To Teach the History of Science? 47 



he and the others have devoted their hves is shaping itself with greater 

 clearness and rigor. During the last half century, the history of art has 

 become gradually a solid body of knowledge much more severe than it 

 was but also more rewarding and altogether more pleasant. Many 

 problems have been solved but many more have been evoked, and the 

 historian of art has been kept very busy, learning and unlearning, search- 

 ing for better knowledge and a deeper understanding of his own position 

 or of the whole field. That field is larger and richer. There is more 

 truth in it than before and more beauty. 



The history of religion reached its period of adolescence at about the 

 same time as the history of art, say, about the last quarter of the century. 

 The main historical difficulties seem to have lain in the correct definition 

 of the field. This was more difficult than for the history of art which 

 shaped itself naturally. Take the history of painting or the history of 

 music. We start with a collection of masterpieces — paintings or parti- 

 tions. These are concrete, dated or datable objects; it is not too difficult 

 to put them, or most of them, in a chronological sequence, and there you 

 have the skeleton of your history. The history of religion, on the other 

 hand, is a history of emotions and of ideas, the origin of which may be 

 extremely difficult to perceive or to date. It is a history of creeds and 

 beliefs, of rites and institutions, and much of that is difficult to analyze 

 and describe, because it does not happen once but flows and continues. 

 The scholars who undertook those studies spent much time in discussing 

 religion, various religions, the comparativeness of religions, the science 

 of religion, the birth and development of religious institutions, etc. The 

 subject was so full of controversies and so widely open to prejudice that 

 it took them a relatively long time to realize the value of purely historical 

 investigations conducted as other historical investigations are, without 

 parti pris or without desire of either apologetics or disparagement. The 

 history of that discipline is well known, because of the methodical writ- 

 ings of many scholars^^ and of the lectures delivered at the international 

 congresses of the history of religion. 



The first of these congresses took place in Paris, in 1900,^^ and the 

 latest one in Amsterdam, in 1950. These congresses were more impor- 

 tant than the art congresses, because they attracted the attention of more 

 scholars, indeed, there are far more men professionally concerned with 

 religion and its past than there are concerned with the history of art. 

 Moreover, every religious man is obliged to think historically, if only 

 because he is always obliged to look back to the origin of his religion, 

 while creative artists are more exclusively concerned with their own 



"E.g., the Belgian, Count Goblet d'Alviella (1846-1925) in his collected 

 essays, Croyances, rites, institutions (3 vols., Paris 1911); in vols. 2 and 3. 



^An earlier congress "The world's first parliament of religions," had been held 

 in Chicago in 1893, but that vv^as something very different in purpose and in realiza- 

 tion, a noble appeal to religious toleration rather than to impartial scholarship. The 

 Chicago Congress vi^as philanthropic rather than scientific. 



