The Religious Sentiment Part 3

[31-1] _An Outline of the Necessary Laws of Thought_, p. 113 (New York, 1860).

[37-1] _The Dhamapada_, verse 93.

[37-2] Koppen, _Der Buddhismus_, s. 30.

[39-1] Spencer in a.s.suming an "unknowable universal causal agent and source of things," as "the nature of the power manifested in phenomena,"

and in calling this the idea common to both religion and "ideal science," fell far behind Comte, who expressed the immovable position, not only of positive science but of all intelligence, in these words: "Le veritable esprit positif consiste surtout a subst.i.tuer toujours l'etude des _lois_ invariables des phenomenes a celles de leurs _causes_ proprement dites, premieres ou finales, en un mot la determination du _comment_ a celle du _pourquoi_."--_Systemede[TN-4] Politique Positive_, i. p. 47. Compare Spencer's Essay ent.i.tled, "Reasons for dissenting from Comte." The purposive law is the only final cause which reason allows.

Comte's error lay in ignoring this cla.s.s of laws.

[43-1] _The Inst.i.tutes of Metaphysic_, 2d Ed. See also Bain, _The Emotions and the Will_, the closing note.

[44-1] Boole, _Laws of Thought_, p. 401.

THE EMOTIONAL ELEMENTS OF THE RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT.

SUMMARY.

The Religious Sentiment is made up of emotions and thoughts. The emotions are historically first and most prominent. Of all concerned, Fear is the most obvious. Hope is its correlate. Both suppose Experience, and a desire to repeat or avoid it. Hence a Wish is the source of both emotions, and the proximate element of religion. The significance of desire as the postulate of development. The influence of fear and hope. The conditions which encourage them.

The success of desire fails to gratify the religious sentiment. The alternative left is eternal repose, or else action, unending yet which aims at nothing beyond. The latter is reached through Love.

The result of love is _continuance_. Ill.u.s.trations of this. s.e.xual love and the venereal sense in religions. The hermaphrodite G.o.ds.

The virgin mother. Mohammed was the first to proclaim a deity above s.e.x. The conversion of s.e.xual and religious emotion exemplified from insane delusions. The element of fascination. The love of G.o.d.

Other emotional elements in religions.

The religious wish defined to be one _whose fruition depends upon unknown power_. To be religious, one must desire and be ignorant.

The unknown power is of religious interest only in so far as it is believed to be in relation to men's desires. In what sense ignorance is the mother of devotion.

CHAPTER II.

THE EMOTIONAL ELEMENTS OF THE RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT.

The discussion in the last chapter ill.u.s.trated how closely pain and pleasure, truth and error, and thought and its laws have been related to the forms of religions, and their dogmatic expressions. The character of the relatively and absolutely true was touched upon, and the latter, it was indicated, if attainable at all by human intelligence, must be found in the formal laws of that intelligence, those which const.i.tute its nature and essence, and in the conclusions which such a premise forces upon the reason. The necessity of this preliminary inquiry arose from the fact that every historical religion claims the monopoly of the absolutely true, and such claims can be tested only when we have decided as to whether there is such truth, and if there is, where it is to be sought. Moreover, as religions arise from some mental demand, the different manifestations of mind,--sensation, emotion and intellect--must be recognized and understood.

Pa.s.sing now to a particular description of the Religious Sentiment, it may roughly be defined to be the feeling which prompts to thoughts or acts of worship. It is, as I have said, a complex product, made up of emotions and ideas, developing with the growth of mind, wide-reaching in its maturity, but meagre enough at the start. We need not expect to find in its simplest phases that insight and tender feeling which we attribute to the developed religious character. "The scent of the blossom is not in the bulb." Its early and ruder forms, however, will best teach the mental elements which are at its root.

The problem is, to find out why the primitive man figured to himself any G.o.ds at all; what necessity of his nature or his condition led him so universally to a.s.sume their existence, and seek their aid or their mercy? The conditions of the solution are, that it hold good everywhere and at all times; that it enable us to trace in every creed and cult the same sentiments which first impelled man to seek a G.o.d and adore him.

Why is it that now and in remotest history, here and in the uttermost regions, there is and always has been this that we call _religion_?

There must be some common reason, some universal peculiarity in man's mental formation which prompts, which forces him, him alone of animals, and him without exception, to this discourse and observance of religion.

What this is, it is my present purpose to try to find out.

In speaking of the development of mind through organism, it was seen that the emotions precede the reason in point of time. This is daily confirmed by observation. The child is vastly more emotional than the man, the savage than his civilized neighbor. Castren, the Russian traveller, describes the Tartars and Lapps as a most nervous folk. When one shocks them with a sudden noise, they almost fall into convulsions.

