IN THE twentieth century the tide of philosophical thought has turned from speculation to criticism. It is customary to distinguish two types of philosophical question, synoptic and critical. The former is the attempt to take the conclusions of all the special sciences and weave them together into a consistent synoptic view of the world as a whole. Because there are gaps in our knowledge unfilled by the special sciences the task is essentially speculative. But science is constantly closing these gaps, and new sciences are constantly springing up to explore, by their own special methods, fields over which speculative philosophy formerly ranged with little restriction from organized knowledge of facts.
Thus the mansion of synoptic philosophy has been left impoverished. It is like a fine old house, once the center of a great estate, when the family has had to dispose of one part of the land after another to younger sons and enterprising strangers, until there is too little left to maintain the traditional scale of activities. When that happens the only hope of the family is to turn its resources and energy to some new enterprise. Fortunately, the members of the philosophical family have been able to do this. Among the resources of their tradition they have found and refurbished the old instruments of critical analysis; and amid the confused abundance of our modern intellectual production they have found a useful and interesting sphere of activity. At first this new trend in philosophy looked like complete abandonment of [ p. 2 ] the old synoptic program; and there were many who were quite willing to make the sacrifice. But as the work of critical analysis goes on, working down to deeper levels and on to wider issues, the possibility and the need of a synoptic view seem to return in another way and with a better prospect of success.
The program of critical philosophy calls for a critical examination of the fundamental assumptions of every science and of the concepts it uses to describe tlie phases of experience with which it deals. The assumptions call for clarification and frank recognition. The concepts call for analysis to bring out all the variations of their meaning. And the experience they are used to describe also calls for analysis in order to insure, on the one hand, that our concepts make a distinction in thought wherever there is a difference in experience and, on the other hand, that they do not make a distinction where there is no difference. This has to be done for the sensory-motor experience whereby we acquire our knowledge of the physical world, for the intellectual experience of our logical thinking, and for all those elusive ranges of feeling that affect our social, moral, aesthetic and religious life. Then, as a further problem, the results of critical analysis call for definition, definition calls for comparison, and comparison for a fitting together of the resultant concepts into the kind of whole that most naturally or reasonably describes the experience from which they are derived. Thus synoptic philosophy begins to emerge again, not as the major task of philosophy, but as the outgrowth and final discipline of the whole endeavor. It is more restrained; but its foundations are better laid, by reason of the more thorough spadework of critical analysis. Something of the old spacious dignity and exhilaration has thus returned to the mansions of philosophy, but without the flamboyance and pretentiousness of former days. As this discussion proceeds we shall see this tendency work [ p. 3 ] itself out in the critical analysis of religious concepts and the experience from which they are derived.[1]
Before we actually begin our study of religion, however, perhaps an illustration from another field may help to make this matter of method clearer. In the Platonic dialogue called the Meno Socrates, having shown Meno that he does not know what virtue is, and having admitted that he himself does not know either, proposes that they start an inquiry upon the subject. To this Meno objects that, if they do not know what virtue is, they cannot know what they are inquiring about and will not recognize it if they find it. Socrates replies by stating the conviction that the human mind has resources of knowledge of which it is not clearly conscious, and that these can be brought to light in the course of reflection if only we can ask ourselves the right questions.[2] In proof of this he takes an ignorant Greek slave and, by judicious questioning, leads him to the discovery that the square on the diagonal of a given square is twice the area of the given square. All that was necessary was to take familiar examples of the concepts derived from ordinary experience of space, such as squares and lines, relate them together in various ways, and by careful observation discover that they had properties and relations not previously recognized. Socrates was mistaken in thinking that some mystical explanation of the phenomenon is necessary. The concepts used were obtained by an [ p. 4 ] elementary analysis of the spatial character of experience. The further information was obtained by an analysis of the logical implications of these concepts. It is in this way that all our mathematical knowledge has been developed; and in the course of it the definitions, even of the original concepts, have been greatly refined and made more adequate to the description of the relevant types of experience.
But if Socrates was wrong in his explanation of the reason why analysis is able to discover new knowledge, he was certainly right in his contention that it is a genuine method of discovery. There are innumerable relations and properties involved in our common experience of space and number that we ordinarily fail to notice; and these, when noticed, constitute structures involving further relations and properties that may or may not be noticed. The same is true, as Socrates contended, in the realm of our moral experience. But here the experience itself is vaguer than that of space and number, and the common concepts with which we attempt to describe it are much less adequate. As Socrates tirelessly insisted, when the man in the street (not to mention the philosopher) talks about virtue he contradicts himself so frequently that he demonstrates that he has no adequate conception of what it is. Yet Socrates was right in insisting that, by persistent questioning of himself in the light of all his relevant experience, he can clarify those concepts. He can show that they stand for something intelligible to himself and his fellows as descriptive of certain common features of human experience, and that he can define those concepts with sufficient clarity to draw from them deductions and interpretations of great significance for life.
The question of method in the philosophy of religion is very similar to that in ethics. Indeed, as we shall see, the two [ p. 5 ] studies are closely interrelated. Ethics may, for the most part, be conveniently separated from religion, but it is disastrous to try to separate religion from ethics. And just as, in ethics, a little inquiry raises the question whether anyone really knows what virtue is, so too one soon finds a similar or worse confusion as to the nature of religion. Professor Leuba, writing in 1912, listed forty-eight definitions of religion,[3] and scholars have been so busy with the subject since then that they must have added at least as many more. The contradictions and conflicts that people find when they begin to discuss religion are notorious.
