Roger Scruton's Aesthetics of Architecture

Roger Scruton's The Aesthetics of Architecture contains a wealth of examples of architectural experience. For present purposes, I shall consider just three. Scruton notes that the designers of the Gothic church intended to produce an image of the heavenly city, and he suggests that our experience of these churches can be structured accordingly. To experience a Gothic church in this way is to see it ‘as a concatenation of smaller structures, of aedicules, fitted together as arches, chapels, windows and spires’, with the result that the building ‘can be seen as an assembled city, rather than as a single entity minutely subdivided’. In such cases, the thought of the church as a likeness of the heavenly city will not just sit alongside the appearance of the church, as a kind of commentary upon it, but will instead enter into the appearance. As Scruton puts the point, ‘the “interpretation” here is not a “thought” that is separable from the experience – it is there in the experience, as when I see the dots of a puzzle picture as a face, or the man in the moon’.Footnote ¹

A second example concerns the way in which experience of a Romanesque cloister can be penetrated by the thought of the way of life with which it was associated. Someone who experiences the building in this way might refer to:

This example is similar to the first in this respect: in each case we begin with some presiding idea (the idea of the heavenly city, or the idea of a religious order and its way of life) and we use that idea to guide our construal of the lines which define a building's shape. However, in the case of the Gothic church, we arrive at a picture of something which is directly picturable (namely, the outline of a city), whereas in the case of the cloister, we arrive at a picture of an abstract idea – the idea of the industriousness of a religious order, or of some ideal that is inscribed in this order's mode of life.

This relationship between the industriousness of the monks and the appearance of the building holds in various respects. It is because they are industrious that the monks have produced such ornamentation: a less industrious order might not have taken the trouble to sculpt such detail, or might not have observed the world in such detail. But the relationship between the order's mode of life and the cloister's ornamentation is not just external or causal, according to Scruton. Rather, the thought of this order's charism can enter into our experience of, for example, the cloister's ornamentation, so that it leaps to the eye as bearing a certain significance, while remaining integrated within the ‘restful harmony’ of the overall design. In this way, the idea of the order's charism can be rendered in experience, rather than just being evidenced by or illustrated by experience.

These examples together suggest not only that religious thoughts can enter into the sensory appearances of things, but that the appearances can be enriched thereby. As Scruton comments, this kind of thought-infused seeing can take the form of a ‘perception in which ambiguities are resolved and harmonies established’.Footnote ³ The capacity of an interpretation to contribute in this way to the unity of our experience provides a reason for favouring it over others, on aesthetic rather than, say, art historical grounds. Scruton cites as an example of this sort of preference the case of seeing the columns rather than the walls of a Renaissance palazzo as weight-bearing. Here we come to our third example:

So on occasions, we can rank thoughts according to their capacity to enter enrichingly or unifyingly into the appearances of things. It is not difficult to multiply examples of our willingness to do this. There is, for instance, a widely reproduced drawing which can be interpreted either as a young woman turning her head away or as an old woman looking down her nose. While other interpretations may be able to enter into the appearance of this drawing in some degree, we favour these two because of their capacity to introduce a satisfying unity into our experience.

Applying Scruton's perspective (1): A pragmatic case for religious belief

So far, we have seen that religious thoughts (including here abstract thoughts, such as the thought of the ideal of life of a religious order) can inhabit the sensory appearances of things, and that the appearances can be enhanced thereby, insofar as they come to exhibit a new and satisfying unity. I want to turn now to the question of how the capacity of a religious thought to inhabit and enrich the look of things might be relevant to an assessment of its truth, or its worthwhileness in other respects. The picture which we have been sketching can be extended relatively easily in the direction of a broadly pragmatist religious epistemology. Let's consider first of all how this might be done.

