Practice and science of religion; a study of method in comparative religion

* OCT 1 1 1907

.jQ.

BL 41 .W8 1906

Woods, James Haughton, 1864

1935.
Practice and science of

PRACTICE AND SCIENCE
OF RELIGION

THE PADDOCK LECTURES
1905-1906

PRACTICE AND SCIENCE
OF RELIGION

A STUDY OF METHOD IN
COMPARATIVE RELIGION

BY ^

JAMES HAUGHTON WOODS

INSTRUCTOR IN PHILOSOPHY AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

91 AND 93 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK

LONDON AND BOMBAY

1906

COPYRIGHT, 1906, BY LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

D. B. UPDIKE, THE MERRYMOUNT PRESS, BOSTON

TO THE MEMORY OF

JOHN COTTON SMITH

AND

HAREIETTE APPLETON SMITH

IN GRATITUDE AND

REVERENT AFFECTION

PREFACE

These lectures were delivered at the General Theolo-
gical Seminary in New York during January ajid Feb-
ruary of this year. The general topic assigned for the
lectures was Comparative Religion. My interest in this
subject, persistent Jhr many years, was first aroused by
the Paddock Lecturer for 1882, a man who stimulated all
my ideals, who revealed to me the charm of the scholar'^s
life, and who bound my life to his in loyal admiration
forever. To him I have ventured to dedicate this work.
The general method which I have followed and tried
further to develop I owe to lectures of Kaftan ; to work
under Harnack in several successive seminars; aiidlast of
all to personal suggestions from Windelband, in lectures
and on delightful strolls up the valleys of the Vosges,
With classes at the university, my treatment of the sub-
ject has adapted itself to the men with whom, from year
to year, I have studied the Science of Religion. The reli-
gious traditions of these men are divers; but Jews and
mystics, Buddhists and Vedantists, are one with Chris-
tians and agnostics in their desire to find common
ground. The search for points of contact between dif-
ferent religions has been encouraged in every way;
points of contrast have often seemed more superficial,
and obvious enough.

viii PREFACE

In this same spirit these lectures are given to the
search Jbr positive ground common to many religions.
To soTne persons, however, this undertaking must in-
evitably seem negative in its aim, since the unique quali-
ties of religions are not brought into the centre of dis-
cussion. In an informal address, which the students at
the Seminary were good enough to ask me to give, I
explained what positive results may be expected if the
ground common to different religions be sought with
the candour and the thoroughness required. One reli-
gion influences another best when it has enough corifi-
dence in itself to take the point of view of the other be-
fore attempting to shift that point.

An illuminating paper on Rinzai by Dr. Motora
has been extremely useful to me. It is a pleasure to re-
member the generous advice and patient correction of
manuscript by Mr. B. Preston Clark and by my bro-
ther. And I wish especially to thank many new friends
at the Seminary for the hearty welcome to their midst
and for much sympathetic criticism.

Cambridge, Massachusetts
March 21, 1906

CONTENTS

PAGE

I. NEW AND OLD SCIENCE OF RELIGION 3

II. LEVELS OF VALUE 23

III. PRIMITIVE BELIEFS 43

IV. ANCESTRAL SYSTEMS 61
V. MYSTICAL IDEALS QX

VI. LEVELS OF RELIGION 103

LECTURE FIRST

I

NEW AND OLD SCIENCE OF
RELIGION

A Hundred years ago, when our forefathers were
. founding theological seminaries, the science of
religion, far from needing to justify its existence,
dominated all our life, our morals, our art and even
our philosophy of nature. Natural theology, as our
fathers then called it, was the predominant creative
activity; its foundation was fixed; its career seemed
indubitably sure. But its importance proved to be
transitory; the generation which followed found all
theology irksome and trusted itself to Sir Walter
Scott and to the worship of beauty. Such aesthetic
reforms do away with narrow antagonisms, and fill
men with eagerness and delight, with personal enthu-
siasms, and with larger outlooks. Any age, capable
of such experiences, capable of loyalty to ideals of
beauty, must regard abstract teachings with impa-
tience, and easily falls into the habit of counting
austere theology a useless and offensive anachronism.
Nevertheless a thoroughly modern science of religion
has its own right to existence, has its own ends, less

4 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

ambitious perhaps, but of distinct significance; pre-
cisely as a modern ethics, however different from the
old English hedonism, has, as ever, its own ends to-
day. These ends, however, can no longer be attained
by the procedure of the old systems. As the problems
of life have changed with changing conditions, so
likewise the methods. To-day, neither in art nor in
ethics nor in religion can we start with abstractions;
to-day we can no longer by dialectics deduce religion
from metaphysics. Like art and morals, religion must
be appreciated as a personal experience; it must be
approached not as a half-transcendental existence,
but as real life, as a human interest, as an actual af-
fair not far from any one of us. It must be viewed
from the individual case, with the fewest possible as-
sumptions, wdth the candour which pervades the lab-
oratory,— so only can there be any hope of recov-
ering the ancient trust in a science of religion.

This situation is not peculiar to religion: it is true
of medicine; it is true of mathematics. All the mental
presuppositions of our days are shifting, we are be-
ginning to feel the extent of these changes. Many of
us are amazed at their intricacy. They are the changes
which follow our successes; and they are changes not

NEW AND OLD SCIENCE OF RELIGION 6

only in the methods of the sciences, but in the whole
range of our perceptive powers. We are stimulating
our sensitiveness to a degree beyond our capacity for
dealing with the results of our perceptions. It is not
easy for us to master our impressions: we crave ex-
citement, we need judgement. Our need is the ability
to control everything we get in terms of ordered
values. Mere impressions produce a tremendous com-
motion which dies away and leaves little result. Im-
pressions, if new, cause rapture for a time and then
disappear. Capacity to follow our own plan must pre-
vail, if we are to keep impressions at all. There must
be a scheme, some kind of order; there must be a
sense of levels ; there must be the perception of an end,
even if the spontaneity of life seem less. So the dis-
covery would follow that order is not, as the modem
mind easily persuades itself, a tyranny, but rather
the only freedom.

In our patriotic speeches we pay all honour to ideals
of liberty : we ask, with almost romantic desire, per-
fect freedom for ourselves. For less fortunate peoples
who have been thrown into contact with us, we are
equally sure that nothing is so wholesome as disci-
pline. The explanation might be that liberty often

6 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

suggests to us nothing more than the ability to act
without regard to consequences; and others, we think,
need disciphne not to help them to act, but because
they prevent us from doing as we wish. We refuse
others liberty because we have not disciplined our-
selves. Accordingly liberty and discipline bring dis-
order each to the other in proportion as we try to
divorce them.

In art, also, we are not satisfied with austere typi-
cal forms such as could express, with beautiful pre-
cision, the common ideals of a whole Greek city.
These forms expressed a sense of order, embodied a
clear purpose, and steadied each man's life. To us
they seem unreal, remote from actual business, too dis-
passionate, too impersonal. We choose, instead, vivid
expressions of sudden changes of feeling or of some
wayward mood, varying with our personality, varying
even with the emotional oscillations of a single day.
Is it as easy for us as for the Athenian to enjoy the
overtones, to trace the values which interweave the
work with social order or with religious standards?
Do we not oftener require intense experiences of single
souls, less limiting conditions, less implications, more
of vibrating life, more actual rhythms of passion.?

NEW AND OLD SCIENCE OF RELIGION 7

We have, it is true, learned to approach our art with
more freedom, with more candour, with more delight;
but have we gained the ability to add to the impres-
sion the power to reach an appreciation, to test the
value of the capricious taste, to add to the pure de-
light the more permanent satisfaction of an orderly
adjustment to life?

Religious ideals are likewise in process of modifica-
tion. All classes of persons, poets, critics, journalists
and philosophers, are restlessly searching for personal
beliefs. Unattached to any religious body, they are
discussing earnestly, with a new range of sensitive-
ness, the foundations of belief and hitherto unper-
ceived shades of religious meaning in life. The em-
phasis is personal ; and the result is a swelling stream
of vivid religious impressions and expectations.

Still more significant is the change in the whole re-
ligious mood of our day and of our time. It is not
easy to describe or to trace this mood, unless it be
said that it has broken forth, by the law of contrast,
from the depths of the human soul. But it is a fact
that we have become averse to self-discipline in pre-
paration for a world to come, to programmes of sal-
vation, and to tables of virtues and vices. Our occu-

8 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

pation is to master this world now, to test it in
actual personal experience, and by our own vigour and
skill to sift out its defects and diseases and add to
its beauty and its sanity.

This personal mood might well have been transitory
and insufficient. But it has proved to be permanent
and well ordered, and has become one of the main
ingredients in what is called Modern Science. This
habit of mind has overwhelmed the ancient world.
Its method has been to search for as many fresh sen-
sations and values as possible; to aiTange all fresh
insights into life in orderly series; to test the whole
and the parts by a personal verification which shall
be unfaltering and final. In such wise, this mood has
mastered Nature, has overcome the distrust of Nature,
and has put the keys of authority over Nature into
the hands of the exultant individual. Modern expres-
sions of belief, with few exceptions, are striving to
adjust themselves to this new authority. New and
alien personal impressions are invading the ancient
order. Ideals of personal behaviour, of hygiene, of tech-
nical arts, of law and of charity are already ordered
upon the new plan. Every newspaper recognizes the
new authority, and each school is kneading the minds

NEW AND OLD SCIENCE OF RELIGION 9

of the coming generation into the new scientific
moulds.

The new sense of order, which is Modern Science,
makes certain insistent personal demands upon mod-
em religion. It does not make a religion; it adjusts
the expressions of the religious life to the new order.
Religion can well exist with no orderly methods from
any scientist ; and science thrives without religion ; but
theology presupposes both.

And the Science of Religion of to-day is the attempt
to give a new order, and as these lectures will try to
show, a new sense of correspondence between the in-
tensely personal experiences of religion and the social
or mystical experiences of religion. It assumes the
point of view of the observer. Like any other science
it attempts to order impressions and values. It has no
intention of creating a religion; just as the chemist has
no intention of creating an element or the historian a
charter. Its method is the same as theirs. It differs
from other sciences in that its material is not the same.
This material is the beliefs and values of the religious
life in all their known variations.

Science of Religion, then, is one of the most recent
expressions of the modern type of mind. And the

10 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

reason why it is more recent and more backward than
other sciences seems to be altogether an historical
reason.

The Christian Church was already becoming a com-
pact and manageable unit when it first encountered
the science of the Greeks, the only science of its day.
The Church and the sinking civilization of the Roman
Empire met as strangers. Unfortunately, instead of
discovering that, in spite of differences in tradition,
in outlook, in resources and in character, they were
meant to live together, they gradually fell into a kind
of pact, by which they agreed to remain apart, to
make concessions, and then only on some few points
to become more like each other.

Like every other rehgion, the Christian religion was
at its beginning unfamiKar with science. The popu-
lation in which it expanded was uneducated. The re-
ligion consisted in an almost ecstatic enthusiasm for
a moral leader and for a divine kingdom. The enthu-
siasm for the Divine King and for the ideal society
fused into one. The result was a new motive. This
motive was a love which swept far beyond the limits
of self, and resulted in a conquest of the soul; the
charm of this conquest was subtle enough to be

NEW AND OLD SCIENCE OF RELIGION 11

its own reward. There was no need of any other au-
thority than this motive and its own operations.
Still less were scientific evidences required. For the one
flaming desire to reach souls was sufficient in itself.
The generation which followed was of weaker moral
fibre. Men asked others to choose for them courses of
action when their own consciences alone should have
given the decision. Singly these men could not face the
pagan world; they must feel that they faced the world
as members of an organization. The regulations which
they received became the faith of the later Church;
all else was profane. The contrast of the organized
system of Christian beliefs and the outer pagan stan-
dards became permanent. God spoke in the Church;
the thoughts of the world lacked the divine wisdom.
But gradually the Pagans brought their ideals with
them into the Church. They brought with them their
science. For the most part this science was a tradition
going back to Aristotle. He had taken into the physi-
cal M^orld a principle of explanation which Socrates
had used in the moral world. Socrates had been sure
that things have their purpose in the moral world;
Aristotle had used this moral purpose in the physical
world as a principle of Nature. Man is a moral force;

12 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

Nature is a moral force; body is explicable as the
moral purpose of soul. The snaiPs soul creates his
body; his soul loves convolutions and so builds a body.
The soul of the fish loves water and constructs an in-
strument to satisfy a moral need. Nature, likewise, is
an instrument of the moral soul of Nature. But at
that time this main scientific ideal of the pagan world
was scarcely able even to transmit itself. The Stoics
made some advances in ethics; but neither ethics nor
science was an observation of experience; it was tradi-
tional; it was not more than a readjustment of the
old principles to actual life.

This kind of science, dependent upon a moral force
as its efficient principle, was the only science which
the Christian Church knew. The Church felt no incli-
nation and possessed no ability to produce for itself an
independent science. It accepted the science, such as
it was, of the schools. And after the first feeling of
repulsion the tension soon ceased. It appeared that
both Pagan and Christian were seeking a life differing
from their own, the life of God, as both called it; each
knew by experience that human life can find the con-
nection with this larger life. The truth which both
recognized was in the religious and ethical world. Both

NEW AND OLD SCIENCE OF RELIGION 18

were sure of the final triumph of the spirit over the
unmitigated Hfe of the senses. Nature was for both a
screen. They were to renounce all temporary desires,
all care for trivial things ; and they were to refashion
themselves in their ideals. The sole use of knowledge
was to enable each to distinguish what was true in
this experience from what was plausible. Scientific
truth was the discovery of ideals in life and was dia-
metrically opposed to what truth might appear at
first sight.

