The Psychological Origin and the Nature of Religion Part 1

The Psychological Origin and the Nature of Religion.

by James H. Leuba.

PREFACE

This little book, the last of a series of similar volumes each containing an exposition by a recognised authority of one of the many Religions the world has known, might have been put with as much propriety at the head of the series, there to show how Religion originated in the mind of man, what mental powers it presupposes, what is its nature and what its relation to the non-religious life. But one is, no doubt, better able to take up profitably these problems after having familiarised oneself with the several aspects of religious life. Therefore _The Psychological Origin and the Nature of Religion_ was placed at the end, where it fulfils the additional purpose of linking the concluded series of Histories of Religions with a cognate one, now being prepared by the same publishers, on Ancient and Modern Systems of Philosophy.

CHAPTER I

THE FUNDAMENTAL NATURE OF RELIGION

The opinions advanced in this essay and the arguments with which they are supported will be more readily appreciated if the fundamental nature of Religion is set forth in a few introductory pages.

The students of Religion have usually been content to describe it either in intellectual or in affective terms. 'This particular idea or belief,'

or 'this particular feeling or emotion,' is, they have said, 'the essence'

or the 'vital element' of Religion. So that most of the hundreds of definitions which have been proposed fall into two cla.s.ses. We have, on the one hand, the definitions of Spencer, Max Muller, Romanes, Goblet d'Alviella, and others, for whom Religion is 'the recognition of a mystery pressing for interpretation,' or 'a department of thought,' or 'a belief in superhuman beings'; and, on the other, the formulas of Schleiermacher, the Ritschlian theologians, Tiele, etc., who hold that Religion is 'a feeling of absolute dependence upon G.o.d,' or 'that pure and reverential disposition or frame of mind we call piety.' According to Tiele, 'the essence of piety, and, therefore, the essence of Religion, is adoration.'

The recent advance of psychological science and the increasingly careful and minute work of ethnographists have tended to discredit these one-sided conceptions. To-day it has become customary to admit that 'in Religion all sides of the personality partic.i.p.ate. Will, feeling, and intelligence are necessary and inseparable const.i.tuents of Religion.' But statements such as this one do not necessarily imply a correct understanding of the functional relation of the three aspects of psychic life. One may be acquainted with the three branches of government--legislative, executive, and judicial--and nevertheless grossly misunderstand their respective functions. Pfleiderer, for instance, hastens to add to the sentences last quoted, 'Of course we must recognise that knowing and willing are here [in religion] not ends in themselves, as in science and in morality, but rather subordinate to feeling as the real centre of religious consciousness.' Thus feeling reappears as _the real centre_ of religious consciousness. What the author may well have meant here by 'centre,' _I_ do not know. A similar criticism is applicable to Max Muller and to Guyau.

The latter begins promisingly with a criticism of the one-sided formulas of Schleiermacher and of Feuerbach, and declares that they should be combined. 'The religious sentiment,' says he, is 'primarily no doubt a feeling of dependence. But this feeling of dependence really to give birth to Religion must provoke in one a reaction--a desire for deliverance.'

Very good, indeed! But, on proceeding, the reader discovers that the opinion the book defends is that 'Religion is the outcome of an effort to explain all things--physical, metaphysical, and moral--by a.n.a.logies drawn from human society, imaginatively and symbolically considered. In short, it is a universal, sociological hypothesis, mythical in form.'[1] What is this but once more the intellectualistic position? Religion arising from an effort to _explain_; Religion an _hypothesis_! It is Herbert Spencer over again with an additional statement concerning the way in which man attempts to explain 'the mystery pressing for interpretation.'

It must be admitted, however, that several of the more recent definitions have completely broken with this bad psychology. Among these are those of J. G. Frazer, of A. Sabatier, and of William James. The first understands by Religion 'propitiation, or conciliation of powers superior to man, which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life.'[2] For A. Sabatier, Religion 'is a commerce, a conscious and willed relation into which the soul in distress enters with the mysterious power on which it feels that it and its destiny depend.'[3] William James expresses his mind thus: 'In broadest and most general terms possible, one might say that religious life consists in the belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto. This belief and this adjustment are the religious att.i.tude of the soul. In the ordinary sense of the word, however, no att.i.tude is accounted religious unless it be grave and serious; the trifling, sneering att.i.tude of a Voltaire must be thrown out if we would not strain the ordinary use of language. Moreover, there must be something solemn, serious, and tender about any att.i.tude which we denominate Religion. If glad, it must not grin or sn.i.g.g.e.r; if sad, it must not scream or curse. The sallies of a Schopenhauer and a Nietzsche lack the purgatorial note which religious sadness gives forth. And finally we must exclude also the chilling reflections of Marcus Aurelius on the eternal reason, as well as the pa.s.sionate outcry of Job.'[4]

But the battle against intellectualistic and affectivistic conceptions of Religion is not yet won. The recent definitions of Tiele and of Kaftan show only too clearly how strong the tendency remains to identify Religion with some feeling or emotion.

