becoming more human by becoming more godlike 347Th e contestability of the conception taints the approach to life that
must rely on it. A comprehensive view demands that we commit our
lives in one direction rather than in another. A daunting disproportion
remains between the weight of that commitment and the adequacy of
its grounds. Th is disproportion is the limited truth in the otherwise
unjustifi ed objection to a passage, intrinsic to religion, from is to ought.
A second preliminary is to identify what it is that we seek to change
when we speak, in such an argument, of changing ourselves. It is our
constitution or our nature. But what kind of reality is our nature? We
know ourselves only as what we are like now, formed by the history of
our societies and our cultures.
Th e self- transformation sought by the religion of the future makes
two crucial assumptions of fact. Both are controversial when consid-
ered from the standpoint of ideas that have exercised infl uence in
thought over the last few centuries. Th ese ideas form part of the meta-
physical background to the struggle with the world. Th e religion of the
future explicates and deepens this background rather than replacing it.
A fi rst factual assumption is that the self is continuous, from birth to
death, and has indefi nite depth. Any belief that contradicts or qualifi es
the continuity of the self, and that dissolves the self into ephemeral states
of being, is incompatible with the religion of the future, as it was incom-
patible with every sacred or profane variant of the struggle with the world.
A second factual assumption is that we all share in the nature of the
species, the human race. Th ere is no simple distinction between invari-
ant and variable aspects of human nature. Every aspect of our experi-
ence is penetrated by the history of society and culture.
Recall, for example, the contrast between the two sides of the mind:
the mind as machine and the mind as anti- machine, or imagination.
Although the physical structure of the brain foreshadows and enables
the workings of the imagination, it fails to predetermine the relation
and the comparative force of these two sides of the mind. Th eir relative
ascendancy depends on the character of education, as well as on the or-
ga ni za tion of society and culture, which may either broaden or narrow
the space of the imagination.
So it goes with every part of our constitution, including the funda-
mental condition of embodied spirit, as both situated and transcendent,