With this common end in view they came closer into
touch than they were aware. But the Church clung to
its first statement: the Church contains the absolute
truth, the Pagan's religion is a feat of human reason
unaided by divine knowledge. The pagan word "re-
ligion" and the pagan conception "religion," (in the
sense that religion is every kind of practice which has
as its end the pleasing or the appeasing of the gods,)
were unknown to the Church. Thus the Church ig-
nored the religious element in the Pagan's world, or,
rather, counted that religion a philosophy and in no
sense a demand of a people upon its God for life.

As a result of this situation, a concept of science
extraordinarily important in the history of Western

14 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

thought came into acceptance ; science contains moral
elements, but does not proceed from a revelation. Nat-
ural knowledge of God has nothing to do \vdth re-
ligion in the fullest sense. This science is a produc-
tion of man. If this science be called natural religion,
it is after all imperfect religion. The nature of this
compromise became clear as soon as the Western
Church found itself confronting an entirely new and
contemporary science. The aim of science was alto-
gether changed. No longer was it an ethics with a
cosmic background. It rested on two new kinds of per-
sonal experience i historical criticism and experimental
natural science. At the same time mystics like Fran-
cis of Assisi or like Dante, although within the Church,
made it appear that intense personal exaltation raised
them above the world into the immediate experience
of God, even when they were not in accord with the
authorities. Thus the new individualism of science and
of the mystics gradually upset the balance between
natural and revealed religion.

The old science had lasted unquestioned for a thou-
sand years. It lost first its ethical character; it in-
terpreted nature irrespective of human desire, or of
good and evil; it adopted experimental methods; it

NEW AND OLD SCIENCE OF RELIGION 15

returned to atomic theories. Finally a new metaphy-
sics appeared; no longer the product of myth and
ethics and logic, but more and more a fresh unifica-
tion of personal experience. But unlike the old Greek
metaphysics, which had been the basis of natural re-
ligion throughout the Middle Ages, this new meta-
physics did not rest upon any religious assumptions
worth mentioning. Thus, only in quite modern times
the way has been opened for a scientific treatment of
religion. This Science of Religion is no longer natural
religion with the old assumptions ; it is now an histori-
cal and psychological classification of religious facts.
It is the investigation and explanation of the reli-
gious life; it investigates and explains religious life
as one investigates and explains morals, social forms
or politics.

From this point of view Christianity is one of the
religions ; it is understood as one among many, or even
as a part of a whole. The distinction between natural
and supernatural, between revelation and reason, be-
comes of minor importance. More exactly, there would
be in every religion both these elements: a natural
element, in the old sense, the actual condition of the
human animal unmodified by social needs or by ideal

16 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

hopes; and, quite as tinily, there would be in every
religion a supernatural element, the activity which
raises the human soul above the unabashed life of na-
ture into a world of spiritual values, into a world
which strives against stupidity and inertia and vul-
garity.

The problems of this science would then be to col-
lect, to order, and to estimate the facts: to discover
what has been the direction of development, to ask
what is the goal of this development, and to inquire
whether the ideal goal exists in the development it-
self. Such a science is becoming, more and more, the
basis for future systems of theology. If the pro-
gramme could be cari'ied out, the difficulties arising
from practical treatment of a theoretical problem
would diminish. Men engaged in the actual living of
the religious ideals would afflict themselves less with
the old enigmas: how to state miracles in terms of
science ; how Christianity maintains preeminence over
all other religious forces; how a modern religion,
which spurns the earthy and carnal, can yet domi-
nate a modern civilization and a modern morality.
These problems would not be solved, but they would
become less oppressive. At the same time science

NEW AND OLD SCIENCE OF RELIGION 17

would be less trammelled by personal feelings; the-
ology would gain in candour and in authority ; and re-
ligion would begin to feel the freedom of asserting its
absolute character.

In some such way as this it would become much
easier to be sure that religion is the experience of the
presence of a larger life, necessary and universal, in-
clusive of all collective and personal forms of life.
The basis of this experience would be the soul's de-
sire for the permanency of its moments of complete
insight; the experience itself would be the sense of a
single inclusive purpose in human life; and the result
would be the freedom to intei-pret its own individual
share in that purpose. This sense of personal freedom,
this certainty of the permanent values in one's own
self, is a product of no science or theology; and no
science or theology can destroy it. It is a fact of the
personal life; one has it or has it not. But science can
search for its simplest forms, can illustrate its con-
nections with other expressions of life, can trace its
intricate changes in history and estimate the worth
of its different forms. Science can clear our minds of
conflicting prejudices; it can convince us of the per-
sistence of values in consciousness more inclusive than

18 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

our own. It creates no fact; but it can form each man's
impressions into a world; it can order beliefs into a
total system of belief. An action adjusted to the be-
lief in an inclusive system of beliefs is a religious act.
Similarly our bodies act with reference to an external
world, a projected system of sensations. Our world,
whatever it may be, would be, without such inclusive
systems, as if it did not exist. Our world is maintained,
in each of us, only by our belief in an inclusive con-
sciousness; it is maintained only by an unconquered
effort to discover and to order purposes, beliefs and
values.

This constant readjustment of personal impressions
to a single standard is oui* religious experience. Our
religion is the final purpose with regard to which we
measure and use all of our impressions. This purpose
is never passive. It is an act of will. The way to
strengthen the sense of ordered values and beliefs in
this will is to direct it in the right way, by interest-
ing ourselves in the things which really matter. With
this deep sense of the importance of discovering what
things count, we begin, unconsciously it may be, to
set up permanent systems of beliefs and values for
ourselves, for human lives, for more inclusive lives.

NEW AND OLD SCIENCE OF RELIGION 19

These scales, expressed in terms of consciousness, are
our religions. The Science of Religion is an artificial
device to collect these experiences, and to aid in the
process.

LECTURE SECOND

II

LEVELS OF VALUE

THE concentration of attention in science is not
the same as the concentration of attention in
religion. In science the observer is interested in the
impressions and in their relations to each other, and
is disinterested in himself. In religion there is inter-
est in the person himself; the interest in the impres-
sions has value only so far as it aids the assertion of
the self in contrast to the world, only so far as it aids
a man to count himself as a whole. This desire to con-
trast himself to his world is no fancy of his idle mo-
ments. It is as strong in his science and in his morality
as in his religion. In his science he constiTicts a sys-
tem of objective knowledge; he projects an image of
an external world. In his morals he strives for a world
wherein his ideal of good becomes real in action. But
in religion he seeks satisfaction for himself as a whole
from the universe as a whole. Often his science assures
him that he is nothing more than a tiny group of os-
cillating energies; often his ideal good leaves him in
doubt whether the good itself is more than a fascinat-
ing illusion. From these scientific and moi-al points

23

24 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

of view he cannot escape the question, more or less
constant, whether any effort of intellect or of self-
sacrifice can preserve the individual life when con-
fronted by Nature; whether his whole personality is
not the product of forces accidentally combining with-
out any end in view; whether all the learning and all
the devotion of men will not, after all, prove to be
futile labour.

It is religion which has helped to answer these
questions in such wise that the feeling of self as a
whole is not destroyed or narrowed. Even in the
least civilized minds, and in its least sufficient forms,
it is religion which gives men most freely the feeling
of the value of personalities. This is true when the
self is contrasted with the chaos of living impressions
which is the world to the mind of the savage; but it
is true quite as well when the self is contrasted to the
prim unearthly abstraction which is the world to the
intellect of the physical scientist. This accomphsh-
ment gives religion its value; and this value is in-
dispensable to the feeling of personality as a whole.
The concept of the god represents, in a vivid symbol,
the assurance in the heart of his worshipper that per-
sonality shall not be completely ignored in conflict

LEVELS OF VALUE 25

with the world. The god encourages men, even when
they are scarcely yet the physical match of the car-
nivorous animals, to impose upon nature the values
of good and of evil; and he gradually helps to set
men free to criticise Nature, or even to create worlds
for themselves. Thus faith in a god is a declaration
of superiority to the blind forces which dominate
man's physical life.

The idea of the god, then, is the expression of the
living relation which can bind together a man's world
and his ideal of himself as a complete person. The
idea of the god, in the form of symbolic imitations,
or of rituals of purification, or of prayers, points out
the way to the worshipper's ideal personality. The god
assures to the worshipper the right to feel a contrast
to the world, and the right to feel a correspondence
to something more inclusive and higher than man's
present momentary self. And this sense of the values
of personality is not a mere postulate or a meaning-
less mystery; it is an intense form of the love of life.
The mystery lies quite as much in the nature of life
itself as in any of the expressions of life ; and the pos-
tulate has its basis wherever life manifests activity.

Each religion searches for higher correspondences to

26 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

life ; this search may be for bodily satisfactions, or for
fulfilment of social desires, or for values of beauty
and of conduct, — so far as any of these aims make a
man surer of self, and develop his individuality, his
criticism of life, or his power of judgement. Impres-
sions are ranked with reference to the sense of expan-
sion of self or of contraction of self. Each religion
has its own scale of values, and differs in its sense of
the value of personality and in its search for higher
con*espondences. Accordingly, each religion differs in
its idea of its god, since the god is the expression of
its own standard of values for the whole of life. The
gods of each religion are therefore symbols of an inner
sense of successful contact between the whole person-
ality and the world.

So long as judgements of value are merely special
wishes of the individual life when beset by one or an-
other obstruction of Nature, at one or another time
or place, they are accidental judgements. They do not
concern life as a whole; they are not religious judge-
ments.

When, however, judgements are necessary, in that
they stand in inseparable connection with the person's
conviction of the continuity of his own individual ex-

LEVELS OF VALUE 27

istence, they are religious judgements. All judgements
which are thus grounded immediately in the inner
experience of the person are religious. These experi-
ences, and the judgements of which these experiences
consist, are a part of his personal existence, which he
cannot give up without destroying himself. Conse-
quently beliefs of this kind are the expression of a
practical necessity which under no circumstances the
person can evade.

Another distinction between judgements of value
would be the distinction between individual judge-
ments, collective j udgements, and universal j udgements.
A judgement which concerns one person only, which
could not concern another person, cannot be religious.
As soon as a man begins in the least to reflect upon
the value of his own actions, he forms such judgements
upon himself in countless numbers. Thousands upon
thousands of these judgements of value upon self make
a man what he is to-day. Extending over years they
determine in one direction the general course of his
life, determine his present choices, determine what he
will be in years to come and what he will succeed in
shaking off and dropping out of his character. Upon
the basis of these judgements which he is constantly

28 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

making, an intricate structure of purposes and values
is building itself up within him. And in general, how-
ever much some of our choices seem childish, however
much our inheritance and resources may differ, how-
ever much our outlook on life may be unequal, this
structure within us of our own individual judgements
invests each with a peculiar interest and with a certain
human dignity.

Some kind of personal disposition, then, is formed
in each man out of the mass of momentary judgements ;
and furthermore many individuals may coincide in
their judgements. My values may be your values; my
beliefs may be your beliefs. The interests of my family,
of my friends, of my profession or of my nation are
extensive interests common to many persons. Collec-
tive judgements are passed by all the members of such
social units; these judgements express the collective
value of an object for persons bound together by a com-
mon purpose. In proportion as the number of com-
mon interests increases and the feeling of community
of purpose becomes more intense, these collective
judgements acquire a different kind of validity. When
the collective judgements reach the point that the in-
dividual would choose not to exist rather than violate

LEVELS OF VALUE 29

them, they become religious judgements. All the mul-
titudes of momentary choices become adjusted to a
commanding social ideal. The single man despairs of
himself, in case he be hindered from aiming at the
social ideal, in case there is not any of his life that he
can give to family, to blood-brotherhood or to city.
His god expresses for him the value, in its might and
majesty, of the ancestral life. His own life is a part
only of one common life; it is the life of the others;
and it is their life which is his life. His values are
theirs; his best is what the common life chooses for
him. That choice is, for him, his own value to him-
self. His life is inseparable from their judgement.
Thus only his personality, as a whole, faces the world.
This common feeling of interest may cover human-
ity as a whole; the collective judgement becomes uni-
versal. If all men feel an interest in controlling Na-
ture, the discovery of the stone-axe or of the Parthe-
non is of universal value. But it is evident that when
I make such a judgement as universal and assert it as
of value to all, I do not mean that by collecting evi-
dence I have discovered in actual existence a uni-
versal common interest and a corresponding judge-
ment; rather, I refer to a condition which ought to

30 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

prevail among men. So long as I refer to an actual
condition, it does not appear that the invention of the
stone-axe or of the most recent machine is univer-
sally valued. But my appeal is not to one or another
temporary or local consciousness, but to a conscious-
ness which, as I maintain in this case, should pre-
vail: this I call a normative consciousness.

Unconditionally we can assert a universal value
when we know the extent of the class to which the
particular objects should be of value: rifles to the sol-
dier; beauty to the artist. Honour, friendship, health,
insight, are now of absolute value in actual experience
to all men whatsoever. Apparently, then, these judge-
ments are universally valid, even though there be no
actual relation between the object and my will, or
rather, even though there be no other relation than
that required for the repetition in ourselves of the
judgement of the others.

Universal judgements, especially if they be reli-
gious, lose in vividness of personal feeling what they
gain in extent of validity. Too easily they become reg-
ulative principles to which we assent in an imper-
sonal tone of mind. They appear remote from our-
selves and poor in quality when contrasted with

LEVELS OF VALUE 31

sudden rushes of emotion which sweep us along for
brief spaces with conviction and irresistible power.

