THOUGHTS ON THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN SCOTT HALDANE 



book The Idea of the Holy^ it has always seemed that what distin- 

 guished religion from theolog}^ or inferior philosophy was the sense 

 of the numinous,^ the divination of sacredness in certain external 

 things, persons or actions. At first this sense is fetishistic: It attaches 

 purely to certain objects, apparently at haphazard. Then great pioneers 

 discover that certain actions are holy — comforting the fatherless and 

 the widow, or putting down the mighty from their seat and raising 

 up them that fall, or following justice and mercy, or above all, the 

 ayairy] rod ttXtjctlov of the Gospels, the love of one's comrade. 



This kind of religion seems to me to have no metaphysical com- 

 mitments of any sort. Whether your comrade is a higher ape with a 

 very complicated nervous system embodying a vast set of reflexes, 

 or on the other hand, a non-material soul inhabiting in some curious 

 way a material body — he is at any rate both beautiful and lovable, 

 and in a certain sense pathetic, and the disposition to love him is a 

 grace not affected by your theories of his nature.^ I do not know 

 what is meant by the phrase the pastoral theologians use, "the love 

 of souls," but I have found that superficial anim.osities and differences 

 tend to disappear if men and women are visualised as the children they 

 once visibly were. Some such deeper comprehension and love must 

 have informed the carver of one of the greatest of all statues of Mary, 

 Conrad of Einbeck, whose work is still in the great church at Halle. 



^ English translation by J. W. Harvey (Oxford 1923). 



^ From the Latin word numen, which means a deity, Otto coined the adjective 

 numinous to designate the quality of sacredness or holiness attached to things, persons 

 or actions. In mediaeval Christianity, the paten and chalice in the Mass were thought to 

 possess this quality, so that even today the subdeacon, being a layman, may only handle 

 them ceremonially wearing the "humeral veil." This is akin to the "mana" of the 

 anthropologists. But persons and their actions may also be numinous, for example, the 

 widow in the Gospels contributing her small coin to the collection, or Irenaeus saying 

 on the morning of his martyrdom, "Now I begin to live," or the death of the five Leveller 

 Corporals in Burford Churchyard, or Dimitrov's immortal witness to certain principles 

 in the face of dementia enthroned. 



^ After I had written the above words, I came across the following in S. Alexander's 

 Space, Time and Deity (London, 1927), Vol. II, p. 32: 



"The experience which assures us not inferentially but directly of other minds 

 is a very simple and familiar one, that of sociality, and it has a double aspect. Our 

 fellow human beings excite in us the social or gregarious instinct, and to feel 

 socially towards another being is to be assured that it is something like ourselves. 

 We do not first apprehend that another being is a mind and then respond to him, 

 whether positively in affection or negatively in aversion; but in our tenderness 

 or dislike we are aware of him as like ourselves. . . But we do not experience the 

 satisfaction of sociality till the creature towards which we act socially reciprocates 

 our action." 



Cf. also Henry Maudsley's Body and Will (London, 1883), p. 45. 



