The psychology of prayer

Front matter

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The of Prayer

Preface

**We hear in these days of scientific enlightenment a great deal of discussion about the efficacy of prayer; and many reasons are given us why we should not pray, whilst others are given us why we should. But in all this very little is said of the reason why we do pray." — So wrote Professor William James nineteen years ago. The temper of the age has changed much in the past score of years and perhaps in nothing more than in its attitude toward religion. Twenty years ago the question was insistently and even clamorously asked: Is religion true? Today we have tacitly concluded to let this question rest while we ask two other questions that seem to need answering first, namely, Wliat is religion? and, What do we mean by 'Hrue*'? Nothing might seem less in need of investigation. Surely religion is too well known to require any description, while to inquire what we mean by "true" sounds like willful sophistication. And yet both these questions are proving most fruitful in stimulating investigation and reflection. With the second of these we have nothing to do here, directly. That may be left, for the time being, to the Pragmatists and their critics. But we may dwell for a moment on some implications of the first question, as showing the reason for studying the psychology of prayer which includes among other subjects * ' the reason why we do pray."

There are some few parts of what we know and feel and do that seem to require only a world of things, on the one hand, and a mind capable of sensing and responding to them, on the other. But by far the most interesting and most important parts of life involve relations to other persons. Language, the means of communicating with others, is an almost if not quite indispensable tool for all thinking. In cooperation or in com|)etition with others we carry on our work, build the structure of home and state, and in short, transform bare existence into a genuine life. Personal relations evoke largely the emotions which give value alike to thought and to action.

Eeligion, whatever else it may signify, belongs to the social aspects of our experience. It is relation to some other. It matters not that the other is not seen. The man of faith lives "as seeing him who is invisible." He finds terms for this other in language borrowed largely from human society. God is Father, Lord, King, Eedeemer, Friend, the Great Companion. As implying social relation religion belongs therefore with other parts of life which involve this adjustment to others, this union with others, to produce and become what would be impossible for any one by himself alone. Whatever we may think of religious experience, it takes its place in human life and human history along with science, morality, and art, as a sphere in which man has developed a personality, a self, of peculiar range and quality.

PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER V

These aspects of human life as being in themselves most significant have repeatedly invited attention. The eighteenth century made brilliant investigations in this field. The nineteenth century turned its interest largely to chemical and biological problems, and we reap the results in our industries, and in our control over disease. In its closing decades, a measure of scientific activity was directed upon the mental life, attacking at first chiefly the simple problems which could be studied in laboratories. But now with some of these more elementary problems on the way toward solution, interest is naturally turning again to what is after all of deepest interest — the world of personal relations. We have as yet scarcely made a beginning in applying to the more complex and more vitally important fields of life the scientific spirit and method which have disclosed new meaning and value in the world of nature. We are seeking to understand more fully what mind and spirit mean in those capacities and activities due to social forces.

To study in this spirit the meaning of religion and prayer does not, of course, answer all questions. A philosophy of religion has still its task. But the first step toward a true philosophy is as full a knowledge as psychology can give of just what religion is as a matter of personal experience. If we study religion and prayer in this manner, we shall better know how to distinguish the lower from the higher, the transient from the essential. And perhaps as we explore the life of the spirit in its pro-

10 PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYEK

founder sources we may come nearer than we think to the answer to our postponed question, Is religion true?

James H. Tufts.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

In June, 1906, as the result of a general study of the psychology of religion with Dr. Ames of the University of Chicago, I wrote a short paper on "The Relation of the Subconscious to Prayer," which was published the following year in the American Journal of Religious Psychology and Education. This was the first definite expression of my growing interest in the effect, upon the conceptions of religion, of results and methods of modern psychology. It was followed the next year by ''Some Religious Aspects of Pragmatism" in the American Journal of Theology, April, 1908. A year later, with the end in view of making a more thorough and detailed psychological study of prayer, I took up some special work with Professor Mead on the subject of Social Psychology. To his suggestions I owe much in the general statement of point of view. To Professor Tufts my thanks are due for suggestions in the arrangement of the book and the preparation of its final form for the press.

Anna Louise Strong.

PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER.

I. Inteoduction. The Essentially Social

Chaeacter of the Self 17

Self-hood and self-consciousness attained through social relations. The "Imaginative Social Process" analyzed — the means by which the self grows.

Prayer as a form of the "Imaginative Social Process," i. e., a means for the construction of a self. The completely social type of prayer arising through the gradual discrimination in consciousness between personal and non-personal means and ends. The two tendencies in the completely social type. The contemplative or "aesthetic." The practical or "ethical."