We can agFee that universal judgements are valid,
and yet they appear rather pallid abstractions. We
feel gaps when we must interpolate our judgements
into the judgements of men distant in time and space
and action. One living exception seems to neutralize
all their validity. A homeless ascetic, striving day and
night to deaden the clamour of appetite, could not
easily assert the universal value of health. Health
is to him the enemy of life. The breaking-down of
health is his release from pain. Some of us, even
here, may not count bodily vigour as an object of
interest ; some of us feel intensely the charm of the
ascetic ideal. And yet as we interpret such a case
the upshot would be, on the whole, a reassertion of
the universal value of health. After the temporary
doubt we wax bolder ; we become even more certain
that all men ought to desire health and set their wills
upon it and find in it the keenest joy. Our final
judgement is not much affected by a slight flaw in
our inductions; it may even be contrary to them;
for the judgement rests, first of all, upon the per-
sonal will, and then upon our imaginative subtlety

32 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

in interpreting other wills. In more technical lan-
guage we may assert our judgement as normative ;
we may assert that contrary judgements are abnormal ;
we appeal to an absolute normative consciousness,
freed from our temporary and personal defects, to
approve and to establish our assertion. Judgements
such as these, without which the highest personali-
ties cannot exist, are characteristic of the mystics
and of the world-religions.

A religion consists in a personal feeling of the cor-
respondence of one's self as a whole with some col-
lective system of values ; and, in more developed
religions, with a normative system of values in addi-
tion to the collective system of values. A man who
is religious in the fullest sense cannot live, unless
he live upon the three levels at the same time, and
unless he feel at one time the correspondences of the
thi'ee levels within himself.

Many religions fail to reach the sense of correspon-
dence with any normative system of values. Many
religions also submerge vivid personal feelings under
collective judgements of the clan, or of the caste,
or of the city. The sense of one level may be de-
fective, the sense of the other may be extremely

LEVELS OF VALUE 33

faint. In the lower ancestral religions the individ-
ual's personal sense languishes ; personal enthusiasms
droop under the burden of usages. Glimmers of
genius are carefully suppressed. Such religions may
seem romantic to us to-day ; but they seem roman-
tic because mysterious, and because their troubles
are remote from us and from our present troubles.
Dreary enough they were to the few rare souls
among them who asked for more life, for more of
a sense of correspondence to something higher than
such systems could generate. In the excessive col-
lective systems of values of the Confucian or of the
Roman ancestral religion, what we miss is a back-
ground of personal beliefs firm enough to break up
some of the conventional mental habits of the clan.
We miss the passions, focal enough and personal
enough to discover and to create fresh values, hith-
erto unassimilated by the communal life.

The ability to discover higher correspondences
within himself enables a man to have value for others.
The lack of this ability is what we miss most in a
friend. What we ask is not so much that he con-
form to usages of society, or that he sharpen his
thinking powers, but rather that he express to

34 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

us his best wishes and choices, his keenest enthusi-
asms and aversions. Then we can better estimate
him as a man. Then we can find permanent common
ground with the man himself. A change in this sys-
tem of his feelings and impulses and likes is a read-
justment of his personality. We wish this system to
be firm, decisive and limitless in a man. In many of
the ancestral religions, this system of personal feel-
ings comes under the subjection of a power too
strong for itself; for the individual is not strong
enough to conceive the collective judgements of his
clan to be a whole of which he is an active part ; he
conceives the collective judgements to be a rival will
mightier always than himself. To him his life is
inconceivable if independent of his clan ; since his clan
requires that he recognize the duty of entire con-
formity. No individual can progress unless he repeat
the will of the clan; and repudiation of the estab-
lished order severs the life of the man from his people.
But if he is sure enough of himself to appeal to a
will more inclusive than the common will of any clan,
he approaches the higher religions. He need not ab-
jure and defy his clan. He asserts that his judgement
is right. He means not only that this or that collection

LEVELS OF VALUE 35

of persons actually so judges, but also that all ought so
to judge. His demand would be brutal, if all he means
is that others must adjust themselves to him. But
his demand obtains its authority as soon as it appears
that his new insight is guided by an ideal which
any man can recognize within himself as authorita-
tive over each of us. And so, in general, as well as in
each one of us, we can discover deeper meanings which
underlie any collective judgements. In every human
life there slumbers a limitless will, an individuality,
which each man is to develop not for the sake of him-
self, nor even for others, but which is to be recog-
nized as having absolute value in itself. On our highest
level our judgements are right, without regard to any
one momentary value, without regard to the weight
of collective judgements, without regard to pleasure or
pain, without regard to single facts or feelings which
express particular conditions or desires. A judgement
of this kind is an expression of the activity of the
person as a whole. This whole is felt to be in corre-
spondence with one infinite system of beliefs which
expresses one whole inclusive system of normative
values, a will which unifies the purposes of human life.
In any one action we never succeed in expressing our

36 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

whole personality. No systems of verbal language or of
symbolic actions are felt to be expressions of our com-
plete self. The face of nature may be set against us; the
face of society may know us not; we may feel helpless
and despondent. But whatever we should count as the
full expression of personal life, the life we desire, the
life of self as one whole, that we should confess as
our religion. Our religion is the larger life we feel
within us, a part of ourselves, struggling with our-
selves, the perfection of ourselves, to which we may
always turn with passionate interest. This larger self,
seemingly within us yet ever just beyond our reach,
this it is that men have tried to represent in their
conceptions of their gods. In our own experience we
have the assurance of this life, at which we aim, and
to which we incessantly return. This life cannot be
altogether different from our own life, for it is that
by which we measure our lives, that from which we
cannot sever our lives, unless we ourselves cease to
be. To this life we appeal whenever we assert a judge-
ment, believing with all the intensity of our best
selves that our judgement must be so; we appeal then
from our transitory self, from social standards to an
inclusive infinite will, never identical with any one of

LEVELS OF VALUE 37

its moments, to a will which we trust will prevail, a
will upon which we stake the best in our lives. In
proportion as our normative judgements extend them-
selves within us, just so far they express in our own
selves what this will must be. But since within
us this will is confused with individual and collective
values, the sense of what it means is broken and easily
lost. The Absolute Will in us is the standard at which
we aim and in which we hope for peace. It is beyond us
because we will it more often than we know we will
it. It is beyond us because we are really willing it,
just when we are only aware of willing what is after
all some temporary and provisional choice. In pro-
portion, then, as we decide to take ourselves more
seriously, we find that our life extends beyond any
momentary boundary and is continuous with a region
of life which we can never at any one time call our
own. How far beyond us this region extends, we can-
not say. But each single judgement that has ever ac-
tuated us, and all the values in the wills of others, in
past and future, to which we have reacted, contribute
to this wider region of our self. Each transitory act
of will merges in this wider self, and passes completely
beyond our control. Of this wider self our present

38 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

condition is a constantly fluctuating expression. Va-
rious judgements have fallen into ordered series; other
judgements have neutralized themselves in reciprocal
conflicts. Each new value finds a correspondent in
some inclusive series and each modifies the wider self.
Each value exercises authority, minimal though it
may be, and each uses its influence, imperceptible
though this influence may appear to the actual self.
This infinite self subsists by these unnumbered mil-
lions of self-subordinating values. The more stable
groups, the collective groups, and above all the nor-
mative groups, gradually crystallize into reliable hu-
man wills and fixed institutions. Each part is in re-
lation to the whole. But it is no less true that the
whole inclusive will requires each part of itself, — each
passion for order, and ungrudging friendship, and
each appreciation of beauty, and loyal deed. Of
these the Absolute Self consists. I stumble into an
adventure, and I find that my wider self has brought
me there. My whole self is facing the situation and
interpreting the moment and weighing the mood. In
such wise each distinguishable single value and the
resultant choice of my total self must affect each
other. Each value is found to be an expression of the

LEVELS OF VALUE 39

wider self. And the Absolute Will is what it is in
part, because of that particular choice.

DiflPerent natures and different wills develop in dif-
ferent ways. For some it seems more natural always
to regard life as a whole; for others to take it as a
collection of gi'oups. Some develop harmoniously,
others in detail and in variable and more one-sided
ways. It is easier for some to find one ruling pui-pose
and to focus their wills upon that; for others it is
easier to adjust themselves frequently to examples of
life or to different social ideals. In all cases, what we
want is the inclusive system of purposes and the sense
of correspondence to it. That is our religion. In this
search we find our life and our encouragement ; we
find larger views of things opened to us ; we discover
that our life lies on higher levels than those which we
have been too exclusively cultivating.

In the three following lectures we will consider (iii)
a case of primitive beliefs as an illustration of individ-
ual judgements not yet in the strict sense religious;
(iv) certain ancestral systems constructed by religious
judgements of the collective class; (v) various mystical
ideals which strive to exclude all judgements that are
not normative.

LECTURE THIRD

Ill

PRIMITIVE BELIEFS

A NY expression of religion is an act of practical
A. Jl. life. Its design is to make remoter values vivid
to the present will, to adjust that will to the more
difficult judgements upon life. Science of Religion
displays to us the situations which call forth reli-
gious acts, the problems which require solution, the
correspondences between different levels of life. It
shows us first the easier religious solutions in the form
of unquestioning following of usage, in the form of
a kind of herd-instinct. Next, it shows us the ven-
eration paid to men of force as objects of worship,
as powers mysterious beyond all calculation, beyond
all approach. Science of Religion shows us how much
the clan-feeling can sustain the more remote aspira-
tions and beliefs. It shows us also how the develop-
ment of a strong tribal life may form the basis for
the subtler feelings and shades of choice which pre-
pare for the mystical religions. And it shows us finally
that as the individual becomes more of an ordered
whole, social control and social suggestion fail to as-
sure him of the ultimate ends of belief. Your tribes-

43

44 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

man may continue the ceremonies: he may observe
food restrictions, he may keep feasts, he may marry,
he may give divine names to his childi'en, he may ini-
tiate his youth, he may pay his respects to the mighty
spirits with whom he has to do; but his beliefs have
become more complex, and his requirements of action
more varied, than the religion of his tribe can satisfy.
The ancient order of beliefs is questioned; the older
purposes are attained in new ways; the problems of
life become more pressing and the emotions more
sensitive. The ancient usages, the first attempts of the
early clan, achieved much, accomplished what no-
thing else at the time could have accomplished so
well. But now they do not seem so decisive : purposes
are now more closely adjusted to new systems of be-
liefs; desires are fulfilled in other systems of volun-
tary control. There are new expressions of actual val-
ues. And all these are again personal acts of choice.

Science of Religion tries to discover these shifting
systems of beliefs and scales of value. If the scientific
descriptions of these religions are to interest us at all,
if we say we understand the personal attitudes, we
mean that we have put ourselves to some degree in
the situation of the clansman. Our will is then his

PRIMITIVE BELIEFS 45

will; his belief might cause us to act as he acts. In
that sense we understand his system of beliefs.
We fit his, as a part, into our own scale of be-
liefs. We fit his beliefs into ours in terms of action
and of personal choice, not in terms of fact or in ver-
bal values. The experience is determined by the will,
and the outer facts group themselves about it. The
will being the object of search, the only way to find
it is to let it affect us. However slightly, the poise of
our will must change. We understand the strange
creature whose will is laid bare before us in so far as
we ourselves change. To that extent he becomes a
part of ourselves. Thus there can be no science unless
there be practice; if divorced, neither exists. My char-
acter influences my science; my science makes me
other than I have been before. The relation is reci-
procal. We may not heed the little shift in the bal-
ance of will; we may not know why our delight is a
shade more keen, or our repulsion a shade less dull;
but nevertheless our total system of beliefs has lost
and regained a central point in order to include one
more act of will. The higher the religion, the more these
alterations of the whole self are expressions of a char-
acter forcible and well ordered on all its levels, able

46 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

to predict and to verify its oscillations of centre with
increasing success.

What, then, is the material to which the Science of
Religion attempts to give this form ? It is, first of all,
a mass of ethnological work: descriptions of ideas,
especially conceptions of gods; descriptions of rites;
descriptions of customs under religious control; de-
scriptions of arts expressing moods which accompany
these ideas or actions. We are no longer content with
sketches of religion from the tourist or the adven-
turer whose point of contact is momentary, who severs
religion from ordinary life. There are now trained
ethnologists, men with orderly minds, who quietly
devote themselves to a people, as a skilful tutor
lavishes life upon a boy. The assumption of the eth-
nologist is that the minds of uncultured men are not
loose heaps of feelings and perceptions, but are as co-
herent systems as his own mind. All that is necessary
is to find his permanent personal interests and the
stimulations which make him feel most alive to him-
self; to discover what permanent ambition and goal of
desire returns most frequently to his imagination;
then we have found the man himself.

The brilliant work in Ceylon of two German natu-

PRIMITIVE BELIEFS 47

ralists, the brothers Sarrassin, gives us a description
of one of the simplest attempts to express in an action
a permanent object of desire. The Rock-Veddahs are
one of the five or six most primitive peoples alive to-
day. They have no agriculture; food is eaten without
the use of fire. Their greatest skill is in the use of a
ten-foot bow. The man lies on his back and holds the
bow with his feet. He sinks his shafts up to the
feather in the water-buffalo and sends them clean
through the wild pig. All his interests, his satisfac-
tions and triumphs are associated with this weapon.
In the crises of his life, when there is sickness or child-
birth or preparation for the hunt, there is worship of
the arrow. In the forest at night the men dance in a
circle around the arrow stuck tip down in the ground.
There are fires to add to the festive character of the
scene. There are rhythmic cries, expressions of thanks
or of hope. This continues until all are worked up to
almost convulsive excitement. But there is no clear
concept of an arrow-spirit, or of a god, or of any soul.
The dance expresses what they want ; but the ideal is
not so clear that it can be expressed in a concept or
in a word or in a figure.
The emotions expressed in the dance and in the rude

48 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

cadences are pre-religious and pre-animistic rather
than religious. The motions and sounds are the first
crude efforts to express what might develop into a
religion. They are dramatic symbols of the qualities
which the Veddah values as the highest he can possi-
bly conceive. They express himself when he seems
most genuinely alive; they make him feel triumphant
over himself and his hindrances.

