LATE MODERN PRAGMATISTS:
JAMES, SANTAYANA, DEWEY
From Classics in the Philosophy of Religion, by James Fieser
© 2026, updated 6/1/2026, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
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CONTENTS
• William James: Religion as a Non-Rational Personal Right (from "The Will to Believe" and Varieties of Religious Experience)
• George Santayana: Religion as the Poetry of Moral Experience (from The Life of Reason)
• John Dewey: Religious Faith without the Supernatural (from A Common Faith)
In the early twentieth century, the philosophy of religion was transformed by American Pragmatism, a movement that offered a new alternative to both rigid traditional theology and cold scientific naturalism. While European philosophy was increasingly dividing between abstract metaphysics and formal logic, the Pragmatists shifted the central question of philosophy. Instead of asking whether a religious doctrine is abstractly or metaphysics-proven to be true, they asked a practical question: what tangible difference does holding a religious belief make in human life? According to Pragmatism, the meaning and value of any idea lie entirely in its practical outcome. As William James wrote, "the effective meaning of any philosophic proposition can always be brought down to some particular consequence" ("Philosophical Conceptions and Practical Results", 1898). The Pragmatists agreed with Kant that God cannot be proven through theoretical reason, and they agreed with naturalists that supernatural doctrines lacked empirical evidence. They also rejected the grand, speculative metaphysical systems of the nineteenth century. Instead, James, Santayana, and Dewey reframed religion as a positive tool for personal transformation and social progress, without ecclesiastical or metaphysical baggage. For James, religion speaks to the individual's search for psychological peace and moral orientation. He defended a person's right to adopt religious faith when facing critical life choices that reason alone cannot settle. Santayana viewed religion as a form of moral poetry, which expresses human ideals symbolically rather than factually. Dewey stripped religion of the supernatural entirely, recasting the "religious attitude" as a shared, commitment to social improvement and human cooperation. The pragmatists' redefinition of religion had a lasting impact outside the university. James's insights into personal transformation helped inspire movements like Alcoholics Anonymous, while Dewey's non-supernatural vision directly shaped twentieth-century Religious Humanism, Unitarian Universalism, and Reconstructionist Judaism.
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WILLIAM JAMES:
RELIGION AS A NON-RATIONAL PERSONAL RIGHT
William James (1842–1910) was born in New York City into an unusually intellectual family. His brother was the novelist Henry James, and their father was a wealthy, eccentric religious writer who moved the family across Europe repeatedly during their childhood, exposing William to a scattered but wide education. James originally trained in medicine at Harvard and briefly considered becoming a painter, but suffered years of poor health and severe depression in his twenties, including thoughts of suicide, a crisis he later credited a chance reading of a French philosopher's essay on free will with helping him escape. He went on to join the Harvard faculty, where he taught for over three decades, first physiology, then psychology, then finally philosophy, helping to establish psychology as a genuine experimental science in America along the way. His 1890 textbook, The Principles of Psychology, became a foundational work in the field, and he later developed pragmatism, the view that a belief's truth should be judged by its practical consequences, into one of the first distinctly American philosophical movements. His 1902 lectures, published as The Varieties of Religious Experience, drew on firsthand accounts of conversion and mystical experience rather than doctrine or theology, and remains one of the most influential works in the psychology of religion. He retired from Harvard in 1907 but continued writing until his health declined. He died at his summer home in Chocorua, New Hampshire, in 1910 at the age of 68. The selections below are from two of his works on religion.
In his influential essay "The Will to Believe" (1897), James defends the believer's right to voluntarily adopt a faith when facing a genuine option that intellect alone cannot resolve. A genuine option must meet three strict conditions. It must be live, meaning both choices hold real credibility for the person facing them. It must be forced, meaning there is no comfortable middle ground available. And it must be momentous, meaning the opportunity is unique and significant rather than trivial. James challenges William Clifford's view that believing anything on insufficient evidence is always wrong. Clifford prioritizes avoiding error above all else, whereas James prioritizes the pursuit of truth. James argues that refusing to decide, as Clifford recommends, is not a neutral or safe position. It is itself a passional decision, and one that risks losing the truth as much as a wrong belief would. In personal relationships and moral questions, James says, personal desire and faith regularly help bring about the very truth in question. For example, if I believe that someone likes me without evidence, that can actually help make it so. He then applies this same logic to religion. Broadly defined, the religious hypothesis holds that the best things are eternal, and that people are better off even now by believing this. For people who hold religion as a live hypothesis, they see personal benefits by believing out of passion.
In his book Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), James states that mystical religious experiences are generally pantheistic, optimistic, and contrary to a purely naturalistic view of the world. He then evaluates their authority through a three-part argument. First, well-developed mystical states carry absolute authority over the individuals who experience them, since those individuals encounter them as direct, immediate perceptions of fact, not as mere feelings or hunches. Second, mystics have no right to demand that outsiders accept these experiences uncritically just because they seem authoritative from the inside. James points out that the apparent unanimity among classic religious mystics breaks down once we include the lower, non-religious forms of mystical experience documented in textbooks on insanity. These darker, even diabolical delusions, he argues, spring from the very same underlying mental mechanism as classic mysticism, which should make us cautious about accepting any mystical claim automatically. Third, mystical states demonstrate that ordinary, rational, waking consciousness is not the only lens through which belief can legitimately form. These altered states simply add a new layer of meaning to ordinary facts, opening onto a wider world that a critic cannot straightforwardly disprove using the tools of ordinary logic alone.
In the same work, James lays out what he takes to be the minimum shared content, and the underlying truth, of religion generally. What all religions have in common, he argues, is that they name what makes our lives feel uneasy, and they offer a solution to that uneasiness. The uneasiness is a sense that something is wrong with us as we naturally stand. The solution is a sense that we are saved from this wrongness by making a proper connection with higher powers. Psychologically speaking, the individual identifies with a small, germinal higher part of the self, one that is continuous with a larger "more" of that same quality already at work in the wider universe. James argues that this generic religious content is literally and objectively true, not merely comforting, because it produces real, measurable, regenerative effects on a person's life. Anything beyond this shared core counts, in James's terms, as "over-beliefs," the varied specific doctrines and rituals that different believers graft onto that same underlying core. James offers his own modest over-belief alongside everyone else's. He believes that other worlds of consciousness exist, and that higher forces connect with our own at certain points. Through prayer, he suggests, an ideal influence raises a person's own energy, and this produces real, tangible effects within the natural world itself.
THE RIGHT TO RELIGIOUS BELIEF ("The Will to Believe", 1897)
Genuine Option: Living, Forced and Momentous
I have long defended to my own students the lawfulness of voluntarily adopted faith; but as soon as they have got well imbued with the logical spirit, they have as a rule refused to admit my contention to be lawful philosophically, even though in point of fact they were personally all the time chock-full of some faith or other themselves. I am all the while, however, so profoundly convinced that my own position is correct, that your invitation has seemed to me a good occasion to make my statements more clear. Perhaps your minds will be more open than those with which I have hitherto had to deal. I will be as little technical as I can, though I must begin by setting up some technical distinctions that will help us in the end.
Let us give the name of hypothesis to anything that may be proposed to our belief; and just as the electricians speak of live and dead wires, let us speak of any hypothesis as either live or dead. A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed. If I asked you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion makes no electric connection with your nature, – it refuses to scintillate with any credibility at all. As an hypothesis it is completely dead. To an Arab, however (even if he be not one of the Mahdi's followers), the hypothesis is among the mind's possibilities: it is alive. This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the individual thinker. They are measured by his willingness to act. The maximum of liveness in an hypothesis , means willingness to act irrevocably. Practically, that means belief; but there is some believing tendency wherever there is willingness to act at all.
. . . [L]et us call the decision between two hypotheses an option. Options may be of several kinds. They may be—1, living or dead; 2, forced or avoidable; 3, momentous or trivial; and for our purposes we may call an option a genuine option when it is of the forced, living, and momentous kind.
1. A living option is one in which both hypotheses are live ones. If I say to you: "Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan," it is probably a dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive. But if I say: "Be an agnostic or be a Christian," it is otherwise: trained as you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small, to your belief.
2. Next, if I say to you: "Choose between going out with your umbrella or without it," I do not offer you a genuine option, for it is not forced. You can easily avoid it by not going out at all. Similarly, if I say, "Either love me or hate me," "Either call my theory true or call it false," your option is avoidable. You may remain indifferent to me, neither loving nor hating, and you may decline to offer any judgment as to my theory. But if I say, "Either accept this truth or go without it," I put on you a forced option, for there is no standing place outside of the alternative. Every dilemma based on a complete logical disjunction, with no possibility of not choosing, is an option of this forced kind.
