UC-NRLF 
 
 ZTbe mniverstts of 
 
 SB MS 335 
 
 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 A DISSERTATION 
 
 SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY 
 
 OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND LITERATURE 
 
 IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF 
 
 DOCTOR OF PHILO,-OT II Y 
 
 DEPARTMENT OF SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY IN THE 
 GRADUATE DIVINITY SCHOOL 
 
 BY 
 
 ARTHUR CLINTON WATSON 
 
 Private Edition, Distributed By 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LIBRARIES 
 
 CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 
 
 Reprinted from 
 
 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY, Vol. XX, Nos. i, 2, January, 
 
 April, 1916; Vol. XXII, Nos. 2, 3, 4, April, 
 
 July, October, 1918 
 
EXCHANGE 
 
 OA 
 
THntx>er8tts ot Cbicago 
 
 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 A DISSERTATION 
 
 SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY 
 
 OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND LITERATURE 
 
 IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF 
 
 DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 
 
 DEPARTMENT OF SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY IN THE 
 GRADUATE DIVINITY SCHOOL 
 
 BY 
 
 ARTHUR CLINTON WATSON 
 
 Private Edition, Distributed By 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LIBRARIES 
 
 CHICAGO, ILLINOIS 
 
 Reprinted from 
 
 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF THEOLOGY, Vol. XX, Nos. i, 2, January, 
 
 April, 1916; Vol. XXH, Nos. 2, 3, 4, April, 
 
 July, October, 1918 
 

 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. THE CONCEPTION OF RELIGION i 
 
 II. THE CONCEPTION OF RELIGION (Continued) 22 
 
 III. THE PROBLEM OF RELIGION 39 
 
 IV. THE PROBLEM OF RELIGION (Continued) 59 
 
 V. CONCERNING METHOD 78 
 
 APPENDIX A: ANIMISM OR "ANIMATISM" 94 
 
 APPENDIX B: TOTEMISM 95 
 
 APPENDIX C: MAGIC 96 
 
 APPENDIX D: MYSTICISM 98 
 
 iii 
 

CHAPTER I 
 THE CONCEPTION OF RELIGION 
 
 Reflection is evoked by the discovery that "things are not what 
 they seem." Serious speculation as to the nature of the reality 
 underlying the world's appearances began with Thale's crude 
 cosmology and ran a free and vigorous course to the time of Plato's 
 idealism and Democritus' atomism. But one who could review 
 with some degree of impartiality the various conclusions of all these 
 metaphysical speculations found a new problem in the fact that 
 their results were marked by such a glaring lack of agreement. 
 Such divergence as culminated in the antipodal differences between 
 Plato and Democritus surely proved the failure of speculation to 
 arrive at truth. Naturally then this activity of thought became 
 itself a problem of investigation. Greek thought had come to an 
 impasse. It was time for someone to inquire as to the processes of 
 thought whereby truth was being sought. This was the work of 
 Aristotle, the creator of logical science. There had, of course, 
 been foreshadowings of it in the need felt by Socrates and Plato 
 for more exact definition of ideas and terms. It remained for 
 Aristotle to see and attempt to solve the general difficulty in a 
 large and permanent way. "Aristotle made the great step in 
 
 advance .... the ripe self-knowledge of Greek science 
 
 He offers an examination of the thinking activity on all sides, a 
 comprehensive examination of its regular forms. " x 
 
 So much for the original occasion of logic in the narrower sense 
 as a branch of philosophy. In general, a similar situation is 
 involved in the development of any department of human activity. 
 When we come to a point where our technique, our intellectual 
 tools, our philosophy of the conduct in question, breaks down or 
 involves us in serious embarrassment, we instinctively turn back 
 upon that philosophy, that technique, to inquire what is wrong 
 
 1 Windelband, Geschichte der Philosophic, Engl. trans, by Tufts, History of Phi- 
 losophy, 2d ed., pp. 132, 133. 
 
LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 with it that it now fails to solve our problems or accomplish our 
 tasks. This examination, or its results as an organized system of 
 principles, is the logic of the activity in question, be it the logic of 
 thinking, or the logic of science, or the logic of morality, or the logic 
 of religion. 
 
 The logic of religion is needed at the same strategic moment as 
 is the logic of any other department of human development, namely, 
 when, on the one hand, after much groping, successes and failures 
 become gradually sifted, main lines of movement become distin- 
 guished from side issues, and, in general, the conditions of successful 
 experimentation become more and more clearly recognized; and 
 when, on the other hand, the need of strong, united, and unhesi- 
 tating advance has become urgent. In religion we have now some- 
 what adequately taken stock of the past few centuries of action and 
 reaction, confused groping and occasional clear glimpses of larger 
 perspectives, and with increasing conviction realize the imperative 
 social need of confident and comprehensive progress. Hence our 
 greatest immediate need is a clear apprehension of the logic of the 
 task we are undertaking. 
 
 We need religion, probably, as much as any age can have needed it. The 
 prevalent confusion, "the tumult of the time disconsolate," is felt in every 
 mind not wholly inert as a greater or less distraction of thought, feeling, and 
 will; and we need to be taught how to live with joy and calm in the presence 
 of inevitable perplexities. A certain natural phlegm is a great advantage in 
 these days, and better still, if we could get it, would be religious assurance. 
 Never was it more urgent or more difficult to justify the ways of God to men. 
 Our material betterment is a great thing, and our comparative freedom a 
 greater, but these rather increase than dimmish the need of a higher discipline 
 in the mind that is to use them profitably; the more opportunities the more 
 problems. Social betterment is like the advance of science in that each 
 achievement opens up new requirements. There is no prospect that the world 
 will ever satisfy us, and the structure of life is forever incomplete without 
 something to satisfy the need of the spirit for ideas and sentiments that tran- 
 scend and reconcile all particular aims whatsoever. Mediaeval religion is too 
 unworldly, no doubt, for our use, but all real religion has its unworldly side, 
 and Thomas a Kempis and the rest were right in holding that no sort of tan- 
 gible achievement can long assuage the human soul. 
 
 Still more evident is the need of religion in the form of "social salvation," 
 of the moral awakening and leadership of the public mind. Society is in want 
 of this, and the agency that supplies the want will have the power that goes 
 
THE CONCEPTION OF RELIGION 3 
 
 with function if not the church, then some secular and perhaps hostile agency, 
 like socialism, which is already a rival to the church for the allegiance of the 
 religious spirit. 1 
 
 This is not the first time in the history of Western thought that 
 men have attacked the problem of clarifying the logic of religion. 
 The great work of Thomas Aquinas is significant from the viewpoint 
 of present-day progressive thought chiefly for its crystallization 
 of the logic involved in the religious thought of the Western world 
 up to his day. Others, to be sure, had attempted the same task, 
 and indeed, somewhat less clearly, attained the same result. 
 
 Hitherto there had been no formal distinction between the domain of 
 philosophy and that of theology. Thomas laid down a clear line between 
 theology and philosophy, between natural and revealed religion, and the 
 province of reason as regards both, which has remained in force among thinkers 
 of all creeds ever since. Philosophy passes from the consideration of the 
 creatures to God; theology passes from God to the creature. 2 
 
 But now we come upon evidence that this Thomist contribution 
 to the logic of religion is no longer valid. That it has been, up 
 until recently, is, to be sure, quite true. But theological pioneers 
 today are claiming that theology, as well as philosophy, must pass 
 "from the consideration of the creatures to God," that theology 
 must be inductive, that doctrine must be formulated empirically. 
 We are demanding a 
 
 theology, which in all sincerity asks the questions which are pressed from the 
 hearts of men ; which in its questioning uses fearlessly the best methods which 
 critical science can furnish; which insists on no aristocratic privilege of defi- 
 nitely limited authoritative doctrines, but admits gladly to its precincts any- 
 thing which compels the moral adoration of men; which learns gratefully from 
 the past, but looks to a better future; which appreciates the service rendered 
 by those conceptions of God and of salvation which have emerged in history, 
 but confidently believes that the borders of our knowledge may ever be 
 enlarged. 3 
 
 On the one hand, tbis is demanded by the spirit of the age, and, 
 on the other, by the exigencies of the theological situation. For the 
 formerly credible method of arriving at a consideration of the 
 
 1 Cooley, Social Organization, p. 379. 
 
 3 Workman, Christian Thought to the Reformation, p. 231. 
 
 s G. B. Smith, Social Idealism and the Changing Theology, p. 243. 
 
4 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 creatures from the consideration of God has been discredited by 
 modern knowledge beyond all repair. The logic of the Thomist 
 system needs no further elaboration. The system itself is utterly 
 obsolete. 
 
 Now from the point where Catholicism loses connection with the 
 advancing thought of Modernism, religion, in the progressive sphere, 
 has moved on instinctively, without a conscious logic of its own 
 movement. For several centuries it has been groping its way, 
 marked by inconsistencies and reactions, but surprisingly vital 
 in many directions. But more and more the inconsistencies have 
 become embarrassing. More and more we have wanted a new 
 theology that should be in fact as new as the new world of Modern- 
 ism. More and more is felt the need of apprehending the deepest 
 logic of the modern religious task. To put it baldly, we modern 
 men are striving to make ourselves at home, religiously, in this new 
 world of modern knowledge. We have tried to move much of the 
 intellectual furniture of the old world, the mediaeval home, into 
 the new, only to find it increasingly incongruous. It will not fit. 
 We have not made ourselves at home. Just what is it we are trying 
 to do ? We feel the religious craving within us; we get help from 
 this or that suggestion; we seem to make some progress, but feel 
 much perplexity. The whole task is as yet tragically incomplete. 
 We are thrown back on ourselves. Just what is it we need to do ? 
 In a word, What is religion ? 
 
 Furthermore, we are beginning to see that the logic of a modern 
 religion must rest upon the logic of all religion. We understand 
 the logic of the Catholic system. We understand also the logic of 
 secular Modernism. But through both eras men feel religious 
 needs and find religious satisfaction, and what we do not yet clearly 
 understand is the logic of religion which is involved in both these 
 eras and underlies both, the complete system of Aquinas and the 
 nascent system of Modernism. It is not enough to seek for the logic 
 of modern religion. We have come to a place where the very 
 life of religion is threatened by the sickening sense of relativism 
 which modern historical research so largely and increasingly fosters. 
 If we are but seeking one sort of religion to replace another, an 
 obsolete sort, this self-conscious relativism threatens the very 
 
THE CONCEPTION OF RELIGION 5 
 
 heart of religious power. What we need, before we can have any 
 sufficient confidence in our modern religion, whatever it may prove 
 to be when matured, is a knowledge of the logic of religion as a 
 whole. We are confronted with three vast eras, Paganism, Catholi- 
 cism, Modernism. As we believe in the continuity of experience, 
 we are compelled to understand the principles which underlie all 
 three. We may be satisfied to understand the logic of other phases 
 of human experience in a more or less disjointed way, to know, for 
 example, the logic of ancient science, the logic of mediaeval science, 
 the logic of modern science, but the very heart of religious satis- 
 faction is gone if we thus separate the religious experience of one 
 age from that of another. For the logic of Mediaevalism and that 
 of Modernism are so disparate, the former seems so unreal, so futile, 
 as compared with the latter, and yet the religious experience of the 
 mediaevalist was so profound, so powerful, that our effort to estab- 
 lish a modern religion is likely to seem to ourselves a mere tour 
 deforce, and futile at that. Yet in spite of the self-consciousness of 
 our effort we feel that the same great forces are driving us forward 
 which compelled the mediaevalist and the ancient to develop their 
 systems. ( It is an understanding of these forces on the most inclu- 
 sive scale that we need> It is the logic of religion that we must 
 discover, and not merely the logic of Paganism or the logic of 
 Catholicism or the logic of Modernism, if our experience is to 
 be relieved of the oppressive self-consciousness which now dis- 
 heartens us. 
 
 We have a modern religious spirit or attitude or conscience, but 
 as yet practically no modern religious doctrine. To be sure, it is 
 only slowly and with great difficulty that this strictly modern 
 attitude has come to clear expression. It is as yet hardly more than 
 an awareness of the moral challenge of the scientific spirit and a 
 desire to meet that challenge if possible. It is not yet clear how 
 this strictly modern attitude can produce a strictly religious con- 
 tent. Science and religion have been at odds so long that now, 
 when a truce is felt to be desirable, it still remains doubtful whether 
 it is really feasible. Paganism made religion the affair of commerce 
 with an invisible world, Catholicism made that invisible world a 
 strictly "other" world, and with this " other" world, for fifteen 
 
6 ' THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 centuries, religion, as the chief business of man, had entirely to do; 
 and now, when modern knowledge has dissolved that "other" 
 world into utter unthinkableness, and has made cogent the demand 
 for an inductive, an empirical, theology, has, in a word, thrown the 
 religious nature back inevitably upon "this" world, the religious 
 thinker is for the time being embarrassed. Before we can go 
 farther, we must find a satisfactory answer to the question, What is 
 religion ? 
 
 / There is so much fundamentally the same in Catholicism and 
 traditional Protestantism that the logic of the two systems may 
 be considered identical, at least in the most important elements. 
 
 There is a remarkable unity in the history of Protestant thought in the 
 period from the Reformation to the end of the eighteenth century. There is 
 still more surprising unity of Protestant thought in this period with the thought 
 of the mediaeval and ancient church. The basis and methods are the same. 
 Upon many points the conclusions are identical. There was nothing of which 
 the Protestant scholastics were more proud than of their agreement with the 
 Fathers of the early church. They did not perceive in how large degree they 
 were at one with Christian thinkers of the Roman communion as well. Few 
 seem to have realized how largely Catholic in principle Protestant thought 
 has been. The fundamental principles at the basis of the reasoning have been 
 the same. The notions of revelation and inspiration were identical. The 
 idea of authority was common to both, only the instance in which that author- 
 ity is lodged was different. The thoughts of God and man, of the world, of 
 creation, of providence and prayer, of the nature and means of salvation are 
 similar. 1 
 
 Now a dualism, "this world" and "the other world," is funda- 
 mental to this logic of Catholicism and traditional Protestantism. 
 This dualism has been in process of dissolution for a long time, and 
 in degree as this process becomes more advanced we should expect 
 to rind the question, What is religion? coming more and more 
 strategically into prominence. And this is exactly what has hap- 
 pened. The last century witnessed the culmination of that process 
 of dissolution, and it was Schleiermacher, at the dawn of the cen- 
 tury, who laid the foundations for a new epoch in theology by 
 asking the crucial question, 'What is religion ? Kant had practically 
 retired the age-old dualism and so had felt compelled to attempt 
 
 1 See E. C. Moore, Christian Thought since Kant, p. 2. 
 
THE CONCEPTION OF RELIGION ^ 
 
 to re-define religion. But both definitions retained, though with 
 necessary vagueness, the sense of an "other" world. For Kant, 
 religion was a sense of duty, duty with, as it were, overtones of a 
 divine imperative, the categorical imperative "within," which 
 somehow has the "intelligible" ("other") world back of it. For 
 Schleiermacher, religion was a feeling of dependence upon a God 
 who is for the most part immanent in " this " world, and yet is appre- 
 hended through the God-consciousness of Jesus which has, in the 
 final analysis, some sort of alien source. Ritschl also wrestled with 
 the problem of defining religion, spurning both metaphysics and 
 mysticism as the sphere or channel of its operation, and yet striving 
 to save it from being swallowed up by secularism. The discredit 
 of metaphysics and mysticism was essentially the discredit of the 
 "other" world. The vast change going on in the world- view of the 
 century is reflected in the most characteristic contribution of 
 Ritschl, namely in his doctrine of justification and reconciliation, 
 according to which salvation is essentially a matter of "this" 
 world a matter of reconstructed character, not of "other worldly" 
 rescue. Ritschl defines religion as a sense of "values. " Theology 
 rests upon " value- judgments, " whereas science and the secular 
 life in general rest upon "existential judgments." But in Ritschl 
 also there lurks, in the last analysis, the old ontological dualism. 
 The "other" world, from the days of its creation by the genius 
 of Plato, has been a "given" world, an a priori world, and while, 
 and in so far as, it remains valid for religious thinkers the definition 
 of religion will naturally be an a priori conception. Kant's, Schleier- 
 macher's, Ritscl's definitions are all of this a priori sort. As the 
 very expression "origin of species" is the final stroke in the retire- 
 ment of Platonism, 1 so the very expression "a psychology of reli- 
 gious experience" is the final stroke in the retirement of the habit 
 of conceiving religion as a bridging of that gulf which the old dual- 
 ism involves. When, about fifteen years ago, William James pub- 
 lished his The Varieties of Religious Experience, a most significant 
 milestone was reached. In place of a priori or arbitrary definitions 
 of religion, the attempt was begun of finding an inductive definition 
 by the application of psychological study to the phenomena of 
 
 1 See Dewey, Influence of Darwin. 
 
8 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 religious experience. While some psychologists of religion are 
 careful to defend their attempt by disclaiming to believe that 
 religion has no extra-scientific or preternatural reference, this 
 apology cannot hide the real issue, for the application of scientific 
 method to the study of religious experience logically implies the 
 end of the old dualism. The " other" world is not "other" if it can 
 be reached by a religious experience which is itself a part of "this" 
 world's life comes, that is, really under the cognizance of science. 
 It is noteworthy that the phraseology of the title of this epoch- 
 marking book 1 is suggestive of the most obvious character of the 
 whole field of religious experience, most obvious and perhaps most 
 discouraging to the investigator who desires to find a definition^ 
 The "varieties" of religious phenomena are indeed bewilderingly 
 numerous. The whole field of pagan, Catholic, and modern types 
 stretches before us, subjective and objective, feeling, fact, and 
 fancy, social custom and individual idiosyncrasy, emotions, activi- 
 ties, beliefs. It is little wonder if this branch of science hesitates, 
 is hardly yet sure of having a really scientific method of procedure. 
 Indeed the initial difficult is to say what is rightful material for 
 investigation. What is religious experience ? What is morality 
 what is mere crass custom what is primitive science ? Obviously 
 some tentative conception of the essential character of religious 
 experience must be entertained before the selection of material can 
 be even begun. And in this connection it is noticeable that while 
 so far there is no unanimity of definition, there yet is a very large 
 consensus as to what experiences are and what are not religious. 
 Any working conception of the essence of religion must first of all 
 demonstrate itself in this field of unquestioned religious phenomena. 
 The final test of the definition will be the clarity with which it makes 
 differentiation possible in the large margins of debatable material. 
 More explicitly, the two chief requirements which we must make 
 of any definition offered are these: First, it must account for the 
 varieties of religious experience; that is, it must offer a simple and 
 satisfactory clue to the infinite differences of expression of the reli- 
 gious life, in all lands and in all ages, and thus reveal their functional 
 or dynamic identity. In the second place, it must serve to differ- 
 
 1 James, The Varieties of Religious Experience. 
 
THE CONCEPTION OF RELIGION 9 
 
 entiate religion from morality, science, aesthetics, or any other 
 department of custom or culture. Of course it may be supposed 
 by some that the identity of religion is not merely functional or 
 dynamic, but that there is an identity as it were of content, that, 
 for instance, the essential mark of religion is a belief in some super- 
 natural or superhuman agency, i.e., the deity content. But the 
 majority of the psychologists of religion claim that this is not 
 tenable. Again, it may be supposed that' no ultimate differentiation 
 between religion and, say, morality, is possible. Ames's con- 
 clusion is practically that. 1 But as there is an almost universal 
 feeling that while religion and morality are indisputably very 
 intimately connected, they nevertheless are essentially different, 
 surely no definition of religion which does not explain both their dif- 
 ference and their intimate connection can be considered adequate. 
 
 The first of these two requisites of a definition calls for further 
 comment. It means that the Hegelian rather than the Aristotelian 
 logical viewpoint must be held, that a " concrete" rather than an 
 "abstract universal" must be discovered. 
 
 The universals of the traditional subsumptive logic are found 
 by analysis and abstraction, the discovery of identity by elimi- 
 nation of differences, the classification of species under genera by 
 attention to similarities and disregard of discrepancies. It gives 
 the "abstract universal," the quality or group of qualities which 
 account for or include the similarity of the various species in the 
 genus. It was the service of Hegel to formulate a theory of "con- 
 crete universals." It is significant that this revolutionary logical 
 innovation came just at a time when Darwin's Origin of Species 
 was about to give the final blow to the Platonic world- view which 
 was the metaphysical background of the Aristotelian logic. 2 
 Whereas the "abstract universal" dealt with species generically, 
 the "concrete universal" deals with them genetically or at least 
 organically. The former is based on identities, the latter is based 
 on differentiation. The former looks for a means of classification, 
 the latter for a means of control. The one depends* upon analy- 
 sis of a "given," the other seeks for the secret of creating new 
 
 1 E. S. Ames, The Psychology of Religious Experience. 
 
 3 See Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, chap. i. 
 
io THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 experience. The first looks for the common elements in similar re- 
 sults, the second looks for the reason for the differences. The one be- 
 longs to a static world, the other to a changing, growing world. The 
 one deals with completed structures, the other with living functions. 
 The one relies upon authority, whether the authority is a " given" 
 of the philosopher's insight, as Aristotle thought, or of the prophet's 
 vision, miracle-attested, as the theologian claimed, or of a system of 
 truth, as the ecclesiastic held. The other relies upon experiment, 
 exploration, discovery; it is the logic of science. The one talks of 
 essence, substance, "nature," being. The other talks of activities, 
 uses, functions, life. Principal Caird gives the following descrip- 
 tion of Hegel's concrete or organic universal. 
 
 This deeper and truer universality is that which may be designated ideal 
 or organic universality. The idea of a living organism is not a common element 
 which can be got at by abstraction and generalization, by taking the various 
 parts and members, stripping away their differences, and forming a notion of 
 that which they have in common. That in which they differ is rather just 
 that out of which their unity arises and in which is the very life and being of 
 the organism; that which they have in common they have, not as members of 
 a living organism, but as dead matter, and what you have to abstract in order 
 to get it is the very life itself. We do not reach it by first thinking the par- 
 ticulars, but conversely we get at the true notions of the particulars only through 
 the universal. 1 
 
 In the first place, the " varieties" of religious experience are so 
 infinitely various that if the method of abstraction is used there is 
 little or no hope of rinding the residual identity ; and in the second 
 place, if such could be found it would necessarily be so vague, so 
 utterly " abstract, " as to furnish no valuable clues in attacking our 
 own peculiar twentieth-century reconstructive problem. The 
 abstraction of a bare " deity" content, as the mark of all religious 
 experience, even if it were defensible, is impotent in our present 
 situation. The validity of theism is the very crux of our recon- 
 structive problem. It is no help to be told simply that to be reli- 
 gious we must have a God. Those who have had their theism 
 dissolved by modern knowledge are thus thrown back upon the 
 alternative of irreligion, while nevertheless, in the agonies of their 
 
 1 Caird, Introduction to Philosophy of Religion, 1891, p. 218; see also Royce, The 
 Spirit of Modern Philosophy, pp. 222 ff. 
 
THE CONCEPTION OF RELIGION II 
 
 enforced atheism, they feel themselves to be poignantly religious. 
 What they need is such an understanding of their religious hunger 
 as will afford some clear line of attack upon the very heart of their 
 problem, some immediately workable line of procedure which they 
 may patiently and without embarrassment explore. 
 
 It would not be surprising if among the earliest attempts to 
 define religion inductively a mixture of these two viewpoints should 
 result an " abstract" universal which is superficially " dynamic. " 
 And indeed this is what we find in a definition which has had con- 
 siderable influence in recent discussions Hoffding's character- 
 ization of religion as "the conservation of values." This view 
 regards religion as a function of society whose nature is seen in its 
 most general results. That is, after reviewing the whole field of 
 religious activities, the conclusion is reached that the only thing 
 which can be said of religion which is true in all cases is that these 
 various religious activities tend to "conserve values." But the 
 abstract and impotent character of this definition is evident the 
 moment we ask what such a conception means when applied to 
 our present reconstructive task. What is religion for us ? It is a 
 conservation of values. What shall we do? We must practice 
 such religious exercises, hold such religious beliefs, as shall tend to 
 conserve the "values" of life which are regarded as in some way 
 involved. Now if it be felt that all traditional forms of religion 
 have become impotent to conserve our felt "values" (and this is 
 just the core of our modern difficulty), we are accordingly forced 
 to consider the invention of such forms of worship and such doc- 
 trines as may prove effective hi the situation. But surely the 
 artificiality of such a position, the self-consciousness of such an 
 undertaking, is utterly embarrassing. Moreover, it is not apparent 
 how religion differs from any other department of life, for surely 
 science and morality are no less truly means of "conserving values. " 
 In spite of the apparently "concrete" character of this "universal," 
 its dynamic appearance, its evolutionary, functional terminology, 
 Hoffding's definition is really an "abstract" universal; it deals 
 fundamentally, not with the cause of differences, but with residual 
 similarities. It is essentially static. It reviews results rather than 
 concrete motives, it deals with consequences rather than impulses. 
 
12 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 It is an abstraction from finished systems rather than an insight 
 into underlying motivation. No doubt it is entirely true that, as 
 James 1 at the outset of this whole investigation pointed out, there 
 is no specific religious " nature," no peculiar "religious instinct"; 
 nevertheless we do not profoundly understand either religion or 
 any other human experience unless we see it from its instinctive 
 side rather than from that of its overt activities and achieved results. 
 There is a great practical difference between the questions, What 
 is the function of religion? and Of what is religion the function? 
 
 The author of this study believes that he has to suggest a defi- 
 nition of religion entirely different from any that have hitherto 
 been put forward, and one which (i) is broad enough to include 
 practically all the phenomena which the various psychologists of 
 religion have fastened upon as religious; (2) is practical enough to 
 suggest a natural method of differentiation in those marginal 
 regions where religion seems indistinguishable from morality, or 
 science, or art; (3) is "concrete" enough to explain the endless 
 variation, in form and content, of religious experience; and (4) is 
 so dynamic as to simplify our present reconstructive task and to 
 suggest the most promiseful lines of advance. 
 
