264 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 



analogy of the general experience of humanity. The great hindrance 

 to the progress of the knowledge of religion was the accepted posi- 

 tion that the truth of the ecclesiastical doctrines was beyond human 

 reason and outside of human examination, since their truth rested 

 upon an immediate divine revelation. Whether this supernatural 

 authority was ascribed to the Church or the Bible makes very little 

 difference, for in either case the assumption of such an authority 

 is a hindrance to the free examination of that which claims to be the 

 divine revealed truth. 



But is this assumption really justifiable in the nature of the case? 

 Do the doctrines of the Church rest upon a supernatural divine 

 revelation? So soon as this question was really earnestly considered, 

 and the thinking mind could not always avoid the consideration, 

 then there was revealed the 'inadequacy of the assumption. Two 

 ways of examination led to a common critical result, the philosophical 

 analysis of the religious consciousness and the historical comparison 

 of various religions. The first to enter upon these ways and at the 

 same time to become the founder of the modern science of religion 

 was the keen Scotch thinker David Hume. Truly the thought of 

 Hume was still a one-sided, disorganizing skepticism; even as his 

 theory of knowledge disturbed the truth of all our previous common- 

 sense opinions and conceptions, so also his philosophy of religion 

 sought to demonstrate that all religion cannot be proved and is full 

 of doubt, and that the origin of religion was neither to be found in 

 divine revelation nor in the reason of man, but in the passions of 

 the heart and in the illusions of imagination. As unsatisfactory as 

 this result was, nevertheless it gave an important advance to the 

 rational study of religion in two directions, in that of religion being 

 an experience of the inner life of the soul and in that of religion 

 being a fact of human history. 



Kant added the positive criticism of reason to the negative skep- 

 ticism of Hume; that is, Kant showed that the human intellect 

 moved independently in the formation of theoretical and practical 

 judgments, and that the various materials of thought, desire, and 

 feelings were regulated by the intellect according to innate original 

 ideas of the true and good and beautiful. Thus as a natural result 

 there came the conception that the doctrines of belief arose not as 

 complete truths, given by divine revelation, but, like every other 

 form of conscious knowledge, these came to us through the activity 

 of our own mind, and that therefore these doctrines cannot be re- 

 garded as of absolute authority for all time, but that we are to seek 

 to understand their origin in historical and psychical motives. So 

 far as one looked at the ceremonial forms of positive religion, these 

 motives indeed were found according to Kant in irrational concep- 

 tions, but as far as the essence of religion was concerned they were 



