mere survival, for religion does in fact perpetuate the traditions of the
most primeval thought. To coerce the spiritual powers, or to square them
and get them on our side, was, during enormous tracts of time, the one
great object in our dealings with the natural world. For our ancestors,
dreams, hallucinations, revelations, and cock‐and‐bull stories were
inextricably mixed with facts. Up to a comparatively recent date such
distinctions as those between what has been verified and what is only
conjectured, between the impersonal and the personal aspects of existence,
were hardly suspected or conceived. Whatever you imagined in a lively
manner, whatever you thought fit to be true, you affirmed confidently; and
whatever you affirmed, your comrades believed. Truth was what had not yet
been contradicted, most things were taken into the mind from the point of
view of their human suggestiveness, and the attention confined itself
exclusively to the æsthetic and dramatic aspects of events.(333)
How indeed could it be otherwise? The extraordinary value, for explanation
and prevision, of those mathematical and mechanical modes of conception
which science uses, was a result that could not possibly have been
expected in advance. Weight, movement, velocity, direction, position, what
thin, pallid, uninteresting ideas! How could the richer animistic aspects
of Nature, the peculiarities and oddities that make phenomena
picturesquely striking or expressive, fail to have been first singled out
and followed by philosophy as the more promising avenue to the knowledge
of Nature’s life? Well, it is still in these richer animistic and dramatic
aspects that religion delights to dwell. It is the terror and beauty of
phenomena, the “promise” of the dawn and of the rainbow, the “voice” of
the thunder, the “gentleness” of the summer rain, the “sublimity” of the
stars, and not the physical laws which these things follow, by which the
religious mind still continues to be most impressed; and just as of yore,
the devout man tells you that in the solitude of his room or of the fields
he still feels the divine presence, that inflowings of help come in reply
to his prayers, and that sacrifices to this unseen reality fill him with
security and peace.
Pure anachronism! says the survival‐theory;—anachronism for which
deanthropomorphization of the imagination is the remedy required. The less
we mix the private with the cosmic, the more we dwell in universal and
impersonal terms, the truer heirs of Science we become.
In spite of the appeal which this impersonality of the scientific attitude
makes to a certain magnanimity of temper, I believe it to be shallow, and
I can now state my reason in comparatively few words. That reason is that,
so long as we deal with the cosmic and the general, we deal only with the
symbols of reality, but _as soon as we deal with private and personal
phenomena as such, we deal with realities in the completest sense of the
term_. I think I can easily make clear what I mean by these words.
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The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an
objective and a subjective part, of which the former may be incalculably
more extensive than the latter, and yet the latter can never be omitted or
suppressed. The objective part is the sum total of whatsoever at any given
time we may be thinking of, the subjective part is the inner “state” in
which the thinking comes to pass. What we think of may be enormous,—the
cosmic times and spaces, for example,—whereas the inner state may be the
most fugitive and paltry activity of mind. Yet the cosmic objects, so far
as the experience yields them, are but ideal pictures of something whose
existence we do not inwardly possess but only point at outwardly, while
the inner state is our very experience itself; its reality and that of our
experience are one. A conscious field _plus_ its object as felt or thought
of _plus_ an attitude towards the object _plus_ the sense of a self to
whom the attitude belongs—such a concrete bit of personal experience may
be a small bit, but it is a solid bit as long as it lasts; not hollow, not
a mere abstract element of experience, such as the “object” is when taken
all alone. It is a _full_ fact, even though it be an insignificant fact;
it is of the _kind_ to which all realities whatsoever must belong; the
motor currents of the world run through the like of it; it is on the line
connecting real events with real events. That unsharable feeling which
each one of us has of the pinch of his individual destiny as he privately
feels it rolling out on fortune’s wheel may be disparaged for its egotism,
may be sneered at as unscientific, but it is the one thing that fills up
the measure of our concrete actuality, and any would‐be existent that
should lack such a feeling, or its analogue, would be a piece of reality
only half made up.(334)
If this be true, it is absurd for science to say that the egotistic
elements of experience should be suppressed. The axis of reality runs
solely through the egotistic places,—they are strung upon it like so many
beads. To describe the world with all the various feelings of the
individual pinch of destiny, all the various spiritual attitudes, left out
from the description—they being as describable as anything else—would be
something like offering a printed bill of fare as the equivalent for a
solid meal. Religion makes no such blunder. The individual’s religion may
be egotistic, and those private realities which it keeps in touch with may
be narrow enough; but at any rate it always remains infinitely less hollow
and abstract, as far as it goes, than a science which prides itself on
taking no account of anything private at all.