From all this one may well conclude that we do not know what religion is. But one would be wrong to argue, with Meno, that therefore it is fruitless to inquire about it. The numerous conflicting definitions offered, even in the last quarter of a century, have added much to our knowledge and greatly clarified our thinking. By their very differences they have brought to light neglected features, and by their critical analyses they have gone far to distinguish the essential from the unessential. Research in the philosophy of religion is simply the task of carrying this process further and doing it more and more thoroughly and systematically. In this way we grow to understand more exactly and more fully what it is to be religious, and what this capacity or feature of human nature implies for the rest of human nature. We may come to see, too, that this feature of human nature has implications that affect our view of the rest of nature, of which human nature is a part. Finally, the deeper insight thus gained into human nature and the rest of nature may reflectively illuminate religion.
In this investigation we have to begin with the rough-andready concept of religion that we have picked up from our [ p. 6 ] social environment and filled with meaning from our own experience. We soon discover that we all have different concepts and differences of experience. But if my concept and experience were entirely different from the reader’s, then what is here written would be entirely unintelligible to him. So if we can understand each other at all when we talk about religion we have some experience of it in common. But when we speak thus of “religious experience” we do not mean by it anything highly unusual or esoteric. It is simply a term to describe the kind of experience people have when they engage in religious activity, including the thinking about religious matters. That, of course, varies from time to time and from person to person. But we shall be looking for the most common and distinctive and significant elements in it. We shall try to define them and work out their implications. Everyone who is willing to give careful and critical attention to religious ideas and practices can thus join in such an inquiry and make his contribution out of his own experience. People who do this will understand each other just in so far as they have a common, or similar, experience and succeed in elucidating and communicating it. Each, by his own and other people’s efforts at elucidation and communication, will add content, definiteness and significance to his concept of religion. He adds to his knowledge of religion. He learns from others; but he does so only in so far as they enable him to find something comparable to their experience in himself. In the last resort, phenomenological analysis is analysis of one’s own experience; and it is communicable only because each person’s own experience of facts and values is an experience of the facts and values of a common world.
But though our whole understanding of such concepts as religion and morality has, in the last resort, to be wrought out of our own experience, it would remain very poor without the illumination we receive from others. It is necessary [ p. 7 ] to bring to bear upon our own experience, therefore, a description of a great variety of the experiences of others, and to seek to enter into sympathetic understanding of them. We need to inquire, not merely how others have felt about certain facts and ideas, but why they have felt that way about them, and why we, perhaps, feel differently. The materials for analysis, therefore, need to be gathered from history and from a wide range of religious experience and activity different from our own. We must not confine ourselves to our own religious tradition, even though that tradition probably does contain everything necessary for a complete understanding of religion. The trouble is that we are sure to fail to see the significance of much of it, and to overemphasize the significance of other features, unless we compare it with other religious traditions. In particular, much can be learned from a study of the religion of primitive peoples. This is not because religion is there seen in its simplest and most essential form, for that, as we shall see, is not the case. Primitive religion is so thickly overlaid with adventitious accretions, and so confused with nonreligious features and motives, that the genuine core of religion in it is difficult to detect. Its distorted emphases carry us far astray if we take them for the most essential features. But the very poverty of primitive religion, when we have cleared away the rubbish, helps us to evaluate the essentials. And the extremes of religion, such as that of the primitive and that typical of the modern scholar, and those of the saint, the prophet and the neurotic, constitute test cases for every theory of religion. They are variants from the common type that the theory of the type must explain. Each of them, when properly understood, casts a flood of light upon obscure phases of the common and undistinguished type of religious experience that most of us share. Thus history, anthropology, psychology and theology all combine to bring grist to the mill of the student who would undertake [ p. 8 ] a philosophical analysis and interpretation of the concept of religion.
This empirical and critical approach to the philosophy of religion leads to a very different conception of religion itself from that assumed when the synoptic task of philosophy is undertaken without first finding a basis for it through thoroughgoing critical analysis. The critical approach issues in an empirical theory of the basis of religion. It leads to an emphasis upon will and the sense of values as constituents of religion at least as important as the intellectual. The synoptic approach inevitably emphasizes the intellectual content and even suggests that religion is primarily and basically a system of thought — a theology. This theory of religion is commonly known as rationalism.[4] It means that man first comes to believe something about the existence of gods, spirits or othet higher powers, and then, on the basis of this belief, concludes that it is right or prudent to worship and obey them. Everything is thus made to depend upon the truth of these beliefs. And the beliefs have to be supported by reasoned argument from the facts of nature and history, i.e., upon a synoptic philosophy or an alleged revelation attested to by historical and supposedly reliable witnesses.
This is probably the commonest theory of religion and is maintained by dogmatists the world over. Since religious beliefs are so various and conflicting, these dogmatists usually maintain either that all religions are false or that all are false except their own. Further, this rationalistic theory of religion means that the motive of religion is ultimately and essentially that of self-preservation.[5] Man is depicted as cultivating [ p. 9 ] religious beliefs and practices as a way of meeting practical problems of life that are beyond his natural means of control. Of course, it is true that this is often one motive of religious activity. But for rationalism it is the fundamental motive; others are merely adventitious. This reverses the conclusion that, as we shall see, develops from an empirical and analytical inquiry, for this seems to show that religious practices (including thinking and believing) are performed for the sake of the values immediately found in them, and that other motives enter in only as the development of belief lays a basis for them. Thus for rationalism religion is first a belief and secondarily a pursuit of values: for empiricism it is first a pursuit of values and secondarily a system of beliefs.
