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IDEALISTIC AND PRAGMATIC INTERPRETA-
TIONS OF RELIGION
CLARENCE H. HAMILTON
University of Nanking, China
Historically idealism has been of religious significance in
two ways. First, by its teaching that all existence is essentially
a being known by some mind, it has maintained the ultimate
spiritual character of the universe and sought to make, man
feel at home in his environment. Secondly, by its doctrine of
the Absolute, the Infinite Bearer of all Experience, the Ultimate
Solver of all Problems, the Absolute Mind that looks before
and after and knows the infinite time-span in one completed
whole of thought, it has developed a majestic conception that
seems to be a logical elaboration of religion's vision of the God
of the universe. With these conceptions it has undertaken, as
one writer puts it, "to substantiate the extreme claims of
faith — the creation of matter by spirit, the indestructible
significance of every human person, and the unlimited suprem-
acy of goodness." 1 It has specifically declared its fundamental
interest in religion and its faith that by means of idealistic
categories it has explicated the inner meaning of Christianity.
Its pages abound with the language of inspiration. It speaks
much of the infinite and the eternal, the fair perfection of the
whole to which our temporal finite eyes are dim; and it pro-
claims in arguments of endless variety that things are not
what they seem.
It is possible to sympathize with the aim of idealism to
bring courage, hope, and inspiration without agreeing with the
method by which it seeks to arouse these attitudes. As a
1 Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies, p. 164.
616
IDEALISTIC INTERPRETATION OF RELIGION 617
matter of fact it has developed through several generations of
minds with an outcome such as to lead to serious doubt whether
the result arrived at is that which was originally intended.
One is led to ask, in the first place: Does the notion that
the physical universe is ultimately spiritual because it is a
system of known objects really help us religiously? No one
urges more vigorously than Royce that the world of ideas is
just as obdurate and unyielding as the world of physical
nature conceived by the materialist. It is still there as a
stern fact. We may call it a system of ideas in the mind of
the Absolute. But the attitude logically called forth by such
a eulogistic view is simply that of humble resignation. The
suggestion is that the core of the religious spirit is essentially
humility, adoration, worship, the acceptance of things as they
are. It is significant that it is the worship element of religious
experience for which men like Josiah Royce, William Ernest
Hocking, and George Plimpton Adams seem most solicitous.
The non-pragmatic participation in what is already there is
the note that is sounded. Despite all appearances to the
contrary our world is through and through spiritual.
Now it is not to be denied that the attitude of acceptance,
acquiescence, adoration has played a great part in the older
religious conceptions. Especially was it cherished by the
western world in the Middle Ages. But it is a fact that the
indubitable progress of science has introduced the concept of
control. It has now become a question whether religion can
remain essentially a worship function. Room must somehow
be made to recognize that change and control of the environ-
ment, amelioration of its conditions, are actual achievements.
It is difficult to see how we can rest content with simply
proclaiming that the world is idea and therefore to be accepted
as it stands.
With reference to the Absolute as maintained by the older
idealists the objections are many. As simply a knower it
is too intellectualistic. Its timelessness disagrees with its
618 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION
immanence, for, as timeless, it transcends finite struggle.
Its all-inclusiveness makes mere appearance out of evil, for evil
must somehow have its place in the Absolute's view of the
timeless whole, and, as having a place, must be somehow good.
As the Ultimate Being in which all problems are solved and
all contradictions resolved it reduces the finite world which is
the nearest concern of struggling, toiling humanity to an
unintelligible puppet-show. Evolution as taking place in
time becomes mere appearance.
But it is not necessary to dwell on the standard refutations
of standard idealism. The question is: Do the more recent
protagonists of idealism develop from it conceptions which are
more congruous with the categories which the development of
modern life are thrusting upon us ?
Adams in Idealism and the Modem Age shows clearly that
he recognizes where the issue lies. Again and again he
reiterates that whereas Platonism, Christianity, and Idealism
have stood for attachment to ideal structures which call for
recognition, knowledge, and love, the modern age emphasizes
control, mastery, activity, the progressive remolding of
circumstances in the interests of democracy. It is significant
that Adams indulges but little in phrases drawn from the older
idealism. One finds no talk of a monistic Absolute but rather
of the pluralistic "significant structures." No space is taken
up with proving that the physical universe is the expression of
an Infinite Cognitive Consciousness. Rather the word idealism
seems to be taken in the more familiar sense of devotion to
ideals. It is the great system of ideals developed in any age,
whether ancient or modern that calls forth the attitude of
loyalty — a more secular expression, perhaps, for the attitude
of religious devotion. Loyalty, reverence, contemplation,
these are the ethical and religious values of idealism which
Adams is concerned to conserve without holding too much to
the trappings in which they have been traditionally enveloped.
IDEALISTIC INTERPRETATION OF RELIGION 619
Ultimately his position resolves to this: There are some things
in the universe which man himself does not make but which
he appreciates and accepts. These are the ideal structures of
his age. To these he gives his loyalty. We cannot accept as
final either the idea systems of a past age nor those of our own
age. But the idea systems of all ages imply one underlying
system which may be envisaged as the good. This last rather
vague and abstract conception is apparently Adams' equiv-
alent for the Absolute, though he does not use the term.
