Tests of religious experience: intellectual and pragmatic

Muhammad Iqbal proposes two criteria for weighing the claims of religious experience. Personal experience alone cannot settle a religious claim, since religion would then belong to a few individuals only. ¹

The intellectual test is a critical interpretation, without presuppositions about experience, that asks whether it leads to a reality of the same character as the one religious experience reveals. The pragmatic test judges an experience by its fruits. Iqbal assigns the first to the philosopher and the second to the prophet, and says he will apply the first in Lecture II. ¹

These criteria are the author's proposal and not a ruling of the museum. ²