es in a wider context than has been usual in university
courses.

Lecture II

CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC

Most books on the philosophy of religion try to begin with a precise
definition of what its essence consists of. Some of these would-be
definitions may possibly come before us in later portions of this
course, and I shall not be pedantic enough to enumerate any of them to
you now. Meanwhile the very fact that they are so many and so different
from one another is enough to prove that the word "religion" cannot
stand for any single principle or essence, but is rather a collective
name. The theorizing mind tends always to the oversimplification of
its materials. This is the root of all that absolutism and one-sided
dogmatism by which both philosophy and religion have been infested.
Let us not fall immediately into a one-sided view of our subject, but
let us rather admit freely at the outset that we may very likely find
no one essence, but many characters which may alternately be equally
important to religion. If we should inquire for the essence of
"government," for example, one man might tell us it was authority,
another submission, an other police, another an army, another an
assembly, an other a system of laws; yet all the while it would be true
that no concrete government can exist without all these things, one of
which is more important at one moment and others at another. The man
who knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself least
about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an
intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would
naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as
a thing more misleading than enlightening. And why may not religion be
a conception equally complex?[9]

[9] I can do no better here than refer my readers to the extended and
admirable remarks on the futility of all these definitions of religion,
in an article by Professor Leuba, published in the Monist for January,
1901, after my own text was written.

Consider also the "religious sentiment" which we see referred to in so
many books, as if it were a single sort of mental entity. In the
psychologies and in the philosophies of religion, we find the authors
attempting to specify just what entity it is. One man allies it to the
feeling of dependence; one makes it a derivative from fear; others
connect it with the sexual life; others still ident