A bill of fare with one real raisin on it instead of the word “raisin,”
with one real egg instead of the word “egg,” might be an inadequate meal,
but it would at least be a commencement of reality. The contention of the
survival‐theory that we ought to stick to non‐personal elements
exclusively seems like saying that we ought to be satisfied forever with
reading the naked bill of fare. I think, therefore, that however
particular questions connected with our individual destinies may be
answered, it is only by acknowledging them as genuine questions, and
living in the sphere of thought which they open up, that we become
profound. But to live thus is to be religious; so I unhesitatingly
repudiate the survival‐theory of religion, as being founded on an
egregious mistake. It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many
errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should
therefore leave off being religious at all.(335) By being religious we
establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points
at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our
private destiny, after all.
You see now why I have been so individualistic throughout these lectures,
and why I have seemed so bent on rehabilitating the element of feeling in
religion and subordinating its intellectual part. Individuality is founded
in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of
character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in
the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is
actually done.(336) Compared with this world of living individualized
feelings, the world of generalized objects which the intellect
contemplates is without solidity or life. As in stereoscopic or
kinetoscopic pictures seen outside the instrument, the third dimension,
the movement, the vital element, are not there. We get a beautiful picture
of an express train supposed to be moving, but where in the picture, as I
have heard a friend say, is the energy or the fifty miles an hour?(337)
Let us agree, then, that Religion, occupying herself with personal
destinies and keeping thus in contact with the only absolute realities
which we know, must necessarily play an eternal part in human history. The
next thing to decide is what she reveals about those destinies, or whether
indeed she reveals anything distinct enough to be considered a general
message to mankind. We have done as you see, with our preliminaries, and
our final summing up can now begin.
I am well aware that after all the palpitating documents which I have
quoted, and all the perspectives of emotion‐inspiring institution and
belief that my previous lectures have opened, the dry analysis to which I
now advance may appear to many of you like an anti‐climax, a tapering‐off
and flattening out of the subject, instead of a crescendo of interest and
result. I said awhile ago that the religious attitude of Protestants
appears poverty‐stricken to the Catholic imagination. Still more poverty‐
stricken, I fear, may my final summing up of the subject appear at first
to some of you. On which account I pray you now to bear this point in
mind, that in the present part of it I am expressly trying to reduce
religion to its lowest admissible terms, to that minimum, free from
individualistic excrescences, which all religions contain as their
nucleus, and on which it may be hoped that all religious persons may
agree. That established, we should have a result which might be small, but
would at least be solid; and on it and round it the ruddier additional
beliefs on which the different individuals make their venture might be
grafted, and flourish as richly as you please. I shall add my own over‐
belief (which will be, I confess, of a somewhat pallid kind, as befits a
critical philosopher), and you will, I hope, also add your over‐beliefs,
and we shall soon be in the varied world of concrete religious
constructions once more. For the moment, let me dryly pursue the analytic
part of the task.
Both thought and feeling are determinants of conduct, and the same conduct
may be determined either by feeling or by thought. When we survey the
whole field of religion, we find a great variety in the thoughts that have
prevailed there; but the feelings on the one hand and the conduct on the
other are almost always the same, for Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist
saints are practically indistinguishable in their lives. The theories
which Religion generates, being thus variable, are secondary; and if you
wish to grasp her essence, you must look to the feelings and the conduct
as being the more constant elements. It is between these two elements that
the short circuit exists on which she carries on her principal business,
while the ideas and symbols and other institutions form loop‐lines which
may be perfections and improvements, and may even some day all be united
into one harmonious system, but which are not to be regarded as organs
with an indispensable function, necessary at all times for religious life
to go on. This seems to me the first conclusion which we are entitled to
draw from the phenomena we have passed in review.
The next step is to characterize the feelings. To what psychological order
do they belong?
The resultant outcome of them is in any case what Kant calls a “sthenic”
affection, an excitement of the cheerful, expansive, “dynamogenic” order
which, like any tonic, freshens our vital powers. In almost every lecture,
but especially in the lectures on Conversion and on Saintliness, we have
seen how this emotion overcomes temperamental melancholy and imparts
endurance to the Subject, or a zest, or a meaning, or an enchantment and
glory to the common objects of life.(338) The name of “faith‐state,” by
which Professor Leuba designates it, is a good one.(339) It is a
biological as well as a psychological condition, and Tolstoy is absolutely
accurate in classing faith among the forces _by which men live_.(340) The
total absence of it, anhedonia,(341) means collapse.
