20 UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO STUDIES 



men are writing on these same eternal subjects without faihng to choose 

 appropriate garb therefor, so that we are driven to the provocative state- 

 ment that our author treats the themes with greater power than most of 

 his contemporaries and makes the appropriate garb more beautiful. 

 In the nature of things, it is impossible to justify such a statement by 

 fragmentary excerpts and curtailed arguments; but we should be thor- 

 oughly surprised if many intelligent readers should rise from a perusal of 

 Mr. Dickinson's works with any strong dissent from the judgment we 

 have submitted. 



Recognizing freely this impossibility, we must still face the duty of 

 giving at least an adumbration of our author's position with reference to 

 some of the central themes of Ufe, and we may as well fail on rehgion as 

 on any other subject. His attitude, then, in marred and imperfect form, 

 is about this : 



I. Religious truth is attainable, if at all, only by the method of science. 

 There is no " revelation " in the accepted usage of the term. 



II. Religion is a "reaction of the imagination upon the world as we 

 conceive it in the light at once of truth and of the ideal," which amounts 

 to saying that religion is a certain attitude toward hfe, wilHng to recog- 

 nize the helpfulness of ideas not based on definitely ascertained truth. 



III. If this definition is too wide, we should consider that there is 

 something between hope and faith, but nearer to the latter and called by 

 its name — an attitude of "active expectancy, the attitude of a man who, 

 while candidly recognizing that he does not know, and faithfully pur- 

 suing or awaiting knowledge, and ready to accept it when it comes, yet 

 centers meantime his emotional and therefore his practical life about a 

 possibiUty which he selects because of its value or its desirabihty." In 

 other words, for practically all men there must be a "vohtional assump- 

 tion," not based upon knowledge, as to the worth- whileness of existence, 

 if life is to be most noble and most fruitful. 



The objections to such a view were too manifest to escape our thinker, 

 and he has stated them fairly, thereby relieving us from enlarging upon 

 them; and we may merely point out that this is the faith, not of an 

 ecclesiastic, but of a platonizing philosopher. And yet, with the more 

 recent work of our author before him, Mr. Gilbert Chesterton could not 