 But before stating it, let me further describe the "abstract" 
 method in contrast with which this definition will be proposed. 
 
 The deductive, merely descriptive character of this "abstract" 
 method is most clearly seen in the results of Professor Wright's 
 analysis. 2 He points out that there are three types of definition 
 thus far proposed : the first following the general direction of Hoff- 
 ding's solution, the second insisting on the supernatural or super- 
 human agency as an ever-present factor, and the third giving the 
 chief importance to the "feeling" element. Professor Wright 
 argues that each of these is correct with reference to some large 
 mass of facts, and that if we are to find a definition which shall 
 disregard no single religious fact we must include each of these three 
 factors. He therefore defines religion as "the endeavor to secure 
 the conservation of socially recognized values through specific 
 
 1 The Varieties of Religious Experience. 
 
 a "A Psychological Definition of Religion," American Journal of Theology, XVI 
 (1912), 385. 
 
TEE CONCEPTION OF RELIGION 13 
 
 actions that are believed to evoke some agency different from the 
 ordinary ego of the individual or from other merely human beings, 
 and that imply a feeling of dependence on this agency." 1 
 
 Now Dr. Wright himself seems to feel the abstract and merely 
 descriptive character of this generalization though not willing to 
 admit its futility. He says: " Perhaps the reader now feels that 
 after all the definition merely affords a descriptive formulation of 
 religion and assists in placing it in a classification along with other 
 disciplines, but that it does not throw much light upon the questions 
 in which he is most interested. " 2 
 
 Now the " abstract universal" is just as legitimate in its place 
 as the " concrete. " The Aristotelian logic has had such a long life 
 because it is just the everyday attitude which we take toward the 
 well known and familiar. It sums up experience in useful and 
 concise concepts. It is at home in the periods of authority. The 
 major premise is essentially the epitomized custom of the group. 3 
 The "abstract universal" is useful when what is wanted is a more 
 facile use of accumulated experience or a reinforcing of a long- 
 accepted custom or truth. And that just this is the problem which 
 Dr. Wright has in mind becomes evident in the latter part of his 
 monograph. He holds that the use of such a definition will enable 
 us to discover that religion has always been more or less successful 
 in conserving social values (though to be sure it has oftener than 
 not done so unconsciously by other means than those which it was 
 explicitly employing, " suggestion" rather than the deity being the 
 real agency) ; has generally produced a certain amount of social and 
 moral solidarity and conservatism with the group; has often 
 fostered a less sordid type of life than otherwise might have pre- 
 vailed; and has helped to enrich and expand the personal life. 
 And so he is interested in showing the importance of preserving, 
 for the sake of general social usefulness, the function of religion as 
 a conservational force tending to maintain our higher values. His 
 
 1 Op. cit., pp. 388, 392. * Op. cit., p. 402. 
 
 3 Cf. "The Concept in its very generality .... is the conserver of the experience 
 of the past. It is the custom of the past put into capitalized and funded form to 
 enable the individual to get away from the stress and competition of the needs of the 
 passing moment" (Dewey, Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, p. 293). 
 
14 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 remarks on the metaphysical validity of religion reveal the same 
 attitude. On any one of the three types of philosophical foundation 
 which contemporary thought affords, religion, he thinks, can claim 
 to be dealing with reality in general and so is worthy of confidence 
 and support. "In a word, the social and personal usefulness of 
 religion once established, the question of its metaphysical validity 
 will largely take care of itself. "* In short, the present need seems 
 to this writer to be to deduce the social value of religion today from 
 the generalization that religion is a useful social institution. This 
 is so characteristic of contemporary apologists that its significance 
 for the logic of the situation should be carefully noted. If the 
 continuance of religion as a social institution is the heart of our 
 problem, then the deductive logic must have its way, and an 
 abstract universal is the sort of definition that we need. But if 
 the problem is actually much more acute than that, if it is expressed 
 in its most crucial form in a widespread need of individuals rather 
 than in a general social indifference; if the core of the difficulty for 
 a multitude of the most earnest and thoughtful persons is, not 
 "Shall we continue to be religious?"; but rather "How can we 
 continue to be religious ? " ; if the metaphysical question is, not of the 
 validity of religion in general, but of the validity of the individual's 
 beliefs and practices in particular; then surely the logic needed is 
 an inductive logic, and the abstract definition is not adequate to the 
 present situation. Moreover, it is impossible to find an abstract 
 definition without retaining some one or more of the elements 
 of the content of the religious experience of the past from which 
 the generalization is made, if at least the definition is to have 
 any semblance of real working value. Hoffding's definition, for 
 instance, does not help us on our way in the explicit religious per- 
 plexities which confront us. It simply gives us a broader acquaint- 
 ance with religion as it has been; it does not discover anything new. 
 This weakness is apparently overcome in Wright's definition by 
 the addition of the element of belief in the other-than-merely-human 
 agency which is evoked by the religious activity. This is simply 
 some deity or its equivalent. But this is a pure a priori, as far as 
 the poignancy of the present situation is concerned. Everyone 
 1 Op. tit., p. 409. 
 
THE CONCEPTION OF RELIGION 15 
 
 admits the helpfulness of believing in the co-operation of some deity. 
 But that only adds to the embarrassment of the present problem, 
 for the very crux of the difficulty is, " What God can I believe in ?" 
 
 In its simplest statement, I would say that religion is a social 
 attitude toward the non-human environment. The quality of religion 
 will of course vary with the degree of organization of the social 
 attitude and with the dimensions of the non-human environment; 
 with the degree in which the various social attitudes are habitual 
 and customary, or purposeful and conscious; with the extent to 
 which the non-human environment has been personified by the 
 social imagination or depersonalized by the rational processes 
 induced by failure of habitual adjustments. 
 
 Or to state it otherwise : Broadly speaking, the most far-reaching 
 and important distinction which we make regarding the world we 
 live in is that line which we draw between "man" and "not man"; 
 while our relations to environment fall into two classes, first, social 
 adjustments, mostly made toward our fellow-men, and, secondly, 
 mechanical, manipulatory adjustments, which are mostly made 
 toward the things about us. The first constitute the sphere of 
 morality, the second constitute the sphere of science. But, of 
 course, these spheres are not water-tight compartments; there are 
 endless cross-currents. For example, we may take the mechanical 
 attitude toward men and treat them as things (which is either 
 non-moral or unmoral). On the other hand, it is inevitable that 
 sometimes we take a social attitude toward the non-human environ- 
 ment. Within this latter general set of relations is the sphere of 
 religious experience. Violent or sudden stimulus tends to arouse 
 the whole organism to activity, so that any situation which tran- 
 scends the efficiency of our acquired mechanical attitudes tends to 
 call forth the larger organic response, or social attitude. 1 The 
 
 1 It is not meant of course that the mere muscular exertion of the whole body is 
 necessarily a social attitude. What is meant is that the more the resources of the 
 entire organism are challenged, the more the response tends to assume the social 
 quality. Briefly, the reason for this is the predominance, both in number and in 
 importance, of the social instincts. The social environment of primitive man is com- 
 posed of both animals and men. Wild beasts and savage foes require alertness of the 
 whole organism to escape or overcome danger. Moreover, the welfare of childhood, 
 both in primitive and in civilized life, depends much more upon successful social 
 
1 6 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 mechanical attitudes are attitudes of only parts of the organism, 
 whereas the social attitudes are attitudes of the whole organism. 
 The most mechanical activity may develop into one genuinely 
 social, as difficulty is encountered and vital needs are at stake. 
 For instance, a savage is trying to lift a log. At first the action 
 is merely muscular, quite mechanical, and devoid of emotional 
 interest. But the log is heavy or it rolls out of the arm's grasp 
 or it falls back on the man's foot and threatens to crush that mem- 
 ber. In other words, as the difficulty of the enterprise increases, 
 as the struggle proceeds, it becomes dangerous to his very life. 
 Gradually or suddenly the whole organism becomes more and 
 more involved, so that at last the savage regards the log as he would 
 regard his bitterest foe, with hatred, anger, suspicion. This social 
 attitude is expressed in a curse or a final kick, fear or grinning 
 triumph. It is not otherwise with a civilized, sophisticated human. 
 We stoop mechanically to pick up some slippery object, but say 
 things under our breath when it eludes our grasp with the appear- 
 ance of diabolic cunning. So one may curse the loose board of a 
 plank sidewalk which trips him up; or one may apostrophize some 
 object in nature, as I heard a friend do recently, on a fine morning 
 in the Rockies, "0! you grand old mountains!" In this realm 
 of social attitudes toward the non-human is the sphere of religion. We 
 do not today, of course, dignify by the name religion the anger 
 which one may feel toward the door which the wind slams in his 
 face, but the same attitude in primitive man we call animism 1 and 
 feel that if animism is not exactly religion, it is at least the stuff 
 out of which religion is evolved. Neither do we call it religion 
 when someone of a poetical temperament breaks out in speech to 
 
 adjustments than upon mechanical adjustments. The power of the gregarious and 
 sex interests is obvious. Further, the mechanical adjustments are developed and con- 
 trolled largely by the reflex equipment, and hence unconsciously, whereas the more 
 important social adjustments require continuous attention. Hence, in general, the 
 more vitally our physical environment stimulates us, the more is our whole, funda- 
 mentally social, nature aroused. A social stimulus awakens what I may call the 
 pan-organic response. On the other hand, the pan-organic response, even though 
 aroused by physical stimulation, is social in its tone. This, very briefly, is my defense 
 for using the expression "the larger organic response, or social attitude." 
 
 1 Or more strictly "animatism," to use Marett's term. 
 
THE CONCEPTION OF RELIGION 17 
 
 a mountain or the moonlight ; yet the very same attitude, if organ- 
 ized into a social habit, elaborated more or less in ritual or defended 
 by doctrine, we should not hesitate to call a religion, "a sun-cult," 
 or what not. 
 
 It is admitted that a very hard-and-fast line of distinction cannot 
 be drawn between the two types of attitude, the social and the 
 mechanical, nor between the two types of environment, human 
 and non-human. There are, to be sure, mechanical phases of every 
 social attitude, as in the handclasp of friendship some of the same 
 motor reactions take place as in the use of a hammer or saw. On 
 the other hand, the social quality never seems to recede very far 
 from the surface of mechanical adjustments, as in the use of tools 
 and materials the workman is not always utterly indifferent to 
 them he is likely at any moment to exhibit a sort of fondness for 
 them or impatience with them. So too with the human and non- 
 human environments. We bestow affection upon our favorite 
 dog or horse, we talk to the bird or the cat. Every employer feels 
 the power of the " economic man" theory, in his temptation to 
 treat workmen as so many tools, mere " things," to be hired, used, 
 cast aside; in the crowded streets we pass most passers-by as 
 indifferently as we step aside to avoid a lamp-post or other non- 
 human obstacle. What is claimed in this study is not that these 
 lines of distinction can be drawn with unwavering definiteness and 
 secure fixity, but that these are the poles, as it were, about which 
 our activities cluster; these are the foci about which our life swings, 
 the contour of action being apparently closer now to this, now to 
 that, center of control. Indeed, to push this last suggestion a little 
 bit, one might say that as the one focus of the ellipse and its more 
 adjacent curve may represent social responses toward the human 
 environment, and the other focus and its more adjacent curve may 
 represent mechanical responses to the non-human environment, as 
 the curve is never, save at two bare points, obedient to the one or 
 the other focus exclusively, so our life is never, save at two bare, 
 logically but hardly empirically real, points, obedient exclusively to 
 either the social or the non-social, never either starkly mechanical 
 nor utterly social; and it is just this cross-reference, so to speak, 
 this response of the curve at one extremity to the focus at the other, 
 
18 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION ' 
 
 this rising and falling stimulation of the social responses by the 
 non-human environment, that constitutes the realm of religion. 
 
 Having roughly outlined the logical limits of religious experience 
 as being "social attitudes toward the non-human environment," 
 some further explanation is now necessary. Obviously much falls 
 within that general scheme today which we should not call religious, 
 although, as I suggested above, any example of similar attitudes, 
 found in the dim primitive past, would probably be considered 
 religious. It will throw light on this phase of my task to look at 
 morals and science from the general viewpoint suggested. There 
 are the two types of environment, the human and the non-human, 
 and the two types of reaction, or attitude, the social and the mechan- 
 ical. Within the general sphere of social attitudes toward the 
 human environment, morality develops; within that of the me- 
 chanical or non-social attitudes toward the non-human, science; 
 within that of social attitudes toward the non-human, religion. Now 
 in all these there are two chief considerations which must be kept 
 in mind. The first is the fact that specialization or development 
 throws some activities into prominence, and the importance of 
 these is the criterion as to how far they are worthy of the adjectives 
 moral, scientific, or religious, respectively. Special activities are 
 at first elicited by problem situations and are at that stage imbued 
 with emotional interest. Often these same activities tend to 
 become merely habitual, the emotional interest in them wanes, and 
 they gradually fade into that vast mass of routine which is com- 
 paratively colorless. For instance, any deviation from the group 
 custom is primitive immorality. But deviation today is not 
 immoral unless it refers to actions which still retain or have come 
 to have emotional interest. An eccentric mode of dress will be an 
 idiosyncrasy or an immorality according to the degree in which it 
 arouses the emotional interest of the group. Similarly, a new 
 method of registering fares on a street car will be regarded at first 
 as a scientific device, but later will be so commonplace and unin- 
 teresting as to seem unworthy of the name scientific. So, too, it is 
 the common criticism of the perfunctory observance of religious 
 rites that such mere habit is unworthy the name of true religion. 
 It is therefore necessary to discover what are the factors that make 
 
THE CONCEPTION OF RELIGION 19 
 
 any experience or activity within the general logical sphere of 
 religion more or less religious. And no extraneous principle must 
 be brought in to vitiate the fundamental simplicity of the logical 
 situation. The explanation lies first of all in the implications of 
 the expression, "a social attitude." " Social" attitudes vary all 
 the way from the instinctive automatisms of animals in their group 
 behavior, the mating of robins, the scout duties of the lookout crow, 
 the snarls of quarreling dogs, the admonitory paw-slaps of the 
 maternal cat, up to the rhetorical flights of the patriot, the exquisite 
 solicitude of a noble parent, the sympathetic handclasp of a loyal 
 friend. But the element which makes the latter human rather 
 than merely animal is the mergence in a man of a " self "-con- 
 sciousness. This "self-consciousness varies in organization, 
 sensitiveness, and other qualities from the quasi-animal beginnings 
 in the child or the savage up to the noblest character of Christian 
 maturity. Now this is the key to the problem of the specifically 
 moral action within the general sphere of social attitudes toward 
 the human environment. We say that any action is moral rather 
 than non-moral in so far as the self is actively and consciously 
 present therein. To turn to the similar religious problem, we would 
 say that in any social attitude toward the non-human, the attitude 
 is more or less religious according to the degree in which the "self- 
 consciousness is organized and active. But even as morality 
 depends for its degree of moral-ness, not only upon the self factor 
 but also upon the quality of the human environment within which 
 the self is active, so any experience is more or less religious in pro- 
 portion as the non-human environment with which the self makes 
 adjustment is large or small, important or trifling. Even as we 
 say that the highest morality is incompatible with provincialism, 
 that a man is not thoroughly moral if he neglects the ballot, that 
 though charity begins at home it cannot stay there, that the 
 business man who has never seen beyond his factory walls is as yet 
 to that extent non-moral, so too the greater the scope of the non- 
 human to which the self, the moral organism, adjusts itself, the 
 more is that adjustment worthy the name religious. 
 
 A further word or explanation is in order here. Every vital 
 situation has two chief stages : the problem stage in which active 
 
20 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 readjustment is demanded and the solution stage in which the 
 activities which emerge through reflection or experiment go on 
 until some new problem arises. Now the tendency of activities 
 once established to become habitual is useful so long as the situation 
 continues which called them forth and in which they are efficient. 
 This situation, however, may cease to exist, while the habitual 
 activities go on of their own momentum. So long as the situation 
 lasts, the activity is, though habitual, worthy the name " moral" or 
 "religious," as the case may be, but when the situation ceases to exist 
 the habitual activity becomes mere meaningless routine, and less 
 and less worthy the name "moral" or "religious." The point is 
 that "moral" and "religious" are essentially vital terms in that 
 they imply a situation of great interest and importance and are 
 more and more applicable within their respective logical spheres 
 in degree as the adjustments contemplated or achieved are of pro- 
 found and far-reaching significance. 
 
 Again, the expression "non-human" will readily be understood 
 to refer in general either to nature or the supernatural, the so-called 
 physical universe which we directly experience or the so-called 
 spiritual world which we experience by faith or imagination. A 
 social attitude to such a world beyond the sensuous as Christianity 
 has conceived is, of course, natural and inevitable, since it is just 
 as truly a social environment as the human. A social attitude 
 toward nature so long as there is this divine social environment 
 beyond nature is for the most part unnecessary and unnatural, 
 since nature is ipso facto comparatively devoid of importance. 
 The heart of the modern religious situation is just this, that 
 historico-psychological research has of late increasingly revealed the 
 processes by which that other or divine world, that social environ- 
 ment beyond nature, was built up by the social imagination of primi- 
 tive man, philosopher, and saint, while at the same time scientific 
 technique and scientific theory have revealed the unexpected 
 importance and vast but inescapable horizons of this world. Our 
 non-human environment is now, at least in our critical and non- 
 traditional moods, not the supernatural, but nature. Much con- 
 fusion has resulted from the fact that the traditional adjustments 
 have gone on of their own momentum, after the real situation was 
 
THE CONCEPTION OF RELIGION 21 
 
 vastly changed. But it is not enough to point out this fact, as so 
 many have been so busy doing, and conclude that since our largest 
 environment is now no longer social we need no longer take a social 
 attitude toward it, or, in other words, need no longer be religious. 
 Whereas the divine social environment in which man has so long 
 lived has immensely fostered his growing sense of selfhood or moral 
 self-consciousness, both democracy and science have taken up and 
 carried much farther this thing that the traditional otherworldliness 
 had been doing. Modern life is much more self-conscious, man 
 is much more aware of himself, with the historical background which 
 Darwinism suggests than with the scheme of the Book of Genesis. 
 Over against this self-conscious modern man is nature, with its vast 
 unplumbed significance; and a moral reaction, a social attitude, 
 a "self "-adjustment thereto is no less inevitable, though apparently 
 vastly more difficult, than in the "ages of faith/ 7 when man's all- 
 inclusive horizon was a divine society. 1 
 
 1 For the suggestion of the general idea of the distinction between the social and 
 non-social environments, and between the social and mechanical attitudes, I am 
 indebted to Professor G. H. Mead's lectures in social psychology. 
 
 It may seem to the reader that a social attitude to the non-human, if that non- 
 human be "nature" or the "world," that is, a social attitude toward a non-social 
 environment, is a contradiction in terms, and religion consequently impossible or an 
 absurdity. This is of course the crux of the constructive problem, which waits for 
 some further investigation of the whole matter of our social and mechanical adjust- 
 ments out of which have probably come, respectively, our apparently contradictory 
 sets of teleological and mechanistic concepts. For further reference to this point, 
 see succeeding chapters. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 THE CONCEPTION OF RELIGION (Continued} 
 
 I have defined religion as a social attitude toward the non-human 
 environment, and have shown somewhat in detail the meaning of 
 this definition. 
 
 I shall now attempt a fuller description of my position by 
 contrasting it with some representative results of contemporary 
 psychological treatment. 
 
 A. First, let me make some further reference to the work of 
 Professor Wright. "The values of religion are all in some sense 
 moral values." 1 True, certainly. But why? If religion is the 
 conservation of socially recognized values, why does it not seek to 
 conserve the vast industrial interests of the land ? No values are 
 more fully recognized socially. Yet Dr. Wright's definition does 
 not suggest why these should not today be a matter of concern 
 to religion, nor why the values with which it is concerned should 
 always be in some sense moral. But if, as I have suggested, religion 
 is a social attitude toward the non-human environment, the "self " 
 is always involved; and where the self is involved, the situation is 
 ipso facto "in some sense moral." Moreover, whereas ancient 
 industry was very often and very largely a matter of concern to 
 religion, modern industry is not, for the simple reason that the 
 manipulation of the sources of wealth is now a matter of science, 
 inasmuch as non-social or mechanical attitudes have been found by 
 men to be vastly more efficient with reference to such things than 
 the earlier social attitudes were. 
 
 Again, "as society advances the general tendency is for religion 
 increasingly to conserve the more important ethical values." 2 
 But why ? If my thesis is sound, the reason for the phenomenon 
 here referred to is at once patent. The "self-consciousness, the 
 
 X "A Psychological Definition of Religion," American Journal of Theology, XVI 
 (1912), 399. 
 
 a Ibid., p. 400. 
 
 22 
 
THE CONCEPTION OF RELIGION 23 
 
 moral tone of the group or the individual, at any given stage of 
 development, is the same whether the organism is adjusting itself 
 to the human or to the non-human, and the ethical values which 
 are the more important in one case will also be more important in 
 the other. This statement, i.e., that the "self " is identical in both 
 the human and the non-human situations, of course is not abso- 
 lutely exact, for the self is ever fluctuating within rather wide 
 limits, shrinking or expanding, waxing or waning in vigor, and this, 
 for the most part, in response to the social environment. There 
 are, however, limits; there is at any period in social evolution, as it 
 were, a "mean temperature" of selfhood or moral tone common 
 to the individual and his group and in large areas of experience. 
 Though, in general, it may be said that the morals of the divine 
 society lag somewhat behind those of the human group whose social 
 imagination has created it (and naturally so, since the constructive 
 imagination cannot work without materials, and those materials 
 must first be produced in the social experience of the group), 
 nevertheless there are more or less definite psychological limits 
 within which the human and the divine codes agree. Herein is the 
 logical explanation of both the truth and the indefiniteness thereof, 
 in the statement that the tendency is for religion to conserve the 
 more important ethical interests. A selfhood in which, for instance, 
 purity has become integral will demand purity in its divine social 
 environment; and when purity is once established in the divine 
 society, it will react powerfully for the fuller establishment of 
 purity in the human group. Again, the proverbial conservatism 
 of religion is explained by the same facts. For the self must be 
 evolved in the human social milieu before it can function in the 
 larger non-human environment. The unseen world is compara- 
 tively static because it is changed, not by concrete fact immediately, 
 but only indirectly by the slow-moving logic of the earthly facts. 
 The construction of a divine world is a slow and arduous process, and 
 is made stable and solid by reason of the very importance of the 
 self's interests which are localized there. Once completed and per- 
 fected, it holds the imagination of individuals and of generations in 
 thrall, and the protests of conscientious iconoclasts make little 
 impression on it. To demand that religion be less conservative 
 
24 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 is to fail to realize the ponderous proportions of its task. "Rome" 
 may fairly epitomize the general scheme of Western orthodoxy, and 
 "Rome was not built in a day. " Various structures in the Eternal 
 City, such as atonement, God, salvation, may be more or less 
 remodeled with comparative ease (though even here, at close 
 range, the cost in energy and earnestness seems incalculable), but 
 such a wholesale reconstruction as is demanded by the seismic 
 shake-up which modern science and psychology have produced will 
 not be undertaken until all effort to live among the ruins has become 
 too obviously futile, and some consciousness has dawned of the 
 resources of the human nature which builded this city in the past. 
 Another question which Dr. 'Wright's essay raises and on which 
 my thesis throws light is that of the relation of religion and aes- 
 thetics. For him they are utterly different and distinct. "The 
 differences between aesthetics and religion are so great and their 
 resemblances so superficial that one wonders how the two ever have 
 been confused. The blunder .... that these features [i.e., 
 music, frescoes, etc.], the merest external adornments and veriest 
 
 accidents of religion, constituted her heartfelt purpose 
 
 The religious endeavor is never an end in itself .... aesthetic 
 contemplation is interesting on its own account: it is an end in 
 itself." 1 Now, if they are so distinct, how account for their 
 apparent close union? Why is it that some religious persons so 
 vehemently insist that religion is not a matter of aesthetics, while 
 others as earnestly assert that it is? If they are not the same, 
 they are at least inextricably interwoven on abundant evidence. 
 Let me again appeal to my thesis. Religion is an adjustment of 
 the self to its non-human environment. Now in every adjustment 
 there are three logically distinct phases: (i) the initial, "problem," 
 stage, in which emotion, ideation, and volition are all active and 
 preponderant; (2) the smooth working out of the solution, in which 
 emotion dies down into interest, and the actions are automatic 
 and habitual rather than volitional, and the intellectual processes 
 proper are comparatively unnecessary; (3) the appreciative 
 or "economic" stage, in which satisfaction is experienced by 
 means of the successful solution and its actualization. These 
 
 *0p. cit. y p. 401. 
 
THE CONCEPTION OF RELIGION 25 
 
 successive phases may be traced in both physical and social situa- 
 tions, and in any social adjustment whether with the human 
 environment or with the non-human. It extends to large epochal 
 adjustments as well as to the individual's experience. The 
 aesthetic epochs are those in which successful experience tends to 
 symbolize its satisfactions. They are the flowering forth of great 
 cultural or moral or religious achievements. So we have the art 
 of the Greek period, of the Renaissance, of today. Obviously an 
 experience is an end in itself, in degree as it passes into the third, or 
 "economic," phase of adjustment. Thus in many instances a 
 religious mood is an "end in itself," as some mystical types of 
 devotion so well attest. It is just as impossible to regard the classic 
 Christian mood of "communion with God" as having some ulterior 
 motive as to think of the experience of conjugal felicity or the inter- 
 course of ideal friendship as being a means to an end rather than 
 an end in itself. But so also religious experience may have the 
 general character of the first or problem stage marked by stress and 
 strain and great intellectual and emotional activity, or of the calm 
 but interestful second stage when the adjustment activity is in 
 process of actualization. 
 