The faith‐state may hold a very minimum of intellectual content. We saw
examples of this in those sudden raptures of the divine presence, or in
such mystical seizures as Dr. Bucke described.(342) It may be a mere vague
enthusiasm, half spiritual, half vital, a courage, and a feeling that
great and wondrous things are in the air.(343)
When, however, a positive intellectual content is associated with a faith‐
state, it gets invincibly stamped in upon belief,(344) and this explains
the passionate loyalty of religious persons everywhere to the minutest
details of their so widely differing creeds. Taking creeds and faith‐state
together, as forming “religions,” and treating these as purely subjective
phenomena, without regard to the question of their “truth,” we are
obliged, on account of their extraordinary influence upon action and
endurance, to class them amongst the most important biological functions
of mankind. Their stimulant and anæsthetic effect is so great that
Professor Leuba, in a recent article,(345) goes so far as to say that so
long as men can _use_ their God, they care very little who he is, or even
whether he is at all. “The truth of the matter can be put,” says Leuba,
“in this way: _God is not known, he is not understood; he is
used_—sometimes as meat‐purveyor, sometimes as moral support, sometimes as
friend, sometimes as an object of love. If he proves himself useful, the
religious consciousness asks for no more than that. Does God really exist?
How does he exist? What is he? are so many irrelevant questions. Not God,
but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is, in the
last analysis, the end of religion. The love of life, at any and every
level of development, is the religious impulse.”(346)
At this purely subjective rating, therefore, Religion must be considered
vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics. It would seem
that she cannot be a mere anachronism and survival, but must exert a
permanent function, whether she be with or without intellectual content,
and whether, if she have any, it be true or false.
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We must next pass beyond the point of view of merely subjective utility,
and make inquiry into the intellectual content itself.
First, is there, under all the discrepancies of the creeds, a common
nucleus to which they bear their testimony unanimously?
And second, ought we to consider the testimony true?
I will take up the first question first, and answer it immediately in the
affirmative. The warring gods and formulas of the various religions do
indeed cancel each other, but there is a certain uniform deliverance in
which religions all appear to meet. It consists of two parts:—
1. An uneasiness; and
2. Its solution.
1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is
_something wrong about us_ as we naturally stand.
2. The solution is a sense that _we are saved from the wrongness_ by
making proper connection with the higher powers.
In those more developed minds which alone we are studying, the wrongness
takes a moral character, and the salvation takes a mystical tinge. I think
we shall keep well within the limits of what is common to all such minds
if we formulate the essence of their religious experience in terms like
these:—
The individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongness and criticises it,
is to that extent consciously beyond it, and in at least possible touch
with something higher, if anything higher exist. Along with the wrong part
there is thus a better part of him, even though it may be but a most
helpless germ. With which part he should identify his real being is by no
means obvious at this stage; but when stage 2 (the stage of solution or
salvation) arrives,(347) the man identifies his real being with the
germinal higher part of himself; and does so in the following way. _He
becomes conscious that this higher part is conterminous and continuous
with a _MORE_ of the same quality, which is operative in the universe
outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a
fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone
to pieces in the wreck._
It seems to me that all the phenomena are accurately describable in these
very simple general terms.(348) They allow for the divided self and the
struggle; they involve the change of personal centre and the surrender of
the lower self; they express the appearance of exteriority of the helping
power and yet account for our sense of union with it;(349) and they fully
justify our feelings of security and joy. There is probably no
autobiographic document, among all those which I have quoted, to which the
description will not well apply. One need only add such specific details
as will adapt it to various theologies and various personal temperaments,
and one will then have the various experiences reconstructed in their
individual forms.
So far, however, as this analysis goes, the experiences are only
psychological phenomena. They possess, it is true, enormous biological
worth. Spiritual strength really increases in the subject when he has
them, a new life opens for him, and they seem to him a place of conflux
where the forces of two universes meet; and yet this may be nothing but
his subjective way of feeling things, a mood of his own fancy, in spite of
the effects produced. I now turn to my second question: What is the
objective “truth” of their content?(350)
The part of the content concerning which the question of truth most
pertinently arises is that “MORE of the same quality” with which our own
higher self appears in the experience to come into harmonious working
relation. Is such a “more” merely our own notion, or does it really exist?
