The religious attitude; a psychological study of its differentiation

Introduction

The historian of religion must pursue his way between the Scylla of primitivity and the Charybdis of philosophy. From each of them he may gain valued information, but to neither of them must he commit himself. Our literature is filled with treatises on the practices of uncivilized peoples, but there is too little study of the more complete religions. Indeed, one is tempted somewhat cynically to say that while the study of the religion of the Bantus is scientific, the study of the religion of Western civilization seems to need an apology. If such an antithesis be too

L radical, a study of the literature of the history of —g religion will show how unconsciously the student « passes from the study of concrete religious attitudes and practices to religious doctrine and philosophy. . No religion can be known by exclusive study of its ~ sacred literature. But even less can it be understood “by the neglect of its more complicated and finished ‘stage. It is easy to say that philosophy becomes < religion, but such a statement indicates a mental con- .- fusion. The psychology of philosophical thinking is «~ very different from that of the devotee of religion. ~ Neither by the study of primitive religious customs nor by the exposition of the rationalization of religious trust and hope can the religious attitude be expressed with fullness and accuracy. v vi Introduction

It is one of the merits of Professor Woodburne’s work that it has sprung not only from a wide orientation in religious science but from a fortunate first-hand acquaintance with the developed religion of India, as well as with Christianity. The more extensive a student’s observation and experience, the more worthy of attention are his conclusions. That is, let it be quickly added, if he has no thesis to prove, but only conclusions to reach. I believe this to be true of Professor Woodburne. He has an academician’s knowledge of primitivity, and in Madras he has also actual contact with two such divergent techniques as those of Christianity and Hinduism. As a result, he has made a thoroughly valuable contribution to the psychology of religion. With noteworthy exceptions, students in this field have not been in a position to make first-hand comparisons and inductions in the field of highly developed religions. The distinction which he draws between religious attitudes and the methods of scientific investigation has quickened his sense of the importance of the scientific method. For these reasons, as well as for its commendable reserve in making unqualified statements, Professor Woodburne’s work is an example of well-directed research which, on the one side, is more than a doctor’s thesis, and on the other, is more than a free speculation as to what religion may or may not be.

SHAILER MaTHEws.

Contents

CHAPTER

I. Tue PsycHotocicaL Meruop IN THE Stupy oF RELIGION

Ill. Tue RELATION SCIENCE .

Chapter I The Psychological Method In The Study Of Religion

Tue use of the psychological method in the study of religion is of comparatively recent origin. Indeed the attempt to use any scientific method for examining religious facts is a strictly modern procedure. The first time that an educational institution attempted such a study was in 1884 when the College de France added Comparative Religion to its curriculum. In the first instance the proposal was met with much opposition, one of the professors remarking, “If religion be true, it is natural and you do not need to study it; if it be absurd, you do not want to study it.” Since that time progress has been exceedingly rapid, and many scholars have laboured in the fields of the history and psychology of religions, greatly enlarging the stock of human knowledge in regard to these fields.

The question suggests itself as to what movements of thought made possible the beginnings of the scientific study of religion. A complete answer to the question would require a very extended study with many acknowledgments. It is impossible in this connection to do more thari indicate a few of the more conspicuous influences. The age of discovery and invention gave rise to the beginnings of induction. With Francis Bacon and Descartes the modern period in philosophy, characterized so distinctively by inductive reasoning, began. These men carried into the field of the mental processes the method of natural explanation which the astronomers had found to be very fruitful in their investigation of cosmic processes. From the seventeenth century onward, induction has been practically a synonym for scientific method, the method itself increasing in effectiveness as scientists have learned through experience the best way of using.it. The use of the method of trial and error in the formulation and testing of hypotheses has been particularly serviceable in making the inductive method more objective and scientific.

