THE LIMITS OF PERSONAL AGENCY
Religion was born from need wedded to ignorance. But needs change, and
illusions fade away and are replaced by knowledge. That religion
reflects these factors of which it is a function cannot be doubted.
Some thinkers, who have sincerely pondered the problem, declare that
religion will only be transformed. Others, as earnest, assert that it
will disappear, and speak of the non-religion of the future. Is not
the question in large measure one of definition? That man will
continue to evolve ethically can scarcely be doubted, but it can be
doubted with good right that he will continue to seek to fulfill his
needs by rites designed to enlist superhuman agents in his behalf. Is
there not more than a note of skepticism in that much-approved saying:
"God helps those who help themselves?" Already, man is beginning to
classify his needs and to believe that his material needs, at least,
can best be met by industry and knowledge. He supplicates less and
works more. Let us not forget what tremendous economic and social
changes have occurred since the days of the little, helpless
communities that lifted up praying hands to their gods lest famine and
war destroy them completely. To-day, man does more harm to man than
does nature. The face of things has changed more radically than we are
accustomed to realize. Social habits and beliefs {111} cannot fail to
reflect this change. It may very well be that we shall be forced to
conclude that what were, in a sense, the by-products of religion have
become all that promises to survive when man has, indeed, eaten of the
fruit of the tree of knowledge.
We have seen that primitive man read his surroundings in the light of
his own consciousness. Everywhere he saw the evidence of will and
anger, desire and caprice. The world was the theater of personal
agents not so dissimilar to himself. Technically, we should speak of
this outlook as anthropomorphic animism. Perhaps a still lower stage
existed in which things are full of _mana_ or a mysterious power for
good and evil. As man felt his own powerlessness in the midst of
tremendous, and often hostile agencies, which overtopped his own meager
powers, he was led to feel the desire to ally himself with these
agencies and propitiate them in order that all might be well with him.
Man was ever more convinced that his own life was bound up with the
plans of the gods. To displease them was to incur the most serious
danger. The anger of Jove, or Neptune, or Asshur, or Yahweh was not
easily turned aside once it was kindled. The winds which threaten
shipwreck, the rains which give increase, the drouth which dries up the
earth, the plague which brings death are under the control of the gods;
and it behooves man to walk warily in order not to offend them. Thus
was the path set in which man was to travel until he reached an ethical
monotheism.
As time passed, demons and gods gave way, in theory at least, to the
sovereignty of one powerful deity who gathered to himself the powers
and activities of the old multiplicity of agents whom man had
worshipped and {112} placated. It is probable that this movement
toward a consciously held monotheism reflected the changing political
organization of society. The old chaos of superhuman agents, each
doing what was right in his own eyes, gave way to a growing heavenly
order in which one powerful agent exerted his suzerainty over minor
principalities. Yet monotheism has always been relative, for the one
god has his agents of subordinate rank--agents, powers and
intercessors--just as the most absolute monarch has his ministers.
Political imagination cannot go beyond its source.
Christianity is usually regarded as the best type of monotheism; yet
the early Church Fathers thought of the old gods as demons working
their nefarious will upon man. It is notorious that many of the saints
of the calendar are only re-christened pagan deities adopted by the
Church to meet popular demands. The peasantry _would_ believe in the
agency of local divinities whose reputation had been great for the
healing of sickness, or the granting of children to the childless, or
the causing of rain to fall in seasons of drouth; and the Church,
wisely enough, controlled and adopted what it could not prevent. The
old pluralism of agencies refused to give way more than formally to a
single agent. The psychology of this resistance is simple enough.
Just as the king is unable to give his personal attention to the
requests of all his subjects but must delegate authority to officers to
look after details, so the one deity cannot give ear and attention to
the incessant cries of his myriads of creatures. I cannot help feeling
that the pious catholic has more psychological realism in these matters
than the protestant sectarian who wearies his deity with all sorts of
trivial matters. Surely a {113} million petitions at the same time
would distract any conceivable kind of personal deity!
