to a more certain and effective wisdom.
With these provisos, let us address ourselves to the Career of
Reason, beginning with religion.

CHAPTER XII

RELIGION AND THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. Since human nature remains
constant in its essential traits, despite the variations it exhibits
among different individuals, it is to be expected that certain
experiences should be fairly common and recurrent among
all human beings. Joy and sorrow, love and hate, jubilance
and despair, disillusion and rapture, triumph and frustration,
these occur often, and to every man. They are, as it were,
the sparks generated by the friction of human desires with the
natural world in which they must, if anywhere, find fulfillment.
Just such a normal, inevitable consequence of human
nature in a natural world is the religious experience. It is
common in more or less intense degree to almost all men, and
may be studied objectively just as may any of the other universal
experiences of mankind.

There are, however, certain peculiar difficulties in the study
of the religious experience. Most men are by training emotionally
committed to one particular religious creed which it is
very difficult for them impartially to examine or to compare
with others. In the second place, there is a confusion in the
minds of most people between the personal religious experience,
and the formal and external institution we commonly
have in mind when we speak of "religion." When we ordinarily
use the term, we imply a set of dogmas, an institution,
a reasoned theology, a ritual, a priesthood, all the apparatus
and earmarks of institutionalized religion. We think of
Christianity, Mohammedanism, Judaism, the whole welter
of churches and creeds that have appeared in the history of
mankind. But these are rather the outward vehicles and
vestments of the religious experience than the experience
itself. They are the social expressions and external instruments
of the inner spiritual occurrence. But the latter is
primary. If man had not _first been religious_, these would
never have arisen. In the words of William James:

In one sense at least, the personal religion will prove itself more
fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism. Churches
when once established live at second hand upon tradition, but the
_founders_ of every Church owed their power originally to the fact of
their direct personal communion with the divine. Not only th