Macintosh's Theory of Natural Knowledge

Abstract

IN CLOSING the introductory chapter of Problem of Knowledge, Professor Douglas C. Macintosh called attention to the correspondence between the problem of knowledge in general and of religious knowledge in particular and suggested that the knowledge value of religious experience would prove to be the most interesting part of epistemology.' A few years ago his original plan came to fruition in the companion volume, Problem of Religious Knowledge. In the Preface he writes: The philosophical position represented by both volumes and by what I have written in the intervening quarter-century may be described as idealism with respect to ideals and realism in relation to reality.2 epistemological counterpart of this philosophy is the contention that can have some direct experience, from which we can gain some verified knowledge3 of physical, human, and divine realities which exist independently of our knowledge of them. These epistemological claims become the basis for the im-