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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: the rational intellectual element, with the gradual fading out of
the emotional element, this latter tending to enter into the
group of purely intellectual sentiments. "Of religious sentiment
properly so called, nothing survives at last save a vague respect
for the unknowable x which is a last relic of the fear, and a
certain attraction towards the ideal, which is a relic of the
love, that characterized the earlier periods of religious growth.
To state this more simply, religion tends to turn into religious
philosophy.--These are psychologically entirely different things,
the one being a theoretic construction of ratiocination, whereas
the other is the living work of a group of persons, or of a great
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