n between different
believers, and help to bring about consensus of opinion. She can do
this the more successfully, the better she discriminates the common and
essential from the individual and local elements of the religious
beliefs which she compares.

I do not see why a critical Science of Religions of this sort might not
eventually command as general a public adhesion as is commanded by a
physical science. Even the personally non-religious might accept its
conclusions on trust, much as blind persons now accept the facts of
optics--it might appear as foolish to refuse them. Yet as the science
of optics has to be fed in the first instance, and continually verified
later, by facts experienced by seeing persons; so the science of
religions would depend for its original material on facts of personal
experience, and would have to square itself with personal experience
through all its critical reconstructions. It could never get away from
concrete life, or work in a conceptual vacuum. It would forever have
to confess, as every science confesses, that the subtlety of nature
flies beyond it, and that its formulas are but approximations.
Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in
ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of
perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be
caught, and for which reflection comes too late. No one knows this as
well as the philosopher. He must fire his volley of new vocables out
of his conceptual shotgun, for his profession condemns him to this
industry, but he secretly knows the hollowness and irrelevancy. His
formulas are like stereoscopic or kinetoscopic photographs seen outside
the instrument; they lack the depth, the motion, the vitality. In the
religious sphere, in particular, belief that formulas are true can
never wholly take the place of personal experience.

In my next lecture I will try to complete my rough description of
religious experience; and in the lecture after that, which is the last
one, I will try my hand at formulating conceptually the truth to which
it is a witness.

Lecture XIX

OTHER CHARACTERISTICS

We have wound our way back, after our excursion through mysticism and
philosophy, to where we were before: the uses of religion, its uses to
the individual who has it, and the uses of the individual himself to
the world, are the best arguments that truth is in it. We return to
the e