Such sexual religions do not arise, as the theory has hitherto been, from study and observation of the generative agencies in nature, but from the identity of object between love in sense and love in intellect, profane and sacred passion. The essence of each is continuance, preservation; the origin of each is subjective, personal; but the former has its root in sensation, the latter in reason.
The sex-difference in organisms, the “abhorrence of self-fertilization” which Mr. Darwin speaks of as so conspicuous and inexplicable a phenomenon, is but one example of the sway of a law which as action and reaction, thesis and antithesis, is common to both elementary motion and thought. The fertile and profound fancy of Greece delighted to prefigure this truth in significant symbols and myths. Love, Eros, is shown carrying the globe, or wielding the club of Hercules; he is the unknown spouse of Psyche, the soul; and from the primitive chaos he brings forth the ordered world, the Kosmos.
The intimate and strange relation between sensuality and religion, so often commented upon and denied, again proven, and always misinterpreted, thus receives a satisfactory explanation. Some singular manifestations of it, of significance in religious history, are presented by the records of insane delusions. They confirm what I have above urged, that the association is not one derived from observation through intellectual processes, but is a consequence of physiological connections, of identity of aim in the distinct realms of thought and emotion.
That eminent writer on mental diseases, Schroeder van der Kolk, when speaking of the forms of melancholy which arise from physical conditions, remarks: “The patient who is melancholy from disorders of the generative organs considers himself sinful. His depressed tone of mind passes over into religious melancholy; ‘he is forsaken by God; he is lost.’ All his afflictions have a religious color.” In a similar strain, Feuchtersleben says: “In the female sex especially, the erotic delusion, unknown to the patient herself, often assumes the color of the religious.”47 “The unaccomplished sexual designs of nature,” observes a later author speaking of the effects of the single life, “lead to brooding over supposed miseries which suggest devotion and religious exercise as the nepenthe to soothe the morbid longings.”48
Stimulate the religious sentiment and you arouse the passion of love, which will be directed as the temperament and individual culture prompt. Develope very prominently any one form of love, and by a native affinity it will seize upon and consecrate to its own use whatever religious aspirations the individual has. This is the general law of their relation.
All the lower forms of love point to one to which they are the gradual ascent, both of the individual and on a grander scale of the race, to wit, the love of God. This is the passion for the highest attainable truth, a passion which, as duty, prompts to the strongest action and to the utter sacrifice of all other longings. No speculative acquaintance with propositions satisfies it, no egotistic construction of systems, but the truth expressed in life, the truth as that which alone either has or can give being and diuturnity, this is its food, for which it thirsts with holy ardor. Here is the genuine esoteric gnosis, the sacred secret, which the rude and selfish wishes of the savage, the sensual rites of Babylon, “mother of harlots,” and the sublimely unselfish dreams of a “religion of humanity,” have alike had in their hearts, but had no capacity to interpret, no words to articulate.
Related to this emotional phase of the religious sentiment is the theurgic power of certain natural objects over some persons. The biblical scholar Kitto confesses that the moon exerted a strange influence on his mind, stirring his devotional nature, and he owns that it would not have been hard for him to join the worshippers of the goddess of the night. Wilhelm von Humboldt in one of his odes refers to similar feelings excited in him by the gloom and murmur of groves. The sacred poets and the religious arts generally acknowledge this fascination, as it has been called, which certain phenomena have for religious temperaments.
The explanation which suggests itself is that of individual and ancestral association. In the case of Kitto it was probably the latter. His sensitively religious nature experienced in gazing at the moon an impression inherited from some remote ancestor who had actually made it the object of ardent worship. The study of the laws of inherited memory, so successfully pursued of late by Professor Laycock, take away anything eccentric about this explanation, though I scarcely expect it will be received by one unacquainted with those laws.
The emotional aspect of religion is not exhausted by the varieties of fear and hope and love. Wonder, awe, admiration, the æsthetic emotions, in fact all the active principles of man’s mental economy are at times excited and directed by the thought of supernatural power. Some have attempted to trace the religious sentiment exclusively to one or the other of these. But they are all incidental and subsidiary emotions.