Bacon and Descartes did little more than introduce the scientific spirit into philosophy, and their positive contributions are not nearly so significant as the contributions of those who built upon the foundations these men laid. The British philosophers, Locke, Berkeley and Hume made a great step forward in their critiques of the concepts of substance and cause, those concepts with which modern philosophy uncritically started. Locke attempted a treatment of the psychological origin of our ideas without metaphysical assumptions. Substance for Locke was the unknown bearer of perceived properties. The mind itself is a blank sheet on which sensation and reflection may write. Berkeley criticized the sensationalism of Locke and carried the analysis one step further. He wanted to know by what right Locke had assumed this unknown bearer. Locke’s criticism of secondary qualities, he claimed, was also applicable to his so-called primary qualities, and Hume added, to the mind itself as an object of knowledge. Berkeley believed that substance was a fiction which philosophy had inherited from the scholastics. Accordingly he substituted a complex of ideas for substance. “To be is tobe perceived” was his formula.

The task of disintegrating the old metaphysical concepts of substance and cause, thus begun by Locke and Berkeley, was carried to completion by Hume. It was from the standpoint of the psychological principle of the association of ideas that he attacked the causal concept. He maintained that the causal connection between events which men assume is not a necessary connection intuitively recognized, neither something perceived nor yet an experience. It is rather something which is added by imagination to perception, a conclusion reached after successive observations of events in association. Perception can furnish us only with post hoc. It is through imagination that we conclude propter hoc. Hume is important for us not only for his psychological criticism of metaphysical concepts, but also for his investigation of religion. He wrote The Natural History of Religions, a volume whose very title is significant of the dawn of a new era. In medizval thought “natural” and “history” were antithetical terms to “religion” and “revelation.” He traced the beginnings of religion to primitive feelings of terror, fear and hope engendered by contact with nature, and these feelings, together with the contrast which he drew between the natural course of events in the cosmic order and the vicissitudes of human experience, led to the formation of ideas of higher powers which man attempted to conciliate and worship. The earliest form of religion was polytheism; and the history of religion is a history of a gradual transition from polytheism to monotheism.

The stream of reflection divided with Hume, different currents flowing in different directions. One stream flowed on through Lessing and Herder. These men continued to use the historical method in investigating the faiths of non-Christian peoples. Both of them were men of deeply religious natures and conceived of religion as a vital and mutual relation between God and man. Religion is impossible apart from revelation, and the history of religions is an account of God’s revelations to man, and God’s education of the human race, the revelations being characterized by a successiveness of deeper and profounder meanings as God gradually unfolded Himself to man. Both of these men had an evolutionary doctrine which anticipated that of Hegel, and which they applied to religion. God teaches one truth after another as men develop in the evolutionary process to the point of being ready for such revelations. Christianity is one step in the evolution of the highest spiritual religion. Nature and spirit are both elements in one great organism through which God reveals Himself.

Another stream which found its source in Hume was positivism. Comte, like Hume, found the origin of religion in human nature, in fear, hope and the causal impulse. Comte declared that supraphenomenal reality was unknowable to man, so that religion in declaring the reality of God was an illusion, perhaps even a delusion. Comte followed Hume in declaring that it was imagination which peopled the unseen world with powers. The doctrine of the unknowability of God was taken up by John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. The ground of their argument was that it is possible to know only phenomena. Religion thus introduces man to the realm of the super-experiential. The positivistic contention is that the beginning of human history gives us cultureless religion, but at the end we may expect religionless culture. An open-minded investigation of the place which religion. has occupied and still occupies in human life must convince us that positivism is too doctrinaire to be scientific. Its only notable contribution for our purposes was the investigation of religion as a social product of human experience, a point in which it has affinity with social psychology.

