§ [17]. Although declining to be discouraged by the conspicuousness of past failures in this connection, one may well profit by them. The amazing complexity of religious phenomena must somehow be seen to be consistent with their common nature. The religious experience must not only be found, but must also be reconciled with "the varieties of religious experience." The inadequacy of the well-known definitions of religion may be attributed to several causes. The commonest fallacy is to define religion in terms of a religion. My definition of religion must include my brother's religion, even though he live on the other side of the globe, and my ancestor's religion, in spite of his prehistoric remoteness. Error may easily arise through the attempt to define religion in terms of my own religion, or what I conceive to be the true religion. Whatever the relation between ideal religion and actual religion, the field of religion contains by common consent cults that must on their own grounds condemn one another; religions that are bad religions, and yet religions.
A more enlightened fallacy, and a more dangerous one, is due to the supposition that religion can be defined exclusively in terms of some department of human nature. There have been descriptions of religion in terms of feeling, intellect, and conduct respectively. But it is always easy to overthrow such a description, by raising the question of its application to evidently religious experiences that belong to some other aspect of life. Religion is not feeling, because there are many phlegmatic, God-fearing men whose religion consists in good works. Religion is not conduct, for there are many mystics whose very religion is withdrawal from the field of action. Religion is not intellection, for no one has ever been able to formulate a creed that is common to all religions. Yet without a doubt one must look for the essence of religion in human nature. The present psychological interest in religion has emphasized this truth. How, then, may we describe it in terms of certain constant conditions of human life, and yet escape the abstractness of the facultative method? Modern psychology suggests an answer in demonstrating the interdependence of knowledge, feeling, and volition.[58:2] The perfect case of this unity is belief. The believing experience is cognitive in intent, but practical and emotional as well in content. I believe what I take for granted; and the object of my belief is not merely known, but also felt and acted upon. What I believe expresses itself in my total experience.
There is some hope, then, of an adequate definition of the religious experience, if it be regarded as belonging to the psychological type of belief.[58:3] Belief, however, is a broader category than religion. There must be some religious type of believing. An account of religion in terms of believing, and the particular type of it here in question, would, then, constitute the central stem of a psychology of religion, and affords the proper conceptions for a description of the religious experience. Even here the reservation must be made that belief is always more than the believing state, in that it means to be true.[59:4] Hence to complete an account of religion one should consider its object, or its cognitive implications. But this direct treatment of the relation between religion and philosophy must be deferred until in the present chapter we shall have come to appreciate the inwardness of the religious consciousness. To this end we must permit ourselves to be enlightened by the experience of religious people as viewed from within. It is not our opinion of a man's religion that is here in question, but the content and meaning which it has for him.
"I would have you," says Fielding, in his "Hearts of Men," "go and kneel beside the Mahommedan as he prays at the sunset hour, and put your heart to his and wait for the echo that will surely come. . . . I would have you go to the hillman smearing the stone with butter that his god may be pleased, to the woman crying to the forest god for her sick child, to the boy before his monks learning to be good. No matter where you go, no matter what the faith is called, if you have the hearing ear, if your heart is in unison with the heart of the world, you will hear always the same song."[59:5]
Religion as Belief.