3. Finally, if I were Dr. Nansen and proposed to you to join my North Pole expedition, your option would be momentous; for this would probably be your only similar opportunity, and your choice now would either exclude you from the North Pole sort of immortality altogether or put at least the chance of it into your hands. He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he tried and failed. Per contra, the option is trivial when the opportunity is not unique, when the stake is insignificant, or when the decision is reversible if it later prove unwise. Such trivial options abound in the scientific life. A chemist finds an hypothesis live enough to spend a year in its verification: he believes in it to that extent. But if his experiments prove inconclusive either way, he is quit for his loss of time, no vital harm being done.
It will facilitate our discussion if we keep all these distinctions well in mind.
Clifford's View: Believe only from Evidence and Reason
The next matter to consider is the actual psychology of human opinion. When we look at certain facts, it seems as if our passional and volitional nature lay at the root of all our convictions. When we look at others, it seems as if they could do nothing when the intellect had once said its say. . . .
The talk of believing by our volition seems, then, from one point of view, simply silly. From another point of view it is worse than silly, it is vile. When one turns to the magnificent edifice of the physical sciences, and sees how it was reared; what thousands of disinterested moral lives of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patience and postponement, what choking down of preference, what submission to the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into its very stones and mortar; how absolutely impersonal it stands in its vast augustness,—then how besotted and contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes blowing his voluntary smoke-wreaths, and pretending to decide things from out of his private dream! . . . . And that delicious enfant terrible [William] Clifford writes; "Belief is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements for the solace and private pleasure of the believer. . . . Whoso would deserve well of his fellows in this matter will guard the purity of his belief with a very fanaticism of jealous care, lest at any time it should rest on an unworthy object, and catch a stain which can never be wiped away. . . . If [a] belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence [even though the belief be true, as Clifford on the same page explains] the pleasure is a stolen one. . . . It is sinful because it is stolen in defiance of our duty to mankind. That duty is to guard ourselves from such beliefs as from a pestilence which may shortly master our own body and then spread to the rest of the town. . . . It is wrong always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."
All this strikes one as healthy, even when expressed, as by Clifford, with somewhat too much of robustious pathos in the voice. Free-will and simple wishing do seem, in the matter of our credences, to be only fifth wheels to the coach. Yet if anyone should thereupon assume that intellectual insight is what remains after wish and will and sentimental preference have taken wing, or that pure reason is what then settles our opinions, he would fly quite as directly in the teeth of the facts.
It is only our already dead hypotheses that our willing nature is unable to bring to life again. But what has made them dead for us is for the most part a previous action of our willing nature of an antagonistic kind. When I say 'willing nature,' I do not mean only such deliberate volitions as may have set up habits of belief that we cannot now escape from,—I mean all such factors of belief as fear and hope, prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship, the circumpressure of our caste and set. As a matter of fact we find ourselves believing, we hardly know how or why. . . .
As a rule we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no use. Clifford's cosmic emotions find no use for Christian feelings. . . . Evidently, then, our non-intellectual nature does influence our convictions. There are passional tendencies and volitions which run before and others which come after belief, and it is only the latter that are too late for the fair; and they are not too late when the previous passional work has been already in their own direction. . . . The state of things is evidently far from simple; and pure insight and logic, whatever they might do ideally, are not the only things that really do produce our creeds.
The Right to Believe based on our Passional Nature
Our next duty, having recognized this mixed-up state of affairs, is to ask whether it be simply reprehensible and pathological [to believe from our passional nature], or whether, on the contrary, we must treat it as a normal element in making up our minds. The thesis I defend is, briefly stated, this: Our passional nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such circumstances, "Do not decide, but leave the question open," is itself a passional decision,—just like deciding yes or no,—and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth. The thesis thus abstractly expressed will, I trust, soon become quite clear. But I must first indulge in a bit more of preliminary work. . . .
One more point, small but important, and our preliminaries are done. There are two ways of looking at our duty in the matter of opinion,—ways entirely different, and yet ways about whose difference the theory of knowledge seems hitherto to have shown very little concern. We must know the truth; and we must avoid error,—these are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are not two ways of stating an identical commandment, they are two separable laws. . . . Believe truth! Shun error!—these, we see, are two materially different laws; and by choosing between them we may end by coloring differently our whole intellectual life. We may regard the chase for truth as paramount, and the avoidance of error as secondary; or we may, on the other hand, treat the avoidance of error as more imperative, and let truth take its chance. Clifford, in the instructive passage which I have quoted, exhorts us to the latter course. Believe nothing, he tells us, keep your mind in suspense forever, rather than by closing it on insufficient evidence incur the awful risk of believing lies. You, on the other hand, may think that the risk of being in error is a very small matter when compared with the blessings of real knowledge, and be ready to be duped many times in your investigation rather than postpone indefinitely the chance of guessing true. I myself find it impossible to go with Clifford.
Moral questions immediately present themselves as questions whose solution cannot wait for sensible proof. A moral question is a question not of what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be good if it did exist. Science can tell us what exists; but to compare the worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart. . . . Turn now from these wide questions of good to a certain class of questions of fact, questions concerning personal relations, states of mind between one man and another. Do you like me or not?—for example. Whether you do or not depends, in countless instances, on whether I meet you half-way, am willing to assume that you must like me, and show you trust and expectation. The previous faith on my part in your liking's existence is in such cases what makes your liking come. But if I stand aloof, and refuse to budge an inch until I have objective evidence, until you shall have done something apt, as the absolutists say, ad extorquendum assensum meum [to force my assent], ten to one your liking never comes. How many women's hearts are vanquished by the mere sanguine insistence of some man that they must love him! he will not consent to the hypothesis that they cannot. The desire for a certain kind of truth here brings about that special truth's existence; and so it is in innumerable cases of other sorts. Who gains promotions, boons, appointments, but the man in whose life they are seen to play the part of live hypotheses, who discounts them, sacrifices other things for their sake before they have come, and takes risks for them in advance? His faith acts on the powers above him as a claim, and creates its own verification.
Religious Belief from our Passional Nature
In truths dependent on our personal action, then, faith based on desire is certainly a lawful and possibly an indispensable thing.
But now, it will be said, these are all childish human cases, and have nothing to do with great cosmical matters, like the question of religious faith. Let us then pass on to that. Religions differ so much in their accidents that in discussing the religious question we must make it very generic and broad. What then do we now mean by the religious hypothesis? Science says things are; morality says some things are better than other things; and religion says essentially two things.
First, she says that the best things are the more eternal things, the overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word. "Perfection is eternal,"—this phrase of Charles Secrétan seems a good way of putting this first affirmation of religion, an affirmation which obviously cannot yet be verified scientifically at all.
The second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even now if we believe her first affirmation to be true.
Now, let us consider what the logical elements of this situation are in case the religious hypothesis in both its branches be really true. (Of course, we must admit that possibility at the outset. If we are to discuss the question at all, it must involve a living option. If for any of you religion be a hypothesis that cannot, by any living possibility be true, then you need go no farther. I speak to the 'saving remnant' alone.) So proceeding, we see, first, that religion offers itself as a momentous option. We are supposed to gain, even now, by our belief, and to lose by our non-belief, a certain vital good. Secondly, religion is a forced option, so far as that good goes. We cannot escape the issue by remaining skeptical and waiting for more light, because, although we do avoid error in that way if religion be untrue, we lose the good, if it be true, just as certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve. It is as if a man should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home. Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married someone else?
Skepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is option of a certain particular kind of risk. Better risk loss of truth than chance of error,—that is your faith-vetoer's exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field. To preach skepticism to us as a duty until 'sufficient evidence' for religion be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us, when in presence of the religious hypothesis, that to yield to our fear of its being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it may be true. It is not intellect against all passions, then; it is only intellect with one passion laying down its law. And by what, forsooth, is the supreme wisdom of this passion warranted? Dupery for dupery, what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear?
I, for one, can see no proof; and I simply refuse obedience to the scientist's command to imitate his kind of option, in a case where my own stake is important enough to give me the right to choose my own form of risk. If religion be true and the evidence for it be still insufficient, I do not wish, by putting your extinguisher upon my nature (which feels to me as if it had after all some business in this matter), to forfeit my sole chance in life of getting upon the winning side,—that chance depending, of course, on my willingness to run the risk of acting as if my passional need of taking the world religiously might be prophetic and right. . . . I, therefore, for one cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or willfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for this plain reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule. That for me is the long and short of the formal logic of the situation, no matter what the kinds of truth might materially be.
LIMITED AUTHORITY OF MYSTICAL EXPERIENCES (Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902, Chapter 17)
Mystical Experiences are Pantheistic, Optimistic and Anti-Naturalistic
I have now sketched with extreme brevity and insufficiency, but as fairly as I am able in the time allowed, the general traits of the mystic range of consciousness. It is on the whole pantheistic and optimistic, or at least the opposite of pessimistic. It is anti-naturalistic, and harmonizes best with twice-bornness and so-called other-worldly states mind.
My next task is to inquire whether we can invoke it as authoritative. Does it furnish any warrant for [i.e., proof] the truth of the twice-bornness and supernaturality and pantheism which it favors? I must give my answer to this question as concisely as I can.