While Adams clearly recognizes the modern activistic trend
and avoids the conceptions that have latterly involved idealism
in much criticism, he is still evidently hampered by the tend-
ency to center religion in the act of worship. He deplores the
fact that "our age estimates religion in accordance with the
presupposition that nothing can be significant for the modern
man except that which contributes to his forward-looking
interest in control, organization, and activity; in behaviour
and the anticipation of behaviour." He thinks that our
modern "practical religion" witnesses to "the success with
which the biological and economic (capitalistic) interest of
men in instrumental power and pragmatic mastery have all
but eaten their way into the very citadel of that interest which
historically has been the spokesman for possession and con-
templation, for the love and worship of some significant
structure which alone makes any activity and any mastery
worth while." But do not Mr. Adams' very words indicate
that the far development of new conceptions calls for a recon-
struction which he finds it impossible to make on the basis of
his idealism and his interpretation of religion? May it not
be that this enemy which he finds storming the citadel is an
enemy only of the limitations of idealistic presupposition and
that after all it is a champion of a larger and fuller religious
life for man. How far can we develop a conception of religion
that holds to the values of worship and possession but which
620 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION
widens its scope to include those of activity and progressive
melioration? To get some light on this question we must
consider the philosophy of pragmatism.
II
With reference to pragmatism the complaint is usually made
that it is many and not one. It must be confessed that there is
a considerable variety among the applications and results of
the various writers in the field. The collaborators in the
volume on Creative Intelligence are careful to abjure any
platform of planks on which the movement stands, modestly
content to indicate that the probable common characteristics
of all of them are the "ideas of the genuineness of the future,
of intelligence as the organ for determining the quality of the
future so far as it can come within human control, and of a
courageously inventive individual as the bearer of a creatively
employed mind." 1 But it is not necessary to canvass the
entire circle of pragmatic writers to consider the significance
of the method for religion. There are two great recognized
leaders in America, William James and John Dewey, and it
will be convenient to limit attention to these.
For both James and Dewey intellectual activity is
essentially a function of will; experience is fundamentally a
striving; and thinking is an instrument in the furtherance of
the process. Ideas are not true in themselves but only in so
far forth as they contribute to the progressive enrichment of
experience. They are significant only if they work, to use the
more popular expression. Ideas are first projected as hypoth-
eses and then tested by their actual ability to lead to further
significant experience. Along with this instrumental con-
ception of intellect goes the faith that the world is such that
it can be transformed and that intelligence can do the trans-
forming. Because this view stresses life and striving it is
called biocentric; because it believes in progressive adaptation
1 Prefatory note, p. iii.
IDEALISTIC INTERPRETATION OF RELIGION 621
and transformation it is evolutionistic; because it rests upon
experience it is empirical; because it believes the whole
process can be one of making things better and more suited to
human welfare it is melioristic and humanistic.
Of our two writers James is the more concerned to make the
specific application to religion. He finds religious faith to be
one aspect or expression of the faith function which is every-
where present in all forms of knowing. Among other things
which experience presses upon us is the necessity for some kind
of attitude toward the universe as a whole. Here is a forced
option. Our attitude may be one of theistic belief or not.
Agnosticism here leads pragmatically to the same result as
atheism and so need not be considered an alternative. Here
religious faith is entirely rational and one may have the right
to act upon it and help make it true by working to establish
the supremacy of the good. Another faith which we may
hold as a definite working hypothesis is what James calls
indeterminism. It is as allowable, James maintains, to
believe that the world is pluralistic and amenable to shift and
change and manipulation among the variously grouped parts,
as it is to believe that it is monistic, whether taken spiritual-
istically or materialistically. Upon this view the mood of
sheer acceptance and resignation is out of place. One is
called upon rather to be up and doing, to bring about organiza-
tion within experience through one's own choices and through
co-operation with God. James's conception of the universe as
pluralistic in character enables him to emphatically deny that
evil is in any necessary way mixed up with the good. In fact
the idealistic Absolute in which all contradictions are resolved
and all ills given a seemly station seems to him a slander upon
the name of God. Rather he prefers definitely to reject the
omnipotence and infinity of God in order to free him from
responsibility for evil. God is not static in some state of
Olympian bliss but is the great toiler with much work to do,
seeking to eject the evil elements from experience and develop
622 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION
a progressively purer and more ethically satisfactory cosmic
organization. To co-operation in this task is man summoned
by religious faith. The summons is urgent because the issue
may be doubtful without our help. God has not yet won
the victory and we have to face the possibility that he may
not win it. But all the more should we recognize that "there
is but one unconditional commandment, which is that we
should seek incessantly, with fear and trembling, so to vote
and to act as to bring about the very largest total universe of
good which we can see."
These conceptions of the functional validity of religious
faith, of indeterminism, and of a finite God are undeniably
suggestive. They show how the modern-age emphasis upon
volition, control, reconstruction, scientific method, and the
democratic faith that the individual counts even in the largest
concerns, can be taken up as significant factors into the
religious consciousness. But it must be confessed that it is
the suggestiveness of a sketch rather than of a completed
picture. Difficulties occur to one. For example one reason
why religion develops in man is that he tends to seek some
expression for his faith that the universe in its deepest nature
accords with moral aspiration — that values will be conserved.