 A further quotation from Dr. Wright's essay will help me to 
 make my meaning clearer. "Ages of comparative religious 
 shallowness like the Italian Renaissance have often produced the 
 finest religious art ; while, as in the case of the Puritans, movements 
 of deep religious earnestness have sometimes rejected the services 
 of art altogether. " z My thesis suggests that to call one "shallow" 
 and the other "deep" is to miss the real comparison. The Italian 
 Renaissance is the culmination of a long process of religious adjust- 
 ment, whereas the Puritan movement is the beginning of another. 
 The first is religious adjustment or experience in the "economic" 
 stage; the latter is religious experience in the "problem" stage. 
 The one very naturally expresses its overripe "satisfaction" or 
 successful accomplishment in the symbols of sacred art. The 
 other in the strenuous period has no sense of ripe accomplishment 
 as yet to symbolize, but has all its energies absorbed in the practical 
 task on hand. To call the one ' ' shallow ' ' and the other ' ' deep " is as 
 
 1 Op. cit., p. 400. 
 
26 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 inadequate as to say that the relaxed mood at the end of a hard 
 day's work, when one goes over the day's deeds in reverie or in con- 
 versation, is ''shallow" as compared with the sweat and dust of the 
 hours of toil. They are both normal phases of the total situation. 
 Similarly, periods of moral reconstruction have their strongly 
 contrasting " problem" and "economic" phases. We fight the 
 great fight of slavery and years later express our appreciation of 
 the importance and success of the task in sculpture, painting, and 
 architecture. We undertake vast industrial problems and soon the 
 sense of having made a beginning at least finds expression in a great 
 mural decoration. Important discoveries are lived over again in 
 pageantry. So the artistic impulse is a normal phase of moral 
 as well as of religious evolution. And in passing, it might be 
 pointed out how the individual aesthetic experience may be regarded 
 as religious. The aesthetic impulse in the individual regarded from 
 the organic functional standpoint is simply the result of racial 
 experience incorporated in the nervous structure of the individual 
 organism. The sense of beauty is organic and instinctive, builded 
 up by many generations. (It may, of course, be liberated by educa- 
 tion. The matter of art as a technique of symbolization is aside 
 from the psychological understanding of the aesthetic nature.) 
 But what in its simplest terms is the appreciative attitude which 
 many people instinctively take toward a " beautiful" landscape 
 but the hereditary responsiveness of the organism toward favorable 
 environment ? This is of the physical type. The appreciation of 
 a beautiful or noble face is an aesthetic impulse of the moral type. 
 The sensitive soul, however, may gaze upon a beautiful landscape 
 with emotions that he himself cannot define but as religious. 
 What has happened to make the aesthetic moment religious? 
 A sense of selfhood has arisen as he gazes. It is no longer merely 
 aesthetic, because the organism is so aroused as to make a total, 
 that is to say, a social, reaction over against the non-human. 
 The aesthetic feeling blends into the religious. Such an aesthetico- 
 religious experience is typically expressed in the lines: 
 
 The clouds that gather round the setting sun, 
 Do take a sober coloring from the eye 
 That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality. 
 
THE CONCEPTION OF RELIGION 27 
 
 B. Let us next consider Irving King's The Development of Relig- 
 ion. 1 This author thus defines religion: "The religious conscious- 
 ness is a special development of the valuational attitudes 2 .... a 
 special development of the valuational type of consciousness. " 3 It 
 is obvious that such a statement involves the necessity, first, of 
 distinguishing between the practical and the valuational attitudes; 
 and secondly, that of differentiating that special type of the 
 latter which is religious from other types of the valuational 
 consciousness. 
 
 Now the primary criticism to be made upon Professor King's 
 position is that his distinction between " practical" and " valua- 
 tional" is entirely artificial. For the larger part of the valuational 
 moments of consciousness are as truly practical as anything else. 
 Indeed, it may fairly be said that the more " appreciation" we have 
 of a situation of danger or object of desire the more intensely 
 " practical" it ipso facto is. 
 
 The trouble with this term " valuational " or "appreciative" 
 is that it may properly refer to three different aspects of activity. 
 In the first place, any action in its third or "economic" stage is 
 practically a mood of appreciation. 4 In the second place, the 
 pleasure-discomfort tone which accompanies most, if not all, sen- 
 sations is the organism's instinctive "evaluation" of its stimuli. 
 When this affective tone is very intense, we may sometimes describe 
 it as "appreciative"; for example, one "appreciates" a good square 
 meal when very hungry, one "appreciates" a fire on the hearth 
 after being out in the cold, damp night, one "appreciates" a danger 
 when its perilous aspects have fully aroused the instinct of self- 
 preservation. In the third place, the emergence of "self- 
 consciousness renders any attitude appreciative or valuational in 
 proportion as the "self" is highly organized and explicit. This 
 is of course the most important of the three factors, and it is this 
 which is the real explanation of the importance of social life in 
 developing a sense of "values" on which King so constantly 
 insists. "The sense of value itself is so thoroughly bound up with 
 
 1 The Development of Religion. New York: Macmillan, 1910. 
 
 2 Op. tit., p. 63. 3 ibid., p. 44- 
 4 See discussion above, p. 25. 
 
28 TEE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 social activities that it may almost be called a social category." 1 
 But he does not see that the most important result of social 
 intercourse is the creation of self-consciousness, and hence the real 
 psychological connection between the social milieu and the sense 
 of value is lost. It is indeed true that "the particular function of 
 the social element is in giving stability and depth to the values 
 brought to consciousness through the rise of intermediate activi- 
 ties," 2 but do not these values acquire "stability and depth" just 
 because they become the values not merely of physical organisms 
 but of social "selves"? 
 
 Professor King himself seems to admit that he has not made 
 a very successful differentiation. For instance, he says: "It 
 [religion] originates, it is true, to a certain extent in the practical 
 
 life of a people It is true that the feelings of appreciation 
 
 thus gained may be carried over and used in very pressing and 
 
 practical situations Prayer and sacrifice, although in a 
 
 way practical expedients, are also just as truly expressions of an 
 
 appreciative disposition on the part of the worshiper One 
 
 mode of reaction will in many cases be sure to merge with the 
 
 other " 3 The artificiality of this distinction between 
 
 practical and valuational attitudes, as such, accounts for some of 
 the strained positions he is compelled to assume. For instance: 
 "Were religion a practical expedient, it would have died out, as 
 magic is doing with the growing sense of inutility. " 4 But religions 
 do die out with the growing sense of their inutility. Religion, in 
 the general sense of what the various religions have tried to do, does 
 not die out and it is equally true that what magic tried to do 
 does not die out. King himself calls magic primitive man's science, 
 and the continuity of the general function which magic attempted 
 is just as real as and no more real than the continuity of the general 
 function of mankind which we call religion. 
 
 Passing now to the second task of differentiation which King's 
 position involves, how does he distinguish between those valuational 
 attitudes which are religious and those which are not religious ? In 
 
 1 Op. tit., p. 64. 3 Op. tit., pp. 172 ff. 
 
 2 The Development of Religion, p. 70. * Ibid., p. 172. 
 
THE CONCEPTION OF RELIGION 29 
 
 general, it seems to be simply a question of the degree of social 
 importance. "As certain of these values stand out and acquire 
 great prominence in the social consciousness, they become in so far 
 religious, and the activities which were before only practical expe- 
 dients are now transformed into religious ceremonials." 1 Or to 
 put it otherwise, religious values are ultimate values. "That the 
 social organization is practically the ne plus ultra of primitive man's 
 life is a most important point for the development of religious 
 
 values out of those of less degree Psychologically the 
 
 values of the group are not only higher than those of the individual, 
 they are genuinely ultimate and universal. This is our argument 
 in a nutshell. " 2 As for modern man, " the religious attitude may be 
 said to be the consciousness of the value of action in terms of its 
 ultimate organization. " 3 In a word, since religion is "the apprecia- 
 tion of the more permanent and far-reaching values," 4 the more 
 permanent and far-reaching the values at stake the more are they 
 to be considered religious. But surely this does not by any means 
 clearly distinguish between religious and moral or scientific values. 
 The very case he cites of the Greenland Eskimo seems to me to 
 expose this. 
 
 The social assemblies of the Greenland Eskimos are good examples of 
 ''accessory" activities, and their social and aesthetic value is so great and 
 their function as an institution of social control is so evident that they may be 
 considered as 'religious rites. The Eskimos have, on the other hand, many 
 habits connected with their hunting, but these depend so clearly upon individual 
 skill and painstaking practice and the conditions under which they are called 
 forth are so acute, that they continue almost of necessity quite definably 
 "practical," and hence non-religious. 5 
 
 Now a technique for social control can hardly be said to be of 
 "more permanent and far-reaching" value than a technique for 
 obtaining food, nor can it be said to be less "practical," so that 
 neither King's primary nor secondary criterion for religion seems 
 to be operative in this case. Indeed, the distinction in this case 
 is based upon other consideration than those suggested in the 
 
 1 Op. tit., p. 82. Ibid., p. 65. 
 
 2 Op. cit., p. 68. * Ibid., pp. 100, 101. 
 
 <*., p. 85. 
 
30 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 criterion of "ultimacy. " " Their social and aesthetic value is so 
 great .... that they may be considered religious rites." This 
 seems to suggest that religious and aesthetic are very much the 
 same thing, a question to which more explicit attention will be 
 given shortly. Meanwhile it should be noted that other criteria 
 are also introduced as well as this aesthetic quality. "That 
 these are ostensibly religious ceremonies is indicated by their 
 definitely prescribed character and by the various symbolic acts 
 which are intermingled with the more useful expedients. " x Surely 
 fixity of form and symbolical representation are very different from 
 ultimacy of value as a touchstone for the religious quality of any 
 activity. And why might not a purely moral value find expression 
 in a "definitely prescribed" or "symbolic" activity? It is indeed 
 just the powerlessness of this definition and the somewhat similar 
 one of Professor Ames to reveal any logical distinction between 
 religion and morality that I find most objectionable. "Morality, 
 as its etymology suggests, refers also to the customary, and on this 
 ground we may argue with much assurance for the view that 
 primitive religion and primitive morals are but two sides of the 
 same thing. " 2 But if the distinguishing mark of religious values is 
 their ultimacy, how does this separate religion from the aesthetic ? 
 It was suggested above that, in the quotation referred to, they 
 seemed to be practically identical. The question of the difference 
 between them King considers on page 84 : 
 
 In general it may be said that the difference between them is one of rela- 
 tionships rather than of intrinsic content. Thus the peculiarity of aesthetic 
 values is that they are detached or isolated from the problems of life, while 
 values of the religious type are expressions of these problems in their most 
 ultimate form. But, in any case, there can be no question as to the close 
 connection of the two attitudes, and in all probability they are always inter- 
 mingled. 
 
 ELing's theory seems to afford no clear differentiation between reli- 
 gion and morality, or between religion and aesthetics. 
 
 Before leaving King's treatment of the subject, I wish to illus- 
 trate further my own conception of religion by using one of the 
 
 1 The Development of Religion, p. 105. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 28. 
 
THE CONCEPTION OF RELIGION 31 
 
 important instances which he cites in support of his. Referring 
 to the dances of the bushmen, he says: 
 
 We pass from these activities in which the sportive element seems to pre- 
 dominate to others of a more religious character There was certainly 
 
 no sharply dividing line between the religious and the non-religious in these 
 
 cases Their ceremonial dances were specializations from a perfectly 
 
 spontaneous manifestation of primitive joyousness Among other 
 
 primitive peoples these same activities came in many instances to express to 
 their doers some sort of ultimate worthfulness. That is, the meaning of their 
 lives, as far as they were able to conceive it, was in some way bound up with the 
 moon, with the sun, with certain natural phenomena, such as thunder storms, 
 or with food itself; and as a consequence, the activities which had gradually 
 crystallized about these intense centers of interest, since they were literally the 
 expression of the relation of the people to the things, and were the only means 
 by which they could think of that relation these activities, we repeat, became 
 religious ceremonials in the true sense. 1 
 
 In this quotation the two essential principles which I suggested in 
 my definition are very suggestively illustrated, namely, the ele- 
 ment of self-consciousness, or feeling of self-worth, and the 
 non-human environment. "The meaning of their lives was 
 in some way bound up with the moon," etc., and hence "these 
 activities, since they were literally the expression of the relation 
 of the people to these things .... became religious ceremonies 
 in the true sense." In the evolution of the religious dance, out 
 of the mere overflow of animal spirits in the moonlight, the point at 
 which religion appears is the point at which moral consciousness or 
 the sense of selfhood or "the meaning of their lives" emerges. 
 C. Another conception of religion which I wish to examine is in 
 Ames's The Psychology of Religious Experience. 2 Professor Ames 
 thus defines religion: "The social consciousness in its most inti- 
 mate and vital phases is identical with religion." 3 He defends this 
 position on several grounds. First, the traditional distinction 
 between morality and religion was based upon one or other of 
 several dualisms which today have been entirely retired, such as 
 that of the natural and the supernatural which science destroys, or 
 
 *0p. cit., pp. in, 112. 
 
 3 The Psychology of Religious Experience. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1910. 
 
 3 Op. cit., p. 377. 
 
32 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 that of the faculties which modern psychology destroys, or even that 
 of the conscious and the subconscious which is also doomed. 1 Dr. 
 Ames concludes : "Without the definite assumption of this dualism 
 the line between morality and religion becomes obscure and tends 
 to vanish completely." Now my contention is that while the dis- 
 tinction, which is basic to my definition, between the human and 
 non-human environment is not a substitute for any of the dualisms 
 referred to, it is a distinction so natural and so important as to be 
 worthy of the prominence I give it and is the real ground of the 
 distinction between religion and morality to which tradition has 
 so tenaciously and instinctively clung. 
 
 Dr. Ames's second argument is that as we study morality and 
 religion genetically we find that in their beginnings there is no such 
 clear-cut distinction, and so we may conclude that the distinction 
 is due to our habits of thought and not to the nature of the case. 
 "What have come to be known as the religious observances of 
 primitive peoples were concerned with all the vital interests of the 
 
 social group It is difficult and in fact quite impossible to 
 
 distinguish sharply and finally in primitive life between law, 
 morality, art, and religion." 2 But granted that religion and 
 morality are not clearly separate in. their primitive beginnings; 
 granted further that they are continually interfusing even in the 
 mostly highly developed forms; this is no more than may be said 
 of any motives in human life, for all our interests are inextri- 
 cably interwoven. Their logical differentiation, however, is of 
 great practical importance for purposes of control and enrichment. 
 My criticism of Professor Ames's treatment is that he fails to note 
 that among the various ritualistic or ceremonial activities of a 
 primitive group which he classes together as religious rites some 
 are obviously referable to interests which lie within the group itself 
 and others to interests which involve the relation of the group to its 
 non-human environment. 
 
 As chief occasions of ceremonial rites Dr. Ames gives the 
 folio whig: 3 (i) phenomena in nature, such as seedtime and harvest, 
 the opening of the fishing and hunting seasons, etc.; (2) birth, 
 
 1 The Psychology of Religious Experience, pp. 286, 290. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 336. 3 Ibid., pp. 73 ff. 
 
THE CONCEPTION OF RELIGION 33 
 
 initiation, and marriage; (3) death and burial; (4) war and treat- 
 ment of strangers. Now it is quite true that the most obvious 
 quality which such varied rites have in common is the emotional 
 enhancement of common vital interests. But I believe they may 
 be separated into two classes without the least arbitrariness. 
 For instance, the celebration of natural phenomena and that of 
 the dangers and success of war refer respectively to the non-human 
 and the human environment. Again, death and birth, while having 
 obviously a social reference, nevertheless are outstanding ex- 
 amples of the vital dependence of the group upon the forces of 
 nature, whereas initiation and marriage embody interests which 
 fall almost entirely within the boundaries of the group. The 
 double reference of death and birth does not discount the importance 
 of the distinction which I am trying to emphasize. One and the 
 same event may have both moral and religious aspects. 
 
 Dr. Ames gives as a further defense of the position that morality 
 and religion are practically identical, the fact that "religion in 
 the minds of its best representatives at the present time consciously 
 and frankly accepts as its highest conception the ideal of a king- 
 dom or brotherhood of moral agents co-operative for the attain- 
 ment of further moral ends." 1 But compare this "kingdom" 
 ideal with a non-religious Utopia, such as socialism. Granted 
 an equal moral earnestness in both, why is the one consciously 
 religious and the other consciously and avowedly non-religious? 
 The one believes itself to be en rapport with an extra-human 
 power with which it is co-operating. The other explicitly depends 
 upon its own efforts, its program limits itself strictly to social 
 human forces. The first is religious because, while profoundly 
 moral, it is fundamentally an adjustment to a non-human en- 
 vironing power; the other is moral, and merely moral, because 
 its whole attention and interest centers in the social human 
 situation. To be sure, there are many indications of socialism 
 taking on a religious quality, but these very instances only serve 
 the more clearly to illustrate my thesis. Such religious brands 
 of socialism are those in which the thinker's horizon broadens 
 to take in "nature" or "evolution" or some other more or less 
 
 1 Op. cit. t p. 286. 
 
34 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 inclusive non-human prospect, with which his moral ideals make 
 some sort of adjustment. 1 
 
 Again, from the results of Starbuck's investigation, Dr. Ames 
 quotes the fact that " among the things absolutely essential, the 
 sine qua non of religion, conduct was most frequently mentioned." 2 
 Here again the connection between moral conduct and religion 
 should be obvious. In the higher phases of experience "social 
 attitudes, " because organized and voluntary and not merely instinc- 
 tive and accidental, are moral attitudes. The organism making the 
 religious adjustment is a moral organism, it can give no account 
 of itself without employing ethical categories. A religious experi- 
 ence that has not conduct or moral behavior as an integral part of 
 itself is not from this standpoint thinkable. 
 
 It seems to me that the logic of Dr. Ames's position leads to 
 untenable conclusions. The enthusiasm of a political campaign 
 and that of a missionary mass meeting may have very much in 
 common, yet there is surely some deep disparity. A torchlight 
 procession is not necessarily a religious ceremony, nor is the final 
 game in a baseball world-series, though it seems to me that if we 
 adopted Dr. Ames's criterion of the religious quality we should be 
 forced to consider them as such. Take the statement that "all 
 moral ideals are religious in the degree to which they are the 
 expression of great vital interests of society." 3 Reform of the 
 currency and tariff revision are great vital interests of society, 
 but no intensity of discussion can make these really religious 
 problems. The high cost of living is a moral or economic and not 
 a religious problem today, whereas the food supply was among 
 primitive men the very impetus to religion; and the reason is 
 that we are concerned with human manipulations of the food 
 supply or with the sources of food in a mechanical or scientific 
 manner, so the problem is partly moral and partly scientific. 
 We are not forced normally to take a social attitude toward the 
 source of the food supply itself, though a great famine would 
 
 1 For instance, one cannot but feel the religious tone of the chapter on "The 
 Good Will" in H. G. Wells's New Worlds for Old. 
 3 Op. cit., p. 287. 
 3 The Psychology of Religious Experience, p. 286. 
 
THE CONCEPTION OF RELIGION 35 
 
 probably inspire in a large part of the population a strictly social 
 attitude toward nature, and many would be likely to pray for rain. 
 I believe we may conclude that it is not merely the greatness of the 
 social interests which are at stake, but the attitude which we take 
 toward the non-human environment with which those interests 
 so closely bind us that determines the religiousness of our ideals. 
 If that attitude is social, and in so far as it is social, we are re- 
 ligious. 
 
 Furthermore, if the " social consciousness in its most intimate 
 and vital phases is identical with religion, " would it not seem that 
 an intensely individualistic religious experience is a contradiction 
 in terms? Of course, there can be no hard-and-fast distinction 
 between the individual consciousness and the social consciousness, 
 yet there can be no such thing as personality without the distinction. 
 But if the primitive man is religious in proportion as his individu- 
 ality is lost and swallowed up in the group consciousness as it is in 
 these great ceremonial experiences, and if this is indeed the logic 
 of religion, how can we possibly account for the religious experience 
 that is profoundly antipathetic to the dominant group conscious- 
 ness and is relatively of an extremely individualistic type ? Is not 
 the religious genius, on these grounds, an anomaly? "The most 
 important feature of these ceremonials, that which distinguishes 
 them and makes them religious, is the public and social character. 
 
 .... The social side is dominant and controlling It 
 
 would be no exaggeration to say that all ceremonials in which the 
 whole group operates with keen emotional interest are religious. " x 
 To be sure, it is a long way from the dance of a tribe of Australian 
 blacks to the meditations of a highly educated white; but it is the 
 logic of the situation we are concerned with, and if it is the social 
 emotional quality which is the religious differentia, how can indi- 
 vidualism be religious? But if the conception of religion be 
 adopted which I have suggested in this paper, is not the religious 
 genius logically normal? It is just the dominant self which 
 emerges in the social milieu which is apt, when confronting the 
 non-human environment, to react more forcefully, with personal 
 variation, toward it and so to initiate changes in the reactions of 
 
 1 Op. tit., p. 72. 
 
36 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 the whole group toward the non-human. So also may be explained, 
 and indeed defended, the insistence which the evangelical Protes- 
 tant tradition has always maintained, that religion is, in the last 
 analysis, a personal affair. 
 
 James in his The Varieties of Religious Experience bases his 
 study of religion not upon rites, cult, or institutions, but upon the 
 subjective or individualistic side of religious experience; not upon 
 the primitive, but upon the modern type of man. He holds 
 that "personal religion should still seem the primordial thing." 1 
 He draws his conclusions from a study of "the feelings, acts, and 
 experiences of individual men in their solitude so far as they appre- 
 hend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider 
 the divine." 2 His conclusion is that "religion is a man's total 
 reaction upon life. " 3 And by total reaction he means this : "Total 
 reactions .... to get at them you must go behind the foreground 
 of existence and reach down to that curious sense of the whole 
 residual cosmos as an everlasting presence, intimate or alien, terrible 
 or amusing, lovable or odious, which in some degree everyone 
 possesses. " 4 Now to find the whole residual cosmos, a "presence" 
 "intimate or alien," "lovable or odious" certainly this is to take 
 a social attitude to the non-human environment. But within the 
 limits of this definition we may find "the light irony of Voltaire and 
 Renan, the pessimism of Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, " and James 
 admits that these are logically religious, though there seems some 
 incongruity in calling them such. "For common men religion 
 .... signifies always a serious state of mind"; and pessimists 
 lack "the purgatorical note which religious sadness gives forth." 
 Now these exceptions are quite in keeping logically with the 
 definition I have suggested. /Religion is a vital adjustment, and 
 the more successful and satisfactory it is the more truly may it be 
 called religious. As James says, "the boundaries are always misty 
 and it is everywhere a question of amount and degree." 5 James 
 feels that religion must have warmth and positiveness : 
 
 Morality pure and simple accepts the law of the whole which it finds 
 reigning, so far as to acknowledge and obey it, but it may obey it with the 
 
 1 Op. tit., p. 30. s Ibid., p. 35. * Ibid., p. 37. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 31. Ibid., p. 35. 
 
THE CONCEPTION OF RELIGION 37 
 
 heaviest and coldest heart and never cease to feel it as a yoke. But for religion 
 in its strong and fully developed manifestations, the service of the highest is 
 never felt as a yoke. Dull submission is left far behind and a mood of wel- 
 come .... has taken its place. 1 
 
 Here again I submit it is not really a question of morality and 
 religion, but of a more or less successful and complete adjustment 
 on the part of a moral organism to an inescapable non-human 
 environment. To ''accept the universe in the drab discolored 
 way of stoic resignation to necessity" is to indicate that the self is 
 baffled or frustated in its effort at adjustment. James admits 
 that morality in this sense and the more successful buoyant type 
 of experience are "both religious in the wider sense." 
 
 What of the value of the definition which I have proposed? 
 If it is a "concrete universal, " it should serve as a guide to further 
 experience. It should clarify the conditions of any real progress. 
 I believe that it simplifies our religious problem in the following 
 ways: 
 
 1. It suggests for the individual the inevitable necessity of 
 some sort of religious experience. The self can never free itself 
 from its encompassing cosmos. For the development of morality 
 enhances the vividness of self-consciousness, and the expansion 
 of science only shifts, never annihilates, the "borderland dun" 
 where "control" merges into mystery. 
 
 2. It reveals the underlying harmony of effort in the most 
 divergent religious views and practices. The most primitive 
 savage and the most profound savant are forced to attempt one and 
 the same task, namely, an adjustment of the "self" to the non- 
 human environment. This should change the war of creeds into 
 a co-operative comparison of the relative efficiency of various 
 instruments wherewith the common task is undertaken. 
 
 3. It removes the "bottomless subjectivity" which con- 
 temporary psychology appears to bring into the religious sphere. 
 For any object of faith is seen in this light to be, not merely the 
 " symbol " of some " value " (which "value " largely evaporates when 
 once its symbol is recognized as mere symbol), but rather an 
 instrument whereby an abiding environment is interpreted or 
 
 1 Ibid., p. 41. 
 
38 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 appropriated or controlled. The reality of this environment 
 abides, and the necessary task of adjustment abides. Though 
 the instrument be outworn, even though it be the greatest of all 
 which the past has fashioned, all the validity formerly felt to inhere 
 in that instrument still remains in the vast and vital task for which 
 that tool was forged and in which it was so long and so well used. 
 The conditions of the task are greatly changed. The task in its 
 ultimate simplicity and necessity remains. 
 
