Lecture II

CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC

Most books on the philosophy of religion try to begin with a
precise definition of what its essence consists of. Some of
these would-be definitions may possibly come before us in later
portions of this course, and I shall not be pedantic enough to
enumerate any of them to you now. Meanwhile the very fact that
they are so many and so different from one another is enough to
prove that the word "religion" cannot stand for any single
principle or essence, but is rather a collective name. The
theorizing mind tends always to the oversimplification of its
materials. This is the root of all that absolutism and one-sided
dogmatism by which both philosophy and religion have been
infested. Let us not fall immediately into a one-sided view of
our subject, but let us rather admit freely at the outset that we
may very likely find no one essence, but many characters which
may alternately be equally important to religion. If we should
inquire for the essence of "government," for example, one man
might tell us it was authority, another submission, an other
police, another an army, another an assembly, an other a system
of laws; yet all the while it would be true that no concrete
government can exist without all these things, one of which is
more important at one moment and others at another. The man who
knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself
least about a definition which shall give their essence.
Enjoying an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities
in turn, he would naturally regard an abstract conception in