ligious object must be believed to be real, it may also be re-
garded as ideal. Devotion and dependence toward a responsive
higher power, believed in and regarded as ideal, would be
a synthesis of fundamental and experimental religion.

But while in what follows, we may occasionally refer to
fundamental religion, we shall be mainly and almost exclusively
concerned with experimental religion. For what theology
seeks to systematize is not so much our appreciations of the
divine ideal as our knowledge of the divine being. And so, an
appropriate title for this work would have been, The Theology
of Experimental Religion.

Moreover, as in life generally, so in experimental religion,
the function of ideas is threefold. Not only do they give ex-
pression to experience, particularly to feeling; they supplement
experience by representing certain phases of reality which
may not at the moment be presented, and they guide practical
adjustments and thus lead to further experience. All this
theology undertakes to do for experimental religion. It is
intimately related to the three main phases of religious con-
sciousness, viz., feeling, cognition and action. Not only does
it give intellectual expression to religious experience; it aims
to represent by means of ideas the divine reality with which
religion is concerned, and thus to guide the religious attitudes
of the subject and lead him to the kind of religious experience
most to be desired.

The question to be faced is as to whether theology, under-
stood thus as description of the divine reality, can be made
truly scientific. And what we mean by "scientific" is not
merely logical in the older deductive sense, i. e., consistent
with presuppositions. Ancient and mediæval science, modelled
upon the geometrical method, was essentially abstract, apriori,
unempirical. With its formal, deductive logic it was an instru-
ment of criticism and discovery within but narrow limits. It
was the lesser organ of exact knowledge. Modern science, with
its concrete, empirical, inductive method, is an instrument
of criticism and discovery within limits set only by human
experience itself. It is, as Francis Bacon called it, the novum
organum, the new and greater organ of exact knowledge.
Whereas the older science, in the main, undertook no more

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