As the amazing discrepancies and contradictions offered by authorised definitions of Religion arise, in my opinion, primarily from a faulty psychology, a moment may profitably be devoted to an untechnical statement of the present teaching of that science upon the relation existing between the three acknowledged modes of consciousness--willing, feeling, and thinking.

Aristotle characterised man as _thinking-desire_. In swinging back from Intellectualism to Voluntarism, modern psychology has accepted the fundamental truth excellently expressed by the Greek philosopher. 'Will is not merely a function which sometimes accrues to consciousness, and is sometimes lacking; it is an integral property of consciousness.'[5] Will without intelligence may be possible; but intelligence without will is not, not even in the case of so-called disinterested, theoretical thinking. There is, there can be, no thinking without desire, intention, or purpose. 'The one thing that stands out,' says, for instance, Professor Dewey, 'is that thinking is inquiry, and that knowledge as science is the outcome of systematically directed inquiry.' Thought absolutely undirected would be not even a dream--mere meaningless, chaotic atoms of thought. It is _the intention_, _the purpose_, which makes thought what it is; that is to say, significant. We think because we will. Thought does not exist for itself; it is the instrument of desire. To discover ways and means of gratifying proximate or distant desires, needs, cravings, is the function of intelligence. The psychologist speaks, therefore, of the _instrumental_ character of thought, and considers cognition to be a function of conduct.

The mastery of desire over thought is abundantly ill.u.s.trated in the history of belief, and nowhere so strikingly as in Religion.

With regard to the relation of feeling to the will and to the intellect, it is to be observed that where there is desire for an object, there liking is present; and, conversely, where there is liking, there actual or potential desire is felt. As to sentiments and emotions, they involve ideas and conative elements in addition to sensations and feelings. An emotion is a reaction, the response of an organism to a situation. It is a form of action. Aristotle's characterisation of man is thus seen to be adequate; it does not leave out the feelings, as it might seem at first.

Thinking-desire includes the affection since it is included in desire.

Every pulse of consciousness is psychically compounded of will, feeling, and thought. Successive moments can differ one from the other neither in the absence of one or two of these three const.i.tuents, nor in the essential relation they bear to one another--that is fixed and unchangeable--but only in the intensity and vividness of their respective components. This, then, is the double teaching of psychology in this matter:--(1) Will, feeling, and thought enter in some degree into every moment of consciousness which can be looked upon as an actuality, and not merely as an abstraction; they are necessary const.i.tuents of consciousness. The unit of conscious life is neither thought, nor feeling, nor will, but all three in movement towards an object. (2) The will is primal; or, in other words, conscious life is always oriented towards something to be secured or avoided immediately or ultimately.

If, with this conception in mind, we turn to Religion, we shall understand it to be compounded of will, thought, and feeling, bearing to each other the relation which belongs to them in every department of life. And it will, moreover, be clear that a purpose or an ideal, _i.e._ something to be attained or maintained, must always be at the root of it. The outcome of the application of current psychological teaching to religious life is, then, to lead us to regard Religion as a particular kind of activity, as a mode or type of behaviour, and to make it as impossible for us to identify it with a particular emotion or with a particular belief, as it would be to identify, let us say, family life with affection, or to define trade as 'belief in the productivity of exchange'; or commerce as 'greed touched with a feeling of dependence upon society.' And yet this last definition is no less informing and adequate than the far-famed formula of Matthew Arnold, which I forbear to repeat. We shall, however, have to remember that Religion is multiform, and that certain ideas, emotions, and purposes appear in it prominently at certain moments, and other ideas, emotions, and purposes at other times. But neither prominence nor predominance is synonymous with 'essence' or with 'vital element.'

I do not intend, at this stage of our inquiry, to offer a complete definition of Religion. But I must guard against a possible misinterpretation. In speaking of Religion as an activity, or as a type of behaviour, I would not be understood to exclude from it whatever does not express itself in overt acts, in rites of propitiation, submission, or adoration. For, just as man's relations with his fellow-men are not all directly expressed, or expressible, in actions, so his relations with G.o.ds, or their impersonal subst.i.tutes, may not have any visible form; they may remain purely subjective and none the less exercise a definite guiding and inspiring influence over his life.