But, in the present chapter, we are not concerned so much with the
problem of the number and inter-relations of the superhuman agents at
work in the universe as with the idea of personal agency itself. The
point I wish to call attention to is that the change from polytheism to
monotheism did not involve any essential modification of the accepted
notions of agency. Nature--and human life with it--was thought of as
under the control of a superpersonal agent who guided the course of
events in accordance with his purposes. An ethical refinement of the
idea of deity had supervened which lifted it far above the crudities of
the so-called nature-religions. Was this not because man and human
society had evolved ethically and socially? But no marked break in the
setting of the idea had arisen. And this fact presents the thinker
with a problem.
In its origins, religion is innately hostile to the extension of
impersonal causation to the cosmos, for the obvious reason that such a
conception conflicts with the operation of special agency. Religion
begins with the postulation of powerful agents whom man can placate.
Up to the present, the evolution of religion has not involved a
withdrawal of this primary assumption but only its ethical refinement
and the reduction of the number of agents. In the Western world, at
least, religion and the idea of an ethical control of the course of
nature have been inseparable. This latter idea underlies prayer for
material blessings, miracles, and the various conceptions of
providence. Can this primary assumption be taken from religion without
destroying it?
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The difficulties which confront this assumption for the educated man of
to-day must not blind us to its naturalness in the past. But that is
the very point to grasp. The primitive view of the world is not being
so much refuted as outgrown. Slowly and painfully, man has learned
that events are conditioned by antecedents of an inflexible character,
and that his wishes and desires must have hands and feet working for
them before they can affect things. He has bettered his condition
through invention and discovery and social organization. Of course,
the world might have been different, and moral categories might have
been the proper ones to apply to nature; but the brute fact of the case
is that our particular universe is not of that sort.
Once given the notion of superhuman agents of a social character, the
after-development of religion is inevitable. Man adopts toward them
the attitude that he takes toward his own rulers. To pray to the gods
is as natural as to pray to those who have power and who, we hope, may
be moved by our prayers. Psychologically, there is no difference in
the attitude involved. Providence is merely the action of an agent who
is more than human. For primitive man it did not imply an intervention
with nature, for the very good reason that the gods were active in
nature. Nature was the sphere of the activities of the gods in the
same way that it was, in a minor degree, the sphere of the activity of
men. We must rid ourselves of the modern conception, nourished by
science, of nature as a realm of causal relations. For ages, man had
no such conception; all activities were thought of as acts. Nature,
man and the gods acted together in a sort of social whole. Law, as we
understand the term in science, would have had no {115} meaning to
primitive man just as it has little meaning for many at the present day.
It is very interesting to study the development of the idea of
providence. It means foresight and the care which renders foresight
praiseworthy. The more the gods were given character and identified
with the life of the community, the more they were thought of as
guardians anxious for the good of their people. As superhuman, they
were gifted with knowledge of events to come and with plans for the
welfare and happiness of their worshipers. The social relations of the
gods inevitably brought them into transforming touch with the ethical
progress of humanity. They became ideals reflecting back the highest
of which man could conceive.
In Christianity, we have a most striking instance of this ethical
transformation of the one deity who is the superhuman agent _par
excellence_. He is the father, kindly and loving, merciful and
bountiful, who looks after the welfare of his children and plans their
individual lives and the course of civilization. The evolution of God
on its ethical side has reached its high point. From the philosophical
side, this evolution was practically a foregone conclusion. Just
because God was conceived socially, he could not escape this goal.
Hosea and Jesus took the direction which ethical idealists could not
help but take.
