290 PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 



steps of the anthropologists when we find among the most undeveloped savages 

 a tendency to personify the objects of their worship. When it comes to the ques- 

 tion of determining the role that this personalizing tendency has actually 

 played in the development of religion, the anthropologists divide into two 

 camps, one of these, led by Max Miiller, regarding it as a symbolic interpretation 

 put upon the impression of some great natural or cosmic object or phenomenon; 

 while others, including Herbert Spencer and Mr. Tylor, prefer to seek the originals 

 of religion in ancestral dream-images and ghostly apparitions. These writers 

 thus start with completely anthropomorphic terms, and their problem is to 

 de-anthropomorphize the elements to the extent necessary to constitute them data 

 of religion. The second factor standing over against the personal, as its opposite, 

 is that of transcendence. By transcendence I mean that deifying, infinitating 

 process that is ever working contra to the anthropomorphic influence in the 

 sphere of religious conceptions. The School of Spencer regard this as the only 

 legitimate tendency in religion. We do not argue this point here, but agree that 

 it is as legitimate and real a factor as that of personality. The root of this factor, 

 if our diagnosis of the idea of religion be correct, is to be sought in the original 

 impression of religion, and it no doubt has its origin in man's feeling-reaction 

 from that impression. We have pointed to submission as one of the religious 

 emotions. Now submission rests on some deeper feeling-attitude, which some 

 have translated into the feeling or sense of dependence. This, however, is not 

 adequate, since men have the sense of social dependence on finite beings, and we 

 have it with reference to the floor we are standing on. Rather, it seems to me, 

 we must translate it into the stronger and more unconditional feeling of help- 

 lessness. One real ground of our religious consciousness is the sense or feeling of 

 helplessness toward God; the sense that we have no standing in being as against 

 the Deity. This radical feeling utters itself in every note of the religious scale, 

 from the lowest superstitious terror to the highest mystical self-annihilation. 



'These two factors, the forces of personalization and transcendence, are in- 

 separable. They constitute the terms of a dialectic within the religious con- 

 sciousness by virtue of which in one phase our religious conceptions are becoming 

 ever more adequate and satisfying, while from another point of view their in- 

 sufficiency grows more and more apparent. And, on the broader field of religious 

 history, they embody themselves in a law of tendency, which Spencer has only 

 half -expressed, by virtue of which the objects of religion are on one hand becoming 

 ever more intelligible; on the other, ever more transcendent of our conceptions." 



A short paper was read by Professor F. C. French, Professor of Philosophy in 

 the University of Nebraska, on "The Bearing of Certain Aspects of the Newer 

 Psychology on the Philosophy of Religion." The speaker said in part: 



"The relation of science to religion has received, to be sure, much study, but 

 to most minds hitherto this has meant the relation of only the physical sciences to 

 religion. The older psychology was largely speculative and metaphysical in 

 character. There were, of course, some who employed the empirical method in 

 psychology, but they were so far from comprehending the full scope of mental 

 phenomena that, at best, their work gave the promise of a science rather than 

 a science itself. 



It is not the fact that the newer psychology takes account of the physiological 

 conditions of mental life; it is not the fact that the subject is now pursued in 

 laboratories with instruments of precision, that gives it its full standing as a 

 science : it is much more the fact that the psychology of to-day has found a place 

 in the natural system of mental things for those strange and relatively unusual 

 phenomena of consciousness which to the scientifically minded seemed totally 

 unreal and to the superstitious manifestations of the supernatural. . . . 



