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realization of one another as constituting a social unit is per se consciousness of, or faith in, a real totem. Tribal and national gods, likewise, are no mere addenda to the social objects; rather, in god-ideas the tribe or nation articulates its own social insistency. Stated in abstract form, faith in divine beings is social valuation asserting itself as objectively valid, that is, as not mere wish but also as law or movement of reality.

So it is with our present most open-eyed social idealism. It knows itself to be more than a subjective preference; it is the fulfilment of a destiny; it is the working out of some cosmic principle through our preferences. Duty is for us not a mere imposition of the mass will upon the individual; it is reality in the large making itself felt in the parts. Intense devotion to the social welfare takes the form, without any addition to itself, of reverence, self-realization through unreserved selfgiving, and desire that all men should reach this same height of realization. Society at this, its highest, would be no mere aggregate of arbitrary preferences, but escape from the arbitrary into law, escape from the seeming into the real. This feeling of a cause that has us as its agent leads spontaneously to the use of religious phraseology. If the approach is through the notion of moral law, we get such terms as "ethical religion" and

I "Morality, truly interpreted, does bring man into contact with the final nature of things." The law of duty "is not made, and cannot be changed by God or man; it belongs to the nature of things." See W. M. Salter, Ethical Religion (London, 1900), pp. 84 f.; cf. F. Adler, The Religion of Duty (New York, 1909), and Life and Destiny (New York, 1903).

2 Cf. G. Haw, "The Religious Revival in the Labour Movement," Hibbert Journal, XII, 382–99.

the "religion of duty." If the approach is through a keen sense of men as worthful objects, the term becomes the "religion of humanity." If the emphasis is upon society as completely organized upon the principle of justice, we hear of the "religion of democracy." If the social impulse attaches itself to the idea of production, the command, "Be a producer," may assert itself as religious.4 In short, the modern social movement, where it is most reflective, is religion, and as such it is also discovery of the real as against the seeming.5

As we have already noticed, this does not imply that there are two separate and independent kinds of

1 See references in the second preceding note. In an argument addressed to ethical societies against giving up the term "religion," the late W. L. Sheldon said: "We hold to the assurance that in spite of all the necessary transformations that may occur in human emotions, in forms of worship, or in beliefs about the supernatural, we can retain the hallowed associations we have had with this phrase. It is not right that we should consent that the deepest feelings connected with it should be regarded as belonging to any particular creed or body of men. If we surrender this word we are liable to be driven to surrender the feelings connected with it. . ... Religion implies the surrender of one's will to ideal or sacred principles which are to him the expression of the true destiny or worth of the human soul."-Ethical Addresses, First Series (Philadelphia, 1895), pp. 47 f., 62.

2

E.g., E. H. Griggs, The New Humanism (New York, 1904), chap. x.

3 C. Zueblin, The Religion of a Democrat (New York, 1908).

4 T. N. Carver, The Religion Worth Having (Boston, 1912).

5 The authors named in the last six notes are only a few of those who reveal this characteristic tendency of present social thinking. Other typical names are as follows: Stanton Coit, "The Humanity of God," International Journal of Ethics, XVI, No. 4 (July, 1906), 424-29; H. D. Lloyd, Man the Social Creator (New York, 1906); G. Spiller, Faith in Man: the Religion of the Twentieth Century (London, 1908); H. Jones, The Working Faith of the Social Reformer and Other Essays (London, 1910).

discovery, the scientific and the religious. The two procedures are continuous without being identical. The sciences are a part of the total adjustment process which in its totality is discovery. We are discovering ourselves, in short, through the reintegration of our wants, scientific and other, in terms of personal-social self-realization. And this is religion.

It will be asked, perhaps, whether we are discussing religion as a whole or only at its best. Have we not idealized it? Is not most religion, after all, institutionalism, traditionalism, conformity? Does it not commonly reinforce the "powers that be" in their resistance to change? Has it not given the authority of supposedly supernatural sanctions to what is natural, temporary, even arbitrary? Are not these alleged discoveries of persons and of society simply instances in which religion has drifted with a general historical current? Has religion, then, contributed anything at all to discovery? These questions deserve an answer; they deserve it most of all because they call attention to historical facts. What is needed is to get the facts into perspective. When this is accomplished we shall see that the whole evolution of mind is discovery, and that the defects just mentioned inhere in the whole discovery process, whether religious or scientific. The history of science, as well as that of religion, discloses a long series of blunders based upon the assumption of finality for that which is partial and temporary. There have been scientific as well as religious orthodoxies, with their mistaken assumption of authority, their suppression of dissent, their loan of power to unprogressive institutions. Moreover, what the sciences of today mean by science, just as what our

discussion has taken as religion, is no mere average of past performances. In both cases we understand ourselves, not by a mere summation of instances, but rather by noting a characteristic tendency. Such a tendency may be resisted; in a particular instance it may be suppressed. Science resists science just as religion resists religion. But each has its prophets who break through the resistance, and in doing so reveal the deeper nature of the enterprise. In neither case can it be said that we merely drift with a historical current; rather we press forward in an adventure, retrieving our own errors, and entering fresh territory.

The conclusion is that social valuation is of itself recognition of the real; that the evolution of social valuations is a progressive discovery of persons as reals; that intense valuation of persons, when it becomes reflective, tends to define itself in terms of a cosmic reality that has social character. What we have here is nothing less than a law of mental integration. Mind gets itself in hand-focalizing dispersed attention, organizing impulsive activities, and realizing a meaning in the whole-by a social process. This process is at once the valuation and the discovery of persons.1

* By an entirely different route, E. Murisier arrives at the conclusion that religion furnishes the chief organizing idea (idée directrice) for the evolution of personality. See Les Maladies du sentiment religieux (Paris, 1909), pp. 69-72.

CHAPTER XV

RELIGION AS SOCIAL IMMEDIACY

By all odds the most baffling item of experience is the fact that persons are present to one another and have experiences in common. It is baffling, that is, as soon as philosophy or science attempts to construe it, however luminous it may seem to be until such attempts begin. Metaphysics throughout its history has found the universal easier to handle than the particular, especially easier than the individual. Usually, too, the philosopher and his disciple converse together (by means of voice or print) concerning various objects of thought—unity and plurality, substance and attribute, time, space, matter, soul-without ever noting that philosophy is conversation, that every bit of philosophic thought is a mutual possession, and that such mutuality might conceivably be a qualifier of every particular philosophic doctrine.

Just so psychology, keeping its eyes upon states of mind and laws of mind, and assuming that there are individual minds to which these laws apply, has rarely taken into account the fact that these minds converse with one another. Psychology itself depends upon conversation between individuals; it is conversation. assumes that psychologists can be mutually present to one another, and that an experimenter and his subject can be present to each other. No one, I think, has ventured to construe the "presence" of a laboratory subject in terms solely of inches apart; there is always

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