The value of religious facts; a study of some aspects of the science of religion

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. The Materials i

II. The Facts of Psychology . 19

Chapter I

THE results of the science of religion have been confusing and contradictory, chiefly, perhaps, because the method and object of the researches have been different. One group of scholars has investigated what they deemed religion, meaning thereby the various cults, standards of life, and usages which have prevailed in the past, or prevail to-day, in greater or smaller communities. Such, for example, are Mr. Grant Allen's valuable descriptions i of sacred stakes, and of corpse worship. Another group, well represented by Biedermann, from the other extreme point of view, abstract the common elements of the psychological conception of religion, and treat religion as the subjective attitude of persons who are members of a common social life.

The method of the first is high in favor at the present day. Following in the way of the natural sciences its course seems clear ; the science of religion is to build itself upon research and experiment. Its first task is to ascertain the common traits of those phenomena which are grouped under the term " religion." Nothing could be more simple. One forms by induction a general conception from definite cases and the result is a clear definition and a deeper insight.

The second method is an inductive analysis and methodical rearrangement of that which distinguishes religion from the other facts of the inner life.

How far may these two methods, the historical and the philosophical, be made to assist, and not to bewilder each other? In the labyrinth of the changing and the intricately interwoven religions of history can a common element with the subjective religious faith of to-day be found ? Is there one force which causes both ? Is there a normal religion with normal religious experiences and standards of living, and is there a normal religious faith ?

To begin with the last question, the method is inductive, and the historical religions are the object of the experiment.

If we try to understand a definite historical form of religion, for example the Egyptian religion, or the Christian religion in the form of the Greek Catholic Church, we turn to funeral inscriptions, ritual papyri, and to sculpture, or to catechisms, hymns, and books of devotion. Here is a mass of ideas in concrete form, a collection of definite statements about God, world, and men ; in addition, certain rules for will and deed toward God and men ; finally, in the ceremonies of worship, rules for certain deeds directly to God alone.

For contemporary religion this material is especially fertile because of its stability ; for religions of the past, with the exception of ritual survivals, we have scarcely any other authoritative material except in this written or artistic form. The confidence that one may really understand a religion from its authoritative books is increased by the fact that adherents of later developments of the same or of allied religions use them in religious education.

And still if we are in any true sense to understand historical religion, we cannot be satisfied with a complex of ideas or of rules, but must to some degree feel its subjective faith. A religion lives as far only as it is felt by living subjects. If we speak with any accuracy of a religion like the Vedic, which has no surviving worshipper, whose sacred writings, however, lie before us, it is only because they help us to reconstruct for our imagination the emotions and the will-acts of the living men and women who ladled out the soma and preserved the sacred flame. The writings meant nothing to those persons except in so far as they aroused conviction of the truth of their teachings about life and man and the gods, so far as they subjected the wills in daily life and in sacred cults, and sustained a certain emotional tone. This mass of written rules and ideas was of course in use for the propagation of the faith; but the immediate transference from one individual life to another within the religious communion of conviction, of expressions of willing obedience, of personal feelings, and of all varieties of mental habits, was a far more effective means of extending the faith. And this expression of deepest religious moods took place often in connection with the written tradition, far more often quite independently of it. Any research into a religion must find the value of these convictions of truth, these attitudes of will, these fluctuating shades of emotion. And the experiment will succeed only when the motives for these states of mind are made clear to one's own self as a real, willing subject.

The object of research, then, in any historical religion is, in the last analysis, the complex of peculiar phenomena of consciousness of the members of that particular religion.

This launches us into incredible difficulties. The multitude of objects is countless; the number of the different religions which exist or no longer exist is sufficiently large, but the peculiar psychic states of the members of these religions even when contemporary were by no means the same, and in the course of time passed through a series of crises. The prevailing moods and motives of a Christian of the fourth century were remote from one of the beginning of the second.

Still the number of cases is not the difficulty so much as the methods of investigation. And this is the difficulty of all science of historical human life, especially of morals, of aesthetical habits, and of religion.

What is the method of natural science ? Given objects are exactly arranged in relations of quantity and quality and in causal relations. Any other attitude than that of an unprejudiced spectator who analyzes and measures, any attempt to penetrate into an inner meaning of the material, is unscientific and ridiculous.

