Sabatier: "That which we call religion in a man is the sentiment of the relation in which he stands and wants to stand to the universal principle upon which he knows himself to be dependent, and to the universe itself of which he finds himself a part."... A filial feeling towards God and a fraternal feeling towards man is what makes the Christian.''

Upton: It is the felt relationship in which the finite selfconsciousness stands to the immanent and universal ground of all being, which constitutes religion."

In the third, or Volitional and Ethical group, "the active principle, the cravings, the desires, the impulses, the will, take the place occupied by the intellect or the feelings in the other classes."

Bradley: "Religion is the attempt to express the complete reality of goodness through every aspect of our being." Feuerbach: The origin, nay, the essence of religion is desire; if man possessed no needs, no desires, he would possess no gods.

Marshall: The restraint of individualistic impulses to racial ones (the suppression of our will to a higher will) seems to me to be of the very essence of religion; the belief in the Deity, as usually found, being from the psychological point of view an attachment to, rather than the essence of, the religious feeling.

The Golden Rule, found in so many of the ancient religions may be cited here as emphasizing this element to the exclusion almost, of all the others. When a Gentile came to Rabbi Hillel with the challenge, Proselytize me, but on condition that thou teach me the whole law whilst I stand upon one leg," the latter converted him by replying, "That which is hateful to thyself, do not do to thy neighbor. This is the whole law, all the rest is its commentary." Similarly, the Apostle James: "What doth it profit though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? Can faith save him?' Right willing and acting, rather than mere believing, is for him the essence of religion.

That these definitions are all more or less one-sided, need hardly be pointed out. Each one as we should expect, finds in religion that which is predominant in his own soul. Goethe could not have possibly been true to himself and said anything else than, Name it what you will, for me it is all feeling. Spencer, Romanes, and other investigators were, by their natures, compelled to define it in terms of the intel

lect, and likewise the men of action like James and Bondaref were compelled to define it in terms of will and conduct. Such definitions are valuable more for the light they shed on individual psychology, than for their aid in the solution of the question What is religion?' The other writers whom we have quoted, deluded by the fatal faculty-psychology, endeavored, either by analyzing and comparing the different historical religions, to arrive at the origin, the seed from which they all sprang, or, by eliminating all that is characteristic of the different species to discover the one quality or essence common to all; a 'summum genus' from which, as a starting point, they might construct a religious tree à la Haeckel.

All the various theories concerning the origin of religion are nothing more than mere idle guesses in the dark. Its roots lie so deeply and intricately imbedded and enmeshed in the past of the race that it has now become almost an instinct, which, in its proper time, and under normal conditions, sprouts forth spontaneously from the dark and impenetrable regions of the individual's sub-consciousness. To say that religion was born of the emotions, or the intellect, or the will is to arbitrarily partition the soul into three air-tight compartments, a procedure which flagrantly violates the truth and for which there is absolutely no justification. The soul is an organic unity of inseparable parts, which develop, ripen, and decay concomitantly and covariantly. When in its gradual evolution it finally reached the mature chrysalis state and was beginning to emerge into a beautiful butterfly, i. e., when our simian ancestors were becoming more human than ape, then many wonderful changes must have taken place and new conditions pregnant with future possibilities were born. It was then that the veil was lifted from the eyes of our ancestors; they beheld the wonders and mysteries of the starry heavens, and the forces of nature playing about them; they caught a glimpse of God, were filled with wonder, admiration, awe, curiosity, and fear; the bud unfolded itself, and the beautiful flower, religion, was born in the world. This, figurative and fanciful as it is, is probably the most that can be said concerning its birth. The Dutch botanist, Hugo de Vries, maintains that new types can arise suddenly. Great variations, not small, as Darwin thought, are, according to him, the condition of evolution through the struggle for life. If religion be the product of some such

sudden mental variation, the futility of trying to trace it back to an instinct, or feeling, or will-act, would be all the more manifest.

Of the essence of religion we can likewise make no dogmatic statement. There are no two religions, we venture to say, whose essences are precisely the same. Indeed, we may go even further and say that as many men, so many religions. We should more accurately speak of religions than of religion which exists only as an abstract term or idea. The attempt to reduce all religions to one common denominator is as futile as that of the ancient School of Miletus, to find in water, the infinite atmosphere, breath, the first and fundamental principle of the whole universe.

