Religion & Sex: Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development

by Chapman Cohen

Ever since the time of Aristotle it has been an accepted truth that man is a social animal. Not only is individual human nature such that it craves for intercourse with its kind, but it can only be effectively understood in the light of those thousands of generations of associated life that lie behind us all. As an isolated object, considered, that is, apart from his fellows, man is more or less of a myth. At any rate, he would not be the man we know and so may well be left out of account. Man as we know him is essentially a member of a group; he is a part of a really organic structure inasmuch as the characteristics of each part are determined by its relations to the whole, and the characteristics of the whole determined by a synthesis of the qualities of the parts.

But while there is agreement in the fact, there is a considerable divergence of opinion as to its nature. What is the nature of this fact of sociability? What is the character of the force that binds the members of a group so closely together? By some, the cause of sociability is found in the pressure exerted upon all by purely external forces. The need for protection, it is said, drives human beings together, and thus in course of time the feeling of sociability is developed. This seems much like mistaking a consequence for a cause. It certainly leaves unanswered the question Why should people have drawn together in the face of danger? Most certainly collective action strengthens the capacity for defence; and it also increases the certainty of obtaining the means of subsistence. Such consequences furnish a justification, so to speak, of group life, but they disclose neither its nature nor its

cause. And most certainly they do not bring us into touch with the fundamental qualities of human society. The need for food, shelter, or protection will not differentiate the gregarious from the non-gregarious forms of life, nor the social from the merely gregarious. All forms of life require food, protection, and shelter; they are part of animal economics. There is nothing specifically human about them.

We may reach what I conceive to be the truth in another way. Environment is to-day almost a cant word. It is very largely used, and, as one might expect, largely misunderstood. Without actually saying it in so many words, a vast number of people seem to conceive the environment as consisting of the purely material surroundings of man. This is to overlook a most important fact. Even in the lowest stages of human society, where man's power over natural forces is of the poorest kind, it is not an exact statement of the case, and it is profoundly untrue when we take society in its higher developments. If we take the lowest existing savage race we find that its attitude towards life, what it does, and what it refrains from doing, is the product of a certain mental attitude, which is itself the outcome of a number of inherited ideas and customs. A number of white people, placed in exactly the same material environment and faced with exactly the same external circumstances, bring a different psychological inheritance into play, and act in an entirely different manner. If we transport a Chinaman into England, or an Englishman into China, we find that both of them possess the same biological and material needs whether in their native country or elsewhere. Yet this community of needs does not make

the Chinaman a member of English society, nor an Englishman a member of Chinese society. They are one in virtue of certain broad human characteristics; they are divided by certain qualities characteristic of their special groups. Each society is marked by the possession of certain psychological characteristics—a number of specific beliefs and emotional developments—without which its distinctive group character disappears. This is true of groups within the State; it is true of the State as a whole; it is true, on the most general scale of all, of the race.

In other words, the distinguishing feature of human society is the possession of a psychological medium. The adaptations that the human being must make are mainly of a psychological character. Their form may be partly determined by external conditions, but this does not affect the general truth. Whether we take man in a civilised or in an uncivilised state we find the important thing about him to be his relations to his fellows. He is not merely a member of a tribe or a society, but he thinks that society's thoughts, he feels their emotions, his individual life is an expression of the psychical life of the group to which he belongs. And his transactions with nature are an expression of the ideas and beliefs current in the society of which he is a part.

The recognition of this truth was one of the outstanding contributions of Herbert Spencer to the science of sociology. Whereas other writers had stressed the power of the environment, as a purely material thing, in shaping human institutions, Spencer placed chief stress upon the emotional and intellectual life of primitive man as determining their beginnings. He showed

how man's feelings and beliefs about himself, and about his fellows, and about the world of living forces with which he believed himself to be surrounded, were the all-important factors of social evolution. And the subsequent history of society has been such that scientific sociology is very largely the study of the growth and elaboration of an essentially psychical environment. The lower animal world—except so far as we allow for the operation of instincts—has, broadly, only the existence of other animals and the physical surroundings for its environment. With man it is vastly different. Owing primarily to language, the environment of the man of to-day is made up in part of the ideas of men who lived and died thousands of years ago. The use of clothing and the invention of tools would alone make mind a dominant fact in human life. But apart from these things, the great fact of social heredity, in virtue of which one generation enjoys the acquired culture of preceding generations, and without which civilisation would have no existence, is a great and dominant mental fact. Our institutions, our customs, are transmitted to us as so many psychic facts. Every new invention, every fresh culture acquisition, is helping to strengthen and broaden the psychical environment of man. Each newcomer is born into it; it moulds his nature and determines his life, as his own career and his own acquisition help to mould the life of his successors. Whether the phenomena be simple or complex, whether we are dealing with man in a civilised or in an uncivilised state, there is no escape from the general truth that man is everywhere under the domination of his mental life.

So far as this enquiry is concerned, we need only

deal with one aspect of the psychological medium in which primitive human life moves. And so far as primitive mankind seeks to control the movements of social life, there can be no question that this is done under the impulsion of that class of beliefs which we call religious. The operation of religious belief in savage society is neither spasmodic nor local. It is, on the contrary, universal and persistent. It influences every event of daily life with a force that the modern mind finds very difficult to appreciate. In almost every action the savage feels himself to be in touch with a supersensual world of living beings that exert a direct and inescapable influence. And any study of human evolution that is to be of real value must take this circumstance into consideration to a far greater extent than is usually done. Professor Frazer, dealing with the origin of various social institutions, rightly observes that "we are only beginning to understand the mind of the savage, and therefore the mind of our savage forefathers who created these institutions and handed them down to us," and warns us that "a knowledge of the truth may involve a reconstruction of society such as we can hardly dream of." He also warns us that we have at all times, in dealing with social origins, to "reckon with the influence of superstition, which pervades the life of the savage and has contributed to build up the social organism to an incalculable extent."[14]