Author: James Henry Leuba

Publisher: Library of Alexandria

Published: 1977

Total Pages: 94

ISBN-13: 1465574514

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 classes. We have, on the one hand, the definitions of Spencer, Max Müller, 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 God,’ 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 participate. Will, feeling, and intelligence are necessary and inseparable constituents 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 Müller 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 analogies drawn from human society, imaginatively and symbolically considered. In short, it is a universal, sociological hypothesis, mythical in form.’ What is this but once more the intellectualistic position? Religion arising from an effort to explain; Religion anhypothesis! It is Herbert Spencer over again with an additional statement concerning the way in which man attempts to explain ‘the mystery pressing for interpretation.’