It is a clear implication of Scruton's discussion that thought-infused experiences, of the kind that we have been considering, can be freely chosen. For example, we can elect whether to see the weight of certain buildings as borne by their walls or their columns. A different perceptual gestalt will be produced in each case, and we can switch relatively easily between one and the other, and we can note the exact moment at which this switch takes effect. Following Scruton again, we may add that our choice of religious thoughts in particular provides one way of opting into a thought-infused experience. It is also an implication of this approach that there is no need for me to assert the truth of a thought for it to enhance my experience. I need not believe, for example, that there is a heavenly city, or that it has the character described in the Book of Revelation, for the thought of such a city to enter into my experience of a Gothic church, and to enrich my experience thereby.

So we can intelligibly suppose that someone might choose to adopt a religious thought simply for the sake of enhancing the appearances of things. Such a person need not treat the thought as irrelevant to questions of life. On the contrary, since her aim is to have the thought make a difference, quite literally, to how she sees things, it follows that it may make a difference to the practical as well as the perceptual discriminations which she is capable of making. Compare the case of someone who comes to see how a heap of rubble at an ancient site in fact constitutes the remnants of a settlement (where ‘seeing’ is understood, once more, in Scruton's appearance-structuring sense). Such a person will now be able to orient herself at the site in practical terms with new-found assurance, because of her new, perceptually mediated sense of how its parts fit together so as to comprise a humanly meaningful whole.

So a person who adopts a tradition's creedal claims simply for the sake of enhancing the appearances of things will not assert the truth of those claims, but he will in some measure inhabit the life-world of that tradition, and to that extent he will participate in the repertoire of affective-perceptual-behavioural responses to the world that characterizes the tradition. Such a commitment can make sound practical sense. It is of a piece with our choosing particular furnishings or clothes, for example, on the basis of their look – and might be counted as practically rational in much the same way. Of course, there is this difference: in the religious case, we are shaping the appearances not so much by choosing to place certain objects within our perceptual field, but rather by choosing to have the appearances penetrated by certain thoughts.

It is worth pausing to consider how the notion of ‘adoption’ as I have understood it here compares with the idea of ‘acceptance’ of a thought, since this latter idea has been central to some recent discussion of non-doxastic forms of religious faith. William Alston introduces the notion of ‘acceptance’ by citing the case of a general who has only partial knowledge of the disposition of the opposing forces, and who ‘accepts the hypothesis that seems to him the most likely of the alternatives, though he realizes that he is far from knowing that this or any other such hypothesis is true’. Alston continues: ‘He uses this [hypothesis] as a basis for disposing his forces in the way that seems most likely to be effective, even though he is far from believing that this is the case.’Footnote ⁵ Alston suggests that we can see non-doxastic forms of propositional religious faith as constituted by the ‘acceptance’, understood in these terms, of a set of creedal items, providing that these two conditions are met: a person S who ‘accepts’ a proposition p must hold ‘the truth or realization of p to be a good thing’, and S's acceptance of p ‘has to be less than ideally or fully supported by reason, evidence, or experience, at least in S's view of the matter’.Footnote ⁶

The non-assertional ‘adoption’ of a religious thought is clearly not simply equivalent to its ‘acceptance’ in this extended sense. Notably, someone might adopt a thought while taking it to be overwhelmingly improbable, or while thinking that the truth of the thought would be bad. Equally, someone might adopt a thought when the evidence falls short of what is required for belief, but still exceeds what is consistent with the sort of acceptance that is characteristic of faith.Footnote ⁷ Alston's proposal strikes me as highly plausible as an account of religious faith, as distinct from some purely aesthetic (even if action-guiding as well as perception-infusing) appropriation of a set of religious thoughts. So we might say that the adoption of a bundle of thoughts will only count as a case of religious faith providing that the various conditions which Alston has identified are met.