If so, in what shape does it exist? Does it act, as well as exist? And in
what form should we conceive of that “union” with it of which religious
geniuses are so convinced?
It is in answering these questions that the various theologies perform
their theoretic work, and that their divergencies most come to light. They
all agree that the “more” really exists; though some of them hold it to
exist in the shape of a personal god or gods, while others are satisfied
to conceive it as a stream of ideal tendency embedded in the eternal
structure of the world. They all agree, moreover, that it acts as well as
exists, and that something really is effected for the better when you
throw your life into its hands. It is when they treat of the experience of
“union” with it that their speculative differences appear most clearly.
Over this point pantheism and theism, nature and second birth, works and
grace and karma, immortality and reincarnation, rationalism and mysticism,
carry on inveterate disputes.
At the end of my lecture on Philosophy(351) I held out the notion that an
impartial science of religions might sift out from the midst of their
discrepancies a common body of doctrine which she might also formulate in
terms to which physical science need not object. This, I said, she might
adopt as her own reconciling hypothesis, and recommend it for general
belief. I also said that in my last lecture I should have to try my own
hand at framing such an hypothesis.
The time has now come for this attempt. Who says “hypothesis” renounces
the ambition to be coercive in his arguments. The most I can do is,
accordingly, to offer something that may fit the facts so easily that your
scientific logic will find no plausible pretext for vetoing your impulse
to welcome it as true.
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The “more,” as we called it, and the meaning of our “union” with it, form
the nucleus of our inquiry. Into what definite description can these words
be translated, and for what definite facts do they stand? It would never
do for us to place ourselves offhand at the position of a particular
theology, the Christian theology, for example, and proceed immediately to
define the “more” as Jehovah, and the “union” as his imputation to us of
the righteousness of Christ. That would be unfair to other religions, and,
from our present standpoint at least, would be an over‐belief.
We must begin by using less particularized terms; and, since one of the
duties of the science of religions is to keep religion in connection with
the rest of science, we shall do well to seek first of all a way of
describing the “more,” which psychologists may also recognize as real. The
_subconscious self_ is nowadays a well‐accredited psychological entity;
and I believe that in it we have exactly the mediating term required.
Apart from all religious considerations, there is actually and literally
more life in our total soul than we are at any time aware of. The
exploration of the transmarginal field has hardly yet been seriously
undertaken, but what Mr. Myers said in 1892 in his essay on the Subliminal
Consciousness(352) is as true as when it was first written: “Each of us is
in reality an abiding psychical entity far more extensive than he knows—an
individuality which can never express itself completely through any
corporeal manifestation. The Self manifests through the organism; but
there is always some part of the Self unmanifested; and always, as it
seems, some power of organic expression in abeyance or reserve.”(353) Much
of the content of this larger background against which our conscious being
stands out in relief is insignificant. Imperfect memories, silly jingles,
inhibitive timidities, “dissolutive” phenomena of various sorts, as Myers
calls them, enter into it for a large part. But in it many of the
performances of genius seem also to have their origin; and in our study of
conversion, of mystical experiences, and of prayer, we have seen how
striking a part invasions from this region play in the religious life.
Let me then propose, as an hypothesis, that whatever it may be on its
_farther_ side, the “more” with which in religious experience we feel
ourselves connected is on its _hither_ side the subconscious continuation
of our conscious life. Starting thus with a recognized psychological fact
as our basis, we seem to preserve a contact with “science” which the
ordinary theologian lacks. At the same time the theologian’s contention
that the religious man is moved by an external power is vindicated, for it
is one of the peculiarities of invasions from the subconscious region to
take on objective appearances, and to suggest to the Subject an external
control. In the religious life the control is felt as “higher”; but since
on our hypothesis it is primarily the higher faculties of our own hidden
mind which are controlling, the sense of union with the power beyond us is
a sense of something, not merely apparently, but literally true.
This doorway into the subject seems to me the best one for a science of
religions, for it mediates between a number of different points of view.
Yet it is only a doorway, and difficulties present themselves as soon as
we step through it, and ask how far our transmarginal consciousness
carries us if we follow it on its remoter side. Here the over‐beliefs
begin: here mysticism and the conversion‐rapture and Vedantism and
transcendental idealism bring in their monistic interpretations(354) and
tell us that the finite self rejoins the absolute self, for it was always
one with God and identical with the soul of the world.(355) Here the
prophets of all the different religions come with their visions, voices,
raptures, and other openings, supposed by each to authenticate his own
peculiar faith.