Psychology of the Religious Life by Stratton George Malcolm;

Author:Stratton, George Malcolm; [Stratton, George Malcolm]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2022-06-20T00:00:00+00:00

Part III Conflicts in Regard to Religious Thought

Chapter XIIISome Stages of Religious Thought

DOI: 10.4324/9781315829883-17

AMONG the powers stirred by the presence of greatness, thought plays an important, though perhaps no dominant, rôle. Yet if we can trace carefully its action the whole of religion will better be understood. So our interest through all the chapters following will be upon the character of the thought that appears in religion, and of the influences that give it form. And to that end first of all some of the changing appearances of thought in this region should be illustrated—thought’s vigorous eminence in some forms of reverence, and again its appearance dim and scarcely discernible either because not yet set apart and cultivated or because stifled by rank overgrowth of that amongst which it must live.

Myths are hardly intellectual in the sense in which most men understand the word; for usually they are the uncritical, spontaneous setting-forth of thought in stories. Yet faint traces of intellect in religion are already noticeable in myth, the theology of early men. The religious thought here concealed does nor exist in the form of judgment and reasoning only, but in the form of ideas of many degrees and kinds, and conjoined in ways with which logic has but little interest or sympathy. Only with a catholic and tolerant sense of what is meant by thought, or intelligence, can one notice its rich abundance in this realm of religious story.

Yet the myths which deal with the great courses of nature show occasionally thought reaching almost the border of science. The representation of heaven and earth as a wedded pair is derived in part at least from an intellectual perception of likeness—from personification guided by analogy. Men notice that the earth becomes fruitful by the influence of the sky with its light and warmth, its dew and rain; and since a most striking instance of fruitful energy is seen in human generation, early men think of natural fertility as a marriage of the elements. And this is the beginning of the scientific spirit—the interest in causes and in explanation; for there is here a crude theory of an observed fact, namely that the earth brings forth abundantly. The mystery of nature’s fruitfulness is thus solved and simplified by regarding it as a process like that involved in human birth. In this the savage naïvely follows the method of the savant who is pleased to make some novel and puzzling fact appear as but another instance of a group of facts already known. The explanatory interest is an important feature in all myths that tell how the world was formed—by clever workmanship of some god, busy at his forge or his potter’s wheel; or it was fished from the sea with hook and line, or it issued from a gigantic egg. Again, some special process of nature may be explained; as the tides, in the Malay myth, by the regular emerging of an enormous crab from a cavern in the depths of

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