In some respects the most important work which Hume accomplished was that of awakening Kant “from his dogmatic slumbers.” The period of the Enlightenment found its culmination in him and his critical method. He examined the form in which the principles of reason appeared in connection with their capacity for being employed necessarily and universally in experience. His work was thus a critique, not only of the content of consciousness but of the reasoning process itself in its various functions. He examined the traditional metaphysical arguments for the existence of God, the physico-theological, the cosmological and the ontological, and showed that they were unwarranted objectifications of the principles of reason. He therefore denied the possibility of demonstrating the existence of God by philosophical argument. In place of the traditional arguments he set up the moral argument, claiming that it is necessary for the moral life to posit the existence of God. Religion for him rested upon interpreting moral laws as divine commandments. In his work, Religion within the Bounds of Mere Reason, he claimed that he had destroyed know!- edge to make room for faith. Thus Kant contributed to the emancipation of religion on the one hand from metaphysical dogmatism, and on the other hand from theological ethics.

Another name which is associated with the newer view of religion is that of Schleiermacher. His work was of especial significance from the psychological point of view, since he found the basis of religion in the feelings. He defined religion as “the feeling of absolute dependence.” From that feeling there arose the God-consciousness which provides the power needed by human nature for its moral perfection. This emphasis on feeling was the result of a violent reaction against the contemporary rationalism of the deists, and its error was the error of all violent reactions in swinging to the opposite extreme. The influence of Schleiermacher on the philosophy of religion has been twofold. In the first place he left an impression which it has been difficult to eradicate that. there is a necessary opposition between the cognitive and affective factors in religion. It has been difficult for the intellectual element in religion to regain recognition since the days of Schleiermacher. But on the other hand he was one of the pioneers in the examination of the religious consciousness from the psychological viewpoint, and the possibility of progress in the use of that method owes much to the work of the German theologian.

The nineteenth century saw a new impetus to the scientific study of religion coming from the side of history. The increasing use of the inductive method was responsible for a keener desire to broaden the range of human observations. A thoroughgoing observation of any human institution involves an investigation of how it came to be in the historical process, of the social atmosphere in which it was created and the order of sequence in its development. This method has been exceedingly fruitful in dealing with the facts of religion. It has rescued religion from the realm of the abstract and enabled students to deal with concrete facts. It has supplanted religion by religions, each of them related to particular social situations on the background of which they must be interpreted.

The historical method furnishes a survey of the way or ways in which human products have functioned and have altered to meet the exigencies of social situations. It also furnished the data for the work of classification and evaluation. By the use of the historical method one is compelled to appreciate the functional significance of all human creations. The mediaeval way was to try to give an account of truth through syllogistic processes; the modern scientific method investigates the worth of ideas and institutions in the historical process. That leads to an understanding of the relative character of all thought products, and of the necessity of working with a true organon. The organon to which the historical study of religion points is that of its competency to do something for man which he needs to have done and which cannot be accomplished in any other way.

The historical method inculcates the habit of intéllectual honesty. Actual problems demanding solution, concrete needs demanding satisfaction, social tensions demanding adjustment—such are the types of facts with which the historical study of religions confronts us. The deductive method is normative. It operates very well when the major premise is scientifically credible, but breaks down when called upon to explain exceptions. But the historical method is just as much interested in exceptions as in rules. Its first consideration is an accurate account of facts, the theoretical interpretation being entirely subsidiary to that. It is thus an out-and-out objective method, uncontrolled by any motive to reduce life to syllogisms. In religion this means the emancipation of the science of religion from theological dogma, and perfect freedom to observe and record the facts of religious experience without reference to a prior: judgments.

A historical study involves the application of the genetic method. An interest in the functional value of an institution or discipline leads to an investigation of how it came to be in an evolutionary process. The present is not an isolated present, but has gathered up into it the past with all its experiences of struggle and achievement. Historical study makes it plain that no period has a right to claim a monopoly of spiritual values. But the values themselves are social achievements the meaning of which can be understood only by reference to their functional significance. That means that the natural complement of a_ historical study is a psychological one. It is by the psychological method that the functional significance of an institution becomes clear. Social psychology enables us to place a religion in the social stream where it originated, and to relate the facts to the larger social whole in which the religion operates. History supplies us with a record of the facts; psychology relates them to the social consciousness of which they are expressions. The historical study has more concern with objectively observable facts, external forms and overt activities. For a scientific account of any religion the scrupulous accuracy which history demands is of the utmost importance. Already it has rescued students of religion from such unhealthy methods as manipulating facts to conform to theological theory, and of making comparisons which are as odious in religion as elsewhere.