II. Undiscriminating Forms op Prayer. The

Child and the Primitive Man 30

The undiscriminating nature of the immature consciousness ; no clear distinction of personal and non-personal, religious and non-religious needs. The beginnings of the "scientific" discrimination, based on efficiency. The ethical discrimination, based on the distinction between the needs of a partial self and those of the widest "social" self. The needs of the partial self satisfied either by magic as vs. religion, or by a non-ethical polytheism.

III. Intermediate Types. The Growth of Dis-

crimination 50

Prayers in which so-called "objective" results are sought, and attained indirectly, through social means not explicitly recognized as such, by (1) the establishment of a more confident self, (2) a different interpretation of the environment, (3) various specific forms of subconscious activity. Prayers for the cure of disease.

IV. The Completely Social Type of Prayer.

Its General Characteristics 66

Prayer is a social relation between two selves arising simultaneously in consciousness, and has as end the establishment of a wider self. The fundamentally social nature of consciousness, illustrated by the demand for strengthening sympathy, self-expression, ethical criteria.

V. The Two Tendencies in the Completely Social Type. The Contemplative or ''Aesthetic" 76

The two tendencies in every social act — the aesthetic and the practical, i. e., the tendency to rest in the experience itself and the tendency to pass as quickly as possible into action. The social nature of the aesthetic satisfaction, Einfuhlungs-thcorie. Nirvana, the mystic trance ; the extreme at which prayer passes first into aesthetic contemplation and thence into unconsciousness. Less extreme examples of this tendency. Ritualistic Prayer. The general psychological characteristics of this form ; surrender of the self of immediate desire and the consequent attainment of peace through reliance on a specific organization of subconscious activities.

VI. The Two Tendencies in the Completely Social Type. The Practical or "Ethical" 97

The tendency in every social act to pass as quickly as possible into action. The limiting of the function of prayer to the production of a strictly ethical result. The extreme at which prayer passes first into moral action and thence into habitual, i. e., unconscious activity. Less extreme examples of this tendency. Prayers for conversion. Moral reinforcement through the establishment of a wider, more truly ethical self. Indirect attainment of this end through the idea of a mighty ally. Direct increase of strength through unification of aim, and reliance on the more regularly efficient subconscious activities.

VII. The Type of Reality and the Objective

Reference Involved in Prayer 114

The "Personal Idea" as ultimate social reality. The conditions under which the subject-object distinction arises and the nature of the objective reference. The "object" as necessary conditioning means to a required end. Extent to which a dynamic unity may be posited of the "object" in prayer.

I. The Essentially Social Nature Of The Self

Man begins as a social being; he does not acquire society. This fact, which seems from one point of view a recognized commonphice, has many farreaching consequences which are not always considered. Moreover, the fact itself has not always been taken as self-evident. According to an older school of philosophy, man began with himself. The self with which he began was a simple, unchangeable substance, dowered with certain inalienable attributes, among which a most important one was a craving for philosophic explanation of the universe. Apparently he knew all the essential facts about this self before he knew anything else ; he then proceeded to deduce the rest of the world from the certainty of his self-knowledge. According to this view, man's religion originated as a direct and conscious attempt to solve various theoretical problems, which were supposed to cause great perplexity to the mind of primitive man. Why did certain natural forces act irregularly? How could he himself be in one place in his dreams when his companions assured him that he had passed the night in another place? A supernatural explanation was obviously the only thing in order.

The older view of the self on which this explanation of the origin of religion is based, may have some possible meaning for metaphysics, which deals with the ultimately real constitution of things. Even in this field, however, it has been shown to have its inconveniences. And when we deal with the matter from the standpoint of psychology, that is, from the standpoint of the material which consciousness actually presents to view, we find no use which we can make of such a conception of the self. The self — any self which we can know and distinguish from other facts of experience, is as much of a growing construction in experience as are those other facts. The self of today is not the self of yesterday; this is true, not in a figurative sense, but literally. Neither is its environment the same. The same experiences which have changed the one have changed the other. And if we are speaking from the standpoint of psychology, which includes as "states of consciousness" such knowledge as we have, both of ourselves and of the rest of the world, we must recognize the fact that any self which we know and distinguish from other things is not something which has consciousness — as j;he older philosojDhers spoke of the self as ''having states" — but something which arises in consciousness.

