I cannot forbear to point out the easily recognizable fact that, in thus defining the plan before us, I have merely tried to adhere, so far as I can, to the programme explicitly laid down by Lord Gifford. A study of religion is required of your lecturer, and Lord Gifford, as appears from the words of his Will, would himself have thought, above all, of studying religion not only as a matter of purely natural and rational knowledge, but primarily as a body of Ontological problems and opinions, in other words as, in its theory, a branch of the Theory of Being. It is of “God, the only Substance,” that your lecturer, if his Ontology so far agrees with Lord Gifford’s, will principally speak. Well then, I can best work in the spirit of Lord Gifford’s requirements if I explicitly devote our principal attention to the ultimate problems of Ontology, laying due stress upon their relations to Religion.
And now let me venture to sketch, in outline, the particular discussions by which I propose to contribute my fragment towards a study of the inexhaustible problems propounded by Lord Gifford’s Will. Programmes in philosophy, as Hegel used to say, mean far less than in other enterprises. But even here some sort of programme is needed to fix in advance our attention.
My precise undertaking then, in the following lectures, is to show what we mean by Being in general, and by the special sorts of Reality that we attribute to God, to the World, and to the Human Individual. These I regard as the problems of the ontology of religion. In every step of this undertaking I shall actually be, in a psychological and in an historical sense,
