d to express? Whatever they may
think of my philosophy, have I been just to their practical fervour
and to their energetic devotion? Do they merely say: God is
omniscient, therefore our life has its purpose defined, and we are
saved?

In brief, the insight of the reason, as I have been stating its dicta,
may seem to you, at best, to show us a sort of heaven which, as I
said, overarches our unwisdom with its starry clearness, but which as
you may now add we can neither reach, nor use, nor regard as a
rational inspiration of our active life. If it is real, it can observe
us, as it observes all reality. But can it save us? It can rise above
us. But can it enter into our will and give us a plan of life?
Granting the validity of the argument sketched in our last lecture,
what has the all-wise knower of truth to do with our salvation?

These are familiar objections to such a view as {131} mine. James
repeatedly urged them in his comment upon what he regarded as not
merely the fallibility, but the futility, or, as he said, the
"thinness" of the idealistic interpretation of the world of the
reason. Similar objections have been urged by many of the critics of
any doctrine similar to mine. Are these objections just?

III

I can answer such questions only through a certain gradual approach to
their complications. I want to show you how the insight of the reason
not only points out a heaven that overarches us, but also reveals an
influence that can inwardly transform us. To this end I shall next
illustrate, by instances taken from life, how some people actually
view their own personal relations to what they take to be the divine
reason. I shall thus indicate in what way such people connect this
divine reason with personal needs of their own which they regard as
vital. Then I shall show why this not only is so in the lives of some
people, but ought to be so for all of us. As a result we shall soon
find that, just as our first statement of the insight of reason, if
indeed it is a true statement, transforms our view of the sense in
which the world is real, so a deeper study of the relations of insight
to action transforms our first cruder notion of the reason itself, of
its office in life, and of the truth that it reveals.

{132}

I begin with illustrations taken from life. A former college student
of mine, some of whose papers upon his own religious experience I was
not very long ago privileged