BRAS RE Se ee ate SSS SEES SSS a se SoS a ER eee = pes ae eet tetas SSS SSS St a ee LS SS SSS SS ae Se SE aay CTS pla Se ee famsh Se eS ee “ON aN OF PRI SS "79 OPERA 7826s BL 51 .W69 1926 Wieman, Henry Nelson, 1884- Religious experience and scientific method “y i ee ae ary : yn gas eel STeL cae ee 7 hte: RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE AND SCIENTIFIC METHOD THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK - BOSTON + CHICAGO + DALLAS ATLANTA + SAN FRANCISCO MACMILLAN & CO., LmitEeD LONDON + BOMBAY * CALCUTTA MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lip. TORONTO RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE AND SCIENTIFIGs#7: AS 7 E? Vv MY METHOD ( | Fee 27 1926 4, < “OLogiont sew By/ Henry NELSON ‘WIEMAN, Pu.D. Professor of Philosophy, Occidental College. New Uork ‘THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1926 All Rights Reserved Copyright, 1926, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1926. Printed in the United States of America by THE FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY, NEW YORK. TO A. M. W. f wy me a yd ‘ PREFACE The general reader who wants to see the practi- cal results of our position and to avoid the more difficult philosophical discussions should read par- ticularly chapters II, IV, VIII, and IX. These have more of what is called ‘human interest.”’ Chapters III, VII, X, XI are a little more rigorous. The student and expert, on the other hand, who desire to get the constructive body of the work and test its intellectual accuracy should read particularly chapters I, III, V, VI and XIII. The chief purpose of this book is to show that religious experience is experience of an object, how- ever undefined, which is as truly external to the in- dividual as is any tree or stone he may experience. It signifies something which extends beyond that space-time occupied by the individual undergoing the experience. I am very sure that religion must plant itself firmly on the data of sense else it will become the plaything of the sentimentalist and nothing more. If the object of religious devotion is more pecu- liarly “‘within”’ than are the objects of scientific in- vestigation, if it is any more a creature of the hu- man mind than are they, then it will be treated very tenderly, as Santa Claus is treated, being an illusion cherished by children, by the weak spirited and 5 6 PREFACE other such who are unable to deal with things as they are. But the strong and intellectually alert will have nothing to do with it. Religion will continue to lose, as it has already lost, intellectual standing. And just as far as it loses intellectual standing it will be given over to sentimental gush and serve its chief purpose in providing a means for self deception to those who want to play the ostrich. It would be presumptuous to call this work a philosophy of religion, but it is a first step in that direction. There is a reciprocal relation between science and religion which I try to trace in parts one and two, intending to show that neither can maintain itself in adequate manner without the ot er. In part three I endeavor to clear away from the face of religion what I believe to be certain pres- ent-day misinterpretations of it and to state my own view of its function in human living. Among teachers to whom I owe much, first men- tion must be made of Professor Wm. Ernest Hock- ing. How far I may have departed from his teaching I do not know, but I do know that I have taken heavily from him. For introduction to the spirit of scientific method, and enthusiastic appre- ciation of it, I owe most to Professor Ralph Bar- ton Perry. The influence of the writings of Pro- fessor John Dewey will be apparent throughout the following pages. For most recent encourage- ment in bringing the present work to publication I want to thank Dean Shailer Mathews, Professor John A. MacIntosh and Reverend Hugh Kerr. Of PREFACE 7 course none of the persons mentioned can be held responsible for the views here presented. While for the most part the material here pub- lished is new, portions of it have appeared in the Journal of Religion, the Journal of Philosophy and the International Journal of Ethics. Ac- knowledgment is here made to the editors of these journals for the use of this material. In chapter VIII I have made quite extensive quo- tations from the World Tomorrow and the Atlan- tic Monthly. I want to thank these journals for the permission they have given to borrow from them; and especially to thank Mr. Paul Green for the use of his story ‘“The Devil’s Instrument’ pub- lished in the Atlantic. Chapter XII appeared in the Journal of Religion, Vol. 5, Sept., 1925, under the heading ‘‘Religion in Dewey’s Experience and Nature.” H. N. W. Bags i Serinp STN AG ts Poe nes ‘i rar ht A Lee + Se ie “y : INTRODUCTION Whatever else the word God may mean, it is a term used to designate that Something upon which human life is most dependent for its security, wel- fare and increasing abundance. That there is such a Something cannot be doubted. The mere fact that human life happens, and continues to happen, proves that this Something, however unknown, does certainly exist. Of course one can say that there are innumer- able conditions which converge to sustain human life, and that is doubtless the fact. But in that case either one of two things is true. Either the uni- verse is a single individual organic unity, in