The conception of God is man's fullest expression of that
assurance. But with James's conception of a finite God the
whole problem breaks out afresh in the cosmic sphere. If
God struggles with his environment after the human fashion,
then what is there to guarantee to Him an ethical character
to the universe which surrounds Him? If another Being is
postulated to meet God's problem then we simply fall into a
hopeless infinite regress. Further, as has been pointed out
by Eugene Lyman {The God of the Modern Age), there is an
ethical unsatisfactoriness about the idea of a finite God. In
the eagerness to avoid ascribing evil to God there is a danger
that we ascribe it to other cosmic forces that are not God, and
IDEALISTIC INTERPRETATION OF RELIGION 623
fail to bear our own responsibility — which, of course, vitiates
the conception from a moral point of view.
When we turn to Professor Dewey we have a thinker who
has wrestled with the central problems of pragmatism and
sought to carry through the conceptions in a complete and
thorough-going fashion. His Essays in Experimental Logic are
perhaps the profoundest attempt to deal with the fundamental
questions of the pragmatic method that have appeared. He
is concerned to describe the actual procedure of the mind in
the solution of problems, and he works out minutely the way
in which difficulties cause the search for hypotheses. Hypoth-
eses are developed in their logical implications to point to further
experience, and further experience in turn is used to verify or
bring about the rejection of hypotheses. One feels behind
Professor Dewey's writings a great wealth of observation of
concrete detail in everyday familiar experiences. He sets
forth with endless patience the way in which we solve piece-
meal our problems, one by one, according to "the situation."
But just because, perhaps, Professor Dewey takes a keen
interest in the variety of concrete situations he seems un-
interested in the larger massive reaction to the universe as a
whole which is involved in the religious attitude. He identifies
this religious reaction, unduly no doubt, with the particular
attempt of idealism to conceive of the universe as a self-
consistent interrelated Whole or Absolute in which all problems
are solved in advance. Apparently this leads him to feel that
religion is only one of the non-intelligent ways of escaping
from the immediate pressure of specific problems. To seek
solutions "in general" is simply to satisfy ourselves with senti-
mentalities, and meanwhile the particular ills of life go uncor-
rected. He has hard words to utter against the purely con-
templative interpretation of intelligence which makes it
simply a beholding eye to view the eternal verities of some
beatific vision instead of setting it to work to make the social
624 THE JOURNAL OF RELIGION
order better. The implication seems to be that the idea of
God is an abstraction which beclouds men's recognition of the
true sources of problems in everyday life. In his own words :
The great scholastic thinkers (i.e., of the Christian theology) taught
that the end of man is to know True Being, that knowledge is con-
templative, that True Being is pure Immaterial Mind, and to know it
is Bliss and Salvation Through this taking over of the concep-
tion of knowledge as contemplative into the dominant religion of Europe,
multitudes were affected who were totally innocent of theoretical
philosophy So deeply engrained was this idea that it prevailed
for centuries after the actual progress of science had demonstrated that
knowledge is power to transform the world, and centuries after the
practice of effective knowledge had adopted the method of experi-
mentation. 1
We recognize the healthy emphasis which Professor Dewey
lays on concrete problems and the active, instrumental char-
acter of intelligence. But with reference to his general
attitude toward religion we raise several questions.
i. Among the various concrete situations which confront
human individuals, are there not some which we recognize as
specifically religious? Despite the fact that we spend most
of our time on limited problems and situations, are there not
circumstances when the problem of a relation to the whole of
things does become specific and urgent ?
2. Because religion and the idea of God have been connected
with idealisms and absolutisms in the past, does that mean they
must always be so, and must be rejected with the discrediting
of these philosophic conceptions ?
3. Is it necessary to read religion always in terms of con-
templation, resignation, mystic estheticism? If God is con-
ceived as the Great Companion in the life of ethical endeavor
does not this hearten humanitarian enterprises instead of
ignore them? It would seem that both Dewey and the
idealists have difficulty because they center religion in the
mood of worship as such instead of in its urge toward wider
and fuller life.
1 Reconstruction in Philosophy, p. 112.
IDEALISTIC INTERPRETATION OF RELIGION 625
4. Do not Professor Dewey's own ideals of humanitarian
ethics, evolutionism, and democracy imply a profounder basis
than he gives ? He presents us with a faith in the power of
intelligence to change the course of events. But the implica-
tions of such a faith is a cosmic ethical tendency which he
does not explicate.
Ill
In conclusion, our study leads us to feel that idealism is
correct in holding to the mood of contemplation and worship
as a significant phase of the religious life, but its difficulty
comes from conceiving this mood as its most important or
even its exclusive aspect. As to pragmatism its emphasis on
volition and activity is profoundly important and calls for
the inclusion of voluntaristic values in religion. But its
religious implications have not been adequately worked out
either in James or Dewey. What is called for is a religion in
which worship is means as well as end, and ameliorative
activity is both an outcome of and an occasion for worship.
