aces. It will make me for the future look at religion--a belief in the
soul, etc.--from a new point of view."
Psychology was henceforth to be based on "the necessary acquirement of
each mental capacity by gradation." With these memorable words the
door closes on the old and opens on the new horizon. The mental focus
henceforth is not on the maintaining or refuting of an orthodoxy but
on the genesis and evolution of a capacity, not on perfection but on
process. Continuous evolution leaves no gap for revelation sudden and
complete. We have henceforth to ask, not when was religion revealed
or what was the revelation, but how did religious phenomena arise and
develop. For an answer to this we turn with new and reverent eyes to
study "the heathen in his blindness" and the child "born in sin." We
still indeed send out missionaries to convert the heathen, but here
at least in Cambridge before they start they attend lectures on
anthropology and comparative religion. The "decadence" theory is dead
and should be buried.
The study of primitive religions then has been made possible and even
inevitable by the theory of Evolution. We have now to ask what new facts
and theories have resulted from that study. This brings us to our second
point, the advanced outlook on religion to-day.
The view I am about to state is no mere personal opinion of my own.
To my present standpoint I have been led by the investigations of such
masters as Drs Wundt, Lehmann, Preuss, Bergson, Beck and in our own
country Drs Tylor and Frazer. (I can only name here the books that
have specially influenced my own views. They are W. Wundt,
"Volkerpsychologie", Leipzig, 1900, P. Beck, "Die Nachahmung", Leipzig,
1904, and "Erkenntnisstheorie des primitiven Denkens" in "Zeitschrift
f. Philos. und Philos. Kritik", 1903, page 172, and 1904, page 9. Henri
Bergson, "L'Evolution Creatrice" and "Matiere et Memoire", 1908, K. Th.
Preuss, various articles published in the "Globus" (see page 507, note
1), and in the "Archiv. f. Religionswissenschaft", and for the subject
of magic, MM. Hubert et Mauss, "Theorie generale de la Magie", in
"L'Annee Sociologique", VII.)
Religion always contains two factors. First, a theoretical factor, what
a man THINKS about the unseen--his theology, or, if we prefer so to call
it, his mythology. Second, what he DOES in relation to this unseen--his
ritual. These factors rarely if ever occur in complete separation; they
are blended in very
|