For the historian, however, the inner lives of men are not merely outer objects, but an object that must in some degree be reconstructed out of his own personal feelings. The historian may actually experience the same feelings which the given historical persons felt, or he may imagine these feelings, and there is no necessity to live through the experience in order to understand. We can put ourselves at the point of view of the Mohammedan without becoming Moslems. We construct within ourselves a hypothetical experience such as he would feel in the worship of Allah. This hypothetical worship may be described by analogy.

Before a definite will-act committing us to a course of conduct, a period of deliberation occurs during which we construct for ourselves a hypothetical experience, and discover how we are likely to feel about it by experiencing in imagination the attitude we should take towards it. We anticipate reactions of pleasure or of pain, as if the imagined experience were actually arousing the emotions and the feelings of effort which make up our self. Likewise we can live ourselves into the feelings of others, and especially into io The Value of Religious Facts

such psychical states as have been active in men in history, in the form, it may be, of a religious life remote from our own. As a concrete example: we can place ourselves in a mood in which Apollo seems to be advancing to the twin heights of Parnassus. The god of the golden hair is as clear to us as daylight, the embodiment of the brightness of the Greek atmosphere and of all that was brilliant and joyous and lofty in the Greek mind. We love to dwell upon the thought. We enter into it. There are the laurel leaves upon the brow, the lyre, and the lips curling with scorn of all that is vulgar. We wonder, we give thanks, and, if we are only Greeks, we cry out that he will save us and guard our homes from woe, and be favorable to us, and crown our city with the honors of the games.

This is hypothetical worship, lacking the conviction of the reality of what we have seen, lacking in impulses which govern our course of action, lacking in the kind of pleasure which experiences of reality bring home to ourselves.

Have we, then, the means to reconstruct the religious situations of others as they themselves experienced them ? We have descriptions of ideas, especially conceptions of gods, we have descriptions of certain religious acts, and, less often, descriptions of the motives and the moods which accompany these ideas and acts. These last lie before us in all degrees of development, from the unconscious expressions of jubilant trust and gratitude in the Delphic hymns to Apollo to the intricate reflection of the Psalms and of religious autobiographies. If we take simple concrete experiences with little or no analysis of feelings bound up with them, the mere mention of the facts arouses sympathetic impulses in us. We can successfully imagine the psychic condition of one who cries for deliverance from marauders, from famine, from loss by fire or by death, of one who bursts out into thanks for bright skies, for harvests, for victory, for a just verdict against tyrants. Our imagination feasts upon the details. The single images group themselves into a picture. Unconsciously we have taken attitude with the strange creatures whose lives are so distant from us. Similarly, passionate expressions of sadness or exultation, of indignation or hope, betray to us inner processes with which we are almost daily familiar. Out of our own life we vitalize the written record.

But we are not limited to a slavish repetition of the experiences suggested in the texts. As we repeat in ourselves the scene of joy or of depression, and the feelings which are bound up with it, our own will-attitude crystallizes about the material, and we compare ours with that of the totemist or the bacchanal or the Buddhist, as the case may be. We try to decide whether this attitude which we have developed in ourselves adjusts itself to the other, whether there is any hint of it there, whether it is not necessary by inference to complete the gaps in the text. We assume that we are doing our utmost to sympathize. When this is impossible, we are obliged to interpolate our feelings in order to understand.

This, then, is the task : to reproduce, as if real to us, all the ideas which compose the mental picture present to the stranger, to repeat in our own imagination all the feelings or will-attitudes which were bound up with this experience.

Out of all this attitude, a mood, made up of the trust, the hope, the indignation, and the gladness, or whatever else, is formed. During the process we acquire a keen sense of difference between our own real attitude and that which we are trying to imitate. As the distinctions are becoming clear to us, we ask half unconsciously whether this motive, this tone, is known to our individual religious life. In proportion as this comparison is searching, our own point of view will be much more definite and the other will begin to be understood. Real contrast with new material gives to ourselves a firmer poise and gives to it the freshness of life.

Not for a moment is the need of dispassionate historical research forgotten. This most exact work is indispensable. Without collection of traditions, editing of texts, chronology, comparison of sources, any hope for a scientific result is folly. But upon this material the method of imagined repetition of the experience must be built up, if any new religious insight is to be required. This has been accomplished in the most rigorous manner by Mr. Jevons, by Professor Oldenberg, Professor Tiele, and, earlier, by Robertson Smith. Progress in history of religion at the present is due not merely to the discovery of papyri and inscribed bricks and other masses of unexpected documents, but quite as much to the newly acquired skill in imagining ourselves on the spot even with prehistoric savages. And this we owe very probably to the poets and the romantic school.