Among the North American Indians, falsely called a phlegmatic race, nervous diseases are epidemic to an almost unparalleled extent. Intense thought, on the other hand, as I have before said, tends to lessen and annul the emotions. Intellectual self-consciousness is adverse to them.

But religion, we are everywhere told, is largely a matter of the emotions. The pulpit constantly resounds with appeals to the feelings, and not unfrequently with warnings against the intellect. "I acknowledge myself," says the pious non-juror, William Law, "a declared enemy to the use of reason in religion;" and he often repeats his condemnation of "the labor-learned professors of far-fetched book-riches."[49-1] As the eye is the organ of sight, says one whose thoughts on such matters equal in depth those of Pascal, so the heart is the organ of religion.[49-2]

In popular physiology, the heart is the seat of the emotions as the brain is that of intellect. It is appropriate, therefore, that we commence our a.n.a.lysis of the religious sentiment with the emotions which form such a prominent part of it.

Now, whether we take the experience of an individual or the history of a tribe, whether we have recourse to the opinions of religious teachers or irreligious philosophers, we find them nigh unanimous that the emotion which is the prime motor of religious thought is _fear_. I need not depend upon the well-known line of Petronius Arbiter,

Primus in orbe deos fecit timor;

for there is plenty of less heterodox authority. The worthy Bishop Hall says, "Seldom doth G.o.d seize upon the heart without a vehement concussion going before. There must be some bl.u.s.tering and flashes of the law. We cannot be too awful in our fear."[50-1] Bunyan, in his beautiful allegory of the religious life, lets Christian exclaim: "Had even Obstinate himself felt what I have felt of the terrors of the yet unseen, he would not thus lightly have given us the _back_." The very word for G.o.d in the Semitic tongues means "fear;"[50-2] Jacob swore to Laban, "by Him whom Isaac feared;" and Moses warned his people that "G.o.d is come, that his fear may be before your faces." To _venerate_ is from a Sanscrit root (_sev_), to be afraid of.

But it is needless to ama.s.s more evidence on this point. Few will question that fear is the most prominent emotion at the awakening of the religious sentiments. Let us rather proceed to inquire more minutely what fear is.

I remarked in the previous chapter that "the emotions fall naturally into a dual cla.s.sification, in which the one involves pleasurable or elevating, the other painful or depressing conditions." Fear comes of course under the latter category, as it is essentially a painful and depressing state of mind. But it corresponds with and implies the presence of Hope, for he who has nothing to hope has nothing to fear.[51-1] "There is no hope without fear, as there is no fear without hope," says Spinoza. "For he who is in fear has some doubt whether what he fears will take place, and consequently hopes that it will not."

We can go a step further, and say that in the mental process the hope must necessarily precede the fear. In the immediate moment of losing a pleasurable sensation we hope and seek for its repet.i.tion. The mind, untutored by experience, confidently looks for its return. The hope only becomes dashed by fear when experience has been a.s.sociated with disappointment. Hence we must first look to enjoy a good before we can be troubled by a fear that we shall not enjoy it; we must first lay a plan before we can fear its failure. In modern Christianity hope, hope of immortal happiness, is more conspicuous than fear; but that hope is also based on the picture of a pleasant life made up from experience.

Both hope and fear, therefore, have been correctly called secondary or derived emotions, as they presuppose experience and belief, experience of a pleasure akin to that which we hope, belief that we can attain such a pleasure. "We do not hope first and enjoy afterwards, but we enjoy first and hope afterwards."[52-1] Having enjoyed, we seek to do so again. A desire, in other words, must precede either Hope or Fear. They are twin sisters, born of a Wish.

Thus my a.n.a.lysis traces the real source of the religious sentiment, so far as the emotions are concerned, to a Wish; and having arrived there, I find myself antic.i.p.ated by the words of one of the most reflective minds of this century: "All religion rests on a mental want; we hope, we fear, because we wish."[53-1] And long before this conclusion was reached by philosophers, it had been expressed in unconscious religious thought in myths, in the Valkyria, the Wish-maidens, for instance, who carried the decrees of Odin to earth.

This is no mean origin, for a wish, a desire, conscious or unconscious, in sensation only or in emotion as well, is the fundamental postulate of every sort of development, of improvement, of any possible future, of life of any kind, mental or physical. In its broadest meaning, science and history endorse the exclamation of the unhappy Obermann: "_La perte vraiment irreparable est celle des desirs._"[53-2]

The sense of unrest, the ceaseless longing for something else, which is the general source of all desires and wishes, is also the source of all endeavor and of all progress. Physiologically, it is the effort of our organization to adapt itself to the ever varying conditions which surround it; intellectually, it is the struggle to arrive at truth; in both, it is the effort to attain a fuller life.

