The Religious Sentiment Part 6

SUMMARY.

Religion often considered merely an affair of the feelings. On the contrary, it must a.s.sume at least three premises in reason, its "rational postulates."

I. There is Order in things.

The religious wish involves the idea of cause. This idea not exhausted by uniformity of sequence, but by quant.i.tative relation, that is, Order as opposed to Chance. Both science and religion a.s.sume order in things; but the latter includes the Will of G.o.d in this order, while the former rejects it.

II. This order is one of Intelligence.

The order is a.s.sumed to be a comprehensible one, whether it be of law wholly or of volition also.

III. All Intelligence is one in kind.

This postulate indispensable to religion, although it has been attacked by religious as well as irreligious philosophers. Its decision must rest on the absoluteness of the formal laws of thought. The theory that these are products of natural selections disproved by showing, (1) that they hold true throughout the material universe, and (2) that they do not depend on it for their verity. Reason sees beyond phenomena, but descries nothing alien to itself.

The formal laws of reason are purposive. They therefore afford a presumption of a moral government of the Universe, and point to an Intelligence fulfilling an end through the order in physical laws.

Such an a.s.sumption, common to all historic religions, is thus justified by induction.

CHAPTER III.

THE RATIONAL POSTULATES OF THE RELIGIOUS SENTIMENT.

In philosophical discussions of religion as well as in popular exhortations upon it, too exclusive stress has been laid upon its emotional elements. "It is," says Professor Bain, "an affair of the feelings."[87-1] "The essence of religion," observes John Stuart Mill, "is the strong and earnest direction of the emotions and desires towards an ideal object." "It must be allowed," says Dr. Mansel,[87-2] "that it is not through reasoning that men obtain their first intimation of their relation to a deity." In writers and preachers of the semi-mystical school, which embraces most of the ardent revivalists of the day, we constantly hear the "feeling of dependence" quoted as the radical element of religious thought.[87-3] In America Theodore Parker, and in Germany Schleiermacher, were brilliant exponents of this doctrine. To the latter the philosopher Hegel replied that if religion is a matter of feeling, an affectionate dog is the best Christian.

This answer was not flippant, but founded on the true and only worthy conception of the religious sentiment. We have pa.s.sed in review the emotions which form a part of it, and recognize their power. But neither these nor any other mere emotions, desires or feelings can explain even the lowest religion. It depends for its existence on the essential nature of reason. We cannot at all allow, as Dr. Mansel asks of us, that man's first intimations of Deity came in any other way than as one of the ripest fruits of reason. Were such the case, we should certainly find traces of them among brutes and idiots, which we do not. The slight signs of religious actions thought to have been noticed by some in the lower animals, by Sir John Lubbock in ants, and by Charles Darwin in dogs, if authenticated, would vindicate for these species a much closer mental kins.h.i.+p to man than we have yet supposed.

If we dispa.s.sionately a.n.a.lyze any religion whatever, paying less attention to what its professed teachers say it is, than to what the ma.s.s of the votaries believe it to be, we shall see that every form of adoration unconsciously a.s.sumes certain premises in reason, which give impulse and character to its emotional and active manifestations. They are its data or axioms, or, as I shall call them, its "rational postulates." They can, I believe, be reduced to three, but not to a lesser number.

Before the religious feeling acquires the distinctness of a notion and urges to conscious action, it must a.s.sume at least these three postulates, and without them it cannot rise into cognition. These, their necessary character and their relations, I shall set forth in this chapter.

They are as follows:--

I. There is Order in things.

II. This order is one of Intelligence.

III. All Intelligence is one in kind.

I. The conscious or unconscious purpose of the religious sentiment, as I have shown in the last chapter, is the _fruition of a wish_, the success of which depends upon unknown power. The votary asks help where he cannot help himself. He expects it through an exertion of power, through an efficient cause. Obviously therefore, he is acting on the logical idea of Causality. This underlies and is essential to the simplest prayer. He extends it, moreover, out of the limits of experience into the regions of hypothesis. He has carried the a.n.a.logy of observation into the realm of abstract conceptions. No matter if he does believe that the will of G.o.d is the efficient cause. Perhaps he is right; at any rate he cannot be denied the privilege of regarding volition as a co-operating cause. Limited at first to the transactions which most concerned men, the conception of order as a divine act extended itself to the known universe. Herodotus derives the Greek word for G.o.d ?e?? from a root which gives the meaning "to set in order," and the Scandinavians gave the same sense to their word, _Regin_.[90-1]

Thus the abstract idea of cause or power is a postulate of all religious thought. Let us examine its meaning.

