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the fundamental truth excellently expressed by the Greek philosopher. ‘Will is not merely a function which sometimes accrues to consciousness, and is sometimes lacking; it is an integral property of consciousness.’^[5] Will without intelligence may be possible; but intelligence without will is not, not even in the case of so-called disinterested, theoretical thinking. There is, there can be, no thinking without desire, intention, or purpose. ‘The one thing that stands out,’ says, for instance, Professor Dewey, ‘is that thinking is inquiry, and that knowledge as science is the outcome of systematically directed inquiry.’ Thought absolutely undirected would be not even a dream—mere meaningless, chaotic atoms of thought. It is the intention, the purpose, which makes thought what it is; that is to say, significant. We think because we will. Thought does not exist for itself; it is the instrument of desire. To discover ways and means of gratifying proximate or distant desires, needs, cravings, is the function of intelligence. The psychologist speaks, therefore, of the instrumental character of thought, and considers cognition to be a function of conduct. The mastery of desire over thought is abundantly illustrated in the history of belief, and nowhere so strikingly as in Religion.

      With regard to the relation of feeling to the will and to the intellect, it is to be observed that where there is desire for an object, there liking is present; and, conversely, where there is liking, there actual or potential desire is felt. As to sentiments and emotions, they involve ideas and conative elements in addition to sensations and feelings. An emotion is a reaction, the response of an organism to a situation. It is a form of action. Aristotle’s characterisation of man is thus seen to be adequate; it does not leave out the feelings, as it might seem at first. Thinking-desire includes the affection since it is included in desire. Every pulse of consciousness is psychically compounded of will, feeling, and thought. Successive moments can differ one from the other neither in the absence of one or two of these three constituents, nor in the essential relation they bear to one another—that is fixed and unchangeable—but only in the intensity and vividness of their respective components. This, then, is the double teaching of psychology in this matter:—(1) Will, feeling, and thought enter in some degree into every moment of consciousness which can be looked upon as an actuality, and not merely as an abstraction; they are necessary constituents of consciousness. The unit of conscious life is neither thought, nor feeling, nor will, but all three in movement towards an object. (2) The will is primal; or, in other words, conscious life is always oriented towards something to be secured or avoided immediately or ultimately.

      If, with this conception in mind, we turn to Religion, we shall understand it to be compounded of will, thought, and feeling, bearing to each other the relation which belongs to them in every department of life. And it will, moreover, be clear that a purpose or an ideal, i.e. something to be attained or maintained, must always be at the root of it. The outcome of the application of current psychological teaching to religious life is, then, to lead us to regard Religion as a particular kind of activity, as a mode or type of behaviour, and to make it as impossible for us to identify it with a particular emotion or with a particular belief, as it would be to identify, let us say, family life with affection, or to define trade as ‘belief in the productivity of exchange’; or commerce as ‘greed touched with a feeling of dependence upon society.’ And yet this last definition is no less informing and adequate than the far-famed formula of Matthew Arnold, which I forbear to repeat. We shall, however, have to remember that Religion is multiform, and that certain ideas, emotions, and purposes appear in it prominently at certain moments, and other ideas, emotions, and purposes at other times. But neither prominence nor predominance is synonymous with ‘essence’ or with ‘vital element.’

      I do not intend, at this stage of our inquiry, to offer a complete definition of Religion. But I must guard against a possible misinterpretation. In speaking of Religion as an activity, or as a type of behaviour, I would not be understood to exclude from it whatever does not express itself in overt acts, in rites of propitiation, submission, or adoration. For, just as man’s relations with his fellow-men are not all directly expressed, or expressible, in actions, so his relations with gods, or their impersonal substitutes, may not have any visible form; they may remain purely subjective and none the less exercise a definite guiding and inspiring influence over his life.

      The adjectives passive and active might be used to separate amorphous from organised Religion, i.e. the feeling-attitude from the behaviour. ‘Passive,’ used in this connection, would mean simply that the person does not actively seek those advantages the gods might procure, but is content to be acted upon by them.

      Unorganised religiosity must be, it seems, the necessary precursor of organised Religion; it is its larval stage. But it does not by any means disappear from society when a system of definite relations with gods, or with impersonal sources of religious inspiration, has been developed. In all societies there is always a large number of people who live in the limbo of organised Religion. They are open to the influence of religious agents, in which they believe more or less cold-heartedly, without ever entering into definite and fixed relations with them.

      Footnotes

       Table of Contents

      1 ↑ The Non-Religion of the Future, p. 2.

      2 ↑ The Golden Bough, 2nd edition, i. p. 63.

      3 ↑ Outlines of a Philosophy of Religion, p. 27.

      4 ↑ The Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 53, 38, abbreviated and rearranged.

      5 ↑ Wündt’s Ethics, English tr., iii. p. 6.

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