cannot possibly upset. The
supernaturalism and optimism to which they would persuade us may,
interpreted in one way or another, be after all the truest of insights
into the meaning of this life.

"Oh, the little more, and how much it is; and the little less, and what
worlds away!" It may be that possibility and permission of this sort
are all that are religious consciousness requires to live on. In my
last lecture I shall have to try to persuade you that this is the case.
Meanwhile, however, I am sure that for many of my readers this diet is
too slender. If supernaturalism and inner union with the divine are
true, you think, then not so much permission, as compulsion to believe,
ought to be found. Philosophy has always professed to prove religious
truth by coercive argument; and the construction of philosophies of
this kind has always been one favorite function of the religious life,
if we use this term in the large historic sense. But religious
philosophy is an enormous subject, and in my next lecture I can only
give that brief glance at it which my limits will allow.

Lecture XVIII

PHILOSOPHY

The subject of Saintliness left us face to face with the question, Is
the sense of divine presence a sense of anything objectively true? We
turned first to mysticism for an answer, and found that although
mysticism is entirely willing to corroborate religion, it is too
private (and also too various) in its utterances to be able to claim a
universal authority. But philosophy publishes results which claim to
be universally valid if they are valid at all, so we now turn with our
question to philosophy. Can philosophy stamp a warrant of veracity
upon the religious man's sense of the divine?

I imagine that many of you at this point begin to indulge in guesses at
the goal to which I am tending. I have undermined the authority of
mysticism, you say, and the next thing I shall probably do is to seek
to discredit that of philosophy. Religion, you expect to hear me
conclude, is nothing but an affair of faith, based either on vague
sentiment, or on that vivid sense of the reality of things unseen of
which in my second lecture and in the lecture on Mysticism I gave so
many examples. It is essentially private and individualistic; it
always exceeds our powers of formulation; and although attempts to pour
its contents into a philosophic mould will probably always go on, men
being what they are, yet these attempts are al