that the only meaning we can attach to
the notion of a thing as it is "in itself" is by conceiving it as it is
FOR itself, i.e., as a piece of full experience with a private sense of
"pinch" or inner activity of some sort going with it.

If this be true, it is absurd for science to say that the egotistic
elements of experience should be suppressed. The axis of reality runs
solely through the egotistic places--they are strung upon it like so
many beads. To describe the world with all the various feelings of the
individual pinch of destiny, all the various spiritual attitudes, left
out from the description--they being as describable as anything else
--would be something like offering a printed bill of fare as the
equivalent for a solid meal. Religion makes no such blunder. The
individual's religion may be egotistic, and those private realities
which it keeps in touch with may be narrow enough; but at any rate it
always remains infinitely less hollow and abstract, as far as it goes,
than a science which prides itself on taking no account of anything
private at all.

A bill of fare with one real raisin on it instead of the word "raisin,"
with one real egg instead of the word "egg," might be an inadequate
meal, but it would at least be a commencement of reality. The
contention of the survival-theory that we ought to stick to
non-personal elements exclusively seems like saying that we ought to be
satisfied forever with reading the naked bill of fare. I think,
therefore, that however particular questions connected with our
individual destinies may be answered, it is only by acknowledging them
as genuine questions, and living in the sphere of thought which they
open up, that we become profound. But to live thus is to be religious;
so I unhesitatingly repudiate the survival-theory of religion, as being
founded on an egregious mistake. It does not follow, because our
ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their
religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at
all.[337] By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of
ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to
guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all.

[337] Even the errors of fact may possibly turn out not to be as
wholesale as the scientist assumes. We saw in Lecture IV how the
religious conception of the universe seems to many mind-curers
"verified" from day to da