FOR A CHRISTIAN PHILOSOPHY. 



61 



if we regard this as cognitive at all) have rational implications 

 behind them. Experience, it may be said, does as a matter of fact 

 convey no knowledge without the co-operation of reason. True 

 enough, but that is not the question. Granted that the two 

 cannot be separated, does it follow that they stand related to each 

 other as form does to matter ? May not reason live at the very 

 heart of experience ? May it not be the child of experience, 

 and may not its highest task be, not to construct its own 

 systems out of experience in its rawest forms, but to draw out 

 the implications of experience in its richest forms ? Personally 

 I am convinced that this is the sound method, and the only 

 possible method whereby a genuine philosophy of Christianity 

 can be formed. It rests on the great intuitionalist principle 

 which I may thus formulate : Experience is as such interncdly 

 significant. In other words, it is not to be identified with feeling 

 or sensation, but includes entire rational systems in their aspect 

 as the creation of spiritual instincts and as answering to vital 

 needs. Intuitionalism is not always as bold as this. It may be 

 hard and narrow, tied down to so-called common sense Kealism, 

 but it may also be mystical, comprehensive, and spiritual. In 

 this latter aspect, I contend, it is the theory of knowledge which 

 must belong to any true Christian philosophy that shall arise. 



The spiritual instinct, the sense of the Divine presence, the 

 feeling after a deeper and fuller life, are now beginning to 

 receive more of their due. Yet still we generally find, as I 

 think, a conspicuous failure to do justice to the full significance 

 of the higher consciousness as a plane of actual knowledge and 

 organizing centre of thought. And one reason is that though 

 our intuitions are introduced to balance reason, or to fructify it, 

 or to give it more adequate material for its inferences, yet 

 modern philosophy still fails to appreciate the inherent rationality 

 of intuition itself. To go back to the Kantian era, Schleiermacher, 

 the great champion of the emotional claims of religion, in 

 contradistinction to the prevailing Eationalism, is like Kant in 

 his de-rationalizing of intuition. Eeligion he regarded as feeling, 

 in a narrow and exclusive sense, not, of course, in isolation from 

 knowledge and morality, but as, in itself , non-intellectual. And 

 so with modern Empiricism. Even the late Professor James, 

 for instance, though he certainly defends the validity for 

 knowledge of special religious experiences, defends them 

 essentially in their individual character, as our own impressions 

 then and there, of a spiritual world. In fact, the more we use 

 them as a basis for definite beliefs, the more individual and 

 unauthorized — however interesting in their way — they become. 