 4. It reveals the relation between science and religion. This 
 cannot possibly be anything but some sort of supplementation. 
 The social and the non-social attitudes toward the non-human are 
 not contradictory. Physical, mechanical manipulation and con- 
 trol of the environment only serve to enlarge that environment, 
 and beyond the scope of achieved mechanical control forever 
 reaches the realm of the larger organic attitude, the social attitude. 
 In science meanings are abstracted from departments of experi- 
 ence for the sake of more adequate control, and this control serves 
 in turn to produce richer meanings. A mechanical interpretation of 
 Nature is not an end in itself. It is but a means of solving prob- 
 lems, and problems solved make for fuller and richer experience. 
 
 It has been the purpose of this essay to indicate the underlying 
 organic relation between the scientific mood and the religious 
 mood. It is not merely that they are alternating tempers, both 
 compelling in their respective ways. They are not merely differ- 
 ent. Why are they different ? Why do they alternate ? Why 
 must they alternate? And what is gained by their alternation? 
 And what is their respective value to the vitality of the human 
 spirit? What are their relative functions in the organism which 
 they both serve ? On such questions as these it is hoped the suc- 
 ceeding chapters may throw some light. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 THE PROBLEM OF RELIGION 
 
 Common sense and science present a vast mass of facts, of 
 brute actualities. In the light of common day this world of our 
 multifarious experience is not at all " divine," just a world of men 
 and things. But in the past many sensitive souls have found in 
 this everyday world the tokens of a divine presence; in the stirring 
 struggles for human rights they have conceived the conviction 
 that "the voice of the people is the voice of God"; in studying 
 the stars with all the machinery of mathematics and telescopes 
 they have had to exclaim at last, " O God, I am reading thy thoughts 
 after thee ! " But those were less critical days, we think ; men were 
 then less conscious of the psychology of their own emotional 
 reactions; is it possible for us to look squarely and steadily into 
 this world of fact and discern in it God ? In other words, for the 
 empiricist the question of the existence of God is the question 
 whether there is any intellectually honest way of accepting the 
 emotional reactions of our whole nature at anything like their 
 face value if we find that the envisaged world of fact has some 
 aspect which, in some of our moods, elicits from deep within us 
 the religious response. For that, from many thoughtful people, in 
 spite of all the concessions which must be made to the scientific or 
 mechanistic interpretation of nature, the world does irresistibly 
 elicit such religious response is unquestionably true. 
 
 This is not the first time that men have faced their world, 
 denuded of meanings put upon it by religious tradition, and have 
 tried to give an unbiased answer to the question of what, all in all, 
 they find this world to be. Doubtless, therefore, it would be a 
 salutary thing to review the outstanding examples, in previous 
 times, of the very same sort of empirical 1 investigation which this 
 
 1 Empirical is of course always a relative term. Though Descartes, for instance, 
 was a "rationalist," he was empirically minded as compared with the Schoolmen. By 
 "empirical" then I mean the open-minded investigative attitude rather than the tradi- 
 tionalist. To investigate without any assumptions is obviously impossible. 
 
 39 
 
40 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 crucial problem of religion forces upon us today. Not that we 
 should be primarily interested in their results, so far as content 
 goes, but it may well be that the very orientation of the task upon 
 a broad and simple historical background will save us useless repeti- 
 tion of fruitless efforts and perchance point the direction in which 
 the problem as a whole seems to tend. In the review which follows, 
 of the way in which this primary problem of religion has presented 
 itself to the empirical mind, I shall try to illustrate rather than 
 demonstrate, and must trust that the statements I make dogmati- 
 cally may commend themselves as interpretations which the 
 generally accepted facts of the history of philosophy will easily 
 bear. I do not claim to have discovered any novel facts, but only 
 to have seen the old facts, after some little effort to see them in a 
 broad and vital way, in a perspective that may clothe them with 
 a new interest. If I can show a certain rhythm and a certain 
 simplicity in the way thought has moved back and forth upon a 
 rather definite pathway, it is not because I have begun with any 
 Hegelian presuppositions, any assumptions as to the way in which 
 reflection ought to move. Far from it. My sole desire has been 
 to read the history of philosophy as one interested primarily in 
 the.psychology of the great movements, not in their minute details, 
 but in their broad outlines. If the reader is suspicious of the 
 simplicity of the parallels which I point out, I can only say that it 
 is a simplicity that, so far as I am aware, I have discovered and not 
 previously assumed. 
 
 To state the whole matter very briefly, I wish to trace in sharp 
 and simple outlines the history of what I shall call the mechanistic- 
 mystical dilemma. And by mysticism, in this connection, I mean 
 a particular kind of mysticism, what perhaps I might name classical 
 mysticism or nature mysticism. Let me proceed first of all to make 
 the meaning of this term clear. 
 
 I have already defined religion as a social attitude toward the 
 non-human environment. This definition was meant to include 
 both nature religion and supra-nature religion. In the latter, 
 where the religious environment is a more or less definitely con- 
 ceived divine society, the social attitude toward this environment 
 is psychologically simple. But in the case of nature religion the 
 
THE PROBLEM OF RELIGION 41 
 
 maintenance of a social attitude toward the non-human environ- 
 ment is not simple, for the spontaneous social responses of the 
 human agent are continually checked and in a way frustrated by 
 the fact that this same nature appears under other circumstances 
 as anything but a socius. The emotional social attitudes are 
 continually dogged by sophistication, and instinctive or spon- 
 taneous responses are pushed into personifications and sublimations 
 of the original experience, wherein imaginative thought may roam 
 unhampered by continuous reference to facts, or into abstractions, 
 in which reflection seeks some sort of reconciliation between the 
 physical and the quasi-personal complexion which the world of 
 fact seems to bear. The easier thing to do, the popular thing, is 
 to allow the imagination to transfer the social qualities of the 
 world to some supramundane or extra-natural sphere. This, of 
 course, has been accomplished in a very complete way only by the 
 great religions, the gods of primitive peoples lingering in a dim 
 borderland not far removed from the actual physical environment. 
 But in those circumstances where a naive imagination is checked 
 by a critical intelligence, the mind is forced to maintain toward 
 nature an attitude to some degree social. This attitude I shall 
 call mysticism in the special sense referred to. It is, as I said 
 above, continually checked and modified by the facts of unemotional 
 experience, and thus two tendencies, two typical interpretations 
 of the world, two mutually opposed and radically inconsistent sorts 
 of response to nature, are found in a Continually shifting balance. 
 This is what I mean by the mechanistic-mystical dilemma. 
 
 It is important that " mysticism," as used in this essay, should 
 always be clearly understood as having the meaning specified above. 
 Mysticism in this sense is particularly characteristic of the great 
 reconstructive periods of thought. In all such situations, when 
 the empirically minded religionist is thrown back upon the world 
 of fact, it is the unavoidable expression of the religious disposition. 
 There is, of course, another type of mysticism, the mysticism of the 
 contemplative monk, the mysticism which is directed, not toward 
 nature, but toward the supernatural, toward the divine beings of the 
 "other" world. This is the mysticism of Thomas a Kempis. It 
 is the mysticism of Christian orthodoxy. The first type, with 
 
42 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 which alone I shall deal in this essay, is the mysticism of Eckhart 
 and Boehme. Its search is for the living or divine element in the 
 natural world, whereas the other is a search for a more immediate 
 experience of the divine reality of the supernatural or "other" 
 world. While, of course, the two types will tend sometimes to 
 fuse in the experience of individuals, they are logically distinct and 
 will be regarded as such in this discussion. 
 
 The history of this mechanistic-mystical dilemma may for the 
 purpose of this essay be divided into three main periods : 
 I. From Thales to Aristotle 
 
 II. From Bruno to Leibniz 
 III. From Rousseau to Bergson 
 
 There are several outstanding characteristics which these three 
 periods have in common. Each one is ushered in by a period of 
 disintegration. In the first case there is the discrediting of Olym- 
 pianism; in the second, that of ecclesiastical supernaturalism; in 
 the third, that of rationalism. Each is at first marked by an 
 earlier stage of uncritical mysticism, and by a later stage of more 
 critical mysticism, in which a special effort is made to reconcile 
 the mechanistic and the mystical elements. The uncritical mysti- 
 cism of the first period is the hylozoism of the lonians ; of the second, 
 the "cosmical poetry" of Bruno and Boehme; of the third, the 
 feeling-philosophy of Rousseau. The critical mysticism of the 
 first period is the teleology of Aristotle; of the second, the monad- 
 ology of Leibniz; of the third, the "creative evolution" of Bergson. 
 In each period, urging thought on toward the final effort of critical 
 mysticism, there are two phases of great importance, (i) an extreme 
 formulation of the mechanistic tendency and (2) a characteristic 
 dualism, the mechanistic and the mystical tendencies threatening 
 to become entirely irreconcilable. The former of these, in the first 
 period, is the atomism of Democritus; in the second, the Galilean 
 mechanics; in the third, the "natural selection" theory of Darwin- 
 ism. The latter, in the first period, is Platonism; in the second, 
 Cartesianism; in the third, Kantianism. 
 
 On the other hand, the three periods are significantly different 
 in this, that whereas the dilemma of the first period is quite objec- 
 tive, in the second it is most characteristically objective-subjective, 
 
THE PROBLEM OF RELIGION 43 
 
 in the third subjective. In other words, if we compare the uncritical 
 mysticism of the three periods, we see that in hylozoism the con- 
 trast and the attempted union are between the world-stuff and the 
 world-life, both quite objectively conceived; that in the case of 
 Bruno or Boehme the two elements whose contrast is emphasized 
 while their fusion is attempted are the macrocosm and microcosm, 
 nature and man; that in the case of Rousseau the contrast-fusion 
 is between the inner and the outer, the true nature and the tangible 
 form of human experience. This difference between the three 
 periods is still more obvious if we compare the critical mysticisms : 
 the contrast-fusion of Aristotle's system is matter-form; of Leibniz, 
 the lower monads (physical) and the higher monads (spirit, mind) ; 
 of Bergson, intelligence and intuition. The effort of each of these 
 is, of course, to emphasize and explain the fusion, reducing the con- 
 trast to the level of mere appearance, of superficiality. It is, 
 however, in the dualisms of the three periods that this point is 
 most clearly to be seen, the point, namely, that the dilemma is in 
 the first objective, in the second objective-subjective, in the third 
 subjective. In Plato the gulf yawns between concrete thing or 
 act and eternal type; in Descartes, between res extensa and res 
 cogitans; in Kant, between pure reason and practical reason. The 
 importance of this sequence, objective, objective-subjective, 
 subjective, I shall refer to later in my discussion. 
 
 i. THE FIRST PERIOD: FROM THALES TO ARISTOTLE 
 
 i. From Olympianism to hylozoism. I have suggested above 
 the psychological principle which goes farthest to explain the 
 rise of hylozoistic philosophy in Ionia. The historical facts 
 which brought this principle into action were, very briefly, these: 
 (a) The Olympian religion had, because of general prosperity 
 and changed conditions of life, got out of touch with practical 
 interests. Originally nature deities, the gods had, through a long, 
 imaginative process, been elevated to the remote grandeur of 
 Olympus. Furthermore, the ethical conceptions of the thoughtful 
 had radically outgrown the moral standards imbedded in the 
 Olympian theology. Olympianism had simply become irrelevant to 
 practical life, (b) All the stimulations of intellectual curiosity and 
 
44 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 of a practical interest in the processes of nature which influenced the 
 lonians of the sixth century, such as the contact with other civiliza- 
 tions and the many novel experiences of the colonists, drove thought 
 back upon the world of fact, a world denuded by the development 
 and the resultant irrelevance of Olympianism of its original 
 (animistic) religious significance. 
 
 The result, psychologically, was inevitable. Many aspects of 
 this world, now contemplated with some considerable degree of 
 religiously unprejudiced curiosity, immediately elicited an inter- 
 pretation of the social type. "All things," said Thales, "are full 
 of gods," by which he meant that the world of the senses was some- 
 how "divine," in some sense alive, however dead the gods of 
 Olympus might be. And the mysterious power of the magnet 
 was a suggestive illustration. 1 Many other aspects of the world, 
 however, elicited, as in all everyday life, only the non-social, the 
 mechanical, adjustments, the physical interpretation. And the 
 Ionian thinker tried to conceive this world, physical yet somehow 
 alive, in terms adequate to both aspects at once, without recourse 
 to mythology. This mechanistic-mystical attitude is hylozoism. 
 
 2. The dualistic tendency of the dilemma. But in hylozoism 
 the strain upon the hyphen is great. Greek speculation at once, 
 quite unconsciously, broke the problem up into that of the world- 
 stuff and that of the world-process. Later, when metaphysics 
 grew up afresh out of the soil of ethics, the dualism was first 
 practical, the Socratic contrast between action and goal; then 
 later the logical distinction between particular and universal; then 
 finally the metaphysical distinction between concrete-temporal and 
 the ideal-eternal, the content and the form, the material and the 
 immaterial. Even as the social dispositions of primitive men had 
 instinctively separated a living something from out the matrix of 
 common experience, the living something expressed in "manaism" 
 or what not, only that finally it should be domiciled as the gods 
 upon Olympus; so again the social disposition of the Athenian 
 intellectual separated out the moral goal from the matrix of every- 
 
 1 The reader can easily get at the psychology of the hylozoists by playing for a 
 few minutes with a good strong magnet, allowing himself to feel vividly the kinaesthetic 
 sensations as the magnet pulls upon the bit of steel held between the fingers, and by 
 giving just a little rein to the imagination. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF RELIGION 45 
 
 day actions, only to see it finally, via logic and metaphysics, 
 settled as the Idea of the Good, in the heaven beyond the heavens, 
 while the earth and the things that are earthy " participate," 
 inexplicably enough, in the reality of which they are but shadows ! 
 
 3. The mechanistic tendency. The non-mystical temperament 
 of the Greeks set the pace for all generations. A brief and simple 
 outline of the conceptions which they formulated, in the attempt 
 to understand the world of fact, will perhaps prove suggestive. 
 
 The greatest progress toward simplifying and so understanding 
 nature was achieved, through many modifications, by the treat- 
 ment of substance, (a) The beginning was made by Milesianism, 
 the quest for the one stuff of which the many things are formed. In 
 Thales and Anaximenes this is an empirical substance. In Anaxi- 
 mander it is conceived of as a transempirical substance, (b) The 
 problem of substance soon is seen to be the problem of qualities. 
 The riot of changing and mingling qualities is vastly simplified 
 when Empedocles and Anaxagoras conceive of qualitatively distinct 
 and changeless elements, whose mixture produces our sensuous 
 world, (c) The greatest step was that of atomism, whereby qualita- 
 tive differences are understood in terms of quantitative differences. 
 There are no real changes in the elements. There are no qualita- 
 tive differences, save those of size and shape. Combination, due 
 to whirling motions and resultant vortices, accounts for all objects 
 and events, while effluxes, due also to the motions, account for 
 sense-impressions and thoughts. This is the acme of the Greek 
 mechanization of nature. 
 
 The treatment of the world-process was more difficult. After 
 the first great step is made of conceiving all changes as merely parts 
 of a world-change, three questions concerning this all-inclusive pro- 
 cess inevitably present themselves, namely, What ? Why ? How ? 
 
 To the first question there are several answers: 
 
 a) Anaximander: Separation of opposites. 
 
 b) Anaximenes: Condensation and rarefaction. 
 
 c) Empedocles and Anaxagoras : Mixing of qualitatively simple 
 elements. 
 
 d} Democritus: Mere motion of non-qualitative elements. 
 Thus far the net result of the simplifying efforts is twofold: the 
 
46 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 world is basically merely quantitative; all change is basically 
 motion. 
 
 To the second question, Why? a mechanistic answer seems 
 impossible. It is a distinctly anthropopathic question. And so 
 we find such conceptions as the generalization of Anaximander 
 that the world-process is injustice requiring compensatory reaction, 
 and that of Heraclitus that the world-strife is justice. But the 
 thoroughgoing mechanist will attempt to make the question Why ? 
 meaningless when asked concerning the nature-process, by showing 
 its meaninglessness when asked concerning human actions. De- 
 mocritus' psychology is a theory of atoms-in-motion. But if the 
 atomistic mind still persists in asking Why ? concerning the vortices 
 of which it is itself but a sample, the answer is Necessity, mathe- 
 matical necessity. 
 
 How? is, as it were, midway between What? and Why? It 
 seeks a more inward interpretation than What ? It is less anthro- 
 popathic than Why? It is the question which becomes crucial 
 only when, after the problem of substance and the problem of 
 process have each received definitive answers, the problem of the 
 relation between substance and process becomes dominant. 
 
 It should be noted that while Democritus in Abdera was con- 
 tent to discuss the What ? of the world-substance and world-process, 
 events in Athens had produced a shift of the philosophic center of 
 gravity, and Socrates had initiated the search for the norm of 
 action and of ethical judgment. As a result the whole metaphysical 
 horizon is tinged with the problem of the normative; the substance- 
 process enigma passes through the alembic of ethical experience 
 and comes out as the content-form enigma. (The means by which 
 the ethical problem is transformed into a metaphysical problem is 
 the logical discussion of the relation between the particular and the 
 universal.) Thus the How? of the world-process is a profounder 
 question than the What ? or the Why ? inasmuch as the motive of 
 the scientific development from Thales to Democritus is now 
 imbued with the moral earnestness engendered in Socrates and 
 Plato by the tragic social situation in Athenian life. It is deeper, 
 also, because of the influence of mathematical insight, and because 
 of the new rigor imposed upon thought by the development of logic. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF RELIGION 47 
 
 This greater profundity may be most clearly seen by noting a 
 relation which, though perhaps not due to a direct connection, is 
 yet actually existent between the Platonic-Aristotelian statement 
 of the world-problem and the Democritean solution. Democritus 
 succeeded in stripping the elemental substance, the atom, of all 
 qualities save form. For Aristotle the substance and the form are 
 separable in thought. Indeed there seemed no way of allowing form 
 to adhere inseparably to substance without being driven to atom- 
 istic materialism. So much at least the preceding three centuries 
 had demonstrated. On the other hand, if separable, how could 
 form and substance be conceived of as being actually related? 
 Plato's failure to answer this question is notorious. The doctrine 
 of participation was not satisfactory, 'The situation is relieved 
 by recourse to mythology. The notion of the demiurge and of the 
 world-soul is anthropopathism revived. If for Plato the world 
 was "fundamentally mathematical," it was nevertheless ultimately 
 not intelligible as such. Without the demiurge and the world-soul 
 the mathematical world cannot be understood. Thus Plato was 
 "in some things a reactionary." 1 Only, according to the thesis 
 of this paper, being "reactionary" was simply being a mystic. 
 Mechanism reacts inevitably against mysticism, and mysticism 
 reacts as inevitably against mechanism. The lion and the lamb 
 do not for long lie down together. 
 
 This, then, is the How-problem of the world-process in the pecul- 
 iarly difficult form in which it presented itself to Aristotle. How 
 does matter take on form ? How does the essence realize itself in 
 the concrete particular reality ? The doctrine of development is 
 Aristotle's answer to the What-problem. But within this notion 
 there lurks the subtler question of how the development takes place. 
 
 4. Critical mysticism. The teleology which Plato had suggested 
 in figurative or mythical form Aristotle embodied in his doctrine 
 of entelechy, the thought that cosmic processes are the realization 
 of the essence in the phenomenon. The cue for this system was 
 the development of growing organisms and the constructive activ- 
 ities of man. It is evident, however, that the teleology of growth 
 and that of artistic construction are not at all the same, and since 
 
 1 Marvin, History of European Philosophy, p. 147. 
 
48 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 these two applications of the teleological principle run through the 
 whole system sometimes quite confused, we have here, in the use 
 of the latter at least, a further illustration of my thesis that the 
 Greek mind was continually forced back upon anthropopathic or 
 social conceptions to eke out its otherwise abstract and mechanical 
 interpretations of reality. Although it is true that the application 
 of this artistic principle is mostly by way of analogy, nevertheless 
 it is just this inability of the greatest mind of the ancient period 
 to dispense entirely with the personal or quasi-personal feeling in 
 his explanation of cosmic processes that is so significant. 
 
 It is illuminating to note the several ways in which Aristotle 
 seeks on the one hand to save his teleology from becoming a merely 
 anthropopathic teleology, and on the other to preserve any real sig- 
 nificance for the human comprehension of it. In the first place, 
 vitalistic finalism and artistic finalism offset each other, the former 
 getting its actual intelligibility by means of the artistic or con- 
 structive analogy, the latter being corrected in its inherent 
 anthropopathic tendency by constant reference to the biological 
 process. In the second place, the artistic finalism is broken up 
 into four elements, namely, material cause, efficient cause, formal 
 cause, and final cause. The last of these is shown to be the most 
 important. Formal cause and efficient cause would inevitably 
 tend toward anthropopathism, if indeed not toward anthropo- 
 morphism. Hence this danger is averted by stressing final cause. 
 Again, the artistic analogy is rendered innocuous by the entelechial 
 psychology, wherein, even as vegetative soul and animal soul are 
 progressively aufgehoben in the rational soul, so the rational 
 soul, which would be responsible for the existence of final cause 
 (in the artistic analogy), is in turn aufgehoben by the cosmic pro- 
 gression toward pure form. And then, in the fourth place, by the 
 subtle correlation of form and matter, the one being drawn on by 
 the attraction of form, the other being effectively attractive only 
 because of the longing of matter for form, by this subtle correlation 
 the pure passivity of the perfection of God is yet dynamic, while 
 the "longing" of matter is yet not a merely hylozoistic longing. 
 
 Thus does the subtle anthropoteleism of the culminating system 
 of antiquity save itself from a cruder anthropopathism. But 
 
THE PROBLEM OF RELIGION 49 
 
 thus, also, does the mystical motif vindicate itself as an inevitable 
 supplementation of the mechanistic motif. From first to last the 
 systems of antiquity illustrate this point that the mechanical 
 and mystical interpretations of the world are complementary and 
 at the same time mutually contradictory. Each tends to force the 
 other from the field, yet each in itself is inadequate. The various 
 conceptions which seek to combine the two are always in unstable 
 equilibrium. They tend to break down either in one direction or 
 in the other. 
 
 II. THE SECOND PERIOD: FROM BRUNO TO LEIBNIZ 
 
 i. From ecclesiastical supernaturalism to Bruno 1 s philosophy. 
 It should be obvious that when the metaphysical dualism, begin- 
 ning in the system of Plato, culminated in the system of Chris- 
 tianity, by which reality falls apart into two utterly distinct spheres, 
 the temporal and the eternal, the sensuous and the supramundane, 
 thought should find much less difficulty in apprehending it in the 
 opposed categories of the mechanical and mystical attitudes. The 
 problem is not now that of interpreting a world that seems inade- 
 quately explained by either mechanical or mystical concepts exclu- 
 sively, but of explaining the possibility and method of contact 
 between the two worlds which are regarded as metaphysically 
 distinct. For the practical needs of Christianity this problem is 
 readily enough solved by the conception of revelation and miracle, 
 and in an age that was hard pressed by practical religious and moral 
 rather than philosophical needs the mystical attitude attached 
 itself inevitably to the supramundane, divine world and the 
 mechanical to the earthly, temporal world. Consequently the 
 patristic and mediaeval periods are comparatively poor in illustra- 
 tions of the thesis I am advancing. But when once the movement 
 which began with Duns Scotus at the culmination of mediaeval 
 thought, namely, the separation of philosophy from theology, 
 reached its consummation, and the thinker was free to look again 
 with untrammeled curiosity at the world about him and to seek 
 expressions for the responses that it evoked within him, this 
 antagonism and necessary mutual supplementation of mechanical 
 and mystical interpretations which I have noted in the Greek 
 period become again remarkably apparent. 
 
30 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 The psychology of this return to the world of fact from a pre- 
 occupation with a world of faith is hardly less simple than that of 
 the lonians. The growing irrelevance of the established view of 
 life, a quickening of the intellect by great discoveries, the discovery 
 of classical culture, of a wide, wide world, of a solar system all 
 this is a familiar story. And thrown back upon this world of fact, 
 aided by the recently discovered neo-Platonic and neo-Pythagorean 
 philosophies, Bruno and Boehihe at once reacted mystically to this 
 great world of fact. The transcendency of God is not so much 
 denied as ignored. It is the immanence of God with which the nat- 
 ural philosophy of the Renaissance is concerned. The essence 
 of God and that of the world are identified. He is the " inex- 
 haustible infinite world-force; the natura naturans which in eternal 
 change forms and ' unfolds' itself purposefully and in conformity 
 with law into the natura naturata." 1 While the cosmology of 
 Bruno bears a striking resemblance to that of Democritus and 
 Epicurus, "a system of countless worlds, each of which . . . . 
 grows from chaotic conditions to clear and definite formation and 
 again yields to the destiny of dissolution," yet Bruno " regarded 
 the plurality of solar systems not as a mechanical juxtaposition, 
 but as an organic living whole, and regarded the process of the 
 growth and decay of worlds as maintained by the pulse-beat of the 
 one divine all-life" 2 
 
 2. The dualistic tendency. It is obvious enough that in Bruno's 
 natura naturans jand natura naturata the passive and active parti- 
 ciples indicate a counterpart of the two aspects of the hylozoism 
 of the lonians. But the dilemma is now not so characteristically 
 objective as it is objective-subjective. 'This is suggested by 
 the importance of the conception of macrocosm and microcosm, 
 which played so important a part in the philosophy of the Renais- 
 sance, and makes self-realization the key to the riddles of the 
 universe. The self-consciousness of this period is one thing that 
 makes it profoundly different from the classic period. 
 