Certain mental diseases, by abnormally stimulating the emotions, predispose strongly to religious fervor. Epilepsy is one of these, and in Swedenborg and Mohammed, both epileptics, we see distinguished examples of religious mystics, who, no doubt honestly, accepted the visions which accompanied their disease as revelations from another world. Very many epileptics are subject to such delusions, and their insanity is usually of a religious character.
On the other hand, devotional excitement is apt to bring about mental alienation. Every violent revival has left after it a small crop of religious melancholies and lunatics. Competent authorities state that in modern communities religious insanity is most frequent in those sects who are given to emotional forms of religion, the Methodists and Baptists for example; whereas it is least known among Roman Catholics, where doubt and anxiety are at once allayed by an infallible referee, and among the Quakers, where enthusiasm is discouraged and with whom the restraint of emotion is a part of discipline.49 Authoritative assurance in many disturbed conditions of mind is sufficient to relieve the mental tension and restore health.
If, by what has been said, it is clear that the religious sentiment has its origin in a wish, it is equally clear that not every wish is concerned in it. The objects which a man can attain by his own unaided efforts, are not those which he makes the subjects of his prayers; nor are the periodic and regular occurrences in nature, how impressive they may be, much thought of in devotional moods. The moment that an event is recognized to be under fixed law, it is seen to be inappropriate to seek by supplication to alter it. No devotee, acquainted with the theory of the tides, would, like Canute the King, think of staying their waves with words. Eclipses and comets, once matters of superstitious terror, have been entirely shorn of this attribute by astronomical discovery. Even real and tragic misfortunes, if believed to be such as flow from fixed law, and especially if they can be predicted sometime before they arrive, do not excite religious feeling. As Bishop Hall quaintly observes, referring to a curious medieval superstition: “Crosses, after the nature of the cockatrice, die if they be foreseen.”
Only when the event suggests the direct action of mind, of some free intelligence, is it possible for the religious sentiment to throw around it the aureole of sanctity. Obviously when natural law was little known, this included vastly more occurrences than civilized men now think of holding to be of religious import. Hence the objective and material form of religion is always fostered by ignorance, and this is the form which prevails exclusively in uncultivated societies.
The manifestations of motion which the child first notices, or which the savage chiefly observes, relate to himself. They are associated with the individuals around him who minister to his wants; the gratification of these depend on the volitions of others. As he grows in strength he learns to supply his own wants, and to make good his own volitions as against those of his fellows. But he soon learns that many events occur to thwart him, out of connection with any known individual, and these of a dreadful nature, hurricanes and floods, hunger, sickness and death. These pursue him everywhere, foiling his plans, and frustrating his hopes. It is not the show of power, the manifestations of might, that he cares for in these events, but that they touch him, that they spoil his projects, and render vain his desires; this forces him to cast about for some means to protect himself against them.
In accordance with the teaching of his experience, and true moreover to the laws of mind, he refers them, collectively, to a mental source, to a vague individuality. This loose, undefined conception of an unknown volition or power forms the earliest notion of Deity. It is hardly associated with personality, yet it is broadly separated from the human and the known. In the languages of savage tribes, as I have elsewhere remarked, “a word is usually found comprehending all manifestations of the unseen world, yet conveying no sense of personal unity.”50
By some means to guard against this undefined marplot to the accomplishment of his wishes, is the object of his religion. Its primitive forms are therefore defensive and conciliatory. The hopes of the savage extend little beyond the reach of his own arm, and the tenor of his prayers is that the gods be neuter. If they do not interfere he can take care of himself. His religion is a sort of assurance of life.
Not only the religion of the savage, but every religion is this and not much but this. With nobler associations and purer conceptions of life, the religious sentiment ever contains these same elements and depends upon them for its vigor and growth. It everywhere springs from a desire whose fruition depends upon unknown power. To give the religious wish a definition in the technic of psychology, I define it as: Expectant Attention, directed toward an event not under known control, with a concomitant idea of Cause or Power.
