International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1 / Philosophy and Metaphysics

by Unknown

"If the idea of religion arises out of an impression, then it will not be possible to deny to it an intellectual root. I make this statement with some diffidence, because if I do not misinterpret them, some recent psychologists have practically denied the intellectual root in their doctrine that religion can have no original intellectual content. If I am not further misled, however, these writers would admit that a content is achieved by the symbolic use of experience. This is perhaps all I need argue for here; since our epistemology is teaching us that the distinction between symbolism and perception is only that between the direct and the indirect; while here it is clear that its use in developing the significance of the religious impression would have all the directness and, therefore, all the cogency of an immediate inference.

"Let us now restore the intellectual and emotional elements of religion to their place in a synthesis; we will then have a concrete religious experience out of which may be analyzed at least two fundamental factors. The first of these is what we may call the personal factor in religion. We are treading in the footsteps of the anthropologists when we find among the most undeveloped savages a tendency to personify the objects of their worship. When it comes to the question of determining the rôle that this personalizing tendency has actually played in the development of religion, the anthropologists divide into two camps, one of these, led by Max Müller, regarding it as a symbolic interpretation put upon the impression of some great natural or cosmic object or phenomenon; while others, including Herbert Spencer and Mr. Tylor, prefer to seek the originals of religion in ancestral dream-images and ghostly apparitions. These writers thus start with completely anthropomorphic terms, and their problem is to de-anthropomorphize the elements to the extent necessary to constitute them data of religion. The second factor standing over against the personal, as its opposite, is that of transcendence. By transcendence I mean that deifying, infinitating process that is ever working contra to the anthropomorphic influence in the sphere of religious conceptions. The School of Spencer regard this as the only legitimate tendency in religion. We do not argue this point here, but agree that it is as legitimate and real a factor as that of personality. The root of this factor, if our diagnosis of the idea of religion be correct, is to be sought in the original impression of religion, and it no doubt has its origin in man's feeling-reaction from that impression. We have pointed to submission as one of the religious emotions. Now submission rests on some deeper feeling-attitude, which some have translated into the feeling or sense of dependence. This, however, is not adequate, since men have the sense of social dependence on finite beings, and we have it with reference to the floor we are standing on. Rather, it seems to me, we must translate it into the stronger and more unconditional feeling of helplessness. One real ground of our religious consciousness is the sense or feeling of helplessness toward God; the sense that we have no standing in being as against the Deity. This radical feeling utters itself in every note of the religious scale, from the lowest superstitious terror to the highest mystical self-annihilation.

"These two factors, the forces of personalization and transcendence, are inseparable. They constitute the terms of a dialectic within the religious consciousness, by virtue of which in one phase our religious conceptions are becoming ever more adequate and satisfying, while from another point of view their insufficiency grows more and more apparent. And, on the broader field of religious history, they embody themselves in a law of tendency, which Spencer has only half-expressed, by virtue of which the objects of religion are on one hand becoming ever more intelligible; on the other, ever more transcendent of our conceptions."

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A short paper was read by Professor F. C. French, Professor of Philosophy in the University of Nebraska, on "The Bearing of Certain Aspects of the Newer Psychology on the Philosophy of Religion." The speaker said in part:

"The relation of science to religion has received, to be sure, much study, but to most minds hitherto this has meant the relation of only the physical sciences to religion. The older psychology was largely speculative and metaphysical in character. There were, of course, some who employed the empirical method in psychology, but they were so far from comprehending the full scope of mental phenomena that, at best, their work gave the promise of a science rather than a science itself.

"It is not the fact that the newer psychology takes account of the physiological conditions of mental life; it is not the fact that the subject is now pursued in laboratories with instruments of precision, that gives it its full standing as a science: it is much more the fact that the psychology of to-day has found a place in the natural system of mental things for those strange and relatively unusual phenomena of consciousness which to the scientifically minded seemed totally unreal and to the superstitious manifestations of the supernatural....

"In showing that the abnormal can be explained in terms of the normal, psychology does now for the phenomena of mind what the physical sciences have long done for the phenomena of nature....

"Psychology as a science postulates the reign of natural law in the subjective sphere just as rigorously as physics postulates the reign of law in the objective sphere....

"It is not in the unusual and the abnormal that the reflective mind is to see God. It is not through gaps in nature that we are to get glimpses of the supernatural. Rather is it in the very nature of nature, rational, harmonious, law-conforming, subject to scientific interpretation, that we have the best evidence that the world is made mind-wise, that it is the work of an intelligent mind, that there is a rational spirit at the care of the universe.