which case it is the whole indivisible universe that has brought forth and now sustains human life; or else certain of these sustaining conditions are more criti- cally, ultimately and constantly important for human welfare than are others. According to the first view God would be, or involve, the whole universe; according to the second he would be those most important conditions which, taken collec- tively, constitute the Something which must have supreme value for all human living. The word God, taken with its very minimum meaning, is the name for this Something of supreme value. God may be much more than this, but he is certainly this by definition. In this sense, with this minimum 9 10 INTRODUCTION meaning, God cannot be denied. His existence is absolutely certain. He is simply that which is supremely significant in all the universe for human living, however known or unknown he may be. Of course this statement concerning God proves nothing about his character, except that he is the most beneficent object in the universe for human beings. He is certainly the object of supreme value. Nothing is implied by this definition concerning personality in God; but neither is personality de- nied. In fact, personality is by no means a clear and simple term. But two things are made certain: his existence and the supremacy of his value over all others, if we measure value in terms of human need. But such abstract reasoning concerning God ac- complishes little save to clear the ground, remove misunderstanding and prejudice and open the way for the more vital problem. We believe nothing is more important at the present stage of human thought than to define God in terms of concrete experience. Failure to do this has led some of the finest scientific thinkers of our time to regard religion as superstition and nothing else. E. Rignano is typical of such thinkers and such an attitude. After tracing the many attempts that have been made to define and demonstrate God and the immortality of the soul by means of “metaphysical reasoning,’’ and finding all these attempts futile, being nothing but “‘defense reac- tions’’ by which men try to make themselves think the world to be as they would like to have it, and concealing the nonsense in all their intellectual con- INTRODUCTION 11 structions by means of the vagueness and obscurity of their thought, he goes on to say: These mystical minds—which will always exist —will always continue to try to realize and sys- tematize their aspirations and their dreams in transcendent constructions, ever new, ever differ- ent, ever vain; pale reflections of the great systems of the past, the last gleams of a great human illu- sion that has vanished. And these metaphysical speculations, old and new, will in their entirety constitute a great epic handing down to posterity the exploits of the tragic revolt, worthy of Pro- metheus, which the infinitely small microcosm has dared and will dare again to attempt against the infinitely great macrocosm.? He contrasts with this ‘‘metaphysical,’’ theo- logical and ‘“‘mystical’’ reasoning the intellectual work of the positivist and scientist who goes to experience for the truth and whose thinking con- sists altogether of experimentation; who discovers the truth partly by actually carrying out experi- ments on nature by physical manipulation, but even more by combining in imagination innumer- able physical experiments that can only be com- bined in such great numbers by imagination and thus be made to reveal new facts otherwise never to be discovered. This classification, multiplica- tion, and unique combination of experimental oper- ations in thought by means of concepts is the great- est achievement of the intellect, the only means by which truth can be brought to light, and the only 1The Psychology of Reasoning, p. 261. 12 INTRODUCTION way in which human aspirations can be rendered effective in this world or wrought into the body of existence. In all these claims which Rignano makes for scientific thought, we believe he is correct. When he points out the error of those who turn away from experience to find God by metaphysical spec- ulation, we believe he is rendering religion a serv- ice. Metaphysics in the sense of that reasoning which adjures experience and the conclusions of scientific thought, is futile, as Rignano says. Furthermore, we agree with him in his condem- nation of mysticism, if mysticism is used in the sense in which he uses it. Perhaps his use of the word is the only legitimate use; but we believe our usage is justified. However, if it is not, our thought must be tested by its actual content and not by the fact that we have given an unconventional meaning to the word. To clarify our usage of mysticism and distin- guish it from other meanings attached to it, let us consider how Rignano applies the word. He uses it in two slightly different senses. In the first place he means by mysticism the rev- erence or emotional glow which may attach itself to certain words or phrases when these have lost all intellectual significance. When a word or other symbol has ceased to signify any fact of experience whatsoever, and precisely because it does not sig- nify anything which will contradict or render foolish and unwarranted the enthusiasm which attaches to it, as a mere word without intelligible INTRODUCTION 13 meaning, it stirs the mystic to emotional raptures. In other words, by mysticism Rignano means