designed to
satisfy. There is a similar virtue in the insistent attempt to
distinguish between the essential and the accessory in religion.

[Sidenote: The True Method of Defining Religion.]

Sect. 17. Although declining to be discouraged by the conspicuousness of
past failures in this connection, one may well profit by them. The
amazing complexity of religious phenomena must somehow be seen to be
consistent with their common nature. The religious experience must not
only be found, but must also be reconciled with "the varieties of
religious experience." The inadequacy of the well-known definitions of
religion may be attributed to several causes. The commonest fallacy is
to define religion in terms of a religion. My definition of religion
must include my brother's religion, even though he live on the other
side of the globe, and my ancestor's religion, in spite of his
prehistoric remoteness. Error may easily arise through the attempt to
define religion in terms of my own religion, or what I conceive to be
the true religion. Whatever the relation between ideal religion and
actual religion, the field of religion contains by common consent cults
that must on their own grounds condemn one another; religions that are
bad religions, and yet religions.

A more enlightened fallacy, and a more dangerous one, is due to the
supposition that religion can be defined exclusively in terms of some
department of human nature. There have been descriptions of religion in
terms of feeling, intellect, and conduct respectively. But it is always
easy to overthrow such a description, by raising the question of its
application to evidently religious experiences that belong to some other
aspect of life. Religion is not feeling, because there are many
phlegmatic, God-fearing men whose religion consists in good works.
Religion is not conduct, for there are many mystics whose very religion
is withdrawal from the field of action. Religion is not intellection,
for no one has ever been able to formulate a creed that is common to all
religions. Yet without a doubt one must look for the essence of religion
in human nature. The present psychological interest in religion has
emphasized this truth. How, then, may we describe it in terms of
certain constant conditions of human life, and yet escape the
abstractness of the facultative method? Modern psychology suggests an
answer in demonstrating the interdependence of knowledge, feeling, and
volition.[58:2