mind when we endeavour to form our philosophy of religious knowledge.
A dogma is the precise enunciation of a general truth, divested so far as possible from particular exemplification. Such precise expression is in the long run a condition for vivid realization, for effectiveness, for apprehension of width of scope, and for survival.
For example, when the Greeks, such as Pythagoras or Euclid, formulated accurately mathematical dogmas, the general truths which the Egyptians had acted upon for more than thirty generations became thereby of greater importance.
It is not the case, however, that our apprehension of a general truth is dependent upon its accurate verbal expression. For it would follow that we could never be dissatisfied with the verbal expression of something that we had never apprehended. But this consciousness of failure to express our accurate meaning must have haunted most of us.
For example, the notion of irrational num-