Let us examine the consequences of this assumption of an omnipotent,
omniscient and ethically perfect agent who acts in nature and in human
history. Simply by deducing the implications of the concept, we find
that it involves a plan for the world. Such a plan is called by
theology God's providence. For one who accepts the assumption, the
only sane attitude to take is that {116} of submission to the course of
events as manifestations of God's will and wisdom. The heart of
religion thus becomes a joyous acceptance of life's portion through a
willed union with the purposes of this perfect being. The most
religious souls in history have drawn this conclusion and acted it out
in their lives. In this way, they taste of an exaltation similar to
that which the patriot experiences when he identifies himself, without
reservation, with the hopes and plans of his country at some time of
crisis. They have, moreover, this advantage that disappointment is
impossible, since they can never know the actual plans of God nor the
time when they are to be fulfilled. If they anticipate and set their
heart on some event which kindles their enthusiasm and it does not come
to pass, they can assuage their disappointment with the remembrance
that God's ways are past finding out and that he has an eternity in
which to work. From the very nature of the hypothesis, the course of
history can never disprove this outlook which is the logical end-term
of the god-idea. This impossibility of test makes it, however,
unscientific. Nothing can be deduced from it. As an hypothesis, it
must always remain unfruitful. When we come to treat of the problem of
good and evil, we shall see other difficulties which it must face.
But the idea of a grand plan from which God cannot be swerved by
intercession and supplication is far from the thought of the usual
level of religion. It is the creation of reflective thought, and does
not find a ready welcome in the minds of people at large. For them,
there is no such thing as complete determination of the course of
events. God is a powerful agent who is able to bring to pass what he
wills but he does not always {117} intervene in particular cases unless
he is asked. It is this situation, in which God is only one of the
forces at work in nature, that gives the setting for the idea of a
special providence and the answer to prayer. Is it not evident that we
have in these beliefs the expression of personal agency, an idea
continuous with mythology?
There are many examples of the appeal to a special providence which
awaken the curiosity of the modern man. In cases of severe sickness,
prayer for restoration to health is offered in the churches and homes.
If God is a personal agent affected by the desires of his worshipers,
this act is perfectly logical. Yet the nature of sickness is now so
well known that we see in it a cause and effect relation of a definite
sort. Knowledge of impersonal agency is undermining the faith in
super-human agency. Perhaps the fact that such prayers have never
stayed a plague, while active measures of a scientific sort have done
so, has had something to do with the purely formal and traditional
character of such prayers among civilized men. Another instance which
has caused many cynical comments is the appeal to God to bring victory
to the nation in time of war. Both combatants pray to the same deity
with about equal fervency and, at the same time, make as careful
preparations as possible for the actual warfare. The religious
ceremonies appear to play the part of an emotional accompaniment for
the grimmer proceedings on the battle-field. To the soldier, God
stands for the element of chance; otherwise, the main precept is to
keep the powder dry.
When we enter the domain of science, we at once realize that a
different conception of agency is held. The universe is regarded as a
closed system of causal {118} relations which spring from the nature of
its parts. It is a systematic and self-contained world whose
activities can be explained by the discovery of laws which constantly
hold and which grow out of the stable properties of nature itself. As
the result of a close and accurate study of the various aspects of
nature, science has come to the conclusion that the large bulk of the
world is lifeless and that its parts react in habitual or mechanical
ways which are invariable. The planets circle about the sun in
accordance with the pull and haul of forces which work in the same
direction from year to year and lead to the same mathematically
describable result. By means of measurements and calculations,
celestial mechanics has been able to predict eclipses centuries ahead
and to test historical records in regard to those which happened
thousands of years ago. The paths of comets have been calculated and
their return to the solar system foretold. Thus the mass-movements of
the universe have been seen to be mechanical in nature and expressive
solely of the energies and configurations distributed throughout its
parts. The events which happen are inevitable and arise out of the
impersonal agency of spatially existent things. In what sharp contrast
is this view of nature to the interpretation primitive man made for
himself when he read his own emotions and desires into the things
around him. Caprice and whim have no place in this regular procession
of the heavens.
Impersonal agency conquered, not only in man's conception of the larger
relations of bodies to one another, but also in his idea of those
events, like sickness and death, which strike nearer home. While the
agencies at work may not be considered mechanical, they are yet {119}
seen to be natural and regular in their working. The characteristic of
the personal agency to which religion makes appeal is that it
disregards space; it works here and there at its own will and leaps
across intervening distances as though they had no reality. Just
because it is spaceless, it is supernatural. It cannot be localized,
and brought into definite relations with other things in the universe.