 This aspect of the situation becomes clearly dominant in the 
 work of Descartes, whose cogito is the starting-point of his philos- 
 ophy, and whose division of reality into res cogitans and res extensa 
 
 1 Windelband, History of Philosophy, p. 367. 3 Italics are mine. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF RELIGION 51 
 
 is the subjective-objective counterpart of the substance-process, 
 or matter-form, dualism of the Greeks. (The latter produced a 
 brood of ontological perplexities and puzzles, taxing to the limit 
 the brain of an Aristotle; the former has produced a still greater 
 horde of puzzles, the problems and perplexities of epistemology. 
 No doubt men will at last learn that the only way to answer the 
 problems created by a dualism, whether ontological or epistemo- 
 logical, is to find the origin of the dualism and understand the 
 conditions which produced it. Otherwise we are treating symptoms 
 and not causes.) 
 
 In a word, the significance of Descartes' res cogitans for our 
 present discussion is simply this: It provided an asylum for all 
 those emotional and quasi-ethical values which the new science 
 had just banished from the 'objective world. Mechanics had 
 reduced the world to a mechanism, robbed of those vague quasi- 
 personal qualities which it has always had except when, as I have 
 said, they had been banished, by Olympianism, Platonism, or 
 Christianity, to some "other" world. Cartesianism finds also 
 an " other" world for them, but it is now not a supramundane 
 world, but the world of man's inner experience, his subjective 
 being. So it is that Descartes' dualism seems at first to afford 
 relief from the mechanizing of the objective world. 
 
 3. The mechanistic development. 
 
 a) In the objective sphere: Probably the most stimulating 
 thing in nature is movement. The evolution of humanity has, 
 physiologically considered, depended predominantly upon the 
 development of the distant receptors, ears and eyes, especially 
 eyes, whose function it is, in large part, to notify the organism of 
 movement in its environment. Even in civilized man the vague 
 perception of something moving, caught by the tail of the eye, 
 often can stir the whole organism more violently than the most 
 gorgeous panorama of motionless landscape or the most splendid 
 prospect of massed stone and brick. An unexpected movement in 
 some supposedly inanimate object can, in spite of us, banish, 
 momentarily at least, our deepest sophistication. The human or- 
 g^nism can soon make itself master of motionless objects. Move- 
 ment is the incalculable element of our experience, in response to 
 
52 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 which our instinctive and emotional nature is always ready to 
 assert itself. It was, then, to put it mildly, an epoch-making event 
 when man learned to apply the laws of the motionless to motion. 
 That was, in a word, the inestimable feat of Galileo. He " created 
 mechanics as the mathematical theory of motion." This achieve- 
 ment was pregnant with incalculable changes in man's attitude 
 toward the forces of the world. Arithmetic and geometry had 
 been long in preparation, but had been applicable, in any successful 
 way, only to motionless objects, as motionless. When Kepler 
 established the principle that all changes in the universe are to be 
 considered primarily as motion, and Galileo immediately found 
 how to apply to motion the principles of the motionless, the founda- 
 tion was laid for that wonderful development known as modern 
 science, the secret of which is, so far as our present discussion is 
 concerned, the substitution of effective, non-emotional, mechanistic, 
 purely intellectual conceptions and manipulations of natural objects 
 and forces, for the spontaneous but ineffective, emotional, instinc- 
 tive, anthropopathic attitudes. 
 
 b) In the subjective sphere: The inspiring success of the new 
 mechanics and the need of a more exact science of social experience 
 made it inevitable that the application of the same mechanical 
 method should be attempted with reference to the subjective realm. 
 Hobbes is the great innovator in this departure; if emotion is 
 simply a kind of motion, a mechanics of morality would seem 
 feasible enough. Locke's sensationalism, the " association" psy- 
 chology and the whole rationalistic development in its application 
 to mental and spiritual experience, is the result of this ambition 
 to work out a mechanics of inner experience. 
 
 4. Critical mysticism. The significance of Leibniz in this 
 period is similar to that of Aristotle in the first. To the intellect 
 a dualism between res extensa and res cogitans is as unsatisfactory 
 as that between matter and form; and to the spiritual interests of 
 man an extreme and unmodified mechanistic view of life, whether 
 objective or subjective, is even more unacceptable. The chief 
 motive in the work of Leibniz was the desire to reduce this dualism 
 and to restore the meaning, the purposefulness, of the world, which 
 mechanism seemed to have destroyed. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF RELIGION 53 
 
 The reconciliation of the mechanical and teleological views of the world 
 .... was the leading motive in the thought of Leibniz. He wished to get 
 the mechanical explanation of nature .... carried through to its fullest 
 extent, and at the same time he cast about for thoughts by the aid of which 
 the purposeful living character of the universe might nevertheless remain 
 comprehensible. The attempt must therefore be made .... to see whether 
 the whole mechanical course of events could not be ultimately traced back to 
 efficient causes, whose purposeful nature should afford an import and meaning 
 to their working taken as a whole. The ultimate goal of this philosophy is 
 to understand the mechanism of the cosmic processes as the means and phenom- 
 enal form by which the living content or import of the world realizes itself. 1 
 
 How then does Leibniz reconcile mechanism and mysticism? 
 In other words, how, in the first place, does he modify mechanism 
 so as to relieve it of its cold and cheerless purposelessness, and how, 
 in the second place, does he guard mysticism against its inherent 
 tendency toward crude anthropopathism ? Space forbids anything 
 more than a compact and dogmatic statement. 
 
 In the first place, let us recall the net result of the achievements 
 in the mechanistic tendency up to this time. Democritus had 
 completed the Greek mechanization of substance by reducing all 
 qualitative differences to purely quantitative differences, as in the 
 doctrine of the atom, and had also reduced all changes to motion. 
 But motion remains as an unexplained datum, inseparably con- 
 nected with substance, for the atoms are eternally in motion. In 
 the second period the Galilean mechanics has logically eliminated 
 motion (the path of a cannon ball, for instance, being definable 
 in a mathematical formula, consisting of "variables," which 
 variables, when assigned any particular values, give, as their actual 
 meaning, a point, a motionless point, in two- or three-dimensional 
 space); so that, in the objective sphere, Descartes finds only res 
 extensa, or substance whose nature is extension. Now Leibniz 
 meets this entire situation by a startling innovation, which has 
 linked his fame with modern physical theory. This innovation 
 is the denial that the ultimate nature of substance is extension, 
 and the affirmation that it is force. There is nothing, he claims, 
 in extension which can explain force or motion, but force can explain 
 both extension and motion. The method by which he arrived at 
 
 1 Windelband, op. cit., p. 421. 
 
54 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 this conclusion was in part an examination of the problem of 
 inertia, 1 and in part (and this is no less significant, as recalling the 
 subjective-objective point of view of this whole humanistic period) 
 by an analysis of the logical judgment, the discovery that a true 
 substance is "that which is the subject of all the various predicates, 
 but is itself the predicate of no subject," and the assumption that 
 the self is the only subject which meets this condition, and is there- 
 fore the type of true substance. "The essential feature of sub- 
 stance, as represented by the Ego, is its self-originating and 
 self-determining nature. This dynamical quality .... [is] an 
 entelechy .... 'a sufficiency which makes it the source of its 
 internal activities.'" 2 This force, further, which is the ultimate 
 nature of all substance, of every "monad," is appetition, a striving 
 to fulfil its own potency by a progressively clear representation of 
 the nature of the whole universe. 
 
 On the surface this would seem to be mysticism with a ven- 
 geance. The whole previous development seems quite reversed, for 
 whereas Democritus, Galileo, and Descartes have reduced all 
 objective reality to extension, Leibniz pushes it all onto the other 
 horn of the dilemma, and reduces everything, bodies and motions 
 alike, to appetition, which confessedly is akin, at least in its higher 
 manifestations, to desire. How then does he safeguard his mys- 
 ticism from becoming a sort of animistic atomism ? 
 
 There are three factors in this part of his task: In the first 
 place, all change is restricted to an inherent development within 
 each monad, for it is explicitly denied that the monads influence 
 each other. They "have no windows." What is implicit simply 
 becomes explicit. What is potential becomes actual. Thus real 
 change is, so to speak, denatured. In the second place, there is a 
 pervasive equivocation in the use of the term "representation." 
 The fallacy of figure of speech could be traced in the suggestions 
 of the phrase, "a living mirror of the universe." 3 Representing 
 means sometimes symbolizing, sometimes perceiving, a curious 
 fusion of the mathematical and the psychological. An algebraic 
 
 X C. Windelband, op. cit., p. 421. 
 
 3 See Hibben, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, pp. 168, 169. 
 
 3 Italics mine. See Monadology, sees. 56, 83. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF RELIGION 55 
 
 equation represents a circle; the conscious purpose of the supreme 
 monad represents the whole cosmic process. The concepts of the 
 mathematician's consciousness and the mathematical truth of his 
 consciousness are melted into an equivocal notion pregnant with 
 a superficial success for the solution of the dilemma under discus- 
 sion. 1 In the third place, the doctrine of " pre-established har- 
 mony " emerges from this mathematical type of representation. If 
 4X 2 4- 93^ = 36 represents an ellipse and 4^ 9^ = 36 represents a 
 hyperbola, the change from plus to minus sign does not cause the 
 change from ellipse to hyperbola; the two changes simply reveal 
 an inherent and necessary co-ordination. In some such sense is 
 there a " pre-established harmony" between thoughts of the soul 
 and movements of the body, between the divine purpose and the 
 events of history, between the "windowless" development of 
 every monad and that of every other. 2 Thus real cause, in the 
 dynamic sense, is, in large part, supplanted by cause in the mathe- 
 matical sense, a " function of variables." In short, the mechanistic 
 world of res extensa is replaced by a mystical world of force-monads. 
 But this dynamic reality is rendered static, its harmony is pre- 
 established, its "appetition" is congealed into formal logic. To 
 be sure, in the last resort, the whole scheme resolves itself into and 
 solves itself by an appeal to theology. But so did Plato fall back 
 on mythology, making "participation" intelligible by invoking 
 the " demiurge" the philosophical deus ex machinal 
 
 To a friend Leibniz writes: "I flatter myself that I have dis- 
 covered the harmony of the different systems, and have seen that 
 both sides are right, provided they do not clash with one another; 
 that in the phenomena of nature everything happens mechanically, 
 and at the same time metaphysically." 3 " Provided they do not 
 clash with one another!" What a petitio principal This age-old 
 puzzle is not solved by a little mathematics, and the philosopher is 
 doomed to tread many more weary rounds. From Aristotle to 
 Leibniz, from Leibniz to Bergson, the problem passes. But in 
 
 1 Compare Windelband's statement in another connection, "Leibniz is here served 
 a very good turn by the ambiguity in the word 'representation,' " op. cit., p. 422, n. 6. 
 3 Compare Hibben, op. cit., pp. 179 ff. 
 3 Schriften, II, 607. Quoted by Hibben, op. cit., p. 185. 
 
56 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 the meantime Kant has, by his "Copernican revolution," enabled 
 men to envisage the whole situation in an entirely new way. 
 Perhaps in this third period we shall come nearer to the heart of the 
 trouble in this mechanistic-mystical dilemma. 
 
 III. THE THIRD PERIOD: FROM ROUSSEAU TO BERGSON 
 
 i. The reaction from rationalism: Rousseau' 's philosophy of 
 feeling. As the Greeks had reacted from Olympianism and dis- 
 covered a hylozoistic world, the Renaissance had reacted from 
 supernaturalism and discovered a self-and-nature reality, a 
 humanistic-naturalistic world. But, as before, the strain upon 
 the hyphen steadily increased. The microcosm and macrocosm 
 of Bruno become the res cogitans and res extensa of Descartes. 
 The simplifying work goes on, and Descartes' res cogitans becomes, 
 for Locke, a tabula rasa, still further impoverished, "innate ideas" 
 being denied. The Cartesian dualism was not so intolerable, 
 because innate ideas, through the demonstration of the existence 
 of God, provided some sort of connection, by means of " occa- 
 sionalisms," "pre-established harmonies," etc. But Locke was 
 harder pressed to find the connection between the tabula rasa mind 
 and the world. The embarrassment is relieved somewhat by 
 Berkeley's startling innovation, but that is soon overthrown by 
 Hume. There is a chasm now between even the surface and the 
 body of the tabula, and the impressions on the once rasa surface 
 give absolutely no clue to the existence of the reality for which 
 they seem to stand. Real connections between God and the world, 
 between self and nature, have utterly disappeared. The two 
 partial dichotomies of Descartes have produced an absolutely 
 complete trichotomy. Rationalism and deism have reduced reality 
 to utter barrenness. Such is the result of the progressive 
 impoverishment of the erstwhile meaningful human microcosm 
 by the assiduous application to it of the ideal of mathematics and 
 mechanics. 
 
 The great significance of Rousseau is, in a word, his effectual 
 affirmation of the truth that there is much in the human microcosm 
 besides a mathematical intellect. As Descartes had begun by 
 shutting out the "animal spirits" from the confines of the soul 
 
THE PROBLEM OF RELIGION 57 
 
 (the real res cogitans), Rousseau reversed the whole matter by 
 submerging the mind in the feelings. 
 
 To re-enrich the self was inevitably to close up the fatal dualisms 
 of the past two centuries, and before long Herder was showing that 
 the individual and the nation are mystically one, ScheUing that 
 the self and nature are mystically one, Schleiermacher that man and 
 God are mystically one, Fichte that moral will and knowledge 
 process are mystically one in a word, the whole new age is rejoicing 
 in the rediscovered unity of life. It finds its great intellectual 
 statement in Hegel. 
 
 2. But in this rich and rapid development the basic difficulties 
 of the mechanistic-mystical dilemma have been somewhat obscured. 
 The passion for unity has outstripped Kant's cautious dualism of 
 the pure reason and the practical reason. The novelty of his 
 "Copernican revolution," his putting of the whole question on the 
 new level of constructive idealism, quite overshadowed the enigma 
 of how the same ego can find both necessity and freedom, irrecon- 
 cilables as they are, in its experience. The world is mechanical, 
 said Kant, because of the inexorable workings of the pure reason; 
 life is mystical because of the no less inexorable workings of the 
 practical reason; can these two expressions of the ego be reconciled ? 
 The Critique of the Judgment was an attempt to solve the old 
 dilemma, stated now, not in objective terms, nor in objective- 
 subjective terms, but in the strictly subjective terms of "pure 
 reason" and "practical reason." But whatever force there was 
 in the solution offered in the Critique of the Judgment was rendered 
 obsolete on the advent of Darwinism. 
 
 3. But advancing science has forced upon religion once more the 
 ancient perplexity. The significance of "natural selection" and 
 "conservation of energy," about the middle of the century, and 
 the whole subsequent development, particularly in psychology, 
 are too obvious to be more than mentioned. In reaction against 
 materialism (mechanism) absolute idealism has been revived, with 
 many modifications and refinements. (Logically, from the stand- 
 point of this paper, absolute idealism belongs to the level of the 
 second period, where the two terms are self and nature, ego and 
 world. During the enlightenment the influence of mechanics 
 
58 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 enabled the mechanism of nature to swallow up the self, the laws 
 of the physical world to reduce the ego to an unreality. In absolute 
 idealism the influence of Berkeley and Kant enabled the mystical 
 creativeness of the self to swallow up nature, the laws of the think- 
 ing ego to reduce the physical world to an unreality. For rational- 
 ism, the world-machine, including the cogs of "association," the 
 levers of "pleasure-and-pain," is all, and, except as a piece of it, 
 of a piece with it, the ego is nothing. For idealism the absolute 
 ego is all, and the world of events and things and men, except as 
 a piece of it, of a piece with it, is nothing, a "mere appearance.") 
 For the rest, the religious spirit has fallen back on Kant's cleavage 
 between the moral nature and the intellect. Such is the logic 
 of the whole Ritschlian movement. We are shown a realm of 
 values and a realm of existences. These are incommensurables; 
 science and religion are mutually immune. 
 
 4. But now finally the task of Aristotle in the first, of Leibniz 
 in the second, has been attempted in this third period by Bergson: 
 In a word, he takes up the problem where Kant left it, and with the 
 new concept of evolution strives to show the underlying unity 
 between the intellect, the organ of mechanism, which reveals a 
 world determined at every point, and intuition, the organ of 
 mysticism, which reveals a world of spontaneity and freedom. 
 
 Of Bergson's treatment of the problem and of the lesson which 
 the whole story of the problem teaches as to the future method of 
 approach I shall speak in the following chapter. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 THE PROBLEM OF RELIGION Continued 
 
 Modern philosophy had its roots in a quickened sense of the 
 distinction between the human self and the non-human world in 
 the midst of which its existence is cast. This enhanced self- 
 consciousness of man began to move around two foci of difficulty: 
 on the one hand the freshly stimulated intellect was keenly aware 
 of its privilege of striving to know its environing world at first hand ; 
 on the other the new evaluation of human worth, accompanied 
 by diminution of vital interest in the traditional " other" world of 
 ecclesiastical thought, inevitably threw the objective " natural" 
 world into the position of a more or less enigmatical vis-a-vis. 
 Hence developed at once a twofold dualism, that of the knower 
 and the object-of -knowledge, and of the self and the non-human 
 "other." To comprehend the difficulties of the former phase of 
 this dualism has been the task of epistemology ; to solve those of the 
 latter, the philosophical problem of religion. The two are obviously 
 closely interwoven. Any solution of either one will ultimately 
 have to reckon with the other. The great need is for a philosophy 
 that embraces both problems from a unitary point of view, and 
 works always with an empirical rather than a speculative method. 
 
 For an empirical theology, of course, the second of these two 
 dualisms and its various difficulties and proposed solutions is of 
 primary importance. But the moral self, which must face its en- 
 vironing non-human world and discover, for weal or woe, whether 
 that world is " spiritual" or "material," is also a knowing self, 
 and the value of its religious convictions must always depend 
 ultimately on the validity of its cognitional processes. 1 To the 
 primary aspect of this twofold problem the present chapter is de- 
 voted; of the other, its indispensable complement, a discussion will 
 be given later. 
 
 1 "Cognitional" is here used in the broadest sense, as including any form of con- 
 sciousness that seems to grasp reality. 
 
 59 
 
60 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 In the preceding chapter I have made an effort to state in 
 brief and simple outlines the way in which what I have called the 
 mechanical-mystical dilemma has presented itself in the course of 
 philosophical reflection. It was pointed out that when serious 
 reflection is thrown back upon nature, on the collapse of some 
 long-standing supranature scheme of things, man always finds 
 some aspects of this non-supernatural environment which elicit 
 from him social responses, more vague, less anthropomorphic, 
 to be sure, than the original animism (or "animatism") of primi- 
 tive religion, but no less truly social in their essential character. 
 *Of such social responses to the non-human environment (in other 
 than these social moods called the physical world) the hylozoism 
 of the lonians was typical, as also the "nature poetry" of Bruno 
 and Boehme. This sort of attitude, instinctive-reflective, I have 
 called mysticism (or classical mysticism to distinguish it clearly 
 from the other type, which is an attitude directed toward the 
 clearly supernatural socii of the divine " other" world). This 
 social sort of attitude toward nature, however, is continually 
 checked and modified by the mechanical habits of thought and 
 action which the events and things of life ordinarily elicit from us. 
 The mystical attitude and the mechanical attitude are thus pitted 
 against each other, neither one being able to force the other com- 
 pletely from the field. Thus through philosophy runs the mystical- 
 mechanical dilemma. 
 
 It was pointed out, further, that the outstanding efforts to find 
 some resolution of this dilemma have moved upon one or other 
 of three levels. In the first period, that of Greek philosophy, 
 the problem was typically upon an objective level; in the second, 
 from Bruno 1 to Leibniz, subjective-objective, that is, the external 
 physical world is mechanically interpreted, the inner world is felt to 
 be spiritual, that is, it is mystically interpreted, and hence the 
 problem of the relation between the microcosm and the macrocosm, 
 the res cogitans and the res extensa, the "monad" which is soul 
 
 1 In its beginnings, it is true, this period attributes to the "macrocosm" a quasi- 
 personal quality, under the idea of natura naturans, and in so far it remains on the 
 first or objective level. But the subjective-objective dualism is soon clearly formu- 
 lated by Descartes. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF RELIGION 6 1 
 
 and the "monad" which is (or seems to be) matter. Though 
 Rousseau and the Romantic movement gave a check to the victory 
 which, in rationalism, mechanism seemed to be winning over 
 mysticism, the advent of physiological psychology, in particular, 
 plunged thought into the old dilemma again, and during the last 
 three-quarters of a century the battle has been waged with increas- 
 ing bitterness, on the question whether the soul or the mind can 
 have, rightfully, any mystical evaluation at all, or whether the 
 human spirit must be seen in the last analysis as only an exceedingly 
 complex mechanism of strictly material forces or elements. Of the 
 tendency to give the inner life this latter purely mechanistic inter- 
 pretation, Haeckel's philosophy is typical. 1 
 
 On the third level, however, the problem is given a distinctly 
 new formulation by Kant. His " Copernican revolution" consists, 
 in a word, in relegating the question of the ultimate nature of 
 reality, as it is apart from human consciousness, to the limbo of the 
 unknowable and in striving instead to understand how it is that 
 the human mind, by virtue of its very constitution, gives to experi- 
 ence the two incompatible aspects of necessity and freedom, and 
 then to discover the underlying unity of this, the mind's twofold 
 activity, which produces these apparent irreconcilables. The 
 explanation of how the mind mechanizes experience is given in the 
 Critique of the Pure Reason; of how it mysticizes experience, in 
 the Critique of the Practical Reason; of how these two are funda- 
 mentally unitary, in the Critique of the Judgment (especially the 
 first part, concerning the aesthetic judgment). 
 
 It will be helpful to make, for the present, a definite effort to 
 keep this phase of the significance of Kant's innovation distinct 
 from the epistemological questions with which it is so closely con- 
 nected. So far as the religious problem is concerned the importance 
 of Kant consists simply in this: first, that the mechanical-mystical 
 dilemma becomes primarily a question of how the human mind 
 by virtue of its own operations gives of the same facts both a 
 mechanistic and a mystical interpretation ; and that, secondly, the 
 
 1 Haeckel, in reality, only pushes the problem back to the first level, in that he 
 attributes to the material atom a rudimentary sort of feeling or inclination only 
 one more of the many modifications of hylozoism. 
 
62 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 reconciliation of these irreconcilables is seen to be primarily a 
 psychological and not a metaphysical problem. This is the new 
 cue for the discussion of the old problem. In so far as it has been 
 ignored by the nineteenth-century philosophy nothing new has 
 been added to the earlier viewpoints. And for the most part it has 
 been ignored on account of three different directions in which the 
 philosophy of the century has moved. 
 
 1. The epistemological difficulties of a human idealism at 
 once pushed philosophers on to an absolute idealism. Within this 
 " absolute" doctrine the same mechanistic-mystical dilemma 
 asserted itself again, so that, as in the case of rationalism and 
 Rousseau, there was the antagonism of the mathematical-logical 
 ideal and the ethical-emotional ideal, in absolute idealism we find 
 a rationalistic dialectic which tends toward a denial that the 
 absolute is "personal" (e.g., Bradley), and an ethico-mystical 
 tendency which asserts that the absolute is " personal" (e.g., 
 Royce). But obviously any attempt at a reconciliation of these 
 opposing viewpoints must, in the nature of the case, be meta- 
 physical or merely dialectical; and such an undertaking is not 
 in line with the psychological method which Kant undertook 
 (which, it is true, gave place to a logical and metaphysical pro- 
 cedure before his task had been carried very far). 
 
 2. The inevitable reaction against idealism carried the problem 
 back at once to the first, the objective, level. Herbart's "reals," 
 for instance, are an attempted amalgamation of the primitive static 
 and the primitive dynamic conceptions the "reals" are abso- 
 lutely changeless in themselves, and yet each seeks to "preserve 
 its identity against disturbances on the part of the other reals." 
 The common, unconfessed assumption of all such systems, from 
 Democritus to Haeckel, is that if one can but reduce the non- 
 dynamic (the non-mystical or mechanical) and the dynamic (the 
 mystical) phases of experience each to the lowest conceivable 
 terms, they will somehow fuse in a single type of existence, a simple 
 entity. The success of all such systems depends upon either an 
 elusive fallacy of equivocation, as in the case of Leibnitz' use of the 
 term "representation," or the uncritical acceptance of a hyphenated 
 
THE PROBLEM OF RELIGION 63 
 
 atom or monad in place of the rejected enigma of a hyphenated 
 (mechanical-mystical) world. 
 
 3. The century has been characterized by heroic efforts to ignore 
 both the religious and the epistemological problems by restricting 
 philosophical attention to the questions of the relation of the self 
 and its human environment. But it is interesting to observe how 
 inevitably these movements are forced to come ultimately face 
 to face with the very extra-human reality from which they tried to 
 withdraw reflection. In this third tendency there are three clearly 
 distinguishable types, (a) Positivism. But note that Comte, in 
 his later days, recognizes the need of religion to supply the social 
 movement with an adequate dynamic, and therefore elaborates his 
 " religion of humanity"; this is a long step toward grounding 
 ethics in an extra-human background, for " humanity" spans 
 the ages and takes on some sort of cosmic significance. Guyau 
 goes farther and describes ethical conduct as a sort of co-operation 
 with the cosmos or with nature, (b) Utilitarianism. But note 
 that Spencer's evolutionism drags the utilitarian ethics irresistibly 
 into the realm of the philosophy of the extra-human by raising 
 the question as to the relation between the law of biological survival 
 and the law of human conduct; through Huxley and Green this 
 issue is pushed on into an idealistic metaphysics, (c) In Germany, 
 Max S timer and Bahnsen give the non-metaphysical ethics an 
 utterly individualistic tendency, defending a regardlessly solipsistic 
 morality. Deprived thus of even its social anchorage (which it 
 had in those typical French and English movements), the reaction 
 against the philosophical tradition, with its apparently unsolvable 
 religious and epistemological perplexities, finds a frantic culmina- 
 tion in the Nietzschian demand for a " revaluation of all values." 
 