In turn, the phenomenological account which we have been developing can be used to extend certain features of Alston's view. As the example of the general indicates, Alston takes the acceptance of p to involve (although it will not simply consist in) taking p as a basis for action. The idea that the content of p can enter into the appearances of things suggests one account of how this connection may obtain, for a person who accepts p and allows its content to inhabit the appearances of things may then be capable of a new set of practical as well as perceptual discriminations. The appeal to phenomenology can also help to explain why the person of faith may take the truth of a religious thought to be ‘a good thing’. Perhaps the idea of the heavenly city, for example, can be rendered more attractive when it is inscribed in the sensory appearances of things, so deepening a person's sense that the realization of such a city would be ‘a good thing’. More generally, if a thought can be written into the sensory appearances of things, then it is perhaps more likely to gain some traction upon a person's affections, whether positively or otherwise, given certain familiar truths concerning the power of perceptual objects, as distinct from verbal abstractions, to engage the will.

It is often said that a religiously authentic way of life cannot be motivated by the prospect of some personal benefit but only by, for example, the love of God. (Some may see this as a further condition, in addition to those which Alston notes, which needs to be satisfied if the acceptance of a set of religious propositions is to count as a case of faith.) It is sometimes thought that this consideration poses a difficulty for pragmatic justifications of religious belief. The account which we have been considering has a response to this objection, I think.

In this case, the prospective benefit has inherently a religious content, since it consists, after all, in the enjoyment of certain religious thoughts as rendered in sensory form. So even if a person adopts these thoughts simply for the sake of their experience-enhancing properties, she will still be engaged, to that extent, in a religiously serious activity. Moreover, if we can invoke once more the power of perceptual objects to stimulate the affections, then we should say that such a person may well be led in the direction of a religiously more authentic engagement with the content of those thoughts on account of their sensory form. So there is a ready route which leads from the contemplation of these appearances towards the love of God, and in time a person's enjoyment of these appearances may become indeed one expression of her love for God.

So the appeal to phenomenological considerations can help to illuminate a number of practical, attitudinal, and motivational questions which are posed by the idea of non-doxastic faith, notably: how might the acceptance of a given religious proposition p be action-guiding? Why might the person of faith have a favourable attitude to the truth of p? Why might this person be motivated to accept p? How might this acceptance be religiously serious or religiously authentic? The usefulness of the account in these respects is to be explained, I suggest, in these terms: if we allow for the embedding of religious thoughts within experience, then we can see how the content of those thoughts can come to seem part of the fabric of the world, notwithstanding the absence of compelling support for the thoughts' truth, and how this content can acquire thereby the psychological vividness which seems to be required for some forms of faith commitment from a practical, attitudinal, and motivational point of view.

The best-known example of a pragmatist religious epistemology of broadly this kind is that developed by William James in his lecture ‘The will to believe’. James begins the lecture by suggesting that the religious ‘hypothesis’ presents his (educated, North American) audience with a choice that is ‘living’, ‘momentous’, and ‘forced’; and he suggests that, accordingly, they have enough of a reason to ‘decide’ in favour of the hypothesis, where such a ‘decision’ is to be distinguished, of course, from judging that the hypothesis is likely to be true.Footnote ⁸ I am going to argue now that the central theoretical terms in James's discussion – the terms ‘living’, ‘momentous’, and ‘forced’ – can all be understood with new nuance from a phenomenological perspective. I shall follow James's example in speaking at times of religious ‘belief’, although what he has in mind is clearly something closer to the ‘acceptance’ of a religious thought in Alston's sense. James seems to suppose in particular that there is, broadly speaking, a state of epistemic parity between religious belief and non-belief; so his discussion is also concerned with the case of acceptance rather than with the adoption of a thought in the face of significant counter-evidence, or on purely pragmatic or aesthetic grounds.