In brief my answer is this – and I will divide it into three parts: –
(1) Mystical states, when well developed, usually are, and have the right to be, absolutely authoritative over the individuals to whom they come.
(2) No authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for those who stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically.
(3) They break down the authority of the non-mystical or rationalistic consciousness, based upon the understanding and the senses alone. They show it to be only one kind of consciousness. They open out the possibility of other orders of truth, in which, so far as anything in us vitally responds to them, we may freely continue to have faith.
I will take up these points one by one.
Mystical States are Authoritative for the Mystic
1. As a matter of psychological fact, mystical states of a well-pronounced and emphatic sort are usually authoritative over those who have them. They have been "there," and know. It is vain for rationalism to grumble about this. If the mystical truth that comes to a man proves to be a force that he can live by, what mandate have we of the majority to order him to live in another way? We can throw him into a prison or a madhouse, but we cannot change his mind – we commonly attach it only the more stubbornly to its beliefs. It mocks our utmost efforts, as a matter of fact, and in point of logic it absolutely escapes our jurisdiction. Our own more "rational" beliefs are based on evidence exactly similar in nature to that which mystics quote for theirs. Our senses, namely, have assured us of certain states of fact; but mystical experiences are as direct perceptions of fact for those who have them as any sensations ever were for us. The records show that even though the five senses be in abeyance in them, they are absolutely sensational in their epistemological quality, if I may be pardoned the barbarous expression – that is, they are face to face presentations of what seems immediately to exist. I abstract from weaker states, and from those cases of which the books are full, where the director (but usually not the subject) remains in doubt whether the experience may not have proceeded from the demon. Example: Mr. John Nelson writes of his imprisonment for preaching Methodism: "My soul was as a watered garden, and I could sing praises to God all day long; for he turned my captivity into joy, and gave me to rest as well on the boards, as if I had been on a bed of down. Now could I say, 'God's service is perfect freedom,' and I was carried out much in prayer that my enemies might drink of the same river of peace which my God gave so largely to me."
The mystic is, in short, invulnerable, and must be left, whether we relish it or not, in undisturbed enjoyment of his creed. Faith, says Tolstoy, is that by which men live. And faith-state and mystic state are practically convertible terms.
Mystical States are not Authoritative for the Non-Mystic
2. But I now proceed to add that mystics have no right to claim that we ought to accept the deliverance of their peculiar experiences, if we are ourselves outsiders and feel no private call thereto. The utmost they can ever ask of us in this life is to admit that they establish a presumption. They form a consensus and have an unequivocal outcome; and it would be odd, mystics might say, if such a unanimous type of experience should prove to be altogether wrong. At bottom, however, this would only be an appeal to numbers, like the appeal of rationalism the other way; and the appeal to numbers has no logical force. If we acknowledge it, it is for "suggestive," not for logical reasons: we follow the majority because to do so suits our life.
But even this presumption from the unanimity of mystics is far from being strong. In characterizing mystic states as pantheistic, optimistic, etc., I am afraid I over-simplified the truth. I did so for expository reasons, and to keep the closer to the classic mystical tradition. The classic religious mysticism, it now must be confessed, is only a "privileged case." It is an extract, kept true to type by the selection of the fittest specimens and their preservation in "schools." It is carved out from a much larger mass; and if we take the larger mass as seriously as religious mysticism has historically taken itself, we find that the supposed unanimity largely disappears. To begin with, even religious mysticism itself, the kind that accumulates traditions and makes schools, is much less unanimous than I have allowed. It has been both ascetic and antinomianly self-indulgent within the Christian church.
Mysticism is Discredited by insane Non-Religious Mystics
So much for religious mysticism proper. But more remains to be told, for religious mysticism is only one half of mysticism. The other half has no accumulated traditions except those which the text-books on insanity supply. Open any one of these, and you will find abundant cases in which "mystical ideas" are cited as characteristic symptoms of enfeebled or deluded states of mind. In delusional insanity, paranoia, as they sometimes call it, we may have a diabolical mysticism, a sort of religious mysticism turned upside down. The same sense of ineffable importance in the smallest events, the same texts and words coming with new meanings, the same voices and visions and leadings and missions, the same controlling by extraneous powers; only this time the emotion is pessimistic: instead of consolations we have desolations; the meanings are dreadful; and the powers are enemies to life. It is evident that from the point of view of their psychological mechanism, the classic mysticism and these lower mysticisms spring from the same mental level, from that great subliminal or trans-marginal region of which science is beginning to admit the existence, but of which so little is really known. That region contains every kind of matter: "seraph and snake" abide there side by side. To come from thence is no infallible credential. What comes must be sifted and tested, and run the gauntlet of confrontation with the total context of experience, just like what comes from the outer world of sense. Its value must be ascertained by empirical methods, so long as we are not mystics ourselves.
Once more, then, I repeat that non-mystics are under no obligation to acknowledge in mystical states a superior authority conferred on them by their intrinsic nature.
Consciousness of the World is only One Type of Human Consciousness
3. Yet, I repeat once more, the existence of mystical states absolutely overthrows the pretension of non-mystical states to be the sole and ultimate dictators of what we may believe. As a rule, mystical states merely add a supersensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of consciousness. They are excitements like the emotions of love or ambition, gifts to our spirit by means of which facts already objectively before us fall into a new expressiveness and make a new connection with our active life. They do not contradict these facts as such, or deny anything that our senses have immediately seized. It is the rationalistic critic rather who plays the part of denier in the controversy, and his denials have no strength, for there never can be a state of facts to which new meaning may not truthfully be added, provided the mind ascend to a more enveloping point of view. It must always remain an open question whether mystical states may not possibly be such superior points of view, windows through which the mind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive world. The difference of the views seen from the different mystical windows need not prevent us from entertaining this supposition. The wider world would in that case prove to have a mixed constitution like that of this world, that is all. It would have its celestial and its infernal regions, its tempting and its saving moments, its valid experiences and its counterfeit ones, just as our world has them; but it would be a wider world all the same. We should have to use its experiences by selecting and subordinating and substituting just as is our custom in this ordinary naturalistic world; we should be liable to error just as we are now; yet the counting in of that wider world of meanings, and the serious dealing with it, might, in spite of all the perplexity, be indispensable stages in our approach to the final fullness of the truth.
In this shape, I think, we have to leave the subject. Mystical states indeed wield no authority due simply to their being mystical states. But the higher ones among them point in directions to which the religious sentiments even of non-mystical men incline. They tell of the supremacy of the ideal, of vastness, of union, of safety, and of rest. They offer us hypotheses, hypotheses which we may voluntarily ignore, but which as thinkers we cannot possibly upset. The super-naturalism and optimism to which they would persuade us may, interpreted in one way or another, be after all the truest of insights into the meaning of this life.
THE MINIMUM CONTENT AND TRUTH OF RELIGION (Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902, Conclusion)
Minimum Content of Religion vs. Over-Belief
I am expressly trying to reduce religion to its lowest admissible terms, to that minimum, free from individualistic excrescences, which all religions contain as their nucleus, and on which it may be hoped that all religious persons may agree. That established, we should have a result which might be small, but would at least be solid; and on it and round it the ruddier additional beliefs on which the different individuals make their venture might be grafted, and flourish as richly as you please. I shall add my own over-belief (which will be, I confess, of a somewhat pallid kind, as befits a critical philosopher), and you will, I hope, also add your over-beliefs, and we shall soon be in the varied world of concrete religious constructions once more. For the moment, let me dryly pursue the analytic part of the task . . .
We must next pass beyond the point of view of merely subjective utility, and make inquiry into the intellectual content itself.
First, is there, under all the discrepancies of the creeds, a common nucleus to which they bear their testimony unanimously?
And second, ought we to consider the testimony true?
Two Common Elements of All Religions
I will take up the first question first, and answer it immediately in the affirmative. The warring gods and formulas of the various religions do indeed cancel each other, but there is a certain uniform deliverance in which religions all appear to meet. It consists of two parts:—
1. An uneasiness; and
2. Its solution.
1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand.
2. The solution is a sense that we are saved from the wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers.
In those more developed minds which alone we are studying, the wrongness takes a moral character, and the salvation takes a mystical tinge. . . . I think we shall keep well within the limits of what is common to all such minds if we formulate the essence of their religious experience in terms like these:
The individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongness and criticizes it, is to that extent consciously beyond it, and in at least possible touch with something higher, if anything higher exist. Along with the wrong part there is thus a better part of him, even though it may be but a most helpless germ. With which part he should identify his real being is by no means obvious at this stage; but when stage 2 (the stage of solution or salvation) arrives, the man identifies his real being with the germinal higher part of himself; and does so in the following way. He becomes conscious that this higher part is conterminous and continuous with a more of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck. . . .
