tting our convictions
into convenient order for purposes of record or of teaching. James's
favourite statement of the contrast here in question identifies the
partisans of reason with the defenders of what he calls "barren
intellectualism." He maintains that religion is hindered rather than
helped by such people. You attain conviction by processes of {82}
which the "barren intellect" can give no adequate account. Conviction,
in religious matters, emanates, according to James, from those
mysterious depths of the subconscious about which I said something in
the last lecture. And convictions thus resulting feel overwhelming to
the persons who have them. Such convictions are what many denote by
the word "intuitions." The effort to define abstract principles, as
grounds for holding your convictions to be true, constitutes the only
effort of the reason in religious matters which James recognises.
According to James, such reasoning processes are inevitably bad. And
as a fact, so he insists, nobody seriously believes in God because
some theologian or philosopher pretends to have demonstrated his
existence. On the contrary, he says, belief in God is intuitive or is
nothing of value. And reason is employed in such matters merely
because of a frequent overfondness for abstract conceptions, or at
best because formulas are useful for the teachers of religious
traditions.

Another form of contrast, and one upon which James also often insists,
while many other recent writers, whose interests are not those of
James, emphasise the same matter, depends upon opposing reason to
experience in general, including under the latter term not only the
intuitions of the devout, but whatever goes by the name experience in
ordinary speech. We see and hear and touch, and by such means get
experience. But we make hypotheses and {83} deduce their consequences;
we assume premises and demonstrate conclusions; and, according to such
writers, what we then do constitutes the typical work of our reason.
The characteristic of the reason is that it attempts either to
elucidate the meaning of an assertion, or to prove some proposition to
be true, without appealing to experience to verify the proposition in
question. And such work of the reason, as these writers tell us, is of
very limited use, in comparison to the use of our direct experience as
a guide. What is found to be true through empirical tests is rightly
tested. What is supposed to be proved true by a