Moreover, the consciousness in which it arises is of a social type. We do not begin with a consciousness of a physical world and infer personalities ; we begin just as truly with social phenomena. In fact, in a sense we begin more truly with social phenomena than with physical. Consciousness of any kind begins in the child only when the unconscious lifeprocesses meet with some disturbance, some problem that demands solution. The most common disturbance is probably that of hunger or of pain. Whatever it be, the point to be noticed is that the need and the satisfaction alike relate the child to some person. At the very dawn of consciousness he is in a vaguely social world, in which his own self gradually comes to be distinguished from the other selves that make his environment. He attains self-consciousness through personal relations.

This is not something which happens once for all, somewhere back in the life of primitive man or of the child. Self -consciousness is not attained at any given period in the history of either the race or the individual. Eather, as life goes on, we are continually attaining self-consciousness, and each time it is the consciousness of a slightly different self. This new self is not a self which, although we have indeed just come to the knowledge of it, has existed all along, deliberately choosing to enter into relations with other selves and coming out of them essentially unchanged. It is a self which became what it is as the result of the personal relation. It will enter into new relations and the resultant of those will be again another self. Thus it is that a small and narrow self develops into a larger self, through what we shall call — following Cooley's admirable discussion in ''Human Nature and the Social Order" — the ''Imaginative Social Process": — social in that it is a relation of selves, imaginative in that the selves concerned in this relation are "personal ideas," imaginative compilations and interpretations of certain parts of experience.

For the selves which enter into relation are in no case physical facts. They are mental facts, states of consciousness. It is an idea of myself and an idea of you which relate themselves in such a way as to produce a new self. The reality of the personal idea does not consist in any physical object to which it may refer, but in the result which it produces. Milton or Shakespeare may have more social reality for me, may produce more results in my development than a man on the next street who passes my door daily. It is the personal idea that has "social" reality — that is real in relations of selves. The process by which a self grows is always an "imaginative" social process, whether the personal ideas concerned are referred to physical accompaniments or not. The question of this objective reference is indeed an important one, but it is a different question and one which will be taken up later.

This imaginative social process is, we repeat, the means by which a relatively narrow and confined! self changes into a larger self. In using the word self, we must again guard ourselves very carefully from the supposition that we mean any underlying substance or activity to which all this association of personal ideas ''belongs" as a state of consciousness. We mean, and shall mean tlirougliout by the term self, simply the mental fact which we can observe from moment to moment, which we observe constantly entering into relations with other selves, out of which relations there emerges, on our next observation, a self which was not there before. "We maintain that this succession of personal relationships, this imaginative social process, is the means by which a self develops, by which all self-conscious life manages to go on. Prayer is one form, one very important form, of this imaginative social process.

In the case of the child or of the primitive man, the imaginative social process is emi^loyed indiscriminately to attain all kinds of ends. There is no clear distinction between personal and impersonal. The child will kick a chair over which he stumbles, "to punish it," not because he reasons that punishment will hurt the chair, but because his immediate unreasoned reactions toward everything are vaguely personal. Difficulties he cannot solve for himself are solved for him by persons. We see the signs of this in the mythological expression of the world of primitive men. Science and the scientific temper is a very late development, and there are even now few people for whom it possesses the importance of the world of personal relations.

The science of the adult grows by abstraction out of the less manageable world of personal ideas. Even the most abstract reasonings show traces of their original form, wliicli was that of a social relation. Thinking is in its very nature a conversation, dependent on language symbols. Until we take the trouble to observe very carefully the workings of our minds, we are unaware of the extent to which we use this form of imagery. ''The imaginary dialogue passes beyond the thinking aloud of little children into something more elaborate, reticent and sophisticated, but it never ceases." ''The mind lives in perpetual conversation.'"

But ideas which are frequently used, and used in just one connection and for one purpose, have a tendency to lose in richness of content what they gain in definiteness. By this loss the personal ideas which make up the consciousness of the child become abstract and de-personalized as they become more manageable. They are no longer endowed, as is the fairy, with wings and wand and golden hair, and a lot of other perfectly irrelevant things. They have only the amount of comjolexity necessary for the performance of the one function for which they are required. And though the distinction between personal ideas and ideas of another kind is only a distinction of degree, not of kind, yet the adult does succeed in making such a distinction. Certain changes — the more complex and less regulated — are felt as real changes of the self, and the relation of ideas out of which they grow as a relation of personal ideas. Other changes, the more mechanical, the more definitely regulated, are not felt as changes

^Cooley : "Human Nature and the Social Order," p. 52.

in the self, and the ideas of which they are the result are not felt as personal ideas. When an idea has only one function and performs that function with perfect and regular adequacy, we are no longer conscious of it as a personal idea. And in our consideration of prayer, we shall see how the social relation, normally present in prayer, may, by the loss of concrete content in one or other of the selves involved, pass into an aesthetic satisfaction or a moral action, which, while social in origin, is no longer social for consciousness. That which becomes habitual becomes impersonal. When we make one definite, unvarying use of a friend, and always succeed in making it, he no longer exists for us as personal.

