ors and monopolists of the world in vain
set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forevermore the
ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun, must
range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil."[11]

[11] Lectures and Biographical Sketches, 1868, p. 186.

Now it would be too absurd to say that the inner experiences that
underlie such expressions of faith as this and impel the writer to
their utterance are quite unworthy to be called religious experiences.
The sort of appeal that Emersonian optimism, on the one hand, and
Buddhistic pessimism, on the other, make to the individual and the son
of response which he makes to them in his life are in fact
indistinguishable from, and in many respects identical with, the best
Christian appeal and response. We must therefore, from the
experiential point of view, call these godless or quasi-godless creeds
"religions"; and accordingly when in our definition of religion we
speak of the individual's relation to "what he considers the divine,"
we must interpret the term "divine" very broadly, as denoting any
object that is god- LIKE, whether it be a concrete deity or not. But
the term "godlike," if thus treated as a floating general quality,
becomes exceedingly vague, for many gods have flourished in religious
history, and their attributes have been discrepant enough. What then
is that essentially godlike quality--be it embodied in a concrete deity
or not--our relation to which determines our character as religious
men? It will repay us to seek some answer to this question before we
proceed farther.

For one thing, gods are conceived to be first things in the way of
being and power. They overarch and envelop, and from them there is no
escape. What relates to them is the first and last word in the way of
truth. Whatever then were most primal and enveloping and deeply true
might at this rate be treated as godlike, and a man's religion might
thus be identified with his attitude, whatever it might be, toward what
he felt to be the primal truth.

Such a definition as this would in a way be defensible. Religion,
whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life, so why not say
that any total reaction upon life is a religion? Total reactions are
different from casual reactions, and total attitudes are different from
usual or professional attitudes. To get at them you must go behind the
foreground of existence and reach down to that curious sense of