rn version of a very old opinion--an opinion which has
been repeatedly examined, revised, assailed, and defended. Let me say
a word as to its history.

Plato held that, through our reason, we are able to rise beyond the
world of sense and to hold communion with a realm of ideally
significant and eternal being. What Plato really meant by his ideal
realm, and in what sense the world of what Plato called the eternal
realities, the forms or ideas, could be, as Plato held it to be, a
divine world, in its worth and dignity, later philosophy repeatedly
attempted to grasp.

The results of such philosophical thinking have deeply affected the
history of religion and still influence the religious interest of all
of you. One {121} version of that philosophical tradition whose origin
is in the thought of Plato--a late version, and also one greatly
transformed by motives of which Plato had known in his day nothing, is
the familiar version to which, in the last lecture, I in passing
alluded--the prologue to our Fourth Gospel. You will all agree that
this prologue attempts to state a religious insight. The relation of
this New Testament view of the world of the reason to the doctrine
which still later came to be formulated by the theologians of the
Christian Church I have here not time to discuss. It is enough now to
say that an opinion according to which our articulate reason, as well
as the more inarticulate intuition of faith, has some sort of access
to the world of the "Logos," and some sort of participation in a
genuine apprehension of the divine life, has come to form part of the
religion in which you all have been trained. In so far, then, it is
surely right to say that the reason, as the philosophers have defined
it, has been an actual source of religious opinion and experience.

In modern times, and especially since Kant, philosophy has been led to
see the older doctrines of the human reason, and of its knowledge of
the divine, from various decidedly novel points of view. The sketch of
a theory of the reason as a source of insight, which I gave, was
influenced by Kant's famous teaching about the nature and unity of
human experience. Kant stated this theory as the doctrine that all our
human knowledge involves an {122} interpretation of the data of our
senses in the light of what he called the "unity of apperception." In
less technical terms, Kant's meaning is that all facts of which a
human experience can obtain knowledge a