Only a thorough going analysis of the concept of religion and of the experience on which it rests can disprove the rationalistic theory. But three preliminary considerations may be cited as suggesting its falsity. First, the fact that religion itself has survived such tremendous changes of belief. If the whole superstructure rested upon a basis of belief, one would expect that destruction of the beliefs would cause the whole structure to collapse. But it does not. When people find even their most fundamental religious beliefs proved false they more often retain as much of their religious activity as they can, modifying the total structure as seems necessary and finding new beliefs to fit in the places of the old. A person may be very deeply distressed at losing his religious beliefs, but he often develops just as fine and satisfying a religion with a mere fraction of his original and traditional system, or with none of it. Indeed, many who have gone through that experience claim — as do, for example, the liberal Protestants and humanists — that they have found the way to a finer religious life than before. At the same time it must be admitted that some sort of belief forms an integral part of every person’s religion. Many fail utterly to reconstitute their religious [ p. 10 ] life after the shattering of their beliefs, yet these often look back on their former religion with a sense of loss and need. It is a very superficial kind of religion that can be lost with the loss of belief and never missed, and it is only the bad types of religious belief that can be lost with a sense of relief and gain. Thus the familiar phenomenon of continuity of religion in spite of forced abandonment of religious beliefs, strongly indicates that belief is not the most fundamental element in religion.
The second and third considerations may be dealt with together, Religion shows its independence of any specific belief in the fact of the enormous variety of beliefs that may be incorporated in a religion, and in the fact that the practical manifestations characteristic of religion may be present even where all the generally recognized characteristic beliefs are absent. There may be one God or many gods, or no gods but only a vague multitude of spirits. Even the belief in spirits does not seem to be essential to religion, for the religious ceremonies of the Australian aboriginals, though they believe in the existence of spirits, are in no sense a worship or even a cajoling of them. Further, in the teaching of Buddha and Mahavira [6] we have religious systems which were very vital to their founders and their immediate followers. Yet in these systems religious activity is entirely dissociated from the gods and spirits in which, on naturalistic and traditional grounds, they believed. Again, in the thought of Spinoza, Auguste Comte and the modern humanists we have religion dissociated from all its characteristic forms of belief except the ethical. Yet in these leaders of ancient and modern life and thought there is a rich and strong spiritual life; and it finds sustenance in its own distinctive vision and practice to a degree matched only by the best in more traditional religions. Religion is made to be something very poor indeed [ p. 11 ] if the essence of it is not recognized to be present in these cases. And if it is, then we must also recognize that the essence of religion is not to be found in any of its characteristic forms of thought. Religion, of course, always involves some thought, some belief. But it is religion that produces the characteristic forms of thought, not the characteristic forms of thought that produce all the rest of the religion. These other features of religion, of course, are experience and action. Religious thought interprets and directs them. At the level at which they are religious they are not devoid of thought; but it is they, and not the varying thoughts that interpret them, that are fundamental.
If the rationalistic theory of religion is adopted then the characteristic forms of religious thought have to be treated as the only genuine forms. Others are irreligious or only pseudoreligious. It becomes a problem to explain how the fruits of a religious life can be brought forth from such nonreligious soil. Further, in defense of religion it becomes necessary to prove the truth of its characteristic forms of thought. These are so various that a certain omnipresent core has to be extracted as the essential minimum. This, it is generally agreed among rationalists, is the belief in a spiritual power or powers, higher than man and able to affect his welfare. If the religion is to be ethical it must be added that this power (or powers) is concerned with man’s moral behavior. Everything then appears to rest upon the question whether these basic beliefs are true. The evidence for this must, for the most part, be drawn from outside the religious life itself. For the religious life, if it rests upon belief, can do little to prove the truth of the beliefs upon which it rests. The mystical experiences to which it can point are too easily explained away as psychological results of the antecedent beliefs. At best [ p. 12 ] it can show the practical value of those beliefs and so justify the will to believe. But the will to believe requires that other considerations shall at least have established an open possibility of the belief’s being true. And the will to believe must be very strong if it is not to demand probabilities to support it in addition to mere possibilities open to it. So these, too, have to be sought in nonreligious considerations.
This makes religion dependent upon synoptic philosophy. Religion is represented as depending on the truth of certain metaphysical propositions, and, notoriously, no propositions are more difficult to prove. The fact that they are also just as difficult to disprove does not help unless the will to believe is strongly present. But people who pride themselves on being tough-minded scorn to be influenced by the will to believe. Many others, who are not tough-minded, are emotionally influenced by the spirit of the age, which likes to be thought tough-minded; so they too scorn the will to believe. Thus all metaphysical propositions are rejected as offering no basis for action and no justification of belief. Religion is left to those who are “tender-minded” and influenced by the will to believe. In reality, of course, tough-mindedness is simply a tendency to do one’s thinking without paying much attention to the values involved in the situation, and tender-mindedness is a tendency to pay considerable attention to values. One type tends to make the mistake of ignoring the relevance of values, and the other of allowing its thinking to be unduly influenced by them. But an age that is proud of its toughmindedness is unconscious of its blindness. The metaphysic that pays little attention to values seems to it the more reasonable. "rhat which gives primacy to values seems like an expression merely of the will to believe. And since religion, on the common rationalistic interpretation of it, seems to be based upon such a metaphysic, it is treated with a lofty skepticism.
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Yet another reason why rationalism leads to skepticism is found in the history of religion. Most religious beliefs are obviously false. So if belief is the foundation of religion its foundations are mostly false. Even if the so-called “essential” belief in a higher spiritual power should be true, it is certain that most of the reasons upon which it has been based in the past are bad reasons, now shown to be false. People have based their belief in gods upon all sorts of stories of revelations and manifestations and upon theories of how the world was made — stories and theories which will not bear investigation. These the rationalistic supporter of religion now rejects and in their place puts more modern metaphysical arguments, some very ingenious, learned, profound and obscure. But these arguments, even if sound, are not the ones on which religious beliefs originally rested. The original arguments were bad. But by fortunate accident, the rationalist has to maintain, they led to some sound conclusions. Thus, if belief is the basis of religion, and the original beliefs were based on errors, religion was originally based on error. Yet it flourished and grew. So, if this be the case, the skeptic may be pardoned for doubting that the new underpinning, supplied by the rationalist to support the tottering structure, is any sounder than the old.