The possibility of error is unavoidable. First, in enlivening the historical data we discover the limitations of our method. In the definition of physical objects we have a right to expect a high degree of precision on account of the relative stability of the material ; in the description of psychical life, since our view of life is estranged from that of other men, especially those of ancient time, security cannot be expected. Likewise, the interpolation of feeling into defective descriptions of religious life is hazardous by reason of the individual character of psychic life. A contradiction apparent to another may not be plain to me. In the same way, with regard to comparison of our own and other religious attitudes, the tendency to distinguish our own, or the tendency to discover resemblances to our own in countless other forms of worship may either be excessive, or our own attitude may change and our conception of other beliefs would also be in danger of change.

There is, then, no absolute certainty that we can reproduce religious sentiment. One may reduce the chances of error by approaching the subject from as many different sides as possible, from many different moods, and with more perfect comprehension of the state of civilization, of the habits of life, and of the peculiar experiences of the given case. And gradually one may compare religions and discover in what degree they agree with one's own.

Before, however, a discussion of this kind may be begun with any hope of a result, we must consider the whole question : whether we have any right to assume that religion is an independent activity, or merely a variation of some other form of human life ; whether it is different in kind, touching other activities but never included in them, or, rather, a species of morals, or of art, or of logic, or of any other distinct province of life. This brings us very close, first, to the facts of psychology, and, later, to the facts of history.

Chapter II

THE very statement of the question, whether religion is a unique fact, in the closest connection with all the rest of human life, or subject to its own laws and relatively independent of all other departments of life, arouses numberless difficulties.

There can be no doubt where the concentration of difficulties lies. As the whole argument has implied, the problem is one of the psychology of religion and of the history of religion. The first examines the existence, the origin, and the significance of religion in human consciousness. The latter 19 gives us the material and searches for the connection between the isolated historical facts.

The task of religious psychology is no longer abstract and individual but historical and social. The field of view has widened enormously. The most heterogeneous and rudimentary religious states, the least developed rites and social forms, are eagerly tested.

The psychology of individual states, — of desire, of intention, of reflection, of resolve, of emotions of joy and grief, hope and expectation, of memory and of imagination ; of the relations between states, such as attention and vividness of idea, reflection and feeling; and of the changes of personality and of abnormal states, — all this is certainly of the greatest aid to religious psychology. But it is the psychology of the social life, — of the psychic processes of sympathy and aversion, envy, hatred, reverence, generosity, of friendship and trust, — which has a direct bearing. Just as there is a psychology of jurisprudence, of economics, of art, and of morals, so there is a psychology of religion.

Such a psychology analyzes the given psychic conditions, and the result is clean-cut descriptions of how, for example, motives group with certain intentions, and certain emotions with certain ideas ; but an abstract construction of a religion out of psychological elements is mythological. Good psychology may be made out of a religion, but no religion was ever patched together out of discoveries of a laboratory.

If we strip off all metaphysics and all prejudice for or against and apply a rigorous psychological method to a religious consciousness, the result of the analysis is the same for this as for any other psychical experience, — a mass of ideas bound up with feelings frorh which manifold voluntary impulses spring. An idea, however simple, is always the starting-point, accompanied by feelings and ambitions which react upon the idea. The religions are complicated forms of these same elements. In all forms of real consciousness we find the simple sensations, with feelings of pleasure and pain, and will-attitudes, developing into countless complications. From these elements the conscious life is built. The sensations are connected in complex conceptions, the feelings and will-impulses develop into permanent dispositions and characters. Intellect and will, the ability to be aware of objects, and the ability to react upon these objects with feelings and impulses, are, then, the elements of religion, and they are always found together. Religions are complicated forms of ideas with intricate emotions and volitions. The content of these ideas may be enormously different, and the emotions and volitions endless in variety.

But there is a constant element. And this remains. This idea is always of superhuman realities to which reverence is due, and these ideas, accompanied by powerful emotions, result in actions, in ceremonies, in social usages, or in morality. By traditions, by custom, by expanding authority, this psychical complex rules groups of human beings and crystallizes in social organizations.

The question naturally arises, whence is this idea and these accompanying states of mind ? A deeper knowledge of the inner structure of life is necessary, if one is to fix more definitely the seat of the religious experience. Not that there are faculties, or powers, or any such abstractions. It is the whole soul that is active, but active on different material and with different relations of the functions which combine into the attitude of will.

