counterpart to the harmony demanded in the unitary comprehension of
external reality. The various activities and experiences of life,
as they are originally given by heredity to the child, are either
independent, or else antagonistic and disharmonious. There must be some
means provided for bringing all of them into a true organization--in
other words into a whole which, though yet single, is composed of
co-operating parts. Here again the actual responses of actual religions
have been many and various; but they all operate by suppression,
repression, and sublimation, or by a combination of these.
It can at once be said that sublimation is the right and highest way,
and that two of the criteria of religious progress are to be found
in the stress laid upon sublimation, and in the enlargement and the
elevation of the dominant ideas at work in the sublimating process. It
is the right and highest way because through it no spiritual energy is
wasted, and the age-long path of progress towards ever higher levels
of complexity in organization is still continued. Among religious
teachers, both Jesus and Paul laid great stress on this--on the
freedom, the emancipation from the shackles of an external law made
possible by the apprehension of some highest harmonizing principle
and the subordination of all other ideas and desires to it. Once one
can see and learn to follow such a principle, whatever one does is in
a sense right, because one’s desires are all subordinate to a desire
for right, and to something which is right. Perhaps it would be better
to say that they appear right to oneself, that the haunting, terrible
sense of sin is laid to rest, and one’s life liberated into free
activity, one’s energy made all available for achievement.
The sense of sin, if not universal at one or other period of life,
is almost so, and comes from an apprehension of inner disharmony. As
one would expect, selfishness and sex are its most common roots; and
whenever it exists, then the necessary preliminary to any further
progress of one’s being is that it should be made to disappear. It
can disappear, as in St. Paul’s natural man, by a suppression of
part of the mind or of the connection between parts, or by a failure
to make certain connections, or it can be eradicated by a growth of
callousness; or--and I take it that this is the proper religious
solution--by discovering a clue which will harmonize the two apparently
opposed sections of experience, the two antagonistic tendencies, and so
resolve the problem with no loss of energy or of vital possibilities.
* * * * * * *
Finally, there remains to be considered the mode in which the mind may
best organize the ideas of external reality given to it by its pure
cognitive and intellectual faculties.
Even from the purely scientific point of view, generalization is
obviously of value. When we have found unity in the outer world’s
apparent diversity, direction in its apparent disorderliness, we
have obviously achieved a great gain. But religion appears to demand
something more. If for a moment we look at the matter pragmatically,
we shall find that a number of the great mystics (and a large majority
of those of our own occidental type and tradition) speak of their
experiences of “divine communion” as being communion with a _person_.
What does this mean? We have seen that a purely intellectual analysis
gives us no handle for finding personality in God. Can we suppose that
this direct intuition gives us that handle? To say so, to my mind,
would be simple obscurantism. Intuition, if it shows us reality, can
only show a reality capable in the long run of intellectual analysis;
to deny this is to deny all our premisses. No: their intuition shows
us that something akin to personality is perceived, but permits no
pronouncement as to whether its resemblance to personality is given in
its real nature, or introduced into it by their thought.
If we look into the history of religion, we find over and over again
that man has taken something from his own mind and projected it into
the external world. The magic power of fetishes, the tabus incurred by
contact with certain objects, the endowment of the idea of external
powers, of God, with human form, the ascription of miraculous influence
to places or things--in every case there has been this projection.
And there is no reason to doubt that here again there has been a
similar occurrence, that man has organized his idea of external power
after the pattern of a personality, and has then ascribed this type
of organization to the external power itself. This projection Blake
symbolized in a sentence: “Thus men forgot that All Deities reside in
the Human breast.”
The rival schools of psychology may disagree: but all are agreed that
some modes of thinking are more primitive than others, and even in the
most educated amongst us tend to persist, often in the subconscious,
side by side with more developed methods that have arisen later.
The use of concrete symbols or images is the most widespread of these
primitive modes of thought. It is natural that the more complex
should at the first be described in terms of the less complex, that
those experiences for which no proper terminology has been hammered
out should be given names out of man’s existing vocabulary. That is
inevitable: but there is an even more fundamental process at work. It
seems as if the human mind works, on its most primitive levels, by
means of image-formation, and that emotions and concepts for which
no simple image exist may call up symbolic images by association
and indeed often dress themselves in these new clothes before they
present themselves to consciousness. Some such process appears to take
place in dreams (including day-dreams!) and possibly in the ordinary
thought-processes of savages. More advanced modes of thought substitute
the currency of an arbitrary token such as a word or a formula for the
barter of images and concrete symbols; the freshness and vividness of
the image is lost, but more efficient and speedier working is attained.
