Note 78 — Chapter II · PRAGMATISM AND THE PRAGMATIST MOVEMENT

Without attempting to enter upon the matter of Harnack’s philosophy as a Neo-Kantian of the school of Ritschl, I am thinking simply of things like the following from his book on the Essence of Christianity. “It is to man that religion pertains, to man, as one who in the midst of all change and progress himself never changes” (p. 8). “The point of view of the philosophical theorists in the strict sense of the word will find no place in these lectures. Had they been delivered sixty years ago it would have been our endeavour to try to arrive by speculative reasoning at some general conception of religion, and then to define the Christian religion accordingly. But we have rightly become sceptical about the value of this procedure. Latet dolus in generalibus. We know to-day that life cannot be spanned by general conceptions” (p. 9). See also his protest (on p. 220) against the substitution of a “Hellenistic” view of religion for religion itself—a protest that is, according to Pfleiderer in his Development of Theology (p. 298), a marked characteristic of Harnack’s whole History of Dogma.