Every reader, the least versed in the history of speculative thought for the last hundred years, knows how long and violent the discussions have been of the relations of "cause and effect." Startled by the criticisms of Hume, Kant sought to elude them by distinguis.h.i.+ng between two spheres of thought, the understanding and the reason. Sir William Hamilton at first included the "principle of sufficient reason'[TN-6] in the laws of thought, but subsequently rejected it as pertaining to judgments, and therefore material, not formal. Schopenhauer claimed to have traced it to a fourfold root, and Mill with most of the current English schools, Bain, Austin, Spencer, &c., maintained that it meant nothing but "uniformity of sequence."

It would be vain to touch upon a discussion so extended as this. In the first chapter I have remarked that the idea of cause does not enter into the conceptions of pure logic or thought. It is, as Hamilton saw, material. I shall only pause to show what is meant by the term "cause"

in the physical sciences. When one event follows another, time after time, we have "uniformity of sequence." Suppose the const.i.tution of the race were so happy that we slept at night only, and always awoke a few moments before sunrise. Such a sequence quite without exception, should, if uniform experience is the source of the idea of cause, justly lead to the opinion that the sun rises because man awakes. As we know this conclusion would be erroneous, some other element beside sequence must complete a real cause. If now, it were shown that the relation of cause to effect which we actually entertain and cannot help entertaining is in some instances flatly contrary to all experience, then we must acknowledge that the idea of cause asks to confirm it something quite independent of experience, that is abstract. But such examples are common. We never saw two objects continue to approach without meeting; but we are constrained to believe that lines of certain descriptions can forever approach and never meet.

The uniformity of sequence is, in fact, in the physical sciences never a.s.sumed to express the relation of cause and effect, until the connection between the antecedent and consequent can be set forth abstractly in mathematical formulae. The sequence of the planetary motions was discovered by Kepler, but it was reserved for Newton to prove the theoretical necessity of this motion and establish its mathematical relations. The sequence of sensations to impressions is well known, but the law of the sequence remains the desideratum in psychology.[92-1]

Science, therefore, has been correctly defined as "the knowledge of system." Its aim is to ascertain the laws of phenomena, to define the "order in things." Its fundamental postulate is that order exists, that all things are "lapped in universal law." It acknowledges no exception, and it considers that all law is capable of final expression in quant.i.ty, in mathematical symbols. It is the manifest of reason, "whose unceasing endeavor is to banish the idea of Chance."[93-1]

We thus see that its postulate is the same as that of the religious sentiment. Wherein then do they differ? Not in the recognition of chance. Accident, chance, does not exist for the religious sense in any stage of its growth. Everywhere religion proclaims in the words of Dante:--

"le cose tutte quante, Hann' ordine tra loro;"

everywhere in the more optimistic faiths it holds this order, in the words of St. Augustine, to be one "most fair, of excellent things."[93-2]

What we call "the element of chance" is in its scientific sense that of which we do not know the law; while to the untutored religious mind it is the manifestation of divine will. The Kamschatkan, when his boat is lost in the storm, attributes it to the vengeance of a G.o.d angered because he sc.r.a.ped the snow from his shoes with a knife, instead of using a piece of wood; if a Dakota has bad luck in hunting, he says it is caused by his wife stepping over a bone and thus irritating a spirit. The idea of cause, the sentiment of order, is as strong as ever, but it differs from that admitted by science in recognizing as a possible efficient motor that which is incapable of mathematical expression, namely, a volition, a will. _Voluntas Dei asylum ignorantiae_, is no unkind description of such an opinion.

So long as this recognition is essential to the life of a religious system, just so long it will and must be in conflict with science, with every prospect of the latter gaining the victory. Is the belief in volition as an efficient cause indispensable to the religious sentiment in general? For this vital question we are not yet prepared, but must first consider the remaining rational postulates it a.s.sumes. The second is

II. This order is one of intelligence.

By this is not meant that the order is one of _an_ Intelligence, but simply that the order which exists in things is conformable to man's thinking power,--that if he knows the course of events he can appreciate their relations,--that facts can be subsumed under thoughts. Whatever scheme of order there were, would be nothing to him unless it were conformable to his intellectual functions. It could not form the matter of his thought.[94-1]

Science, which deals in the first instance exclusively with phenomena, also a.s.sumes this postulate. It recognizes that when the formal laws, which it is its mission to define, are examined apart from their material expression, when they are emptied of their phenomenal contents, they show themselves to be logical constructions, reasoned truths, in other words, forms of intelligence. The votary who a.s.sumes the order one of volition alone, or volition with physical necessity, still a.s.sumes the volitions are as comprehensible as are his own; that they are purposive; that the order, even if not clear to him, is both real and reasonable. Were it not so, did he believe that the G.o.ds carried out their schemes through a series of caprices inconceivable to intelligence, through absolute chance, insane caprice, or blind fate, he could neither see in occurrences the signs of divine rule, nor hope for aid in obtaining his wishes. In fact, order is only conceivable to man at all as an order conformable to his own intelligence.

