Allport, G. W. (1950).  The individual and his religion.  Toronto: The MacMillan Company.

Chapter 1

Origins of the Religious Quest

AMONG MODERN INTELLECTUALS---especially in the universities-the subject of religion seems to have gone into hiding.  Is it because the educated portion of mankind is learning to live with less finality and is coming to distrust embracing formulae of all types? Or is it because in their zeal to liquidate pseudo-knowledge and to discover truth in a piece- meal fashion the universities have found it necessary quietly to adopt a thoroughgoing secularism?  Whatever the reason may be, the persistence of religion in the modern world appears as an embarrassment to the scholars of today. Even psychologists, to whom presumably nothing of human concern is alien, are likely to retire into themselves when the subject is broached.

            During the past fifty years religion and sex seem to have reversed their positions. Writing in the Victorian age William James could bring himself to devote barely two pages to the role of sex in human life which he labeled euphemistically the instinct of love.  Yet no taboos held him back from directing the torrent of his genius into the Varieties of Religious Experience.  On religion he spoke freely and with unexcelled brilliance.  Today, by contrast, psychologists write with the frankness of Freud or Kinsey on the sexual passions of mankind, but blush and grow silent when the religious passions come into view. Scarcely any modern textbook writers in psychology devote as much as two shamefaced pages to the subject--even though religion, like sex, is an almost universal interest of the human race.

            It is not difficult to understand the reluctance of psychologists to enter a field that is both technical and tortuous, where institutional interests and historical considerations are of overpowering concern, and where methods of psychological research are few and undependable. It requires a certain hardiness of spirit for a psychologist to pronounce upon a subject that involves so many departments of life, and to which he brings little in the way of special research or knowledge.

            Yet he has no right to retire from the field. Fully two-thirds of the adults in our country regard themselves as religious people, and at least nine-tenths, by their own report, believe in God.2 A sentiment and a belief of such extent cannot be disregarded whether for reasons of professional modesty or disinterest. What is more, at just this juncture of the world's history literate people are growing more and more concerned with the relation between psychology and religion.  Perhaps the reason is that while the majority subscribe to the tenets of an historic faith they find that they hold the faith with many mental reservations. Why, they wonder, do doubts increasingly haunt them? They note too that, while they still “feel” religious, the regulative principles for their conduct are coming less and less from their religious belief and more from psychology, psychiatry, and mental hygiene.

            This trend toward doubt, toward secularism, toward psychologism, does not in the slightest degree mean that religion is a thing Of the past, or that it is on the way out. History shows that as fast hs institutional religion decays it has a way of reviving. The nineteenth century, marked as it was by increasing secularism, none the less witnessed the Oxford Movement, the Evangelical Revival, the birth of Christian Science, and the founding of the Salvation Army. The present century has seen the further spread of these movements and the resurgence of many fundamentalist sects, as well as a striking growth of ecumenicism. But it is not with the condition of organized religion that we are concerned.

The argument of this chapter is that the subjective (personal) religious sentiments of mankind--whatever the fate of institutional religion may be--are very much alive and will perhaps always remain alive, for their roots are many and deep.

Is There a Single Form of the Religious Sentiment?

Before we ask about the roots of religion in the life of the individual we do well to inquire whether there is a single basic form of experience that is inevitably a part of every religious sentiment.  It would be convenient if we could discover such a common denominator for the religious sentiment. Many attempts have been made to do so. One of the best known of these is Schleiermacher's.  This writer claims that the distinctively religious experience is a feeling of absolute dependence.   In the last analysis religion is a sense of appeal, dependence, surrender. Many subsequent writers have been fascinated by Schleiermacher's attempt to find one central and distinctive attribute in the religious sentiment. But each has preferred his own version of the case.

            Rudolf Otto felt that Schleiermacher had overlooked the cognitive counterpart of dependence. After all, the individual, overwhelmed by his own nothingness, is yet aware of a mysterious reality, tremendous and fascinating, on which he is dependent--a reality wholly other than man himself.  The intention of the Sanctus in the Mass would, to Otto, represent the quintessence of religion. Holy, Holy, Holy is the heart of all religion. Since no other aspect of human experience entails this amazement absolute, the religious sentiment, Otto concludes, is basically unique and unlike any other human experience?

            But even while we are admiring Otto's analysis we turn to Wobbermin and discover that to his mind the feeling of security and the sense of longing are insufficiently represented in either Schleiermacher or Otto. The psalms and prayers in all religious cultures, he insists, are replete with references to both longing and security. In Buddhism, for example, the feeling of dependence, so central 'to Schleiermacher's analysis, recedes while the feeling of security and poignant longing are dominant.

            I shall not multiply examples, for this type of analysis, however gratifying to the individual author, is foredoomed to failure. Each analyst seems to pinch a bit here and pull a bit there, in order that the formula for subjective religion may include his own introspections. Writers of this type are essentially autobiographical and unconsciously project their own delicate states of religious sensitivity upon all mankind. It is important to reject this approach at the outset, for if the religious sentiment were of uniform composition, marked by a single phenomenal core, then our task of psychological analysis would be straightforward; but if this simplicist approach is not acceptable--and it is not--then our attack must be pluralistic and varied.

            Most psychologists who have written on religion seem agreed that there is no single and unique religious emotion, but rather a widely divergent set of experiences that may be focused upon a religious object.  It is the habitual and intentional focusing of experience rather than the character of the experience itself that marks the existence of a religious sentiment. The wide variety of emotions that may enter into the religious intention is depicted by James:

            There is religious fear, religious love, religious awe, religious joy, and so forth. But religious love is only man's natural emotion of love directed to ,a religious object; religious fear is only the ordinary fear of commerce, so to speak, the common quaking in the human breast, in so far as the notion of divine retribution may arouse it; religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge; only this time it comes over us at the thought of our supernatural relations; and similarly of all the various sentiments which may be called into play in the lives of religious persons.

            Dunlap denies both a unique or universal religious emotion and likewise the existence of universal religious concepts. Although historical religions, he finds, frequently deal wits certain common concepts, they do not invariably do so Interest in divinities generally exists, though not universally. Daimons, spirits, and souls are commonly but not always a matter of concern. Problems of cosmology and metamorphosis are usually present, but there may be exceptions. Sin, salvation, and life after death are topics of only frequent interest. Mystical states and the idea of holiness are usually, but not invariably, included. In dealing with this core of conceptual interests, which is only approximately common, the individual himself experiences an infinite variety of mental states. There are no feelings and no emotions that are not experienced by devotees of one religion or another; and in most of the religions of the world the whole gamut of feelings and emotions is involved, each emotion or feeling being experienced in appropriate circumstances.

            True, James and Dunlap are somewhat extreme in their pluralism. Many authors prefer to establish a fixed norm for the religious sentiment and then to admit, a bit grudgingly, that individual variations do occur. One recent writer, Max Schoen, goes so far as to speak of the religious experience as subject to a variety of distortions.s It seems odd for a psychologist to speak of distortions of experience. An experience is what you have. While it may conceivably distort reality, it can scarcely distort itself. The error of Schoen, and of the majority of writers on religion in its subjective aspects, is that they do not refer the task of characterizing the religious consciousness to the only authorities capable of knowing what it is namely the individuals who experience it.

            In denying that the religious pattern in the individual's life possesses a standard form, we are not thereby denying it a personal form. Quite the contrary, in any given individual there are characteristic feelings and recurrent concepts highly typical of his own mental life. He is likely to have a well-organized personal sentiment that can presumably, with intensive psychological study, be accurately construed and understood. Even though in their religious lives people are not consistent with one another, they are as a rule markedly consistent with themselves.

Is There a Common Origin of the Religious Sentiment?

Just as there is no standard pattern of content in subjective religious experience, so too there is no common point of origin. To deny the existence of a single religious instinct entails no heresy in modern psychology, for it would be difficult to find any writer who makes a case for such an instinct. Even McDougall, the arch instinctivist of the present century, found no evidence for a single underlying religious propensity. Rather, he considered the emotion of reverence to be very complex. Into it enters awe which itself is a blend of fear and admiration. Admiration, in turn, represents a fusion of negative sell-feeling and wonder. In addition, reverence includes gratitude, a binary compound of the tender emotion and negative self-feeling. Underlying this emotional complex at least four McDougallian propensities are at work: curiosity, self-abasement, flight, and the parental instinct.

            Though we fail to find psychological support for a single and specific religious instinct we do find a tendency to identify religious thought and feeling with the operation of some one single bodily or mental mechanism. The theory of sex repression, for example, has its devotees. For evidence they cite the prominence of sex symbols in religion and the orgiastic nature of some forms of religious frenzy and mystical fantasy. Religion, they maintain, is a thinly veiled sublimation of the aim-inhibited sexual impulse. But this line of reasoning over-looks the even greater emphasis that religion gives to symbols of nutrition, security, repose. It is likewise specifically guilty of confusing all forms of excitement with sex emotion, or else of darkening counsel by equating sex with completeness. In any case it overlooks the passionlessness that marks so much of religion. Also, we know, religion flourishes over the face of the earth in places and in epochs that know no sex repression. If further refutation be needed, we have reports from present-day youth. Given a free and anonymous opportunity to comment on this subject, only 8 per cent of 5oo students recently interrogated thought sex turmoil was a factor in their religious awakening, while 23 per cent mentioned gratitude, 17 per cent sorrow and bereavement, and 42 per cent fear and insecurity.

