Naturalism and Religion

by Rudolf Otto

The attacks that have been made by naturalism upon the independence and freedom of the spiritual are so familiar to every one—even from school days—through books of the type of Büchner's “Kraft und Stoff,” and Haeckel's “The Riddle of the Universe,” and other half or wholly materialistic popular dogmatics, that it is unnecessary to enter into any detail. Very little that is new has been added in this connection to the attack made by Plato on himself in the “Phædo” through Simmias and Kebes. It is only apparently that the modern attacks have become more serious [pg 284] through the deepened knowledge of natural science. At all times they have been as serious and as significant as possible, and the religious and every other idealistic conception of the universe has always suffered from them. It is plain that here, if anywhere, “faith goes against appearances,” and that in the last resource we have to postulate free moral resolution, the will to believe, the desire for the ideal, for freedom, and for the eternity of the spirit, and the confidence of the spirit in itself. All this is, or at least ought to be, self-evident and generally admitted.

Let us once more take a brief survey of the reasons on the other side and arrange them in order.

That nature is everything and spirit very little seems to follow from a very simple circumstance. There are whole worlds of purely natural and corporeal existence without mind, sensation, or consciousness, which, quite untroubled by their absence, simply exist according to the everlasting laws of matter and energy. But nowhere do we find spirit or mind without a material basis. All that is psychical occurs in connection with a physical being, and with relatively few physical beings. Spirit seems wholly bound up with and dependent upon the states, development, and conditions of material being. With the body of living beings there arises what we call “soul”; with the body it grows, gains content, changes, matures, ages, and disappears. According as the body is constituted and composed, as it is influenced by heredity, race, and [pg 285] selection, by nutrition, mode of life, climate, and other circumstances, there are developed in a hundred different ways what we call the natural disposition or character, inclinations, virtues or vices, passions or temperaments. Even the names given to the different temperaments emphasise this dependence of what is innermost in us, the deepest tendencies of our being, on the bodily organisation and the nature of its physiological constitution. The man whose blood flows easily and freely is called sanguine, and the melancholic is the victim of his liver. According as our organs are good or bad, function freely or sluggishly, our mood rises or sinks, we are bold or cowardly, languid or impetuous, and enthusiasm is often enough only a peculiar name for a state which, physiologically expressed, might be called alcoholic poisoning. There is one soul in the sound body, another in the sickly. Fever, and the impotence of the soul against it, made Holbach a materialist. If the brain be diseased, that marvellous order of psychical processes which we call reasoning is broken; the “soul” is wholly or partly eliminated; it fades away, or becomes nothing more than a confused disconnected medley of images and desires. Even artificial interference with, and changes in the bodily organisation react upon the mind. The removal of the thyroid gland may result in idiocy. Castration not only prevents the “breaking” of the voice in the Sistine choristers, it damps the fires of life to dulness, and makes of the impetuous Abelard a comfortable discursive father-confessor. [pg 286] The mind is bound up almost piece by piece with its material basis. Through the “localisation” of psychic processes in the particular parts of the brain, naturalism has enormously strengthened the impression that existed even among the ancients, that sensation and imagination are nothing more than, let us say, what the note is to a tightly stretched string. Cerebrum and cerebellum are regarded as the seats of different psychic processes. The secret of the higher processes is believed to be hidden in the grey matter of the cortex of the cerebrum. We seek and find in the various lobes and convolutions of the brain the “centres” for the different capacities, the power of sight, of smell, of moving the arms, of moving the legs, of associating ideas, of co-ordinated speech, and so on. When brain and spinal cord are injured or removed piece by piece from a pigeon or a frog, it seems as if the “soul” were eliminated piece by piece,—the capacity for spontaneous free co-ordination, for voluntary action, for the various sense-impressions, and so on from the higher to the lower. It has even been maintained that the different feelings and perceptions which are gradually acquired can be apportioned among the individual cells of the brain in which they are localised, and the thought-processes, the associations of percepts, the origin of consecutive ideas, the rapid and easy recalling of memory-images, and the process of voluntary control, of instincts, can be explained as due to the “gradual laying down of nerve-paths” between [pg 287] the different centres and areas of localisation in the brain. All this seems to refute utterly the old belief in the unity and personality of the soul. It is different in youth and in age, and indeed varies continually. It is the ever-varied harmony of the notes of all the strings which are represented by the fibres and ganglion-cells of the nerve-substance. It apparently can not only be completely confused and brought to disharmony, but it may be halved and divided. An almost terrifying impression was produced when Trembley in 1740 made the experiment of cutting a “hydra” in two, and showed that each of the halves became a complete animal, so that obviously each of the two halves of the soul grew into a new hydra-soul. And Trembley's hydra was only the precursor of all the cut-up worms, of the frogs, birds, and guinea-pigs that have been beheaded, or have had their brain removed, or their nerves cut, and have furnished further examples of this divisibility of “souls.”

If the independence of the spiritual is thus shown to be a vain assumption, the alleged difference between the animal and the human Psyche is much more so. Not from the days of Darwinism alone, but from the very beginning, naturalism has opposed this claim to distinctiveness. But it is due to Darwinism that the fundamental similarity of the psychical in man and animals has come to be regarded as almost self-evident. The mental organisation of man, as well as his corporeal organisation, is traced back through gradual stages to [pg 288] animal antecedents, and in thus tracing it there are two favourite methods of procedure, which are, however, apt to be mutually destructive.