The adjectives _pa.s.sive_ and _active_ might be used to separate amorphous from organised Religion, _i.e._ the feeling-att.i.tude from the behaviour.

'Pa.s.sive,' used in this connection, would mean simply that the person does not actively seek those advantages the G.o.ds might procure, but is content to be acted upon by them.

_Unorganised religiosity_ must be, it seems, the necessary precursor of organised Religion; it is its larval stage. But it does not by any means disappear from society when a system of definite relations with G.o.ds, or with impersonal sources of religious inspiration, has been developed. In all societies there is always a large number of people who live in the limbo of organised Religion. They are open to the influence of religious agents, in which they believe more or less cold-heartedly, without ever entering into definite and fixed relations with them.

CHAPTER II

THREE TYPES OF BEHAVIOUR DIFFERENTIATED

In his dealings with the different kinds of objects or forces with which he is, or thinks himself, in relation, man has developed three distinct types of behaviour. A concrete ill.u.s.tration will bring them before us more forcibly than an abstract characterisation. A stoker in the hold of a ship, throwing coal into the furnace, represents one of them. His purpose is to produce propelling energy. The amount of coal he shovels in, together with the air-draught, the condition of the boiler and other factors of the same sort, determine, as he understands the matter, the velocity of the ship. The same man, playing cards of an evening, and having lost uninterruptedly for a long time, might get up and walk round the table backwards in order to change his luck. He would then ill.u.s.trate a second mode of behaviour. If a storm threatens to sink the ship, our stoker might be seen falling on his knees, lifting his hands to heaven, and addressing in pa.s.sionate words an invisible being. These are the three differentiated kinds of responses he has learned to make, the three ways by which he endeavours to make use of the forces about him in his struggle for the preservation and the enrichment of life. We may designate them as--

1. The mechanical behaviour.

2. The coercitive behaviour, or Magic.

3. The anthropopathic behaviour, which includes Religion.

The mechanical behaviour differs from the anthropopathic by the absence of any reference to personal beings. In the sphere in which it obtains, threats and presents are equally ineffective. It implies instead the practical--not the theoretical--recognition of a fairly definite and constant quant.i.tative relation between cause and effect. If science is to be provided with an ancestor, and only with one, it should be this first type of behaviour rather than Magic. For, the moment the existence of the fixed quant.i.tative relations, implicitly acknowledged in the first type of behaviour, is explicitly recognised, science is born. Magic separates itself, on the one hand, from the mechanical behaviour by the absence of implied quant.i.tative relations, and, on the other hand, from anthropopathic behaviour by the failure to use means of personal influence; punishment and reward are just as foreign to Magic as to mechanical behaviour. As to the anthropopathic type of activity, it includes the ordinary relations of men with men as well as those with G.o.ds. One's frame of mind and behaviour when dealing with a human person, especially if exalted far above us, resembles Religion so closely that it is proper to place them in the same cla.s.s.

Mechanical behaviour and Religion are, obviously, by far the most common and important modes of activity among civilised peoples, whereas in primitive culture the coercitive behaviour (Magic) is everywhere in evidence and Religion may be practically unknown. As one ascends from the lowest stages of culture, Magic gradually loses official recognition.

Among us, though it leads only a surrept.i.tious existence, it has by no means lost all influence. The list of magical superst.i.tions that have retained a hold among us would be found tediously long. A numerous cla.s.s of them includes the gambler's methods of securing luck. So-called 'religious' practices may really be magical. The cross, the rosary, relics, and other accessories of Religion, acquire in the mind of many Christians a power of the coercitive type; that is, for instance, the case when the sign of the cross, of itself, without the mediation of G.o.d or Saint, is felt to have power; or when 'saying one's beads' is held to possess a curative virtue of the kind ascribed to sacred relics by the superst.i.tious. Even when the symbolism of the sign of the cross, and the meaning of the _Ave Maria_ are realised, it happens not infrequently that signing oneself and saying one's beads are regarded as acting upon the Virgin Mary, Jesus Christ, or G.o.d, in the manner of an incantation _i.e._ magically.

