William James — The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture XVIII (“Philosophy”), 1902

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1. This statement comes from William James's Gifford Lectures, delivered in 1901–1902 and published in The Varieties of Religious Experience. The line appears in Lecture XVIII, where James critiques the limits of rational theology and argues that logical argumentation cannot bring a person to the living reality of God. He contrasts the abstractions of dogmatic proofs with the experiential encounter described in the book of Job. For James, reason alone is “superficial and unreal” compared to the direct sense of God's presence that shapes genuine religious life. The sentence is often misattributed to Louis Berkhof and other Reformed theologians, but it does not appear in Systematic Theology or any of Berkhof's works.