§ [18]. The general identification of religion with belief is made without serious difficulty. The essential factor in belief, is, as we have seen, the reaction of the whole personality to a fixed object or accepted situation. A similar principle underlies common judgments about a man's religion. He is accounted most religious whose religion penetrates his life most intimately. In the man whose religion consists in the outer exercise of attendance upon church, we recognize the sham. He appears to be religious. He does one of the things which a religious man would do; but an object of religious faith is not the constant environment of his life. He may or may not feel sure of God from his pew, but God is not among the things that count in his daily life. God does not enter into his calculations or determine his scale of values. Again, discursive thinking is regarded as an interruption of religion. When I am at pains to justify my religion, I am already doubting; and for common opinion doubt is identical with irreligion. In so far as I am religious, my religion stands in no need of justification, even though I regard it as justifiable. In my religious experience I am taking something for granted; in other words I act about it and feel about it in a manner that is going to be determined by the special conditions of my mood and temperament. The mechanical and prosaic man acknowledges God in his mechanical and prosaic way. He believes in divine retribution as he believes in commercial or social retribution. He is as careful to prepare for the next world as he is to be respectable in this. The poet, on the other hand, believes in God after the manner of his genius. Though he worship God in spirit he may conduct his life in an irregular manner peculiar to himself. Difference of mood in the same individual may be judged by the same measure. When God is most real to him, brought home to him most vividly, or consciously obeyed, in these moments he is most religious. When, on the other hand, God is merely a name to him, and church a routine, or when both are forgotten in the daily occupations, he is least religious. His life on the whole is said to be religious in so far as periods of the second type are subordinated to periods of the first type. Further well-known elements of belief, corollaries of the above, are evidently present in religion. A certain imagery remains constant throughout an individual's experience. He comes back to it as to a physical object in space. And although religion is sporadically an exclusive and isolated affair, it tends strongly to be social. The religious object, or God, is a social object, common to me and to my neighbor, and presupposed in our collective undertakings. This reduction of religion to the type of the believing state should thus provide us with an answer to that old and fundamental question concerning the relative priority of faith and works. The test of the faith is in the works, and the works are religious in so far as they are the expression of the faith. Religion is not the doing of anything nor the feeling of anything nor the thinking of anything, but the reacting as a whole, in terms of all possible activities of human life, to some accepted situation.
Religion as Belief in a Disposition or Attitude.
§ [19]. We may now face the more interesting but difficult question of the special character of religious belief. In spite of the fact that in these days the personality of God is often regarded as a transient feature of religion, that type of belief which throws most light upon the religious experience is the belief in persons. Our belief in persons consists in the practical recognition of a more or less persistent disposition toward ourselves. The outward behavior of our fellow-men is construed in terms of the practical bearing of the attitude which it implies. The extraordinary feature of such belief is the disproportion between its vividness and the direct evidence for it. Of this we are most aware in connection with those personalities which we regard as distinctly friendly or hostile to ourselves. We are always more or less clearly in the presence of our friends and enemies. Their well-wishing or their ill-wishing haunts the scene of our living. There is no more important constituent of what the psychologists call our "general feeling tone." There are times when we are entirely possessed by a state that is either exuberance in the presence of those who love us, or awkwardness and stupidity in the presence of those whom we believe to suspect and dislike us. The latter state may easily become chronic. Many men live permanently in the presence of an accusing audience. The inner life which expresses itself in the words, "Everybody hates me!" is perhaps the most common form of morbid self-consciousness. On the other hand, buoyancy of spirits springs largely from a constant faith in the good-will of one's fellows. In this case one is filled with a sense of security, and is conscious of a sympathetic reinforcement that adds to private joys and compensates for private sorrows. And this sense of attitude is wonderfully discriminating. We can feel the presence of a "great man," a "formidable person," a superior or inferior, one who is interested or indifferent to our talk, and all the subtlest degrees of approval and disapproval.
A similar sensibility may quicken us even in situations where no direct individual attitude to ourselves is implied. We regard places and communities as congenial when we are in sympathy with the prevailing purposes or standards of value. We may feel ill at ease or thoroughly at home in cities where we know no single human soul. Indeed, in a misanthrope like Rousseau (and who has not his Rousseau moods!) the mere absence of social repression arouses a most intoxicating sense of tunefulness and security. Nature plays the part of an indulgent parent who permits all sorts of personal liberties.
"The view of a fine country, a succession of agreeable prospects, a free air, a good appetite, and the health I gain by walking; the freedom of inns, and the distance from everything that can make me recollect the dependence of my situation, conspire to free my soul, and give boldness to my thoughts, throwing me, in a manner, into the immensity of things, where I combine, choose, and appropriate them to my fancy, without restraint or fear. I dispose of all nature as I please."[64:6]