Concluding Remarks

Abstract

This has been a long and winding voyage through the story of twentieth century western philosophy of religion. It began in a world that emphasizes certitude, universality and the one, and ends in a world that places more emphasis upon the relative, the particular and the plural. The British and American idealists found neither Reid nor Hamilton up to the task of providing a foundation for religious faith in an age that was becoming increasingly empirical and secular. They appreciated Kant’s recognition of transempirical reality, but reacted to the dualism that left God an unknown absolute. The balancing of subject and object, experience and reason, which for Kant had been an ideal, they sought to realize in a unity of the infinite whole. In their efforts many of the idealists rejected the conception of God as an absolute monarch set over against the world and replaced it with a God more immanent to human experience. Often, however, they seemed to reduce religion to an intellectual world view and eroded distinctions between finite and infinite, immanent and transcendent, and persons and God. These difficulties helped prepare the way for the downfall of idealism soon after the turn of the century.