Philosophy, in Taylor’s estimate, also enjoys a certain sanctification of mind and will. He cites Descartes to suggest how we are rational beings demanding to be ruled by reason governed by will. Freud’s sense of the proud solitariness of the ego is also an example of the inner truth of the emotions asking to be controlled apart from formal religion, and William James’s “Varieties of Religious Experience” indicates how people everywhere have a need to believe that can be determined by the will.
Taylor’s case for the moral authority of “self-sufficient reason” may claim too much for mind and will. Descartes could scarcely break free from the Calvinist conviction that the will, rather than exercising sovereign control over the body, remained in bondage to the sins of the flesh. Freud saw religion as an illusion born of the need to deny death; and James gave us the right to believe, but not necessarily the reasons for it. The most Taylor succeeds in arguing is that secularization did not kill off religion, since the depths of humanism have survived as spiritual values.