It has been the habit of most students of the origin of Religion to concern themselves exclusively with the origin of the G.o.d-idea, as if belief in the existence of G.o.ds was identical with Religion. They have ignored its other essential components: the motives or desires and the feelings, as well as the means by which, in Religion, the gratification of desire is sought. But the limitation of the problem of origin to that of the G.o.d-idea is not entirely amiss. For there are neither specifically religious motives, nor specifically religious feelings. Any and every human need and longing may, at some stage or other, become a spring of Religion, and conversely the feelings and emotions met with in any form of Religion appear also in non-religious experience. As to the practical means of securing the favour of the G.o.ds, it is agreed that they were at the beginning essentially the same as those men were already in the habit of using in their relations with their fellow-men. It is the Agent or the Power with which man thinks himself in relation, and through whom he endeavours to secure the gratification of his desires, which alone is distinctive of religious life. And so the origin of the idea of G.o.ds, though not identical with the origin of Religion, is at any rate its central problem.

In the preceding remarks, as also in practically all writings on the origin of Religion, it is a.s.sumed that the G.o.d-concept precedes, in the mind of man, the establishment of Religion. This opinion is, as we shall see, the correct one. But it cannot be taken as a matter of course.

Actions may become established in other ways. Our first problem is to discover how Religion arose, and what psychological capacities and conceptions it implies.

A comparative study of the three modes of behaviour is, after all, the shortest way of gaining a satisfactory understanding of the origin of Religion.

_What are the abstract conceptions necessary to the establishment of the three modes of behaviour?_--There is usually little difficulty in determining what end any particular action is intended to secure. It is quite otherwise if one wishes to ascertain the nature of the power from which the desired effect is supposed to proceed. The philosopher, suffering from the illusion to which his cla.s.s is subject, is in danger of imagining the presence of highly abstract notions where much simpler mental processes actually take place. A comparatively easy way of getting oneself disentangled from these high-flown interpretations and of ascertaining what is the intellectual minimum really involved in these types of behaviour, is to examine them in the least developed men known to us, or, better still--if they are to be found there--among animals. Let us accordingly turn for a moment to animal behaviour with the intention of determining what ideas of power, or of agency, are involved in their modes of action, and thus take a preliminary step towards the solution of our problem.

Apes, dogs, beavers, in fact all the higher animals, show by their behaviour a 'working understanding' of the more common physical forces.

They estimate weight, resistance, heat, distance, etc., and adapt their actions more or less exactly to these factors when climbing, swinging at the end of boughs, breaking, carrying, etc. I remember observing a chimpanzee trying to recover a stick which had fallen through the bars of his cage and rolled beyond the reach of his arm. He looked around, walked deliberately to the corner of the cage, picked up a piece of burlap, and threw the end of it over the stick. Then, pulling gently, he made the stick roll until near enough for him to get hold of it with his hand. This ape dealt successfully with physical forces. Towards animals and men, animal behaviour is quite different. A dog will beg from a man; he will not beg from a ham suspended out of his reach. Towards animals and men, animal behaviour is similar to that of men when dealing with invisible anthropopathic beings.

One may well believe that the inner experiences of animals differ in these modes of behaviour as much as their external movements. The feelings and emotions which appear in a dog's intercourse with his master are of the same species, if not of the same variety, as those felt by man when he deals with his fellow-men and with superhuman beings. Certain highly gifted animals feel blame and approbation, independently of physical punishment or reward, and attach themselves to their masters with a devoted affection possessing all the marks of altruism. The higher animals do, then, without any doubt, practise both the mechanical and the anthropopathic types of behaviour, but they exercise the latter only towards _actually present_ persons or animals. We shall have to consider subsequently the significant psychological difference to which this fact points.

But, is there no trace in animal life of the coercitive behaviour? I know of none, though some perplexity might be caused by certain reactions animals learn under the tuition of man. What shall be said, for instance, of a dog who has learned to raise its forepaws when he wishes to be liberated from confinement under circ.u.mstances making the person causing the door to open invisible to him? Is this magical behaviour? There is certainly no quant.i.tative nor any qualitative relation between lifting up the forepaws and the opening of a door, neither is there any visible continuity between cause and effect. That the dog's action is not determined, in this instance, in the same way as that of a magician, appears when it is observed that whereas the latter would perform the same magical rite in a great variety of external circ.u.mstances, the dog will seek liberation by lifting its paws only when in the particular cage in which he has learned the trick, or in one very much like it.[6] But more about this presently. It is not to be overlooked that without the interference of man, the dog would never have learned to perform this quasi-magical trick. This ill.u.s.tration serves, if no other purpose, at least to indicate how apparently slight is the impediment which prevents the higher animals from setting up a magical art.

