In a still more radical vein, Professor Ribot (Psychologie des Sentiments, p. 310) describes the evaporation of religion. He sums it up in a single formula—the ever-growing predominance of the rational intellectual element, with the gradual fading out of the emotional element, this latter tending to enter into the group of purely intellectual sentiments.
“Of religious sentiment properly so called, nothing survives at last save a vague respect for the unknowable x which is a last relic of the fear, and a certain attraction towards the ideal, which is a relic of the love, that characterized the earlier periods of religious growth. To state this more simply, religion tends to turn into religious philosophy.—These are psychologically entirely different things, the one being a theoretic construction of ratiocination, whereas the other is the living work of a group of persons, or of a great inspired leader, calling into play the entire thinking and feeling organism of man.”
I find the same failure to recognize that the stronghold of religion lies in individuality in attempts like those of Professor Baldwin (Mental Development, Social and Ethical Interpretations, ch. X) and Mr. R. Marshall (Instinct and Reason, chaps, VIII to XII) to make it a purely “conservative social force.” ↩
Compare, for instance, here, here, here, here, here onwards, here onwards. ↩
J. H. Leuba: American Journal of Psychology, VII 345. ↩
Example: Henri Perreyve writes to Gratry:
“I do not know how to deal with the happiness which you aroused in me this morning. It overwhelms me; I want to do something, yet I can do nothing and am fit for nothing. … I would fain do great things.”
Again, after an inspiring interview, he writes:
“I went homewards, intoxicated with joy, hope, and strength. I wanted to feed upon my happiness in solitude, far from all men. It was late; but, unheeding that, I took a mountain path and went on like a madman, looking at the heavens, regardless of earth. Suddenly an instinct made me draw hastily back—I was on the very edge of a precipice, one step more and I must have fallen. I took fright and gave up my nocturnal promenade.”
A. Gratry: Henri Perreyve, London, 1872, pp. 92, 89
This primacy, in the faith-state, of vague expansive impulse over direction is well expressed in Walt Whitman’s lines (Leaves of Grass, 1872, p. 190):—
“O to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs, as the trees and animals do.
⋮
Dear Camerado! I confess I have urged you onward with me, and still urge you, without the least idea what is our destination,
Or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell’d and defeated.”
This readiness for great things, and this sense that the world by its importance, wonderfulness, etc., is apt for their production, would seem to be the undifferentiated germ of all the higher faiths. Trust in our own dreams of ambition, or in our country’s expansive destinies, and faith in the providence of God, all have their source in that onrush of our sanguine impulses, and in that sense of the exceedingness of the possible over the real. ↩
Compare Leuba: “The Contents of Religious Consciousness,” in The Monist, XI 536, July, 1901, pp. 346–349. ↩
J. H. Leuba: “The Contents of Religious Consciousness,” in The Monist, XI 536, July, 1901. ↩
J. H. Leuba: The Contents of Religious Consciousness, in The Monist, XI 536, July, 1901, pp. 571, 572, abridged. See, also, this writer’s extraordinarily true criticism of the notion that religion primarily seeks to solve the intellectual mystery of the world. Compare what W. Bender says (in his Wesen der Religion, Bonn, 1888, pp. 85, 38):
“Not the question about God, and not the inquiry into the origin and purpose of the world is religion, but the question about Man. All religious views of life are anthropocentric.”
“Religion is that activity of the human impulse towards self-preservation by means of which Man seeks to carry his essential vital purposes through against the adverse pressure of the world by raising himself freely towards the world’s ordering and governing powers when the limits of his own strength are reached.”
The whole book is little more than a development of these words. ↩
Remember that for some men it arrives suddenly, for others gradually, whilst others again practically enjoy it all their life. ↩
The practical difficulties are: 1, to “realize the reality” of one’s higher part; 2, to identify one’s self with it exclusively; and 3, to identify it with all the rest of ideal being. ↩
“When mystical activity is at its height, we find consciousness possessed by the sense of a being at once excessive and identical with the self: great enough to be God; interior enough to be me. The ‘objectivity’ of it ought in that case to be called excessivity, rather, or exceedingness.” Récéjac: Essai sur les fondements de la conscience mystique, 1897, p. 46. ↩
The word “truth” is here taken to mean something additional to bare value for life, although the natural propensity of man is to believe that whatever has great value for life is thereby certified as true. ↩
F. W. H. Myers: Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, vol. VII p. 305. For a full statement of Mr. Myers’s views, I may refer to his posthumous work, Human Personality in the Light of Recent Research, which is already announced by Messrs.