 We come back then to the question as to how far Kant's formu- 
 lation of the mechanical-mystical dilemma has guided philosophy 
 in the last century. In one way his example has had a very great 
 effect, in the practical dualism of existence and value, of intellectual 
 processes and appreciative insight, of scientific method and religious 
 faith, which has played so large a part in recent thought. For 
 example, the whole Ritschlian movement is based on the Kantian 
 
64 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 dualism of the "pure reason" and the "practical reason." But 
 this neo-Kantian movement fails to do justice to Kant's concern 
 for the underlying unity of the mind, which, as said above, found 
 expression in his Critique of the Judgment. 
 
 The philosopher who in recent times has made the greatest 
 effort to orient this problem of the mechanistic-mystical aspects 
 of life on the third level, that of Kantian constructive idealism, 
 and to seek a solution for it from the larger Kantian viewpoint 
 is Bergson. He starts, as Kant did, to make a psychological study 
 of the contradictory testimony which our human consciousness 
 gives as to the nature of reality; his psychology proves inadequate, 
 as Kant's did, and is supplemented by metaphysics ; he combines a 
 constructive idealism with dualism and realism, as Kant also did. 
 (And yet, professing a radical empiricism and a thoroughgoing 
 evolutionism, he seems to some to have much in common with the 
 "pragmatism" of William James.) It seems to the present writer 
 that a brief examination, of Bergson's philosophy may make a 
 particularly appropriate background against which to suggest the 
 direction in which a strictly psychological, non-metaphysical 
 method of approaching this ancient dilemma must probably 
 proceed. 
 
 Let us note, in the first place, how forcibly Bergson states the 
 issue regarding the mechanical and mystical aspects of experience, 
 especially in that realm where the ancient debate has taken on its 
 peculiarly modern intensity, that of the inner life. This is the 
 theme of the first of his three major works, Essai sur les donnees 
 immediates de la conscience. 1 Note in the first place his discussion 
 of the two conceptions of causality, the mathematical and the 
 dynamic. 2 These two conceptions are continually striving to 
 replace each other. 
 
 Unfortunately the habit has grown up of taking the principle of causality 
 
 in both senses at the same time Sometimes we think particularly of the 
 
 regular succession of physical phenomena and of the kind of inner effort by 
 which one becomes another; sometimes we fix our mind on the absolute regu- 
 
 1 Paris, 1889; English translation by Pogson, Time and Free Witt. Macmillan, 
 1910 (sd ed. 1913). 
 
 3 Op. cit., pp. 204 ff. and 211 ff. 
 
' THE PROBLEM OF RELIGION 65 
 
 larity of the phenomena, and from the idea of regularity we pass by impercep- 
 tible steps to that of mathematical necessity And we do not see any 
 
 harm hi letting these two conceptions blend into one another and in assigning 
 greater importance to the one or the other according as we are more or less con- 
 cerned with the interests of science. 1 
 
 But with the progress of science this quasi-personal notion of 
 causation is more and more excluded in favor of mathematical 
 equivalence. 
 
 The sundering of these two ideas is an accomplished fact in the natural 
 sciences. The physicist may speak of forces and even picture their mode of 
 action by analogy with an inner effort, but he will never introduce this hypothe- 
 sis into a scientific explanation. Even those who, with Faraday, replace the 
 extended atoms by dynamic points will treat the centres of force and the lines 
 of force mathematically, without troubling about force itself considered as an 
 activity or an effort. It then comes to be understood that the relation of 
 external causality is purely mathematical and has no resemblance to the 
 relation between psychical force and the act which springs from it. 2 
 
 Science cannot deal with tune and motion except on condition of first 
 eliminating the essential and qualitative element of time, duration, and of 
 motion, mobility. 3 
 
 Nevertheless, we cannot entirely succeed in mathematicizing 
 the natural world. On this pertinacity of the anthropopathic ele- 
 ment in our conception of nature, the way in which some not 
 entirely necessary factor seems to remain, our feeling for a residual 
 spontaneity in the natural process, note the following: 
 
 We certainly feel, it is true, that although things do not endure as we do 
 ourselves, nevertheless there must be some reason why phenomena are seen to 
 succeed one another instead of being set out all at once. And this is why the 
 notion of causality, although it gets indefinitely near that of identity, will 
 never- seem to us to coincide with it, unless we conceive clearly the idea of a 
 mathematical mechanism or unless some subtle metaphysic removes our 
 very legitimate scruples on that point.* 
 
 With regard to the inner life there is the same mechanical- 
 mystical dilemma as in the case of outer fact. 
 
 There are finally two different selves, one of which is, as it were, the ex- 
 ternal projection of the other, its spatial and, so to speak, social representation. 
 
 1 Op. cit., p. 216 (last italics mine). 3 Op. cit., p. 115. 
 
 2 Op. cit., pp. 218-19. 4 Op. cit., p. 210. 
 
66 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 We reach the former by deep introspection, which leads us to grasp our inner 
 states as living things, constantly becoming, as states not amenable to 
 measure, which permeate one another and of which the succession in duration 
 has nothing in common with juxtaposition in homogeneous space. But the 
 moments at which we thus grasp ourselves are rare, and that is just why we are 
 rarely free. The greater part of the time we live outside ourselves, hardly 
 perceiving anything of ourselves but our own ghost, a colorless shadow which 
 pure duration projects into homogeneous space. Hence our life unfolds in 
 space rather than in tune; we live for the external world rather than for our- 
 selves; we speak rather than think; we "are acted" rather than act ourselves. 
 To act freely is to recover possession of oneself, and to get back into pure 
 duration. 1 
 
 But, in our view, there is a third course which might be taken, namely, 
 to carry ourselves back in thought to those moments of our life when we made 
 some serious decision, moments unique of their kind, which will never be 
 repeated any more than the past phases in the history of a nation will ever 
 come back again. We should see that if these past states cannot be adequately 
 expressed in words or artificially reconstructed by a juxtaposition of simpler 
 states, it is because in their dynamic unity and wholly qualitative multiplicity 
 they are phases of our real and concrete duration, a heterogeneous duration and 
 a living one. We should see that, if our action was pronounced by us to be 
 free, it is because the relation of this action to the state from which it issued 
 could not be expressed by a law, this psychic state being unique of its kind and 
 unable ever to occur again. We should see, finally, that the very idea of 
 necessary determination here loses every shred of meaning, that there cannot be 
 any question either of foreseeing the act before it is performed or of reasoning 
 about the possibility of the contrary action once the deed is done, for to have 
 all the conditions given is, in concrete duration, to place oneself at the very 
 moment of the act and not to foresee it. But we should also understand the 
 illusion which makes the one party think that they are compelled to deny 
 freedom, and the others that they must define it. // is because the transition 
 is made by imperceptible steps from concrete duration, whose elements permeate 
 one another, to symbolical duration, whose moments are set side by side, and conse- 
 quently from free activity to conscious automatism. It is because, although 
 we are free whenever we are willing to get back into ourselves, it seldom happens 
 that we are willing. It is because, finally, even in the cases where the action 
 is freely performed, we cannot reason about it without setting out its condi- 
 tions externally to one another, therefore in space and no longer in pure dura- 
 tion. The problem of freedom has thus sprung from a misunderstanding ; it has 
 been to the moderns what the paradoxes of the Eleatics were to the ancients, 
 and, like these paradoxes, it has its origin in the illusion through which we 
 
 1 Op. cit., pp. 231-32. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF RELIGION 67 
 
 confuse succession and simultaneity, duration and extensity, quality and 
 quantity. 1 
 
 In whatever way, in a word, freedom is viewed, it cannot be denied except 
 on condition of identifying time with space; it cannot be defined except on 
 condition of demanding that space should adequately represent time; it cannot 
 be argued about in one sense or the other except on condition of previously con- 
 fusing succession and simultaneity. All determinism will thus be refuted 
 by experience, but every attempt to define freedom will open the way to 
 determinism. 2 
 
 Certainly we are under a great obligation to Bergson for stating 
 so clearly the dilemma of the mind that is both religious and 
 scientific. The fact stands out amazing, fascinating. In the 
 great moments of life we know ourselves to be free, but we can give 
 no account of the experience in definite description, without, ipso 
 facto, showing the whole experience to be utterly determined, step 
 by step, element by element, in unbroken and unbreakable suc- 
 cession of cause and effect, condition and consequence. We know 
 our own free act as free and spontaneous, but the moment we 
 reflect upon it our freedom utterly vanishes. The Greeks began this 
 baffling quest by finding the world, self-contradictingly, both 
 spirit and matter, both spontaneous and machine-like, both fortui- 
 tous congeries of soulless atoms and meaningful system of events 
 and ends. For us moderns the struggle of the two motifs has been, 
 by psychology, reduced to the more bitterly contested arena of 
 inner experience. That this is the core, the crux, of the religious 
 problem, there can be no doubt. The fact that Bergson has put 
 his finger so definitely and clearly upon it and has offered an appar- 
 ently promiseful solution is ample explanation of his great popu- 
 larity with thoughtful religious people. 
 
 Let me anticipate here, for the sake of clearness and emphasis, 
 the point which I hope to make at the conclusion of this chapter. 
 Bergson' s problem turns upon this transition made by imperceptible 
 steps from intuition to intellect, from the mystical to the mechanistic 
 type of cognitional consciousness. The question is, Are these 
 steps really imperceptible? In spite of the fact that in many 
 places Bergson speaks of intuition (or instinct) and intellect as 
 
 1 Op. cit., pp. 238-40 (italics mine). a Op. cit., p. 230. 
 
68 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 fused and blended in every moment of consciousness (and so, 
 one would think, amenable to close psychological scrutiny and 
 possible disentanglement), he has conceived of them, in his meta- 
 physics, as so profoundly different in their respective natures 
 that any actual psychological account of the " transition," any 
 analysis of the "steps, " from intuitional to intellectual operations is 
 simply out of the question. If his psychology had been adequate 
 to the task of analyzing these so-called " imperceptible steps," 
 would not his metaphysical account of the gulf between instinct 
 and intellect have been quite uncalled for? In other words, if 
 the gulf which seems to yawn between them could be seen, by 
 psychological analysis, to be filled with a series of conscious states 
 differing not in kind but only in innumerable delicate degrees, no 
 metaphysical explanation would be required, for the gulf would not 
 exist. A more adequate psychology would render unnecessary a 
 more "subtle metaphysic." This doubtless is the direction in which 
 an empirical theology must look for light on its primary problem, 
 the mechanical-mystical dilemma. 
 
 What then is the explanation which Bergson gives of this 
 peculiarity of human experience, that by a kind of mystical direct 
 apprehension we grasp the reality of spontaneity and freedom but 
 by every act of intellectual reflection thereon we inevitably cognize 
 our acts and thoughts as utterly determined, of this " illusion 
 through which we confuse succession and simultaneity, duration and 
 extensity, quality and quantity," of the fact that "the transition 
 is made by imperceptible steps from concrete duration, whose ele- 
 ments permeate one another, to symbolical duration, whose 
 elements are set out side by side" ? 
 
 The explanation is, briefly, as follows: 
 
 The Original Impetus, the Elan vital, the primordial "con- 
 sciousness," like a jet of steam, becomes "congealed" into a kind of 
 inert negation of itself; falls back, as it were, upon itself and so 
 offers a kind of resistance and obstruction to its own free movement. 
 This "inverse movement" of "consciousness" is "matter." But 
 the Elan vital pushes its way into matter, retarding its "inverse" 
 tendency, in part held back by it and in part carrying it along on its 
 own current. In this partial imprisoning of the Impetus by its 
 
THE PROBLEM OF RELIGION 69 
 
 inverse movement, in this Organization of inert matter by "con- 
 sciousness," consists what we mean by "life." Life takes three 
 directions torpor, instinct, intellect. These, it is important to 
 note, are not successive stages or levels but parallel branches of 
 evolution. The contrasted characters of instinct and intellect 
 are explained on the ground that in its progress life as instinct has 
 been turned inward upon itself, whereas life as intellect has been 
 turned toward matter. Instinct has thus a power of getting 
 directly at the secrets of vital processes, whereas intellect must play 
 forever upon the surface of living things as upon the surface of inert 
 solids. 
 
 The following citations (from Mitchell's translation of Creative 
 Evolution) will make clear the foregoing interpretation. 
 
 Consciousness, or supraconsciousness, is the name for the rocket whose 
 extinguished fragments fall back as matter; consciousness again is the name 
 for that which subsists of the rocket itself passing through the fragments 
 and lighting them up into organisms [p. 261]. 
 
 Life appears in its entirety as an immense wave which starting from a 
 centre spreads outwards and which on almost the whole of its circumference 
 is stopped and converted into oscillation [p. 266]. 
 
 That undivided movement of descent which is materiality itself [p. 271]. 
 
 The double form of consciousness is then due to the double form of the 
 real, and theory of knowledge must be dependent upon metaphysics [p. 178]. 
 
 Vegetative torpor, instinct, and intelligence these, then, are the elements 
 that coincided in the vital impulsion common to plants and animals, and 
 which, in the course of a development in which they were made manifest in most 
 unforeseen forms, have been dissociated by the very fact of their growth. The 
 cardinal error which, from Aristotle onwards, has vitiated most of the philosophies 
 of nature is to see in vegetative, instinctive, and rational life, three successive degrees 
 of the development of one and the same tendency, whereas they are three divergent 
 directions of an activity which has split up as it grew. The difference between 
 them is not a difference of intensity, nor, more generally, of degree, but of 
 kind [p. 135]. 
 
 One of the clearest results of biology has been to show that evolution has 
 taken place along divergent lines. It is at the extremity of two of these lines 
 the two principal that we find intelligence and instinct in forms almost pure 
 
 [p. I75J. 
 
 Intuition and intellect represent two opposite directions of the work of con- 
 sciousness : intuition goes in the very direction of life itself; intellect goes in the 
 inverse direction and thus finds itself naturally in accordance with the move- 
 ment of matter [p. 267!. 
 
70 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 Instinct and intellect are two divergent developments of one and the same 
 principle, which in the one case remains within itself, in the other steps out of 
 itself and becomes absorbed in the utilization of inert matter. This gradual 
 divergence testifies to a radical incompatibility and points to the fact that it 
 is impossible for intelligence to reabsorb instinct. That which is instinctive in 
 instinct cannot be expressed in terms of intelligence [p. 167]. 
 
 Consciousness is essentially free; it is freedom itself; but it cannot pass 
 through matter without settling on it, without adapting itself to it. This 
 adaptation is what we call intellectuality [p. 270]. 
 
 The intellect has been cut out of it [life] by a process resembling that which 
 has generated matter [p. 268]. 
 
 If consciousness has thus split up into intuition and intelligence it is because 
 of the need it had to apply itself to matter at the same time as it had to follow 
 the stream of life [p. 178]. 
 
 The success of physics would be inexplicable, if the movement which con- 
 stitutes materiality were not the same movement which, prolonged by us to 
 its end, that is to say, to homogeneous space, results in making us count, 
 measure, follow in their respective variations terms that are functions one of 
 another. To effect this prolongation of the movement, our intellect has only 
 to let itself go, for it runs naturally to space and mathematics, intellectuality 
 and materiality being of the same nature and having been produced in the 
 same way [p. 219]. 
 
 For we cannot too often repeat it intelligence and instinct are turned 
 in opposite directions, the former toward inert matter, the latter toward life. 
 Intelligence, by means of science, which is its work, will deliver up to us more 
 and more the secret of physical operations; of life it brings us, and, moreover, 
 only claims to bring us, a translation in terms of inertia. It goes all around life, 
 taking from outside the greatest possible number of views of it, drawing it into 
 itself instead of entering into it. But it is to the very inwardness of life that 
 intuition leads us [p. 176]. 
 
 The intellectual representation of continuity is negative, being at bottom 
 only the refusal of our mind before any actually given system of decomposition 
 to regard it as the only possible one. Of the discontinuous alone does the intel- 
 lect form a clear idea [p. 154]. 
 
 Of immobility alone does the intellect form a clear idea [p. 155]. 
 
 The intellect is characterized by a natural inability to comprehend life 
 [p. 165]. 
 
 The main purpose of the present discussion is to point out, first, 
 that Bergson's philosophy has the inveterate mechanical-mystical 
 dilemma as its central problem; then, that his discussion which 
 begins with psychological analysis (the third level, upon which 
 the problem has gained a footing since Kant's great innovation) 
 
THE PROBLEM OF RELIGION 71 
 
 is soon forced to re-enter the metaphysical realm because of 
 the inadequacy of this psychological analysis; and, finally, to sug- 
 gest, against this background, the direction in which a more 
 tenacious and consistent psychological investigation must probably 
 proceed in order to overcome this deficiency, and thus enable 
 empirical theology to come to terms with science upon ground that 
 is itself a proper subject for strictly scientific treatment. A criti- 
 cism of the Bergsonian metaphysics, therefore, is beside the mark. 
 It is, however, pertinent to the main issue to note at least one 
 point (a pivotal point it is) in which the metaphysics most obvi- 
 ously points to an unsolved psychological problem, and to indicate 
 how unsatisfactory the proffered metaphysical solution is. And 
 the point in question is not merely a pivotal point so far as Berg- 
 son's treatment of this religious problem is concerned; it is like- 
 wise essential to his treatment of the other, the epistemological, 
 phase of that great underlying self-and-nature dualism which, as I 
 indicated at the outset, is the most important motif of modern 
 philosophy. I refer to his doctrine of the relation between the 
 spatiality of matter and the spatiality of the intellect. Note 
 the following characteristic statements: 1 " Determinations of space 
 or categories of the understanding, whichever we will, spatiality 
 and intellectuality being moulded on each other" (p. 257). "In- 
 tellectuality and materiality have been constituted in detail by 
 reciprocal adaptation" (p. 186). "The division of unorganized 
 matter into separate bodies is relative to our senses and to our 
 intellect, and matter, looked at as an indivisible whole must be a 
 flux rather than a thing" (p. 186). "It is our perception which 
 cuts inert matter into distinct bodies" (p. 227). But compare 
 with these last two statements the following: "Things have a 
 natural tendency to fit into a frame of this kind." "A certain 
 natural geometry suggested by the most general and immediately 
 perceived properties of solids" (p. 161). In a word, space is partly 
 real and partly ideal; matter has a "certain natural geometry," 
 and ' ' all the operations of our intellect tend to geometry. " " When 
 we observe that a thing really is there where it acts, we shall be led 
 to say (as Faraday was) that all the atoms interpenetrate and 
 1 Mitchell's translation of Creative Evolution. 
 
72 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 that each of them fills the world. On such a hypothesis, the atom, 
 or more generally the material point, becomes simply a view of the 
 mind, a view which we come to take when we continue far enough 
 the work (wholly relative to our faculty of acting) by which we 
 subdivide matter into bodies. Yet it is undeniable that matter 
 lends itself to this subdivision, and that in supposing it breakable 
 into parts external to one another, we are constructing a science 
 sufficiently representative of the real" (p. 203). 
 
 And what is the explanation of this reciprocal spatiality of 
 matter and intellect ? The most concise statement is the following: 
 "The space of our geometry and the spatiality of things are mutu- 
 ally engendered by the reciprocal action and reaction of two terms 
 which are essentially the same, but which move each in the direc- 
 tion inverse of the other . . . . ," z a statement which neither in 
 itself nor in its thirty-odd pages of exposition is very illuminating 
 or convincing. But and this is the important thing Bergson's 
 treatment suggests here the very point at which the problem of 
 knowledge needs most to be attacked. "This long analysis was 
 necessary to show how the real can pass from tension to extension 
 and from freedom to mechanical necessity by way of inversion." 3 
 But this analysis begins with a little psychological introspection. 3 
 Query: Might not a more thoroughgoing psychology, genetic as 
 well as introspective, with the aid of physics, give us a more empiri- 
 cal and hence a more useful account of this undeniable reciprocity 
 of spatiality, of quantityness, between thought and things, which 
 is the strength of exact science and the stronghold of realism ? 
 
 Let us now note some general aspects of Bergson's psychology. 
 Probably its chief point of inadequacy is its lack of an appreciation 
 of the instinctive nature and primary importance of social experi- 
 ence. For Bergson the individual seems to be primary and social 
 consciousness secondary. This inadequacy is of special importance 
 in connection with the question of the self. What is the "funda- 
 mental self" and what are the "parasitic selves" of which he 
 
 1 Op. cit., p. 202. This recalls the similar fashion in which Aristotle resolved the 
 dilemma as it shaped itself in his time, namely the skilful playing upon one another 
 of two mutually necessary and strictly complementary conceptions. 
 
 2 Op. cit., p. 236. *0/>. cit., pp. 199-220. 
 
TEE PROBLEM OF RELIGION 73 
 
 speaks so often ? Here one cannot but observe how little Bergson 
 appreciates the part which social experience plays in the actualiza- 
 tion of any real selfhood. For him the parasitic self is the "spa- 
 tialized," that is, social, self. The fundamental self is essentially 
 non-social. 
 
 As the self thus refracted and thereby broken to pieces is much better 
 adapted to the requirements of social life in general and language in par- 
 ticular, consciousness prefers it and gradually loses sight of the fundamental self. 
 Below the self with well-defined states, a self in which succeeding each other 
 means melting into one another, and forming an organic whole. . . , . But we 
 are generally content with the first, i.e., with the shadow of the self projected 
 into homogeneous space. 1 .... In order to recover this fundamental self, 
 as the unsophisticated consciousness would perceive it, a vigorous effort 
 of analysis is necessary, which will isolate the fluid inner states from their 
 image, first refracted, then solidified, in homogeneous space. 2 
 
 But to discover the " fundamental self" by withdrawing from all 
 human intercourse, surely that is impossible. Yet Bergson is 
 certainly right in insisting that if we are to get to the bottom of life's 
 problem we must discover the fundamental self and assign it a 
 rightful sway over the parasitic selves. That indeed is a most 
 important point for the philosophy of religion. But an empirical 
 procedure would surely require every man to answer the question, 
 what is for him his fundamental self ? If the psychologist can 
 discover any unanimity in the results of such an inquiry, well and 
 good such a definition may be taken as authoritative. But the 
 futility of looking for a self that is just itself, a pure, isolated, uncon- 
 ditioned self, surely is apparent. The great question is, In what 
 situation is the self most active, most free, most alive ? What is 
 the most vital relationship in which we find it? When is a man 
 most truly himself? Even our freedom, whenever and however 
 deeply experienced, is never an utterly relationless freedom. We 
 are free for something, from something, to do something, to be 
 something. Just sheer unadulterated freedom is the barest ab- 
 straction. And furthermore, it may well be that the less impor- 
 tant phases of life are not so much parasitic selves as conditioning 
 and contributing selves. The fundamental self is the organizing 
 
 1 Time and Free Witt, p. 128. * Ibid., p. 129. 
 
74 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 self, the dominating self, the integrating and unifying self, the self 
 of most vital function. 
 
 The psychology of Bergson, then, has this crucial defect of 
 isolating the self. But this is a twofold isolation. In the first place 
 the self is regarded as fundamentally individual, atomistic. The 
 social self is a "parasitic self." The "real self " is a self which can 
 never be known in social, that is, spatialized, experience. In the 
 second place the "real self" is still further isolated within the 
 larger and more "spatial" phases of even personal experience. 
 To find this real self one must turn in upon the deepest of "deep- 
 seated psychic states." Now this is a most interesting counter- 
 part of the Cartesian self. The self which has figured strategically 
 in the post-Cartesian epistemological discussions is the knowing self. 
 Cogito, ergo sum. The real self is the self of cognitive function. 
 This cognizing self has been isolated within the vague general 
 matrix of experience, and from this isolation have grown the whole 
 brood of epistemological perplexities. But for Bergson the isolated 
 self is the exact opposite of the Cartesian cognizing self. It is the 
 self which does not cognize but feels, intuits. But the isolation is 
 no less extreme and no less troublesome. For the Cartesian the 
 fatal difficulty is to pass from the acts of the isolated cognizing 
 self to the common-sense, everyday acts and experiences of the 
 human organism. For Bergson the difficulty is to pass from the 
 acts of the isolated pure durational self to commonplace knowledge 
 and social, spatial experience. In this Bergson is, though appar- 
 ently so far removed from the traditional epistemologists, really at 
 one with them. Likewise he is at one with them in isolating the 
 self from the social organism of which it is an integral part. The 
 two sorts of isolation, however, are practically the same. It is a 
 severing of the vital ties between the so-called real self and its 
 supposedly less real experience. The importance of this point 
 cannot be overestimated. With such a psychology no one can 
 possibly escape the necessity of seeking in metaphysics a cure of 
 the troubles which follow in its train. It surely is obvious that 
 since such an isolation of the self is artificial any other solution than 
 an undoing of this isolation is bound to be artificial. If this isola- 
 tion be frankly denied, the passing by "imperceptible" steps from 
 
THE PROBLEM OF RELIGION 75 
 
 the experience of the so-called real self to that of the so-called 
 parasitic self is not a mystery to be solved by a " sub tie meta- 
 physics," but a process capable of psychological analysis. 
 
 There is another most important point in which Bergson has 
 failed to scrutinize closely enough the actually observable work- 
 ings of the human mind. The business of the intellect, he insists, 
 is to facilitate our actions upon solids. In this, and in so far, he 
 is an "instrumentalist." But he stops far short of the broad truth 
 recognized today by many American psychologists and logicians, 
 namely, that intellectual processes are "instrumental" not only for 
 action upon solids but for all desired ends, whether they be ethical, 
 religious, political, or physical. Not only so, but these "instru- 
 mental" forms of consciousness are not merely spatial in their 
 essential character; rather they are "abstract" this is their 
 very usefulness, in that irrelevant characteristics of things and 
 events are pro tempore ignored, and only the one or the few char- 
 acteristics of those things or events which are of supreme impor- 
 tance in the situation are emphasized or even noticed. No doubt 
 the spatializing, unitizing type of "abstraction" is of tremendous 
 importance; but the "intellectual" processes are not necessarily 
 only spatial. "Spatiality" is no doubt a conspicuous character 
 of "intellectuality," but by no means all of it. And "fabrication," 
 action upon solids, is no doubt a conspicuous example of instru- 
 mental consciousness, but it by no means monopolizes it. 
 