The more we conceive the universe as a spatial, self-contained system
of things and processes, the more it excludes the presence of an agency
which intervenes in it but is not really of it. So long as events can
be explained as the effects of the natural working of things in nature,
the assumption of a supernatural agent is unmotived.
The conflict between science and religion has thus passed beyond the
stage where a primitive and childish idea of the extent and origins of
the visible world struggled against a more rational and better-founded
outlook. No educated man to-day would seriously defend the cosmical
theories of ancient times. It is simply absurd to deny that we have
outgrown them once and for all. But this first victory of science only
involved the capture of the weakest outposts of the religious view of
the world. The heart of traditional religion seems to be the belief in
a personal, superhuman agency at work in nature or, rather, upon
nature. Even the religious mind, however, admits that investigation
has shown that there is a routine aspect to nature which covers the
ordinary course of events. The final crux of the problem comes, then,
to be whether there is good reason to believe that there are unusual
events which cannot be accounted for by natural conditions. The
victorious career of science has undoubtedly cast {120} suspicion upon
the occurrence of events which cannot be explained by means of regular
changes in nature. The appeal to superhuman, personal agency to
account for such events presupposes their occurrence, while the belief
in their occurrence is psychologically based upon the acceptance of
such supernatural agency. Hence it is probable that both beliefs will
fall together. In the meantime, they give one another mutual support.
He who believes in supernatural agency is the more likely to be
credulous in regard to testimony advanced in its favor.
Nature was at first regarded as a realm in which personal agency ruled.
Yahweh thundered from Sinai and rode in the tempest. Apollo guided the
horses of the sun. The gods did things in nature directly, much as man
does them, only they are able to do things that man cannot do. By will
and word of command, they make the mountains tremble and the hills to
shake. But gradually man came to conceive nature as a self-contained
realm in which parts affected one another. We owe the beginning of
this view to the Greeks. They developed, from the first, a way of
approach to events which was absolutely opposed to the older outlook.
As nature became, for man, more and more self-sufficient and capable of
explaining what occurred within it, there was less need to appeal to an
agent of the old mythical sort.
Religion is rightly anthropomorphic, just as ethics is. Man's welfare
and destiny are properly and inevitably the important questions for
man, and he naturally approached the world with these problems in mind.
He used personal and social categories in his vague thinking about his
environment. The discovery that nature {121} did not work that way was
made slowly and only after comparative civilization had brought leisure
and safety. Even to-day, the intellectual restraint, which the
application of impersonal and non-moral concepts to nature demands, is
distasteful to the majority. But this restraint will become less and
less as man is introduced from childhood to a world of law and order to
which he can adapt himself with a fair measure of success. His eyes
will remove themselves from far horizons and turn to the world around
him, nor will he dream of a transcendent realm of which earthly things
are only the appearance and veil. He will seek his welfare and find
his destiny among his fellows during the normal time allotted to his
species. Banded with them, he will become an active and clear-eyed
worker for the four great blessings which, he finds, are within his
grasp, health, knowledge, goodness and beauty. Many virtues and ideals
which religion has sheltered and encouraged will find themselves at
home in this valiant and intelligent world, but the religion of the
past must shed many things before it will feel in harmony with its new
setting. Will sufficient identity remain to make the term still
significant? Frankly, it is very hard to say--impossible to say with
certainty.
What, then, are the limits of personal agency? The limits set to that
incarnated intelligence which organisms possess. The ability to
re-direct and distribute the energies which surround them in accordance
with laws which study reveals, the ability to build dwellings for
shelter and for adornment, the ability to use medicines for healing,
the ability to drain marshes, dig canals, girdle the earth with iron
roads, the ability to conceive things of beauty and to translate these
{122} conceptions into sensuous form, all these abilities are theirs.
Such agency works within nature as a highly gifted part within a whole
to which it is not alien. But experience gives us no hint of a
transcendent agent for whom the earth is as a footstool and who whirls
stars and planets through space to their appointed orbits.
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