But if it means an exclusion of the supersensuous sources of knowledge
or the denial of the existence of absolute values as the source of our
relative and subjective understanding, then it strikes at the heart
of religion. Because the religious life is built on those factors of
experience that lie above the strictly rational realm of consciousness
just as the pagan view rests on primitive instincts that lie beneath
it. Of course, in asserting the importance of these "supersensuous"
values the religionist does not mean that they are beyond the reach
of human appraisal or unrelated by their nature to the rest of our
understanding. By the intuitive he does not mean the uncritical nor by
the supersensuous the supernatural in the old and discredited sense of
an arbitrary and miraculous revelation. Mysticism is not superstition,
nor are the insights of the poet the whimsies of the mere
impressionist. But he insists that the humanist, in his ordinary
definition of experience, ignores or denies these superrational
values. In opposition to him he rests his faith on that definition of
experience which underlies Aristotle's statement that "the intellect
is dependent upon intuition for knowledge both of what is below and
what is above itself."

Now it is this first set of factors which are the more important.
For the cause, as distinguished from the occasions, of our present
religious scale of values is, like all major causes, not practical but
ideal, and its roots are found far beneath the soil of the present
in the beginnings of the modern age in the fourteenth century. It was
then that our world was born; it is of the essence of that world that
it arose out of indifference toward speculative thinking and unfaith
in those concepts regarding the origin and destiny of mankind which
speculative philosophy tried to express and prove.