There is no doubt that the historical study of religions has come to stay. It took a long time to emancipate it from the control of vested interests, and even at first these interests tried to assert themselves in the comparative method. A comparative study of religions may serve a useful purpose if it be carried on with meticulous scientific care, but it is exceedingly difficult to avoid the danger of being unfair. Some of the earlier studies in comparative religion were contrasts between a divine revelation, true and necessary, and human inventions, false and mischievous; but such studies are usually both unscientific and immoral. Of course the significance of the comparison is only with reference to a norm, and that implies some a i0 The Religious Attitude priori conceptions with which the student begins his work. The historical study of religions is not concerned with trying to compare and contrast so much as with tracing the development of a particular religion with reference to the other phases of the life of which it forms an integral part. Historical studies are thus as a rule studies of particular sects, cults, doctrines or movements, and they are wholly concerned to know the truth about such particulars. On account of the social character of religion, now clearly recognized, and the necessity of studying each religion in particular with reference to the social life, it has latterly become a subject to which social anthropologists have devoted no little attention. Anthropologists, with their investigations of folkways, social institutions, and in short everything related to the social life, have very largely increased our knowledge of the function of religion in the social life. In so doing they have codperated very cordially with historians, and both together have placed the student of religion under a very heavy debt of gratitude.

Anthropology and history thus furnish us with the facts in regard to religious experience. But the student is not yet satisfied; for there are certain gaps because of the incompleteness of the records. Further he would like to know what were the mental factors which determined the succession of religious occurrences, what were the causes for the origin of religious phenomena, and how the religious consciousness itself originated. Obviously these are functional problems which transcend the limits of a historical investigation, and belong to the province of that science which studies mental processes, individual and social—psychology. The study of historical records is of far-reaching value in enabling students to be faithful to facts. But after the facts have been assembled, there still remains the task of interpreting their significance with reference to human interests, motives and sentiments, a task which necessitates the codperation of the psychologist.

The advance made in psychological science itself is happily coincident with its use as a method for studying the phenomena of religion. In particular the change from the faculty to the functional psychology, and the progress made in social psychology have been significant. We are learning more about the social element in personality, and the fact that the individual’s consciousness, mental and moral, is realized only in a social atmosphere. The rise of religion is in the corporate life of the group. Furthermore the religion of any folk involves a socializing of the supermundane world on the analogy of its own social structure. It is thus in the life experiences of folks, considered historically and socially, environmentally and organically, that we find the genesis and value of religious experience. For behaviour is socially determined both as to origin and direction. So that history and psychology alike lead into the sphere of social investigation.

The faculty method of dealing with the mental life, involving a tripartite division of the processes, made it difficult to account for the religious consciousness. Philosophers sought first in one and then in another of the faculties of the mind or soul the dominating influence. Descartes emphasized the faculty of judgment as a result of which man was for him little more than a cognitive mechanism and God an epistemological device. Pascal shifted the emphasis from cognition to feeling, as is evident from his famous dictum, “Le cceur a ses raisons que le raison ne connait pas.” With Kant we have a further shift, this time to the will or practical reason, and in the practical reason he found the guarantee of our faith in God, freedom and immortality. Another outcome of the faculty psychology was the tendency to keep religion as a thing apart from the other interests of life, a tendency which we see in Lotze and Ritschl. Ritschl tried to make religion quite independent of science, by declaring that religion gives us value-judgments whereas science gives us existence-judgments, as if value and existence could be separated into compartments. The great difficulty of the faculty psychologists was their compartmentalized view of life which robbed it of the fundamental fact of unity. When applied to religion it tended to make it a particular affair of one faculty instead of being a vital concern of the whole life, and thus it entailed the exceedingly difficult problem of trying to invent some principle of unity.

