We can therefore sum up this second part of our investigation by saying that religion, to be more than mere ritual, must involve the possibility of harmonizing the parts of the soul, of wiping out the sense of sin, of sublimating instinct, of rendering the subconscious reservoirs of energy and being available for the personal self, and of organizing the ideas of external reality into a single organized mental whole—the idea of God—capable of reacting with the personal self by interpenetration.
Although he was moving to quite other conclusions, it is worth recalling James’s ideas. For instance, “The line of least resistance ... is to accept the notion ... that there is a God, but that he is finite.... These, I need hardly tell you, are the terms in which common men have usually carried on their active commerce with God; and the Monistic” [sc. Absolutist] “perfections that make the notion of him so paradoxical practically and morally are the colder addition of remote professorial minds operating in distans upon conceptual substitutes for him alone.” (James,’09, p. 311.)
I may perhaps be rebuked for trying to analyse the unanalysable, for neglecting the supreme and sufficing fact of experience of God in favour of the unprofitable and impossible task of catching the infinite in an intellectual net. There are two answers to this. One is that unanalysed experience is selfish because less communicable: with that we deal later. The other is even more important: it is this. Humanity at large is not content with emotional experience alone, however complete and apparently satisfying: it has always demanded an intellectual formulation of the reality with which it is in contact, as well as emotional experience of it, and so far as we can judge it will always continue to do so.
But it is further found, as matter again of general experience, that such formulations do not remain innocuous in the vacuum of pure intellect, but reverberate upon action and influence conduct. When men believe that they are surrounded with magical powers, they spend half their lives in ritual designed to affect the operations of these (wholly hypothetical) influences. When they worship a God whom they rationalize as man-like, they sacrifice a large proportion of their produce on his altars, and may even kill their fellow-creatures to placate his (again imaginary) passions. When they believe in a Divine Revelation, they think that they possess complete enlightenment on the great problems of life and death; and they will then cheerfully burn those who differ from them, or embark upon the bloodiest wars in defence of this imaginary certainty. When they worship God as absolute and as a person, they cannot help making deductions that lead them into absurdities of thought and of conduct: they deny or oppose ideas derived from a study of nature, the only actual source of knowledge, because they conflict with what they believe to be immutable truths, but are in reality conclusions drawn from false premisses; they tend to an acquiescent and obscurantist spirit in the belief that such moral and intellectual laziness is “doing God’s will,” when that will is in reality their own personification of cosmic direction.
Sooner or later, false thinking brings wrong conduct. Man can perhaps get along with empirical methods and ideas which turn out on analysis to be only symbols, provided that he does not attempt difficult construction. He can have some sort of a religion, which will be some sort of a help to him, even when its so-called certitudes are only a collection of mixed metaphors, in the same way as he can practise agriculture on a basis of mingled empiricism and superstition. But just as he is finding that he is only able to raise agricultural efficiency to its highest pitch by relying on the result of scientific method, as when he uses synthetic nitrates instead of ploughing in a leguminous crop, or just as a power-station would be very difficult to run if the staff had only symbolic ideas on the nature of electricity no closer to the real than is the symbolism of most religions, so if he does not bring scientific analysis into the intellectual side of his religion, he cannot realize religious possibilities. True that in a sense all knowledge and intellectual presentation is symbolic: but there is the world of difference between the merely analogical symbolism which takes one idea or thing as symbolic of another because there is some degree of similarity between the two and the first is more familiar, and the scientific symbolism which strives to find a scientific counter, so to speak, which shall represent particular phenomena as closely as possible, and them alone.
Not only this, but religion unillumined by reason degenerates into an evil thing. Religion seems to be a natural activity and need of the average human mind. But when its more primitive components are allowed to dominate, when the instinctive and emotional in it are unchecked by reflection and rational thought, then, as history too clearly shows us, it becomes a cruel and obstructive power. To the fine mind of Lucretius, the religion that he knew was the greatest enemy:—
“Quae caput a caeli regionibus ostendebat
Horribili super aspecta mortalibus instans.”
And he replies to the charge of impiety by pointing to the foul deeds perpetrated by religion:
“—Quod contra saepius illa