270 Science Religion and Reality 



3. Religion as a Special Type of Thought or 

 Feeling or Acting 



More recently the tendency has been to define religion, not 

 by the object, but by the manner of its belief ; not by its cults, but 

 by its piety. The reasons given are, first, that such inward marks 

 of it are simpler and more certain than any attempt to combine 

 the multitudinous outward forms ; and, second, that the special 

 quality of religion concerns a person's faith or piety and not the 

 objects of his belief, which may be merely accepted from tradition. 



The first reason, however, does not seem to be justified by 

 experience, because there never has been any agreement even on 

 so broad a question as the department of mind to which religion is 

 to be assigned. If the marks are simple, this question ought to be 

 elementary. Yet the answers given to it by the profoundest 

 thinkers have radically disagreed. Kant held religion to be 

 essentially belief in the reality and sovereignty of the moral order, 

 and, therefore, to be dependent, in the last resort, upon a right 

 attitude of the will. Schleiermacher denied that such an appendage 

 to morality was of the nature of real religion at all, and found the 

 sphere of religion in piety, which he described as a feeling of 

 dependence that is absolute because it places us in immediate rela- 

 tion to the absolute, universal, final reality. Hegel rejected both 

 views and regarded religion as intellectual exaltation into the 

 region of eternal truth. Thus Kant placed religion in the sphere 

 of will, Schleiermacher of feeling, and Hegel of reason. Such 

 wide divergence between thinkers so serious and profound does 

 not encourage the hope that the essential mark of religion will be 

 easier to discover in the peculiar quality of religion in the soul than 

 in its manifold outward manifestations ; and, in point of fact, the 

 question of what belongs to religion in history has never received 

 quite such divergent answers as the question of what belongs to 

 religion in psychology. 



The second argument, that the essential quality of religion 

 belongs to the soul that cherishes it, rests on the fact that no kind 

 of religious belief would be of any religious value unless it were 

 entertained by a conviction of a peculiar quality, and that no rite 

 is truly religious except as it is done with piety. And, without 

 doubt, when personal belief and reverence are wanting, religion 

 is an unreality : and our chief difficulty in studying the religions 



