Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion based on Psychology and History

This volume contains three parts which are related to each other as the three stories of one and the same edifice. The first treats of religion and its origin; the second of Christianity and its essence; the third of Dogma and its nature.


Proceeding thus from the general to the particular, from the elementary forms of religion to its highest form, passing afterwards from religious phenomena to religious doctrines, I have endeavoured to develop a series of connected and progressive views which I do not wish to be regarded as a system, but as the rigid application and the first results of the method of strictly psychological and historical observation that for years I have applied to this species of studies. In no domain is there a greater incoherence of ideas, a sharper conflict of feeling, or data more contradictory or, at all events, more difficult to reconcile. In no other is it more urgent to introduce a little sequence, clearness, harmony. Our century, from the beginning, has had two great passions which still inflame and agitate its closing years. It has driven abreast the twofold worship of the scientific method and of the moral ideal; but, so far from being able to unite them, it has pushed them to a point where they seem to contradict and exclude each other. Every serious soul feels itself to be inwardly divided; it would fain conciliate its most generous aspirations, the two last motives for living and acting that still remain to it. Where but in a renovated conception of religion will this needed reconciliation be found?


No one nowadays underestimates the social importance of the religious question. Philosophers, moralists, politicians, show themselves to be alive to it; they see it dominating all others, whose solution, in the end, it may prevent or decide. But, singular contradiction! the more zeal and the more decision these men manifest in handling the religious question in the social order, the more indifference or impotence they show in solving it for themselves both in their inner and their family life... No one has the right to impose a doctrine or the presumption, surely, to dictate to others how they must direct their thought; but a sincere and persuaded mind may tell how it has directed its own, and may set forth as an experience and a "document" the views at which it has arrived....