So far, however, as this analysis goes, the experiences are only psychological phenomena. They possess, it is true, enormous biological worth. Spiritual strength really increases in the subject when he has them, a new life opens for him, and they seem to him a place of conflux where the forces of two universes meet; and yet this may be nothing but his subjective way of feeling things, a mood of his own fancy, in spite of the effects produced. I now turn to my second question: What is the objective "truth" of their content?
The Two Common Elements of Religion are Objectively True
The part of the content concerning which the question of truth most pertinently arises is that "more of the same quality" with which our own higher self appears in the experience to come into harmonious working relation. Is such a "more" merely our own notion, or does it really exist? If so, in what shape does it exist? Does it act, as well as exist? And in what form should we conceive of that "union" with it of which religious geniuses are so convinced? . . .
The "more," as we called it, and the meaning of our "union" with it, form the nucleus of our inquiry. Into what definite description can these words be translated, and for what definite facts do they stand? It would never do for us to place ourselves offhand at the position of a particular theology, the Christian theology, for example, and proceed immediately to define the "more" as Jehovah, and the "union" as his imputation to us of the righteousness of Christ. That would be unfair to other religions, and, from our present standpoint at least, would be an over-belief. . . .
Disregarding the over beliefs, and confining ourselves to what is common and generic, we have in the fact that the conscious person is continuous with a wider self through which saving experiences come, a positive content of religious experience which, it seems to me, is literally and objectively true as far as it goes.
James's Religious Over-Belief
If I now proceed to state my own hypothesis about the farther limits of this extension of our personality, I shall be offering my own over-belief— though I know it will appear a sorry under-belief to some of you—for which I can only bespeak the same indulgence which in a converse case I should accord to yours. . . .
What the more characteristically divine facts are, apart from the actual inflow of energy in the faith-state and the prayer-state, I know not. But the over-belief on which I am ready to make my personal venture is that they exist. The whole drift of my education goes to persuade me that the world of our present consciousness is only one out of many worlds of consciousness that exist, and that those other worlds must contain experiences which have a meaning for our life also; and that although in the main their experiences and those of this world keep discrete, yet the two become continuous at certain points, and higher energies filter in . . .
If asked just where the differences in fact which are due to God's existence come in, I should have to say that in general I have no hypothesis to offer beyond what the phenomenon of "prayerful communion," especially when certain kinds of incursion from the subconscious region take part in it, immediately suggests. The appearance is that in this phenomenon something ideal, which in one sense is part of ourselves and in another sense is not ourselves, actually exerts an influence, raises our centre of personal energy, and produces regenerative effects unattainable in other ways. If, then, there be a wider world of being than that of our every-day consciousness, if in it there be forces whose effects on us are intermittent, if one facilitating condition of the effects be the openness of the "subliminal" door, we have the elements of a theory to which the phenomena of religious life lend plausibility. I am so impressed by the importance of these phenomena that I adopt the hypothesis which they so naturally suggest.
Source: William James, "The Will to Believe" (1897); Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), adapted.
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GEORGE SANTAYANA:
RELIGION AS THE POETRY OF MORAL EXPERIENCE
George Santayana (1863–1952) was born Jorge Ruiz de Santayana in Madrid and spent his early childhood in Spain before joining his mother in Boston, where he was educated in the city's public schools and later at Harvard. After graduate study in Germany, he returned to Harvard to teach philosophy, counting among his students figures such as T. S. Eliot, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Conrad Aiken. Although trained in the American pragmatist milieu, he developed a distinctive philosophical outlook that combined naturalism, aestheticism, and a classical sense of detachment, expressed in works such as The Life of Reason (1905–06), Scepticism and Animal Faith (1923), and the four‑volume Realms of Being (1927–40). In 1912 he resigned his professorship and left the United States permanently, spending the rest of his life in Europe—mostly in Rome—where he wrote prolifically on philosophy, literature, religion, and culture. A critic of both supernaturalism and reductive scientism, he treated religion as a poetic expression of human ideals rather than a source of literal truth. He died in Rome in 1952 at the age of 88. The selections below are from The Life of Reason, Volume 3, titled Reason in Religion.
In the first section, George Santayana argues that religion is significant, yet we must not take its doctrines as literal truth. Comprehensive thinkers in every age find something to accept in the religion of their time, for a deep philosophy brings minds back to a purified religious understanding. Heretics and atheists often rebel merely against a specific alien convention, which means they yearn for a world interpreted in their own fashion rather than a total rejection of religious meaning. Skeptics who focus only on the scientific failures of religion fail to explore the habits of thought from which beliefs sprang. However, the traditional ideas that protect a society always contradict other religions and themselves. What religion a person holds is a historical accident, much like language, consequently, every healthy faith carries a marked identity that provides another world to live in.
In the second section, he asserts that religion aims at the life of reason but fails to attain it. Religion closely relates to the life of reason, since both serve as the source of ultimate values, establish absolute moral divisions, and free individuals from personal limitations. Yet reason is a neutral principle of order, whereas religion is a changing force composed of conscious ideas and worship. Religion directs humanity toward an ultimate harmony, thus it is a more conscious pursuit of the ideal life than science or art. Despite this intent, the religious pursuit of reason has been unsuccessful, for religions offer imaginary remedies for mortal ills, such as the Christian promise of heaven as an antidote to natural death. This reliance on fictions confuses intelligence, ruins morality, and blocks science. In the third section, he views religion as the poetry of moral experience. This failure occurs because religion pursues rationality through the imagination, serving as an imaginative substitute for science and wisdom. Its only truth comes from its symbolic interpretation of moral experience, while its falsehood stems from treating poetic conceptions as literal information about reality elsewhere. When people mistake symbolic rightness for scientific truth, religion becomes a continuous deception that works harm in the conscience. Nevertheless, we must thank religion for introducing sensitivity and speculative insight into a world of practical slavery. In this light, different doctrines represent different moral planes, meaning religions are better or worse rather than true or false.
In the fourth section, he analyzes the failure of magic and mythology. Santayana notes that religion fails when it attempts to do the work of science or practical labor, for imagining that work could be done by magic or prayer merely consumed human energy. Similarly, mythology harmed the intellect by inventing dramatic causes for natural phenomena, which delayed the discovery of natural forces. Rational religion consists of two human phases, namely piety, which honors natural conditions, and spirituality, which looks to ideal ends. In the final section, he evaluates the nature and value of mysticism. Mysticism represents a primitive loosening of rational or mythical conventions, as it visits formed minds only during moments of intellectual arrest, for the only pure mystics are the animals. Mysticism can never stand alone as the basis of anything, but functions as a normal disease within the life of reason. Reason ultimately contains the mystic's original joys, but it provides distinction and connection to turn a dumb ecstasy into natural happiness.
HOW RELIGION MAY BE AN EMBODIMENT OF REASON (from The Life of Reason, Volume 3, Chapter 1)
Religion is Significant, but not Literally True
Experience has repeatedly confirmed that well-known maxim of Bacon's, that "a little philosophy inclineth man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion." In every age the most comprehensive thinkers have found in the religion of their time and country something they could accept, interpreting and illustrating that religion so as to give it depth and universal application. Even the heretics and atheists, if they have had profundity, turn out after a while to be forerunners of some new orthodoxy. What they rebel against is a religion alien to their nature; they are atheists only by accident, and relatively to a convention which inwardly offends them, but they yearn mightily in their own souls after the religious acceptance of a world interpreted in their own fashion. So it appears in the end that their atheism and loud protestation were in fact the hastier part of their thought, since what emboldened them to deny the poor world's faith was that they were too impatient to understand it. Indeed, the enlightenment common to young wits and worm-eaten old satirists, who plume themselves on detecting the scientific ineptitude of religion—something which the blindest half see—is not nearly enlightened enough: it points to notorious facts incompatible with religious tenets literally taken, but it leaves unexplored the habits of thought from which those tenets sprang, their original meaning, and their true function. Such studies would bring the sceptic face to face with the mystery and pathos of mortal existence. They would make him understand why religion is so profoundly moving and in a sense so profoundly just. There must needs be something humane and necessary in an influence that has become the most general sanction of virtue, the chief occasion for; art and philosophy, and the source, perhaps, of the best human happiness. If nothing, as Hooker said, is "so malapert as a splenetic religion," a sour irreligion is almost as perverse.
At the same time, when Bacon penned the sage epigram we have quoted he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them. It would be pitiful indeed if mature reflection bred no better conceptions than those which have drifted down the muddy stream of time, where tradition and passion have jumbled everything together. Traditional conceptions, when they are felicitous, may be adopted by the poet, but they must be purified by the moralist and disintegrated by the philosopher. Each religion, so dear to those whose life it sanctifies, and fulfilling so necessary a function in the society that has adopted it, necessarily contradicts every other religion, and probably contradicts itself. What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak. In the rare circumstances where a choice is possible, he may, with some difficulty, make an exchange; but even then he is only adopting a new convention which may be more agreeable to his personal temper but which is essentially as arbitrary as the old.