In speaking of the imaginative social process as a relation of selves or personal ideas we have hitherto spoken as if all personal ideas were essentially the same in function, as if an idea of myself were not different, as a mental fact, from an idea of you. In one sense this is true. Both are imaginative combinations of certain mental facts under one idea. Both, moreover, are equally essential to the production of the future self which is to be the result of their present relation. But there is one very important difference, the distinction between subject and object. As long as life goes on in an habitual routine, there is no such distinction made; indeed, in a very real sense, there is no definite consciousness at all. Consciousness arises as the result of a disturbance, and takes immediately the form of a distinction between a purposing activity and tlie means through which this activity can attain its end. The purposing activity is felt as subject; the conditioning means as object/

When this object is not made a part of a larger system, when it is not resolved into a collection of abstract qualities and relations, but remains a rich complexity, unanalyzed and not completely explicable, then it tends to take on a personal form, and to be given the value, not only of an object, but of a personal object, a self. In this case, the relation in consciousness is a relation between two selves, one of which we shall call the me, or self of immediate purpose and desire, and the other the alter, the objectified self. Both of these selves have arisen at the same moment of disturbance in consciousness. Before the disturbance, there was consciousness neither of the one nor of the other. The normal result of their relation, is the production of another self, which will again take the position of "me" in still other social relations, but which is a wider and more efficient self than the me which preceded it.

Prayer is one form of this imaginative social process. Prayer is the direct interaction of two selves arising simultaneously in consciousness, as the result of a need, a lack, a disturbance which demands the presence of a completer and more adequate self before it can be overcome. Praj^er re-

\See Stewart's "Valuation as a Logical Process," in Dewey's "Studies in Logical Theory."

suits normally in tlie attainment of this completer self — born out of a social relationship. One of the selves concerned in this social relationship is the me, or self of immediate purpose and desire; the other is the objectified self, which we have called the alter. Prayer is a distinctly social relation and aims at a social end. That is: It is a relation of selves, and aims at the production of another self.

In children's prayers, primitive prayers, and a small percentage of the prayers occurring among adults, no .distinction is maintained between personal and impersonal means and ends. The growth of this distinction marks a stage in the discrimination of the use of prayer. And this discrimination may take place in either or both of two ways. The use of prayer in certain fields may cease because it is not found to ''work", or because there is a gradually growing sense of shame in connection with such a use. These two methods of discrimination we shall call the scientific and the ethical.

The child and the primitive man do not make such distinctions. The prayers they use are not, from our standpoint, the most effective means to the end desired. Yet even here they are perhaps as efficient and direct a means as any means present to the consciousness of the child or the primitive man. His science is as undiscriminating as his religion; he has as yet no thorough correlation of means and ends. And even for the adult the distinction between personal and impersonal is not at all completely made. There are fields which are still claimed for both concepts, — especially the field of therapeutics. In fields of this type we occupy much the same position as that occupied by the primitive man in regard to all his activities. We try now one means, now another; prayer is sometimes efficient, sometimes not; and we do not know precisely when or how it is going to prove efficient.

Meantime another form of discrimination is constantly going on with regard to prayer. Certain needs are seen to be the needs of a partial self, others of the larger, unlimited "social" self. And when, as in the case of an ethical religion, the alter is given the value of the highest, most inclusive self conceivable, there arises a sense of shame in the employment of a relation with such an alter for the attainment of trivial ends. We shall trace the gradual growth of this discrimination in the next section.

The completely discriminating forms of prayer vary almost infinitely. But they may be conveniently classified according to the predominance in them of one or the other of the two tendencies in every social relation. One of these is a tendency to take into consciousness the largest amount of social content possible, to rest in the experience itself ; the second is the tendency to hurry as quickly as possible into action. The first of these we shall call the contemplative or "aesthetic" tendency; the second the practical or "ethical" tendency.

Prayers of adoration, of meditation, of joy in the greatness of God, come under the first head. "Thou, 0 Lord, art from everlasting to everlasting", is a

PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYEE 27

form of adoration in which the narrower finite self finds joy in the contemplative sharing of a wider, a mightier, an infinite life. In prayers of this type the me aims to lose itself completely in a sympathetic participation in the life of the alter, in such a way as to give np entirely all thought of an activity or problem of its own. This form is seen, at its extreme, in the Buddhist meditations, the aim of which is complete forgetfulness of the finite self. It is seen in less extreme forms in all types of religious-SBsthetic absorption; it is seen when the psalmist^ after mentioning with much lamentation his own trials, finds comfort in the fact, not that Jehovah will deliver him, but that Jehovah is mighty in Israel, and will ultimately win the day in the succeeding generations. Such prayer finds its chief end in the prayer-state, in the enlargement of the self through the contemplative sharing of a wider life, and in the peace, rest and joy therefrom resulting.