As if to discredit the evidence of such introspective reports another simple and sovereign correlate of the religious life has been advanced, namely, the alleged operation of the “unconscious.” If the roots of religion lie wholly below the threshold of awareness, then, of course, introspection is valueless. The famous exponent of this view is Freud who maintains that the individual’s conception of God “is in every case modeled after the father.”  Our personal relation to God is dependent upon our relation to our physical parent. “God is at bottom nothing but an exalted father.”  If true, the correctness of this statement depends upon the existence of deeply repressed, infantile ideas which, Freud thinks, strive to express themselves whenever the individual finds life rough going.

There are many other ways in which religion has been tied to the unconscious. William James, for example, invoked the hypothesis of a subliminal connection between the individual's mind and a universal mind. The island of individual consciousness, to use his analogy, rests ultimately upon the limitless ocean floor from which it draws its composition and support. The theory that the individual mind is merely a fragment of a universal mind is common in many religions as diverse in type as Hinduism and Christian Science. To some extent this theory seems to be present in nearly every religion. Its merit, as James himself clearly saw, is metaphysical rather than psychological. It provides a possible channel for the inrush of divine consciousness into the individual mind.

Psychologically, any theory of unconscious origins is difficult to prove or to disprove. The only thing we can be sure of is that such theories are one-sided. The force of the unconscious cannot be the whole story, for a large array of conscious causal forces lie also at hand.

Perhaps the most striking fact about subjective religion is the contrast between its essential simplicity when, well-formed, it is playing its part in the economy of the personal life, and its extreme complexity in the process of forming. It is a rich pudding, smooth and simple in its blend, but intricate in ingredients. Or, to dignify the metaphor, it is a white light in personality which, though luminous and simple, is in reality multicolored in composition.

To make a spectroscopic analysis is not easy, since the prisms of each personality are unique. In nearly all instances, however, we find that in the course of development the religion of the individual has been refracted by (1) his bodily needs, (2) his temperament and mental capacity, (3) his psychogenic interests and values, (4) his pursuit of rational explanation, and (5) his response to the surrounding culture.  Each of these formative factors requires separate comment, although it is only through their synthesis that they engender the religious sentiment.

The Role of Organic Desire

            All of human life revolves around desire. And, as Dunlap says, “there seem to be no desires that are not, or have not at some time been, items in religions. Prayer certainly is an expression of desire, and there is nothing which man could desire that some man does not or has not prayed for.''

            Among the basic desires of men are those pertaining to food, water, and shelter. Fear, too, is an early and important ingredient in the individual and in the race. Man's life, bracketed between two oblivions, is haunted by fear of enemies, of nature, of sickness, poverty, ostracism; most of all of death, for of all creatures on earth man alone knows that he will die. Do we invoke the protection of an amulet, do we trust ourselves to the everlasting arms, do we discipline ourselves to seek Nirvana and so escape the threats that hover over us? To demand some form of reassurance is a spontaneous response to insecurity. The typical religious supplication results, with variants in all faiths:

Guide me, O thou great Jehovah,

Pilgrim through this barren land.

I am weak but thou art mighty,

Hold me with thy powerful hand.

            The reciprocal of fear is the desire for companionship. In most human beings the capacity to love is great and the desire for love insatiable. It is doubtful whether even the happiest of earthly lovers ever feel that they love or are loved enough. A margin of yearning remains. And if death takes the beloved from this world, the desire mounts. A small child in her bereavement nightly addressed her prayers to her dead mother. Culture did not sanction this practice; it was not taught by her elders. Rather it was for her a spontaneous solution of an insupportable conflict. Her religion was nourished by her orphan hunger.

            Customarily it is in the critical periods of life, when desire is more intense, that religious consciousness is acute. Many people are religious only in moments of crisis; the rest of the time they rub along comfortably and godlessly, content to let their religious sentiment lie dormant. But it is important to note that is felt as a crisis by one person is often not so regarded by another. One young girl became devout in the course of praying that her parents might not obtain a divorce, another in her desire to be delivered from haunting nightmares. Bereavement or self-reproach often engender vivid religious experience. The longing for a suitable marriage may lead the Catholic maiden to say a Novena for divine assistance. Over and over again in a multitude of ways, the religion of the individual brings to a focus the mingled motives and desires of an unfulfilled life.

It is unnecessary to exhaust the list of contributing desires. Their multiplicity is indicated by the varying conceptions of deity held by different individuals and by one and the same individual at different periods of time. Sometimes the attribute of power is stressed; God is omnipotent the creator and able to still the tempests; the heavens declare His glory. Sometimes He is the source of security and strength, an ever-present help in time of trouble. Often He is cosmic perfection, to be worshiped in the beauty of holiness. When we need affection, God is love, knowledge, He is omniscient; consolation, He granteth peace that passeth understanding. When we have sinned, He is the Redeemer; when we need guidance, the Holy Spirit. Divine attributes plainly conform to the panorama of desire, although the individual is seldom aware that his approach to his deity is determined by his present needs.

            An interesting rite in the Hindu religion here comes to mind. Around the age of sixteen or eighteen, the Hindu youth receives from his teacher a name for God, which all his life long shall serve this youth as a private instrument for prayer and for binding himself to the deity. In this custom Hinduism recognizes that the temperament, needs, and capacities of the  initiate himself must in large part determine his approach to religious verities. A young person with an unusually affectionate nature will seek in God the complement to his love. Hence the name Beloved may be privately assigned to him. A theoretically minded youth may be advised to select Soham, a name that affirms the unity of all existence. In preparation for this rite the teacher assumes the responsibility for correctly assessing the personality of his charge. Although other religions provide personal counsel for the initiate at the threshold of maturity, probably none goes to such lengths in making a close analysis of the youthful personality. In this practice we have a rare instance of an institutional religion recognizing the ultimate individuality of the religious sentiment. The fact that the teacher takes upon himself more responsibility than a psychodiagnostician in the West would like to assume is not here the issue.

           In India it is not enough that each individual should have a name for the deity suited to his own personal needs; it is also strictly advised that this name be kept secret even from one's bosom friends and from one's spouse. In the last analysis each person confronts his deity in solitude, and it is thought well to symbolize this fact, especially in over-crowded households and communities, with the seal of secrecy. It has been said that a congenial husband and wife, or two bosom friends, not infrequently have received identical names for God, thus signifying the astuteness of teachers in perceiving the like-mindedness of two developing personalities. But so closely are the names guarded that the frequency of this occurrence cannot accurately be estimated.

Temperament

This Hindu rite deafly recognizes underlying differences in temperamental constitution. Some men live always close to the region of pain and melancholy; they are bound to emphasize the grimmer aspects of whatever they encounter, and to stain their religious sentiment with their sense of forlornness. Others have started in life with sparklers and hells; even in their moments of dependence they incline to take a sanguine view of the operations of Providence.

Both the gloomy and the gay may be concerned with the wrongness of life and may seek a religious mode of righting it, but their paths will be separate. Their theological and ritualistic preferences will differ according to their emotional thresholds, according to the quality of their prevailing mood, and according to their tendency to express or to inhibit feeling. Moreover, they are likely to be sharply biased in favor of these preferences, and correspondingly critical of other who find a different sort of religion better adapted to their needs. In this obdurate fact of temperament there lies a practical limitation to the aspirations of the current ecumenical movement.

The roots of religion that lie in temperament are but poorly understood. Indeed, the entire relation of genetics to the temperamental foundations of personality is still unexplored territory. The time is fast approaching, however, when psychologists who have banked so heavily upon the forces of the environment in fashioning personality will have to devote an equivalent amount of energy to the study of the inborn climate of personality. Until they do so, a false picture of human nature will prevail.

Psychogenic Desires and Spiritual Values

I have suggested that subjective religion is, in the first instance, the flower of desire. Many desires, including those having to do with nourishment, rest, sex, and physical safety, are dearly organic in character. We share them with all animal life. For the most part these viscerogenic desires have a one-to-one correspondence with the tissue needs of the body. But there are other desires, psychogenic in character, that are very different from viscerogenic desires. We recognize the latter as subjective and private, and though they may indirectly nourish the religious hunger, especially when they are blocked, yet in themselves they normally clamor for objects which bring direct bodily satisfaction.  Psychogenic desires, by contrast, are objectified.  We long for information, let us say, and we locate the desired knowledge somewhere outside ourselves, calling Truth.  Or perhaps we long for fair and just social relations, and call them Good, again objectifying the value we seek. A symphony or a stained glass window furnishes satisfaction to our aesthetic hungers. Beauty too we locate outside ourselves. The inner restlessness that seeks satisfactions of this order is more complex than the specifically localized, segmental drives of the body. It is also a distinctively human, as opposed to animal motive.