But it does not appear that the series of beliefs
in himself is sufficiently continuous to find expression
in the conception of a spirit as a constantly active
personal force, always alert, always master of the de-
cisive stroke. The reason seems clear: the long foot-
bow is too large a part of the whole effort. The wea-
pon is too much for the man. The game is the victim
of the arrow, not of the bowman. Furthermore, the
game is shot while the man is at rest. No game is
tracked through the maze of bamboos. The hunter
does not trample through the jungle with all his
senses intent upon the game. There is no pursuit;
there is little variety of movement. What the forest
sends he will shoot. Hence the plot is too brief The
emotions are intense, but spasmodic and unbalanced.
The values within are not enough ordered to become

PRIMITIVE BELIEFS 49

projected outward as a compact and self-existent
whole. The feelings are immersed in a half-conscious
neutral flux. The beliefs do not form systems,
nor can they crystallize into the conception of a god,
corresponding to a man's life, but able to meet trium-
phantly the situations which baffle the man. Hence
the Veddah cannot express his total self; and because
he cannot express himself, his fellow-tribesmen cannot
understand him or offer to sustain him when he tries
to contrast himself with his world.

All this is ethnological. If we choose simple cases like
this with few balanced masses of feelings, the mere
imagination of the scene arouses sympathetic im-
pulses in ourselves. The trunks of the great trees, the
heavy swaying leaves, the flecks of sunlight through
the branches, the birds and drowsy beetles, the insipid
fragrances, all these sensations are keen in us. We
can feel the suspense, the release of the shaft, the fall
of the quarry^ and the elation of the midnight festi-
val. We feel traces of the impulses in ourselves. All
that this imaginary experience of ours lacks in com-
parison with the actual experience of the bowman is
the conviction of the reality of what we see and hear
in imagination. The mass of our sensations may be

60 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

the same in quality, but they lack the setting of his.
Our world does not fit to his world. The scene causes
us to act appropriately, but it commits us to no course
of action. It cannot give us the delightful flavour of
full reality. Yet in imagination we feast upon the de-
tails. The images group together; we face towards
them, or we turn away. We have measured wills with
the strange creature whose beliefs seem so distant
from our own. Similarly, any simple passionate ex-
pression by another of sadness or of hope, betrays to
us, within ourselves, latent tendencies to action far
below the thin crust of sensation upon which our
present life revolves.

If, however, the material is more complex, a delib-
erate effort to sympathize will be required. If the
documents are not human but written, not only the
material but the beliefs which interest us in the
documents will vary in quality. The acts of will are
no longer direct adjustments to momentary impulse.
Beliefs which find expression in verse or in writing
are already partly detached from the intense physi-
cal excitements which alone give the Veddah his
chance to express his purposes. The minds of the
men who make songs are of a paler and less resonant

PRIMITIVE BELIEFS 51

fibre. Sudden upheavals of the emotional apparatus
are more rare. Fewer stimulations result directly in
deeds. There are more interests which involve a long
series of approaches to an end. If the feelings seem
less vivid to us, it is because they are less physio-
logical, and more evenly distributed. To the singer
they seem more vivid ; they are more the expres-
sion of his personahty and less of his body. But all this,
unfortunately, hides the beliefs in the song from
him who is searching from without for the inner
value of the song to the singer. To the observer
from without the song expresses the person less
candidly than the dance. The poet, the maker of the
verse, cannot put himself into his words as pre-ani-
mistic man can throw himself without reserve into
a lumbering bodily rhythm. The poet cannot easily
lose himself in undirected passion ; cannot give as
much of himself with his song ; nor can he use mas-
sive physical vibrations. He severs himself from his
body; he faces his own body. The complexity of
his beliefs prevents him from expressing himself com-
pletely. Consequently we do not find more of him in
the poem than he has himself put there. When the
song becomes prose it is still more depersonalized. It

52 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

restrains beliefs and becomes a mere thread of ab-
stractions and of hard outlines ; it can speak only of
what is common property ; thus beliefs are spun out
into generalities.

But in the Science of Religion we cannot accept
anything verbal as having in itself personal value.
Nothing impersonal, nothing abstract, can pass for
religion. Words at their best are a kind of debased
currency. Easily we forget how subsidiary a word is
to the meaning which the user of the word gives it.
Suppose now we have a gi*eat mass of incanta-
tions, epitaphs, rituals, meditations, books of ori-
gins, formulas of salutations, and dreams of the life
of the soul. How can these words have value to us ?
How can we arouse in ourselves sympathetic reac-
tions? Can we, in any degree, repeat the quick judge-
ments and the emotions of the man who used these
very words when beset by starvation or death, or
by brutal tyrants ? Or can we repeat the feelings of
the victor exulting in harvests, and bright skies,
and in deliverance from enemies?

The belief of the man who used the words can be
a value to us only so far as we can compare the
imagined inner mental states of the stranger with

PRIMITIVE BELIEFS 53

our own inner life. Otherwise we may translate the
hymn, we may edit the manuscript, and publish as
many texts as we please, but we shall remain dead
to the religion expressed in the words. Any religion
that we can understand must be a sense of corre-
spondence of values which are alive within us. We
must reconstruct the inner meaning out of beliefs of
our own. We must imagine ourselves feeling the
values as the harvester or the bacchanal or the
anchorite felt them. Then our feelings fall directly
into some kind of a unified belief. There will be new
impulses to act, a new balance, and a new act of will
crystallizing about the verbal picture. If we have
any heart for sorrow of our own, if we can feel delight
ourselves, then we can interpolate feelings of our own
into the record. But it is of ourselves that we vitalize
the words. Constantly we test the attitude which we
have developed artificially within ourselves ; from this
process we acquire a keener sense of the difference be-
tween our ordinary state of mind and that which we
are trying to reproduce. As the distinctions become
more clear, as we decide how we ourselves should act
if we were equipped with the stranger's sensations, we
begin to estimate the value to ourselves of the religion

54 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

which we are trying hypothetically to feel. And in pro-
portion as our own religion implies much to ourselves,
the nearer our reconstruction will be to the other's
actual belief. In the experiment our own judgement
will become much more definite to ourselves, and
the belief of the other will seem real as never before.
A sharp contrast of will gives us a firmer poise and
gives the stranger the fi*eshness of life.

This reconstruction of another's will is a familiar
process to us. Every drama we have read is an expeii-
ment of this kind. Delight in the di*ama is distinct
from the mere reading of the pages. Our aesthetic
pleasm*e and our artistic judgement demand far more
than accurate reading. If the characters of the drama
are to be more than names, we must feel their pas-
sions, their ecstasies and their pains; we must feel
their suspense. But the feelings and beliefs which
make the characters must be in us. To some of us Lear
is a mere name; the words he speaks are sounds with
no values. To others he is a person more distinct than
we are ourselves. To some of us MaeterHnck's Meli-
sande is a wan and repellent caricature, to others a
definite and impressive character. In other words, we
might say that Lear and Antigone are merely words,

PRIMITIVE BELIEFS 65

not persons, until we make them alive out of our own
store of human passions. It is not that we imitate
feelings alien to ourselves, but rather, out of the dim
background of feeling in ourselves we bring forth a
grouping, uncombined hitherto, of our own feelings,
now first unified by the genius of the dramatist,
henceforth permanent in us under the name Antigone
or Lear. These characters, then, are objectifications
of feelings. It is our own feelings which we see pass
before us as Lear or as some ethereal creature with
an Attic or a Gallic name; they are definite objects;
they live within us a life of their own.

Quite distinct is another kind of feeling. We take
sides with or against the persons of the drama; we
avoid them or welcome them; we reject them or ac-
cept them; our sympathy goes to them or we hold
aloof; we suffer with their agony. These feelings are
not those which constitute the persons of the drama;
these feelings are not objects to us; they are sympa-
thetic feelings ; they are our personal attitudes towards
the characters already formed; they are the reaction
of the observer to the object of his attention.

At the end of the drama there are, besides these
sympathetic feelings, yet other personal feelings.

56 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

There is a resultant mood; we are exultant in spite of
the sight of falseness and of pain, in spite of our own
doubt and gloom. The feeling towards the drama as
a whole results in a new total feeling of our o^\ti.
The total self includes now a new insight into life; it
has felt itself in new activities. A judgement has found
total expression, complete in itself, in a work of art
which for the moment has seemed the world. The
little world of this drama has its own stubbornness
and its own savagery; it has also delicate and beau-
tiful and reckless devotions. Both of these aspects of
this drama must now find their place in my inner
world. Both have affected myself. Both result in a
new relation of myself to the world.

Thus the drama may bring us back to religion in
that it makes clearer how religious conceptions of the
gods might be formed. In some similar way, we must
lend life out of ourselves if we are to understand the
meaning of a tribal god, or of the great Indra, or of
Dionysus. We bring a mass of concrete, often very
trivial, tales into consciousness. We empty our own
minds of our usual reflections, and by a slight strain
of attention we make the descriptions of the gods
alive with our own personal prejudices and passions.

PRIMITIVE BELIEFS 67

Directly, then, the god is alive, as alive as Hamlet,
alive with beliefs of his worshippers. So the concept of
the god also consists of objectified feelings; he ex-
presses how the world should be to win human love
and approval. In a symbol the concept of the god ex-
presses a standard of worth by which the world is to
be judged. Similarly, the sympathetic feelings to-
wards the persons in the drama would correspond to
the human loyalties to the god as king or as moral
leader. Such sympathetic loyalties give new structure
to the stuff of which life is made ; and they express a
kind of belief which we hope will be a part of the
total expression of our lives. And finally, the result-
ant feeling, as the di*ama ends, would correspond to
the deep religious belief that through the world one
vast purpose runs, one life, one plan which we have
followed, which for a time we have understood, — one
plan which we accept as the complete fulfilment of
all our beliefs, a plan to which all that is best in us
is now felt to correspond.

LECTURE FOURTH

IV
ANCESTRAL SYSTEMS

THE advance from the prehuman ancestor to
man is said to be marked by three discoveries:
the use of fire, the use of weapons, and the use of
words as a supplement to gesture language. To make
good use of these inventions man needed yet another
discovery of another kind. He needed to discover that
a man's life is worse off and not better if he continues
to assume that human life is so small an affair that
its outcome is a matter of indifference. That assump-
tion cannot be of much practical value. It leads men
easily to a kind of placid despair, to the feeling that
effort is futile. Wherein lies the root of this indolent
assumption? Clearly, it is in the assumption that
the individual human being is self-sufficient; that he
need recognize no obligations nor do anything for
reasons, unless he choose; or that he need not even
find reasons for what he wants to do. The discovery
required was religion, the discovery that each man
can accept as the fulfilment of his own purpose a
purpose made actual in a society, and at the same
time rooted in reality. This discovery of the cori'e-

61

62 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

spondence of one's own purpose with the purposes of
society gave a meaning and a value to life which the
blind obedience to animal impulses had not given.
So long as man knew nothing more than the healthy
action of his own body, and so long as his chief de-
light was in plenty of unimpeded massive sensations, —
such as self-abandonment to the crude rhythms of
his dance, — his experience would be too simple to re-
quire a religious reaction. But as his organism be-
comes finer, his experience wider, and the demands
for action more varied, the joy in purely physical ac-
tion and in massive emotional upheavals is less fre-
quent. Many ends, as he finds, cannot be attained in
isolated bursts of passion ; many ends can be attained
only when he is conscious of acting by choice as a
member of a group, or as a part of a whole. Social
loyalties will add to his own valuation of himself; be-
cause they give him the confidence he needs to face
the purposeless forces of the world. Religion is a de-
vice which helps him to attain this goal, that is, to
find himself expressed in his loyalties and to discover
the worth of this correspondence by testing its struc-
ture in the stuff of his own experience. Religion is
also a device to overcome situations of social tension,

ANCESTRAL SYSTEMS 63

which, as he has found, make his life as a self-suffi-
cient individual impossible. At the same time it is a
device to control the actions of the tribe. Certain
common habits are found to correspond; certain purely
individual habits are rejected. The man finds his self
in his social habits and loyalties. He finds himself or-
ganized with over-individual aims in view, with aims,
that is, which extend beyond the range of his indi-
vidual life. The maintenance of the social body be-
gins to have a supreme value in itself; and it assures
to the individual the preservation of the ends without
which he cannot live. It is surely true that extreme
situations of emotional tension result, in almost every
case, in the formation of new conceptions. The end
which releases him from such tensions, if it be an end
upon which he will stake his life, is represented in an
idea of a god. The god is the picture of the man re-
leased from imperfections and tensions, unbalked by
body, or beasts, or cosmic weather. The god is the
concept embodying some latent perfection restricted
within the man. If this idea of the god be accepted
by the group as its social ideal, the first step in re-
ligion is taken. The idea of a tribal god expresses
collective judgements which are religious. As soon as

64 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

the concept of the god no longer oscillates with the
individual's moods, it attains a fixed character. It ex-
presses a collective value; it expresses more than an
emotion emerging and diffusing in one man; it
asserts a definite solution, by a body of persons, of
certain problems of life. When the assertion is firm,
if the men are daring and persistent, they see the
fulfilment of their purpose, they behold the god do-
ing with ease the deeds they have never done in this
world. Henceforth common actions are controlled by
a comparison wdth the god''s completed act. The con-
cept grows more definite as it represents more life, as
it includes more beliefs, as it orders more values, as
it gives more direction to the actions of the group.
The god assumes authority over all who feel the need
of correspondence between their own lives and the
ideal action which he symbolizes. The god begins to
feel the unwavering support of the tribal will. He be-
comes independent of any single experience. He en-
ters into a close communion with each member of the
common life. His life is inseparable from their life;
their life is worthless if severed from his life. Their
social rites and usages are exercises in imitation of his
life. Their hymns urge them on to feel the joy of

ANCESTRAL SYSTEMS 65

completed effort as he feels it; to feel the world, in
actual experience, as a responsive whole, wherein false
notes and discords persistent in man are resolved into
one harmony including the single tones.