As stimuli to action, therefore, the commonest and strongest of all emotions are Fear and Hope. They are the emotional correlates of pleasure and pain, which rule the life of sensation. Their closer consideration may well detain us awhile.

In the early stages of religious life, whether in an individual or a nation, the latter is half concealed. Fear is more demonstrative, and as it is essentially destructive, its effects are more sudden and visible.

In its acuter forms, as Fright and Terror, it may blanch the hair in a night, blight the mind and destroy the life of the individual. As Panic, it is eminently epidemic, carrying crowds and armies before it; while in the aggravated form of Despair it swallows up all other emotions and prompts to self destruction. Its physiological effect is a direct impairment of vitality.

Hope is less intense and more lasting than fear. It stimulates the system, elates with the confidence of control, strengthens with the courage derived from a conviction of success, and bestows in advance the imagined joy of possession. As Feuchtersleben happily expresses it: "Hope preserves the principle of duration when other parts are threatened with destruction, and is a manifestation of the innermost psychical energy of Life."[54-1]

Both emotions powerfully prompt to action, and to that extent are opposed to thought. Based on belief, they banish uncertainty, and antagonize doubt and with it investigation. The religion in which they enter as the princ.i.p.al factors will be one intolerant of opposition, energetic in deed, and generally hostile to an unbiased pursuit of the truth.

Naturally those temperaments and those physical conditions which chiefly foster these emotions will tend to religious systems in which they are prominent. Let us see what some of these conditions are.

It has always been noticed that impaired vitality predisposes to fear.

The sick and feeble are more timorous than the strong and well. Further predisposing causes of the same nature are insufficient nourishment, cold, gloom, malaria, advancing age and mental worry. For this reason nearly invariably after a general financial collapse we witness a religious "revival." Age, full of care and fear, is thus prompted to piety, willing, as La Rochefoucauld remarks, to do good by precept when it can no longer do evil by example. The inhabitants of swampy, fever-ridden districts are usually devout. The female s.e.x, always the weaker and often the worsted one in the struggle for existence, is when free more religious than the male; but with them hope is more commonly the incentive than fear.

Although thus prominent and powerful, desire, so far as its fruition is pleasure, has expressed but the lowest emotions of the religious sentiment. Something more than this has always been asked by sensitively religious minds. Success fails to bring the gratification it promises.

The wish granted, the mind turns from it in satiety. Not this, after all, was what we sought.

The acutest thinkers have felt this. Pascal in his _Pensees_ has such expressions as these: "The present is never our aim. The future alone is our object." "Forever getting ready to be happy, it is certain we never can be." "'Tis the combat pleases us and not the victory. As soon as that is achieved, we have had enough of the spectacle. So it is in play, so it is in the search for truth. We never pursue objects, but we pursue the pursuit of objects." But no one has stated it more boldly than Lessing when he wrote: "If G.o.d held in his right hand all truth, and in his left the one unceasingly active desire for truth, although bound up with the law that I should forever err, I should choose with humility the left and say: 'Give me this, Father. The pure truth is for thee alone.'"[56-1] The pleasure seems to lie not in the booty but in the battle, not in gaining the stakes but in playing the game, not in the winning but in the wooing, not in the discovery of truth but in the search for it.

What is left for the wise, but to turn, as does the preacher, from this delusion of living, where laughter is mad and pleasure is vain, and praise the dead which are dead more than the living which are yet alive, or to esteem as better than both he that hath never been?

Such is the conclusion of many faiths. Wasted with combat, the mortal longs for the rest prepared for the weary. Buddha taught the extinguishment in Nirvana; the Brahman portrays the highest bliss as _shanti_, complete and eternal repose; and that the same longing was familiar to ancient Judaism, and has always been common to Christianity, numerous evidences testify.[57-1] Few epitaphs are more common than those which speak of the mortal resting _in pace, in quiete_.

The supposition at the root of these longings is that action must bring fatigue and pain, and though it bring pleasure too, it is bought too dearly. True in fact, I have shown that this conflicts with the theory of perfect life, even organic life. The highest form of life is the most unceasing living; its functions ask for their completest well being constant action, not satisfaction. That general feeling of health and strength, that _sens de bien etre_, which goes with the most perfect physical life, is experienced only when all the organs are in complete working order and doing full duty. They impart to the whole frame a desire of motion. Hence the activity of the young and healthy as contrasted with the inertness of the exhausted and aged.