Some Religious Implications of Pragmatism

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1919 Excerpt: ... CHAPTER IV RELIGIOUS REALITIES We are now in a position to indicate precisely what the religious implications of pragmatism are. The type of questions which pragmatism must face if it treats the religious problem in its traditional form is, as we have seen, somewhat as follows: Does the religious object exist? Is it real? How can we know its reality? What is to be the criterion of the truth of our ideas concerning it? But the fundamental presupposition implied in such statements of the problem is that there is a problem of religious reality, of religious knowledge, and of religious truth in general, or at large. And it is just this presupposition that pragmatism denies. Like all other problems, religious problems must be specific; they must have their origin and their termination within the limits of a concrete situation. Pragmatism recognizes, to be sure, that there are problems of a general nature concerning the particular realities constituted by religious experience and concerning the nature and function of religious ideas. But such problems, it thinks, must have specific reference, and must be solved from the point of view of such reference. In the first place, then, pragmatism recognizes no problem of religious reality in general. If the religious object may be said to exist at all, it must exist as a part of experience; if it is real, its reality must be empirical. Any statement of the religious problem which implies that religious reality stands over against or is external to the individual, would seem to have missed the whole point of modern epistemological criticism and to hark back to the mediaeval dualism of God and the world. If the epistemological movement had any significance at all it was that no such dualism characterizes reality; that the ...