 But not only is Bergson' s metaphysics made necessary by the 
 inadequacy of his psychology; not only is this metaphysics quite 
 unconvincing, especially in such a central matter as the theory of 
 "inversion"; but the basic distinction between instinct and 
 intellect leads logically to the most undesirable practical conse- 
 quences. The isolation of the intuitional self from the intellectual 
 self, in spite of the "subtle metaphysics" which seeks to reveal their 
 underlying unity, continues the divorce of religion and science; and 
 the isolation of the real self from the social self continues the divorce 
 between religion and social endeavor. Social life, civilization, the 
 technique of progress, are obviously dependent upon the intellect. 
 All mystical experience, all sense of freedom and spontaneity, all 
 direct sense of the original life, these, for Bergsonism, are functions 
 
76 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 of intuition. To save our souls we must renounce the world. 
 There is no idea of a corporate salvation. The fusion of scientific 
 social service and religious enthusiasm is logically impossible. But 
 this means ethical apriorism, religious fanaticism, and socially 
 barren intellectualism. To separate the real self and the social 
 self, the self of intuition and the self of collective endeavor, is to 
 divorce the vision of God and the task of civilization, to paralyze the 
 Christian conscience, to quench the dream of the twentieth- 
 century religion of a "new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth 
 righteousness." 
 
 To summarize the foregoing discussion of Bergson: His phi- 
 losophy is primarily an effort to resolve the mechanical-mystical 
 dilemma upon the plane of constructive idealism (the third level 
 on which this ancient perplexity has moved). This task evidently 
 calls for a psychological examination of the antagonistic mechaniz- 
 ing and mysticizing activities of consciousness, and an attempt 
 to find some underlying unity of the two tendencies. Bergson, 
 however, has recourse to a so-called intuitional metaphysics to sup- 
 plement his psychology ("theory of knowledge and theory of life" 
 seeming to him to be "inseparable"). The real reason, however, 
 why he so soon falls back upon metaphysics probably is that his 
 psychology is fundamentally inadequate. As it is, the core of his 
 metaphysical explanation, the theory of "inversion," is not by any 
 means convincing, and the dualism of intuition and intellect is not 
 sufficiently mitigated by Bergson's theory of evolution to remove 
 the unfortunate practical dualism of religion and science, religion 
 and social endeavor. What then are the chief points of inadequacy 
 in the psychology with which Bergson approaches the mechanical- 
 mystical problem ? There are four such points: (a) the individual 
 self is too much isolated from its real social matrix; (b) the "instru- 
 mental" character of intellectual processes is too closely restricted, 
 being affirmed only of the consciousness accompanying our action 
 on solids; (c) the instinctive-intuitional and the intellectual phases 
 of consciousness are too rigidly distinguished, even though their 
 fusion in common experience is admitted; (d) no effort is made 
 toward a genuinely genetic psychological study of the "undeniable" 
 mystery of a mutual spatiality in thought and things, but instead 
 
THE PROBLEM OF RELIGION 77 
 
 we are given a purely speculative account of the common genesis 
 of intellect and matter. 
 
 Of the first two of these four defects we have in contemporary 
 American thought abundant correction: of the first in our social 
 psychology 1 and of the second in the literature of "experimental 
 logic." 2 Some of the discussions in the latter have a bearing also 
 upon the third point. 3 But so far as I am aware the* last two 
 difficulties have not been discussed in any way that throws light 
 upon the problem of religion. It is the question involved in the 
 third of the four points urged here against Bergson's psychology 
 that is most crucial for the primary phase of the problem of religion, 
 which is, as this and the preceding chapter have maintained, the 
 mechanical-mystical dilemma. I have already stated the issue. 4 
 It amounts simply to this : ignoring for the time being the question 
 as to which of the two types of cognitional consciousness gives us 
 the nearer approach to reality, we are primarily concerned to under- 
 stand how or why we do move from one type to the other, how they 
 are related to each other, what, in a word, the " imperceptible 
 steps" actually are by means of which we pass from the moment 
 of "practical reason" to that of "pure reason," from that of 
 "duration" to that of "spatiality," from the mystical to the 
 mechanical, from religion to science. For surely these are not two 
 incommensurable activities of a divided ego, but are part and 
 parcel of each other, inextricably interwoven, fused by innumerable 
 connective activities, with which they are continuous, into an 
 integral organic consciousness. 
 
 1 E.g., Cooley, Social Organization; Human Nature and the Social Order. 
 
 3 E.g., Dewey, et al., Studies in Logical Theory; Moore, "Existence, Meaning, 
 and Reality," Decennial Publications of the University of Chicago, First Series, 
 Vol. III. 
 
 s E.g., Moore, chapter entitled "The Reformation of Logic," in Creative Intelli- 
 gence, p. 75. 
 
 4 Supra, p. 67. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 CONCERNING METHOD 
 
 I have pointed out that the inveterate mechanistic-mystical 
 dilemma, which seems to be the crux of the religious problem, 
 especially as it presents itself today under the general antith- 
 esis of the religious and the scientific view of the world, now, 
 with Bergson's treatment before us, demands the following 
 formulation: First, how shall we understand the underlying 
 unity of the mind's operations which give us on the one hand a 
 mystical and on the other a mechanistic interpretation of the world, 
 since we cannot be content to leave these two antithetical types of 
 mental operation in a hopeless dualism ? Bergson's theory of the 
 original bifurcation of instinct and intellect in the evolutionary 
 process whereby the Elan vital creates its way through the resistance 
 of matter has suggested that probably a more adequate psycho- 
 logical examination of the contrasted operations of intuition and 
 intellect would make unnecessary the " sub tie metaphysic" which 
 Bergson proposes as an explanation of the ultimate unity of these 
 two types of experience. 
 
 In the second place, how shall we understand the underlying 
 linkage between our intellectual cognitions and the material world 
 with which they, in exact science, so successfully deal ? (This phase 
 of the problem is dealt with in Bergson's theory of "inversion," 
 which holds that "intellectuality and materiality have been con- 
 stituted in detail by reciprocal adaptation.") 1 Assuming that the 
 organic solidarity of intuition and intellect could be revealed by 
 psychology, how can this organically unitary knowledge-activity 
 be seen as linked up inseparably with the whole substructure of our 
 experienced world ? For linked up in some intimate fashion it cer- 
 tainly is, upon the testimony of common sense, the exact sciences, 
 and the whole realistic tendency in philosophy. If, now, such link- 
 age could at last be brought to light by psychological analysis, there 
 
 1 Creative Evolution, p. 186. 
 
 78 
 
CONCERNING METHOD 79 
 
 would then appear a real continuum embracing what realism would 
 call the " independent reality," our mechanical-mathematical cog- 
 nitions thereof, and our mystical interpretation of the whole. In 
 other words, the ancient dilemma would be resolved, for there would 
 no longer be a question as to which is more true, our mechanical 
 or our mystical interpretations of "reality," but only as to what 
 sort of interpretation carries reality farthest in its unfolding through 
 human reconstruction. Or, to put it otherwise, we would no longer 
 orient human interpretation as apposed, in its double aspect, to 
 " reality," but rather as existing in the living midst of that reality, 
 a dynamic integral part thereof. 
 
 So much for a condensed statement of the problem. The next 
 question is, Can psychology give us an answer as trustworthy as the 
 results of scientific investigation in other fields ? If our theology 
 is to be truly empirical, it must work with scientific tools. Cer- 
 tainly the progress of experimental psychology in recent years 
 should encourage us to hope that the questions suggested above 
 may find at last adequate scientific treatment. Though the experi- 
 mental method as applied to cognitional and allied forms of con- 
 scious experience is still in a somewhat chaotic condition, it is 
 certainly becoming more and more an exact science, and to it we 
 must look for the assured results which dialectic and speculation 
 have failed to furnish. 
 
 Probably such an inquiry as is here suggested would deal with 
 such points as the following: What are the various stages and 
 factors in the perceptual and conceptual apprehensions of motion 
 as they approximate toward the mechanistic or the mystical types 
 respectively? Probably analysis will show that there are three 
 broad ways in which motion as such is denuded of mystical mean- 
 ing: (a) the evaporation, so to speak, of immediate emotional inter- 
 est through mere familiarity; (b) the same result through a long 
 regressus of causal explanations, that is, the dedynamizing of the 
 immediately perceived motion through more or less remote con- 
 ceptual forms of movement or change; (c) the assignment of a 
 supernatural cause, robbing the motion thus of its intrinsic interest. 
 The opposite tendency will probably be seen to comprise such 
 factors as these: (a) the enhancement of emotional appraisal 
 
8o THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 through the relevance of the motion in question to vital and 
 instinctive interests; (b) the tendency to clothe the motion or 
 movements alluded to with " tertiary" qualities through the inevi- 
 tably stimulated kinaesthetic imagery and sensations; (c) the rein- 
 forcement of such a tendency by the social imagery which these 
 emotional and kinaesthetic factors usually arouse through vague 
 association. 
 
 Again, what are the stages and factors in the two opposite tend- 
 encies which center, in unstable equilibrium, so to speak, in the 
 quantity-quality perceptions which bulk so large in common expe- 
 rience, especially the visual and tactual kinaesthetic complexes with 
 their spatial and other components, the stuff of " primary" and 
 "secondary" qualities? Probably, in the one, the abstracting 
 function of attention will be found to be the controlling factor, 
 while in the other the feeling-tones and the emotional elements into 
 which they so readily pass or with which they fuse will be the most 
 important point for study. 
 
 Again, how do the imagery and reactions appropriate to our 
 contact with the physical environment become complicated with the 
 imagery and reactions appropriate to our contact with the social 
 environment, and vice versa ? How, in its many phases or degrees, 
 does personal feeling wax and wane as we adjust ourselves to the 
 people about us, displacing, as it waxes, the non-personal or mere 
 ihing-i eeling, and reinforcing itself with the latter as it wanes ? And 
 how, on the other hand, does the non-personal feeling, the ihing- 
 attitude, wax and wane, with its varying personal feeling comple- 
 mentation, as we adjust ourselves to the inanimate objects and 
 animals about us ? Obviously habit and novelty, the thwarting or 
 forwarding of our activities by the objects of our environment, 
 directness and indirectness of interest such factors are here of 
 great importance. 
 
 More specifically the two categories of causation and purpose 
 will be in special need of such a psychological examination. Instead 
 of two conceptions of causation, the anthropopathic notion, com- 
 posed mostly of the " feeling of effort, " and the mathematical notion 
 of "function," are there many vaguely different, intermediate sorts 
 of conception ? 9 A careful examination will probably discover that 
 
CONCERNING METHOD 81 
 
 there are. What are they, and under what conditions do they 
 arise ? And how many varieties of finalistic conception are there, 
 and how does the mind pass through the various stages, from the 
 crudest anthropoteleism to what Bergson would call " radical final- 
 ism "? What are the situations in which the various types are 
 elicited? And, again, what light can this sort of psychological 
 approach throw upon the whole matter of "existence" and "value" ? 
 Are these, also, but foci, so to speak, around which the ellipse of 
 conscious experience swings, "value" judgments and attitudes 
 always tinged, though sometimes in the minutest degree, with the 
 "existence" quality, "existence" judgments and perceptions 
 always colored, though sometimes also in slight degree, by the 
 "value" factor? And if so, what, once more, are the various 
 determining conditions of the proportions of the elements in the 
 complex ? 
 
 For the present I can only express my conviction that such a 
 method of approach is as promiseful as it is necessary and would 
 prove not only an entirely new but an extremely important factor 
 in any adequate statement of the religious situation; for it would 
 doubtless make clear what, since Kant's time, men have more or 
 less dimly apprehended, namely, that the antagonism of religion 
 and science is due to highly contrasted methods of cognition, which, 
 however, are somehow continuous with each other, unless the mind 
 be a house hopelessly divided against itself. 
 
 In the meantime let us note that "functional" psychology and 
 the so-called "empirical" logic which rests immediately upon it 
 have pioneered a path in the same general direction as that indicated 
 above. Its bearing upon the philosophy of religion can perhaps be 
 most briefly pointed out by passing at once to a consideration of 
 some contrasts between pragmatism and the other dominant 
 philosophies of the day (for pragmatism is in philosophy what 
 functionalism is in psychology and empiricism is in logic). And 
 probably the contrast most closely relevant to our subject is that 
 involved in the discussion of the so-called "ego-centric predica- 
 ment." 1 It constitutes a chief bone of contention between realism 
 
 1 See Perry, Present Philosophical Tendencies, pp. 129 fL; also Journal of Philoso- 
 phy, Psychology, and Scientific Method, VII. 
 
82 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 and idealism and as such serves well to clarify the position of prag- 
 matism as contrasted with both. 
 
 Both realism and idealism seek in primis for what we might call 
 the citadel of consciousness, the very core of cognition. This for 
 both of them is the act of pure knowledge, that is, knowledge of the 
 formal logic type, of the self-evident kind, of the sort that has an 
 inherent authenticity. Take, for instance, the point from which 
 Bradley begins in building up his system of metaphysics and note 
 how it is just what I have called the citadel of consciousness. "To 
 think is to judge, and to judge is to criticise, and to criticise is to 
 use a criterion of reality. And surely to doubt this would be mere 
 blindness or confused self-deception. But if so, it is clear that, in 
 rejecting the inconsistent as appearance, we are applying a positive 
 knowledge of the ultimate nature of things. Ultimate reality is 
 such that it does not contradict itself; here is an absolute criterion." 1 
 On the other hand, take such a statement as the following on the 
 side of realism: "The ultimate terms of knowledge are the terms 
 that survive an analysis that has been carried as far as it is possible 
 to carry i." a Logical analysis, then, is the very ideal of knowledge 
 for both philosophies. And, so to speak, around this citadel a 
 moat is dug, an important separation between this pure knowledge 
 and the innumerable varieties of mere " psychological" knowledge, 
 which, indeed, is dangerous ground, infested with the sources of 
 error. The depth of this moat is greater than the enemies of truth 
 suppose; that is just its practical importance. For though neo- 
 realism professes to treat knowledge "as a natural event" and 
 bridges the gap between logical knowledge and psychological 
 knowledge by means of a nervous system, stimulus-and-response, 
 etc., this bridge is truly a drawbridge, for while contact with non- 
 logical experience seems plausible enough as a part of this philoso- 
 phy, for strategical purposes the connection is actually severed. 3 
 Similarly Bradley, while admitting other possible criteria of reality, 
 practically and indeed explicitly makes the difference between them 
 and the one taken as the fundamental criterion a difference of kind 
 and not of degree. If, then, the real center of knowledge is an 
 
 1 Appearance and Reality, p. 136. 3 The New Realism, p. 32. 
 
 3 On this point compare Moore in Creative Intelligence, pp. 105 f . 
 
CONCERNING METHOD 83 
 
 isolated logical judgment, we have indeed a "predicament." But, 
 as it seems to the pragmatist, it is a predicament for the idealist 
 no less than for the realist. For the former the difficulty is to con- 
 ceive reality, as apprehended from this logical center, as in any 
 degree more attractive than a cosmic abstraction. 1 For the realist, 
 however, the "predicament" is no less embarrassing; for his object 
 is not to prove the ultimately purposeful character of reality, since 
 his preoccupation is with science and not with religion, but to show 
 how the real can be discovered as independent of experience. Real- 
 ism seeks an existential sort of independence in reality and cannot 
 find it. Idealism finds a qualitative sort of independence in the 
 absolute reality and does not want it. And (we cannot repeat it 
 too often) the core of the trouble is that both have really dissociated 
 logical knowledge and non-logical experience. And so the predica- 
 ment is not that our human world is ego-centric, but that these 
 philosophies have assigned an arbitrary circumference to the cog- 
 nitive experience from within which our exploration and discovery 
 of reality must obviously begin. At the core Bergsonism, idealism, 
 and realism have this common trait they assume, as a basic factor 
 in their technique of discussion, a hiatus between pure intellect and 
 merely " psychological" experience. 
 
 Pragmatism would say, then, that the solution of the deadlock 
 must and does come from removing that arbitrary and entirely 
 artificial delimitation of intellect. That is done by doing more 
 thoroughly what realism purports to do, namely, by regarding 
 knowledge as a " natural event"; that is, by taking our functional 
 social psychology all the way with us and refusing to drop it when 
 formal logic steps in and says "thus far and no farther." In other 
 words, we must dig no moat about the citadel of pure knowledge, 
 because, forsooth, pure knowledge, or logical thought, is not a 
 citadel at all. The real tactics of the intellectual life are indeed 
 more akin to modern methods of warfare than to mediaeval. Not 
 even the mathematician locks himself in an immovable and impreg- 
 nable thought-fortress, but "digs himself in" at whatever point his 
 
 1 See, for instance, chap, xxvii, "Ultimate Doubts," in Bradley's Appearance 
 and Reality. Royce is finally no more successful in demonstrating an absolute which 
 is not merely abstract and logical. 
 
84 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 obstacles threaten his advance. That is just what we are all doing 
 in all intellectual effort when face to face with problems we 
 intrench ourselves in those aspects or phases of our whole experience 
 which seem at the time to be steadfast and secure and attack the 
 uncertainties and perplexities with what seem to be the most avail- 
 able or most effective weapons with which our conscious experience 
 has furnished us. We are " instrumentalists" in practice, whether 
 we are such in theory or not. 
 
 We must, I said, dig no moat around "pure knowledge"; which 
 means that the conception with which psychology furnishes us is 
 of cognitive activities that are inextricably intermingled with other 
 activities of perceptual, sensational, and emotional sorts, which ac- 
 tivities in turn are no less inextricably interwoven in the dynamic 
 structure of our far-reaching environment. In a word, the physical- 
 psychical-social organism we call man is in dynamic connection with 
 his environment, and within his complex conscious experience there 
 are everywhere dynamic functional connections between the most 
 abstract and the most emotional phases of experience and those 
 more elementary phases which we call motor, sensory, and percep- 
 tual. There are no structural cleavages between environment and 
 organism nor within the conscious processes of the organism. 1 
 
 But, some will object, this functionalism goes too far. It psy- 
 chologizes all entities into " instruments, "all facts into useful fictions, 
 all attainments into adjustments. Instead of exploring the ontologi- 
 cally solid shores of reality, we are kept forever floundering in a sea 
 
 1 For a characteristic statement of this so-called functional point of view see 
 Irving Miller, The Psychology of Thinking, especially chap. vi. Note also the 
 following statements, from the "empirical logic" point of view, as represented in 
 A. W. Moore's article, "The Reformation of Logic," in Creative Intelligence: "The 
 operations of habit, instinct, perceptions, memory, and anticipation become logical 
 when instead of operating as direct stimuli they are employed in a process of inquiry'' 
 
 (p. 82). "The conditions under which non-logical conduct becomes logical 
 
 The transformation begins at the point where non-logical processes instead of operating 
 as direct unambiguous stimuli and response become ambiguous with consequent inhi- 
 bition of conduct This modification of form and function constitutes 'reason' 
 
 or better reasoning" (p. 83). "It is important to observe that these forms of inter- 
 action instinct and habit, perception, memory, etc. are not to be located in either 
 of the interacting beings [the organism and the environment] but are functions of both. 
 The conception of these operations as the private functions of an organism is the 
 forerunner of the epistemological predicament" (p. 84; italics mine). 
 
CONCERNING METHOD 85 
 
 of words. For these many centuries the profoundest philosophers 
 and the devoutest souls have been seeking permanence in the midst 
 of change, unity in the midst of plurality, purpose in the midst of 
 mechanism; but now this instrumentalist doctrine gives us all and 
 nothing. For our monisms become useless once they are shown to 
 be valid only because and hi so far as they are useful; permanence 
 is shown to be only a relative permanence; and all our faith in 
 teleology is shown to be but the by-product of imagination in its 
 service of biological and social adjustment. Every adjustment 
 remakes both the environment and the organism, and nothing 
 abides but adjustment, adjustment and yet more adjustment! 
 
 Is there then nothing to which we may assign some abiding 
 metaphysical status? Let us avoid phenomenalism by assigning 
 the metaphysical quality of "reality" to the whole of our experience, 
 at a lump sum, at a stroke. Let us stop talking about our experi- 
 ence of reality and talk of experience as reality. We shall thus have 
 to recognize that in spots, as it were, this real total experience gives 
 us a kind of trouble which we have been wont to call unrealness. 
 The simplest diagnosis of this trouble is that various elements of 
 experience are discovered to fall apart or to become frictional among 
 themselves. The established connections of the multifarious ele- 
 ments of experience are found to be ruptured. In other words, we 
 find that some part, usually a comparatively small part, of experi- 
 ence has become ''problem." The larger part which retains its 
 stability remains "real." In everyday language we call this intact 
 portion "fact." The specifically reflective process of thought then 
 begins and consists essentially in an examination of the dislocated 
 elements of our experience to discover where the tension begins, 
 what are the factors most under strain, and to attempt various 
 modifications of the involved elements in the effort to restore the 
 normal condition of unstrained interaction. The organic vitality 
 of experience is such that it is autotherapeutic. Otherwise it 
 remains dislocated, fractured, and painful, or it grows well, in time, 
 we hardly know how. In any case experience is reality, though 
 sometimes a painful or crippled reality. It is on the whole sound, 
 though with parts now here, now there, that are, as it were, out of 
 order. 
 
86 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 But, it may be asked, Whence comes this disorder, this disloca- 
 tion, this fracture ? The dislocations, the strains, and the ruptures 
 are due to uneven growth. They are growing pains, indeed. Some 
 part has grown faster, has changed more rapidly, than some other 
 part; the skeleton of science, as it were, is pushing the musculature 
 of morality and religion too hard. Stress and strain, rupture and 
 dislocation, are possible and almost inevitable indeed, just because 
 experience as a whole is growing. There are no unrealities for the 
 static life, if such a thing there be. 
 
 Is this, then, subjectivism ? No and yes. And again no. Let 
 us recall the " ego-centric predicament." We have said that prag- 
 matism insists on allowing no metaphysical cleavage between a 
 so-called independent entity and a cognizing mind. All cognitions, 
 even the most pure logical knowledge acts, are functionally con- 
 tinuous with all sorts of psychological and physiological activities. 
 Ideation is the clearing-house function of the socio-psycho-physical 
 organism. Thoughts are continuous, organically integral, with 
 sensations, conations, and affections. Let there be no doubt on 
 that point. But sensations, conations, and affections are func- 
 tionally related to, organically part and parcel of, things, events, 
 men, stars. The nervous system is not merely responsive. It is 
 selective and reconstructive. " Stimulus-and-response " realism 
 should not obscure the fact that every psychical or psychological 
 or physiological event is a function of both the organism and the 
 environment, of both the stimulus and the stimulated. Experience, 
 particularly knowing, is not something that represents reality or cor- 
 responds to reality, but is a reconstructing of reality by itself, within 
 itself, in that phase or on that plane or at that juncture which we 
 designate as the cognitive activity or the intellectual process of 
 human life ; which means that to assign metaphysical status to any 
 center of reality is as arbitrary as to assign absolute centricity to 
 any organ or function of a living organism. If the heart is the 
 center, what of the brain ? If the stomach is the center, what of 
 the sympathetic system ? But from the standpoint of the heart's 
 correlations with other structures and with other functions the 
 heart is the center, and from that of the stomach the stomach is 
 the center. So from the standpoint of the correlations of the human 
 
CONCERNING METHOD 87 
 
 organism with those multitudinous activities of the world within 
 the broad matrix of which its functions operate, from the stand- 
 point of the ego, reality is ego-centric. Or, more adequately, from 
 the standpoint of human consciousness reality is anthropocentric; 
 and if we try to transcend our human viewpoint we still use it. 
 We are in an " anthropocentric predicament." But shall we call 
 it a " predicament " ? If we persist in doing so, it is simply because 
 we cannot school ourselves into relinquishing naive realism's rep- 
 resentational notion of thought and adopting the recreative, recon- 
 structive doctrine which psychology presents. 
 
 But if this viewpoint be adopted, what shall we say of truth 
 and error? " Truth" must at once appear to be the character of 
 such reconstructive activities within conscious experience as result 
 in harmonious interaction between the various parts of experience, 
 such, in a word, as make for the total well-being of that conscious 
 nucleus within reality which we humans are. The test of the 
 truth of an idea is its working within experience, with other parts 
 of experience, not with things outside of experience. In general, 
 the question of the truth or error of any philosophy or religion must 
 mean its worth as a great reconstructive function within the broad 
 boundaries of common experience. A true religion is a saving reli- 
 gion. There is no other test, and there never has been. Humanity 
 is too dynamic to accept for long in its soul's concerns any less vital 
 test of truth than it applies to the recipes with which it prepares 
 its food or to the specifications from which it builds its bridges. 
 
 But, it may be objected, the saving quality of our specifications 
 for building bridges seems to be objectively conditioned, whereas the 
 saving quality of religious faith seems, in these psychologizing days 
 at least, to be inwardly or subjectively conditioned. Is there not, 
 then, some incongruousness in judging a religion by its results and 
 judging the plan for a bridge likewise by its results ? What is at 
 the bottom of this difficulty that common sense seems to feel in 
 such a situation? It is, I think, just this: When the internal dis- 
 locations to which I have referred as "problem" situations (the 
 awareness of something "unreal" in our experience) when these 
 occur, we feel an inward compulsion to follow a certain pretty 
 definite order in our manipulations and reconstructions by means 
 
88 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 of which we attempt to restore the equilibrium, the harmony, of 
 our whole experience. What, then, is this order that we feel com- 
 pelled to follow, and what is the source of the compulsion ? 
 