The attempt to speak without speaking any particular language is not more hopeless than the attempt to have a religion that shall be no religion in particular. A courier's or a dragoman's speech may indeed be often unusual and drawn from disparate sources, not without some mixture of personal originality; but that private jargon will have a meaning only because of its analogy to one or more conventional languages and its obvious derivation from them. So travellers from one religion to another, people who have lost their spiritual nationality, may often retain a neutral and confused residuum of belief, which they may egregiously regard as the essence of all religion, so little may they remember the graciousness and naturalness of that ancestral accent which a perfect religion should have. Yet a moment's probing of the conceptions surviving in such minds will show them to be nothing but vestiges of old beliefs, creases which thought, even if emptied of all dogmatic tenets, has not been able to smooth away at its first unfolding. Later generations, if they have any religion at all, will be found either to revert to ancient authority, or to attach themselves spontaneously to something wholly novel and immensely positive, to some faith promulgated by a fresh genius and passionately embraced by a converted people. Thus every living and healthy religion has a marked idiosyncrasy. Its power consists in its special and surprising message and in the bias which that revelation gives to life. The vistas it opens and the mysteries propounds are another world to live in; and another world to live in—whether we expect ever to pass wholly into it or no—is what we mean by having a religion.
Religion Aims at the Life of Reason, but Fails to Attain it
What relation, then, does this great business of the soul, which we call religion, bear to the Life of Reason? That the relation between the two is close seems clear from several circumstances. The Life of Reason is the seat of all ultimate values. Now the history of mankind will show us that whenever spirits at once lofty and intense have seemed to attain the highest joys, they have envisaged and attained them in religion. Religion would therefore seem to be a vehicle or a factor in rational life, since the ends of rational life are attained by it. Moreover, the Life of Reason is an ideal to which everything in the world should be subordinated; it establishes lines of moral cleavage everywhere and makes right eternally different from wrong. Religion does the same thing. It makes absolute moral decisions. It sanctions, unifies, and transforms ethics. Religion thus exercises a function of the Life of Reason. And a further function which is common to both is that of emancipating man from his personal limitations. In different ways religions promise to transfer the soul to better conditions. A supernaturally favoured kingdom is to be established for posterity upon earth, or for all the faithful in heaven, or the soul is to be freed by repeated purgations from all taint and sorrow, or it is to be lost in the absolute, or it is to become an influence and an object of adoration in the places it once haunted or wherever the activities it once loved may be carried on by future generations of its kindred. Now reason in its way lays before us all these possibilities: it points to common objects, political and intellectual, in which an individual may lose what is mortal and accidental in himself and immortalise what is rational and human; it teaches us how sweet and fortunate death may be to those whose spirit can still live in their country and in their ideas; it reveals the radiating effects of action and the eternal objects of thought.
Yet the difference in tone and language must strike us, so soon as it is philosophy that speaks. That change should remind us that even if the function of religion and that of reason coincide, this function is performed in the two cases by very different organs. Religions are many, reason one. Religion consists of conscious ideas, hopes, enthusiasms, and objects of worship; it operates by grace and flourished by prayer. Reason, on the other hand, is a mere principle or potential order, on which, indeed, we may come to reflect, but which exists in us ideally only, without variation or stress of any kind. We conform or do not conform to it; it does not urge or chide us, nor call for any emotions on our part other than those naturally aroused by the various objects which it unfolds in their true nature and proportion. Religion brings some order into life by weighting it with new materials. Reason adds to the natural materials only the perfect order which it introduces into them. Rationality is nothing but a form, an ideal constitution which experience may more or less embody. Religion is a part of experience itself, a mass of sentiments and ideas. The one is an inviolate principle, the other a changing and struggling force. And yet this struggling and changing force of religion, seems to direct man toward something eternal. It seems to make for an ultimate harmony within the soul and for an ultimate harmony between the soul and all the soul depends upon. So that religion, in its intent, is a more conscious and direct pursuit of the Life of Reason than is society, science, or art. For these approach and fill out the ideal life tentatively and piecemeal, hardly regarding the goal or caring for the ultimate justification of their instinctive aims. Religion also has an instinctive and blind side, and bubbles up in all manner of chance practices and intuitions; soon, however, it feels its way toward the heart of things, and, from whatever quarter it may come, veers in the direction of the ultimate.
Nevertheless, we must confess that this religious pursuit of the Life of Reason has been singularly abortive. Those within the pale of each religion may prevail upon themselves to express satisfaction with its results, thanks to a fond partiality in reading the past and generous draughts of hope for the future; but any one regarding the various religions at once and comparing their achievements with what reason requires, must feel how terrible is the disappointment which they have one and all prepared for mankind. Their chief anxiety has been to offer imaginary remedies for mortal ills, some of which are incurable essentially, while others might have been really cured by well-directed effort. The Greek oracles, for instance, pretended to heal our natural ignorance, which has its appropriate though difficult cure, while the Christian vision of heaven pretended to be an antidote to our natural death, the inevitable correlate of birth and of a changing and conditioned existence. By methods of this sort little can be done for the real betterment of life. To confuse intelligence and dislocate sentiment by gratuitous fictions is a short-sighted way of pursuing happiness. Nature is soon avenged. An unhealthy exaltation and a one-sided morality have to be followed by regrettable reactions. When these come, the real rewards of life may seem vain to a relaxed vitality, and the very name of virtue may irritate young spirits untrained in any natural excellence. Thus religion too often debauches the morality it comes to sanction, and impedes the science it ought to fulfil.
Religion as the Poetry of Moral Experience
What is the secret of this ineptitude? Why does religion, so near to rationality in its purpose, fall so far short of it in its texture and in its results? The answer is easy: Religion pursues, rationality through the imagination. When it explains events or assigns causes, it gives imaginative substitute for science. When it gives; precepts, insinuates ideals, or remoulds aspiration, it is an imaginative substitute for wisdom—I mean for the deliberate and impartial pursuit of all good. The conditions and the aims of life are both represented in religion poetically, but this poetry tends to arrogate to itself literal truth and moral authority, neither of which it possesses. Hence the depth and importance of religion become intelligible no less than its contradictions and practical disasters. Its object is the same as that of reason, but its method is to proceed by intuition and by unchecked poetical conceits. These are repeated and vulgarised in proportion to their original fineness and significance, till they pass for reports of objective truth and come to constitute a world of faith, superposed upon the world of experience and regarded as materially enveloping it, if not in space at least in time and in existence. The only truth of religion comes from its interpretation of life, from its symbolic rendering of that moral, experience which it springs out of and which it seeks to elucidate. Its falsehood comes from the insidious misunderstanding which clings to it, to the effect that these poetic conceptions are not merely representations of experience as it is or should be, but are rather information about experience or reality elsewhere—an experience and reality which, strangely enough, supply just the defects betrayed by reality and experience here.
When Religion's Poetic Method is Denied, its Value is Reduced
Thus religion has the same original relation to life that poetry has; only poetry, which never pretends to literal validity, adds a pure value to existence, the value of a liberal imaginative exercise. The poetic value of religion would initially be greater than that of poetry itself, because religion deals with higher and more practical themes, with sides of life which are in greater need of some imaginative touch and ideal interpretation than are those pleasant or pompous things which ordinary poetry dwells upon. But this initial advantage is neutralised in part by the abuse to which religion is subject, whenever its symbolic rightness is taken for scientific truth. Like poetry, it improves the world only by imagining it improved, but not content with making this addition to the mind's furniture—an addition which might be useful and ennobling—it thinks to confer a more radical benefit by persuading mankind that, in spite of appearances, the world is really such as that rather arbitrary idealisation has painted it. This spurious satisfaction is naturally the prelude to many a disappointment, and the soul has infinite trouble to emerge again from the artificial problems and sentiments into which it is thus plunged. The value of religion becomes equivocal. Religion remains an imaginative achievement, a symbolic representation of moral reality which may have a most important function in vitalising the mind and in transmitting, by way of parables, the lessons of experience. But it becomes at the same time a continuous incidental deception; and this deception, in proportion as it is strenuously denied to be such, can work indefinite harm in the world and in the conscience.
On the whole, however, religion should not be conceived as having taken the place of anything better, but rather as having come to relieve situations which, but for its presence, would have been infinitely worse. In the thick of active life, or in the monotony of practical slavery, there is more need to stimulate fancy than to control it. Natural instinct is not much disturbed in the human brain by what may happen in that thin superstratum of ideas which commonly overlays it. We must not blame religion for preventing the development of a moral and natural science which at any rate would seldom have appeared; we must rather thank it for the sensibility, the reverence, the speculative insight which it has introduced into the world.
