The Religious Aspect of Philosophy Author:Josiah Royce Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION ; RELIGION AS A MORAL CODE AND AS A THEORY. Auch beweifl' ich, dass du glaubest, Was so rechter Glaube heisst, Glaubst wohl nich... more »t an Gott den Vater, An den Sohn and heil'gen Geist. Heine. Intending in the following pages to sketch certain philosophic opinions that seem to him to have a religious bearing, the author must begin by stating what he understands to be the nature of religion, and how he conceives philosophy to be related to religion. We speak commonly of religious feelings and of religious beliefs; but we find difficulty in agreeing about what makes either beliefs or feelings religious. A feeling is not religious merely because it is strong, nor yet because it is also morally valuable, nor yet because it is elevated. If the strength and the moral value of a feeling made it religious, patriotism would be religion. If elevation of feeling were enough, all higher artistic emotion would be religious. But such views would seem to most persons very inadequate. As for belief, it is not religious , merely because it is a belief in the supernatural/ Not merely is superstition as such very different from religion, but even a belief in God as the highest of beings need not be a religious belief. If La Place had needed what he called " that hypothesis," the Deity, when introduced into his celestial mechanics, would have been but a mathematical symbol, or a formula like Taylor's theorem, — no true object of religious veneration. On the other hand, Spinoza's impersonal Substance, or the Nirvana of the Buddhists, or any one of many like notions, may have, either as doctrines about the world or as ideals of human conduct, immense religious value. Very much that we associate with religion is therefore non-essential to religion. Yet religio...« less