But the situation is very different if religion is based on experience. Religious thought or belief is then an interpretation of that experience, and religious activity a response to it. The response may be more or less appropriate; the interpretation may be more or less correct. Both are questions for careful investigation. The fact that many interpretations are certainly wrong and many responses inappropriate does not eliminate the need of finding the right ones. It means that the task has difficulties, but not that it is impossible. If there are “characteristic” interpretations and responses, then these, in their essential features, have a certain probability in their [ p. 14 ] favor if they do not conflict with other evidence. They, of course, need careful and constant re-examination. But the fact of error in the past, though it indicates the need for caution and the folly of dogmatism, does not of itself cast doubt upon the interpretations of the present. On the contrary, the predominant interpretations of the past, since they (on this theory) grow out of experience, constitute important material to guide our search for the correct interpretation. So, with this in mind, we may take a preliminary glance at some of the empirical interpretations of religion.
The father of modern religious empiricism is Friedrich Schleiermacher. His revolt against rationalism is an important part of the romantic movement which succeeded the Age of Reason. In harmony with the spirit of the times it expressed the conviction that the roots of religion are to be found neither in reason nor in morality but in feeling. Religion, he pointed out, is not a matter of knowledge but of piety. “True religion,” he asserts in the second of his famous Speeches on Religion, “is a sense and taste for the infinite.” [7] In his major work. The Christian Faith, he maintains that “the essence of piety is a feeling of absolute dependence or, which is to say the same thing, a consciousness of our relation with God.” [8] This is said to be the highest grade of feeling, but it is indescribable. It is an “intuition,” an “immediate self-consciousness” which one may contemplate but cannot express. It is something psychologically more fundamental than ideas. Ideas and words are inadequate to describe it. Ideas, therefore, are not necessary to religion — not even the idea of God. “Christian doctrines are expressions of the Christian religious emotions set forth [ p. 15 ] in speech.” [9] Such accounts are necessary though always inadequate.” The manner in which the Deity is present to man in feeling is decisive of the worth of his religion, not the manner, always inadequate, in which it is copied in idea.”[10]
Schleiermacher, in revolt against both Scholasticism ant" Calvinism, had gone for his inspiration to Plato and Spinoza The practical piety of common men had shown him that ; living religion is independent of theological knowledge Plato and Spinoza had convinced him that the divine im manence is more important than the divine transcendence The skepticism in which the Age of Reason ended impellec him to look deeper for the roots of religion. His psychology suggested just three possible alternatives in the tripartin division of mental life into perception, feeling and activity. The first, he said, issues in science, the third in morality, the second in religion. Thus religion seemed to be saved from the attacks of science. It had a world of its own to cultivate. It had an acquaintance with the divine as immediate as that of the senses with their world. In that acquaintance it had the basis for tentative affirmations about the spiritual world (the world discovered in the inner self, but not confined to it) which science could not gainsay.
Schleiermacher’s revolt started a vital new movement in religious thinking. But it was only a beginning. He had pointed to the fact that religion does not begin or end with dogmas, whatever part they play in between. He had asserted the need of a clear analysis of the inner religious life if the true nature of religion is to be understood. But that problem of analysis has proved very elusive, and Schleiermacher’s was only a first attempt upon it. To criticize, refine and correct his work has been the task of his successors. His [ p. 16 ] notion of “feeling,” “intuition” or “immediate self-consciousness” has proved too vague. Feeling, in the strict sense, as James Ward has pointed out,[11] involves a subject that feels and an object upon which the activity of that subject is directed; i.e., I always feel somehow about something. And that something is always some particular object. We do not directly feel the Infinite. Only after we have thought about it do we have any feelings about it. Schleiermacher in his earlier writings used the term “intuition” as synonymous with feeling, but later dropped it in order to get rid entirely of the notion that religion must have an intellectual basis. But to fall back on feeling as the explanation does not suffice. It cannot account for the fact that religion is always vitally concerned with objective conditions and registers the conviction that its object, which it calls “God,” is objective. If feeling alone were primarily concerned then religion should be merely a problem of inner personal adjustment. Yet it is never merely that. Schleiermacher ’s theory tends to degenerate into a vague pantheism in which the vital distinctions of good and evil, truth and falsehood, are lost. But with such interpretations of itself religion never can be content. So an empirical theory of religion, if it is to make the vitality of religion intelligible, must return to its problem of analysis to seek the root of religion in something more definite and less subjective than a vacuous feeling of dependence.
Schleiermacher, by reason of his references to intuition and the vagueness of his concept of a feeling of the divine, is often called a mystic. A more distinctively mystical turn is, however, given to empirical religious thought by William James. He finds that, amid all the variations of creed and practice, [ p. 17 ] the religious consciousness universally bears witness to a certain common nucleus of testimony. First, there is a vague uneasiness, a sense that there is something wrong about us as we actually are; and second, the solution of this uneasiness lies in “a sense that we are saved from this wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers.”[12] But this sense of a contact with higher powers is merely mystical, ineffable and transient. It cannot be subjected to close analytic and scientific inquiry. However, James has a hypothesis that fits this mystical experience into place among a mass of known and ordered psychological facts, and at the same time suggests that the religious conviction concerning contact with higher powers may be true.