            Now anything that yields a satisfaction or provides a means for such satisfaction we designate a “value.”  Chronologically the viscerogenic or “bodily” values precede the psychogenic or “spiritual” values.  Further, all values grow ever more generalized. The infant, who at first merely consumes one concrete value after another as they are successively presented to him, soon comes to recognize food, companionship, playthings, as broad categories of desiderata. Similarly in the psychogenic realm, not only does some particular act of justice yield satisfaction but it does so for the reason that it conforms to an abstracted class of activities that constitute our sense of what is good and right. Gradually then we come to regard Goodness, Beauty, Truth, Holiness as categorical. They exist outside ourselves, in some realm of essences, and determine the objects toward which much of our striving is directed. Not all psychogenic interests are socially or spiritually desirable. There are hungers for self-expression, for adventure, for power, which, I believe, are properly classed as psychogenic, but these are readily recognized as being relatively self-centered and not so widely removed from the viscerogenic drives in which they originated.

            To illustrate the evolution of values and their final bearing upon subjective religion, let us take the central phenomenon of egoism. The infant, so far as we can tell, is not at all self-conscious. He reacts to stimuli, expresses his wants, consumes the satisfaction offered, and lapses into quiescence.  Philosophically we are probably required to attribute to the infant from birth, if not before, the possession of a self; but with almost perfect assurance we can assert that only in the second year of life does he commence to relate his experiences to himself and begin to act as a reflexly conscious agent. Only when he comes to resent offenses against his person, encroachments upon his dignity, is he building up a sense of his own ego as an object of value. This stage in a child's development, marked, as it usually is, by stubbornness and negativism, is unmistakable. From the age of two onward the most universal of all values resides in the keen sense of individuality which constantly demands self-expression, craves power, and feels pride. Our organisms are so constructed that our personal life is the highest value that we ever know directly. Yet by indirect stages the evolution of this value continues much further.

            Soon I come to ask myself, “If I am acutely self-conscious and disposed to brook no lese majeste against my person, are not others, in all probability, equally attached to their egos?”  And thus abstracting from my physical individuality file general concept of selfhood, I gradually come to value whatever makes for the conservation of personal integrity anywhere. The Natural Rights of Man, the Golden Rule, the Second Commandment of Christ, are varied statements of the value that I affirm. I affirm it because in the course of my own development the generalizing powers of my mind have brought my own sense of selfhood into higher combinations.  Where once only my personal life was the supreme value, I now acknowledge the worth of any person. And this enlarged value may come to subsume, depending on my own trends of logic and the teaching offered me, many subordinate values such as charity, tolerance, equality. My concept of the person may by now be even divested of corporeal attributes without thereby losing its insistent character. God Himself I may declare to be the supreme expression of personality, a necessary and final value required to explain and to conserve all other values of selfhood.

            This psychogenic interest in the integrity of personality beginning with my own ego, and developing finally to embrace both an ethics and a theology, is only one illustration of the process I am depicting. The world of art, the world of science, as well as the social universe around us, are all concerned with the production of values capable both of satisfying us and enlarging our horizon. We become eager that no value should perish. God as Beauty would guarantee the conservation of the values in art; God as Truth would assure them to science and philosophy; God as Love would conserve all that strikes us as valid and worth preserving in human relations; God as Infinite would establish the inter-connectedness of values in all these realms. It is this line of thought that led H6ffding to declare all religion to be motivated by the individual's desire to conserve value.  What he will wish to conserve depends upon his own needs, and needs vary from individual to individual, from nation to nation, and from time to time. When values do not rise above the egoistic level, the resulting religion is designed to conserve self-interest; when they are more highly abstracted and generalized, as in the affirmation of the worth of personality, the character of the religious faith broadens. Hoffding notes further that it is when values come into conflict with the struggle for existence that subjective religion is most acutely felt, for when values are threatened a conserving agent is most needed. Thus it comes about that under conditions of fear, illness, bereavement, guilt, deprivation, insecurity, the restoration of values through religion is commonly sought.

Pursuit of Meaning

Now the factors that we have been considering desire temperament, values .are relatively speaking the more emotional roots of the religious sentiment in the individual. It is unfortunate that limitations of vocabulary force psychological analysis to treat emotion and reason, affection and cognition as if they were separate provinces of mental life. From the point of view of the concrete functioning of the human mind nothing could be more false than is this division. In reality every emotional state is freighted with knowledge. Take two such elementary passions as terror and anger. The distinction between them, odd though it seems, is largely cognitive in character, for the bodily changes in both are virtually identical. In terror we know we are trapped; in anger we figure we have a fighting chance. Though the cognitive ingredients are swiftly and subtly marshaled, no emotion is devoid of them. Conversely, even our most crystal clear moments of logical reasoning would not take place at all unless they were sustained by present motivation (that is to say, by some state of desire).

            It follows that subjective religion, like all normal sentiments, must be viewed as an indistinguishable blend of emotion and reason, of feeling and meaning. When we' study it we are dealing with neither rationality nor irrationality, but rather with a posture of the mind in which emotion and logical thinking fuse. We are dealing with a mode of response wherein a combination of feelings is tied to a conception of the nature of things that is thought-provoking, reasonable, and acceptable. It is regrettable that we have no term in the lexicon of psychology to designate this cognitive-affective fusion. The only term that approximately fills our need, and the one we shall adopt, is sentiment, though its flavor unfortunately suggests feeling more than meaning.

            Because of this unbalanced connotation it is necessary to call special attention to the explanatory significance of the religious sentiment in the individual's life. He may, in a cool Thomistic manner, be able to demonstrate to himself the steps of proof for the existence of God, and continue, in the same fashion, to define the world in such a way that all his thoughts and feelings slip nicely into place. Under the guidance of such a sentiment, unifying feeling and meaning, his life proceeds fluently, and he experiences both ease and peace. All the great religions of the world supply, for those who can subscribe to their arguments and affirmations, a world-conception that has logical simplicity and serene majesty.

            Most individuals, however, are not sufficiently contemplative nor sufficiently imitative to adopt in toto the explanation offered by any one master theologian. They may grasp parts of his system of thought, and sense the direction of the system as a whole. But they find that they require their own interpretations when they are in the grip of the engrossing pressures of their lives. In times of acute desire it is not the perfection of a system as a whole that satisfies but some aspect of it that renders intelligible and supportable the needs of the moment.

            I am saying that all the while we are fretting, desiring valuing, we are often busily seeking to interpret our own unrest. Early we come to realize that our frustrated longings are not in any literal or direct way satisfied through religion. Terrestrial food, drink, shelter are still necessary for survival; justice, beauty, truth, are still sought; but we do ask why we have such longing, what is the purpose of seeking its satisfaction? What is it all about anyhow? In many lives questions of this sort are remarkably insistent, and the curiosity they engender, like the dinging ivy, fiercely demands a support.

            The universe is simply incomprehensible. Fragments of it may be fairly well understood, but not the interrelation of these fragments, and certainly not the design of the whole. Every man wonders at times about the void which gave way to creation, and about the successive links that connect this original void to his own momentary state of wonder. To many men, religion is primarily a search for complete knowledge, for unfissioned truth.

           This appetite for meaning differs from person to person, and owing to nature's preference for diversity, some are, satiated earlier than others. Furthermore, the capacities of individuals for comprehension differ, as do ability and inclination to make use of scientific explanations or of poetic metaphor. No two people have identical intellectual difficulties or powers, and hence no two reach identical solutions.

Is This Rationalizing Tendency Magical?

           Some writers scoff at this rationalizing tendency in religious thinking, and regard it merely as a prelogical prelude to empirical and scientific thinking. This view was a favorite with certain older anthropologists who, possessing a handful of evidence from primitive tribes, argued that people who think religiously are, like primitives, living in a magical phase of development. The argument holds that we confuse the utilitarian and the sacred. Unable to control scientifically the propagation of plants, the navigation of ships, the construction of durable and effective tools and weapons, the primitive is said to have recourse to incantation, ritual, and prayer. Similarly in our own culture the child or the ignorant adult resorts to religious practices instead of adopting empirical procedures in order to solve his dilemma.

The error in this derivation of the religious sentiment is partly a mistake in fact and partly a mistake in interpretation. Pointing to the error in fact, Malinowski has shown that the Trobriand Islander, for example, possesses an impressive and accurate store of scientific knowledge that governs his fishing, gardening, and boat-construction. He is realistic and genuinely scientific in much of his thinking and behavior. It is tree that, side by side with tins severely empirical mode of thought, there exists a system of magical practices and beliefs, but these are specifically not confused with it? The native knows full well that successful results will follow only from empirically proper manipulations. At the same time he knows there are factors in the situation beyond his rational understanding and control. For this reason he engages, just as do the majority of people the world over, in a dual set of expressions, the one to deal with factors within comprehension and control, the other with factors beyond comprehension and control.

Take the case of sickness and death. All people of all times have had scientific remedies to employ, medicinal herbs, techniques of first aid, therapeutic exercises. But they have also invoked religious aid. In our own culture the dual nature of these resources is clearly recognized. We know that when we summon a doctor and when we summon a priest we are acting on entirely different levels. Probably to the primitive the boundary is somewhat more obscure, and yet, according to Malinowski, he too is not unaware of transposing his problems to the religious plane.

The point is even more clearly brought out in bereavement. Probably no people on earth, primitive or civilized, believe that incantation, ritual, or prayer will resuscitate a corpse. Yet, as Parsons has pointed out, in no society does death lack ritual observances far in excess of the utilitarian need for disposing of the corpse and for making other practical adjustments. The strong emotions caused by bereavement have everywhere resulted in the development of religious ceremonies that are engaged in simply because minimal practical adjustments are felt to be inadequate. Thus, we cannot concede that funeral ceremonies, whether in the primitive or in the civilized world, are the result merely of an unscientific view of death.

If religious thinking were identical with prelogical thinking we could not account for many facts in the development of our own culture. History shows us that with relatively few exceptions religious institutions themselves have fostered the development of logic, mathematics, and scientific method. Church schools, with few exceptions, teach the same science as do private universities. And we could probably prove that throughout history those Christians who have accomplished the most practical benefit in this world are those who believed most fervently in the next.

The fact of the matter is that scientific thought is known by most people, primitive or civilized, to be able to cover only part of the ground. It goes a long way but not far enough. In Max Weber's terminology science deals with problems of empirical causation, religion with problems of adequate meaning. For most people, even for primitives, it is not hard to assign to science that which is science's and to religion that which is religion's. How the atomic energy of the sun reaches the earth or how it may be released through nuclear fission are problems of empirical causation. Problems of the creation, purpose, and ethical control of atomic energy are all of a different stripe. How a young child came to be burned to death is an empirical question that can be answered; why such things must happen is a question of a wholly different order.

The Bias of Intelligibility and the Bias of Optimism

For the most part the problems of meaning which people commonly refer to the religious mode of thought have to do with the issue of creation or with the issue of evil. Cosmological wonder is surely one of the commonest of all origins of religious thinking. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the world? the Lord asks of Job.

But even more insistent is preoccupation with evil, reflected in the great literature of all religions. Typical are the opening pages of the Yogavasistha, a sacred Hindu text dating probably from the sixth century?

What happiness can there be in the world where everyone is born to die? Everything comes into existence only to pass away…Life is as evanescent as autumnal clouds, as the light of an oilless lamp, and as the ripples on the surface of water...Desire is as fickle as a monkey. It is never satisfied with the objects already in hand, but jumps to other unattained ones   There is nothing good in the body. It is an abode of disease, a receptacle of all kinds of agonies, and subject to decay...What delight can we have in the portion of our life called youth, which comes like a flash of lightening, soon to be inevitably followed by the thunderclaps and the agonies of old age?...What direction is there from which cries of suffering are not heard?…Let me know the best possible secret of becoming free from the sufferings of life.

Like many religious systems the Yogavasistha is intended for people who are keenly alive to the undesirable aspects of life and eager to know the secret of self-liberation.

The purpose of creation and evil are twin problems of meaning that have throughout the ages been referred to religious systems for their solution. In virtually every life these problems exist side by side, although it is quite customary for one individual to direct his quest more pointedly toward the solution of one of these problems than of the other.

To the extent that the individual finds some approximate or partial solution to these vexing problems, his whole life is shifted in some degree toward intelligibility and optimism. Religious people are often heard to say, “I don't know what I would do without religion.” This remark testifies to the relatively satisfying framework of meaning they have attained. To destroy such intelligibility and such optimism would be to cut much of the ground from under their existence.

Does this frequent bias of religion toward optimism, intelligibility, and the conservation of value indicate wishful thinking? Although the charge is commonly made, it is usually superficial. For one thing it overlooks the fact that the character of the hope and the tenor of the explanations involved in religion have very little to do with the clamorous wishes of ordinary life. What is demanded by the great religions is self-abnegation, discipline, surrender. To find one's life one must lose it. Such a transposition of values is too extensive to be covered by the formula of autism that is applied appropriately only to daydreams and to the rationalizations of daily life that are transparent in their self-centeredness. Only occasionally, I think, ddo we find individuals in who religion runs its course on the level of wish-fulfilling fantasy. When this occurs we are dealing with a merely abortive religious sentiment in the individual.

The bias of intelligibility is by no means peculiar to the religious outlook on life. It saturates mental processes of all types. Take simple sensory perception, for example. As we let our eye wander about the room in which we sit, we conveniently overlook the sensory gaps that result from the blind spots in our retinas. When we read a page of proof we are satisfied with the meaning we derive that we may over-look many typographical errors. When we think of a race of people, perhaps with a feeling of dislike or hostility, we have created an inner world of meaning that finds little or no support in biological or anthropological fact. All our life is biased in the direction of obtaining simplified perceptions and categorical meanings. If we say that the intelligibilities of religious people leap far ahead of verifiable evidence, we must not forget that the intelligibilities of irreligious people do so likewise. All our cognitive operations press toward coherence and unity. Whether we be theists or atheists, we are prone to stereotype the world we live in. Equally inevitable is our bias toward optimism. No young man, says G. B. Shaw, ever really believes that he is going to die. The doctor and his patient usually assume, and always act, as though health will result from the medical service. Yet a doctor who himself lived long enough would be bound to lose every one of his patients, and equally bound to suppress this certainty of defeat in favor of the optimistic bias. Most college students, we know, have a rosy and unreal view of the income they will earn after leaving college. But we regard this optimistic tendency as a wholesome mark of aspiration and legitimate ambition, and not as illusion, because after all there is a genuine element of uncertainty involved. All of us expect to be alive next year and yet actuarial estimates indicate that one and a half per cent of us will not be. Wherever there is uncertainty, hope springs eternal. The irreligious individual, no less than the religious, plans for a happy landing.

And so we see why it is unsound to trace the origin of the religious quest to the desire for escape from reality. It is true that religion tends to define reality as congenial to the powers and aspirations of the individual, but so too does any working principle that sustains human endeavor. Those who find the religious principle of life illusory would do well not to scrutinize their own working principles too closely.

Culture and Conformity

I have argued that desiring and valuing and the pursuit of meaning, conditioned by temperament and capacity, spin the threads that become woven into the subjective religious pattern, and that the infinite diversity of these threads, guarantees that each weaver's design will be unique. But am I not in danger of overstating the case for pluralism? Must we not grant that culture imposes rigid constraints that tend to offset nature's preference for diversity? A child brought up in the Confucian tradition could not possibly arrive unaided at the intricate system of Christian theological beliefs held by many inhabitants of the Western world. And why throughout the ages has proselyting into far lands been necessary except to offset the strict cultural determination of religious belief?

Conformity to culture, especially during the period of childhood, is indeed an important origin of the religious quest. In all lands the social training of the child directs him to translate tribal ritual into personal habits. At first the religious practices prescribed for the young child have no meaning for him, at least none of the meaning that they will later come to have. He regards the ritual as something that his group (his family or his tribe) engages in, and learns that to perform the required act is to cement his identification with those who provide him security, affection, approval. The fast of Ramadan, the prayers of the rosary, grace at table, a silent Quaker meeting a child ordinarily learns to participate in these rites before he learns the corresponding myth that explains their purpose. And when the myth is learned it too is at first accepted without question for the same reason the ritual was adopted. The in-group is safe and familiar and therefore whatever it does and says is good and right.

           We accept this interpretation offered us by cultural anthropology, and we accept likewise three additional facts of importance taught by this discipline. First, the cultures of all peoples in the world give great prominence to ritual and myth, and all possess some mode of organization or priesthood to sustain religious beliefs and practice. Secondly, wherever religious systems are hopelessly disrupted, the consequences for the life of the people are disastrous, unless some equivalent systems of belief replace them. Thirdly, religious systems are not independent of the remaining portions of a culture, but are intimately integrated with them. For this reason the supplanting of one religion by another is not possible unless the culture itself is basically altered. The threads of religion are lockstitched into the social and economic fabric. Agricultural peoples worship deities of fruition. In India the caste system has been closely bound to the belief in the transmigration of souls; for if one's deeds in a previous existence are responsible for the state of one's life in this world, there is little point in protesting against one's present placement in a caste. And our own Protestantism, as Max Weber makes us see, is inextricably related to the rise of capitalism in the West. Whether we could have had one without the other is doubtful.

           In view of all these indisputable ties between religion and culture would it not be wise to define the former in terms of the latter? Should we not say that religion is merely a culturally created design for living, acting as a potential guide for the behavior of men? That its utility within the culture guarantees that it will be handed on from father to son? And that the child believes what he believes because he was taught to believe it?

            Many social scientists are content with this type of analysis but it is far too gross. For one thing it assumes that the religious sentiment of an individual is a faithful replica of the cultural model that is offered him. We can put this assumption to a test very easily by asking ourselves whether our religious views do in fact mirror faithfully those of our parents, teachers, or clergy. There would be few affirmative answers to this question. How then does it come about that so many individuals within a culture fail to reflect the systems of belief that were carefully taught them?

The reason is the place of religion in the personal life is basically different from its place in society. The social scientist argues that the function of religion is to produce social stability. Yet no individual, I venture to assert, is religious for any such reason. Indeed, most people would hasten to discard their religion if they thought it was merely a device to keep them out of the hands of the police and out of their neighbor's hair. Further, the social scientist tells us that religion is a culturally sanctioned vent for the release of' overstrong emotions which would be disruptive if expressed in society. But from the individual's point of view strong emotions are only rarely involved in his religious life, and their social control is a matter of no particular concern to him.

            It is certainly true that rulers in all ages have enjoined religious faith and observance upon their subjects in order to secure social stability and prevent untimely outbursts of passion, but the individuals concerned are not motivated by any such political considerations. Machiavelli saw in the Church an instrument for maintaining civil peace, while his contemporary, St. Catherine of Genoa, found in it the motive and meaning for a life of exceptional charity and devotion. There is a world of difference between the ruler's view and the participant's view.

Up to now the social scientist has looked so closely at the prescribed codes of institutional religion and at their consequences in terms of social control, that he has failed to think of the participant. The person who conforms to a religious custom does so for his own private reasons and derives from his conformity some special significance for his own life. In the Middle East on Fridays one may enter a mosque and witness a sea of humanity kneeling and bending low in the direction of Mecca. The wave of conformity is like that of a vast impersonal tide. Yet, from the point of view of subjective religion, the significance of the devotion is different for each Moslem. All over the world on Sundays millions of Christians recite a common creed, with innumerable shades of interpretation. Such variety neither invalidates nor weakens any historic faith. It does, however, if properly taken into account, rectify and enrich the approach of both social scientists and theologians to their respective tasks.

Conclusion

The conclusion we come to is that the subjective religious attitude of every individual is, in both its essential and non-essential features, unlike that of any other individual. The roots of religion are so numerous, the weight of their influence in individual lives so varied, and the forms of rational interpretation so endless, that uniformity of product is impossible. Only in respect to certain basic biological functions do men closely resemble one another. In the higher reaches of personality uniqueness of organization becomes more apparent. And since no department of personality is subject to more complex development than the religious sentiment, it is precisely in this area that we must expect to find the ultimate divergences.

This conclusion, I know, will be uncongenial to many. It will offend some scientists who will ask, “How can we possibly classify phenomena that are unique, and does not all science of necessity proceed by classification?”   It will disturb some historians and sociologists who like to think that the individual cannot help but mirror the cultural model offered to him as a guide to his development. It will be unpalatable likewise to those theologians and churchmen who deceive themselves by thinking their followers are safely and entirely within some particular ecclesiastical fold.

Chapter 3

The Religion of Maturity

A person of twenty, thirty, or even seventy, years of age, does not necessarily have an adult personality. In fact, chronological age is a comparatively poor measure of mental and, emotional maturity, likewise of religious maturity. In emerging from childhood one gives up the egocentricism of his thought and feeling only under pressure, and ordinarily environmental pressure does not force a maturity of religious outlook upon the individual as inexorably as it does other forms of maturity. For the individual's religion is usually regarded by others as his own business and, so far as others care, call easily remain egocentric, magical, and wish-fulfilling. Hence, in probably no region of personality do we find so many residues of childhood as in the religious attitudes of adults.

            Maturity in any sentiment comes about only when a growing intelligence somehow is animated by the desire that this sentiment shall not suffer arrested development, but shall keep pace with the intake of relevant experience. In many people, so far as the religious sentiment is concerned, this inner demand is absent. Finding their childhood religion to have comforting value and lacking outside pressure, they cling to an essentially juvenile formulation. Often they retain it to preserve pleasant associations accumulated in the childhood, or because conformity to the status quo insures present comfort and social position.  They take over the ancestral religion much as they take over the family jewels. It would be awkward to bring it into too close a relationship with science with suffering, and with criticism.

            Nor shall we gauge the maturity of religion by a predetermined standard of belief or practice that we personally are pleased to approve. To sa5, that your views or my views are mature, and to impose them as a test of maturity upon all other views would be impertinent. Discussions of religion are usually marked by the assumption that the beliefs of the writer are superior to all other varieties of belief.

            The criteria of maturity should be more objective, drawn from a defensible theory of the nature of human personality.  Elsewhere I have argued that the attributes of a mature personality are three in number. First, a variety of psychogenic interests is required which concern themselves with ideal objects and values beyond the range of viscerogenic desire.  Unless one escapes the level of immediate biological impulse, one's life is manifestly dwarfed and infantile.  A second attribute is the ability to objective fire oneself, to be reflective and insightful about one's own life.  The individual with insight sees himself as others see him, and at certain moments glimpses himself in a kind of cosmic perspective.  A developed sense of humor is an aspect of this second attribute.  Finally, a mature personality always has some unifying philosophy of life, although not necessarily religious in type nor articulated in words, nor entirely complete.  But without the direction and coherence supplied by some dominant integrative pattern any of life seems fragmented and aimless.

            These three attributes of maturity are not selected in arbitrary manner.  They are chosen because they represent the three primary added use of development that are open to any human beings in the course of his growth: the avenue of widening interests (the expanding self), the avenue of detachment and insight (self-objectification), and the avenue of integration (self-unification).

            Not every mature individual forms a religious sentiment.  If he does not, it is because he has some other satisfactory philosophy of life, a move of synthesis that is perhaps aesthetic, ethical, or philosophical in character.  But whenever in a mature personality in mature religious sentiment does develop it has a heavy-duty to perform, for it is charged with the task of accommodating every atom of experience that is referred to it.  Other master sentiments are ordinarily less ambitious in their scope. A thoroughly aesthetic person, for example, may evolve what for him is an adequate style of life. With art and humor he makes out well enough, but he does so because he declares many of the moral and meta-physical puzzles of life to be of no great consequence to him.  By contrast, the mature religious sentiment lays itself open to all facts, to all values, and disvalues, and claims to have the clue to their theoretical and practical inclusion in a frame of life. With such a task to perform it is impossible for this sentiment in a mature stage of development to remain disconnected from the mainstream of experience, relegated to a corner of the fantasy life where it provides an escape clause in one's contract with reality.

            Most of the criticism of religion is directed to its immature forms. When immature it has not evolved beyond the level of impulsive self-gratification. Instead of dealing with psychogenic values it serves either the wish to filling or soporific function for the self-centered interests.  When immature it does not entail self-objectification, but remains unreflective, failing to provide a context of meaning in which the individual can locate himself, and with perspective judge the quality of his conduct. Finally, the immature sentiment is not really unifying in its effect upon the personality. Excluding, as it does, whole regions of experience, it is spasmodic, segmented, and even when fanatic in intensity, it is but partially integrative of the personality.

The Nature of Sentiment

           When I use the tern1 sentiment, I might equally well for our purpose speak of interest, outlook, or system of beliefs. All these terms simply call attention to the fact that in the course of development relatively stable units of personality gradually emerge. Such units are always the product of the two critical and vital functions of mental life: motivation and organization.  Motivation refers to the go of mental life, organization to its patterning. It is regrettable, as I have previously said, that our psychological vocabulary inclines us to separate the two- the emotional forces from the cognitive or organizing forces. From the point of view of actual conduct the primary unit of mental life is organized motive, or, if you prefer, motivated organization. Whatever it is called, this unit is a system of readiness, a mainspring of conduct, preparing tile person for adaptive behavior whenever the appropriate stimulus or associations are presented.

If a system of readiness is well ingrained and fairly specific, such as that involved in driving an automobile, we are likely to speak of a habit. If it represents a somewhat broader style of adapting without reference to specific stimulus, such as dispositions leading to politeness, aggressiveness, timidity in conduct, we speak of a trait. If it represents a tendency disconnected from the individual's socialized dispositions and warring with them, we are likely to speak of a neurosis. If it represents all organization of feeling and thought directed toward some definable object of value a mother, a soil, a keep sake, a neighborhood, a fatherland--we call the system sentiment. The object of a sentiment need not be as physically concrete as those just named. A sentiment may also deal with more abstract ideas of value, as in the devotion some people have to beauty, or to the sacredness of personality, or to the idea One World. Besides such positive sentiments, there are of course negative sentiments wherein aversion is felt to persons, objects, ideas that are regarded by the individual not as values but as disvalues. Thus an atheist may have a negative sentiment relating to all things commonly regarded as religious.

           At the level of tile more abstract sentiments we encounter difficulty in designating the precise object to which the individual is attached.  Can we prescribe, for example, what the object or focus of the religious sentiment must be? I think not, for the sentiment is so broad that it constitutes a mere posture of the mind that persists while various objects and sub-values are successively brought into view. At one moment a certain aspect of the deity May and each the individual’s attention; soon he finds himself thinking of the nature of evil, and then of the chances for immortality; a moment of adoration intervenes; and then another aspect of the deity is brought to mind, which perhaps fixes attention upon the significance of some sacrament, and this in turn arouses a special attitude toward some item in the creed. And so it goes endlessly, ardor rising and falling as different objects and sub-values of the sentiment are present in the mind. It is common to find people who are much alike in some component attitudes and very unlike in others.

  The astonishing thing about the religious sentiment, and to a less degree about any sentiment, is that, although it entails many component attitudes and objects of interest, it represents nonetheless a stable unit of mental life. The component attitudes are variable but all contribute to a single well-patterned system.

            Shall we then define the mature religious sentiment as a disposition, built up through experience, to respond favorably, and in certain habitual ways, to conceptual objects and principles that the individual regards as of ultimate importance in his own life, and is having to do with what he regards as permanent or central in the nature of things? Thus defined, the religious sentiment allows wide variation both in the human race at large and during the course of any single individual' s development.

            Unless we are dealing with a religious genius--Christ being the example--we must not expect that the religious sentiment, even when mature, will be absolutely consistent. More than with other sentiments, it's fashioning is always unfinished business. Such a heavy assignment, the synthesis of all facts and forces "central in the nature of things," calls for more than can be accomplished. A person with even a strongly developed religious sentiment still finds that his conduct does not issue as uniformly as he wishes from its directive control. Impulse often wins out, and many of the things he would not do he does; and much that he would do he leaves undone. If the religious sentiment were perfectly organized and in sole control there would be no discrepancy between profession and practice. But, excepting in a religious genius, such a degree of integrated direction of conduct is never achieved.

While we guard against over estimating the consistency and completeness of the mature religious sentiment, we may nonetheless list the attributes that mark it off from the immature sentiment. By comparison the mature sentiment is (l) well differentiated; (2) dynamic in character in spite of its derivative nature; (3) productive of a consistent morality; (4) comprehensive; (5) integral; and (6) fundamentally heuristic. It will be seen that these criteria are nothing else than special applications in the religious sphere of the tests for maturity of personality: a widened range of interests, insight into oneself, and the development of an adequately embracing philosophy of life.

Differentiation of the Mature Sentiment

When we say that mature religious sentiment is differentiated we are calling attention to its richness and complexity. In any single life this sentiment is almost certain to be more complex, subtler, and more personal in flavor, than any single definition of religion can possibly suggest. According to Westermarck, religion is “a regardful attitude towards a supernatural being, on whom man feels himself dependent and to whom he makes an appeal in his worship. And so it often is.  MacMurray introduces a social note, regarding the name of religion has human perfection in relation with others, as a realization of fellowship.  Relation often has this social emphasis.  But Whitehead introduces the opposite note, defining religion as “what a man does with his solitariness” and as the “longing of the spirit that the facts of existence should find their justification in the nature of existence.”  All of these, and many additional points of emphasis are valid; but it is sheer presumption to suppose that one formulation captures the completeness or precise emphasis of the sentiment as it exists in any single mature adult.

The multiplicity of interests that fall within the religious sentiment I designate as differentiations of this sentiment. It is better to do this than to regard them as myriads of separate sentiments: toward the church, toward the divine, toward world brotherhood, toward good and evil. For it is evident that these components, though discriminable, are woven into a pattern. There are dominant and subsidiary designs in this pattern characteristic of each individual's personal life. Those who have not developed a differentiated sentiment often show a kind of uncritical abandon. They may say, I don't know enough about it to be rational; I'm accepting my religion on purely emotional grounds, or, I believe what I was taught, and that's good enough for me. There is here no reflective articulation of parts., The distinction between the undifferentiated and the differentiated sentiment is illustrated by two students' descriptions of their fathers. One wrote, “Dad is a perfect father. He loves his family and his family loves him…He is looked up to in all the town, highly admired…He will help anyone. He is noted for his fairness and honesty. Fairness and honesty are Dad.” This encomium betrays an undifferentiated sentiment. The father is just perfect, everything about him is right. The student's devotion to him is marked by such abandon that we suspect she has never made a close and analytic inspection of his character, and even that her lavish praise may cover some repressed animosity. Detailed study of this case shows this suspicion to be justified. Deep inside the girl dislikes many things about her father, though she denies this dislike even to herself. The sentiment therefore emerges as an oversimplified disposition, not well integrated with the deeper life of the subject.

            Another daughter describes her father in the following way: "he is somewhat unsocial, but dramatic enough to be pleasing in company; irritable, but not at all ill-natured; conscientious, hard-working, puritanical; timid in some things, dogged in others. His imagination is shown in his love of travel, but is not much in evidence otherwise.” This daughter likewise approves of her father. Yet, unlike the first, she is observant, critical, not merely abandoned in her admiration. One suspects that the very differentiation of the sentiment in the second case prevents repressed criticisms and hostility from forming. Her view of her father, if more complex, is more realistic.

Now evidence shows that tile very subjects who accept religion unreflectively and uncritically tend to react in an equally unreflective way to their parents, to political issues, to social institutions. Their sentiments seem uniformly immature. They are found usually to have repressed conflicts. In them, hostility, anxiety, prejudice, are detectable by psychological methods. Recent investigations, for example, have uncovered the fact that among people with strong religious sentiments race prejudice is often marked. Closer analysis indicates that the religious sentiment in these cases is blindly institutional, exclusionist, and related to self-centered values. Among people with reflective and highly differentiated sentiments, race prejudice is rarely found.  A differentiated sentiment is the outgrowth of many successive discriminations and continuous reorganization. Commencing in later childhood or adolescence the individual who is on the way to maturity probably will repudiate both the oversimplified product of his earlier egocentric thinking, and blind conformity to institutional or parental views. He discovers that the literal minded and secondhand faith that he previously held now needs changing.  He sees the evasions and escapist dangers of his original beliefs. He perceives the shortcomings of tradition even while he appreciates its virtues.  Whole sections of humanity, he observes, have halted at the performance of empty ritual or at a belief in the supernatural which squares neither with science nor with experience. The authoritarianism and conceit of entrenched ecclesiasticism revolt him.  Religion, he now has to admit, is not necessarily a good thing.  Religious orders, inquisitions, persecutions, and bigotry make macabre spectacle.  Perhaps he will decide to Epstein from the activities of institutional religion, as did Abraham Lincoln, who found its bickerings and boring and irrelevant to the mature mood of aspiration and wonder.  Or, just the opposite, he may find an approximately satisfactory expression of his own sentiment in some existing brands of the church, perhaps that on his own family tradition.  Again, he made decide that his development requires submission of unruly impulses to strong discipline, and that on the whole the sacramental church is the best to tie to.  In any case, the precise ecclesiastical coefficient of the individual is not an index of the maturity of his religious sentiment.  Adherence to almost any church, or to none at all, mark those who in their maturing personalities have fought through the issues of religion.

            Is the test of a differentiated sentiment, then, the presence of critical tendencies?  Partly yes, for a sentiment would never become differentiated unless the original stage of simple child belief had given way to reflective examination and questioning.  But differentiation implies more than criticism; it implies an articulation and ordering of parts.  There are, as we have seen, many objects, many "cognitive poles," involved in the religious orientation.  The deity is a matter of concern; so to the nature of the soul, the ordering of the values in life; the issues of freedom, sin, immortality; personal attitudes toward prayer, good works, creeds, tradition.  The issues confronted by mature personalities are not the same in all cultures, nor in all individuals.

A differentiated organization will somehow fit all these objects into a pattern. Toward each item the individual will evolve an appropriate rational and emotional attitude, consistent with the value-structure of tile sentiment. As a result the individual nose with precision his attitude toward the chief phases of theoretical doctrine and the principal issues in the moral sphere, while at the same time maintaining a genuine sense of whole mess into which the articulated parts fit.

At certain moments, those that are ordinarily called mystical, the sense of wholeness may be overwhelming. One of Freud's patients reported that for him religion was an “oceanic feeling.” If the patient meant that it was always a vague gray surge and never anything else, he was describing an undifferentiated religious sentiment. In such sentiment the unconscious component is likely to be marked, and Freud would no doubt be justified in suspecting its origins to lie in a troubled sea of repression.

           If, however, the patient was referring to occasional mystical states, customarily of short duration, he did well to characterize them as oceanic. Mystical experiences yield a sense of immediacy devoid of interpretation. They are, James has said, “transient, noetic, passive and ineffable.” One may perhaps question the attribute of ineffability in view of the case with which some mystics have discussed the nature of these transfigured moments. A girl of 15 tells of her first communion. During the service she had felt an increasing reverence and expectancy, and,

then came tile holy moment in which my soul sank in the sea of love ...But I cannot describe in words the feeling which I then experienced. Words for it are only empty noise. There was in me such a great fullness of blessedness and holy, pure joy. Every fiber of my feeling belonged to my Creator. At that moment I would have so liked to die. Die,O, it is no real death, it is only just the releasing of our poor body, in order that the soul thus freed to may hasten back to the arms of its first Parent, its Creator.

Such mystical moments differ from simple reverence in that the latter always entails some elements of interpretation In reverence one knows that one is being devotional, and has an orderly and coherent chain of thoughts and feelings under voluntary control. Mysticism, on the other hand, is a benign dissociation of the stream of salt and feeling from the ordinary critical and self-conscious activities of the mind. Of course moments of reverence and moments of mysticism may be interlocked as they often are in tile course of prayer.

Mystical experience is not in itself a token of a mature religious sentiment. On the other hand, it is by no means incompatible with such a sentiment. In several of its forms advanced religious thinking makes a prominent place for mystical states and invites their occurrence, sometimes regarding them as the highest attainment of religious striving Neo-Platonism, the philosophy of Vedanta, as well as certain lines of Christian philosophy do so. They hold that the ordinary process of knowing, like desiring and valuing, requires the separation of the self (the subject) from the object of knowledge, desire or value. Such separation is inimical to the unity that religion affirms. Since the religious verity, whatever it may be, must encompass both subject and object, the distinction between them ought to be overcome. Approval is therefore given to mysticism that seeks, in complete repose or rest in God, a state of fathomless unity, Nirvikalpa, able to annihilate the sense of duality and to silence the clamor of analytical interpretation. To attempt an analysis of such a state is regarded as futile and presumptuous. God is best conceived as a nameless nothingness, the very negation of all things man can think or express. Although the cultivation of mystical states may thus be a reasonable consequence of a thoroughly mature religious outlook, or in some cases the initial cause that leads into the quest for maturity, few individuals succeed in overcoming for long tile normal duality in knowing and desiring. Mysticism in its extreme form, therefore, is not an especially common form of religious functioning.

           Whether or not the religion of maturity includes periods of mysticism, the basic structure of its sentiment is well differentiated, comprising many subsidiary attitudes, critically arrived at, and flexibly maintained as the sphere of experience widens.

Derivative Yet Dynamic Nature of the Mature Sentiment

 The second attribute of tile mature religious sentiment is found in the autonomous character of its motivational power. The energy that sustains such a sentiment may be said to pertain to it alone. For, in only slight degree, if at all, is this energy drawn from the reservoir of organic drives—from the fears, hungers, desires of tile body.

           It is true, as I argued in the first chapter, that the origins of religious life do lie, in part, in these organic cravings which, when blocked, give rise to a displaced type of longing and to transposed goals that are expressed in the language of religion. Is it then consistent to maintain, as I am now doing, that a mature religious sentiment supplies its own driving power, and becomes dynamic in its own right? Yes, I venture to assert that the most important of all distinctions between the immature and the mature religious sentiment lies in the basic difference in their dynamic characters.

           Immature religion, whether in adult or child, is largely concerned with magical thinking, self-justification, and creature comfort. Thus it betrays its sustaining motives still to be the drives and desires of the body. By contrast, mature religion is less of a servant, and more of a master, in the economy of the life. No longer goaded and steered exclusively by impulse, fear, wish, it tends rather to control and to direct these motives toward a goal that is no longer determined by mere self-interest.

            I reaffirm the point made in the first chapter, that the religious outlook is highly derivative in its origins. Born of organic unrest, of self-interested desire, of juvenile interpretation (verbal realism), it nonetheless undergoes extensive transformation. Like an oak tree in its growth it shatters and discards the acorn from which it originally drew nourishment. The vitality it acquires becomes authoritative over the motives from which it grew. Tracing its evolution from childhood onward, we clearly see that each stage is continuous with each other, and yet at the same time a definite emergence of new meaning and new motive is taking place.

            A religious sentiment that has thus become largely independent of its origins, “functionally autonomous,” cannot be regarded as a servant of other desires, even though its initial function may have been of this order. It behaves no longer like an iron filing, twisting to follow the magnet of self-centered motives; it behaves rather as a master-motive, a magnet in its own right by which other cravings are bidden to order their course. Having decided that the religious sentiment is the best instrument for dealing with life, the self, as it were, hands over to it the task of interpreting all that comes within its view, and of providing motive power to live in accordance with an adequate frame of value and meaning, and to enlarge and energize this frame.

The power of religion to transform lives assuming that we are dealing with genuine transformations and not with ephemeral conversions is a consequence of the functional autonomy that marks the mature religious sentiment. Whenever this sentiment takes a prominent and active role ill the personality its influence is strikingly pervasive. Many events bring it into play (the beauties of nature, the acts of men, signs of value and disvalue in everyday life), and the person's resultant response to these events is to a greater or less degree steered and determined by the religious sentiment. Perceptions and interpretations, thoughts and conduct can be thoroughly saturated by this sentiment. We know, in fact, that some stubborn and injurious forms of behavior, alcoholism for example, can hardly be transformed by anything excepting a strong, autonomous, religious sentiment.

           Though the mature sentiment thus has authentic motivational character of its own, and may constitute the mainspring of life, yet it is neither fanatic nor compulsive. Fanaticism is fed by immature urgencies arising from unconscious forces that, as we have noted, enter into an uncritical, undifferentiated sentiment. Rather than admit criticism that would require the arduous process of differentiation, such a sentiment stiffens and fights intolerantly all attempts to broaden it. In compulsive religion there is a defensive ruling out of disturbing evidence.

            The absence of fanaticism in mature religion will, to some, seem a weakness. Do not developed minds, they ask, in the process of becoming critical and reflective, lose their glow and zeal? Does not ardor degenerate into a mere belief that certain formulas are probably true, and passion decay into an intellectualistic philosophy of religion? Often, of course, such entropy does occur. Sentiment may fade into nothingness. But when this happens we can be certain that religion was never a central feature of the personality. When the religious sentiment is central it characteristically keeps its ardor, and maintains throughout life an enthusiastic espousal of' its objects, and an insatiable thirst for God. The degree of dynamism in the mature religious sentiment depends upon how central it is among all the various psychophysical systems that compose the personality.

The Mature Sentiment Is Consistently Directive

A third earmark of the mature sentiment lies in the consistency of its moral consequences. We have just remarked the obvious fact that, when intense, religious belief is able to transform character. While an immature sentiment is very likely to raise moral storms, and sporadically alter conduct, it lacks the steady, persistent influence of the seasoned religious outlook.

The relationship between personal religion and morality is admittedly complex. One study of contemporary college youth brings to light a striking degree of independence between the two. Many students outstanding for their sense of decency and consideration for others report that they feel no need of religion in their lives. At the same time, some say that their standards Of conduct, unsupported by their theological beliefs, would collapse.  But on the whole, in dealing with individual cases, one is more impressed by the apparent separation of moral standards from religion than by their dependence upon it.

One thinks here of the situation that came to light during the recent war. It was found that bravery, clear-headedness, emotional stability were encountered frequently among individuals brought up in religious homes but who had drifted away from the faith of their fathers. The mental and emotional stability of such passive religionists is high, though, they now embrace no religion. Apparently what has happened is that the steadying influence of tile family tradition, the discipline imposed by the parents, stemming in most cases from their own faith, combined to produce well-balanced sons. The sons are as sound as their parents or grandparents, but with a difference. They have lost faith that the standards according to which they live possess objective validity. Because of the momentum in their family tradition these young men are still in the process of becoming, but have lost their guide in being. Through how many generations, one may ask with Renan, can we continue to live on “the perfume of an empty vase”? Ethical standards are difficult to sustain without idealism; and idealism is difficult to sustain without a myth of Being. We often heat it said that the increase in war and crime and divorce can be traced to the decline in religious faith. And in respect to democracy itself the question has been asked: “As a form of idealism and as a standard of conduct can democracy sustain its vitality unless it is reset within the wider context of a religious sentiment that passionately affirms democracy's derivation from the Christian order?” Finally, we hear it said that the popularity of social activities in American churches is the secular residue of a religious conviction that has been lost. The vigor of the “myth in the grand style,” as Oswald Spengler called it, is gone. Remaining is a mere twitch of humanitarian activity at the end of tile heroic cycle.

            This ominous course of reasoning cannot lightly be dismissed. At tile same time it can badly exaggerate the situation that prevails. So far as social service is concerned, we are by no means justified in regarding it as a mere hollow vestige of religion. To translate the private world of thought and feeling into action is not to weaken conviction but to strengthen it. Belief in the doctrine of the person, for example, can remain firm only if it leads the individual to act in behalf of social betterment. So far as democracy is concerned, we cannot yet say whether its healthy growth requires metaphysical and religious support. In many lives, of course, the ideals of democracy are related to the religious sentiment. In others, this is not the case.

The principal error of tile prophets of disaster is their assumption that no longer do religious sentiments generate high and consistent standards of action. This assumption is unproved. Even though in these transitional times the faith of our ancestors is not often maintained intact, yet the moral power of the religious sentiments that are formed anew in each generation is considerable. We cannot yet conclude that we are merely squandering the capital accumulated by our parents and grandparents. New religious sentiments are maturing all the time, producing fresh moral zeal, and engendering consistency upon men's purposes.

The Comprehensive Character of the Mature Sentiment

The mature mind, as we have said, demands a comprehensive philosophy of life. The hurly-burly of the world must be brought into some kind of order. And the facts calling for order are not only material; they include emotions, values, and man's strange propensity to seek his own perfection.

Casting about, the individual sees various possibilities. First of all, in Ibis day and age he encounters humanism. Does it, he asks, succeed in binding the many-sided universe? It offers itself, in the terms of one of its advocates, as “a religion in harmony with facts as now known, recognizing nature as impersonal and inexorable, fostering cooperation under the realization that man has but himself and his fellow men upon whom to rely.” But humanism, he suspects, is something like science acceptable so far as it goes, but quite uncurious regarding its own presuppositions. He doubts that the motive power for humanism is more than the lingering breeze of the powerful dynamic of Christian faith. So far as science is concerned, he knows well that his own religious faith is unlikely to rival it in clarity nor, in all points, equal it in validity; but it shall--and this is his point of insistence--it shall surpass it in adequacy. Religion, like philosophy, must answer questions that science dares not frame but, unlike philosophy, it must also infuse all of life with motive.

           The question whether humanism may properly be called a religion is much like the question whether Communism, or any reformism, is or is not religious. Certain earmarks are identical. A cause or sincere belief of any sort, ardently embraced, performs an integrative function. It confers intelligibility and direction upon conduct, prescribes rights and duties; is highly motivational; is satisfying; and may cover all those aspects of existence that really matter to the individual. All strongly ideal interests confer unity to the mind, and provide significance and enlargement to the lives of those who possess them.

            It was his perception of this fact, I believe, that led William James to circumscribe his definition of subjective religion. For him religion means “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine.” By thus requiring the religious sentiment to direct itself toward some conception of divinity, we would probably disqualify most causes however ardently embraced. True, some zealous Communists deify Lenin, and some fanatic Nazis deify Hitler. When so, we would have, by James's definition, a true instance of religion. Whitehead's definition of religion, on the other hand, does not require a conception of the divine. For him religion is “the art and theory of the internal life of man, so far as it depends on the man himself and on what is permanent in the nature of things.'' For James, Communism and like causes would be disqualified because they postulate no divinity; for Whitehead, because they deal only partially, if at all, with what is permanent in the nature of things.

            Approaching the matter psychologically we are bound to admit that in many lives whole-hearted zealousness for a cause acts like a religious sentiment. Such lives seem to need no other religion, for in their economy they have discovered its equivalent. Yet, even from the psychological point of view, we see that the ground covered by any secular interest, however vital, falls short of the range that characterizes a mature religious sentiment which seems never satisfied unless it is dealing with matters central to till existence. A cause may be absorbing, but it seldom includes the whole of a mature individual's horizon. Residues are left over which only religion can absorb.

            The demand that one's religious sentiment be comprehensive makes for tolerance. One knows that one's life alone does not contain all possible values or all facets of meaning. Other people too have their stake in truth. The religion of maturity makes the affirmation, “God is,” but only the religion of immaturity will insist, “God is precisely what I say He is.” The Hindu Vedas were speaking mature language when they asserted, “Truth is one; men call it by many names.”

Integral Nature of the Mature Sentiment

Closely allied to the demand for comprehensiveness is the mature individual's insistence that his religious sentiment compose a homogeneous pattern. Not only must its coverage be great but its design must be harmonious. Like a tapestry weaver he is forced to work behind the design he creates. Holding the threads singly and inserting them with care he can only hope that the pattern he fashions will be whole when seen from the front. From behind the loom the complexity of strands appears baffling. To fashion an integral pattern is the task of a lifetime and more.

A modern man, brought up in the Hebraic-Christian tradition; finds that the theology and ethics of this tradition were written down in an era that was pre-scientific and pre-technological. Bucolic parables belong to a mode of life remote from our own. Commandments and codes formulated in an age of shepherds and petty kings seem difficult to implement in an age of giant industry, instant communication, and atomic energy. Since we cannot and will not turn our backs on the modern world, then the religion we embrace cannot be pre-scientific; nor anti-scientific; it must be co-scientific. But science alone produces none of the integrity, the direction, or the zeal, that are needed in order to assure the benefits of its own achievements. It is up to modem man, the weaver, to take the strands of science and bind them with values and purpose. No threads may be rejected, perhaps least of all those that come from modem psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. For to apply the prophetic teachings of past ages to a technical age requires special assistance from the sciences that deal with personality and with human relations.

           To be truly integral a religious sentiment must admit the disturbing fact that human conduct, to a large degree, is determined. To ascribe more freedom of will to man than he possesses is to hold to an anachronism and to destroy the hope for a proper integration of science and religion. Yet an adroit mind will readily perceive that the degree and type of freedom a man has depends in part upon what he believes. If he thinks he is hopelessly bound he will not exert himself, and if he fails to exert himself he will not improve his lot. If, on the contrary, he believes that there are doors that may be opened and that lead to a fuller realization of values, he will explore, discover, enter. A well-differentiated religious sentiment engenders freedom simply because the possessor of such a sentiment finds that obdurate though nature and habit may be, still there are regions where aspiration, effort, and prayer are efficacious. A person believing he is free uses what equipment he has more flexibly and successfully than does the person who is convinced he dwells in chains.

An integral sentiment will have difficulty in accommodating the problem of evil. It is upon this rock, and upon the reefs of determinism, that most religious sentiments are wrecked in their quest for maturity. I shall not attempt to review all the solutions to the problem of evil that struggle for a place in the mature mind. A solution acceptable to one individual may be unacceptable to another. One holds that the only way out is to regard God himself as a finite Being, suffering from dark spots in His own nature and unable to control the tides of natural law and of man's perverseness. Another, while professing inability to solve the issue, holds fast to the conviction that religion, effectively applied, would eliminate at least the evil that stems from human ignorance and misconduct. Another says that our understanding is inadequate, that what we call evil is a stage in development. Were the veil of Maya destroyed the essential virtue of all things would appear. “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my way, saith the Lord.” However the problem is handled, the suffering of innocent persons is for most people the hardest of all facts to integrate into a religious sentiment. Yet the issue has to be faced and fought through; otherwise, the sentiment cannot become mature.

Heuristic Character of the Mature Sentiment

The final attribute of mature religion is its essentially heuristic character. A heuristic belief is one that is held tentatively until it can be confirmed or until it helps us to discover a more valid belief. For example, the individual fashions his creed and conceives his deity as best he can.  Perhaps he accepts the authority of some revelations. If so, he does it not because he can demonstrate its final validity by events occurring in time and space, but because that which he accepts helps him find out better and fuller answers to the questions that perplex him.  His faith is his working hypothesis.  He knows perfectly well that doubt concerning it is still theoretically possible.

It is characteristic of the mature mind that it can act whole-heartedly even without absolute certainty· It can be sure without being cocksure. We are not positive that we shall be alive tomorrow but it is a good hypothesis to proceed on. We are not certain that the social agencies of our big cities are decreasing the margin of suffering and evil in our midst, but it seems like a probability worth backing. It is still less demonstrable that you and I will succeed in the goals we have respectively set for ourselves; but it is the mere chance of success that nerves us for sustained and eager endeavor. The odds of success do not have to be large in order to keep us going. Writers as diverse in stripe as Descartes, Pascal, Newman, James, have made the point. Faith is a risk, but everyone in some way or other is bound to take it. Probabilities always guide our lives. Sometimes the degree of statistical probability can be ascertained; more often, as in the area of religion, it cannot. It is not necessary to know how probable a probability is in order to embrace it. In religion, according to Cardinal Newman:

It is faith and love which give to probability a force which it has not in itself. Faith and love are directed toward an object; in the vision of that object they live; it is that object, received in faith and love, whirl renders it reasonable to take probability as sufficient for internal conviction

Newman goes on to say that though certainty is impossible, the commitment one makes a fusion of probability, faith and love engenders sufficient certitude for the guidance 0f one's life.

Such a commitment, even when it is tentatively held, has important consequences. For all accomplishment results from taking risks in advance of certainties. Chronic skepticism, inhibitory and depressive thoughts, are incompatible with everything excepting vegetative existence. The optimistic bias toward life is a necessary condition for life. Only by having expectations of consequences beyond the limits of certainty do we make these consequences more likely to occur. Faith engenders the energy which when applied to the task in hand enhances the probability of success.

What many unbelievers do not realize is that the mature believer’s eyes are wide open. The latter knows that he is finally uncertain of his ground. But he feels, reasonably enough, that in a world where optimistic bias and faith are largely responsible for human accomplishment, it would be, silly for him to lapse into unproductive skepticism, so long as he has a chance of being correct. The believer is often closer to the agnostic than we think. Both, with equal candor, may concede that the nature of Being cannot be known; but the believer, banking on a probability, slight though he may deem it to be, finds that the energy engendered and the values conserved' prove the superiority of affirmation over indecisiveness.

We may then say that the mature religious sentiment is ordinarily fashioned in the workshop of doubt. Though it has known intimately “the dark night of the soul,” it has decided that theoretical skepticism is not incompatible with practical absolutism. While it knows all the grounds for skepticism, it serenely affirms its wager. In so doing, it finds that the successive acts of commitment, with their beneficent consequences, slowly strengthen the faith and cause the moments of doubt gradually to disappear.

           Some people, of course, say they are unable to entertain religious propositions with less than full certainty—even though these same people commit themselves gladly to the probabilities of everyday life. They seem to fear that unless one has certainty one will lose the vital force to proceed. Their dilemma is like that stated by opponents of liberal education: How, they ask, can we allow full play to analysis and criticism, and still expect our youth to develop firm purpose, strong character, and devotion to a right cause? There are others, Renan and Eugene O'Neill among them, who go further and insist that belief in an illusion is necessary in order to sustain purpose. I think we need not worry unduly about the matter. To the genuinely mature personality a full-faced view of reality in its grimmest aspects is not incompatible with an heuristic-commitment that has the power to turn desperation into active purpose. A heuristic-commitment is not a matter of illusion, at least until such a time as the probabilities upon which it is based are proved to be absolutely groundless. And if one cannot prove the religious commitment to rest on certainties, neither can one prove it to be groundless.