sen- timentality. “Certain terms thus become in time pure sounds, no longer evoking intellectual rep- resentations, but only emotions; and not certain particular emotions relating to a well-determined object, but ‘general emotions,’ similar to those aroused by a ‘series of musical notes in the minor mode,’ ’”? Now there is no question but that this kind of “mysticism’’ does occur. There are people who maintain such an attitude toward certain intellec- tually meaningless symbols, and the value of the symbol can be preserved for them only by keeping it intellectually meaningless. If one wishes to call this mysticism, of course he can. It is a legitimate use of the word. But it is not the sense in which we shall use the word. There is a second sense in which Rignano uses mysticism, closely allied to the first. It is the belief that back of the world of sense there is some ‘‘nou- menal reality’’ inaccessible to experience, but never- theless existent. “‘....any act of mysticism does just consist in admitting the existence of something mysterious which is not capable either of coming under the observation of any of our senses or of being imagined by means of sensible elements com- bined together in any fashion.’’ It is interesting to note that he accuses mathema- ticians, many and prominent, of being mystic in this sense. Such mysticism rises among mathema- 2 loc. cit. p. 256, 8 loc, cit. p. 185. 14 INTRODUCTION ticians when they begin to use mathematical sym- bols which refer to such infinities of complex operations that they lose the connection between these symbols and the empirical operations signi- fied. Consequently, when they operate with the symbols to produce results which are mathemati- cally correct and yet seem to have no existence in the world of experience because they have lost the reference these symbols have to empirical opera- tions, they think they are dealing with some tran- scendental reality. To demonstrate the error of this view Rignano very acutely traces the higher branches of mathematics showing how they refer, directly or indirectly, but always ultimately, to the world of experience.* Here again we have a kind of “‘mysticism’’ that does certainly occur. There are many people who feel that they are leaping into a transcendental sphere beyond the reach of all experience when they operate with symbols which, so far as they can see, do not refer to anything in experience. We agree with Rignano in claiming that when we deal with such symbols either one of two things is true. Either the symbols do refer to facts of experience which we fail to discern, or else they refer to noth- ing at all and hence are meaningless. In neither case do they introduce us to the transcendental. Of course a symbol may refer to experience in a very indirect fashion, by referring to other symbols and these to others and so on. But if the ultimate object 4 Our own Cassius Keyser would doubtless come under the head of such mystics. See his Human Worth of Rigorous Thinking. Also Spaulding with his New Rationalism. INTRODUCTION 15 of reference be not some phase of experience, then this mutual reference of symbols to one another merely serves (if it serves any good at all) to de- fine and distinguish the symbols from one another, so that they can be used more effectively in desig- nating some object of experience. But the only ob- jects we can know are the objects of experience. We trust that our use of the word mysticism will not be confused with either of these meanings which have so frequently been attached to it. By mysticism we mean a certain way of experiencing the world of empirical fact, and nothing more. It is the sort of experience described by William James, for instance, in his essay on ‘‘A Certain Blindness in Human Beings,’’ quotations from which will be found in chapter III following. There are times when men, with a partial sus- pension of thought processes, become aquiver with the vast fullness of sensuous experience that rains down upon them. This is the mystic state. It may be brought on by symbols and in many other dif- ferent ways. But it is not a thinking state: it is merely a form of immediate experience. It cannot yield knowledge until it is correctly interpreted. Its true meaning must be brought to light by in- tellectual operations which are not mystical. In the mystic state one does not think, he does not cog- nize, he is simply immediately aware—of what? Of the fullness of some concrete experience. Since mysticism is not a thinking state, the definition and description of the religious object, God, can- not be the work of mysticism, although mysticism 16 INTRODUCTION may supply the datum through which intellect may discover God. NOTE: The reader who wishes to omit the more theorctical portions and read only the parts of general interest should pass over chapter I and read chapters II, IV, VIII and IX. INTRODUCTION CHAPTER i. II. III. IV. THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF RELIGION CONTENTS se oe Tel woe See Sere ie. eos 6 Oe, 8 a) 'e) 2 8 el ee. © PART I WHY RELIGION NEEDS SCIENCE SCIENCE AND OUR KNOWLEDGE OF GOD..... SCIENCE THE CORRECTIVE OF RELIGION.....- THOUGHT AND WORSHIP CHRISTIANITY AND LOVE of aie w O10) ei eye) ay 61 Bie cel oi ne PART II WHY SCIENCE NEEDS RELIGION THE TWO SIDES OF LIFE SCIENTIFIC METHOD AWARENESS AND SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY..... REBIRTH AND AUTO-SUGGESTION CHRISTIANITY AND SCIENTIFIC MORALITY ... Rg a ay OS lst [oh Ow. Be “Oye ee), le 6 & ee @. 