This hypothesis is based on two sets of psychological facts. First, there is the commonly experienced division within the self, wherein a person feels that his neglected and unfulfilled ideals are really a part of his” better self,” so that the division can be overcome by wholeheartedly identifying himself with that better part. Second, there are the facts of the marginal consciousness and the subconscious mental process. These reveal a great reservoir of feeling and meaning from which influences flow into the attentive consciousness in ways not explicable in terms of the consciously present sense experience, logical thought and associative connections. In the solution of that inner conflict, says James, whereby the individual identifies himself with his higher self,
he becomes conscious that this higher part is coterminous and continuous with a More of the same quality which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck.[13]
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When we ask what is this “more,” and whether it is really external to the individual, James replies; . . whatever it may be on its farther side, the ‘ more ’ with which in religious experience we feel ourselves connected is on its hither side the subconscious continuation of our conscious life.”[14]
But the subconscious was, in James’s day, beyond the pale of scientific research, for Freud had not yet given to the world the key to its investigation. So, for James, empirical inquiry ended there. However, beyond the reach of science he ventured an “overbelief” that the wider self of the subconscious is, on its farther side, continuous with a wider spiritual reality, the unconscious being that part of the human mind susceptible to influences from that transcendental region. This hypothesis he found to be suggested by the empirical fact of the continuity of the narrow and egoistic part of the self with “a wider self through which saving experiences come,” [15] for why, otherwise, should these finer influences well up from these subliminal regions of the mind? Beyond this, James found pragmatic support for his overbelief in its psychological value, it being beyond the range of scientific facts to prove or disprove and thus a proper place for exercise of the will to believe.[16]
There has been no greater master of psychological analysis than William James, and his description of the facts here is beyond cavil. However, much work has been done, especially upon subconscious phenomena, since James wrote, and we now know that, in so far as the intellectual content of the unconscious includes a “more” that is “of the same quality” with the” higher part” of the self, it is a deposit of previous activity of the conscious self. Thus it is not in this region that [ p. 19 ] we should look for the roots of the better self. There certainly is a tendency of the self to reach out after values that are not merely egoistic, and this tendency does come into conflict with other, more prominent tendencies. This conflict, as we shall see, comes close to the heart of religious experience. But more light on the whole process from normal religious experience, of both civilized man and the primitive, is needed, and a better understanding of the unconscious is required. It is not satisfactory to pass the whole problem over to an inscrutable “unconscious” region of mind and leave religion floundering in the ineffabilities of mysticism. James, following up with keen analysis the vaguer beginnings of Schleiermacher, has ably pioneered. But further empirical inquiry is needed.
Following in the trail that James blazed, a great many investigators have become convinced that the roots of religion are to be found in a more or less mystical experience that may be isolated by psychological analysis. Notable among these are Ernst Troeltsch and Rudolph Otto. Space forbids that we should investigate them all, though concerning Otto’s theory we shall have more to say later. This general trend, however, is to be noted among those who, more recently, have attempted these analyses. There is a growing tendency to give more and more definite shape to religious experience as essentially a type of value experience, though opinions differ as to how far it is purely subjective and how far its objective features are spiritual in nature. This tendency to recognize the object of religious experience as an object of value is, at the same time, a tendency away from mysticism toward concreteness of the religious object.
Those empiricists who have been influenced strongly by the instrumentalist philosophy of Professor John Dewey and, more recently, by its less profound but more precise Anglo [ p. 20 ] German counterpart, logical positivism, have, quite naturally, seen in religious symbolism a key to the value and power of I religious experience. In Dewey’s philosophy, mind is a system of meanings, and meaning is an organic process functioning symbolically. Further, the growth of meaning is practically equivalent to the increase of value.[17] Thus symbols are not only real, but are objects of supreme importance. With this philosophy as a mental background Dean Edward Scribner Ames [18] turned to a psychological inquiry into the roots of religion and found its origin in primitive ceremonial, but emphasized that that which gives a religious character to a ceremony is not the mere fact that it is symbolic but its relevance to the values of the group life. Belief in spirits is not the root of religion, but spirits find their place in religion as symbols of the vital interests of the group. The same is true of totem and myth and sacrifice. The religious consciousness, Ames claims, is not essentially distinguishable from the social consciousness, the practices and beliefs characteristic of religion being due to its tendency to pursue social aims through the influence of symbols. The idea of God is a socially developed symbol into which a group of people have projected their highest interests and ideals. At its best it signifies the totality of human values, and its power over the human mind is the power of the meaning society has poured into it.
This same point of view, in essentials, has been developed, corrected and deepened by Professor H. N. Wieman in a series of brilliant and stimulating books culminating in his contribution to a co-operative volume with Professor W. M. [ p. 21 ] Horton.[19] His instrumentalist theory of knowledge and positivistic presuppositions, of course, make it impossible for him to arrive at a belief in a personal God,[20] but the penetration and breadth of understanding of his analysis of the religious life are all the more striking for being free from any such influence upon his thinking. The term “God,” he contends, is correctly used for whatever rightfully commands the supreme devotion of man, whether personal or supernatural or not. This, he finds, points beyond the range of immediate experience, of the world as known, to a system of real processes of the natural world pregnant with a meaning and value yet unrealized but in course of realization. “God (or the work of God) is unlimited growth of meaning and value,” [21] a creative synthesis that is superhuman and suprapersonal, though, so far as we know, unconscious.[22] The lack of consciousness Wieman refuses to regard as a serious deficiency, while the nonpersonal nature of God, he claims, removes from our conception of the divine nature certain limitations that are alleged to go with the notion of personality.