Three elements are embraced in this definition, a wish, an idea of power, ignorance of the nature of that power. The first term prompts the hope, the third suggests the fear, and the second creates the personality, which we see set forth in every religious system. Without these three, religion as dogma becomes impossible.
If a man wishes for nothing, neither the continuance of present comforts nor future blessings, why need he care for the gods? Who can hurt him, so long as he stays in his frame of mind? He may well shake off all religions and every fear, for he is stronger than God, and the universe holds nothing worth his effort to get. This was the doctrine taught by Buddha Sakyanuni, a philosopher opposed to every form of religion, but who is the reputed founder of the most numerous sect now on the globe. He sought to free the minds of his day from the burden of the Brahmanic ritual, by cultivating a frame of mind beyond desire or admiration, and hence beyond the need of a creed.
The second element, the idea of power, is an intellectual abstraction. Its character is fluctuating. At first it is most vague, corresponding to what in its most general sense we term “the supernatural.” Later, it is regarded under its various exhibitions as separable phenomena, as in polytheisms, in which must be included trinitarian systems and the dualistic doctrine of the Parsees. But among the Egyptians, Greeks and Aztecs, as well as in the words of Zarathustra and in the theology of Christianity, we frequently meet with the distinct recognition of the fundamental unity of all power. At core, all religions have seeds of monotheism. When we generalize the current concepts of motion or force beyond individual displays and relative measures of quantity, we recognize their qualitative identity, and appreciate the logical unity under which we must give them abstract expression. This is the process, often unconscious, which has carried most original thinkers to monotheistic doctrines, no matter whence they started.
The idea of power controlling the unknown would of itself have been of no interest to man had he not assumed certain relations to exist between him and it on the one hand, and it and things on the other. A dispassionate inquiry disproves entirely the view maintained by various modern writers, prominently by Bain, Spencer and Darwin, that the contemplation of power or majesty in external nature prompts of itself the religious sentiment, or could have been its historical origin. Such a view overlooks the most essential because the personal factor of religion – the wish. Far more correct are the words of David Hume, in the last century, by which he closes his admirable Natural History of Religions: “We may conclude, therefore, that in all nations the first ideas of religion arose not from a contemplation of the works of nature, but from a concern with regard to the events of life, and from the incessant hopes and fears which actuate the human mind.” A century before him Hobbes had written in his terse way: “The natural seed of religion lies in these four things: the fear of spirits, ignorance of secondary causes, the conciliation of those we fear, and the assumption of accidents for omens.”51 The sentiment of religion is in its origin and nature purely personal and subjective. The aspect of power would never have led man to worship, unless he had assumed certain relations between the unseen author or authors of that power and himself. What these assumptions were, I shall discuss in the next chapter.
Finally, as has so often been remarked in a flippant and contemptuous way,52 which the fact when rightly understood nowise justifies, religion cannot exist without the aid of ignorance. It is really and truly the mother of devotion. The sentiment of religious fear does not apply to a known power – to the movement of an opposing army, or the action of gravity in an avalanche for example. The prayer which under such circumstances is offered, is directed to an unknown intelligence, supposed to control the visible forces. As science – which is the knowledge of physical laws – extends, the object of prayer becomes more and more intangible and remote. What we formerly feared, we learn to govern. No one would pray God to avert the thunderbolt, if lightning rods invariably protected houses. The Swiss clergy opposed the system of insuring growing crops because it made their parishioners indifferent to prayers for the harvest. With increasing knowledge and the security which it brings, religious terror lessens, and the wants which excite the sentiment of devotion diminish in number and change in character.