It may be a matter for astonishment that two complicated and effective modes of reaction are arrived at by animals in the absence of abstract ideas about forces. Yet so it is; before any speculation on power, before any induction or deduction, before any abstract notion of the nature of spirit and matter, animals have learned to deal quite well with what we call physical and personal forces. How did they do it? The study under experimental conditions of the establishment of new reactions in animals reveals the process very clearly. Imagine a cat shut up in a cage, the door of which can be opened by pressing down a latch. When weary of confinement the cat begins to claw, pull, and bite, here, there, and everywhere. After half an hour, or an hour of this purposive, but unreasoned, activity, he chances to put his paw upon the latch and escapes. If again put into the cage, he does not seem to know any better than before how to proceed. Yet something has been gained by the first experience. For now he directs his clawing, pulling, and biting more frequently towards the part of the cage occupied by the latch. Because of this improvement he finds himself released sooner than the first time. The repet.i.tion of the experiment shows the cat learning to bring his movements to bear more and more exclusively upon the door or its immediate surroundings. Ultimately he will have learned to make just the necessary movement and no other. In this gradual exclusion of useless movements, the cat is guided entirely by results. The psycho-physiological endowment required for acquisitions of this kind involves no abstract ideas but only (1) the desire to escape; (2) the impulse and ability to perform the various movements we have named; (3) an indefinite remembrance of the position occupied when success was achieved, combined with a tendency to repeat the same movements when in the same situation.

The method ill.u.s.trated above by which animals learn to deal with forces in the midst of which they live has a much wider range of application in human existence than is generally supposed. Man's fundamental mode of learning is also the unreflective, experimental, one in which frequent blind attempts and chance successes slowly lead to the elimination of ineffective movements. Would you convince yourself of the vastly exaggerated role ascribed to abstract ideas and to logical processes in ordinary human behaviour, inquire how 'power' is conceived of by those who use it. What is in the mind of the stoker when he thinks of the power of coal? What in the mind of the gambler when he tries to coerce fate? What in the mind of the necromancer when he summons the shades of spirits?

Nothing definite beyond a knowledge of what is to be done in order to secure the desired results and the antic.i.p.ation of these results them selves. The stoker thinks of what he sees and feels: the coal, in burning, gives heat; the heat makes the water boil; the steam pushes the piston-rod, and so forth. Each one of the successive links in the chain is vaguely thought of by him as striving to bring about the following one.

That is how he understands the coal-power. And what does the ordinary person know, for instance, about electricity? Simply what is to be done in order to start the dynamo, light the lamp, switch the current, and what the effect will be in each case, nothing more. The superst.i.tious person, whether belonging to a primitive tribe or to the Anglo-Saxon civilisation of the twentieth century, understands in no other than this practical way the forces he deals with. I remember the delight shown by an elderly lady when a brood of swallows fell down our sitting-room chimney. 'It will bring luck to the household,' said she. I did my best, patiently and in several ways, to ascertain the sort of notion the lady had regarding the nature of the power that was to bring about the fortunate events predicted, and also to discover her idea of the connection existing between the fall of the swallows and the exertion of the 'power' in our behalf. I had to come to the conclusion that there was no idea whatsoever in her mind beyond those expressed by 'swallows-down-the-chimney' and 'happy-events-coming.' These two ideas were in her mind directly a.s.sociated. When I declared my inability to see the causal connection between the two, she complained of my abnormal critical sense! Nothing more than the immediate a.s.sociation of an antecedent with its consequent need be looked for in the mind of most civilised, superst.i.tious persons, and, of course, nothing more in the mind of a savage. That is sufficient for practical purposes.

The words 'matter' and 'spirit' wield a very considerable influence among us; what do they mean to most of those who use them? Physical science ascribes either extension alone, or extension and weight, to physical substances. Non-material forces are, then, according to science, both s.p.a.celess and weightless. I will venture to affirm that not one educated person in a thousand is acquainted with this distinction. Most of the few who have known it have forgotten it. So that the words 'matter' and 'spirit' mean different things to the philosopher and to the layman. In the popular mind, if spirits are not perceptible it is because the senses are not sufficiently acute. Spirits are here or there, diffused over wide areas or concentrated in narrow s.p.a.ces. The average Christian, whatever he may say to the contrary, is, theoretically speaking, a materialist, and, I might add, a polytheist. Whatever matter and spirit mean to him, and they certainly have a substantial meaning, the distinction made by the philosopher is for him non-existent. The following facts may be of some interest in this connection. A few years ago, in a conversation with a shop-clerk, I happened to mention a lead coffin made hermetic with solder.