ary
givings-up are added in order that the happiness may increase.
Religion thus makes easy and felicitous what in any case is necessary;
and if it be the only agency that can accomplish this result, its vital
importance as a human faculty stands vindicated beyond dispute. It
becomes an essential organ of our life, performing a function which no
other portion of our nature can so successfully fulfill. From the
merely biological point of view, so to call it, this is a conclusion to
which, so far as I can now see, we shall inevitably be led, and led
moreover by following the purely empirical method of demonstration
which I sketched to you in the first lecture. Of the farther office of
religion as a metaphysical revelation I will say nothing now.

But to foreshadow the terminus of one's investigations is one thing,
and to arrive there safely is another. In the next lecture, abandoning
the extreme generalities which have engrossed us hitherto, I propose
that we begin our actual journey by addressing ourselves directly to
the concrete facts.

Lecture III

THE REALITY OF THE UNSEEN

Were one asked to characterize the life of religion in the broadest and
most general terms possible, one might say that it consists of the
belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in
harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. This belief and this
adjustment are the religious attitude in the soul. I wish during this
hour to call your attention to some of the psychological peculiarities
of such an attitude as this, or belief in an object which we cannot
see. All our attitudes, moral, practical, or emotional, as well as
religious, are due to the "objects" of our consciousness, the things
which we believe to exist, whether really or ideally, along with
ourselves. Such objects may be present to our senses, or they may be
present only to our thought. In either case they elicit from us a
REACTION; and the reaction due to things of thought is notoriously in
many cases as strong as that due to sensible presences. It may be even
stronger. The memory of an insult may make us angrier than the insult
did when we received it. We are frequently more ashamed of our
blunders afterwards than we were at the moment of making them; and in
general our whole higher prudential and moral life is based on the fact
that material sensations actually present may have a weaker influence
on our action than ideas of remoter facts.