This is apt to cast general discredit on religion. When we make the discovery that so many events which excited religious apprehension in the minds of our forefathers are governed by inflexible laws which we know all about, we not only smile in pity at their superstitions, but make the mental inference that the diminished emotion of this kind we yet experience is equally groundless. If at the bottom of all displays of power lies a physical necessity, our qualms are folly. Therefore, to the pious soul which still finds the bulk of its religious aspirations and experiences in the regions of the emotions and sensations, the progress of science seems and really does threaten its cherished convictions. The audacious mind of man robs the gods of power when he can shield himself from their anger. The much-talked-of conflict between religion and science is no fiction; it exists, and is bound to go on, and religion will ever get the worst of it until it learns that the wishes to which it is its proper place to minister are not those for pleasure and prosperity, not for abundant harvests and seasonable showers, not success in battle and public health, not preservation from danger and safety on journeys, not much of anything that is spoken of in litanies and books of devotion.
Let a person who still clings to this form of religion imagine that science had reached perfection in the arts of life; that by skilled adaptations of machinery, accidents by sea and land were quite avoided; that observation and experience had taught to foresee with certainty and to protect effectively against all meteoric disturbances; that a perfected government insured safety of person and property; that a consummate agriculture rendered want and poverty unknown; that a developed hygiene completely guarded against disease; and that a painless extinction of life in advanced age could surely be calculated upon; let him imagine this, and then ask himself what purpose religion would subserve in such a state of things? For whatever would occupy it then – if it could exist at all – should alone occupy it now.
THE RATIONAL POSTULATES OF THE RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT
SUMMARY
Religion often considered merely an affair of the feelings. On the contrary, it must assume at least three premises in reason, its “rational postulates.”
I. There is Order in things.
The religious wish involves the idea of cause. This idea not exhausted by uniformity of sequence, but by quantitative relation, that is, Order as opposed to Chance. Both science and religion assume order in things; but the latter includes the Will of God in this order, while the former rejects it.
II. This order is one of Intelligence.
The order is assumed to be a comprehensible one, whether it be of law wholly or of volition also.
III. All Intelligence is one in kind.
This postulate indispensable to religion, although it has been attacked by religious as well as irreligious philosophers. Its decision must rest on the absoluteness of the formal laws of thought. The theory that these are products of natural selections disproved by showing, (1) that they hold true throughout the material universe, and (2) that they do not depend on it for their verity. Reason sees beyond phenomena, but descries nothing alien to itself.
The formal laws of reason are purposive. They therefore afford a presumption of a moral government of the Universe, and point to an Intelligence fulfilling an end through the order in physical laws. Such an assumption, common to all historic religions, is thus justified by induction.
CHAPTER III
THE RATIONAL POSTULATES OF THE RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT
In philosophical discussions of religion as well as in popular exhortations upon it, too exclusive stress has been laid upon its emotional elements. “It is,” says Professor Bain, “an affair of the feelings.”53 “The essence of religion,” observes John Stuart Mill, “is the strong and earnest direction of the emotions and desires towards an ideal object.” “It must be allowed,” says Dr. Mansel,54 “that it is not through reasoning that men obtain their first intimation of their relation to a deity.” In writers and preachers of the semi-mystical school, which embraces most of the ardent revivalists of the day, we constantly hear the “feeling of dependence” quoted as the radical element of religious thought.55 In America Theodore Parker, and in Germany Schleiermacher, were brilliant exponents of this doctrine. To the latter the philosopher Hegel replied that if religion is a matter of feeling, an affectionate dog is the best Christian.
This answer was not flippant, but founded on the true and only worthy conception of the religious sentiment. We have passed in review the emotions which form a part of it, and recognize their power. But neither these nor any other mere emotions, desires or feelings can explain even the lowest religion. It depends for its existence on the essential nature of reason. We cannot at all allow, as Dr. Mansel asks of us, that man’s first intimations of Deity came in any other way than as one of the ripest fruits of reason. Were such the case, we should certainly find traces of them among brutes and idiots, which we do not. The slight signs of religious actions thought to have been noticed by some in the lower animals, by Sir John Lubbock in ants, and by Charles Darwin in dogs, if authenticated, would vindicate for these species a much closer mental kinship to man than we have yet supposed.
