It is easy of course to point to the numerous evils that religion has directly or indirectly brought about; conservatism, intolerance, persistent opposition to the progress of scientific or unprejudiced thought, the fostering of manifold delusions and absurdities, the retention of vast masses of mankind in superstitious fear and ignorance when they should have been acquiring confidence and knowledge. In spite however of these and of the many other very serious charges that may be brought against it, religion can claim to have played a very necessary and beneficial rôle in the past history of culture. Sublimation is, as we have seen, a process that works slowly and by finely graduated steps, so that neither in the individual nor the race can we expect to see far-reaching moral transformations rapidly and easily achieved. The feelings and tendencies of the child in relation to the family environment are in many of their aspects so primitive and crude and yet so powerful and persistent, that we must welcome gladly any means of displacement that has proved itself of value to the individual and to Society. It is for this service, above all others, that we are indebted to religion in the past.
As regards the future, it is evident that the needs of The future of religion humanity to which religion has ministered will, in some sense at any rate, long continue to exist. The backward pull of the tendencies of infancy and childhood, forming, as they do, the foundation upon which all subsequent desires and aspirations are built up; the closeness of the similarity between the situation of the adult confronted with the vast and overwhelming power of Nature and that of the child who helplessly depends upon his parents both for happiness and life—these are influences which may well continue to make religion in some form a permanent necessity.
Nevertheless it would appear that the future progress of human culture will demand a very considerable modification and purification of most existing religious forms. The study of the psychology of religion is showing that these forms are, for the most part, based on crude unconscious motives which have to be outgrown and superseded if civilisation is to prosper and advance. In retaining and fostering these forms we are in many cases playing into the hands, not of the higher, but of the baser and more primitive aspects of our nature, aspects which, at our present level of development, it is necessary indeed to understand, but not to venerate or even to approve. Even in so far as the forms of religion give expression not so much to the direct promptings of these baser aspects as to the reactions we have formed against them, it must be remembered that true moral advance lies in sublimation rather than in repression and that so long as the human mind confines itself to the purely negative task of opposing its own primitive tendencies, it will never achieve either true emancipation or true progress[199].
Further, the study of religion shows that the conceptions which religion has formed as to the nature and working of the Universe have arisen as products of the human emotions, having no necessary counterparts in the real world; much the same indeed in this respect as the inventions of the fairy stories and imaginative games of childhood or the day-dreams, romances and novels of a later age. In adult life such phantasies must either be abandoned or, if indulged in, recognised for what they are—productions of the mind which, apart from objective evidence, have no valid claim upon reality. They may indeed guide us in our ideals and aspirations and so lead ultimately to the reconstruction of the outer world through our own efforts, but in themselves they must be held distinct from the order of reality belonging to this outer world. Only so will Man achieve his full stature and be able to play that part in Nature's scheme of things to which, in virtue of his intellectual powers and his moral aspirations, he appears to be entitled.
CHAPTER XIV
THE ATTITUDE OF PARENTS TO CHILDREN
In dealing thus far with the psychic aspects of the filio-parental The affective reactions of the parent towards the child relations in their origin, nature and development, we have for the most part based our considerations on the standpoint of the child rather than on that of the parent. Such a course would seem to be justified from the genetic point of view by the fact that every individual has first to be a child before he can become a parent, and that consequently, though his attitude as a parent is very liable to be influenced by his experience as a child, there can be no corresponding influence of a converse nature. As a matter of fact, however, we have, in the course of our consideration of the psychic development of the child in relation to the influences emanating from the family, fairly often had occasion to concern ourselves at least indirectly with the mental attitude of the parents as a factor in this development.
Thus we have seen that the direction of the child's affection to the parent of the opposite sex rather than to the one of his own sex is probably determined largely by the extent of the affection which the child in his turn receives from the two parents respectively; the heterosexual inclinations of the parents causing them on the whole, and in the absence of any powerful factors tending to produce an opposite result, to give their love most freely towards those of their children who are of the opposite sex to their own. We have seen too that the nature and duration of the feelings of envy, jealousy and hate which a child is liable to experience towards one or other of its parents are to a very considerable extent dependent on the behaviour of this parent towards the child. It is evident also from our previous considerations that there is likely to be a quantitative as well as a qualitative correspondence between the love and hate which a child may feel towards its parents and the manifestation of corresponding emotions in the parents themselves. All that is left for us to do in this direction is to look a little more closely into some of the factors which determine the nature and extent of the affective reactions of the parent towards the child.
It is now pretty generally agreed among psychologists The instinctive love of parents to children that the love of parents to their children takes place in virtue of the formation of a sentiment[200] or organisation of instinctive dispositions about an idea (in this case the idea of the child), and it is further usually supposed that in this sentiment a leading part is played by a particular instinctive disposition—a disposition which manifests itself in consciousness in an emotion of more or less specific quality, to which McDougall, following Ribot, has given the now familiar term "tender emotion." Now there are clear indications that the energy involved in this disposition (like that of all other instinctive dispositions) can play a part—and normally does play a part—in many other sentiments besides that which is concerned in The love of parents to children stands in reciprocal relationship to the parents' other interests and affections the love of a parent towards his (or her) child. For this reason the emotional outflow along the lines of this latter sentiment varies to some extent in inverse proportion to the outflow along the lines of other sentiments. Thus the amount of love which a parent can bestow upon a child is limited by the amount of the affection and interest which he bestows upon other persons and other things. The parent who has no other occupation in life than the care of his or her children is usually bound to these children by emotional ties of a much closer, more intimate and more intensive nature than is one whose energies are partially absorbed by outside interests and occupations. The parent of a single child will, as a rule, be more strongly attached to that child than the parent of many children will be to any one of his. Again, the parent whose sexual emotions and tendencies have but little opportunity for discharge will be apt to lavish a greater amount of affection on his children than one who is leading a more active sexual life. Thus it is that widowers, widows and those who are unhappily married[201] frequently display a more than normal degree of attachment to their children, the latter receiving, in addition to the love that would ordinarily fall to their share, the displaced affection which would otherwise find its outlet in the love of wife or husband. For this reason the tie between such parents and their children is apt to be more than usually close; and all psychological characteristics which are produced by such a tie will occur more readily in these cases than in others. In order to avoid this emotional overloading of the filio-parental tie, it will usually be necessary for such parents to find compensation elsewhere for the energy which cannot be directed to its normal goal, and for the measures undertaken with a view to the prevention of undue fixation of the children's love upon their parents to be prosecuted with more than usual care and energy.