These negative elements in Wieman’s conception of God are due chiefly to the limitations of his starting point in philosophy.[23] The positive elements are due to his profound analysis of religious experience. “There is,” he says, “a peculiar [ p. 22 ] quality of living, incommensurate with anything else, which religion alone can give.” It is “to live only ‘ for the will of God,’” and the will of God is “the creative synthesis of each unique situation.” It is marked by a life-transforming decision to pursue a good that transcends the established order of specific human desire. “It is a self-commitment to the service and enjoyment of something that is better, greater, richer than any definite thing or objective which can be brought fully within our understanding.” It brings “a sense of alienation between the order of life’s abundance and the established order of human existence,” a recognition that specific human desires are maladjusted to the total goodness of God, a “sense of sin” which is simply the obverse side of the recognition that the continuous remaking of personality is always capable of further heights and riches. Finally, it involves a “world-transforming interest,” a” radical instrumentalism” that seeks” to make all things means to an end that cannot as yet assume definite form in our experience because we have not attained it.” It is a propulsive movement of life that finds release and specific direction only through crisis and decision and requires for its cultivation the communion of a group of kindred spirits.[24] This, of course, is presented as an analysis of religious living at its purest and best, but, for that very reason, as involving what is most essential to and characteristic of religion. It is a selfsurrender and devotion in which one gives up specific self-direction as at present established and commits himself to the direction of the best that is unpredictably brought forth in the ceaseless innovations and creative syntheses of actual living. … In religious phraseology, this means to be seeking always God’s will and not one’s own.[25]
What, then, is the nature of that to which the truly religious person is thus devoted and which he calls “the will of [ p. 23 ] God”? Wieman rightly insists that it is not merely an “ideal” in the ordinary sense of some specific goal framed by the imagination. It is both too fluctuating and too close to us for that. Yet it is more than merely the progressively unfolding values of the real world. It is these and the continuous promise of something more beyond. Perhaps we might interpret Wieman’s meaning by saying that it is a feature of reality that always points beyond itself to a vague and fluid ideal that calls us to reach actively beyond the present and actual to something of supreme worth not yet realized but realizable.
Three features, he declares, must be possessed by anything that can be regarded as worthy of that supreme devotion of man which alone is religious in quality: It must be superhuman, having a power for good greater than the intelligently directed efforts of men. It must be the best reality in existence, supremely worthful, the sovereign good. It must be that which exercises the greatest power for good and must be limited to that which does good. Is there any such reality? Certainly the universe as a whole is not such. But it is to be found, says Wieman, within the universe. It is the process of “unlimited connective growth,” connective growth being distinguished from competitive growth by its harmony with, and support of, all further connective growth. Competitive growth is the root of evil. Connective growth is purely good. “God is the growth of connections between activities which are appreciable,” which for us is equivalent to the “growth of value and meaning in the world.”[26] In Wieman’s instrumentalist philosophy this growth of value and meaning is growth of symbolic behavior (including language) , for it is symbolic behavior that is creative of mind, personality, society and all their values.[27]
[ p. 24 ]
Of God thus conceived Wieman speaks with a personal pronoun, for He is declared to be suprapersonal, and the impersonal “it” implies something infrapersonal. But this usage, and a certain rhetorical freedom, make it possible to present this unconscious, nonpersonal system of social, biological and physical tendencies to connective growth, which he calls God, as something much more satisfying to the religious consciousness than it really is. God, Wieman says, responds to the intimate needs and attitudes of each individual personality.[28] He is a source of human personality and fellowship, giving to personalities all their enrichment and fullest flowering. He catches up the intimate and secret outreaching of the human heart. “We know the mighty gentleness, we know the tender care which characterize his being.” [29]
Now if we agree — as I think we may and as our own analysis will proceed to show — that religious living involves all that Wieman says of it, then we must also agree that it demands for its object of devotion a being with at least all the positive characters that he has ascribed to God, including these last named. A God that could not be believed to be all this would scarcely call forth, or be worthy of, the kind of devotion Wieman has described as religious. But one may question whether a God that is nonpersonal and unconscious could really fulfill these demands of the religious consciousness if the personal pronoun and the rhetoric did not cover up its deficiencies. Can the religious person be satisfied with the” response” of a blind and unfeeling cosmic activity, or with the “fellowship” of an unconscious process? Take away the personalization involved in the use of such terms as “will,” “tender care” and “gentleness,” and that which is [ p. 85 ] left is something too poor to call forth the devotional feeling earlier described.
The cultivation of the religious life, as Wieman well recognizes, requires the fellowship of kindred spirits to sustain us in the crises and draw the best out of us. But the severest test of the religious life comes when the good that a man would do is not appreciated and the kindred spirits who should stand by him fail to understand. It is then that the religious person needs to find strength in the conviction that the good he does is shared by One at least who does appreciate, and whose approval outweighs all the rest. Without that conviction few if any of us can scale the heights of human devotion and stand alone. Without it most of the prophets would have failed to face the hostile multitudes. And such is the shyness of human beings about their deeper aspirations, and such the obtuseness of those who should understand and appreciate, that the need is commoner than might at first be thought. It is the need of a God with whom the individual may feel a sense of communion. But there can be no real communion with an unconscious process. There can be no sympathetic understanding, approval and appreciation from that which neither feels nor knows. It fails to give support to the religious life just where that support is most needed. If this be truth then religion would certainly seem to be the poorer for it.
But there is another consideration that is even more important. Personality is the highest thing we know. It is the vehicle in which all values are realized; and the “good,” as we shall see, defines itself for us most clearly and concretely as personal development. What gives its unique value to personality is the fact of consciousness. Values no being is conscious of are as worthless as jewels lost in the depths of the ocean. No amount of rhetoric, therefore, can give to an unconscious entity a higher value than attaches to a conscious [ p. 26 ] being. A deity that is unconscious is therefore infrapersonal in value, however suprapersonal it, or “he,” may be in other respects. The creature that is conscious of value is the creature that has value in the only sense that is of ultimate importance. And if man is the creature most fully conscious of value then it is he who, in the last analysis, is the creature that has the greatest value. Either God must be a conscious being or he cannot be the object of supreme devotion. We only fool ourselves with rhetoric when we try to pay devotion to something allegedly superhuman that, being unconscious, is in reality infrahuman in value.