Instead of vainly endeavoring to discover the origin or essence of religion, several recent writers have wisely undertaken to ascertain the psychological meaning and value of the religions which the different peoples, primitive, barbarous, and civilized, now possess and the influence they exert upon their lives. Here we may mention among others, the following definitions:

Eliza Ritchie : "When we speak of a religious man or race, we have in view a certain temper of mind, a certain way of conceiving the facts of existence, a doctrine of some sort. But we also know that a doctrine itself, however elaborate it may be, does not constitute a religion. When the doctrine affects the tone and color of the individual's emotional life, and has a determining influence upon his conduct, then the individual may be said to be religious. Whether the creed be low or lofty, simple or complex, it must be felt; whether its outer expression consist in ceremony or ritual, moral precepts or ethical principles, philanthropic work or fanatical persecutions, some effect it must have on the emotional and practical life; if either of these factors be wholly absent, the phenomenon is not that of religion.

"1

Pfleiderer: "In the religious consciousness all sides of the whole personality participate. Of course we must recognize that knowing and willing are here, not ends in themselves, as in science and morality, but rather subordinated to feeling as the real centre of religious consciousness. This is not simply a feeling, but a combination of feelings of freedom and dependence.

1The Essentials of Religion, Phil. Rev., Jan., 1901.

Caird: "Without as yet attempting to define religion, we may go as far as to say that a man's religion is the expression of his ultimate attitude to the Universe, the summed-up meaning and purport of his whole consciousness of things.

Tolstoi: "True religion is a relation, accordant with reason and knowledge, which man establishes with the infinite life surrounding him, and it is such as binds his life to that infinity, and guides his conduct.''1

James: Religion means, for the purpose of these lectures, the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine."2

The phrase, in their solitude," limits the definition to the passive, subjective type of individuals, such as the mystics, monastics, and ascetics, and eliminates that much larger class of individuals in whom the religious fervor is at its highest pitch only when they are in a group or crowd, when they are laboring for their unfortunate fellow-beings, for the general welfare of the race; or, if fanatics, when they are warring against heretics and the enemies of their God.

As definitions, it is not difficult to raise objections against each of the above, but the point which they emphasize, namely, that religion is an experience which is the combined effect of all the activities of the psyche, beliefs, emotional responses, and volitional acts of various kinds, and which shapes in large measure the lives and conduct of men, evinces a deeper and broader knowledge of the true nature of religion and its relation to life than any of the previous ones.

Owing to its fullness, comprehensiveness, and extreme complexity, we shall never, perhaps, have a perfectly adequate and satisfactory definition of religion, and it is doubtful whether such a definition is at all necessary. A summation of all the definitions that have ever been offered, and those that will be offered in the future, would approach nearer the truth than any particular one, for as has already been stated, religion is not an abstract something which exists somewhere in the realm of space, but is a concrete experience which every individual has in a greater or less degree, and in no two are they precisely the same.

1 Essays and Letters, p. 295.

2 Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 31.

It should be plain, therefore, that the following is not offered as a standard definition of religion, but as the writer's attempt to state as briefly and concisely as possible his own conception of the meaning of the term in the hope that it will better enable the reader to follow him and understand his view-point and conclusions.

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Religion is a whole-souled or rather a psycho-physical reaction to one or more preternatural objects or beings, or to ideals which are believed to be somehow constantly and seriously related to the individual and the race. We employ the term preternatural rather than supernatural because the latter does not accurately describe the conceptions and beliefs of primitive and barbarous peoples concerning their gods and idols. They were not exactly natural, nor yet, properly speaking, supernatural. They were something other than natural, as nature was then understood, i. e., preternatural. Now that we have stated as best we can what we mean by normal religion, we can more readily explain what we mean by pathological religion. In an off-hand fashion, it may said, that religious experience which is not a well-rounded, well-balanced reaction of the whole soul is pathological, but in saying this it must be remembered that not all people react with the same fullness of force, nor in the same way. There are all stages of religious development in the individual as well as in the race, and the reaction which is normal to one stage of development is different from that which is normal to another. Indeed, what is normal for one may be pathological for the other. We cannot, therefore, have a hard. and fixed standard of measurement for all religions, but must employ a different standard for each religion. The child and savage cannot be expected to have as lofty and abstract religious conceptions as have the Buddhists, for example, or the modern Christians, but they are justly expected to have the religious conceptions and experiences which are normal to their stage of development; anything short of that is an evidence of arrested development or degeneration. In the field of morals we are told that the individual should act in accordance with the idea of his kind or his type,1 and the same rule applies to religion as well. In judging, therefore, of an individual's or race's religious normality, we must compare them not with individuals belonging to another race,

1 See Alexander: Moral Order and Progress, p. 236; Leslie Stephen, Science of Ethics, p. 397.