Religion is Merely Symbolic and Thoroughly Human
We may therefore proceed to analyse the significance and the function which religion has had at its different stages, and, without disguising or in the least condoning its confusion with literal truth, we may allow ourselves to enter as sympathetically as possible into its various conceptions and emotions. They have made up the inner life of many sages, and of all those who without great genius or learning have lived steadfastly in the spirit. The feeling of reverence should itself be treated with reverence, although not at a sacrifice of truth, with which alone, in the end, reverence is compatible. Nor have we any reason to be intolerant of the partialities and contradictions which religions display. Were we dealing with a science, such contradictions would have to be instantly solved and removed; but when we are concerned with the poetic interpretation of experience, contradiction means only variety, and variety means spontaneity, wealth of resource, and a nearer approach to total adequacy.
If we hope to gain any understanding of these matters we must begin by taking them out of that heated and fanatical atmosphere in which the Hebrew tradition has enveloped them. The Jews had no philosophy, and when their national traditions came to be theoretically explicated and justified, they were made to issue in a puerile scholasticism and a rabid intolerance. The question of monotheism, for instance, was a terrible question to the Jews. Idolatry did not consist in worshipping a god who, not being ideal, might be unworthy of worship, but rather in recognising other gods than the one worshipped in Jerusalem. To the Greeks, on the contrary, whose philosophy was enlightened and ingenuous, monotheism and polytheism seemed perfectly innocent and compatible. To say God or the gods was only to use different expressions for the same influence, now viewed in its abstract unity and correlation with all existence, now viewed in its various manifestations in moral life, in nature, or in history. So that what in Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics meets us at every step—the combination of monotheism with polytheism—is no contradiction, but merely an intelligent variation of phrase to indicate various aspects or functions in physical and moral things. When religion appears to us in this light its contradictions and controversies lose all their bitterness. Each doctrine will simply represent the moral plane on which they live who have devised or adopted it. Religions will thus be better or worse, never true or false. We shall be able to lend ourselves to each in turn, and seek to draw from it the secret of its inspiration.
THE VALUE OF MAGIC, MYTHOLOGY, AND MYSTICISM (from Chapter 15)
The Failure of Magic and Mythology
The preceding analysis of religion, although it is illustrated mainly by Christianity, may enable us in a general way to distinguish the rational goal of all religious life. In no sphere is the contrast clearer between wisdom and folly; in none, perhaps, has there been so much of both. It was a prodigious delusion to imagine that work could be done by magic; and the desperate appeal which human weakness has made to prayer, to castigations, to miscellaneous fantastic acts, in the hope of thereby bending nature to greater sympathy with human necessities, is a pathetic spectacle; all the more pathetic in that here the very importunity of evil, which distracted the mind and allowed it no choice or deliberation, prevented very often those practical measures which, if lighted upon, would have instantly relieved the situation. Religion when it has tried to do man's work for him has not only cheated hope, but consumed energy and drawn away attention from the true means of success.
No less useless and retarding has been the effort to give religion the function of science. Mythology, in excogitating hidden dramatic causes for natural phenomena, or in attributing events to the human values which they might prevent or secure, has profoundly perverted and confused the intellect; it has delayed and embarrassed the discovery of natural forces, at the same time fostering presumptions which, on being exploded, tended to plunge men, by revulsion, into an artificial despair. At the same time this experiment in mythology involved wonderful creations which have a poetic value of their own, to offset their uselessness in some measure and the obstruction they have occasioned. In imagining human agents behind every appearance fancy has given appearances some kinship to human life; it has made nature a mass of hieroglyphics and enlarged to that extent the means of human expression. While objects and events were capriciously moralised, the mind's own plasticity has been developed by its great exercise in self-projection. To imagine himself a thunder-cloud or a river, the dispenser of silent benefits and the contriver of deep-seated universal harmonies, has actually stimulated man's moral nature: he has grown larger by thinking himself so large.
Through the dense cloud of false thought and bad habit in which religion thus wrapped the world, some rays broke through from the beginning; for mythology and magic expressed life and sought to express its conditions. Human needs and human ideals went forth in these forms to solicit and to conquer the world; and since these imaginative methods, for their very ineptitude, rode somewhat lightly over particular issues and envisaged rather distant goods, it was possible through them to give aspiration and reflection greater scope than the meaner exigencies of life would have permitted. Where custom ruled morals and a narrow empiricism bounded the field of knowledge, it was partly a blessing that imagination should be given an illegitimate sway. Without misunderstanding, there might have been no understanding at all; without confidence in supernatural support, the heart might never have uttered its own oracles. So that in close association with superstition and fable we find piety and spirituality entering the world.
The Nature and Value of Mysticism
Rational religion has these two phases: piety, or loyalty to necessary conditions, and spirituality, or devotion to ideal ends. These simple sanctities make the core of all the others. Piety drinks at the deep, elemental sources of power and order: it studies nature, honours the past, appropriates and continues its mission. Spirituality uses the strength thus acquired, remodelling all it receives, and looking to the future and the ideal. True religion is entirely human and political, as was that of the ancient Hebrews, Romans, and Greeks. Supernatural machinery is either symbolic of natural conditions and moral aims or else is worthless.
There is one other phase or possible overtone of religion about which a word might be added in conclusion. What is called mysticism is a certain genial loosening of convention, whether rational or mythical; the mystic smiles at science and plays with theology, undermining both by force of his insight and inward assurance. He is all faith, all love, all vision, but he is each of these things in vacuo, and in the absence of any object.
Mysticism can exist, in varied degrees, at any stage of rational development. Its presence is therefore no indication of the worth or worthlessness of its possessor. This circumstance tends to obscure its nature, which would otherwise be obvious enough. Seeing the greatest saints and philosophers grow mystical in their highest flights, an innocent observer might imagine that mysticism was an ultimate attitude, which only his own incapacity kept him from understanding. But exactly the opposite is the case. Mysticism is the most primitive of feelings and only visits formed minds in moments of intellectual arrest and dissolution. It can exist in a child, very likely in an animal; indeed, to parody a phrase of Hegel's, the only pure mystics are the brutes. When articulation fails in the face of experience; when instinct guides without kindling any prophetic idea to which action may be inwardly referred; when life and hope and joy flow through the soul from an unknown region to an unknown end, then consciousness is mystical. Such an experience may suffuse the best equipped mind, if its primordial energies, its will and emotions, much outrun its intelligence. Just as at the beginning pure inexperience may flounder intellectually and yet may have a sense of not going astray, a sense of being carried by earth and sky, by contagion and pleasure, into its animal paradise; so at the end, if the vegetative forces still predominate, all articulate experience may be lifted up and carried down-stream bodily by the elementary flood rising from beneath.
Every religion, all science, all art, is accordingly subject to incidental mysticism; but in no case can mysticism stand alone and be the body or basis of anything. In the Life of Reason it is, if I may say so, a normal disease, a recurrent manifestation of lost equilibrium and interrupted growth; but in these pauses, when the depths rise to the surface and obliterate what scratches culture may have made there, the rhythm of life may be more powerfully felt, and the very disappearance of intellect may be taken for a revelation. Both in a social and a psychological sense revelations come from beneath, like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions; and while they fill the spirit with contempt for those fragile structures which they so easily overwhelm, they are utterly incapable of raising anything on the ruins. If they leave something standing it is only by involuntary accident, and if they prepare the soil for anything, it is commonly only for wild-flowers and weeds. Revelations are seldom beneficent, therefore, unless there is more evil in the world to destroy than good to preserve; and mysticism, under the same circumstances, may also liberate and relieve the spirit.
The feelings which in mysticism rise to the surface and speak in their own name are simply the ancient, overgrown feelings of vitality, dependence, inclusion; they are the background of consciousness coming forward and blotting out the scene. What mysticism destroys is, in a sense, its only legitimate expression. The Life of Reason, in so far as it is life, contains the mystic's primordial assurances, and his rudimentary joys; but in so far as it is rational it has discovered what those assurances rest on, in what direction they may be trusted to support action and thought; and it has given those joys distinction and connexion, turning a dumb momentary ecstasy into a many-coloured and natural happiness.
Source: George Santayana, Reason in Religion: Reason in Religion (1905) v. 3, adapted
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JOHN DEWEY:
RELIGIOUS FAITH WITHOUT THE SUPERNATURAL
John Dewey (1859–1952) was born in Burlington, Vermont, to a middle‑class family, his father a merchant and Civil War veteran. He attended the University of Vermont, where he developed early interests in philosophy and psychology, and after a brief period teaching high school he pursued graduate study at Johns Hopkins University, completing his doctorate in 1884. Over the next decade he held academic posts at the University of Michigan and the University of Minnesota before moving to the newly founded University of Chicago in 1894, where he became a central figure in both the philosophy department and the university's experimental school. In 1904 he joined the faculty of Columbia University, a position he held for the remainder of his career and from which he became one of the most influential American intellectuals of the twentieth century. During these years he wrote prolifically on education, politics, psychology, and philosophy, publishing many of the works for which he is best known, including Democracy and Education (1916) and Experience and Nature (1925). He retired from teaching in 1930 but continued to lecture and write well into his nineties. He died in New York City in 1952 at the age of 92. The selections below are from A Common Faith.