The transition to the functional psychology was a change from the physical to the biological approach, a change from the structural and static to the dynamic view of the mental life. The gist of the matter is that the human organism is an integral unity, psycho-neural in character, and that neither the mental nor the neural elements have any separate existence. The habit we have of talking of body, mind or spirit as if they were separate entities serves certain practical or theoretical ends, but we never experience them in separation. Our responses to stimuli are the responses of a single integral organism. The mental and neural processes are everywhere interconnected and _ interrelated. A second characteristic of the functional psychology is that it places the emphasis on processes and tendencies rather than on forms, structures and states. It views the mental life as a process of adaptation through which the organism adjusts itself to the environment, and in the sphere of these adjustments there emerge the conscious attitudes, of which the religious attitude is one. The functional approach is in line with genetic study through which we are able to trace the development of the processes from simpler and native types to more complex, acquired behaviour. It is not accidental that group psychology should develop at the same time as functional psychology, for it is really one manifestation of the newer view of the mental life. The psychologist is interested in every determinant of the directions of mental tendencies, and it is easily appreciated that the traditional ways of thinking and acting—the folkways—of the society of which one is a member are probably greater than any other determinant of individual behaviour. This point of view is of profound significance for all the mental processes, including the instincts, the emotions and the attitudes, matters of first-rate importance in the psychological investigation of religion. The functional point of view in religion means that you view the religious consciousness as an integral phase of the whole conscious life. You study the facts of the religious life, not as elements distinct and separable from the other elements of experience, but as particular responses to definite stimuli. Religious experience is a complex of attitudes, sentiments and overt actions, each of which ought to be analyzed from the point of view of biological reactions. The experiences of life present certain situations which demand responses of a religious character. The exigencies of experience invoke feelings of need which can be satisfied only by religious means. From the functional point of view psychology investigates these experiences of felt need and examines the way or ways in which man seeks to attain satisfaction for them when he is religious.

This approach to the study of religion is of far-reaching importance. It involves little less than a revolution in method. Instead of the traditional dogmatic method which began with its a priori conceptions of the results which must be attained, it substitutes the method of open-minded inquiry with a readiness to accept and record whatever facts come to light. The appeal is to function rather than to origins. The interest is not that of trying to establish absolute truth or falsity with reference to the different forms and beliefs, but of seeking to understand what need was satisfied, what motive released, what tension relieved, what interest served or what emotion expressed. Religious practices and ideas can be neither understood nor explained apart from the mental and social complex in which they emerge and to which they minister. The religious consciousness is thus related to the whole conscious life, individual and social. This method of study has engendered a mutual understanding and sympathy hitherto unknown, while at the same time it has added scholarly contributions to the science of religion.

The mental life is exceedingly complex. The fact of complexity is one which impresses the student of the religious consciousness. This makes the matter of logical definition enormously difficult. The facts of religious experience are so multiform in their significance, their intensity, their degree of differentiation from other social facts, their cultural associations, as well as their geographical and chronological references, that the formulation of a definition of religion is increasingly difficult. One wonders, in view of the bewildering variety of phenomena that are described as religious, whether the attempt is desirable. One thing is certain. Religion, like science and art, is a collective term. There is no such thing as pure, abstract religion apart from the concrete, historical forms any more than there is pure science, pure art or pure ethics apart from the various sciences and arts and ethical systems. A definition of religion would be an abstraction of the elements common to all the concrete forms, and the task of formulating a definition is primarily logical. But inasmuch as the elements in common are chiefly mental or spiritual, while the cult side exhibits such a breadth of variety, the only kind of definition.that could do justice to the situation must be psychological. Can we ascertain, with any degree of assurance, what the elements are which are characteristic of the attitude of mind experienced by people when they are religious? Such an attempt to describe the religious consciousness is more. likely to be scientifically successful than the attempt to formulate a definition. In other words a psychology of religion is more scientifically achievable than a logic of religion. It is more feasible to ascertain the attitude of mind common to all people when they are religious than to formulate a definition that will be commensurate with the great variety of individual religious experiences, practices and beliefs. It is only by this psychological approach that we may hope to ascertain the essential attributes of these expressions of conscious minds. The possibility of discovering a unifying tendency behind the multiplicity of religious phenomena is in a common attitude of consciousness which characterizes men everywhere when they are religious.