However, in most of us the concrete image-using mode of thought is a
relief from the apparently less natural and more artificial (though
more efficient) operations of reason, and we relapse into it, wholly or
partially, more often than we realize.
This unconscious irrational tendency to symbolism, together with the
other tendency to project ideas properly attaching to the subjective
world into external objects and processes--these between them account
for much of the modes of expression so far found for religious belief;
and, since the majority of human beings have a profound distaste for
sustained or difficult thought, it is likely that they will continue to
account for much in the future.
These are facts of extreme importance. The professional sceptic is
at once tempted to exclaim that every such projection and illogical
symbolism is illusion through and through, and must be wholly swept
aside. He would be wrong. We each of us must know from our own
experience the “influence” (to use a general term) which may inhere
in certain things and places. True that the influence is of our own
mind’s making; but it is none the less real, not only as a momentary
existence, but, as the term implies, as exerting a definite and often
a great effect upon our lives. The lover who cherishes a ring or a
lock of hair; the man who is drawn back to the haunts of his childhood
or his youth; the mind refreshing itself with some loved poem or
picture;--what do we have in these and innumerable other instances but
a peculiarity of mind whereby it may take external objects into itself
and invest them with its own emotions and ideas, in such a way that
those same objects may later reflect their stored-up emotion back again
into the mind? It operates by a form of association; but the actual
working resembles the charging of a battery, which may subsequently
discharge back. We have in it, in fact, a special faculty which, if
rightly used, is of the greatest practical value. Further, the symbol,
if rightly used and rightly limited, is of service to most minds in
giving a more or less concrete cage for the winged, elusive, and
hardly-retained creatures of abstract thought.
So too, the organization of the idea of God into a form resembling a
personality appears definitely to have, at least with the majority of
people belonging to what we call “Western civilization,” a real value.
Biologically, the essence of real personality is first that it is
organized, and secondly that on each of its many faces it can, if I may
put it metaphorically, enter into action at a single point, but with
its whole content of energy available behind the point. In other words,
man as a personality can concentrate his mind on one particular problem
of one special aspect of reality; but he is able, if need be, to summon
up ever fresh reinforcements if he cannot carry the position--more
facts, other ways of thinking and feeling, memories, reserves of will.
In a properly organized personality, it is possible to bring the whole
to bear upon any single object.
Now when the idea which man makes for himself of outer reality is
organized after the same general pattern as a personality, it too will
be able to act in this same sort of way.
When man in perplexity interrogates the idea he has of external
reality, he is anxious to put his little individual self in harmonious
relation with the whole of reality that he knows. Therefore he should
organize that reality as a whole, and in such a way that it can all
be brought to bear through any single point. The relation between the
self and the idea of outer reality is, for any one problem, that of two
pyramids touching by their points only; but the points of contact can
shift as by miracle over their surfaces as the problem is changed.
But another power of personalities is their power of interpenetration.
The purely material cannot do this. One portion of matter cannot
occupy the same space as a second portion. It is another of the
great differences between the psychozoic and all previous stages of
evolution, between man and all else that we know in the universe,
that the discrete units reached at this level of organization, the
individual human beings, can achieve interpenetration by means of their
minds. When you expound a new idea to me, and I grasp it, our minds
have obviously interpenetrated. This is a simple case; but there may be
an intimate union of mind with mind which is the basis of the highest
spiritual achievement and the greatest happiness. If mind and matter
are two properties of the same world-substance, then the rise of mind
to dominance has enabled this basic substance to escape from some of
the imprisoning limitations which confined it at lower levels of its
development; do we not all know that despair at being boxed up, that
craving for communion? Using our previous line of argument, we see
that the interpenetration of personalities is right, implies a further
step in progress, must be part of the basis on which future advance in
evolution is to build.
But to apply this to our present point. By organizing our knowledge of
outer reality after the pattern of a personality, we make it possible
for it to interpenetrate our private personality. If, therefore, we
have, in any true sense of the word, “found religion,” it means that we
shall so have organized our minds that, for flashes at least, we attain
to a sense of interpenetration with the reality around us--that reality
which includes not only the celestial bodies, or the rocks and waters,
not only evolving life, but also other human beings, also ideas, also
ideals.
This, to my mind, is what actually happens when men speak of communion
with God. It is a setting, an organizing of our experiences of the
universe in relation with the driving forces of our soul or mental
being, so that the two are united and harmonized. There is a resolution
of conflicts, an attainment of a profound serenity, a conviction that
the experience is of the utmost value and importance.