James introduces the idea that a hypothesis can be ‘live’ in these terms: ‘A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed. If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion makes no electric connection with your nature, – it refuses to scintillate with any credibility at all.’Footnote ⁹ Clearly, for a hypothesis to count as ‘live’ or be a ‘real possibility’ for a person, it is not enough for her to judge that the hypothesis is possibly true. I can judge that the hypothesis of the Mahdi's being divinely inspired may be true, for all I can tell, without thereby finding that it ‘scintillates with any credibility’. The difficulty here is not fundamentally that the hypothesis is not well enough evidenced for me: I might assemble a compelling case in its favour without it becoming ‘live’, and equally it might become ‘live’ without the provision of any further evidence. The problem is, rather, that the hypothesis lacks, for me, the requisite kind of psychological potency: it fails to engage, we could say, with my sense of my practical life possibilities. To put the point in James's terms, the ‘deadness and liveness of a hypothesis are measured by … willingness to act’.Footnote ¹⁰

The idea that religious thoughts or ‘hypotheses’ can enter into the appearances of things provides one way of expanding on James's meaning at this point. If I am Sudanese, then perhaps the thought that the Mahdi is divinely inspired can enter into the appearances of things for me, so structuring my life-world. Again, this need not be because my beliefs about the Mahdi will be better evidenced if I am Sudanese. More importantly, if I am Sudanese, then I may find myself in a material context – comprising, for example, certain buildings, modes of dress, and styles of eating and speaking – whose appearances can be penetrated by Mahdi-focused thoughts. Similarly, as Scruton notes, a Christian living in the medieval West would have encountered cloisters, churches, and other cultural artefacts whose appearance could be penetrated by the thought of various elements of the Christian world-view. So, for the Sudanese and the medieval European alike, religious thoughts can generate a new set of perceptual and practical possibilities – and as we have seen, this gives them a reason, potentially, to adopt and even to accept such thoughts.

I am not suggesting, of course, that this is the only way of expanding on James's meaning here, but this proposal does mesh with his on a number of important points. It shows how we can have good reason to act on a religious ‘belief’ even if we are unable to assert its truth; and more exactly, it shows how religious belief can make a difference to a person's sense of their practical possibilities directly, and indeed perceptually, rather than in some relatively extrinsic or theoretical way. (Perhaps this captures part of James's meaning when he speaks of an ‘electric connection’?)

James also supposes that the choice between belief and non-belief is ‘momentous’, on the grounds that the person who opts for religious belief will thereby gain access to certain substantive benefits. Again, within the confines of the lecture, he does not spell out the nature of these benefits in any detail. He notes that according to ‘religion’, ‘we are better off even now’ if we believe that ‘the best things are the more eternal things’, but he does not say much about why this should be so.Footnote ¹¹

On this point too, James's proposal can be given further definition once we introduce the idea that religious thoughts can enter into the appearances of things. This time we can appeal to the second of the themes that we have taken from Scruton: in some cases, a religious hypothesis can not only enter into but enrich the appearances of things. In these cases, there will be, potentially, a very significant benefit which attaches to the adoption of the hypothesis ‘even now’: namely, the benefit of gaining access to an enriched life-world, and of enjoying the various perceptual and practical discriminations which are made possible thereby. So drawing out James's account in Scruton's terms, we might say that a religious hypothesis will be ‘live’ if it can enter into the appearances of things, and that the choice between this hypothesis and its alternatives will be ‘momentous’ if the hypothesis can significantly enrich (or impoverish) those appearances. It follows that the account we are developing also matches James's on this point: we are not considering here a post-mortem benefit of religious belief, but a benefit which is made available here and now.

Finally, James observes that the choice between belief and non-belief is ‘forced’, and in support of this claim he adduces the fact that agnostics and disbelievers alike will forfeit the benefits of belief.Footnote ¹² (Of course, this is a further aspect of the idea that this choice is ‘momentous’.) One might wonder: since the Jamesian believer does not take religious belief to be more likely than not, why should she not ‘believe’ and ‘disbelieve’ at the same time, in the sense of entertaining, rather than asserting, at the same time both religious belief and disbelief? Why suppose, then, that any choice here is ‘forced’?