In the first place, then, the religious experience is not the co-ordinating functions which are always more or less active, even, very probably, subconscious states. These activities are by no means the same as the actual contents of the soul. The most important of these are the logical connection of ideas, according to the laws of contradiction and of sufficient reason, and the associative connection of ideas in memory and imagination.

Logic arranges the given material, but never produces the contents of consciousness. In all its forms the constant element is the strife for the feeling that certain contents belong together, the strife for consistency and unity.

But since the material of logic is an exceedingly small section of the whole of reality, and since even this material is restless in movement and transformation, the logical activity never comes to the complete whole and never comes to rest.

In spite of this the struggle for unity persists. One who clings to isolated facts or to certain keen impressions without effort to compare them with other facts or feelings is condemned as a narrow thinker or a sentimentalist. Another, who will not face details, but rushes to conclusions for the sake of generalizations, is one-sidedly intellectual. Thought is productive when it is compelled to postulate a higher unity, not given directly in experience, which will include the single, isolated items of concrete life. These postulates are empirically verifiable or stand in permanent relation to some one of the great meanings of life. Thus the religious idea has often been analyzed as the result of a similar postulate, as the impulse to assume a single cause of reality.

As a matter of fact, no known religion has arisen in this manner. Religion is what it is, not because it satisfies logical postulates, but because of its own peculiar value, and its close connection with all the ideal significance of reality, with the higher emotions, and with the sense of an infinite reality higher than what is human.

All the geniuses of religious history have troubled themselves precious little about unity and sufficient reason. They have lived in an immediate experience, and in indifference to such problems.

Naturally the religious idea, when once actually presented, satisfies the need of a cause, or promises a final satisfaction. But it is incredible that the bare idea of a cause could generate a great religion or could even furnish the germ of more than a temporary and provisional individual religious mood. Logical thinking is important enough for a conception of reality and for a conception of religious life, but it is never its origin.

It is a law of associative memory that a feeling which has been aroused by a certain cause may call forth a similar or contrasted idea or one merely accidental connected with it, which it has as its occasion. Thirst recalls the idea of the last refreshing drink. An enormous part of the inner life runs on in this way, dreaming, hoping, or dreading — ideas which correspond to no reality. Religion has been explained as the idea of a force similar to, but more effective than, human powers, which can free us from evils, as one man helps another. The awakening of all varieties of feeling of the need of such a Power could only intensify and extend the idea.

This attempt at explanation which brings religion into the closest intimacy with the emotional life of man, and therefore nearer to his real self, is certainly much less inaccurate than the previous attempt.

All that need be stated here is, that the statements of all genuine religions about themselves completely contradiet this theory. Possibly in the most primitive forms it may be valid. But their origin eludes historical research. The question now is whether, according to those who speak of what they experience, religion is one of the immediate and most real contents of the inner life.

Another explanation of religion by the laws of association deserves attention. The imagination is not only the stream of all sorts of associated presentations, but also the expression of the ideal significance of experience to the will in certain perceptible impressions and forms. All human thinking, speaking, and acting is bound up with these sensuous forms, and in connection with such forms only is there any experience at all.

Thus the picture, which has served as a medium in which the meaning was o The Value of Religious Facts expressed, or which possesses some kind of affinity with the meaning, becomes the invariable implement to represent, to reawaken, or to communicate these ideal experiences.

Art and poetry, beside the aesthetic pleasure of their form, express ideal meaning which is otherwise inexpressible; and these forms become the mightiest means of the education of the will. The most abstract language of metaphysics betrays the childish metaphor of the primitive symbolic speech of the imagination.

Likewise religion is bound up with images and media, which have some kind of analogy with the ideal religious experience, or suggest it to the inner life ; and these are so inextricably bound up with this inner experience that they become indispensable symbols of religious speech and imaginations. Heaven, Creation, Light, Lord are poetical terms, but to a developed religious nature symbols of inner facts independent of any aesthetic insight.

The religious idea, then, is not the result of these co-ordinating activities.

The contents of the soul, in contrast to the activities which have the character of immediacy are of two classes: one of percepts and presentations, the other of an ideal world.

The first, the world of visible, sounding, impenetrable bodily things which our senses present to us, the other, that which gives a significance and calm to the inner life, and to the outer world, forms, purposes, and values of beauty, of goodness, of truth and of holiness. The latter exist only in connection with the former in origin and result, but are clearly distinguishable from it and independent of it.