An example of the formation of the idea of a per-
sonal protector, and of the expansion of this concept
into the concept of a god expressive of the collective
beliefs of a society, is given us in an accurate and
very subtle study of the religion of the Omaha tribe.
In the Legend of the Sacred Pole, Miss Fletcher tells
us how the Sioux boy obtains his protector. The le-
gend recounts how this protector was first discovered.
"The people felt themselves weak and poor. The old
men gathered together and said, 'Let us make our
children cry to Wakonda.' So they took their chil-
dren, covered their faces with soft clay, and sent them
forth to lonely places. The old men said, 'You shall
go forth and cry to Wakonda. When on the hills you
shall not ask for any particular thing. Whatever is
good that may Wakonda give.' " This rite has been
observed up to the present day. The boy is told what
he is to do, moistened earth is put upon his head and
face, a small bow and arrows are given him. He seeks
a secluded spot on some high hill ; and under the pines

66 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

he chants the prayer; he lifts to heaven his hands wet
with tears and then lays them on the earth; he fasts,
until at last after some days he falls into a sleep or
trance. If in his dream or trance he hear or see any-
thing, that thing is to become the special mediator
through which he receives aid. Then, the ordeal over,
the youth returns for food and rest. No one questions
him, but at the end of four days he confides his vision
to some old man, and starts out to find the animal
he has seen in his trance. The totem is the symbol of
this animal. The totem is the most sacred thing he
can possess. By it his natural powers are to be re-
enforced so as to give him success as a hunter, vic-
tory as a warrior, and even abihty to see into the
future.

The assumption in this belief is that all things
animate and inanimate are pervaded by one common
life, called wakonda or orenda. This hfe is continu-
ous and cannot be broken.

The men who have received the same vision group
together. This is the simplest form of social action.
Those who see the bear make up the Bear Society ;
those to whom the thunder comes form the Thun-
der Society. The tribe is formed by certain fixed

ANCESTRAL SYSTEMS 67

relations between these totem-bands, and all these
totem-bands receive their organization from the
wdkojida.

The concept of the god is then a statement by the
tribe of its collective values for life. It matters little
how logical the concept be, provided social values
are embodied in it, and provided the actions of the
individual and the impulses of the tribe are governed
and lifted up towards this concept. It matters much
that the concept should embody in vivid form con-
duct of life indispensable to the tribe as a whole.

If now we should wish to repeat or to understand
in any degree the beliefs and loyalties burning in
the soul of the youthful initiate, we must strip off,
for a moment, layer after layer of mental categories
with which, so far as we are civilized, we have over-
laden the passions of the primitive man within our-
selves. This is not such a difficult process for us to-
day. When we see the paroxysms of our young men
supporting with their voices the efforts of their
comrades in the games, we are in range with similar
mental levels. In the minds of youth intent upon
such contests there are no obstacles to prevent the
will from focusing upon a single scale of values. The

68 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

objects of consciousness are unclassified except with
reference to the desire to surpass the opponent. If
these objects of consciousness could find themselves
expressed in the concept of a single animal which
should express in actions the harsher predatory pas-
sions surging to and fro from margin to margin of
consciousness, we should be very near the attitude of
will in the Sioux boy. A certain course of action is
extremely prized. By training his mind and body
for days, the Sioux boy expels from his mind con-
cepts discordant with this course of action. He fills
his mind with pictures of heroes; these heroes are
the animals; and their deeds are examples of life. He
regards these animal heroes with sincere admiration.
His life is spent in contention with them. When he
is alone, they surpass him in power. The more he
thinks of them the more his life is effective, the
more valuable he becomes to his tribe. If he is un-
true to the ideal of life expressed in the animal, his
life is left without guidance. We civilized men can-
not so easily express supreme aims in life by symbols
which are living animals. And furthermore, those
who direct our education do not encourage us so to
express ourselves, or teach us to boast of ancestry

ANCESTRAL SYSTEMS 69

from a wolf or from a raven. But if we could for a
moment imagine ourselves subjected to similar influ-
ences, I think we may assume that our imagination
might take the same course. It is only that our train-
ing has been for fifty generations in a very different
direction. Our education aims to reduce the force of
any one such emotion. We strive to make it impos-
sible for a man to reduce himself to a single scale of
values until he become an inert mass so far as other
values are concerned. If one of us should so reduce
himself, we should say that such a one does not know
what he is about, although the individual in ques-
tion might assure us he feels very much alive. To-day
above all other habits of mind we encourage reflec-
tion. In types of mind like the Sioux, men living in
compact groups bound together by blood relation-
ships, there is almost no reflection, or at least no
habit of reflection. Even in advanced cases of the
same type, in the ordinary life of the Greek city or
of the Roman gens, there was the same lack of reflec-
tion, the same inability to feel more than one scale
of values at a time, and the same passive mind
overwhelmed by the weight of collective beliefs.
There were no habits of experiment or of discussion,

70 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

and but little analysis of objects. There was no ques-
tioning of the value of sensations. There was no
search for the origin of an idea or for its right to
existence. Every idea was accepted without reserve
and as it appeared. The apparent and the real were
identical. It would appear, then, that we can never
think as the Sioux thinks, or as men in the fields of
Attica thought. Still after all, since man has existed,
the world, in its main outlines and in its laws, has
not changed. The nervous mechanism and the sim-
ple sensations seem much the same. It is the grouping
of sensations that has changed. The composition, the
structure, the methods of classifying the mental units,
have greatly changed. Thus it might yet be possible
to dissever the primitive layer from the derived layers
of consciousness, the simple from the complex.

Consequently if we wish to repeat the scale of val-
ues or the system of beliefs of the Omaha Indian,
or of any other ancestral system, or of any belief in
one common soul life reincorporating itself in the
transitory lives of individual members of the tribe, we
must strip ourselves of our modern habits of mind, —
we must simplify the classification of our sensations
aud cultivate a less active mind.

ANCESTRAL SYSTEMS 71

This means that all modern philosophy, which in-
variably has taught that the human understanding
has an activity and an individuality of its own, must
be given up. Aristotle also, who taught that each
single act considered in itself is our work, although
as a whole the active intellect is a portion of the di-
vine reason, must be abandoned. Plato was convinced
that a man contributes nothing to the elaboration of
any active states; he does not even suspect the pre-
sence in himself of a power to change his thoughts.
To Plato's thinking, ideas come from without, inter-
mingled, easy to confound; yet each is complete in it-
self. There are no degrees in the assimilation of im-
pressions. Ideas are poured into us as water into a
pool. The soul contributes nothing to the exis-
tence, or to the grouping, or to the changes of sensa-
tions.

One step backward beyond Plato brings us into an-
other mental world. We are on a level with the clans-
men of the Iliad, we are mental contemporaries of the
Buddha, we are not far from the world of the Omaha.
If we can find our way at all in this world, we find it
is an'anged in very simple mental series. There, one
must search to find any general ideas, or more than

72 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

a few abstract terms. But there is a sea of crude feel-
ing, of antipathies and loyalties. The individual can
feel only a single strong emotion at one time. All
other feelings than the one strong emotion are felt
only in common with a mass of men. Insight is shal-
low, and self-possession is easily relaxed. Each man is
an automatic mass of blind impulses, a mass which
passively collects social stimulations. Like a physical
contagion, courage comes from without. Cowardice,
likewise, is something not ourselves. Now the gods are
the names of the permanent and more mighty of these
emotions. The god launches forth a passion and de-
scends upon men as a stampede comes over a di'ove of
cattle. All critical turns in life, the power of attack
at the right instant, the unaccountable weakening
in emergencies, — this is the work of gods, or is it
not rather, the god himself.'^ Passions, desires and
judgements are, at best, tools, weapons or ornaments
borrowed in times of unexpected stress. Passions and
judgements do not belong to a man, do not arise in
him, and are not part of himself. Passions rove about
the world ; they are sent into a man ; they surge through
the empty spaces within him; they sting the inert
body into frenzy. These nomad inhabitants of the

ANCESTRAL SYSTEMS 73

mind, to us pale subjective conflicts of values, are to
him living things, active wills, realities more real than
himself. Any unaccountable event, even the quiver of
the leaf fluttering unexpectedly in the breeze, may be
the action of some god. If strange passions become
persistent in him ; if they require his constant atten-
tion; if they become of such importance that the
whole tribe is compelled to take an attitude towards
them, then the god has proved the passion to be his
act. In other words, the passion expresses such judge-
ments upon life that life cannot continue indifferent
to these judgements. Life is not a whole without them.
The judgement is then a religious judgement. Society
may fall to pieces if these judgements are ignored.
Social institutions are held together by hospitality to
the passions of the more majestic of these wandering
gods. Each of the gods has his fixed programme of
action. A man cannot live the night through if he
has forfeited the respect of the gods for him or lost
their love. He cannot be himself if estranged from
them. If he be in sore distress, he cries out to the
great over-lord, heretofore remote at the circumfer-
ence of human living, but now swiftly approaching
the centre of his life.

74 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

Great emotions and the release from great emo-
tions both come, then, from without. The decisive
stroke is usually the act of a god. The value of the
act has nothing to do with the individual will. The
relation between a man and his thoughts is almost the
reverse of the noniial relation as we think of it to-day.
The man's mind is more like the mind of a child or
of a hypnotized subject. The great passion lives; it
energizes in the man ; he is its docile tool, and is less
alive than the passion in him. The man himself hesi-
tates to act. It seems impossible to act; yet some
deed must be done. Then it is that the god puts de-
cision into the man.

If, now, the god be the conceptual embodiment of
such a passive herd-instinct, the positive human gain
of this system of beliefs becomes forthwith quite pal-
pable. In the social life the interests of each indi-
vidual depend upon the welfare of the whole group.
Each life is forfeit to each other life. The original
animal instincts, the sex instinct, the lust of the
power to kill, the cry of hunger, the need of protec-
tion for property and self, might yield to the more
human interests of admiration, of respect, of delight
in common purposes, of disinterested affection. The

ANCESTRAL SYSTEMS 76

more firm the texture of the tribal life, the greater
would be the dependence of the individual, and the
more insistent his wish that the customs of the clans
be conserved.

Thus, in ancestral systems, the concept of the god
which expresses the social ideal might widen until the
god might be conceived as the guardian of the collec-
tive life of the clan. At the same time, social usages,
the resultants of past and present individual purposes,
would be the bonds by which the god would hold his
tribe together. It may be the god is a deified ances-
tor ; his quality in battle and in councils of the tribe
is known. By effective living he has won his way to
leadership ; the tribe respects him and loves him for
his work. His will expresses the tribal will. His will
represents voluntary loyalties and voluntary restric-
tions of purely individual desires. The concept of the
god would express a resultant ideal and is also an
actual will. Some such expression of the resultant
ideal is a necessary condition for the more complex
social life of a clan. The god is then more than a tem-
porary passion or even guardian ; he becomes the un-
dying king. He himself is offended in case his will
be transgressed. The correspondence is complete;

76 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

each single will finds fulfilment in him, the symbol
of the collective purpose of the tribe. Such a system
implies a disinterested choice of social values ; yet
there is never an entire break with individual inter-
ests. Two great levels correspond: the god, the re-
presentative of the common ideals of the tribe, is con-
scious of a social dignity of his own ; and again, each
man, under the guidance of the god, secures his own
personal welfare. In terms of ritual, the god delights
in sacrifices, the physical signs of deferential affec-
tion towards himself, and, correspondingly, he res-
cues his worshippers who love him and obey him ; or,
conversely, he thwarts the impious who pay him no
devotion or who lightly mutilate customs of which the
life of his tribe consists. Thus, trust in the will of
the god and the personal feeling of obligation con-e-
spond ; and the will of the god embodies the sanc-
tion of right ; personal moral ideals inhere in the will
of the god ; and his will is the moral imperative.

In such wise the half-brutal and egoistic inter-
course between gods and men weakens on both sides ;
and common interests in conduct and in art, and a
common sense of self-respect, are con'espondingly
stronger. The fulfilment of life is over-individual,

ANCESTRAL SYSTEMS 77

the full value of life cannot be attained by a solitary
will. The criterion of value cannot depend upon any
one will ; the criterion of right is the will to serve a
social ideal such as to include and preserve the wider
interests of each member. The god embodies the col-
lective ideal; he rises above the bare impulses of ani-
mal life ; at the same time selfish motives as reasons
for worship become meaningless and offensive.

Some sense of correspondence of these two levels,
(of the individual impulse and of the collective values,)
is one of the features without which no religion can
be complete.

The defect of the ancestral system would probably
be that the god wavers, and knows not how to lead.
It may be that the god has not learned to reflect as
soundly as he knows how to act. If such a god be
compelled to deliberate, he becomes less imposing.
He has been wont to strike out first, and forecast his
action after. Later this course suffices not for suc-
cessful guidance of the tribe. If now it appear neces-
sary to think before acting, such deliberation, to
such a mind as his, might seem to be the feeling
that he is the accidental meeting-point of two possi-
ble courses of action.

78 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

The ancestral god is the embodiment of the social
ideal of action. If, then, he hesitates to act, he must
abdicate. This means that the system of collective
beliefs, if not supplemented by normative beliefs,
now proves inefficient. This is the stage through
which all Europe was passing when the Platonists
and Christians were upheaving the consciences of
men.

Normative beliefs or positive mystical beliefs prove
most effective precisely at the point where the social
ideal begins to break down, at the point where the
great world-religions begin to add normative stand-
ards to merely collective ideals. And at this point
human life begins to make for itself a new and a no-
bler world.

