gh its being confirmed by experience or reason. In
other words, it is the office of revelation to reveal truth, but not to
establish it. In consequence of this fact it may even be necessary that
a man should redeem the truth in defiance of what he takes to be the
disposition of God. Neither individual conscience nor the moral judgment
of mankind can be superseded or modified save through a higher insight
which these may {230} themselves be brought to confirm. Whatever a man
may think of God, if he continues to live in the midst of his fellows, he
places himself within the jurisdiction of the laws which obtain there.
Morality is the method of reconciling and fulfilling the interests of
beings having the capacity to conduct themselves rationally, and ethics
is the formulation of the general principles which underlie this method.
The attempt to live rationally--and, humanly speaking, there is no
alternative save the total abnegation of life--brings one within the
jurisdiction of these principles, precisely as thinking brings one within
the jurisdiction of the principles of logic, or as the moving of one's
body brings one within the jurisdiction of the principles of mechanics.

Religion, then, mediates an enlightenment which it does not of itself
originate. In religious belief the truth which is derived from a
studious observation of nature and the cumulative experience of life, is
heightened and vivified. Like all belief religion is conservative, and
rightly so. But in the long run, steadily and inevitably, it responds to
every forward step which man is enabled to take through the exercise of
his natural cognitive powers. Only so does religion serve its real
purpose of benefiting life by expanding its horizon and defining its
course.

I have hitherto left out of account a certain {231} stress or insistence
that must now be recognized as fundamental in religious development.
This I shall call _the optimistic bias_. This bias is not accidental or
arbitrary, but significant of the fact that religion, like morality,
springs from the same motive as life itself, and makes towards the same
goal of fruition and abundance. Life is essentially interest, and
interest is essentially positive or provident; fear is incidental to
hope, and hate to love. Man seeks to know the worst only in order that
he may avoid or counterwork it in the furtherance of his interests.
Religion is the result of man's search for support in the las