This is another matter which comes into new focus if we suppose that the religious hypothesis is to be adopted because of its role in structuring the appearances. I can see the walls (rather than the columns) of a Renaissance palazzo as weight-bearing and I can see its columns as weight-bearing, but I cannot experience these two gestalts simultaneously. And in the same way, we might suppose, I may be able to experience the perceptual gestalt which is relative to belief, and the perceptual gestalt which is relative to disbelief, but what I cannot do is experience both gestalts at the same time. So if I ‘decide’ for the religious hypothesis in order to enjoy the appearance-enriching benefits of belief, then I will need to choose belief to the exclusion of disbelief for as long as I wish to enjoy those benefits. On this reading, mere suspension of belief will amount to a refusal to allow the appearances to be structured by either belief or disbelief – and such a strategy will also place the appearance-enhancing benefits of belief beyond reach. So in this way, we can give further content to James's suggestion that the choice between belief and non-belief is ‘forced’, and we can support this claim on broadly Jamesian grounds, by showing how the benefits of belief will be denied to agnostics and disbelievers alike.

The central thesis of ‘The will to believe’ is that if the evidence enduringly under-determines the truth of the religious hypothesis, then we are entitled to decide for the hypothesis, and to make practical choices on that basis, providing that the hypothesis forms part of an option which is ‘living’, ‘momentous’, and ‘forced’ (where an option is ‘living’ when it concerns a choice between hypotheses each of which is ‘live’).Footnote ¹³ Our rendering of these terms allows us to see the force of this case. To put the point briefly, if by adopting a religious belief, you can inhabit a richer life-world, then you have a sound, practical reason for adopting that belief. Again, this is not to say that you have reason to assert the truth of the belief, only that you have reason to allow the thought-content of the belief to shape the lived texture, the phenomenology, of your relationship to the world. Even allowing for the fact that this case is only ‘pragmatic’ and not epistemic, it is, as James supposed, potentially life-transforming. Again, following Alston, we may wish to add that this train of reflection will be relevant to the case of religious ‘faith’ providing that certain additional conditions are met (and as we have noted, it appears that James himself would endorse these conditions).

There is one qualification which should be appended to this discussion. The person who adopts a set of religious thoughts for the sake of their appearance-enhancing properties while holding them to be overwhelmingly improbable is unlikely to share in all respects in the life-world of a creedally more committed believer, or the person of faith in Alston's sense. This is not least because such a person is unlikely to do all the things that the person of faith does. For instance, the person who treats a church simply as an object of thought-infused contemplation and the person who also uses it for worship are likely to have different experiences of the building. And the worshipper's experience may well be richer in some respects for, as Gordon Graham has noted, some of a church's aesthetic properties, notably its ‘fittingness’ as a space for worship, may only become evident in the act of worship.Footnote ¹⁴ So while there may be a broadly Jamesian case for adopting religious thoughts so as to gain access to an enriched life-world, the person who takes this step while lacking faith, or ‘belief’ in some more robust sense, may have to make do with a subset of the benefits which are available to creedally more committed believers.

I have been arguing that Scruton's discussion allows us to give further definition to a familiar option in religious epistemology – namely, the view that William James defends in ‘The will to believe’ or, more broadly, the view that the adoption and even acceptance of a set of religious thoughts may be justified, at least in part, on non-truth-directed grounds. We might ask next whether it is also possible for the appearance-enhancing potentialities of a religious scheme to be relevant to an assessment of its truth. The case I am going to make on this point will be rather schematic, but I hope to show that there is some initial reason to take the capacity of a religious thought to enter enrichingly into the appearances of things as an index of its claim to be true. If that is so, then philosophers of religion will have a further reason for attending to the idea that religious thoughts can inhabit the sensory appearances of things.

Applying Scruton's perspective (2): A truth-directed case for religious belief

According to Scruton, the designers of the Gothic church intended these buildings to serve as an image of the heavenly Jerusalem. If this was their intention, then there is reason to expect that the thought of the heavenly city will be able to inhabit and enrich the appearance of such churches. Why? Because if this was the designers' intention, then we should be able to use the thought of the heavenly Jerusalem to grasp intellectually how the parts of a Gothic church fit together, so as to resemble a city. And in turn, since this intellectual grasp concerns the ordering of the lines which comprise a church's shape, there is good reason to suppose that it will be capable of being rendered in our experience of the building. And assuming the competence of the designers, the experiential apprehension of this unity ought to make for a satisfying integration in the appearances.Footnote ¹⁵ (Compare again how the thought of an old woman looking down her nose can produce a satisfying unity in the appearance of the picture which I mentioned earlier.)

