ut are dependent for your
advances in knowledge upon experience. Therefore, as you may continue,
the issue which James and other empiricists raise must not be evaded
by any appeal to vaguer uses of the word reason, whether common-sense
or the Supreme Court chances to authorise such special forms of
expression.

I fully agree to the importance of this comment and of the issue as
thus stated. I am ready to consider the issue. But I also insist upon
estimating the whole use of reason in its proper context. James, in
common with countless other partisans of intuition in religious
matters, is fond of insisting that all our nobler intuitions and all
our deeper faiths are, in their foundations, inwardly compelling, but
inarticulate, and that we degrade them rather than help them when we
define their meaning in abstract terms or employ processes of explicit
{89} demonstration in their defence. James, in common with many
empiricists, also opposes experience in general to all processes of
reasoning, and asserts that the latter never teach us anything novel.
The issue, fairly viewed, is therefore not a perfectly simple one. It
involves the question whether the two modes of getting knowledge
between which we are asked to choose are the only modes actually in
use. Intuition, and experience in general, are by James and by others
sharply contrasted with certain processes of abstraction and of
analysis. It is then pointed out that since these latter processes,
taken by themselves, never give us any essentially novel insights, you
must on the whole cease to use your powers of abstraction and of
analysis, except for the mere purpose of record or of teaching, or of
some other such technical end--computation, analysis of hypotheses,
and the like. You must, at least in religious matters, depend upon the
uprushes from your subconscious self or upon whatever else is
persuasively inarticulate. In the ultimate decisions of life,
inarticulate intuition, mere faith, and that alone, can save you.
Hereupon the perfectly fair question arises whether the alternatives
are thus exhaustively stated. Must one choose between inarticulate
faith and barren abstractions? Must one face the alternative: Either
intuition without reasoning, or else relatively fruitless analysis
without intuition? Perhaps there is a third possibility. Perhaps one
may use one's process of abstraction {90} as a sort of preparation for
certain articulate and noble intuitions that c