8,5) Beh) Cee) 6 PART II RELIGION AND IDEALS CHRISTIANITY AND PSYCHOLOGY RELIGION AND REFLECTIVE THINKING THE EMERGENCE OF RELIGION 17 i We Ong de SB ey a ove we aro 10 0) eal 6 ghee ta PAGE 21 48 65 86 119 160 189 215 236 ar rer rd a iha { PART! WHY RELIGION NEEDS SCIENCE qt) r WAT a Sh, hit tia i Religious Experience and Scientific Method CHAPTER I SCIENCE AND OUR KNOWLEDGE OF GOD Two views have been held concerning the way we know God. One has asserted that we must know God just as we know any other object; that there are no other powers or faculties of knowledge except those by which we know ordinary objects; and that we must know God as we know trees and houses and men or else not know Him at all. The other view has tried to show that knowledge of God is a special kind of knowledge; that there is a certain feeling, inner sense, eye of the soul, in- stinct, or intuition, faith, spiritual organ, moral will, or what not, which has God as its special object; that trees, houses and men may be known through interpretation of the data of sense that God is discerned in this special and peculiar manner. ~ Now there are two senses in which one may refer to feeling, intuition, faith, moral will, etc., as means to knowing God. By these terms one may mean merely to designate certain distinctive kinds of ex- perience which provide the data that may lead to the knowledge of God if correctly interpreted. If 21 22 RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE that is all that is meant, then the assertion amounts to the first of the two above mentioned views. If that is what is meant, we know God as we know any other object, for that is the manner of all knowledge. But if faith, feeling, intuition, and moral will are represented as giving us an immedi- ate kind of knowledge in which there is no need for the analysis and interpretation of immediate experience by means of concepts, then the assertion amounts to the second of the two above mentioned views. Then the claim is that a certain kind of immediate experience gives us knowledge without the intervention of any further intellectual proc- esses. | This second view we hold to be false. We be- lieve it erroneous, in the first place, because it identifies knowledge with immediate experience. Immediate experience never yields knowledge, although it is one indispensable ingredient in knowledge inasmuch as it provides the data from which knowledge may be derived. We hold this view wrong, furthermore, because it resorts to a peculiar and mysterious faculty, as though every special kind of object must have a special kind of faculty for discerning it. “These mysterious facul- ties of discernment have long since been regarded as mythical by psychology and epistemology so far as all ordinary cognition is concerned. To cling still to such a view with respect to discernment of God is to put the knowledge of God outside the field of scientific knowledge, where it can be neither examined or tested. Such a position is fatal to AND SCIENTIFIC METHOD fie, religion. It means that knowledge of God will be calmly ignored by all those who are interested in scientific thought. As a matter of fact, we believe it is precisely because this view has prevailed that knowledge of God has been so widely ignored in scientific circles. And by scientific circles we mean scientifically inclined philosophers, and all who are dominated by the scientific method, whether they be professional scientists or not. All knowledge must depend ultimately upon science, for science is nothing else than the refined process of knowing. Scientific method is simply the method of knowing. We call it scientific only because it has been deliberately developed for the purpose of guarding against error. All knowledge is scientific except in so far as it has not developed a method for discriminating accurately between the false and the true. Ordinary knowledge is dis- tinguished from the scientific only because of its © vagueness and its undetected fancies and illusions. The knowledge of God must be ultimately sub- jected to scientific method. We say ultimately rather than immediately because, as we shall see later, science has not yet developed a method ade- quate to deal with the more complex data of ex- perience. Physics became a science long before psychology because its data were so much more simple. Sociology has scarcely yet attained the status of a science because its data are so complex. The datum of religious experience is so exceedingly complex that no method has yet been devised which is fit to treat it scientifically. But we are working 24 RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE in that direction. In the meantime men can have acquaintance with God without accurate knowl- edge of Him, just as men could have acquaintance with matter long before there was any science of physics to give them scientific knowledge of it; just as men had acquaintance with food long before there was any scientific knowledge of the nature of food. Our knowledge of matter and life and mind is more or less scientific. Our knowledge of society is becoming scientific. We do not yet have any knowledge of God that can be called scientific. But for centuries our knowledge of the object of religious experience has been growing more scien- tific. But before we can consider adequately the rela- tion