If we dispassionately analyze any religion whatever, paying less attention to what its professed teachers say it is, than to what the mass of the votaries believe it to be, we shall see that every form of adoration unconsciously assumes certain premises in reason, which give impulse and character to its emotional and active manifestations. They are its data or axioms, or, as I shall call them, its “rational postulates.” They can, I believe, be reduced to three, but not to a lesser number.
Before the religious feeling acquires the distinctness of a notion and urges to conscious action, it must assume at least these three postulates, and without them it cannot rise into cognition. These, their necessary character and their relations, I shall set forth in this chapter.
They are as follows: —
I. There is Order in things.
II. This order is one of Intelligence.
III. All Intelligence is one in kind.
I. The conscious or unconscious purpose of the religious sentiment, as I have shown in the last chapter, is the fruition of a wish, the success of which depends upon unknown power. The votary asks help where he cannot help himself. He expects it through an exertion of power, through an efficient cause. Obviously therefore, he is acting on the logical idea of Causality. This underlies and is essential to the simplest prayer. He extends it, moreover, out of the limits of experience into the regions of hypothesis. He has carried the analogy of observation into the realm of abstract conceptions. No matter if he does believe that the will of God is the efficient cause. Perhaps he is right; at any rate he cannot be denied the privilege of regarding volition as a co-operating cause. Limited at first to the transactions which most concerned men, the conception of order as a divine act extended itself to the known universe. Herodotus derives the Greek word for God θεος from a root which gives the meaning “to set in order,” and the Scandinavians gave the same sense to their word, Regin.56 Thus the abstract idea of cause or power is a postulate of all religious thought. Let us examine its meaning.
Every reader, the least versed in the history of speculative thought for the last hundred years, knows how long and violent the discussions have been of the relations of “cause and effect.” Startled by the criticisms of Hume, Kant sought to elude them by distinguishing between two spheres of thought, the understanding and the reason. Sir William Hamilton at first included the “principle of sufficient reason’ in the laws of thought, but subsequently rejected it as pertaining to judgments, and therefore material, not formal. Schopenhauer claimed to have traced it to a fourfold root, and Mill with most of the current English schools, Bain, Austin, Spencer, &c., maintained that it meant nothing but “uniformity of sequence.”
It would be vain to touch upon a discussion so extended as this. In the first chapter I have remarked that the idea of cause does not enter into the conceptions of pure logic or thought. It is, as Hamilton saw, material. I shall only pause to show what is meant by the term “cause” in the physical sciences. When one event follows another, time after time, we have “uniformity of sequence.” Suppose the constitution of the race were so happy that we slept at night only, and always awoke a few moments before sunrise. Such a sequence quite without exception, should, if uniform experience is the source of the idea of cause, justly lead to the opinion that the sun rises because man awakes. As we know this conclusion would be erroneous, some other element beside sequence must complete a real cause. If now, it were shown that the relation of cause to effect which we actually entertain and cannot help entertaining is in some instances flatly contrary to all experience, then we must acknowledge that the idea of cause asks to confirm it something quite independent of experience, that is abstract. But such examples are common. We never saw two objects continue to approach without meeting; but we are constrained to believe that lines of certain descriptions can forever approach and never meet.