LECTURE FIFTH

V
MYSTICAL IDEALS

MYSTICISM always presupposes more or less
highly elaborated social systems. Mystical
ideals are most likely to supervene when the social
ideal begins to waver. But, from the point of view of
society, an ascetic mysticism, at its best, must be a
temporary and restricted business. It intervenes, pro-
visionally, after the old ideal can no longer dominate
the clan. It may not be said under just what condi-
tions mysticism begins to break through the social
mind; but very often it dawns upon the mind when
men begin to meditate upon the force of words; es-
pecially when the word is a concept of great dignity
and when the stream of consciousness naiTows and
centres repeatedly upon that word.

Among the Iroquois Indians, when the chief of one
of the two phratries dies, it is the duty of the one
phratry to condole with the other for its loss. The
phratry must install another person. It must give this
person the title and the insignia of the dead chief.
It must bring the dead chief to life in the person of
his successor. All this is accomplished by the potency

81

82 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

of a ritual. Unfortunately, the ritual does more: the
words are so mighty that the ceremony cannot be
held in the spring or in the summer. For then the
words might kill the seed for planting, or blight the
growing grain and fi-uits. It appears that the power
exerted by the words is more than sufficient to pro-
mote the welfare of the tribe. If its use is untimely, it
destroys the food of the tribe. This mystic power is
the force in the word itself. The force of the word is
conceived as physically as the body which expresses
the force of the dance. The meaning of the word is a
physical act. All the changes of inorganic matter are
thought to be a kind of music chanted by physical
things. The sounds produced by the life of the forest
are expressions of the wills of animate beings. The
trees and animals are exercising the mystic power
of their rituals. Since all motions of bodies are
thought to be acts of living beings, and since motions
are accompanied by sounds, sounds are the evidence
that some will is exerting a mystic potency with the
intention of effecting some purpose. The cry of a bird,
the sigh of the wind, the voices of the night, the
moaning of the storm, the cracking of river-ice, are
conceived to be the chants of various bodies giving

MYSTICAL IDEALS 83

forth words in the exercise of mystic power. Mr. Hew-
itt, who tells us of this, to whom the Iroquois is
native speech, informs us that this power which the
Iroquoians trust is called orenda. The same concept
is found among other peoples. A few cases may sug-
gest to us the force of this idea to the Iroquoian
mind : if a youth, in a game of skill, overcomes an-
other, his orenda overcomes the orenda of the other;
if clan is pitted against clan, in public games, men
reputed to possess powerful orenda are engaged to
suppress the orenda of the antagonists ; when a storm
is brewing, the storm -maker is preparing orenda.
Thus, singing means that the singer or chanter,
whether he be beast, bird, wind, tree, stone or man,
is putting forth his mystic power to execute his will.
The medicine-man chants in imitation of one of the
beings about him : it may be an insect or beetle, it may
be the locust. The locust is called the Corn-Ripener.
When it sings early in the morning, the day is hot
and the corn will ripen. The inference is that the lo-
cust controls by his chant the summer heat and the
crops of maize. His singing is the exertion of his orenda
to bring on the heat necessary to ripen the corn. In
like manner the rabbit sings, and by cutting the bark

84 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

at the right height, indicates the depth of the win-
ter's snow. The orenda controls the falhng of the
snow. Again, the word which is equivalent to the verb
"to pray*" does not signify a petition, but, rather, sig-
nifies an act which indicates that he who desires some-
thing from the body controlling an orenda must first
lay his own orenda down. The sentence- word, "he
prays," would then imply defeat, surrender, self-abne-
gation or a plea for life.

The Iroquois interprets the activities of the whole of
nature to be a ceaseless struggle of one orenda against
another. To obtain welfare he must exert his own
orenda or employ devices, gifts, praise or self-abase-
ment to persuade other more powerful beings to exert
their orenda in his behalf. But gradually, in the stress
of practical life, he unveils the weakness of the orenda
in which he has learned to trust. He searches for more
inclusive and more powerful charms. By means of ob-
taining favours and gifts from the more vigorous and
insistent wills in the environment, he discovers the
great collective orenda, that is, the gods. His religion
is then a highly developed system of words and sym-
bolic acts, in intricate complications, employed to
control the Iroquoian world. Life consists in the abil-

MYSTICAL IDEALS 85

ity to keep in touch with the mysterious chants which
fill the world. Success consists in mastering the chants
which really count. Mystic power is inherent in all
things ; it is everywhere, and over and below every-
thing. There is nothing which is beyond it. All social
usages become affected by it. It keeps unbroken the
thread of life running through all things.

This idea of the orenda lacks only a certain aesthe-
tic definiteness to engender one of the great mystical
beliefs. A similar system of ideas, with regard to one
power inherent in all things, prevails upon the peoples
on the west African coast. The negro is more ad-
vanced in embodying his religious conceptions than
the American Indian. His sense of rhythm is more
sensitive. His feeling for the cosmic sequences is more
acute. His lunar and solar myths are more complex.
He has vague notions of time reading back into in-
calculable distance; he has a suspicion that there are
fixed procedures for the whole of things. The gi'eat
cosmic rhythms impress him in half-conscious fashion ;
but they do not rouse him to question them. He is
aware of them only so far that he would be amazed
if they should cease. These suspicions of cosmic regu-
larity are associated in his mind with the distant

86 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

spirit of the sky. The clear day-sky is not subject to
change. His calm overarching vault is above all ; he
overshadows and includes all. No one can say when he
came into existence. He is beyond the chances and
changes of human life. Thus, the first glimmering
sense of a permanent world-order is associated with a
perceptible object. The experience of a permanent
cosmic series embodies itself in the visible image of
the heavens. But the unchanging spirit of the sky
comes a little closer to human life in that he receives
to himself the spirits of the dead. The souls of those
whose bodies are clothed in night are led upward to
the spirit of the sky. The air is filled with such souls ;
they are conducted to his beatific repose. Their lives
then continue unchanged with him. Life itself, like
the serene, outspread, all-protecting sky-spirit, is seen
to be the everlasting, the only permanent fact. There
is no such thing as destruction of life; there is no
creation of life ; there is no expectation of death.

This African system of beliefs, like the Iroquoian,
just falls short of development into a clear mystical
system. But in some respects the African is a little
farther away than the American Indian, inasmuch as
the symbol of the one eternal idea is drawn fi-om the

MYSTICAL IDEALS 87

outer and visible world. The African system seeks its
god in deserts of space and time, in outer immensi-
ties, in inferences built upon direct sensations. It cuts
him off from human values. It prevents the stream of
consciousness from internalizing itself upon a single
concept of unsurpassable dignity.

If the African were mentally capable of regarding
fixedly the conception which forms itself in his mind;
if he could have felt it less sensuously and more as a
concrete expression of his own inner life unified and
harmonized in a single majestic concept; if he could
have lived more consistently upon its level and re-
frained from sportive and repellent fancies with re-
gard to it, it might suggest in some dim way the
Indo-European Sky-Father and the Indo-European
Fate, it might have led him close to the brink of a
superb mystical faith such as we find in India or among
the later Greeks.

The Greeks were worshippers of another sky-god.
Their great Sky-Father was not content to remain in a
beatific condition of perpetual drowsiness, which is the
perfection of bliss to the mind of the indolent negro.
Zeus was an active god. At times, however, he deliber-
ated before acting. He selected not only a fixed end,

88 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

but also a connected series of means to the end. But
again, Zeus was uncertain how to choose ; then to es-
cape embarrassment, he weighed in his hand the bal-
anced scale. To us this scale is the symbol of justice.
To the old lonians it was nothing of the kind. All it
meant to them was that the Sky-Father in perplexity
was attempting to avoid deliberate injustice. On his
paii: it was less the symbol of justice than the sign of
blind and brutal evasion of difficult action. The scale
signified the need of an intervention of Fate, the
Spoken Word. From without. Fate acted upon Zeus, in
like manner as Zeus from without acted upon men. To
the older thinkers Fate signified the resultant action of
a sum total of forces which were unknown to the indi-
vidual, not a mysterious voice, inaccessible, lowering
upon the world, sending forth from an abyss irrevoca-
ble decrees. This may be the conception of Aeschylus,
but it was not the old Ionian Fate. Fate connected
itself in an especial form with the Sky-Father, who
was in no sense infinite. Zeus had a beginning. He
was not in all places. His knowledge was limited. His
power was great, but the gods did not always obey him.
He had no control over death. He could not restrict
the action of an oath when it was once well launched.

MYSTICAL IDEALS 89

An oath was a living reality, with wings, an armed di-
vinity traversing the world, ready to rush upon men
who forgot, upon men of bad faith, upon the gods.

This oath was the essence of the conception of Fate
so far as the Sky-Father was concerned. He was lim-
ited most of all by his own orenda^as the Iroquois would
say. Fate was the unified action of his own words and
of all that passed beyond the actual personality of the
god. But it does not seem to have been a distinct and
isolated force. His Fate, the necessity which con-
strained, had its essence within himself. His Fate, the
necessity which endured, was the after-effects of his own
thinking. It is not a simple aspect of the nature of Zeus
immanent in his substance. It was objectified, yet still
not a personality complete in itself and eager to
check him. It permeated all. It enfolded and directed
all human and divine wills. It gave wretchedness or joy ;
it supplied steadiness of purpose; it enriched the sensu-
ous life; it called forth decisions. It alone was always
alert in the world in each event, in each change of
form, in each idea and action. The Ionian Fate is an
advance from the Iroquoian orenda and also from the
west African sky-spirit. But to the Ionian it never
seemed quite clear whether the Sky-Father and Fate

90 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

were distinct or not. So long as beliefs associated
with the visible sky or with any other cosmological
symbol adhere to the concept of Fate, it must remain
at the margin of consciousness; it cannot easily sat-
isfy longings aroused within a man by experiences of
his own inner life ; it does not arise in his own heart
as an immediate reality, and so it cannot give ex-
pression to a classical mysticism.

In India the development of mysticism was fi'om
the beginning uninterrupted, more recklessly logical,
less repressed by social restraint. Here social life was
stagnant ; the individual intellect was intensely keen.
Meditation upon the meanings of language has al-
ways been one of the most important occupations of
the Indian mind. To us of European stock it seems
that any one spoken word stands in two kinds of
relations : one, the relation of the sound to the idea
which it symbolizes ; the other, the relation of the
sound to the external meanings of words. To us, both
of these relations seem artificial and conventional. In-
dividual variations, changes in social habits and physi-
ological details all affect the relations of word and
idea and meaning to each other.

To the Indian mind the relation of these three was

MYSTICAL IDEALS 91

much less loose. The word spoken, the vibration of
air, was the immediate continuation of the idea, the
auditory sensation, in the mind. Immediately the idea
becomes a movement ; immediately the idea becomes
a meaning in relation with other words. To the Hindu
these three, sound, idea and meaning, together form
an indissoluble whole, a single indivisible reality. Of
these three aspects the most conspicuous seems the
most important. It appears to be the source of the
other two. The spoken word gives the most vivid im-
pression ; it plays steadily its own role in the world ;
it strikes the ear; it holds the curiosity. Hence, it
seems to have value to give to the other two aspects.
To us it appears that the meaning creates the lan-
guage: a man speaks, we should say, because he
thinks. To the Hindu it seems less apparent that this
is always the fact. Logically and temporally, the word
seems to precede its idea and its meaning : a man
thinks, the Hindu would say, because he is talking.
The benefactor of the race would be, not a Prome-
theus who brings a few sparks from above, but he
who releases among men the most finished of aU
forces, an irresistible word.
We think of words as receiving their meaning from

92 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

us. In themselves they are only intricately woven
waves of air. But to the Indian, words exist in them-
selves, and liave their values in themselves. They are
alive. Like all living beings they have preferences
and repulsions, aptitudes and passions. One word
associates with another, and avoids a third. Each
word is a force : it forms permanent combinations,
or it destroys other words. Each sentence is a com-
bination of forces. Every phrase exerts a positive
material action, quite as perceptibly as air or as a
storm of wind. Each has a fixed moral character. All
of these energies belong to the word, as heat to the
sun or as danger to night. Powerful words transform
the life of the dead or create life. In the Rig-veda
the adoration of the word reaches its highest point
of splendour. Chants are directed to the word. The
word passes on to new triumphs ; it commands the
gods ; it regulates the totality of life ; it keeps order
in the three worlds. Even more it accomplishes : it
not only governs, but is the source of order. It ends
chaos, it begins the world.

By the help of the philologists, we can trace in
India the growth of the mystical interpretation of life
in the history of a single word. In the oldest mantras

MYSTICAL IDEALS 93

of the Veda, the word brahman has the very simple
meaning of a charm or utterance of peculiar potency.
As a house is built by carpenters, these words, as
complete external wholes, are fashioned by the seers.
But though external to man, and complete in them-
selves, they have yet an internal meaning. The world
rests upon a brahman; a brahman is the truth; all
things exist in it ; the seven seers subsist upon it.
The power internal in the structure of the brahman
is at the heart of all things.

To the thinking of Eastern peoples this inner mean-
ing, resident in the sum total of existence, is the one
idea of unsurpassable dignity. The sole reality is a
single all-embracing meaning. Within the Brahman
every individual, everything concrete, is as if it were
not. To-day at this day's dawn, as the sun's golden
arms were raised aloft before his coming to enliven
the world, every good Hindu, scholar or peasant, has
prayed :

"That longed-for glory of the heavenly Savitar

may we ivin,
And may himself enlighten our prayers"

This longed-for glory is the great Self, the all-em-
bracing meaning in each one of us.

