Much, of course, depends here upon the sense in which the word “experience” is used.  The assumption need not necessarily be challenged except where, as is very often the case, an arbitrarily limited definition of experience is intended.  From this general assumption flows the subjective theory of morals; from it is derived the conviction that the rationalistic values in religion are the only real, or at least demonstrable, ones; and hence from this comes the shifting of the seat of religious authority from “revelation” to experience.  In so far as this is a correction of emphasis only, or the abandonment of a misleading term rather than the denial of one of the areas and modes of understanding, again we have no quarrel with it.  But if it means an exclusion of the supersensuous sources of knowledge or the denial of the existence of absolute values as the source of our relative and subjective understanding, then it strikes at the heart of religion.  Because the religious life is built on those factors of experience that lie above the strictly rational realm of consciousness just as the pagan view rests on primitive instincts that lie beneath it.  Of course, in asserting the importance of these “supersensuous” values the religionist does not mean that they are beyond the reach of human appraisal or unrelated by their nature to the rest of our understanding.  By the intuitive he does not mean the uncritical nor by the supersensuous the supernatural in the old and discredited sense of an arbitrary and miraculous revelation.  Mysticism is not superstition, nor are the insights of the poet the whimsies of the mere impressionist.  But he insists that the humanist, in his ordinary definition of experience, ignores or denies these superrational values.  In opposition to him he rests his faith on that definition of experience which underlies Aristotle’s statement that “the intellect is dependent upon intuition for knowledge both of what is below and what is above itself.”

Now it is this first set of factors which are the more important.  For the cause, as distinguished from the occasions, of our present religious scale of values is, like all major causes, not practical but ideal, and its roots are found far beneath the soil of the present in the beginnings of the modern age in the fourteenth century.  It was then that our world was born; it is of the essence of that world that it arose out of indifference toward speculative thinking and unfaith in those concepts regarding the origin and destiny of mankind which speculative philosophy tried to express and prove.

From the first, then, humanistic leaders have not only frankly rejected the scholastic theologies, which had been the traditional expression of those absolute values with which the religious experience is chiefly concerned, but also ignored or rejected the existence of those values themselves.  Thus Petrarch is generally considered the first of modern humanists.  He not only speaks of Rome—­meaning the whole semi-political,