RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY
25
most precious of human experiences. No one organism can possibly
yield to its owner the whole body of truth. Few of us are not in
some way infirm, or even diseased; and our very infirmities help us
unexpectedly. In the psychopathic temperament we have the emo-
tionality which is the sine quâ non of moral perception; we have
the intensity and tendency to emphasis which are the essence of
practical moral vigor; and we have the love of metaphysics and
mysticism which carry one’s interests beyond the surface of the sens-
ible world. What, then, is more natural than that this temperament
should introduce one to regions of religious truth, to corners of the
universe, which your robust Philistine type of nervous system, for-
ever offering its biceps to be felt, thumping its breast, and thanking
Heaven that it hasn’t a single morbid fibre in its composition,
would be sure to hide forever from its self-satisfied possessors?
If there were such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm, it
might well be that the neurotic temperament would furnish the
chief condition of the requisite receptivity. And having said thus
much, I think that I may let the matter of religion and neuroticism
drop.
The mass of collateral phenomena, morbid or healthy, with which
the various religious phenomena must be compared in order to
understand them better, forms what in the slang of pedagogics is
termed “the apperceiving mass” by which we comprehend them.
The only novelty that I can imagine this course of lectures to
possess lies in the breadth of the apperceiving mass. I may succeed
in discussing religious experiences in a wider context than has been
usual in university courses.
26
THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
LECTURE II
CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC
M
OST books on the philosophy of religion try to begin with
a precise definition of what its essence consists of. Some of
these would-be definitions may possibly come before us in later
portions of this course, and I shall not be pedantic enough to
enumerate any of them to you now. Meanwhile the very fact that
they are so many and so different from one another is enough to
prove that the word “religion” cannot stand for any single principle
or essence, but is rather a collective name. The theorizing mind
tends always to the over-simplification of its materials. This is the
root of all that absolutism and one-sided dogmatism by which both
philosophy and religion have been infested. Let us not fall immedi-
ately into a one-sided view of our subject, but let us rather admit
freely at the outset that we may very likely find no one essence, but
many characters which may alternately be equally important in
religion. If we should inquire for the essence of “government,” for
example, one man might tell us it was authority, another submission,
another police, another an army, another an assembly, another a
system of laws; yet all the while it would be true that no concrete
government can exist without all these things, one of which is more
important at one moment and others at another. The man who
knows governments most completely is he who troubles himself
least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying an
intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would
naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified
as a thing more misleading than enlightening. And why may not
religion be a conception equally complex?
1
1
I can do no better here than refer my readers to the extended and admirable remarks on
the futility of all these definitions of religion, in an article by Professor Leuba, published in
the Monist for January, 1901, after my own text was written.
CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC
27
Consider also the “religious sentiment” which we see referred to
in so many books, as if it were a single sort of mental entity.
In the psychologies and in the philosophies of religion, we find
the authors attempting to specify just what entity it is. One man
allies it to the feeling of dependence; one makes it a derivative
from fear; others connect it with the sexual life; others still identify
it with the feeling of the infinite; and so on. Such different ways of
conceiving it ought of themselves to arouse doubt as to whether it
possibly can be one specific thing; and the moment we are willing
to treat the term “religious sentiment” as a collective name for the
many sentiments which religious objects may arouse in alternation,
we see that it probably contains nothing whatever of a psycholo-
gically specific nature. There is religious fear, religious love, religious
awe, religious joy, and so forth. But religious love is only man’s
natural emotion of love directed to a religious object; religious fear
is only the ordinary fear of commerce, so to speak, the common
quaking of the human breast, in so far as the notion of divine retri-
bution may arouse it; religious awe is the same organic thrill which
we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge; only this time
it comes over us at the thought of our supernatural relations; and
similarly of all the various sentiments which may be called into play
in the lives of religious persons. As concrete states of mind, made
up of a feeling plus a specific sort of object, religious emotions of
course are psychic entities distinguishable from other concrete emo-
tions; but there is no ground for assuming a simple abstract “religious
emotion” to exist as a distinct elementary mental affection by itself,
present in every religious experience without exception.
As there thus seems to be no one elementary religious emotion,
but only a common storehouse of emotions upon which religious
objects may draw, so there might conceivably also prove to be no
one specific and essential kind of religious object, and no one specific
and essential kind of religious act.
The field of religion being as wide as this, it is manifestly imposs-
ible that I should pretend to cover it. My lectures must be limited
to a fraction of the subject. And, although it would indeed be
foolish to set up an abstract definition of religion’s essence, and
then proceed to defend that definition against all comers, yet this
need not prevent me from taking my own narrow view of what
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