94 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

Thus, the Self of each of us can be stated in cosmo-
logical terms ; and again, the unknown ground of all
reality is identical, within the limits of its range,
with ourselves. This does not mean that man is equiv-
alent to Brahman. It does not mean that the highest
reality we know must include the best in ourselves,
and more, within itself. It means that this Brahman
is the eternal unchanging reality within each of us,
itself changeless amid all change. It is not external
to any of us ; it is not an unknowable something ; but
it is the only reality to which we have sure access. It
is wider and more comprehensive than any present
grouping or collection of our concepts or desires. In
respect to Brahman we are absolutely unchangeable;
in all other respects we are a ceaseless series of trivial
fluctuations.

The same system of ideas, with some variation in
expression, is set forth in the Yoga philosophy of
Patanjali and in Buddhism. The narrower and shal-
lower part of us, consisting of names and concepts
and superficial conscious motives, is likened to an ex-
panse of water. The seven changing forms of con-
sciousness, the five sensations, the feeling of pleasure
and pain, the feeling of self, are like waves on the

MYSTICAL IDEALS 95

water; water and waves are in hopeless disorder;
each fluctuation is caught in conflicting rhythm.
Each body Hves in the same sense as each wave is a
portion of the great expanse of water. As the wave
is set in motion by movements of the atmosphere, so
the fluctuations of our minds are driven onwards by
ignorance. Each human hfe is a portion of the great
over-soul. While the body lives, the over-soul is a
person in bodily form ; when the body is dead, that per-
son exists no longer. Only the over-soul remains, of
which the individual was a part, as the body of
water remains when the waves cease to fluctuate. The
over-soul is that unchanging will within us and with-
out us, no longer, as it now seems to us, broken into
fragments by the unceasing interruptions of igno-
rance. We cannot name it ; it is all internal mean-
ing ; while every name is external ; every name is an
illusion. It is called unnamable that we may rid it
of names. It is that of which our little minds can as-
sert and deny nothing except that it is, and is one,
and is self-complete.

Every one, then, may know himself directly and
give his own self some kind of guidance. Every one
may find his own self. The method is to transcend

96 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

momentary consciousness by an effort of will. All
concepts belong to that which changes; there must be
something unchanging in dependence upon which all
concepts exist. All representations are mixed with il-
lusions. We must search for our permanent and ori-
ginal nature. We must train ourselves to repress re-
presentations of objects. There are different ways of
training the mind. One way is to sit still, closing the
eyes and keeping the mind as quiet as possible until
self-enlightenment come. The other way is the same
except that the spiritual teacher gives his follower a
question. Both sit together thinking of the question :
"What is my permanent state of mind.?" or "How
do I comprehend a sound or a flash of light.?" These
questions seem to have no meaning; no hint for any
solution is given. But the answer lies in an experience
of value. The answer is never a verbal answer. The
answer is expressed in an attitude of the whole body.
We become like a lower animal, with no concepts and
with no speech. The answer is not with the mouth, but
in conduct, in action. In other words, speech and con-
cepts are always false; we need a direct experience.
We do not understand, but we become our self. As
we should describe this state in the speech of our lab-

MYSTICAL IDEALS 97

oratories, we inhibit all particular concepts ; attention
is so widely distributed that all special ideas are kept
subconscious, yet the mind is kept in an intense ten-
sion-feeling. In this state the mind is ready to re-
spond to any suggested stimulus lofty enough in qual-
ity to excite it. It is calm, but full of latent power.

This state of mind is precisely the opposite of the
mind which the West is struggling to form. The
East is firmly convinced that the mind not directed
to objects is the true state of mind. The West is be-
ginning to believe that the mind is a series of more
or less dissociated sensations. But may not both be
true? May not both be relative points of view? Are
not both subject and object artificial classifications of
pure experience? Neither can exist without the other.
Sometimes one and sometimes the other attracts more
attention. But we may cultivate either; we may give
our lives to an approach to one or to the other extrem-
ity of experience. We may try to make ourselves sure
of subjective categorical imperatives and of logics of
mathematics with no regard to particular existing ob-
jects; or we may lose ourselves altogether in the con-
templation of objects of beauty ; or we may struggle to
transcend both subject and object in a pure experience.

98 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

It is not true, then, that mysticism must deny the
existence of objects, the existence of persons or of
things. But it does deny that there can be a person-
ality, in the highest sense of the word and on the
highest levels of reality, unless there be one inclusive
system of values or one will which is complete in it-
self, and a single system of ideas expressing this will
or value.

If any person's values are changeable, if desires are
constantly sifting through each other, that person
cannot accomplish much of a result because of the
weakness of his motives. Or again, if his system of
concepts does not work well, the range of thoughts
narrows, the person is moved all the time by one
exclusive set of impulses, and his interests become in-
fantile. But as the desires become refined and more
comprehensive, the personality becomes less intermit-
tent. The man is now no longer satisfied with help-
ing one set of desires by mutilating others which he
equally values. He tries to give satisfaction to all;
and he adds new values of beauty, of ethics, of social
life. Still even these higher levels of personality may
waver; the passion for art may cease; the chivalrous
instinct may come too late ; unforeseen self-centred

MYSTICAL IDEALS 99

desires may flicker up within him. Then it is that the
mystic presses on, intent upon the one eternal system
of beliefs expressed in one concept which shall subor-
dinate all these spasmodic interests, which shall in-
clude all values within itself, and which shall order
all in such wise that good shall not clash with good.
Whatever the path be to the mystic's goal, — whether
it be in the life of the forest, or in the voice of sway-
ing trees; whether it be Gautama's Nirvana stilling
the body and mind in an ecstasy of keen intelligence;
or whether it be the path of Francis of Assisi, wooing
poverty as his bride and serving her by finding the
one meaning of life in lowly forms, in birds, in wolves
and lepers, in rich men and in thieves, — do we not
feel that in our harsh and greedy modern life we
have lost something which these tireless wandering
dreamers found, and are we not the poorer when they
take to their path again and leave us, with our ma-
chinery and our possessions and our piled -up furni-
ture, feeling vulgar and needy and wondering through
what ages of striving we must pass before we can ap-
proach their simplicity?

This problem still remains upon our hands : how we
can feel sure of this one supreme value in all life.

100 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

and at the same time be true to the social loyalties
and to the collective beliefs which we are hourly
striving to express in definite deeds.

LECTURE SIXTH

VI
LEVELS OF RELIGION

yi NY attempt to estimate in what respect one reli-
-Z \. gion is complete, and another not complete,
must come at the end and not at the beginning of the
discussion. The complete religion could not be a new
religion: there is no such religion. Still less is it a
philosopher's religion or the religion of any band of
specialists. Such religions are traceable in the past;
but soon their place knows them no more. The com-
plete religion must be far more comprehensive. Every
one who has breathed the breath of life and felt its
mystery and desired its fulness knows in his own ex-
perience what religion is. Neither the vagueness of
the experience nor the endless variety of its forms
affects the fact that the experience is direct and uni-
versal. It is then less important exactly to limit the
definition of complete religion than to make sure
that no characteristic level of religious experience is
omitted.

In a complete religion we should distinguish the
characteristic features and take care only that we do
not exchange theological, or philosophical, or any

103

104 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

other ready-made conceptual substitutes for the ac-
tual expansion of religious life. The completeness would
consist in a constant extension of life; and this life
must be effective on at least three levels of experience.

A religion of any vitality at all must include, on
its first level, a vivid and inner feeling of personal
values. Beliefs as the expressions of values, and ideas
as portrayals of beliefs, must not be substituted for
the values themselves. There need be no clear idea,
unless there be an attempt to communicate the value.
But in every religion there must be the characteris-
tic personal thrill of expectation, of wonder, of sur-
prise, of enthusiasm which is what is called religious
emotion.

The second level, of quite a different quality, con-
sists of collective values and must find expression in
social forms of life. In a complete religion the sense
of correspondence between the two levels is a spon-
taneous feeling of a discovery of more life ; each level
falls into its new place and each strengthens the tex-
ture of the other. But in lower religions the first
level of unconscious and impulsive life is easily con-
cealed under the conceptual and voluntary life of the
second level of the social life. In such religions the

LEVELS OF RELIGION 105

superficial social layer, trained not to react to outer
excitements, floats insecurely upon the stagnant un-
conscious personal life, the deeper and animal level,
still fluctuating with primitive conditions of life. A
primitive religion expresses and discovers these rudi-
mentary impulses and buries them under the weight
of social usages and of verbal substitutions. But
under the stress of conflicting impulses the correspon-
dence is broken, the religion is rent, the upper layer
of speech and custom is stripped ofl*, and the animal
man stands forth again alone.

The third level of values is a system of supersen-
sible realities. This level is a metaphysical level; and
the metaphysics is very often mysticism. This level
of religion moves in a kind of being which is not
confined to groups of men or to things that men can
touch or see or feel. Knowledge on this level insists
that there is a kind of being which does not exist in
its totality at any one moment of time, and is not in
its totality at any point of space or in any part of
Nature. In that sense it does not exist ; just as num-
ber cannot exist as a magnitude or as an object of
perception. The objects of this level of religion can-
not exist as objects of perception, and yet they are.

106 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

Normative judgements are of this kind of being ; and
these objects which cannot be perceived correspond to
the best attainable system of actual human pui*poses.
This system of normative purposes controls the in-
hibitions and impulses of life. It is a constant back-
ground for every dramatic advance. And it raises
and expands the whole life. No universal religion
has failed to insist upon such a system of super-
sensible realities and to teach that the value of these
realities is universal. The value is universal in the
sense that some such system is obligatory upon every
right-thinking man, and in the sense that it corre-
sponds to what each man and each society wishes
most consistently for itself. Each of the universal re-
ligions is an attempt to adjust our personal life to
these supersensible realities, to perfect constantly the
sense of direction towards them, and to make men
feel that there is nothing in our lives that is out of
relation to them.

The three levels, personal and social and metaphysi-
cal, correspond in a numberless variety of combina-
tions. The interest lies in the correspondence of the
personal life and of the social life with the higher
universal level. It is in the peculiar character of this

LEVELS OF RELIGION 107

correspondence that the completeness of a religion
must consist. Religion, in the full sense, is the life on
this highest level, the life in the Normal Conscious-
ness, the life which is not the product of the individual
nor of the race nor of empirical conditions.

On the metaphysical level there are three great re-
ligions : ascetic mysticism, social mysticism, and his-
torical mysticism. An example of the first would be
the Vedanta system, an example of the second would
be Buddhism, and Christianity would be the third.

The first of these types, ascetic mysticism, is not a
permanent state of ecstasy; it is a development cul-
minating in one supreme insight. It is a life ordered
in a single direction towards one idea. Mysticism dif-
fers from any other deliberate pursuit of one fixed
aim only in one respect : in the character of the cul-
mination at which it aims. The different stages may
coincide with levels of ordinary life. But the final
stage is the essential feature: this is ecstasy. Ecstasy
is such a narrowing of the stream of consciousness that
outer objects are inhibited, and is at the same time
a concentration of the stream upon one idea of great
dignity. The point of departure is an aspiration after
a supersensible being of absolute perfection. The per-

108 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

feet being is as yet unknown and unrepresentable in
knowledge. But the search for it besets the whole
inner life until the concept appears as the concrete
expression of fulfilled aspiration and the counterpart
of human needs. Life is interpreted in terms of perfec-
tion. A divine ideal draws men upward to itself. The
thought of God logically precedes all self-seeking mo-
tives. All imperfect ideas merge in the one perfect be-
ing ; all partial acts of will surcharge God with their
own authority.

Thus the mystic's world is inverted. The old world
loses its fascination ; its colour pales ; admiration for
the old system of values becomes meaningless and
painful. All is now focal upon a higher level. The old
ideal is faded and dead; and before the mind rises
the perfect being, the final expression of all the ex-
pectations and strivings of past life, now, at last, an
ideal living within the inmost self, — and so perfect
that no perceptible reality can express what it con-
tains. All things are now seen to be fragments of one
unlimited whole. One word implies within itself all
possible meanings ; one concept is the sole object of
desire; one substance owns all possible properties.
And this energized within the mystic when as yet he

LEVELS OF RELIGION 109

knew it not. In the words of the great Vedantist,
" This is his real form, in which his wishes are ful-
filled, in which the Self only is his wish, in which no
wish is left. There is then no second, no other differ-
ent from him that he could see."

At this point the ascetic mystic diverges shai-ply
from the Buddhist and the Christian. The one Being
alone is worthy. Methodically the ascetic begins to
strip off the ties which bind him to his fellows, bind
him to objects formerly loved, — all feelings must con-
form to the One. Consequently internal combat against
social loyalties is encouraged. The tension-feeling in-
creases the determination to cut the bond. There
must be abrupt change; there must be no transitory
values; there must be changeless being in perfect
purity. All shall be of the quality of the ecstasy, of
immediate experience with no associative memories
or desires. The self is in the perfect being and it is in
the self. The self is total being and itself at the same
time. The feeling of contrast of personality to per-
sonality is lost. There must be no social level what-
soever. The only value is above; the only progress is
from above ; the perfect must create in us the search
for itself; nothing not perfect has any value. The only

110 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

relation in life is self-identity; the only aim is the ef-
fort to be perfect. The life of the world is a hin-
drance. Henceforth the ascetic devotes himself to con-
templation; henceforth let no man know him; hence-
forth he is a passenger on earth.

This mysticism unifies and coordinates all values in
a single concrete experience. This experience is as
clear to this mystic as is the taste of pineapple or as
the colour of the hibiscus. The quality is different, but
the experience not less vivid; on the contrary he
insists it is more specific. All mystics know that the
personal life inheres in an infinite system of supersen-
sible reality. The ascetic mystic differs from others in
his way of approach to this metaphysical being. The
rigid mystic of this type is convinced that the
only method of approach is to abolish this world.
Social life is renounced; family, state and property,
art and science must cease utterly to prevail. There
can be no middle term between the One and the in-
dividual soul. Human societies and human loyalties
are illusory and must be suppressed. All is repressed
except the Great Self.