If we distinguish the contents of the soul into two different kinds of reality, we may distinguish the psychic activities into perception and feeling. Towards the outer world of objects the activity appears as perception and sensuous emotion. On account of the constancy and clearness of the conception, and on account of the lack of interest on the part of the deeper nature of the personality, the emotional reaction is insignificant, easily separated from the object, and diminishes to a mere care for accuracy of perception or even of total indifference. The object is comparatively separable from the real self.

In the inner life of perceptions of ideal realities and of ideal feelings of values with the corresponding voluntary impulses, the element separable from the subject is small. We have here to do not with a world, incomprehensible, easily detached from the self, foreign to the innermost nature, but with a world affirming itself, immediately perceptible, comprising all that gives meaning and consistency to life. Hence we find these values, in spite of their universality and necessity, everywhere in the closest relation to the individual person, in the most deeply rooted intimacy with the passions, in dependence upon the will, which gathers itself together and moulds itself, and subjects itself to their ideal authority, if they are permanently to master the character distracted in the ever-varying world of the senses. Hence the indistinctness and dissimilarity of the ideal values in comparison with the distinctness and similarity of the sensuous perceptions.

The connection of this knowledge 3 of ideals with the will which subjects itself to moral commands has the further consequence that its higher forms can grow only with the moral development of the race and with the gradual moral gain of individuals. The perception of the sensuous world, on the contrary, is always, at least in principle, the same. The concept of the tree permits a far less degree of development than the idea of truth or of love.

Therefore the attempt has been made by some apologists of the ideal world to denote this more definite and stable mass of perceptions as the practical side of life or as the world of judgments of value, and as such to separate it from the world of ideals. But thereby the false assumption is made that practical perceptions of value need not be related to an ideal, and that this world of ideals may be arbitrarily secluded. On the contrary, any attempt at a standard demands that different concrete cases find their right relation to each other and to the other facts of reality. As a matter of fact, it is true, these different individual cases of judgment, since they belong to different levels in the scale, are often in violent conflict with each other, and likewise with the more or less accurate knowledge of the facts of history or of nature. But the difference between the different kinds of knowledge is of importance. In the purely sensuous sphere mental presentations may be almost completely severed from their emotional accompaniment; they rest their evidence upon their constancy and clearness apart from any subjective feeling. But ideals may never be severed from o accompanying feelings of value and stimulations of the will, and they base their evidence not upon their mere presence in the mind, but, far more, upon their power upon the inner life, a power to which one must subject one's self unless the germs of the ideal are to wither away.

Their indispensability for the practical life and their positive effect upon the whole mental life are a part of their evidence, and the basis for the measurement of their value. Certainty for the reality of the sensuous world is easy to attain in comparison with the certainty for the reality of the ideal worth which must be slowly wrought out in personal experience.

But, in the first case, we have to do with a kind of reality foreign to us, and impenetrable; in the other with one immediately comprehensible to one's own life. The question of the relation of these two forms of reality to the total reality, of the relation of the two to each other, and of the relation of the laws of causality in the first to the ideal motivation of the will, all lead us astray from the issue, which is, — that religion, in accordance with its own testimony, takes its place in the second, the ideal, and non-sensuous world, and shows all the peculiarities of this kind of knowledge. Like ethics, logic, and aesthetics, science of religion deals with the ideal life as its material.

But the chief difficulty is to distinguish the religious intuition from the moral and the aesthetic. These two depend upon rules and laws, which are immanent as such in the mind in their human form. But religion, at least religion of daily life, depends upon something distinct from a mental habit of action, upon something complete in itself and " personal," which is above the individual, and the laws of which are merely modes of its own activity.

It is clear that such a belief arouses difficulties which do not beset the belief in the existence of such rules, or the belief which limits knowledge to the concrete and immediate experience. Moral and aesthetic laws may be recognized, fragmentarily at least, in actual control of reality and be felt as part of the very nature of the inner life ; the religious principle is never expressed as such in the reality and is usually dressed in such fantastic forms that it often can scarcely be felt as a simple fact of the soul's life.

The moral and logical in some shape are deeply rooted in the very nature of human minds, whether in actual control or not; to these the individual is indifferent. The religious is a personal relation, felt in his own way by each. The former may be thought as infinite and superhuman, or as belonging to the nature of the human mind ; the latter seems at every attempt to insist upon its infinity, to be involved in contradictions and to have entered into men by some kind of sorcery.