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Necessarily implied by my analysis of the existential question as a single question distinct from both properly metaphysical and properly moral questions, but having two aspects that in turn relate it respectively to both of these other types of questions, is that the procedures for verifying any assertion answering it are distinct from, even while also related to, the procedures for verifying assertions answering properly moral and metaphysical questions respectively. In other words, there are distinct procedures appropriate for verifying existential assertions in essentially the same way in which there are such distinct procedures for verifying both metaphysical and moral assertions

Wiki MarkupEven so, in some, if hardly all, of my discussions of the procedures for verifying existential assertions, I have asserted or implied \ -\- at any rate, clearly given the impression \ -\- that the only such procedures are those for verifying properly metaphysical and properly moral assertions respectively. Thus, for example, I say in _Is There Only One True Religion or Are There Many?_, "Broadly speaking we may say that a specific answer \ [_sc_. to the existential question\] is true insofar as it so responds to the question as to solve the problem that all religions exist to solve \ -\- the problem, namely, of making sense somehow of our basic faith in the meaning of life, given the facts of life as we actually experience it. But whether, or to what extent, a specific religious answer is capable of doing this can be determined only by verifying its necessary implications, ethical \ [_sc_. moral\] as well as metaphysical. If it is true, its implications also must be true; and unless they can be verified by procedures appropriate to ethical and metaphysical claims respectively, it cannot be verified, either" (18 f.). The sentence, "But whether, or to what extent, a specific religious answer is capable of doing this can be determined only \ [_sic\!_\] by verifying its necessary implications, ethical as well as metaphysical" clearly gives the impression, not simply that the necessary implications of religious answers must _also_ be verifiable metaphysically and morally, but also that the _only_ procedures for verifying properly existential assertions themselves are the procedures appropriate for verifying properly moral and properly metaphysical assertions respectively.

But if this were true, there would be no reason to allow that properly existential questions and assertions are distinct from as well as related to properly metaphysical and properly moral questions and assertions respectively. Conversely, if they really are distinct from as well as related to these other types of assertions, there must be at least some correspondingly distinct procedures for verifying them. And this is so even if it is also true that no assertion could be verified existentially, or religiously, unless its necessary implications, both metaphysical and moral, could also be verified metaphysically and morally. -- Needless to say, everything said here about "existential," or "religious" assertions would also hold good of any properly "philosophical" assertions insofar as they, too, are addressed to the same existential question.

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