This second postulate embraces what has been recently called the "Principle of continuity," indispensable to sane thought of any kind. A late work defines it as "the trust that the Supreme Governor of the Universe will not put us to permanent intellectual confusion."[96-1]

Looked at closely, it is the identification of order with reason.

The third and final postulate of the religious sentiment is that

III. All intelligence is one in kind.

Religion demands that there be a truth which is absolutely true, and that there be a goodness which is universally and eternally good. Each system claims the possession, and generally the exclusive possession, of this goodness and truth. They are right in maintaining these views, for unless such is the case, unless there is an absolute truth, cognizable to man, yet not transcended by any divine intelligence, all possible religion becomes mere child's play, and its professed interpretation of mysteries but trickery.

The Grecian sophists used to meet the demonstrations of the mathematicians and philosophers by conceding that they did indeed set forth the truth, so far as man's intelligence goes, but that to the intelligence of other beings--a bat or an angel, for example--they might not hold good at all; that there is a different truth for different intelligences; that the intelligence makes the truth; and that as for the absolutely true, true to every intelligence, there is no such thing.

They acknowledged that a simple syllogism, constructed on these premises, made their own a.s.sertions partake of the doubtful character that was by them ascribed to other human knowledge. But this they gracefully accepted as the inevitable conclusion of reasoning. Their position is defended to-day by the advocates of "positivism," who maintain the relativity of all truth.

But such a conclusion is wholly incompatible with the religious mind. It must a.s.sume that there are some common truths, true infinitely, and therefore, that in all intelligence there is an essential unity of kind.

"This postulation," says a close thinker, "is the very foundation and essence of religion. Destroy it, and you destroy the very possibility of religion."[97-1]

Clear as this would seem to be to any reflective mind, yet, strange to say, it is to-day the current fas.h.i.+on for religious teachers to deny it.

Scared by a phantasm of their own creation, they have deserted the only position in which it is possible to defend religion at all. Afraid of the accusation that they make G.o.d like man, they have removed Him beyond the pale of all intelligence, and logically, therefore, annihilated every conception of Him.

Teachers and preachers do not tire of telling their followers that G.o.d is incomprehensible; that his ways are past finding out; that he is the Unconditioned, the Infinite, the Unknowable. They really mean that he is another order of intelligence, which, to quote a famous comparison of Spinoza, has the same name as ours, but is no more one with it than the dog is one with his namesake, the dog-star!

They are eagerly seconded in this position by a school of writers who distinctly see where such a doctrine leads, and who do not hesitate to carry it home. Mr. Mill is right in his scorn for those who "erect the incurable limitations of the human conceptive faculty into laws of the outward universe," if there are such limitations. And Mr. Spencer is justified in condemning "the transcendent audacity which pa.s.ses current as piety," if his definition of the underlying verity of religion is admitted--that it is "the consciousness of an inscrutable power which, in its nature, transcends intuition, and is beyond imagination."[98-1]

They are but following the orthodox Sir William Hamilton, who says: "Creation must be thought as the incomprehensible evolution of power into energy."[99-1] We are to think that which by the terms of the proposition is unthinkable! A most wise master!

Let it be noted that the expressions such as inscrutable, incomprehensible, unknowable, etc., which such writers use, are avowedly not limited to man's intelligence in its present state of cultivation, but are applied to his _kind_ of intelligence, no matter how far trained. They mean that the inscrutable, etc., is not merely not _at present_ open to man's observation--that were a truism--but that it cannot be subsumed under the laws of his reasoning powers. In other words, they deny that all intelligence is one in _kind_. Some accept this fully, and concede that what are called the laws of order, as shown by science, are only matters of experience, true here and now, not necessarily and absolutely true.

This is a consistent inference, and applies, of course, with equal force to all moral laws and religious dogmas.

The arguments brought against such opinions have been various. The old reply to the sophists has been dressed in modern garb, and it has been repeatedly put that if no statement is really true, then this one, to wit "no statement is really true," also is not true; and if that is the case, then there are statements which really are true. The theory of evolution as a dogma has been attacked by its own maxims; in a.s.serting that all knowledge is imperfect, it calls its own verity into question.

If all truth is relative, then this at least is absolutely true.