RELIGION AS ADJUSTMENT 



ery either upon the individual himself or upon 

 others, science merely recognizes that there has 

 been a breach of law ; but religion further de- 

 clares that sin has been done, and there ensues 

 a painful state of consciousness which, as we 

 must carefully note, is not due to selfish dread 

 of suffering to be encountered (since similar suf- 

 fering in a righteous cause would be met with a 

 feeling of self-approval), but is made up chiefly 

 of self-condemnation for the inexcusable infrac- 

 tion of nature's ordinance. Regarded as a pro- 

 duct of psychical evolution, this sense of sin, 

 peculiar to the most highly developed organ- 

 isms, is the analogue of the sense of pain shared 

 in some degree by all organisms endowed with 

 consciousness. The sense of sin, like the sense 

 of pain, is normally the deterrent from actions 

 which tend to diminish the completeness of the 

 correspondence in which life consists. But while 

 the sense of pain is common to those creatures 

 whose incentives to action are purely selfish, the 

 sense of sin can be possessed only by those crea- 

 tures whose intelligence is sufficiently complex 

 to enable them to recognize the relationship 

 in which they stand to the omnipresent Power, 

 and whose highest incentives to action are there- 

 fore quite impersonal. To feel the sting of self- 

 reproach because of wrong-doing, without any 

 selfish reference to the misery which the wrong- 

 doing must inevitably entail, is the high pre- 

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