Religion has to regard religion as a fact of human experience. Now religion is given to us in a twofold experience: first, the inner experience of the subjectively religious consciousness and the external experience of human history. Will it be enough to confine ourselves to one of these two sides — to seek religion only in history or only in the religious consciousness? Both attempts have been made, but neither could lead to satisfactory results. Indeed, this is self-evident, since each of the methods has its advantages, but also its weaknesses and dangers, which may be avoided only by the other supplementing it.
The exclusively historical view is unsatisfactory, because religion is, in its germ and essence, an internal principle of our spirit, which is given to us immediately only in our own consciousness. What is manifested in the external world also belongs to it, but only as a secondary and partial expression of its inner essence — an expression which is considerably influenced by the conditions of environment and by extra-religious circumstances and motives. In order, therefore, to understand the significance of the phenomena in which religion manifests itself historically — the forms of worship, the manifold legends and doctrines, the social institutions — we must regard them as modes of expression of the inner spiritual life and essence of religion. We must explain the meaning that is expressed in these symbolic forms by means of the fundamental motives of the religious consciousness, and must therefore project ourselves into the spirit of the historical religious societies. Such an interpretation of the symbols of the spiritual life of others is possible only for him who knows and observes the corresponding impulses of his own soul. We may say, therefore, that the indispensable key to the understanding of the phenomena given in external historical experience, or external manifestations of religion, lies in the inner experience of subjective consciousness. In addition to this we may say that the historical phenomena of religion are exceedingly complex and different in kind. The lowest and highest, the crudest and the most refined, the basest and the noblest, is found not only at different points of time, but also simultaneously in different religious
