390THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
The resultant outcome of them is in any case what Kant calls
a “sthenic” affection, an excitement of the cheerful, expansive,
“dynamogenic” order which, like any tonic, freshens our vital
powers. In almost every lecture, but especially in the lectures on
Conversion and on Saintliness, we have seen how this emotion
overcomes temperamental melancholy and imparts endurance to
the Subject, or a zest, or a meaning, or an enchantment and glory
to the common objects of life.
1
The name of “faith-state,” by which
Professor Leuba designates it, is a good one.
2
It is a biological as
well
as a psychological condition, and Tolstoy is absolutely accurate
in classing faith among the forces by which men live.
3
The total
absence of it, anhedonia,
4
means collapse.
The faith-state may hold a very minimum of intellectual content.
We saw examples of this in those sudden raptures of the divine
presence, or in such mystical seizures as Dr. Bucke described.
5
It
may
be a mere vague enthusiasm, half spiritual,
half vital, a courage,
and a feeling that great and wondrous things are in the air.
6
1
Compare, for instance, pages 160, 172, 176, 178, 195 to 200, 215 to 217.
2
American Journal of Psychology, vii. 345.
3
Above, p. 146.
4
Above, p. 117.
5
Above, p. 310.
6
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. G
RATRY
: 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, wonderful-
ness, 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.
CONCLUSIONS
391
When, however, a positive intellectual content is associated with
a faith-state, it gets invincibly stamped in upon belief,
1
and this
explains the passionate loyalty of religious persons everywhere to
the minutest details of their so widely differing creeds. Taking creeds
and faith-state together, as forming “religions,” and treating these
as purely subjective phenomena, without regard to the question
of their “truth,” we are obliged, on account of their extraordinary
influence upon action and endurance, to class them amongst the
most important biological functions of mankind. Their stimulant
and anæsthetic effect is so great that Professor Leuba, in a recent
article,
2
goes so far as to say that so long as men can use their
God, they care very little who he is, or even whether he is at all.
“The truth of the matter can be put,” says Leuba, “in this way:
God is not known, he is not understood; he is used — sometimes as
meat-purveyor, sometimes as moral support, sometimes as friend,
sometimes as an object of love. If he proves himself useful, the
religious consciousness asks for no more than that. Does God
really exist? How does he exist? What is he? are so many irrel-
evant questions. Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer,
more satisfying life, is, in the last analysis, the end of religion. The
love of life, at any and every level of development, is the religious
impulse.”
3
At this purely subjective rating, therefore, Religion must be con-
sidered vindicated in a certain way from the attacks of her critics.
It would seem that she cannot be a mere anachronism and survival,
but must exert a permanent function, whether she be with or with-
out intellectual content, and whether, if she have any, it be true
or false.
1
Compare L
EUBA
: Loc. cit., pp. 346–349.
2
The Contents of Religious Consciousness, in The Monist, xi. 536, July, 1901.
3
Loc. cit., 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. B
ENDER
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.