We might wonder next whether we can reason similarly when we think of God as a designer and the world as a designed object. It will be easiest to sustain this parallel if we suppose that God intended the world to image something or other. Of course, this is precisely what many theists have believed. Christians, for example, have commonly supposed that the world was made in order to image God.Footnote ¹⁶ On this assumption, there is reason to expect that the thought of the universe as an image of God will be able to enter enrichingly into the appearances of things. Why think this?

Well, if the creation is to image God, then it will need to constitute a unity in some relevant respect, since on any account, God's reality is in no way fragmentary. And if we understand how the universe constitutes a unity in this respect, then shouldn't we be able to use that understanding to guide our construal of some parts of the world, so that its unity in this respect comes to be rendered in our experience of those parts? (If we were unable to do this, then we might conclude that the world did not after all constitute much of an image of the divine.) And shouldn't we suppose that any experiential apprehension of a unity which images God's unity will involve a satisfying integration of the appearances? Of course, there may be reasons why we cannot use the thought of the world as an image of God in this way, even if God did intend the world to be such an image. My suggestion is just that in the absence of such a reason, and assuming the truth of Christian teaching on this point, then the presumption should be that the thought of creation as an image of God will be able to enter enrichingly into the appearances of things.

This proposal marks an extension of our earlier discussion, because we are no longer thinking of the appearance of cultural artefacts, such as churches and cloisters, but of the natural order's appearance.Footnote ¹⁷ For present purposes, I am not going to try to provide an account of how the phenomenology of our experience of the non-artefactual world (or, we could say, of the world considered as a divine artefact) might be penetrated by religious thoughts, but some pointers to what might be said on this count can be found in William James's description of the phenomena of conversion in his Gifford Lectures. Here he explores, for example, the idea that ‘a not infrequent consequence of the change operated in the subject [following conversion] is a transfiguration of the face of nature in his eyes. A new heaven seems to shine upon a new earth’.Footnote ¹⁸ We might also take note of the idea that design in nature can be registered perceptually, and not only by way of some inference.Footnote ¹⁹

We might seek to press the Gothic-church example a little further by asking whether the same sort of case can be made given simply the idea that an object serves a purpose, whether or not that purpose involves any kind of imaging. Again, the argument I am going to develop here will be schematic, but I hope it succeeds in establishing an initial presumption in favour of its conclusions. In general, we might say, if an object is intended to serve a certain purpose P, then we should be able to use the thought of P to understand how the object constitutes a unity in so far as its parts are together fitted for the realization of this purpose; and by analogy with the case of the Gothic church, shouldn't we be able to use this intellectual grasp of the object's unity to guide our construal of its parts, so that this understanding comes to be inscribed in our experience of the object? And assuming the competence of the designers – assuming that the object fittingly serves P – shouldn't we expect an experiential apprehension of this unity to make for a satisfying integration in the appearances?

If this line of thought can be sustained, then there is some reason to suppose that the capacity of a faith tradition's conception of the world's purpose (whether or not that purpose involves any kind of ‘imaging’) to enter enrichingly or unifyingly into experience can be relevant to an assessment of the tradition's epistemic standing. For example, if the Christian faith supposes that God made the world for purpose P, and if the thought of the world as serving P should fail to enter enrichingly into the appearances of things, then that is a reason (not necessarily an all-things-considered reason) for doubting that God, if there is a God, has purpose P. Conversely, if the thought of the world as serving P can enter enrichingly into the appearances of things, then to that extent the thought that God has purpose P is confirmed. (Similarly, if the thought of the Gothic church as an image of the heavenly city can enter enrichingly into the experience of a Gothic church, then the idea that these churches were made for this purpose is to that extent confirmed.) It seems that this sort of account should work for any variety of theism which postulates a divine purpose in creation, and which attributes to human beings some understanding of that purpose.

