Page:Philosophical Review Volume 2.djvu/26

12 We are therefore driven from external experience or history to inner experience, and compelled to seek in religious self-consciousness the key to the explanation of the historical phenomena of religion. But do we then agree with those who assert that the essence of religion can be discovered only in the subjective consciousness, be it rational thought or devout feeling? The one-sidedness of such a procedure is plain, for it can with difficulty escape the charge of individual arbitrariness. Looking at the matter more closely, however, we can say that such a procedure is not only unsuitable, but also impossible, and that, wherever it has been attempted and insisted upon, it has always been based more or less on self-deception. The religious self-consciousness with which the philosopher begins, is not an empty form, but filled with a rich content communicated to it by the developing influence of social environment. The Christian philosopher of religion cannot, and should not, abstract from his Christian modes of thinking and feeling, which belong to him as the inheritance of Christian centuries. He must derive his knowledge, not from an indefinite abstract ego, but from the fulness of the experiences of the real, devout self-consciousness formed by historical Christianity. This concrete Christian self-consciousness contains in an abbreviated form the entire product of the religious life of the Christian community and of the whole of humanity. The evolutionary stages of the race are repeated in an abbreviated form in the personal life of every individual. There is the same relation between the different stages in the religious development of the race and those of each individual. A consideration of the inner religious life does not exclude, therefore, an examination of historical religion, for the former owes its development and form to the latter, and is constantly nourished and moulded by its influence. The more closely, then, the philosopher attends to this actually existing interrelation, develops and enriches his own religious consciousness by a survey of the historical religions of humanity (and especially of Christianity), and interprets and judges those facts by the light of his own inner experience, the more easily will he avoid both of these false paths,