By President E. Y. Mullins, D.D., L.L. D. Louisville, Kentucky, U. S. A.
Human experience is the one datum of all philosophy, and all science. The experience of the individual and of the race is the grist which is poured into all the scientific and philosophic mills. Hence Christian experience as a distinct form of human experience ought to receive more attention than it has ever received before.
Professor Bowne has emphasized the fact that whatever your philosophy, your experience is the same. You may call things, by any names you wish and it will not affect experience, Christian Science says that all is mind; that a cobble stone, for example, is simply an idea and not a real piece of matter. We will suppose that someone hurls it and it strikes your head and sends you off for relief. Then you have an experience in the realm of the ideal. You have an ideal stone, striking an ideal head, and raising an ideal bump and producing an ideal dizziness and pain, and requiring the application of an ideal liniment, which produces an ideal cure, and affords you an ideal satisfaction and peace of mind. But all this does not in the slightest degree alter the experience itself. And if you were going to rear a philosophic system on the principle deduced from sudden contact of cobble stones with human craniums, you would be compelled to take this concrete human experience to begin with.
JOHN JASPER PHILOSOPHY
Science and philosophy are beginning to recognize the evidential value of Christian experience though they are very slow about it and very reluctant about it even yet, apparently because it is not as obvious to the sense as the facts of the physical world. The world has laughed long at brother John Jasper who contends that the “Sun do move” around the earth because he sees it on one side of his house in the morning and on the other side at night. But we know there is a system and set of motions in the background more comprehensive and wonderful than the rising and setting sun alone can explain. Now to refuse to accept the testimony of Christian experience because it lies in a realm behind sense-experience is to adopt the John Jasper attitude towards truth. Science and philosophy have both been guilty of this to a greater or lesser extent. They have been pursuing the Ptolemaic system of truth with brother Jasper instead of the Copernican with modern astronomy.
RELIGIOUS RADIUM
Nobody now doubts the existence of radium, and yet as one says, it has been “bombarding”, the universe for aeons and under the very nose of science, and yet it was only discovered yesterday and already threatens to revolutionize science. Now religious experience is the radium of the spiritual universe, which needs only discovery to revolutionize any man’s thought as to life and destiny.
Christian experience, the experience of regeneration and conversion, of moral transformation through Christian agencies, has evidential value in several directions.
EXPERIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY
I. It is the supplemental link to complete philosophy. Philosophy is man reaching up towards God. Christian experience is the effect of God reaching down to man.
Philosophy seems always on the point of discovering the secret of the universe, but it never succeeds in doing it. We thought awhile ago that idealism had come to the Kingdom to save us from materialistic science, and it did good service. But idealism has become so abstract and impersonal that it cannot be distinguished from Naturalism. These two philosophies are still debating and disputing, but their differences are chiefly imaginary. The dispute reminds one of the reply of the unlearned American who had traveled abroad. He was saying he had visited the Matterhorn and the Jung Frau, and Lake Geneva and Lake Leman. “But,” a friend interposed, “Lake Geneva and Lake Leman are synonymous.” “Oh, I know that, but Lake Geneva is a great deal more synonymous than Lake Leman,” he replied. Idealism in its abstract form is perhaps just a little more “synonymous” than Naturalism, that is all.
SECRET OP PHILOSOPHY’S FAILURE
Now why is it that philosophy seems to expend so much labor for naught. To me it is clear that the reason why it seems to labor so long without satisfactory results is that it refuses to consider all human experience, including the religious. It splits experience up into little bits and hunts among the bits for some single abstract principle which will explain all the rest. It is very much as if one were going to attempt to explain the ocean and all its contents, its variety and marvelous abundance of life, and instead of searching its depths should take a single fish and scale off from the fish a single scale, and on that scale as a foundation build up his theory of the ocean and its contents; how accurate do you suppose his account would be? And yet this is analagous to what philosophers have done. Spinoza scaled off from the world of experience and being the idea of substance, and built a pantheistic system on that scale. Hegel scaled off the conception of reason or the idea and reared a vast idealistic system on that. Schopenhauer scaled off the conception of will and reared his pessimistic system of philosophy on that. Haeckel has scaled off the conception of matter and builds his materialistic system on that. Another takes motion or energy and force, and so on, I had almost said ad infinitum.
The result of the process is that the philosophers get clear away from human life and experience. They fix their gaze on the photograph of a dim and far away image of reality and become absorbed in excessive star-gazing, metaphysical cliff-climbing and transcendental soap-bubble-blowing. They are like the Indian juggler who hung his ladder on thin air without touching the ground below, sprang upon it, climbed out of sight, pulled the ladder after him, and disappeared in the clouds.