The uniformity of sequence is, in fact, in the physical sciences never assumed to express the relation of cause and effect, until the connection between the antecedent and consequent can be set forth abstractly in mathematical formulæ. The sequence of the planetary motions was discovered by Kepler, but it was reserved for Newton to prove the theoretical necessity of this motion and establish its mathematical relations. The sequence of sensations to impressions is well known, but the law of the sequence remains the desideratum in psychology.57
Science, therefore, has been correctly defined as “the knowledge of system.” Its aim is to ascertain the laws of phenomena, to define the “order in things.” Its fundamental postulate is that order exists, that all things are “lapped in universal law.” It acknowledges no exception, and it considers that all law is capable of final expression in quantity, in mathematical symbols. It is the manifest of reason, “whose unceasing endeavor is to banish the idea of Chance.”58
We thus see that its postulate is the same as that of the religious sentiment. Wherein then do they differ? Not in the recognition of chance. Accident, chance, does not exist for the religious sense in any stage of its growth. Everywhere religion proclaims in the words of Dante: —
“le cose tutte quante,
Hann’ ordine tra loro;”
everywhere in the more optimistic faiths it holds this order, in the words of St. Augustine, to be one “most fair, of excellent things.”59
What we call “the element of chance” is in its scientific sense that of which we do not know the law; while to the untutored religious mind it is the manifestation of divine will. The Kamschatkan, when his boat is lost in the storm, attributes it to the vengeance of a god angered because he scraped the snow from his shoes with a knife, instead of using a piece of wood; if a Dakota has bad luck in hunting, he says it is caused by his wife stepping over a bone and thus irritating a spirit. The idea of cause, the sentiment of order, is as strong as ever, but it differs from that admitted by science in recognizing as a possible efficient motor that which is incapable of mathematical expression, namely, a volition, a will. Voluntas Dei asylum ignorantiæ, is no unkind description of such an opinion.
So long as this recognition is essential to the life of a religious system, just so long it will and must be in conflict with science, with every prospect of the latter gaining the victory. Is the belief in volition as an efficient cause indispensable to the religious sentiment in general? For this vital question we are not yet prepared, but must first consider the remaining rational postulates it assumes. The second is
II. This order is one of intelligence.
By this is not meant that the order is one of an Intelligence, but simply that the order which exists in things is conformable to man’s thinking power, – that if he knows the course of events he can appreciate their relations, – that facts can be subsumed under thoughts. Whatever scheme of order there were, would be nothing to him unless it were conformable to his intellectual functions. It could not form the matter of his thought.60
Science, which deals in the first instance exclusively with phenomena, also assumes this postulate. It recognizes that when the formal laws, which it is its mission to define, are examined apart from their material expression, when they are emptied of their phenomenal contents, they show themselves to be logical constructions, reasoned truths, in other words, forms of intelligence. The votary who assumes the order one of volition alone, or volition with physical necessity, still assumes the volitions are as comprehensible as are his own; that they are purposive; that the order, even if not clear to him, is both real and reasonable. Were it not so, did he believe that the gods carried out their schemes through a series of caprices inconceivable to intelligence, through absolute chance, insane caprice, or blind fate, he could neither see in occurrences the signs of divine rule, nor hope for aid in obtaining his wishes. In fact, order is only conceivable to man at all as an order conformable to his own intelligence.
This second postulate embraces what has been recently called the “Principle of continuity,” indispensable to sane thought of any kind. A late work defines it as “the trust that the Supreme Governor of the Universe will not put us to permanent intellectual confusion.”61 Looked at closely, it is the identification of order with reason.
The third and final postulate of the religious sentiment is that
III. All intelligence is one in kind.
Religion demands that there be a truth which is absolutely true, and that there be a goodness which is universally and eternally good. Each system claims the possession, and generally the exclusive possession, of this goodness and truth. They are right in maintaining these views, for unless such is the case, unless there is an absolute truth, cognizable to man, yet not transcended by any divine intelligence, all possible religion becomes mere child’s play, and its professed interpretation of mysteries but trickery.
The Grecian sophists used to meet the demonstrations of the mathematicians and philosophers by conceding that they did indeed set forth the truth, so far as man’s intelligence goes, but that to the intelligence of other beings – a bat or an angel, for example – they might not hold good at all; that there is a different truth for different intelligences; that the intelligence makes the truth; and that as for the absolutely true, true to every intelligence, there is no such thing. They acknowledged that a simple syllogism, constructed on these premises, made their own assertions partake of the doubtful character that was by them ascribed to other human knowledge. But this they gracefully accepted as the inevitable conclusion of reasoning. Their position is defended to-day by the advocates of “positivism,” who maintain the relativity of all truth.