On the one hand, some naturalists regard the animal anthropomorphically, insist on its likeness to man, discovering and extolling, not without emotion, all the higher and nobler possessions of the human mind, intellectual capacities, reason, reflection, synthesis, fancy, the power of forming ideas and judgments, of drawing conclusions and learning from experience, besides will in the true sense, ethical, social and political capacities, æsthetic perceptions, and even fits of religion in elephants, apes, dogs, down even to ants and bees, and these naturalists reject old-fashioned explanations in terms of instinct, and find the highest already contained in the lowest. Those of another school are inclined to regard man theriomorphically, to insist on his likeness to animals, explaining reason in terms of perception and sensation, deriving will from impulse and desire, and ethical and æsthetic valuations from physiological antecedents and purely animal psychological processes, thus, in short, seeking to find the lowest in the highest. (We have already met with an analogous instance of a similarly fallacious double-play on parallel lines.) So it comes about that both the origin and the development of the psychical and spiritual seem to be satisfactorily cleared up and explained, and at the same time a new proof is adduced for its dependence upon the physical. For what is true of all [pg 289] other parts of the organisation, of the building up and perfecting of every member and every system of organs, the bony skeleton, the circulatory system, the alimentary canal, that they can be referred back to very simple beginnings, and that their evolution may be traced through all its stages—is equally true of the nervous system in general and of the brain in particular. It increases more and more in volume and in intricacy of structure, it expands the cranial cavity and diversifies its convolutions. And the more it grows, and the more complex it becomes, the more do the mental capacities increase in perfection, so that here again it seems once more apparent that the psychical is an accompaniment and result of the physical.

Popular naturalism usually stops short here, and contents itself with half-truths and inconsequences, for it naïvely admits that psychical processes, sensation, perception, will, have a real influence upon the physical, and, not perceiving how much the admission involves, it does not trouble itself over the fact that, for instance in the so-called voluntary movements of the body, in ordinary behaviour, the psychical, and the will, in particular, is capable of real effect, and can move hand and foot and the whole body, and thus has a real reciprocal relation with the physical. This form of popular naturalism sometimes amuses itself with assuming a psychical inwardness even in non-living matter, and admitting the co-operation of psychical motives even in regard to it.

But it is far otherwise with naturalism in the strict sense, which takes its fundamental principles and its method of investigation seriously. It is aware that such half-and-half measures interrupt the continuity of the system at the most decisive point. And therefore with the greatest determination it repeats along psychological lines the same kind of treatment that it has previously sought to apply to biological phenomena: the corporeal must form a sequence of phenomena complete in itself and not broken into from without. All processes of movement, all that looks as if it happened “through our will,” through a resolve due to the intervention of a psychical motive, every flush of shame that reddens the cheek, every stroke executed by the hand, every sound-wave caused by tongue and lips, must be the result of conditions of stimulation and tension in the energy of the body itself.

This is the meaning of all those psycho-physical experiments that have been carried on with so much ingenuity and persistence (usually associated with attempts to explain vital phenomena in terms of mechanism). First, they attempt to interpret the expressions of will, feeling and need, the spontaneous activities and movements of the lowest forms of life—protists—as “pure reflexes,” as processes which take place in obedience to stimuli, and thus are ultimately due to chemical and physical influences and causes without the intervention of a psychical motive; and, secondly, when this has been apparently or really achieved, the theory of irritability [pg 291] and reflex mechanism is pushed from below upwards, until even the most intricate and complex movements and operations of our own body, which we have wrongly distinguished as acts or behaviour from mere processes of stimulation, are finally recognised as reflexes and liberations due to stimuli. Some stimulus or other, from light or sound or something else, is, according to this theory, conducted to the nervous centre, the ganglion, the spinal cord, the cerebellum or the cerebrum. Here it produces an effect, not of a psychical nature, but some minute chemical, or physical,—or purely mechanical change, which goes through many permutations within the nervous centre itself, unites there with the stored energies, and then, thus altered, returns by the efferent nerve paths to effect a muscle-contraction in some organ, a stretching of the hand, or a movement of the whole body. The physical process is accompanied by a peculiar inward mirroring, which is the psychical penumbra or shadow of the whole business. Thus what is in reality a purely mechanical and reflex sequence appears like a psychical experience, like choice and will and psychical causality. We may be compared to Spinoza's stone; it was thrown, and it thought it was flying.

The reasons for interpreting things in this way lie in the principles of investigation. It is only in this way, we are told, that nature can be reduced to natural terms, that is, to chemistry, physics, and mechanics. Only in this way is it possible to gain a true insight [pg 292] into and understanding of things, and to bring them under mathematical formulæ. Thus only, too, can “the miraculous” be eliminated. For if we are obliged to admit that the will has a real influence on the corporeal, for instance upon our brain, and nerves, and arm-muscles, this would be a violation of the law of the constancy of the sum of energy. For in this case there would occur, at a certain point in the nexus of phenomena, a piece of work done, however small it might be, for which there was no equivalent of energy in the previous constitution. But this is, since the days of Helmholtz, an impossible assumption. And thus all those experiments and theories on what we have called the “second line” of mechanistic interpretation of the universe show themselves to be relevant to our present subject.

Interpretations of the psychical such as these have given rise to four peculiar “isms” of an epistemological nature, i.e., related to a theory of knowledge. Not infrequently they are the historical antecedents which result in the naturalistic theory of the psychical. These are nominalism and sensualism, empiricism and a-posteriorism, which, setting themselves against epistemological rationalism, assail the dignity, the independence, and the autonomy of the thinking mind. They are so necessarily and closely associated with naturalism that their fate is intimately bound up with its fate, and they are corroborated or refuted with it. And it would be possible to conduct the whole discussion with which we [pg 293] are concerned purely with reference to these four “isms.” The strife really begins in their camp.