In the first section, John Dewey argues that traditional religions are allied with ideas of the supernatural, yet a deep division exists between those who consider the supernatural essential to religion and those who believe science has discredited both concepts. Both camps mistakenly identify the religious phase of experience with supernatural elements. Dewey seeks to separate the two, for he believes that what is genuinely religious will undergo an emancipation when it is relieved from supernatural encumbrances. This non-supernatural view faces attacks from traditional believers, who feel it cuts the vital nerve of faith, and from extremists, who view it as a timid compromise. In the second section, he maintains that the dictionary definition of religion has little real meaning. The definition requires recognition of an unseen higher power that controls human destiny and deserves worship, but history shows that people have conceived this power in a multitude of incompatible ways. These range from the vague force of primitive Shintoism to the personal Providence of Christianity. Because these conceptions differ so wildly, eliminating the differences leaves nothing beyond a bare reference to something unseen and powerful, which reduces the definition to a low common denominator.
In the third section, he proposes freeing the religious quality of experience from its historical encumbrances. Past religions were relative to the conditions of their social culture, and our present beliefs remain relative to our current culture. Consequently, we must inquire how much of our accepted religion consists of survivals from outgrown cultures, and we must imagine a clean slate to discover how a non-supernatural religiousness can express itself freely. In the fourth section, he argues that historical religion is irrelevant to the adjectival religious quality of experience. A religion signifies a special body of institutional beliefs and practices, whereas the adjective "religious" denotes no specific entity or church. Instead, it describes attitudes that people may take toward any ideal end. Many individuals are repelled by the moral implications of existing religions, thus they remain unaware of genuinely religious attitudes within themselves.
In the fifth section, he asserts that supernatural religion holds back non-supernatural religiousness. Any activity pursued on behalf of an ideal end against obstacles is religious in quality, and many humble citizens achieve this integration without supernatural beliefs. Traditional religions claim a monopoly on ideals, which stands in the way of natural experience, therefore the identification of religious values with religious creeds must be dissolved. In the sixth section, he explains that secular institutions are the new social center of gravity. The state and other secular organizations have grown in influence at the expense of religious institutions, so church membership is now merely a matter of individual choice within a secular community. Educational, economic, and scientific associations now exercise the greatest hold on human interest. In the final section, he concludes that a non-supernatural faith is grounded in the continuous human community. The things we prize in civilization exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the human community that extends into the past. Ours is the responsibility to conserve and expand this heritage for those who come after us, and this shared responsibility provides all the elements for a common, explicit faith.
RELIGION BAD, THE RELIGIOUS GOOD (from A Common Faith, 1934, Chapter 1)
The Supernatural Essential to Religion
Never before in history has mankind been so much of two minds, so divided into two camps, as it is today. Religions have traditionally been allied with ideas of the supernatural, and often have been based upon explicit beliefs about it. Today there are many who hold that nothing worthy of being called religious is possible apart from the supernatural. Those who hold this belief differ in many respects. They range from those who accept the dogmas and sacraments of the Greek and Roman Catholic church as the only sure means of access to the supernatural to the theist or mild deist. Between them are the many Protestant denominations who think the Scriptures, aided by a pure conscience, are adequate avenues to supernatural truth and power. But they agree in one point: the necessity for a Supernatural Being and for an immortality that is beyond the power of nature.
The opposed group consists of those who think the advance of culture and science has completely discredited the supernatural and with it all religions that were allied with belief in it. But they go beyond this point. The extremists in this group believe that with elimination of the supernatural not only must historic religions be dismissed but with them everything of a religious nature. When historical knowledge has discredited the claims made for the supernatural character of the persons said to have founded historic religions; when the supernatural inspiration attributed to literatures held sacred has been riddled, and when anthropological and psychological knowledge has disclosed the all-too-human source from which religious beliefs and practices have sprung, everything religious must, they say, also go.
There is one idea held in common by these two opposite groups: identification of the religious with the supernatural. The question I shall raise in these chapters concerns the ground for and the consequences of this identification: its reasons and its value. In the discussion I shall develop another conception of the nature of the religious phase of experience, one that separates it from the supernatural and the things that have grown up about it. I shall try to show that these derivations are encumbrances and that what is genuinely religious will undergo an emancipation when it is relieved from them; that then, for the first time, the religious aspect of experience will be free to develop freely on its own account.
This view is exposed to attack from both the other camps. It goes contrary to traditional religions, including those that have the greatest hold upon the religiously minded today. The view announced will seem to them to cut the vital nerve of the religious element itself in taking away the basis upon which traditional religions and institutions have been founded. From the other side, the position I am taking seems like a timid halfway position, a concession and compromise unworthy of thought that is thoroughgoing. It is regarded as a view entertained from mere tendermindedness, as an emotional hangover from childhood indoctrination, or even as a manifestation of a desire to avoid disapproval and curry favor.
Dictionary Definition of Religion has Little Meaning
The heart of my point, as far as I shall develop it in this first section, is that there is a difference between religion, a religion, and the religious; between anything that may be denoted by a noun substantive and the quality of experience that is designated by an adjective. It is not easy to find a definition of religion in the substantive sense that wins general acceptance. However, in the Oxford Dictionary I find the following: "Recognition on the part of man of some unseen higher power as having control of his destiny and as being entitled to obedience, reverence and worship."
This particular definition is less explicit in assertion of the supernatural character of the higher unseen power than are others that might be cited. It is, however, surcharged with implications having their source in ideas connected with the belief in the supernatural, characteristic of historic religions. Let us suppose that one familiar with the history of religions, including those called primitive, compares the definition with the variety of known facts and by means of the comparison sets out to determine just what the definition means. I think he will be struck by three facts that reduce the terms of the definition to such a low common denominator that little meaning is left.
He will note that the "unseen powers" referred to have been conceived in a multitude of incompatible ways. Eliminating the differences, nothing is left beyond the bare reference to something unseen and powerful. This has been conceived as the vague and undefined Mana of the Melanesians; the Kami of primitive Shintoism; the fetish of the Africans; spirits, having some human properties, that pervade natural places and animate natural forces; the ultimate and impersonal principle of Buddhism; the unmoved mover of Greek thought; the gods and semidivine heroes of the Greek and Roman Pantheons; the personal and loving Providence of Christianity, omnipotent, and limited by a corresponding evil power; the arbitrary Will of Moslemism; the supreme legislator and judge of deism. And these are but a few of the outstanding varieties of ways in which the invisible power has been conceived. . . .
Freeing the Religious from its Historical Encumbrances
I gladly admit that historic religions have been relative to the conditions of social culture in which peoples lived. Indeed, what I am concerned with is to press home the logic of this method of disposal of outgrown traits of past religions. Beliefs and practices in a religion that now prevails are by this logic relative to the present state of culture. If so much flexibility has obtained in the past regarding an unseen power, the way it affects human destiny, and the attitudes we are to take toward it, why should it be assumed that change in conception and action has now come to an end? The logic involved in getting rid of inconvenient aspects of past religions compels us to inquire how much in religions now accepted are survivals from outgrown cultures. It compels us to ask what conception of unseen powers and our relations to them would be consonant with the best achievements and aspirations of the present. It demands that in imagination we wipe the slate clean and start afresh by asking what would be the idea of the unseen, of the manner of its control over us and the ways in which reverence and obedience would be manifested, if whatever is basically religious in experience had the opportunity to express itself free from all historic encumbrances. . . .
Religion Irrelevant to the Religious
For the historic increase of the ethical and ideal content of religions suggests that the process of purification may be carried further. It indicates that further choice is imminent in which certain values and functions in experience may be selected. This possibility is what I had in mind in speaking of the difference between the religious and a religion. I am not proposing a religion, but rather the emancipation of elements and outlooks that may be called religious. For the moment we have a religion, whether that of the Sioux Indian or of Judaism or of Christianity, that moment the ideal factors in experience that may be called religious take on a load that is not inherent in them, a load of current beliefs and of institutional practices that are irrelevant to them.
I can illustrate what I mean by a common phenomenon in contemporary life. It is widely supposed that a person who does not accept any religion is thereby shown to be a non-religious person. Yet it is conceivable that the present depression in religion is closely connected with the fact that religions now prevent, because of their weight of historic encumbrances, the religious quality of experience from coming to consciousness and finding the expression that is appropriate to present conditions, intellectual and moral. I believe that such is the case. I believe that many persons are so repelled from what exists as a religion by its intellectual and moral implications, that they are not even aware of attitudes in themselves that if they came to fruition would be genuinely religious. I hope that this remark may help make clear what I mean by the distinction between "religion" as a noun substantive and "religious" as adjectival.
To be somewhat more explicit, a religion (and as I have just said there is no such thing as religion in general) always signifies a special body of beliefs and practices having some kind of institutional organization, loose or tight. In contrast, the adjective "religious" denotes nothing in the way of a specifiable entity, either institutional or as a system of beliefs. It does not denote anything to which one can specifically point as one can point to this and that historic religion or existing church. For it does not denote anything that can exist by itself or that can be organized into a particular and distinctive form of existence. It denotes attitudes that may be taken toward every object and every proposed end or ideal. . . .