Up till now, we have been defining and analysing: here we see religion
in operation. It is a relation of the personality as a unit to external
reality as a unit--and a relation of harmony. First, the inner
structure of the mind must be organized into a harmonious unit, then
our knowledge of outer reality organized similarly, and finally, in
religious experience, the two must be harmonized in interpenetrating
union.
Once this harmony has been achieved, it is for one thing so precious
in itself that it will be sought for again; the knowledge that we have
once reached the stage at which difficulties and doubts are resolved in
what the philosophers would perhaps call a higher unity, but which I
should prefer to call an organic harmony, is always there to fall back
upon in times of discouragement; and finally the harmony is actually
woven into the tissue of our mind, just as the amazing physical harmony
revealed by physiology has, in the course of evolution, been woven into
the structure and working of living bodies; and it can remain there
as the dominant idea to which the rest of our ideas, and consequently
our actions, are brought into subordinate relation. In other words,
it becomes the dominant sublimating principle. Once more, however,
the subordination is not forced, but free--we find that what we once
thought obstacles are aids, what once seemed sin is now the willing and
efficient handmaid of good. That is the fundamental fact in all genuine
and valuable religious experience as such--the resolution of conflict
and the losing, or enlarging as you will, of the private personality,
the mere “self.” You will find this set out more fully, though in
different terminology, in Miss Underhill’s books on mysticism, or in
William James’s _Varieties of Religious Experience_, or in Thouless’s
_Psychology of Religion_.
One side-issue. Such experience, if not absolute in the philosophical
sense, is absolute for us. If I may be Irish, its absoluteness is
relative to our organization and to reality as we perceive it. We
cannot perceive anything fuller, more absolute--until perhaps one day,
with the growth of our minds, we come to have some still richer and
more complete experience. As William James was so fond of reminding the
world, we have no right to assume that our minds are, much less that
they must be, the highest type of mind realized in the universe--no
more right than our domestic animals have, although our minds to them
could only be measured by their own standards.
What is more, owing to our power of framing general concepts and
ideals, and of accumulating past and future in our present, we can
focus a vast deal to one point. In such experiences, whether they come
through religion, or love, or art, we may say that although we are but
a system of relations, we touch the Absolute--although we are mortal,
we mount to the Eternal for a moment. Only, to guard against error, we
must remember that it is obviously not in reality the Absolute or the
Eternal that we attain to, but only the nearest approximation to them
of which we are capable.
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
Religio peparit scelerosa atque impia facta.”
Many another thinker and reformer has felt the same.
There are those who, like Jung, believe that religion is an illusion
but also a necessity to the bulk of mankind, and therefore should be
encouraged. But the broader and truer view, I believe, is the one we
have adopted. We have seen that, in man, evolution has reached a new
plane, on which not only have new aims and values appeared, but the
possibility of new and better evolutionary methods has arisen. These
new methods are only possible, however, in so far as life, in man, uses
her new gifts. The progress of civilization is a constant conflict
between that part of man which he shares with the beasts and that part
which is his alone--between man as no more than a new kind of animal
and man as a rational and spiritual being. In so far as religion
is irrational, it is no more than a dog baying the moon, no higher
activity than the nocturnal concerts of Howler monkeys, no more and no
less moral than the nobility of birds or beasts to a strangely-marked
or unusually-built member of their species, or the sense of being
a trespasser so often shown by a bird that has ventured upon the
nesting-territory of another. Recall the “Natural Religion” of Robert
Browning’s _Caliban_; on which plane did that grow? But when we have
discovered its real bases, and subordinated its impulsive promptings
to the control of reason and of the new, higher values in which reason
must always share--then it becomes an instrument for helping in the
conquest of the new regions which lie open to man as individual and as
species. And in this it resembles every other human activity without
exception.
In religion the danger has always been that analogy and symbolism be
taken for more than they are--for scientific knowledge, or even for an
absolute certainty of some still higher order--and conclusions then
drawn from it. The conclusions follow with full syllogistic majesty:
but their feet are of clay--their premisses are false.
If we find that this is the case to-day, we not only may but we
must endeavour to make our formulation correspond more closely with
reality, must not be content to take one thing in place of another, the
familiar for the unfamiliar, must set about destroying the old false
formulation for fear of the further harm that it will do by its hold
upon man’s incurable habit of drawing conclusions.
Nor does this in any way interfere with or detract from the private and
unique experiences that in the long run _are_ religion. They remain;
but they are thus hindered from becoming draped with delusion, from
leading their possessor into false courses.