Further, values are not taken discretely, but they are conceived as in process of organization. Exactly why religion is here limited to social values, and specifically to the highest of such values, however, is not quite clear. Is not a man religious who is desperately seeking to save his own soul, or when he enjoys purely private ecstasy of communion? Or, to state the matter in another way, is not such an experience functionally continuous with experiences in which salvation is conceived socially? Further, how does Ames differentiate religious consciousness from social consciousness as such? If "highest" be given a specific content (so that we could say, for example, that a man is not religious until he accepts this or that social standard), the definition is obviously too narrow; but if "highest" refers, not to ạ specific set of standards, but to a law of social valuation in accordance with which men criticize and reconstruct their standards, then Ames's point of view is to this extent (but not further) identical with the one here suggested. As a matter of fact, in the body of Ames's book, "highest social values" appear again and again to deliquesce into the social as such. To propose, as I have done, that we think of religion as an immanent movement within our valuations, a movement that does not terminate in any single set of thought contents, or in any set of particular values, may easily seem to make religion elusive if not vague. But the difficulty is with the thing itself, not with the proposed point of view. That religion is in fact the most puzzlingly elusive phase of experience is fairly deducible from the history of thought about religion. And we can convince ourselves of the fact likewise by direct inspection of current phenomena. How, for example, would one describe the attitude expressed in the following poem? WAITING Serene, I fold my hands and wait, Nor care for wind, or tide, or sea; I stay my haste, I make delays, I stand amid the eternal ways, And what is mine shall know my face. Asleep, awake, by night or day, The friends I seek are seeking me; What matter if I stand alone? I wait with joy the coming years; The waters know their own, and draw The brook that springs in yonder heights; So flows the good with equal law The stars come nightly to the sky; Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high, Can keep my own away from me. -John Burroughs, in The Light of Day (Boston, 1900). That the attitude here is religious seems obvious; but just what is the attitude, and what is the relation of it to knowledge on the one hand and to the complex of one's specific purposes and activities on the other? Whatever we call it, we have here within one's particular valuations an immanent critique which is also a movement toward completeness, unity, and permanence of the value experience as a whole.1 If the question be asked wherein, then, religious value is distinct from ethical value, the answer is that it is not distinct from ethical or any other value. When ethical value attempts its own ideal completion in union with all other values similarly ideal and complete, what we have is religion in the sense in which the term is here used. The sphere of religion, as of ethics, is individualsocial life. In this life religion refers to the same persons, the same purposes, the same conditioning facts, as ethics. In most ethical thinking, however, a difference is recognized. For ethics commonly limits its attention to cer The present European war furnishes excellent illustrations of the intensification and unification of the valuational phase of consciousness. One single interest tends strongly to overshadow and even swallow up all others in each of the warring groups. Each individual mind becomes organized, and all the individuals of a nation become thoroughly focused at a single point. There is now only one thing that counts, and it must be-this is the spirit. And behold, it is conscious of itself as religious! From Germany, from France, from England, from Canada, comes news of extraordinary ethical elevation and religious tone. The French flock to their neglected churches. There are revival outbursts in the trenches, and the soldiers either have visions or else are ready to believe that others have had them. Ministers are confident that a new era for faith is dawning. Let us attempt an analysis of this movement of the mass mind. In the first place, this is not a response to new evidence (in the logical sense) for the old religion. The new convincingness of "things unseen lies altogether in the emotion-producing qualities of the new situation. In the second place, the recognized religiousness of the emotions produced in each of the national situations obviously depends upon intensification and unification of desire and action, and not upon the particular tain values only, whereas religion is interested in all values, in the whole meaning of life. Even within the sphere of social values this distinction between a narrower and a wider horizon is commonly made; for ethics, as ordinarily understood, limits itself to the visible life of men, while religion goes on to raise the question of extending social relationships to the dead and to divine beings. But we must not imagine that naming a horse is the same as putting a bit into his mouth. If, becoming restive under the phrase “mere ethics," one insists upon making ethical ideals a norm for the whole of experience, what happens is the very effort at completion, unification, and conservation of values to which the name religion is here given. qualities of the things desired. The German consciousness and the English consciousness are religious in exactly the same sense. Each is certain that God is on its side, and that the enemy is moved by base motives. On each side there are such ethical phenomena as sense of obligation, postponement of self-regard, submission to discipline, selfsacrifice, and the glow of a good conscience. Each side is sustained and calmed in the horrible welter by trust in the God of might and of justice. In the third place (I anticipate principles that will be discussed in later chapters), the idea of God is here in process of derivation from the form and the interests of the social organization. A newspaper writer has remarked with entire justice that monotheism is inappropriate and inconvenient for nations that are fighting for nationalism. It will be found, I think, that only to the extent that people are able to criticize the acts and purposes of their own nation from the standpoint of worldwelfare is there any vital monotheism at all. That is, just as the intensity of faith reflects the intensity and unification of values, so the breadth of faith reflects the breadth of social outlook and self-criticism. On the other hand, it is not improbable that the idea of one only God, which is already held in a somewhat wavering fashion, will assist in organizing a world-society. L CHAPTER V RACIAL BEGINNINGS IN RELIGION Not only is it difficult to find out just what the lower races do in the way of religion, and why they do it; it is difficult for us who are not anthropologists to understand the findings of anthropology. In the present chapter we must make an effort to reverse many of our customary notions of how men act, and think, and feel. Thus: 1. If you ask me in what sense I am religious, you throw me back upon myself as an individual. I say, "Whatever life may mean to others, to me it means so and so." If, now, we imagine that such personal realizations are the first things in religion, and that the earliest religious group or community is an aggregate of such individuals, we reverse the facts. The religious individual is a late and high development out of the religious group.1 How a group as such can be religious we can see, however, by recalling our own experiences as members of crowdsa college class, a political meeting, or an audience at a concert. Under such conditions it is perfectly natural for us to feel and act and even think in ways that are impossible to us in private. 'Not until the national-religious consciousness of Israel had been battered down by other nations did the notion of a direct personal relation to Jahwe take firm root. Ezekiel, chap. 28, transfers the notion of guilt and innocence from nation or family lineage to the individual. 76 with is not Ezek. ch.18 the correct reference vistiend |