ves as a longing of the soul for
its divine home land--these myths are allegories which Plato intended
to illustrate his own view of what reason teaches us. These myths
express in figurative speech a philosophy that actually affects to-day
your own religious interests. For instance, this philosophy influences
your traditional conception of God, and your ideas about the immortal
life of the soul. And if the prologue of the Fourth Gospel seems to
you to contain any truth, your religious ideas are again moulded by a
form of ancient philosophy which dealt with the nature and with the
insight of the reason. My own sketch of modern philosophy is but a
reinterpretation of the very truth which that ancient doctrine
attempted to portray. Historically, then, some of your religious
opinions are actually due to the work of the reason. My philosophy
simply tries to interpret to you this work.

And reason not only has been, but now is, such a source of insight.
And this is the case whenever you try to apply the "rule of reason" to
any problem of your life, and hereby gain a confidence that, by being
as reasonable and fair as you can, you are learning to conform your
life to the view which, as you suppose, an all-wise God takes of its
meaning. My philosophy simply tries to tell you why you have a right
to hold that an all-wise being is real.

I am anxious, I say, to have such facts about the {128} office of
reason recognised, whatever you may think of my philosophy. And this
is my purpose when I use my philosophy merely to illustrate the office
of reason. For indispensable as individual religious experience is, in
all the capriciousness of its feelings--indispensable also as social
religious experience is, with all its insistence upon human love and
also upon human religious convention--the synthetic use of the reason,
that is, the systematic effort "to see life steadily and see it
whole," is also indispensable. The recent efforts to make light of the
work of reason--efforts to which, at the last lecture, I directed
your attention, would tend, if taken by themselves, to result in
basing religion upon an inarticulate occultism, upon a sort of
psychical research that would regard whatever witch may peep and
mutter, whatever mystic may be unable to tell what he means, whatever
dumb cry of the soul may remain stubbornly inarticulate, as a _more_
promising religious guide than is any form of serious and far-seeing
devotion to the wider i