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      The Fundamental Nature of Religion

       Table of Contents

      THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ORIGIN AND THE NATURE OF RELIGION

       Table of Contents

      CHAPTER I

       Table of Contents

      THE FUNDAMENTAL NATURE OF RELIGION

      The opinions advanced in this essay and the arguments with which they are supported will be more readily appreciated if the fundamental nature of Religion is set forth in a few introductory pages.

      The students of Religion have usually been content to describe it either in intellectual or in affective terms. ‘This particular idea or belief,’ or ‘this particular feeling or emotion,’ is, they have said, ‘the essence’ or the ‘vital element’ of Religion. So that most of the hundreds of definitions which have been proposed fall into two classes. We have, on the one hand, the definitions of Spencer, Max Müller, Romanes, Goblet d’Alviella, and others, for whom Religion is ‘the recognition of a mystery pressing for interpretation,’ or ‘a department of thought,’ or ‘a belief in superhuman beings’; and, on the other, the formulas of Schleiermacher, the Ritschlian theologians, Tiele, etc., who hold that Religion is ‘a feeling of absolute dependence upon God,’ or ‘that pure and reverential disposition or frame of mind we call piety.’ According to Tiele, ‘the essence of piety, and, therefore, the essence of Religion, is adoration.’

The recent advance of psychological science and the increasingly careful and minute work of ethnographists have tended to discredit these one-sided conceptions. To-day it has become customary to admit that ‘in Religion all sides of the personality participate. Will, feeling, and intelligence are necessary and inseparable constituents of Religion.’ But statements such as this one do not necessarily imply a correct understanding of the functional relation of the three aspects of psychic life. One may be acquainted with the three branches of government—legislative, executive, and judicial—and nevertheless grossly misunderstand their respective functions. Pfleiderer, for instance, hastens to add to the sentences last quoted, ‘Of course we must recognise that knowing and willing are here [in religion] not ends in themselves, as in science and in morality, but rather subordinate to feeling as the real centre of religious consciousness.’ Thus feeling reappears as the real centre of religious consciousness. What the author may well have meant here by ‘centre,’ I do not know. A similar criticism is applicable to Max Müller and to Guyau. The latter begins promisingly with a criticism of the one-sided formulas of Schleiermacher and of Feuerbach, and declares that they should be combined. ‘The religious sentiment,’ says he, is ‘primarily no doubt a feeling of dependence. But this feeling of dependence really to give birth to Religion must provoke in one a reaction—a desire for deliverance.’ Very good, indeed! But, on proceeding, the reader discovers that the opinion the book defends is that ‘Religion is the outcome of an effort to explain all things—physical, metaphysical, and moral—by analogies drawn from human society, imaginatively and symbolically considered. In short, it is a universal, sociological hypothesis, mythical in form.’^[1] What is this but once more the intellectualistic position? Religion arising from an effort to explain; Religion an hypothesis! It is Herbert Spencer over again with an additional statement concerning the way in which man attempts to explain ‘the mystery pressing for interpretation.’

It must be admitted, however, that several of the more recent definitions have completely broken with this bad psychology. Among these are those of J. G. Frazer, of A. Sabatier, and of William James. The first understands by Religion ‘propitiation, or conciliation of powers superior to man, which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life.’^[2] For A. Sabatier, Religion ‘is a commerce, a conscious and willed relation into which the soul in distress enters with the mysterious power on which it feels that it and its destiny depend.’^[3] William James expresses his mind thus: ‘In broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that religious life consists in the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. This belief and this adjustment are the religious attitude of the soul. In the ordinary sense of the word, however, no attitude is accounted religious unless it be grave and serious; the trifling, sneering attitude of a Voltaire must be thrown out if we would not strain the ordinary use of language. Moreover, there must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any attitude which we denominate Religion. If glad, it must not grin or snigger; if sad, it must not scream or curse. The sallies of a Schopenhauer and a Nietzsche lack the purgatorial note which religious sadness gives forth. And finally we must exclude also the chilling reflections of Marcus Aurelius on the eternal reason, as well as the passionate outcry of Job.’^[4]

      But the battle against intellectualistic and affectivistic conceptions of Religion is not yet won. The recent definitions of Tiele and of Kaftan show only too clearly how strong the tendency remains to identify Religion with some feeling or emotion.

      As the amazing discrepancies and contradictions offered by authorised definitions of Religion arise, in my opinion, primarily from a faulty psychology, a moment may profitably be devoted to an untechnical statement

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