 Briefly the order is this: The more usual sensations have a 
 preferential advantage over unusual sensations; habitual attitudes 
 over novel; sensational data over conceptual data (in the sense 
 of " facts" over "theories"); social standards over individual 
 standards ; ' ' primary qualities ' ' over ' ' secondary qualities ' ' ; visual 
 and tactual experience over auditory ; immediate needs over remote 
 ends; safety over mere comfort; quantity over quality; the day's 
 work over the evening's pleasure; the useful over the aesthetic. 
 Such a list could be indefinitely enlarged. The suggestions made 
 are most general. What does this preference mean? "But," an 
 objector interposes, "this order is not universal or constant. Men 
 often choose the beautiful in place of the useful, if they are involved 
 in a clash; men often give the individual's standard right of way 
 over the social standard, even though they be martyred for it; men 
 often prefer the evening's pleasure to the day's work, even though 
 their families go hungry." Even so. And it is just to these 
 exceptions that I shall gladly turn in a moment. But I insist for 
 the present that these preferential advantages are given by most 
 men in most cases. They form the general order of procedure 
 when conflicts must be eliminated in experience; that is, unless 
 reflection can succeed in rearrangement or modification of one or 
 the other or both of the conflicting elements, which is just the 
 business of reflective thinking. But in such reflection the one sort 
 of element generally has an advantage. What, I ask, does this 
 preference mean ? This, that in the continuous reconstruction of 
 experience by means of and within itself, what we mean by "evolu- 
 tion" is that certain activities precede other activities and so always 
 condition the latter. The order in which our human life has 
 evolved within the cosmic life is the explanation of the fact that in 
 a conflict, say between a toothache and a theory of mental healing, 
 the toothache is very likely to get the right of way. It is easier 
 to modify the theory to accommodate the tooth than to modify 
 the tooth to accommodate the theory. Physical elements show a 
 kind of pre-emption right when spiritual elements seem to collide 
 
CONCERNING METHOD 89 
 
 with them. It may not be a matter of mere priority or of mere 
 repetition; it may in part be a matter of proportion and organic 
 structure. There is no doubt something more than mere chance 
 in the fact that mathematics is the oldest science and in a sense 
 the normative science. Mathematical science is the ideal of the 
 exact sciences, because, probably, the evolution of our conceptual 
 thinking has had such a life-history that quantitative and spatial 
 thought-forms are indeed nearer to the simpler and more rudimen- 
 tary reactions between organism and environment than qualitative 
 thought-forms are. 1 In other words, the reconstructive activities 
 of the socio-psycho-physical organism have a life-history that makes 
 some more original, more basic, and others more secondary, more 
 derived. In readjustments within the complex the former have an 
 advantage. 
 
 But the order I have spoken of is only general, not universal. 
 The exceptions are notable. In the long run they have often 
 proved the more salutary. The artistic genius who prefers beauty 
 to bread, the martyr who prefers conscience to comfort these are 
 indeed the great saviors and leaders of humanity. Doubtless the 
 facts revealed in the general rule have their own usefulness. But 
 the only test is value in vital function. The martyrs have demon- 
 strated that the priority of the physical over the spiritual is not 
 necessarily inherently valid. While we do, as a matter of fact, 
 tend to measure the value of any element by comparing it with 
 those which seem to have this (evolutionally conditioned) priority, 
 this tendency has only the sanction of inveteracy, and must be cor- 
 rected if occasion demand. If occasion demand ? And what shall 
 be the criterion ? When shall we know that the occasion demands 
 it? And how shall we determine which is right, to follow the 
 common tendency or to take the less usual method of giving pre- 
 cedence to those elements of experience which seem at a disadvan- 
 tage ? Again, there is no standard but the result. Which works 
 best ? Which achieves the more desirable results ? How shall we 
 use the various instruments which the past and present have pre- 
 pared for us and put at our disposal ? "Who shall arbitrate?" 
 
 1 Recall Bergson's statement that "intellectuality and materiality have been con- 
 stituted in detail by reciprocal adaptation." 
 
90 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 There can be no arbitrament but the results. But how shall 
 we evaluate the results, how compare them? There is but one 
 answer. To put it bluntly, it is up to us. We are, it seems, pri- 
 marily selective organisms, and all that we are, as the past has 
 produced us, must rise up and say what sort of result we most 
 desire. Is it attainable? We can know only by striving for it. 
 What instruments, what "philosophies of life," what faiths, what 
 hypotheses shall we use ? Those which experience teaches, as we 
 live and strive, are on the whole, in the long run, for the largest 
 situation, the most serviceable, those which most adequately attain 
 the result we most deeply desire. 
 
 We must remember that for no healthy mind does the whole of 
 experience ever need to be reorganized and inwardly readjusted. 
 For the most part our experience is sound. We feel it, as a whole, 
 to be real. Our world is always made, for the most part, of fact. 
 All wholesome progress must rest its weight, as it were, upon this 
 mass of fact, of reality. But we are truly pragmatic only so long 
 as we remember that it is not hopelessly final fact, just because it 
 is not independent of our reconstructive vital activities. We can 
 rest upon a great ocean liner solid and substantial it indeed seems 
 as compared with the unstable waters glimpsed over the rail not 
 as one might rest in a prison, but as one rests in his home, because 
 we are conscious that even the liner's mighty bulk is in some real 
 degree responsive to our control. In fine, a fact world which is 
 independent of our experience is as likely to be a hopeless world as 
 a hopeful world. If our intelligence is not creative, reconstructively 
 creative, then, so far as religious interests are concerned, it is an 
 impotent intelligence. Impotent ? Then, say some, let us turn to 
 mysticism. Ah, yes, but your mysticism will not find intellect im- 
 potent to criticize and destroy. It will undermine the foundations 
 of mysticism almost inevitably. In other words, if intelligence is 
 not creative, then its greatest power is, as the new logic of realism 
 claims, analytical. And the only reality which analysis can, in the 
 nature of the case, demonstrate is an abstract, atomistic, quanti- 
 tative reality. This will satisfy the mechanizing tendencies of the 
 mind but will starve the mystical. 
 
CONCERNING METHOD 91 
 
 Realism forces on us the enigma of the existence of a trans- 
 empirical object of belief; instrumentalism the question of an 
 empirical objective of belief, a goal in which belief-contents are 
 continually redintegrated. For the instrumentalist the validity 
 of the belief-content is inseparable from the reality of the belief- 
 objective, and the reality of the objective is a matter of concrete 
 experience. To seek it is the only way to prove it. Its reality is 
 its realization. Even though it is a " flying goal," it is within expe- 
 rience; it is part of a progressive reality. Since it is a part of 
 experience, there is no question of its existence, but only of its worth. 
 
 I said that the belief-content is continually redintegrated in the 
 objective of the belief. This is a dynamic aspect, especially of reli- 
 gious experience, and is vital. Let a man believe today that there 
 is a force in nature making for righteousness. The very act of 
 belief is itself a force making for righteousness, and it is a force 
 which stands rooted and grounded in nature. Let a nation go to 
 war to prove that might is not right, that rather right is might, and 
 lo! right becomes might with every blow struck, with every battle 
 fought. In a word, we see a world struggling to renew itself through 
 human moral progress. If men cherish for generations a faith in 
 something they call divine, behold, the world through the power of 
 that faith becomes divine. The more sublimely moral men believe 
 the world-life to be, the more sublimely moral it thereby becomes 
 and is. In so far as we are a humanity believing in God, God is, in 
 believing humanity. Our little definitions are brittle and partial. 
 But the sweep of faith in its vast social reaches, its historical self- 
 transformation, its renewing and creative power, is beyond the 
 petty contradictions of its own small parts, which indeed grow just 
 by mutual modification. A world believing in its own spiritual 
 significance ipso facto has spiritual significance. In a large and 
 world-historic sense it is at least a minimal truth that the belief 
 in God is self-authenticating. Man has found God by seeking him. 
 Is one's country something real, other than himself ? No. With- 
 out faith in one's country there is no country. The faith of 
 Americans in America is America. The belief-content is redinte- 
 grated in the objective and the objective is redintegrated in the 
 
92 THE LOGIC OF RELIGION 
 
 content. The experienced objective is fresh material for belief - 
 content. The enriched content is a new and better instrument for 
 a growing objective. 
 
 And so the world's God is one who lives and moves and has his 
 being in his world. He cannot live if the world dies. And the 
 world lives, and lives divinely, if we strive more and more humanly. 
 And we do so strive, if we believe in ourselves. 
 
 Do we then believe in ourselves ? Do we believe in our better 
 selves, the selves we may become? Does America believe in its 
 better self ? Does the world believe in its better self ? The only 
 answer is action, choice, decision. History is recording and will 
 appraise the great decisions. The individual, in so far as he can 
 appraise his own choices, does know whether he believes in himself. 
 To anyone but a misanthrope, to anyone who has escaped the 
 malady of him who says, "The more I know of men the more I 
 admire my dog/' there is no question as to the moral grandeur of 
 common human life. 
 
 Why, then, once more, do men cleave to "the true, the good, 
 the beautiful," following the lure of an ever-unfolding and ever- 
 renewing nobleness ? Why do men believe in their better selves ? 
 Because, once more, they are selective organisms, and this is what 
 they select. Why try to go behind it ? Shall we say that this type 
 of selection is itself the result of "natural selection"? Let us 
 say so. There is something very heartening in such a statement, 
 after all. 
 
 But, of course, the notion of "natural selection" is not meant 
 to be heartening. It is a generalization meant for the intellect, not 
 the heart. And so we have "mechanism and mysticism" on our 
 hands again. But if "intelligence " is "creative, " let us remember 
 that it is a mystical intelligence as well as a mechanistic intelligence, 
 that it is in some situations extremely mystical, in others extremely 
 mechanistic; in most situations of common life it has any one of 
 many complexions, ranging anywhere from the one extreme to the 
 other. If our social experience is the evolutional background of 
 the mystical moments, and our manipulation of the physical envi- 
 ronment, of the mechanistic moments, and if religion and the reli- 
 gious problem consist fundamentally just in our confronting of the 
 
CONCERNING METHOD 93 
 
 otherwise physical-seeming world in emotion-provoking situations 
 wherein we irresistibly react with the attitudes, concepts, and feel- 
 ings of our social dispositions, the assertion of our selfhood if this 
 is true, then the religious outlook of our day can be nothing less 
 than our purpose to direct, by the most efficient manipulation we 
 can devise, all the energies and activities which enter in any way 
 into our experience toward the realization of those ends which, 
 when our most wholesome self is stirred to appraisal, we are com- 
 pelled, by the urgency of life within us, to choose and champion. 
 And the sort of thought-forms, whether mathematical or poetical, 
 coldly quantitative or vividly dramatic, which we most habitually 
 use will be determined by the character of that particular small 
 portion of the vast task to which we may have laid our hands. 
 
APPENDIX A 
 ANIMISM OR "ANIMATISM" 
 
 The general viewpoint of this paper should make it clear that it is a mistake 
 to think of animism as characteristic only of primitive peoples. There are 
 animistic impulses in the most sophisticated of us. It is not necessary explicitly 
 to personify a natural object to be animistic. Indeed, complete personification 
 is but the completely organized and consciously maintained stage of the social 
 attitude. It is less correct to say that such vaguely personal feelings and atti- 
 tudes which modern grown-ups often experience toward nature and natural 
 objects are survivals of animism than to recognize that in the lower races and in 
 children the preponderance of social attitudes as compared with mechanical 
 or non-social attitudes is simply the positive aspect of their lack of corrective 
 experience and mechanical control. The word animism is simply a positive 
 characterization of the tardiness with which the non-social aspects of environ- 
 ment are differentiated from the social. The essential difference between the 
 physical and the social objects in the child's home is the method of control 
 required. The physical object is normally passive and requires only manipu- 
 lation. The social object is normally active and requires constant readjust- 
 ment in a ceaseless series of gestures or attitudes or social stimuli or responses. 
 Whenever a physical object behaves in an unexpected or abnormal manner; 
 when, in other words, the customary manipulations or non-social adjustments 
 fail of control, the process of sophistication is arrested, and the social responses 
 or attitudes are elicited. The child is "angry" with the door that slams 
 against him. The savage is "afraid" of the roaring river or the queer-looking 
 rock or the poisonous food. Control breaks down. Habitual adjustments 
 are ineffective. Mere manipulation is inadequate and the whole organism 
 is thrown on the alert. The dangerous thing is an "enemy." In the most 
 primitive stages the whole surrounding world of trees, streams, clouds, rocks, 
 storms, winds, etc., being so largely beyond control, evokes the social attitudes 
 because the whole organism is on the qui vive. This general social attitude 
 toward nature or the physical environment is animism. As methods of control 
 develop in the race or in the child, the environment becomes differentiated 
 into the social and the non-social. (The question of the differentiation of 
 the social into "human" and "animal" will be referred to in Appendix B.) 
 
 Now if animism be understood as the prevalence among primitive peoples 
 of these instinctive social attitudes toward the phenomena of nature, the 
 question whether it is a form of religion will, in the light of my analysis, find 
 a simple answer. Animism is the general field within which develop those 
 "more vital adjustments which we call religious ceremonies and beliefs. To try 
 to determine at what stage animism is pre-religious or religion is pre-animistic 
 is an arbitrary proceeding. Logically animism and religion are identical. 
 Practically we are inclined to restrict the name "religion" to the more vital 
 or important examples of the animistic attitude. 
 
 94 
 
APPENDIX B 
 TOTEMISM 
 
 What is the relation between a religious totemism and a possible pre- 
 religious totemism? Now if religion is a social attitude toward the non- 
 human, it may be urged that there never was a time when men were not 
 religious, since the social attitudes are primary. But the beginning of religion 
 will be in the rise of the differentiation between the human and the non-human. 
 "In a pure system of totemism the human and the non-human members ..... 
 are not distinguished " (Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy, p. 76). "Every 
 totem clan traverses what seems to us the natural boundary between man and 
 other creatures, and brings a department of nature inside a subdivision of 
 
 society It is only when the dim consciousness of a distinction has 
 
 dawned and the nature and behavior of (say) an emu begin to appear in some 
 degree different from and independent of the nature and behavior of emu-men 
 that the first step is taken on the road to religion" (Cornford, op. cit., p. 91). 
 "This crisis closes the first or pure stage of magic the birthplace of what 
 is currently called religion" (ibid., p. 92). "In this primary stage we find a 
 pre-religious condition of man-kind; for in the definition of religion we include 
 some representation of a power that is ' not ourselves. ' " Logically the religious 
 quality emerges, in social attitudes toward the non-human, with the dawn of a 
 consciousness of its non-humanness; or, to put it otherwise, with the dawn 
 of a human self-consciousness. Cornford, however, confuses religion and 
 morality by failing to analyze into its human and non-human elements that 
 "power not ourselves," a consciousness of which he accepts as the test for the 
 presence of religion. "The collective consciousness is super-individual. It 
 
 resides of course in the group In so far as this power is not myself and 
 
 greater than myself, it is a moral or restraining force which can and does 
 impose upon the individual the necessity of observing the uniform behavior of 
 the group. With the first dawn of a distinction between myself and the social 
 consciousness comes the first shadowy representation which may be called 
 religious or moral" (op. cit., p. 81). Is it not much simpler and more satis- 
 factory to say that in so far as that "power not myself" which controls me is 
 the will or custom of my group, the control is nascently moral, and hi so far 
 as that "power not myself," even though mediated by group custom, is really 
 a non-human or superhuman force or principle, the control is of the religious 
 sort? 
 
 95 
 
APPENDIX C 
 
 MAGIC 
 
 There has been much discussion as to whether magic and religion are 
 identical or different. Ames and King hold that magic is of two sorts, group 
 magic and individual magic, and that the former is religious and the latter 
 non-religious. "Not all magic but only such as belongs to group activities enter 
 into religion" (Ames, The Psychology of Religious Experience, p. no). "Public 
 magic to all intents and purposes is identical with primitive religion. On the 
 other hand, when religion becomes subservient to anti-social or merely private 
 ends, it is scarcely to be distinguished from sorcery" (King, The Development 
 of Religion, p. 195). King thus defines sorcery: "The sorcerer is one who 
 deals privately with secret powers, or at least with means not generally known 
 to the group, and the object is almost always private gain or personal ven- 
 geance" (ibid., p. 191). 
 
 Let me make some further quotations from King, on the basis of which I 
 wish to offer a criticism which will make my own position clearer. 
 
 "If these practices [i.e., "the great mass of unreflective spontaneous 
 reactions of the psycho-physical organism"] had chanced to be more closely 
 associated with the evolution of tribal consciousness and tribal interests, they 
 might have furnished the nuclei of rituals and definite religious ideas. If they 
 had been more closely connected with lines of individual interest, so as to 
 furnish a technique available to the individual for carrying out his personal 
 desires, they would have formed the basis of magic" (ibid., p. 189). "Magic 
 is simply primitive man's science, and there is nothing to hinder the tribe from 
 availing itself of the scientific knowledge in the hands of its members. Many 
 social groups may and have adopted magical practices. Magic furnishes 
 the community with a technique for doing many simple things In com- 
 munities of loose organization magic might be so thoroughly taken up by the 
 group as to be indistinguishable from religion. " Among the North American 
 Indians, in general, "medicine practices cannot be differentiated from religious 
 rites and observances" (op. cit., p. 203). 
 
 As to sorcery: "When a man feels he is capable of becoming a sorcerer, 
 he ventures forth quite alone, until he comes to the mouth of the cave where 
 the spirits dwell" (ibid., p. 198). "Having been instructed by the sorcerer 
 in the mysteries of the Great Mother, the master of divination turns him out 
 into the bush all by himself to the contemplation of the mysteries that lie 
 all about him" (ibid., p. 198). 
 
 Now if the criterion for the religious quality is the "public and social" 
 character of any activity, and if magic is "public and social," of course it is, 
 
 96 
 
APPENDIX C: MAGIC 97 
 
 ipso facto, religion. But if we should have reason to feel that private magic 
 also may have a religious aspect, what becomes of the "public and social" 
 criterion ? Of course, we may argue in a circle and see religion where we are 
 predisposed to look for it. But I must confess that if I were taking a course 
 in sorcery standing alone in the mouth of the cave where the spirits dwell 
 or contemplating the mysteries of the Great Mother all about me, if my experi- 
 ence in such a situation would not be distinctly religious then I do not know 
 what the "feel " of religion is. Has not many a victim been burnt as a sorcerer, 
 only to be recognized by succeeding generations as a martyr to some religious 
 faith ? Would it not be more adequate to say that the practicer of a private 
 magic may be a sorcerer so far as the tribe is concerned, a prophet or priest, 
 a religious person, so far as his relationship with the non-human is concerned ? 
 And if his "sorceries, " as in the case of North American Indians, should prove 
 beneficial rather than detrimental to the tribe, will he not be recognized as a 
 prophet by his tribe, and no longer called a sorcerer ? We have known enough 
 of non-social and even anti-social religion in modern times to enable us to avoid 
 confusing a lack of public spirit with a lack of religion. And when the magic is 
 used by the group, is not its religious quality still due to the same factor as 
 made it religious in the prophet-sorcerer ? Moreover, this public magic may be 
 called primitive man's science, if we are thinking merely of the practical 
 results achieved or attempted. Indeed, both public and private magic may be 
 considered as non-religious a mere customary use of certain formulae or per- 
 formance of specific acts, out of which the original religious quality has dis- 
 appeared by sheer weight of habit or absence of cause for emotional interest. 
 Indeed, many magical acts may never have had any religious origin, being simply 
 the repetition of chance "lucky" movements or methods. When, however, 
 by reason of enhanced emotional quality the group consciousness becomes 
 aware of some other-than-the-group force or power, the magical ceremonies 
 take on the religious complexion. 
 
APPENDIX D 
 
 MYSTICISM 
 
 The union of functional and social psychology which forms the background 
 of my thesis should serve to indicate the normal place of mysticism in religious 
 experience. The primacy of instinctive organic responses, their organization 
 into habit, the production by habit of cerebral processes which we call idea- 
 tion, the rise of emotion as the accompaniment of the inhibition of action by 
 reason of conflicting tendencies to act, and the solution of the conflict by 
 means of intellectual or ideational processes or reconstructions, the primary 
 preponderance of the social instinctive responses, the tendency of the organism 
 when on the qui vive, when subject to intense or vague stimulation, to exhibit 
 the social attitudes, these briefly are facts which underlie the following state- 
 ment of the place of mysticism in religion. 
 
 Pratt, in his Psychology of Religious Belief, contrasts three types of religion: 
 that of credulity, that of rationalism, that of feeling. He can, of course, 
 account for the breakdown of the first two, but believes that the third is indis- 
 pensable and inevitable. He claims that "the whole man should be trusted" 
 (op. cit., p. 27), and the "whole man" will continue to experience "the religion 
 of feeling," in which the "belief in God .... is .... a vital rather than a 
 theoretical matter" (ibid., p. 293). Now if my presuppositions are correct, the 
 "whole man" will react to his environment instinctively, correcting his actions 
 by means of the ideational equipment, which he gradually develops and elabo- 
 rates; in degree as his actions are inhibited by conflicting suggestions, emotion 
 or feeling is aroused; as successful reactions are established in habit, the accom- 
 panying ideas are fixed and feeling dies away; as the habitual reactions are 
 rendered futile by some new situation, the ideational accompaniments of these 
 habitual reactions are rendered useless or "false " ; the following period of stress 
 and strain is comparatively meager in ideas of any settled quality and rich in 
 the emotional element; the less definite adjustments of the new situation will 
 be preponderantly social in their type. In situations of the less definite, less 
 habitual sort, obviously the inarticulate emotional responses will preponderate, 
 and this is the mystical phase of religion. In the more finished, elaborated 
 adjustments the ideational or intellectual element is prominent, and the feeling 
 factor is relatively small. Furthermore, the vague emotional phase will be 
 normally of the social instinctive type, so that in the mystical mood we are 
 aware of a "presence" of some vague sort. This inarticulate awareness 
 tends, of course, to become articulate; the mystical mood will probably leave 
 a creedal deposit of some sort; fervor, to the great disgust of the prophet, tends 
 in the average man to lose itself in a habit or a formula. So Pratt is quite 
 
 98 
 
APPENDIX D: MYSTICISM' 99 
 
 correct in saying that "the belief in God of the religion of feeling is a vital 
 rather than a theoretical matter" it is a non-intellectual social response to a 
 vaguely comprehended situation, a social attitude which can find no better 
 explanation of itself than to say that it is aware of a "Presence" in the world 
 in Nature. But he fails entirely to grasp the relative significance of the three 
 types of religion when he puts them in the order of credulity, rationalism, 
 feeling. It would be more accurate to say, that in every religious experience 
 there are normally three stages: first, the feeling stage, in which adjustment 
 has not yet achieved explicit expression; secondly, credulity, in which the 
 ideational accompaniments of adjustment are comparatively crude and uncriti- 
 cized, relative to the more immediate situation rather than to the larger 
 implications and connections thereof; thirdly, the rational or even rationalistic, 
 in which the ideational factors tend to become more and more elaborate, the 
 situation so familiar as to fail to elicit any great emotional interest, decidedly 
 other than what we mean by a "vital" situation. Our present religious situa- 
 tion, to be sure, is one which seems to suggest that hereafter we can have 
 only the "feeling" type of religion, for the new universe in which modern men 
 are trying to make themselves at home is so vast, so many new factors are 
 being revealed almost every day; hi a word, the problem situation is so novel, 
 so varied, so boundless, that a well-articulated, compact, fully elaborated 
 ideational adjustment seems almost beyond the range of possibility. Mysti- 
 cism seems to promise the fullest satisfaction we dare hope for. We can but 
 trust "the whole man" in his deeper, more instinctive, more emotional parts. 
 But the whole man is a thinking organism, and can -hardly be expected to be 
 forever content with mere feeling. Mysticism is sure sooner or later to develop 
 a bony framework of ideas. The demands of modern life upon "the whole 
 man" are so great that both endo- and exo-skeletons are imperatively needed if 
 progress is to be achieved in any definable direction, and if we are not to suffer 
 overlong from the buffetings of uncertainty. 
 
 The mysticism of the traditional type is accounted for on the same grounds. 1 
 The stimulation of unusually sensitive personalities by the tremendous social 
 or moral appeal of the Christian divine society, in conjunction with the vague- 
 ness and uncertainty which an intangible reality necessarily entailed, logically 
 produced a stress-and-strain situation in which feeling preponderates and clear 
 ideas are impossible. This mood is naturally accentuated by inhibition of 
 action which the saint's withdrawal necessarily produced. In a word, it is a 
 situation in which there is a tremendous stimulation to the social nature, but 
 in which no action is either possible or called for, and hence the floods of feeling 
 and ecstatic experience, and the intense sense of a "Presence." 
 
 1 In chap. Ill, I distinguish between "classical" or naturalistic mysticism and 
 what I have referred to as the "traditional type," i.e., the supernaturalistic type of 
 mysticism. This distinction does not in any way invalidate the psychological sug- 
 gestions in this Appendix. 
 
\ 
 
 14 DAY USE 
 
 RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED 
 
 LOAN DEPT. 
 
 This book is due on the last date stamped below, or 
 
 on the date to which renewed. 
 Renewed books are subject to immediate recall. 
 
 m$*\9 
 
 
 n 9, 6d38 
 
 
 SEP 9 '63 U 
 
 
 
 
 RETC D LD 
 
 
 SEP 9 1963 
 
 if 
 
 ^ 
 
 
 7 
 
 
 |, 
 
 
 g: 
 
 
 
 i 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 405951 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY