LECTURE 02. CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC.

LECTURE II. CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC.

Most books on the philosophy of religion try to begin with a precise

definition of what its essence consists of. Some of these would‐be

definitions may possibly come before us in later portions of this course,

and I shall not be pedantic enough to enumerate any of them to you now.

Meanwhile the very fact that they are so many and so different from one

another is enough to prove that the word “religion” cannot stand for any

single principle or essence, but is rather a collective name. The

theorizing mind tends always to the over‐simplification of its materials.

This is the root of all that absolutism and one‐sided dogmatism by which

both philosophy and religion have been infested. Let us not fall

immediately into a one‐sided view of our subject, but let us rather admit

freely at the outset that we may very likely find no one essence, but many

characters which may alternately be equally important in religion. If we

should inquire for the essence of “government,” for example, one man might

tell us it was authority, another submission, another police, another an

army, another an assembly, another a system of laws; yet all the while it

would be true that no concrete government can exist without all these

things, one of which is more important at one moment and others at

another. The man who knows governments most completely is he who troubles

himself least about a definition which shall give their essence. Enjoying

an intimate acquaintance with all their particularities in turn, he would

naturally regard an abstract conception in which these were unified as a

thing more misleading than enlightening. And why may not religion be a

conception equally complex?(9)

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Consider also the “religious sentiment” which we see referred to in so

many books, as if it were a single sort of mental entity.

In the psychologies and in the philosophies of religion, we find the

authors attempting to specify just what entity it is. One man allies it to

the feeling of dependence; one makes it a derivative from fear; others

connect it with the sexual life; others still identify it with the feeling

of the infinite; and so on. Such different ways of conceiving it ought of

themselves to arouse doubt as to whether it possibly can be one specific

thing; and the moment we are willing to treat the term “religious

sentiment” as a collective name for the many sentiments which religious

objects may arouse in alternation, we see that it probably contains

nothing whatever of a psychologically specific nature. There is religious

fear, religious love, religious awe, religious joy, and so forth. But

religious love is only man’s natural emotion of love directed to a

religious object; religious fear is only the ordinary fear of commerce, so

to speak, the common quaking of the human breast, in so far as the notion

of divine 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. As concrete states of mind, made up of

a feeling _plus_ a specific sort of object, religious emotions of course

are psychic entities distinguishable from other concrete emotions; but

there is no ground for assuming a simple abstract “religious emotion” to

exist as a distinct elementary mental affection by itself, present in

every religious experience without exception.

As there thus seems to be no one elementary...