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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: statements are misleading from their brevity, and it will take
the whole hour for me to explain to you exactly what I mean.
When I call theological formulas secondary products, I mean that
in a world in which no religious feeling had ever existed, I
doubt whether any philosophic theology could ever have been
framed. I doubt if dispassionate intellectual contemplation of
the universe, apart from inner unhappiness and need of
deliverance on the one hand and mystical emotion on the other,
would ever have resulted in religious philosophies such as we now
possess. Men would have begun with animistic explanations of
natural fact, and criticised these away into scientific ones, as
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