ways secondary processes
which in no way add to the authority, or warrant the veracity, of the
sentiments from which they derive their own stimulus and borrow
whatever glow of conviction they may themselves possess.

In short, you suspect that I am planning to defend feeling at the
expense of reason, to rehabilitate the primitive and unreflective, and
to dissuade you from the hope of any Theology worthy of the name.

To a certain extent I have to admit that you guess rightly. I do
believe that feeling is the deeper source of religion, and that
philosophic and theological formulas are secondary products, like
translations of a text into another tongue. But all such statements
are misleading from their brevity, and it will take the whole hour for
me to explain to you exactly what I mean.

When I call theological formulas secondary products, I mean that in a
world in which no religious feeling had ever existed, I doubt whether
any philosophic theology could ever have been framed. I doubt if
dispassionate intellectual contemplation of the universe, apart from
inner unhappiness and need of deliverance on the one hand and mystical
emotion on the other, would ever have resulted in religious
philosophies such as we now possess. Men would have begun with
animistic explanations of natural fact, and criticised these away into
scientific ones, as they actually have done. In the science they would
have left a certain amount of "psychical research," even as they now
will probably have to re-admit a certain amount. But high-flying
speculations like those of either dogmatic or idealistic theology,
these they would have had no motive to venture on, feeling no need of
commerce with such deities. These speculations must, it seems to me,
be classed as over-beliefs, buildings-out performed by the intellect
into directions of which feeling originally supplied the hint.

But even if religious philosophy had to have its first hint supplied by
feeling, may it not have dealt in a superior way with the matter which
feeling suggested? Feeling is private and dumb, and unable to give an
account of itself. It allows that its results are mysteries and
enigmas, declines to justify them rationally, and on occasion is
willing that they should even pass for paradoxical and absurd.
Philosophy takes just the opposite attitude. Her aspiration is to
reclaim from mystery and paradox whatever territory she touches. To
find an escape from obscure an