IN THE FORM OF EDUCATION AND RELIGION 7 



Let us endeavor to find, by the well-known road taken by the 

 philosophy of history, the twofold root of all human experience which 

 gives rise to the religious insights which in their first form of exter- 

 nal authority govern human life before the advent of the stage of 

 reflection and individual free thought - - religion before secular 

 education. 



Examine life and human experience as we may, we find our 

 attention drawn to two aspects, or opposite poles, so to speak, of 

 each object presented to us. 



The first aspect includes all that is directly perceivable by the 

 five senses, sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. This is the aspect 

 of immediate existence. 



But experience begins at once to go beyond the immediate aspect 

 and to find that it is a product or effect of outlying causes. We are 

 not satisfied with it as an immediate existence; it now comes to be 

 for us an effect or mediated existence. 



If we call the first aspect an effect, we shall call this second aspect 

 a causal process. 



Each immediate object, whether it be thing or event, is an effect, 

 and beyond it we seek the causes that explain it. The first pole of 

 existence is, therefore, immediate existence, and the second is the 

 causal chain in which the object, whether it be considered as thing 

 or as event, is found. 



Since the causal process contains the explanation of immediate 

 existence, the knowledge which is of most importance is that know- 

 ledge which includes the completest chain of causation. It is the 

 knowledge of primal cause which contains the fullness of explanation. 

 And the mind of the human race has devoted itself chiefly to the 

 question of first cause. 



In this search, as already suggested, it has been the mind of the 

 social whole of a people that has done the thinking rather than the 

 minds of mere individuals. Even the most enlightened individuals 

 and the most original and capable ones have borrowed the main 

 body of their ideas from the religious tradition of their people, and 

 their success in effecting modifications and new features in the ex- 

 isting creed has been due to the cooperation of like-minded contem- 

 poraries which assisted the utterance of the new idea so far as to 

 make it prevail. Again the collisions of peoples settled by war and 

 conquest have brought about new syntheses of religious doctrine, 

 which have resulted in deeper religious insight and more consistent 

 views of the divine nature. 



It has been the long-continued process of pondering on the second 