Various attempts have been made to. describe the processes of consciousness when the response is religious. Religious experience is so much an affair of the total personality that it is difficult to define its psychological limits. Some have attempted to locate religion among the instincts. If the biological definition of instinctive behaviour be accepted, it will be seen that it is behaviour which does not require the functioning of the cerebral cortex and therefore belongs to a level below that of consciousness, consciousness when present being only a spectator. On the other hand it is quite possible to account for the development of the conscious attitudes out of instinctive reactions, even as it is possible to show that all acquired reactions are developed out of the material of native reactions. Though religious reactions are conscious, still it is possible to trace their roots in those ineradicable native types of behaviour which one calls instinctive. Other scholars have endeavoured to identify religion psychologically as an emotion or a sentiment. In either case the emphasis is on the feeling character of the experience. While it is true that the affective is a prominent part of religious experience, it is not doing justice to religion as a concern of the whole personality to identify it with feeling. Some of the psycho-analytic school refer to religion as a projection of consciousness which is equivalent to describing it in terms of the imagination. There is no doubt of the activity of the creative imagination in the operations of the religious consciousness, but to deny that there is any objective stimulus to the religious reaction is a metaphysical interpretation of the experience which it is beyond the province of psychology to make.

The psychological conclusion which seems to be best warranted from the observable facts of religious experience that are so widespread and so multiform is that religion has taken its rise within the field of man’s social attitudes towards the extra-human environment. By an attitude is meant a disposition to attend or to act in a characteristic manner. Attitudes are indeed the unifying tendencies of conscious life. The attitudes indicate the way in which mental development takes place through the organization of experience. They may be grouped on one basis into habits of conservation and modification according to the human need to conserve an acquisition or to modify a type. Another basis for classification is into the social and the mechanical, according as the object to which the attitude is directed is conceived as a person or a mechanism. Now religion is the habitual disposition to seize upon the spiritual elements in the environment, the effort to organize and conserve them in the interests of the larger life. It originates and functions within the field of social relationships, having for its reference the cosmic environment. There is no other concept, logical or psychological, that so completely describes and includes the multitude of forms and activities which are expressions of the religious consciousness.

The religious attitude is based on the assumption that the universe is amenable to social manipulation and treatment. Although it has grown out of an ineradicable impulse in life, and is a persistently appearing product of the social consciousness, yet it is not always easy to differentiate it from other mental attitudes. It is not a compartment of consciousness, and neither are our other attitudes such as the esthetic or the moral. It is one possible aspect of a unified consciousness, the aspect which consciousness assumes when the person is socializing with his cosmic environment. But it does not preclude the presence of other attitudes at the same time or closely related in time. It is a person who is religious or moral or esthetic, and he may be all three at the same time. The mental attitudes must not be conceived as existing in isolation. They are constantly intersecting and interacting, and have mutual effects on one another. This makes the task of differentiation all the more difficult. The logical task involves differentiating the religious attitude from the magical, the scientific, the esthetic and the moral. This includes an examination of the relation between religion and each of the other disciplines of thought. Since each represents an activity of conscious minds, the method of approach which meets the situation most satisfactorily is the psychological.