The Logic of Religion

ns of a divine presence; in the stirring struggles for human rights they have conceived the conviction that "the voice of the people is the voice of God"; in studying the stars with all the machinery of mathematics and telescopes they have had to exclaim at last, " O God, I am reading thy thoughts after thee!" But those were less critical days, we think; men were then less conscious of the psychology of their own emotional reactions; is it possible for us to look squarely and steadily into this world of fact and discern in it God ? In other words, for the empiricist the question of the existence of God is the question whether there is any intellectually honest way of accepting the emotional reactions of our whole nature at anything like then- face value if we find that the envisaged world of fact has some aspect which, in some of our moods, elicits from deep within us the religious response. For that, from many thoughtful people, in spite of all the concessions which must be made to the scientific or mechanistic interpretation of nature, the world does irresistibly elicit such religious response is unquestionably true. This is not the first time that men have faced their world, denuded of meanings put upon it by religious tradition, and have tried to give an unbiased answer to the question of what, all in all, they find this world to be. Doubtless, therefore, it would be a salutary thing to review the outstanding examples, in previous times, of the very same sort... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.