Nonsupernatural Religiousness Held Back by Supernatural Religion
Lives that are consciously inspired by loyalty to such ideals as have been mentioned are still comparatively infrequent to the extent of that comprehensiveness and intensity which arouse an ardor religious in function. But before we infer the incompetency of such ideals and of the actions they inspire, we should at least ask ourselves how much of the existing situation is due to the fact that the religious factors of experience have been drafted into supernatural channels and thereby loaded with irrelevant encumbrances. A body of [supernatural] beliefs and practices that are apart from the common and natural relations of mankind must, in the degree in which it is influential, weaken and sap the force of the possibilities inherent in such [non-supernatural religious] relations. Here lies one aspect of the emancipation of the religious from religion.
Any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss because of conviction of its general and enduring value is religious in quality. Many a person, inquirer, artist, philanthropist, citizen, men and women in the humblest walks of life, have achieved, without presumption and without display, such unification of themselves and of their relations to the conditions of existence. It remains to extend their spirit and inspiration to ever wider numbers. If I have said anything about religions and religion that seems harsh, I have said those things because of a firm belief that the claim on the part of religions to possess a monopoly of ideals and of the supernatural means by which alone, it is alleged, they can be furthered, stands in the way of the realization of distinctively religious values inherent in natural experience. For that reason, if for no other, I should be sorry if any were misled by the frequency with which I have employed the adjective "religious" to conceive of what I have said as a disguised apology for what have passed as religions. The opposition between religious values as I conceive them and religions is not to be bridged. Just because the release of these values is so important, their identification with the creeds and cults of religions must be dissolved.
NON-SUPERNATURAL FAITH GROUNDED IN THE SECULAR HUMAN COMMUNITY (Chapter 3)
Secular Institutions are the New Social Center of Gravity
The change that has taken place in conditions once universal and now infrequent is in my opinion the greatest change that has occurred in religion in all history. The intellectual conflict of scientific and theological beliefs has attracted much more attention. It is still near the focus of attention. But the change in the social center of gravity of religion has gone on so steadily and is now so generally accomplished that it has faded from the thought of most persons, save perhaps the historians, and even they are especially aware of it only in its political aspect. For the conflict between state and church still continues in some countries.
There are even now persons who are born into a particular church, that of their parents, and who take membership in it almost as a matter of course; indeed, the fact of such membership may be an important, even a determining, factor in an individual's whole career. But the thing new in history, the thing once unheard of, is that the organization in question is a special institution within a secular community. Even where there are established churches, they are constituted by the state and may be unmade by the state. Not only the national state but other forms of organization among groups have grown in power and influence at the expense of organizations built upon and about a religion. The correlate of this fact is that membership in associations of the latter type is more and more a matter of the choice of individuals, who may tend to accept responsibilities imposed by the church but who accept them of their own volition. If they do accept them, the organization they join is, in many nations, chartered under a general corporation law of the political and secular entity.
The shift in what I have called the social center of gravity accompanies the enormous expansion of associations formed for educational, political, economic, philanthropic and scientific purposes, which has occurred independently of any religion. These social modes have grown so much that they exercise the greater hold upon the thought and interest of most persons, even of those holding membership in churches. This positive extension of interests which, from the standpoint of a religion, are non-religious, is so great that in comparison with it the direct effect of science upon the creeds of religion seems to me of secondary importance. . . .
The Common Faith of Humanity Expands upon the Values of the Continuous Human Community
The considerations put forward in the present chapter may be summed up in what they imply. The ideal ends to which we attach our faith are not shadowy and wavering. They assume concrete form in our understanding of our relations to one another and the values contained in these relations. We who now live are parts of a humanity that extends into the remote past, a humanity that has interacted with nature. The things in civilization we most prize are not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying and expanding the heritage of values we have received that those who come after us may receive it more solid and secure, more widely accessible and more generously shared than we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common faith of mankind. It remains to make it explicit and militant.
Source: John Dewey, A Common Faith (1934), adapted.
STUDY QUESTIONS
Please answer all of the following questions.
1. According to James in "The Will to Believe," what three conditions must an option meet to be considered a genuine option?
2. According to James in "The Will to Believe," why is Clifford's principle that it is always wrong to believe anything upon insufficient evidence an untenable rule for living options?
3. According to James in "The Will to Believe," how can faith or desire in personal relationships actually bring about the truth of a hypothesis?
4. According to James in "The Will to Believe," why is remaining skeptical in the face of the religious hypothesis itself a passional decision rather than a neutral stance?
5. According to James in *Varieties of Religious Experience*, why do well-developed mystical states possess absolute authority for the individuals who experience them?
6. According to James in *Varieties of Religious Experience*, why does the existence of delusional or diabolical mystical experiences in insane patients undermine the authority of classic religious mysticism for non-mystics?
7. According to James in *Varieties of Religious Experience*, what are the two common elements found in the nucleus of all religions?
8. According to James in *Varieties of Religious Experience*, what is an "over-belief," and what is James's own personal over-belief regarding higher forces?
9. According to Santayana in *The Life of Reason*, why is a person's specific religious faith best understood as a historical accident rather than a universal truth?
10. According to Santayana in *The Life of Reason*, in what way does religion aim at the Life of Reason, and why has its historical pursuit of that goal been abortive?
11. According to Santayana in *The Life of Reason*, why is religion properly understood as the poetry of moral experience rather than literal, scientific information about reality?
12. According to Santayana in *The Life of Reason*, why does Santayana argue that religions should be evaluated as better or worse rather than true or false?
13. According to Santayana in *The Life of Reason*, how did the reliance on magic and mythology retard human progress and the discovery of natural forces?
14. According to Santayana in *The Life of Reason*, why is mysticism a primitive state of intellectual arrest rather than an ultimate stage of rational development?
15. According to Dewey in *A Common Faith*, what is the shared assumption held by both traditional believers and radical anti-religious extremists that Dewey seeks to challenge?
16. According to Dewey in *A Common Faith*, why does the standard dictionary definition of religion lose meaningful content when applied across human history?
17. According to Dewey in *A Common Faith*, what is the crucial distinction between "religion" as a noun substantive and "religious" as an adjective?
18. According to Dewey in *A Common Faith*, how does the institutional claim to possess a monopoly on supernatural ideals actually impede natural religious experience?
19. According to Dewey in *A Common Faith*, how has the shift in the social center of gravity toward secular institutions changed the nature of religious church membership?
20. According to Dewey in *A Common Faith*, what is the continuous human community, and how does conserving its inherited values ground a common faith?
21. Short Essay Options: Please select one of the following and answer it in a minimum of 100 words.
(a) Critics argue that James's defense of the "will to believe" provides an uncritical license for wishful thinking and confirmation bias; if passional desire can validate beliefs prior to evidence, an individual could justify believing almost any comforting delusion. How might James respond?
(b) Critics argue that James's pragmatic test of truth confuses psychological utility with objective fact; a belief may produce regenerative and comforting effects on a person's life without being factually true. How might James respond?
(c) Critics argue that Santayana's reduction of religion to "moral poetry" misrepresents the actual nature of religious faith, since no religious believer would maintain their moral devotion if they believed their doctrines were merely symbolic fictions. How might Santayana respond?
(d) Critics argue that Santayana's sharp separation between poetic intuition and scientific fact relies on an outdated, rigid positivism that fails to see how scientific theories themselves rely on imaginative constructs and metaphors. How might Santayana respond?
(e) Critics argue that Dewey's attempt to preserve a "religious attitude" while stripping away all supernatural content is a linguistic sleight of hand; without a transcendent object or deity, the term "religious" loses its distinct meaning and becomes indistinguishable from ordinary moral enthusiasm. How might Dewey respond?
(f) Critics argue that Dewey's reliance on the "continuous human community" as the sole ground of faith is overly optimistic; history shows that human communities and secular institutions are frequently corrupt, unjust, and prone to collective madness, requiring a transcendent moral standard to judge them. How might Dewey respond?
(g) Critics argue that the Pragmatist approach to religion is fundamentally individualistic and subjectivist, treating personal psychological fruitfulness as more important than historical, institutional, or communal orthodoxy. How might either James, Santayana, or Dewey respond?
(h) Critics argue that naturalistic Pragmatism fails to explain how non-material moral ideals can exert a genuinely binding obligation on human conduct if all values are merely natural human creations. How might either Santayana or Dewey respond?
(i) Critics argue that Pragmatism's rejection of fixed, absolute metaphysical truths leaves it without a solid foundation to resist totalitarian ideologies that claim to promote practical social utility. How might any one of these thinkers respond?
(j) Critics argue that Pragmatism treats religion as a purely functional instrument for human welfare, thereby ignoring the central religious experience of awe, reverence, and submission before a transcendent reality that exceeds human utility. How might any one of these thinkers respond?