Moving further still from the example of the Gothic church, we might wonder whether a similar sort of case should hold for non-theistic faiths. These faiths may not consider the world as a designed or purposive object, but they do presumably aim to provide an overarching account of the conditions and sense of a human life. No doubt it would be implausible to suppose that, in general, the truth of such an account establishes a presumption, however weak, that it will be able to enter into our experience of those conditions. However, we might still wish to say, more modestly, that if such an account can enter enrichingly into the appearances of things, then it is to that extent confirmed.

We can expand on this proposal by returning to Scruton's example of the Romanesque cloister. The implication of this example is that an abstract idea (here, the ideal of life of a monastic order) can be inscribed in an object's appearance, with the result that the idea is imaged by that appearance. Similarly, we might suppose that a conception of the conditions and sense of a human life can in principle be inscribed in the appearances of things, with the result that the appearances provide an image of that conception. In such cases, the appearances are presumably unified, insofar as they hang together in the way required to image the idea. And if a conception of the conditions of human life can enter unifyingly into the appearances of things in this sort of way, then that is a reason, we might suppose, for saying that this conception is true. For one obvious explanation of why the conception can have this unifiying power is because it ‘carves nature at the joints’ – that is, because it identifies a unity which really does inhere in things. (Similarly, if the conception of a religious order's way of life can enter unifyingly into the appearance of a cloister, that is a reason for supposing that the construction of the cloister really was informed by this ideal of life.)

So it may be that religious faiths in general, whether or not they postulate a designer, are open to a degree of testing on these grounds. In each case, we can determine whether the conception of the world that is purveyed by a tradition is capable of introducing a satisfying unity into the appearances of things and, minimally, we might say that if such a conception can do this, then it is to that extent confirmed. And on this basis, we might then be able to form some impression of the relative epistemic success of various traditions, when measured against this common criterion.

So far I have been talking in very general terms, but it should of course be acknowledged that the force of this sort of case will vary to some extent from tradition to tradition; and accordingly, a more compelling presentation of this general case will need to descend to the detail of particular traditions. Some traditions will generate a relatively strong expectation that their doctrinal claims can enter illuminatingly into experience, and they may even lay claim to this sort of experience-enhancing power. Other traditions may take human experience to be so deeply corrupt that it is only rarely if at all capable of being penetrated by a true conception of things. Some traditions may aim at achieving a kind of disenchantment with the world of sensory experience. Here too, we might suppose, there ought to be a prima facie expectation that at least some of the defining thoughts of the tradition will be capable of entering integrally into the sensory appearances. After all, in such traditions, it is commonly supposed that the appearances which constitute the experience of the sage are infused by the thought of the sensory world's transitoriness or unsatisfactoriness. So here again we find that the truth of a tradition carries phenomenological consequences, which can in principle be tested.

Clearly, there are further differences between traditions which will also be relevant to an assessment of the scope, degree and nature of any unification in the appearances which we might take to be implied in the truth of a tradition, or to be relevant to the confirmation of its truth. I mention these cases as simply some of the more obvious examples.

Although I cannot prove the matter here, it seems reasonable to suppose that many believers take the fit between the defining thoughts of their tradition and the sensory appearances of things to be a mark of the truth of those thoughts. I am not suggesting, of course, that this association is standardly rehearsed in argument; rather, the experience of fit is typically taken non-inferentially as grounds for the belief that the relevant thoughts are true. It might be objected that this stance rests on a misunderstanding: hasn't the believer confused the experiential vividness of their world-view with its claim to truth? The case which we have been considering here suggests that, on the contrary, there is good reason to take the experiential vividness of a set of religious thoughts as a guide to their epistemic standing.