The Varieties of Religious Experience | Page 4

account of their ideas and motives. These men, of course, are either
comparatively modern writers, or else such earlier ones as have become
religious classics. The documents humains which we shall find most
instructive need not then be sought for in the haunts of special
erudition--they lie along the beaten highway; and this circumstance,
which flows so naturally from the character of our problem, suits
admirably also your lecturer's lack of special theological learning. I

may take my citations, my sentences and paragraphs of personal
confession, from books that most of you at some time will have had
already in your hands, and yet this will be no detriment to the value of
my conclusions. It is true that some more adventurous reader and
investigator, lecturing here in future, may unearth from the shelves of
libraries documents that will make a more delectable and curious
entertainment to listen to than mine. Yet I doubt whether he will
necessarily, by his control of so much more out-of-the-way material,
get much closer to the essence of the matter in hand.
The question, What are the religious propensities? and the question,
What is their philosophic significance? are two entirely different orders
of question from the logical point of view; and, as a failure to recognize
this fact distinctly may breed confusion, I wish to insist upon the point
a little before we enter into the documents and materials to which I
have referred.
In recent books on logic, distinction is made between two orders of
inquiry concerning anything. First, what is the nature of it? how did it
come about? what is its constitution, origin, and history? And second,
What is its importance, meaning, or significance, now that it is once
here? The answer to the one question is given in an existential
judgment or proposition. The answer to the other is a proposition of
value, what the Germans call a Werthurtheil, or what we may, if we
like, denominate a spiritual judgment. Neither judgment can be
deduced immediately from the other. They proceed from diverse
intellectual preoccupations, and the mind combines them only by
making them first separately, and then adding them together.
In the matter of religions it is particularly easy to distinguish the two
orders of question. Every religious phenomenon has its history and its
derivation from natural antecedents. What is nowadays called the
higher criticism of the Bible is only a study of the Bible from this
existential point of view, neglected too much by the earlier church.
Under just what biographic conditions did the sacred writers bring forth
their various contributions to the holy volume? And what had they
exactly in their several individual minds, when they delivered their

utterances? These are manifestly questions of historical fact, and one
does not see how the answer to them can decide offhand the still further
question: of what use should such a volume, with its manner of coming
into existence so defined, be to us as a guide to life and a revelation?
To answer this other question we must have already in our mind some
sort of a general theory as to what the peculiarities in a thing should be
which give it value for purposes of revelation; and this theory itself
would be what I just called a spiritual judgment. Combining it with our
existential judgment, we might indeed deduce another spiritual
judgment as to the Bible's worth. Thus if our theory of revelation-value
were to affirm that any book, to possess it, must have been composed
automatically or not by the free caprice of the writer, or that it must
exhibit no scientific and historic errors and express no local or personal
passions, the Bible would probably fare ill at our hands. But if, on the
other hand, our theory should allow that a book may well be a
revelation in spite of errors and passions and deliberate human
composition, if only it be a true record of the inner experiences of
great-souled persons wrestling with the crises of their fate, then the
verdict would be much more favorable. You see that the existential
facts by themselves are insufficient for determining the value; and the
best adepts of the higher criticism accordingly never confound the
existential with the spiritual problem. With the same conclusions of
fact before them, some take one view, and some another, of the Bible's
value as a revelation, according as their spiritual judgment as to the
foundation of values differs.
I make these general remarks about the two sorts of judgment, because
there are many religious persons--some of you now present, possibly,
are among them--who do not yet make a working use of the distinction,
and who may therefore feel first a little startled at the purely existential
point of view from which in the