Unless, therefore, a deeper analysis still can reveal a basis for some form of belief more adequate to the requirements of a high devotion, then devotion on that level is likely to fade out of human society. But perhaps we may take further courage from the fact that most of Professor Wieman’s negative pronouncements concerning God are based on a theory of mind and knowledge which is far from commanding universal assent even among naturalistic philosophers. And, in any case, we must be grateful to him for a profoundly sympathetic and penetrating analysis of religious experience, which is all the more convincing for its obvious freedom from any bias due to prior convictions of the personality of the divine being. At the same time, one may question whether such insight would be possible for a mind that had never, at any time, experienced the influence of such convictions.
The tendency to find the roots of religion in our sense of values is by no means confined to those who view those values as attached merely to nonpersonal processes and symbols. Much the more common tendency is to regard the values with which religion is concerned as rooted far more deeply in the nature of things, conditioned by a spiritual reality that transcends [ p. 27 ] human society. When values are given this objective foundation in the world order, then their claim upon us as presenting moral obligations forces itself to the front. Those thinkers who have regarded the whole pursuit of social values as religious, without distinguishing carefully between the religious, the irreligious and the merely secular pursuit of such values, have paid attention almost entirely to the distinction of good and evil within the religious consciousness. This is the point of view of Dean Ames and, though somewhat less decisively, of Professor Wieman.
But the thinkers who now come under discussion find the fact of greatest significance for the religious consciousness, not merely in the distinction of good and evil, but in that between right and wrong. It is in the moral consciousness, above all, that they find the roots of religion. This insight we owe, in the first place, to Immanuel Kant. But Kant was still under the influence of the Age of Reason and tried to make the passage from morality to religion by the rationalistic approach. It took the form of his moral argument for the existence of God. Since Schleiermacher and James first pioneered the empirical approach, however, there has been a growing body of investigators who have expressed the conviction that religion grows out of morality, and that in the very nature of the moral-religious consciousness of man there is direct evidence of the existence of a superhuman spiritual reality.[30]
Probably the most thorough and illuminating analysis arriving at this conclusion is that of Professor John Baillie.[31] In the course of a brilliant discussion of rationalism, romanticism, and the empiricisms which we have classified as mystical and symbolistic, he traces the essential core of the religious consciousness to our consciousness of value. By bringing out [ p. 28 ] the distinction between the religious attitude and the nonreligious, from certain of the Greek Sophists to Huxley’s Romanes Lecture[32] and Lord Bertrand Russell’s A Free Man’s Worship, he shows that the line of cleavage is defined by the question of the objectivity of values. Have the higher human values any support and sanction in the nature of things beyond the conventions and conditions of the social order? Where the conviction is emphasized that there is something beyond ourselves, something in the nature of independent reality, that puts us under obligation to be true to the highest values we know, there religion flourishes and tends to develop a belief in a moral and personal God. Where values are believed to have no deeper ground than human decisions, conventions and occasional preferences, there irreligion flourishes, or religion pales into humanism.
This means that the religious consciousness is grounded in the moral consciousness. The further question is as to the nature of the transition from the one to the other. Here, Baillie’s exposition seems to me to be less convincing. He points out that human beings are very deeply convinced of the truth of at least the broad outlines of their system of moral values. He argues (and most people will agree with him) that if we could be as certain of our principal religious beliefs as we are that it is right to help our fellow traveler out of the ditch, we might well be content. But Baillie further contends that any belief in the objectivity of our values implies that " the ultimate reality must … be One Who loves the Good.” And this is grounded in the assertion that “if reality demands these things of me, then reality must be interested in moral value; … it must be on the side of the good and against the unworthy and the evil. But that is to say that it is a moral Being itself.”[33]
[ p. 29 ]
Now it must be admitted that most thinkers, on both sides, have been inclined to agree with Baillie here. It is for this very reason that opponents of theism have usually sought the ground of moral obligation in individual necessity or in the requirements of the social order. Any admission of a deeper ground of the moral order in nature itself was felt to imply that the natural order is somehow spiritual or divine. But this implication is by no means necessary. It has, for example, recently been boldly challenged by Professor Nicolai Hartmann in what is certainly one of the most significant works on ethics for several decades.[^xxxx]* Values, and the distinctions of higher and lower within the scale of values, Hartmann treats as part of the order of nature; and the sense of obligation he regards as part of the response of personality to this natural order of values. Thus there is teleology and interest manifested in the course of human behavior but, he contends, no evidence of teleology on the cosmic scale. It must be admitted that Hartmann’s hypothesis undermines the cogency of Baillie’s argument that “if reality demands these things of me then reality must be interested in moral value.”
However, though his final proof of theism is thus met with an alternative hypothesis, another part of Baillie’s thesis may still remain sound. This is his suggestion that man arrives at the belief in a higher spiritual reality by implicitly supposing that that which makes moral demands of him must itself be a moral being, so that, if the moral demands come from beyond himself and beyond human society, there mustj be a moral being beyond himself and human society. This, as; we have seen, is a perfectly natural, though not a necessary, ‘ inference. Baillie regards it as the source of the belief in God. He recognizes that it is not “a conscious piece of deductive reasoning,” but rather holds that ‘‘ under the long tuition [ p. 30 ] of moral experience, the consciousness of the moral claim comes, by an almost imperceptible transition of thought, to be interpreted as an awareness of a Divine Reality.” [34] Baillie is content to rest the matter there, for to him this transition of thought, when made clearly explicit, seems a perfectly sound inference. To one who feels that the major premise of this inference does not exhaust the possibilities, this will not seem so satisfactory an explanation of the origin of religious belief. In any case the transition of thought involved is left extremely obscure. Further analysis seems to be called for if any greater light on the problem is to be obtained.