between science and our knowledge of God we must get as clear an idea as possible of the nature of cognition. * Jmmediate experience, we have said, does not necessarily yield knowledge at all; much less does it necessarily yield true knowledge. Our hand may brush a table in the dark and yet we do not know it. We may not interpret the experience at all. We may not know that our hand has touched any- thing, our mind being turned to other things. We have had a genuine experience of the table, an ex- perience, however, in which there is no cognition or knowledge. The same, of course, applies to vis- ual sense data or any other sensation or combina- tion of sensations. The image of the table may fall upon the retina of my eye and I be unaware of it or interpret it wrongly, thinking it to be a shadow. AND SCIENTIFIC METHOD 25 While immediate experience is not identical with knowledge and does not necessarily yield knowl- edge, yet our knowledge of the concrete external world, including other minds, is derived from im- mediate experience. We know an object when we are able to designate certain sense qualities having a certain order in time and space. When we experi- ence one or more of these sense qualities in certain temporal and spatial relations to other sense quali- ties, we are able to infer that the object before us is of a certain sort, a table or chair or what not. We test this inference by exposing ourselves to fur- ther sense qualities. If these further sense qualities are of the sort that properly pertain to the inferred object occurring in that order in space and time which is proper to the object in question, we know that our inference was correct. Our knowledge is then fairly certain. All the elaborate tests of scien- tific investigation depend ultimately upon this cor- roboration of inference by means of sense data. Of course the situation may be so familiar that we infer instantly from a bit of given experience what the object is, and do so with a high degree of certainty. We want to make a distinction between knowl- edge by acquaintance and knowledge by descrip- tion, but not using these terms in exactly the same sense as William James, who coined the phrases. Knowledge by acquaintance, according to our usage, is of that which has been experienced by some one, or presumptively could be if the right kind of or- ganism could be placed in the right situation. Knowledge by description, on the other hand, is of 26 RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE that which could not be experienced by any organ- ism or mind whatsoever, because it does not refer to any of the data of experience. Mathematical points and lines are such objects of knowledge. They do not belong to the realm of experience at all, although they may be related to experience by means of what Whitehead calls ‘‘extensive abstrac- tion.” All geometrical, mathematical and purely logical entities are outside the realm of experience. Our knowledge of them consists of concepts which refer to other concepts and not to any data of ex- perience. All number is of this sort, number being no object or group of objects which can be expe- rienced, but being a “‘class of classes,’’ according to Bertrand Russell. Now in both these two kinds of knowledge, that of acquaintance and that of description, knowledge requires a whole system of concepts. An isolated proposition does not yield knowledge any more than an isolated datum of experience. But the difference between the two is that in descrip- tion the single concept refers to a system of concepts and nothing more; while in knowledge by ac- quaintance the system of concepts which are thus brought into play serve to designate certain data of experience. In accurate scientific knowledge this system of concepts serves to define the order in space-time in which certain data of experience must occur in order to constitute a certain object. Scien- tific knowledge consists in designating this order of experience plus, generally, certain hypothetical entities which are required to fill out the fragmen- AND SCIENTIFIC METHOD 27 tary experience. But in purely descriptive knowl- edge there are no such data of experience. In purely descriptive knowledge there are no hypothetical entities to fill out the ragged edges of experience, because no experience enters into the object of such knowledge. Such knowledge is simply the inter- locking of a perfectly consistent system of concepts without regard to any experience whatsoever. Any perfectly consistent set of propositions which have been built up without regard to any particular ex- perience, would be knowledge by description. Some would say that such consistency could not yield knowledge of anything save of the necessary logical requirements of thinking. Now this distinction between these two kinds of knowledge has a very direct bearing upon knowl- edge of God. It raises one of the most important questions that bear upon this matter. Is our knowl- edge of God knowledge by acquaintance, or is it purely descriptive? Is God an object that enters into our immediate awareness, or is He only an object of speculation, known only through the logical consistency of propositions, which must be the form of all accurate knowledge, but known through a logical consistency which does not de- fine any object entering our immediate awareness? Is he an object of possible experience, or is He purely a system of concepts?