Philosophy of Religion

Philosophy of Religion starts with the presupposition that religion and religious ideas can be taken out of the domain of feeling or practical experience and made objects of scientific reflection. It implies that, whilst religion and philosophy have the same objects, the attitude of the human spirit towards these objects is in each case, different. In the one they are present to it in an immediate way as objects of devotion or spiritual enjoyment; they come before it at most only in the form of outward fact or of figurative representation. In the other, they become the objects of reflection or intellectual apprehension, and are finally elevated to the form of pure or speculative thought. Feeling, indeed, in all cases, involves a kind of knowledge; the objects of emotion, whether moral or aesthetic or religious must be grasped by the subject, of them with an implicit intelligence, apart from which, its relation to them would be no deeper than that of blind instinctor animal impulse.