poetry and religion no less than of science. Philosophy is human experience and human life becoming conscious of itself. But not even may philosophers be expected "to see life steadily and see it whole", and philosophical traditions show selective variations. In the rather slender Italian tradition, for example, it seems that philosophy is mainly a criticism of history, of history conceived as an Erlebniss, as something lived through. And thus in the style of Croce and Gentile, and even perhaps of Varisco, there is a suggestion of the dramatic and the poetic which may very well strike our own philosophers as scandalously sentimental. For in our own tradition, inherited chiefly from Britain and Germany, and concentrated in the issue between Hume and Kant, philosophy is mainly a criticism of natural science. Kant's great critique, the "Critique of Pure Reason", could be justly

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