It will be impossible for religious thought to
escape the influence of John Dewey's latest, and
perhaps greatest, work, the Paul Carus lectures
published under the title of Experience and Nature.
He makes very little explicit reference to religion
but his ideas have important bearings upon religion.
His thought is one of the noteworthy forces shap-
ing modern life and anything so pervasive as reli-
gion cannot escape its touch. There are two ideas
running through his recent work which we want
to develop and use as searchlights to illumine the
nature and function of religion.

The first of these is his concept of meaningless
experience. The prevailing philosophic tradition
has declared that all experience is meaning and
without meaning there can be no experience. But
Professor Dewey makes a sharp distinction between
meanings and mere events which occur in space-
time, whether these appear in the consciousness of
some individual or not. It is quite possible for
experience to occur as a meaningless event. Mean-
ing is the significance which some event or events
may have. Significance is the pointing function,
the signifying, which some events may possess.

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