In the remaining chapters of this book an effort will be made to carry that analysis further. And this will mean that we shall have to begin it all over again. The new feature that this further analysis, if sound, discloses is the fundamental part played in the religious life by the experience of the altruistic will (in the sense of a will to secure the good of others) in its conflict with egoistic tendencies and in its integration in harmony with the self as a whole. If this analysis is sound it means that the moralistic empiricists, such as Baillie, have stated correctly the most essential point, for this conflict and this integration are the most vital features of the moral life and are undoubtedly felt as involving a personal relation to an objective moral order. At the same time a full measure of justice may be done to those features of the religious experience emphasized by the other empirical points of view. With Schleiermacher we may recognize the part played by feeling, and the particular significance of the sense of dependence on something of infinite worth beyond ourselves. With Ames and Wieman we must recognize the tremendous importance of religious symbolism, and the social [ p. 31 ] nature of the values with which religion is primarily concerned. We can also account for the element of mysticism emphasized by James and others, for religious experience, as we shall see, involves a sense of contact of the ego with a * will that seems to be more than merely its own.
Our method in this undertaking will be, in Part I, to analyze phase after phase of religious experience, gradually making its essential characteristics more and more clear, and then, in Parts II and III, to consider the significance of the understanding of religion at which we have arrived. This will be done first for practical conduct and, second, for questions of belief. In the epilogue we shall examine the essential significance of the Christian faith in the light of the foregoing analysis and interpretation. This analysis and interpretation will summarize the grounds for belief in God as a superhuman spiritual reality so far as such grounds are to be found in the philosophical examination of religion itself.
This method, which combines the logical analysis of concepts with the phenomenological analysis of experience, seems to me to be the distinctive and proper method of phdosophical investigation. It is, in a strictly proper sense, both empirical and scientific, yet distinguishes the philosophical sciences by their method and task from the empirical sciences in the narrower sense. Broadly speaking, in “science the problem is generalization and the method inductive; in “philosophy " the problem is definition and the method analytic. ↩︎
Socrates’ own explanation of this phenomenon is that the soul must have learned these things in a previous existence and recollects them in the course of the inquiry. This is an excellent example of the way synoptic philosophy often closes inquiry by overhastily jumping to some far-reaching conclusion. ↩︎
J. H. Leuba: A Psychological Study of Religion (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1912) , Appendix. ↩︎
For a critique of rationalism, cf. John Baillie: The Interpretation of Religion (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928) , especially Part II, chap. 2. ↩︎
This conclusion is explicitly and logically drawn from the rationalistic premises by George Foot Moore in The Birth and Growth of Religion (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923). ↩︎
The founder of Jainism. ↩︎
Schleiermachers samtliche Werke (Berlin: Reimer Verlag) , I, 188. ↩︎
Ibid., III, 14. ↩︎
Ibid., p. 94. ↩︎
Schleiermacher: Speeches on Religion to Its Cultured Despisers, translated by John Oman (London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Truebner & Co., 1893) P- 97 ↩︎
In Psychological Principles (London; Cambridge University Press, igso) , chap. t. § 3. ↩︎
William James: Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1902) , p. 508. ↩︎
Ibid. ↩︎
Ibid., p. 512. ↩︎
Ibid., p. 515. ↩︎
For a very valuable discussion of James’s conception of the will to believe see R. B. Perry: In the Spirit of William James (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1938) , chap. 5. ↩︎
“Good consists in the meaning that is experienced to belong to an activity when conflict and entanglement of various incompatible impulses and habits terminate in a unified orderly release in action” — John Dewey: Human Nature and Conduct (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1932) , p. 210. ↩︎
Cf. his The Psychology of Religious Experience (New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., igio) and Religion (New York: Henry Holt &: Co., 1929) . ↩︎
Wieman and Horton: The Growth of Religion (Chicago: Willett, Clark k Co., 1928) . ↩︎
Instrumentalist philosophy seeks to interpret the difference between the mental and nonmental as a mere difference of function developed by organisms in the course of evolution. For a discussion of this question see chap. 8 of this book. ↩︎
Wieman and Horton, op. cit., p. 323. ↩︎
Ibid., p. 365. ↩︎
In an article, “God is More than We Can Think” (Christendom, I, 433) , Wieman says: “The empirical method requires, as I understand it, that every belief be formed and tested by sensory observation, experimental behavior and rational inference." Here, like so many other empiricists, he fails to give due weight to the fact that mental acts and values arc also data of observation, though not sensory. ↩︎
Wieman, in Wieman and Horton, op. cit., chap, lo passim. ↩︎
ibid., p. 304. ↩︎
Ibid., pp. 350 fl. ↩︎
In a privately circulated paper from which he permits me to quote, Wieman says: “Symbolic behavior is the outgrowth of sublinguistic developments which reach very far down into the total process of existence. The reality of God is this sublinguistic process which sustains and promotes the growth of symbolic behavior, plus the growth itself, and all the infinite possibilities of enrichment to which it points and leads.” ↩︎
The Growth of Religion, p. 361. ↩︎
Ibid., p. 365. ↩︎
Among the leaders in expression of this view may be mentioned A. S. Pringle-Pattison, W. R. Sorlcy, A. E. Taylor, D. C. Macintosh, A. N. Whitehead, F. R. Tennant, John Oman, and John Baillie. ↩︎
The Interpretation of Religion, especially Part II, chaps. 5-8. ↩︎
On Exmliition and Ethics, delivered in 1R93. ↩︎
Op . cit ., p. 352. ↩︎
op. cit., p. 348. ↩︎