This programme cannot easily be completed ; the ac-
tual result is often nothing more than the establish-

LEVELS OF RELIGION 111

ment of a correspondence between the old primitive
level of the animal instinct of self-preservation and
the new level of ecstatic aspiration. In the words of
Spinoza, "The passion to be perfect is the same as
the tendency to persist in one's own form of being."

The social type of mystic, such as Gautama, has a
similar system of control for life : he also, by means of
a symbolic idea of perfect experience, attempts to feel
that experience. For him also there is no external, no
transcendence; all is internal, all is continuous, all is
limitless; there is no contrast of mind or body, of
subject and object, nor any such thing; all is a unique
Presence supertemporal and free and self-determined ;
all is life; all is self; all is peace.

The ineffable union summing up in one all known
values is concretely experienced. When the mystic's
self merges, on the higher level, in the one perfect
meaning, the sting of defeat is soothed away in pas-
sionate adoration. His life yields him pleasure of hith-
erto undreamed purity. His exaltation in his own
self with beautiful precision unifies his life. All his
aspirations for the ideal find their counterpart in his
own experience. This sense of correspondence is the
source of his delight. The inner anarchy is now trans-

112 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

formed into a single order. The one idea, absolute in
the authority of its beauty, persists in consciousness
without perceptible change, and so directs the stream
of thoughts that emotional tones and motor tenden-
cies fall automatically into correspondence with it.
This exceptional unification of the stream of con-
sciousness diffuses him with joy and focuses his will
in mighty moral efforts.

This mystic of this joyous and social type finds his
highest value of life not in hatred of the world of
change, not in disgust at men and at human institu-
tions and at social aims, but in an almost ecstatic de-
light in contemplating them all. After their ecstasies
these mystics look again at the life of men, the ordi-
nary life in the fields or in the lanes of the city, and
it appears to them transfigured. To the pure all
things are pure. The poor human animal is evil only
when gazed upon with carnal eye. In loving the de-
spised and the rejected this mystic finds his peace and
loves his God. To find the new value in the old life
is to him a test of courage, a trial of strength and skill,
a spiritual athletics, a knightly exercise. Every limb,
every impulse, every faculty, shall be at the bidding
of the one supreme value. Thus his life is to him a

LEVELS OF RELIGION 113

kind of practice for the higher intensities of soul. He
chooses to taste pain, he searches for pain; he makes
the world a part of himself, and himself a part of the
one life. Other men are not felt to be distinct from
himself. And in hearing all living hearts beat in cor-
respondence with his own pulsating feelings, he has
his reward : a sublime sense of correspondence with the
highest level. As Gautama would put it, "By ceasing
to hunt for pleasures and by ceasing to fear pain, by
the cessation of the conditions for both, and by con-
centration of mind, the lesser values have no mean-
ing,— thus only, and on an immense scale, we gain
the real, the unchanging, the peace."

In Buddhism, then, concentration of mind, imply-
ing a withdrawal from the world, is of fundamental
importance. Accompanying this is an extraordinary
interest in ordinary social life. Both mystical and
social levels seem complete : Buddhism has duties and
privileges for both recluse and householder. There is
no thought of abolishing social loyalties ; both social
loyalties and mystical ideals coexist in the same reli-
gion. But while both are recognized, the ascetic life
is looked upon not only as the highest, but as abso-
lutely essential to the highest result. We read that

114 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

Nagasena taught the king Milinda, who questioned
him on this very matter, that no person "can enter
the path that leads to peace" who has not observed
the thirteen ordinances, that is, who has not embraced
the monastic life in the present birth or in a former
birth. Faithful householders could be born into hea-
ven; Nirvana was reached only by the ascetic life.

This ascetic ideal will of course affect the whole
conception of loyalty and of duty. If the ascetic life
is regarded as the normal life, and if the values of life
are estimated according as they bring a man nearer
this ideal standard; the ordinary level has a morbid
element injected into it which must affect all its rami-
fications. The morality of Buddhism is of a very high
standard; we do honour to its sublimity and to its
beauty ; but it is not easy to overlook this morbid
element. Effective life depends upon the clearness and
accuracy of the moral will. If this is confused, the
whole inner world of values will suffer. And confusion
results as tinily from over-strictness as from laxity. If
a man believes that what is in itself indifferent is
either duty or crime, the poise of will is injured as
truly, though perhaps not so decisively, as though
what in itself is wrong is made to appear right. At

LEVELS OF RELIGION 115

least the balance is disturbed. The morbid view of
life which underlies the Buddhist mystical ideal in-
troduces into the standards of life the results which
we should thus expect. This effect is aggravated by
that other view of life which makes a deed chiefly
valuable as it contributes to the spiritual advance-
ment of the individual doing it. Thus we have in the
Buddhist morality often a certain extravagant, mor-
bid, and we are tempted to say, maudlin character
which we cannot help noticing even while we admire
the extraordinary elevation of the standard. This ele-
ment may be illustrated by a description of one of the
meditations practised by the Buddha : "Then, Ananda,
the Great King of Glory went out from the chamber
of the Great Complex and entered the Golden Cham-
ber and sat himself down on the golden couch. And
he let his mind pervade one quarter of the world
with thoughts of Love ; and so the second quarter,
and so the third, and so the fourth. And thus the whole
wide world, above, below, around, and everywhere,
did he continue to pervade with heart of Love, far-
reaching, grown great, and beyond measure, free from
the least trace of anger or ill-will." This process was
repeated with thoughts of Pity, then with thoughts

116 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

of Sympathy, and finally with thoughts of Equanim-
ity. Later this exercise became one of the practices
required of Buddhist monks. When the monk had
arrived at a convenient spot and placed himself in
a proper position, he was to exercise this wish, "May
all the superior orders of beings be happy; may all
men, whether they be monks or laymen, all the devas,
all who are suffering the pains of hell, be happy;
may they be free from soitow, disease, and evil de-
sire.

From the Buddhist point of view, which makes the
culture of the inner sense of being and the freedom
of the individual from all outward bonds the most
decisive aims, this meditation has its place and its
meaning. But to Western minds it seems neither a
preparation for social service nor anything like a
prayer, but more like an aimless overflowing towards
space, a kind of ungrounded happiness and good-fel-
lowship with the universe ; consequently to us it ap-
pears somewhat extravagant. The same boundlessness
we discover in the acts of charity for which the Buddha
is praised : in former states of existence he had given
away everything. To us this ideal of conduct seems
aimless, unbalanced and sentimental. It is easy to

LEVELS OF RELIGION 117

see the value of such acts as elements in the discipline
of one who is trying to sever all the ties which bind
him to the earth; but giving to one who asks until
he is loaded with gifts that he needs less than the
giver while the rights of others are ignored, has
small social value.

While we consider these blemishes in the otherwise
almost perfect system of Buddhist morality, it is well
not to forget that in contrast to this exaggerated
self-discipline, we have in the life of the Buddha him-
self an example of sublime self-sacrifice. Out of pure
unselfishness, out of the devotion of love and pity, he
lavished his life upon the world. This life goes far
to counteract the imperfect social morality. And in
Japan this defect is supplemented by the intense social
loyalties of the Shinto religion to the state and to
the family ideal ; the result to-day is the very high-
est quality of social morality.

The third type of religion on the metaphysical level
is the Christian religion. If we consider the early
Christian religion wherever it has manifested itself in
its original purity, it is sharply contrasted with the
ideal life of ascetic mysticism or with the ideal life of
Buddhism. Christianity asserts the value of the per-

118 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

sonal life, with its concrete rights and its obHgations
and its needs as the chief end of the final purpose of
the world. Human lives are not to be abolished ; hu-
man wills are not to be absorbed in one mass of abso-
lutely identical experience. All men are to seek life to-
gether; each life is to give all it can to the other
lives ; the past is to give life to the present, the pre-
sent is to coiTect the errors of the past ; all men are
to will one common purpose. This purpose, constantly
developing and endlessly fulfilling itself, is the one
supersensible reality i-unning through all human lives :
to know this is eternal life. No one fulfils this one
will which unifies all lives ; nor do all working together
as parts of one collective purpose know its full mean-
ing ; it is beyond all and yet in all ; and each one
is this purpose, so far as he can will it. All this is
an entire change of emphasis : God is not rigid,
changeless, infinite rapture, consisting of the per-
fect thought of self ; nor is He the last and the most
impersonal abstraction of actual experience. But God
is the ultimate energy of personal will, not dependent
on any one human will nor upon any social will, and
yet inseparable from any human will, and necessa-
rily conditioning every will. The contemplative ideal

LEVELS OF RELIGION 119

gives place to that of action, to the unflinching,
practical fulfilment, by persons and by social units,
of one endless purpose. Men are not to reflect what
they are, but to will to become what they are capa-
ble of being. The end of life is the realization by
each man of his own capacities. These capacities may
be regarded as elements of one infinite purpose;
this purpose needs our lives and carries them to one
common goal which is altogether beyond our efforts
to reach or even to conceive. This realization can-
not be effected by a variety of impulses, nor by med-
itation upon abstract ideals, but only by an increas-
ing sequence and ordering of purposes toward a
common, infinite goal, by virtue of a feeling of in-
ternal obligation of will, a feeling that a man owes
more to himself than any one impulse can give.
Loyalties toward other men are a part of a man's
own pm-pose for himself, and each purpose, so far
as each man wills it, is defined by its place in the
one plan. And so far as effort to live out the one
common loyalty in deeds is tested by pain, the more
clearly the quality of the one common life becomes
purified within us and fixed in the focus of our vol-
untary life.

120 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

All these abstractions were portrayed by Christ in
descriptions of the search for the Kingdom of God
and His righteousness. The quality of this kingdom
of souls, of the nature of God, and of His righteous-
ness are identical. All are aspects of the same thing
from different points of view. The kingdom is the
social level, or in the later theological language, the
Spirit. Life in this kingdom is the gift of God, is
the revelation to us of Ultimate Being; He is the
Giver of all good things, or in the later theological
language, the Father. The righteousness is the personal
sense of correspondence to these other levels. All three
express one purpose; all three are one in quality and
aim. The metaphysical level is meaningless, if out
of correspondence with the social. The social level has
meaning in itself, but the ideal of a common life,
which consists of human beings, those who choose to
will the higher purposes of other lives as the final
purpose of their own lives, a kingdom founded on
ideal human love, — this has wider and more perma-
nent significance than the mutual relations of men to
each other. The ability to will such an ideal, and the
ability to think of the world with reference to such an
ideal, becomes the critical experience. Science and art

LEVELS OF RELIGION 121

and politics and economics may all be counted as
particular expressions of one infinite purpose, in which
each life of the past, each one of ourselves and of the
races to come, has his definite opportunity, at a defi-
nite point, to share. The sense of working out such a
mighty purpose in one''s own life gives a man the
right mettle to face the world ; in contrast to this the
ascetic ideal seems more a cry of defeat from men of
weaker moral fibre, an appeal for a tenderer humanity,
an entreaty for a more merciful and peaceful world.

One of the unique qualities in Christianity is that
this metaphysical ideal becomes the single aim of the
historical life of Christ, who gave his whole life to the
training of a band of men who should communicate
this ideal by personal contact with single individ-
uals to the race of men. The choice of that task as a
life-calling, the foundation in history of a spiritual
kingdom based upon the belief that we count most to
ourselves when we choose the lives of others as ex-
pressions of our own life, and at the same time as ex-
pressions of the Ultimate Will, is not superseded by
other ideals.

The peculiar effectiveness of this life of Christ seems
due to a certain elemental simplicity and candour

122 PRACTICE AND SCIENCE OF RELIGION

which makes him an absolute master of himself, and
makes his revelation of God inseparable from his own
inner life.

Absolute certainty is the commonest form of belief,
especially for the lower grades of mentality and the
lower forms of religion. As soon as comparisons and
reformations seem inevitable, the original absolute
certitude becomes a scientific certitude; reality is
thought in general terms of serial order and not in
isolated terms of absolute impression. However much
legendary material and theological speculation ob-
scure from us the character of Christ, it is evident that
his religious insight into reality was unfaltering in its
order and un obscured in its range of aim. His life was
not a partial life, wavering with the ambitions of strug-
gling men, but rather life in the absolute conscious-
ness; not only over-individual, but over-social and
over-empirical. Certainty of this consciousness is ab-
solute : never the certainty of momentary excitement,
and not the belief in the reality of our ideals, but the
firm conviction of the supremacy of the final purpose of
reality in us. Every act seems an expression of this pur-
pose that the total life of man on all its levels shall be
brought into a feeling of correspondence with the ab-

LEVELS OF RELIGION 123

solute will : and of the belief that the absolute will,
in its breadth, in its height and depths, is in close
correspondence with each personal life and is a con-
stant standard of desire for all lives, and that there is
yet no end to the variation of its relations to single per-
sonal lives. The resulting history, so far as we can trace,
has been that the religion of Christ has absorbed within
itself a richer deposit from all other beliefs than any
other religion ; that it has drawn into itself number-
less streams of personal desire, of aesthetical taste,
of social inventions and of mystical systems, — all
of which have been the life of the most cultivated
races. The appeal has been not to authority nor to
reason, but to conscience, aesthetic or social or mysti-
cal. And thus, this Man, although using power drawn
neither from economics nor from politics nor from
church, nor from science or art, was so penetrated
with passionate love of men and of the Father-God,
and so true to each man's own best wishes for his own
good, that whenever the inner motives of His life have
been understood, the enlightened conscience of hu-
manity has accepted Him as representative of the
religious conscience of the race, and has followed His
life and found Life in Him.

Date Due

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