At the other extreme from this type is a form of prayer-relation which is more exclusively practical. Prayer is sought for assistance in some moral aim, either for the sake of giving enough incentive to carry the action through, or in order to furnish an ethical test in the decision between various possible lines of action. Kant illustrates this ethical emphasis in prayer when he declares that religion is useful chiefly as giving divine authority to the moral imperative. Just beyond the position occupied by

Kant we reach the extreme at which prayer ceases to be a recognizably social relation, and hence ceases to be prayer as such. We reach this extreme, as we have previously suggested, by a loss of social content in the alter. A similar extreme may also be reached in the case of the '* aesthetic" type of prayer, by loss of content in the me.

The prayers of the typical religious consciousness vary between these two extremes. At the limit either of aesthetic contemplation or of moral action, there ceases to be any mentally recognized relation of selves, and we find accordingly that the average religious person will deny religious content to these extremes. Yet they are merely the limiting forms of the same relationship observed in prayer, and result from the exclusive emphasis on one or the other of the two tendencies in any social relation.

We have seen, then, that prayer is a social relation arising in consciousness, and that the result of this relation is the establishment of a wider self. We have seen that as the growing consciousness learns to distinguish between personal and impersonal means and ends, and between the needs of a partial self and those of a completely social self, these distinctions are applied in the use of prayer. And we have seen, finally, that even in the completely discriminating type of prayer there are manifest two tendencies, leading respectively to two extremes between which prayers may vary infinitely. We shall proceed to take up a general survey of the different forms of prayer, beginning, in section two, with the undiscriminating reactions of the immature consciousness, passing, in section three, to types of prayer in which gradual discrimination is at present taking place, and finally, in the remaining sections, to a consideration of the completely social forms of prayer.

30 PSYCHOLOGY OP PEAYEB

II

UNDISCRIMINATING FOEMS OF PRAYER. THE CHILD AND THE PRIMITIVE MAN

Prayer is, then, as we have seen, a social relation which has as aim the attainment of a wider, less partial self, — a more confident self, a self more strong to endure, a self of larger sympathies, a more truly ethical, more completely social self. This is the need, the "problem" of the religious consciousness.

But in the beginnings of religion, as we should expect from the vaguer, less discriminating tyj^e of earlier consciousness, there was no marked division between religious needs and needs of any kind. Irving King has shown this in his thesis, ''The Differentiation of the Eeligious Consciousness". All activities might partake of the religious character; none were religious in the modern sense of the term. Ceremonies which might be called either religious or magical or artistic, and which have indeed been classed as all three, were performed at the recognized crises of life. Birth, the attainment of maturity, marriage, and death, were the recognized crises in the life of the individual; while seed-time and harvest or the expeditions of hunting and warfare marked tribal crises which demanded ceremonial preparation of a religious nature.

What is true of primitive races in this connection is also true of the child. The child who attaches any really vital meaning to the term God, makes use of that meaning in order to satisfy any need that can possibly occur to him. This fact is somewhat obscured, as might be expected, from the way in which religious education is given to children. The child may learn to repeat the conventional formula that we must pray to God "to make us good". But any one who attempts to discover just what the child means in this connection, finds a striking blankness of content. The words are words and are seldom exchangeable, even for other words, unless the teacher himself has furnished one or two handy synonyms. The child does not distinguish his religious needs from other needs. He has therefore no specifically religious needs. He wants something, and he makes use of any and every means he can think of; prayer is one of those means. And prayer is a means not very alien to the general content of his mental life, which is made up largely of personal ideas, to be influenced in ''personal" ways. He will use in prayer the same kind of whining entreaty, or the same attempts at bargaining, which mark his attempts to control other personal forces. ''Please, God, please let" such and such a thing happen, or "I won't ask for anything else for a long time if I can just have this", or "I'll do thus and so, if you will do thus and so ' ', are types of entreaty which the writer has heard in the spontaneous parts of the evening prayers of several children. The child in the tale who said: "Please, God, take care of cousin Ann now, but we don't need you any more here, for motlier's come home", showed the exact kind of need which he felt, and the exact kind of a being which he posited to satisfy that need. God as a person had for him the same function that other persons, more especially one other person, had ; there was as yet no distinction between religious needs and the other needs of life.