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Page 14
A second factor was the rise of the humane sciences. In the seventh
and eighth decades of the last century men were absorbed in the
discovery of the nature and extent of the material universe. But
beginning about 1890, interest swerved again toward man as its
most revealing study and most significant inhabitant. Anthropology,
ethnology, sociology, physical and functional psychology, came to
the front. Especially the humane studies of political science and
industrial economics were magnified because of the new and urgent
problems born of an industrial civilization and a capitalistic state.
The invention and perfection of the industrial machine had by now
thoroughly dislocated former social groupings, made its own ethical
standards and human problems. In the early days of the labor movement
William Morris wrote, "we have become slaves of the monster to which
invention has given birth." In 1853, shortly after the introduction of
the cotton gin into India, the Viceroy wrote: "The misery is scarcely
paralleled in the history of trade." (A large statement that!) "The
bones of the cotton workers whiten the plains of India."
But the temporary suffering caused by the immediate crowding out
of cottage industry and the abrupt increase in production was
insignificant beside the deeper influence, physical, moral, mental,
of the machine in changing the permanent habitat and the entire mode
of living for millions of human beings. It removed them from those
healthy rural surroundings which preserve the half-primitive,
half-poetic insight into the nature of things which comes from
relative isolation and close contact with the soil, to the nervous
tension, the amoral conditions, the airless, lightless ugliness of
the early factory settlements. Here living conditions were not merely
beastly; they were often bestial. The economic helplessness of the
factory hands reduced them to essential slavery. They must live where
the factory was, and could work only in one factory, for they could
not afford to move. Hence they must obey their industrial master in
every particular, since the raw material, the plant, the tools, the
very roof that covered them, were all his! In this new human condition
was a powerful reinforcement, from another angle of approach, of
the humanistic impulse. Man's interest in himself, which had been
sometimes that of the dilettante, largely imaginative and even
sentimental, was reinforced by man's new distress and became concrete
and scientific.
Thus man regarded himself and his own world with a new and urgent
attention. The methods and secondary causes of his intellectual,
emotional and volitional life began to be laid bare. The new situation
revealed the immense part played in shaping the personality and
the fate of the individual by inheritance and environment. The
Freudian doctrine, which traces conduct and habit back to early
or prenatal repressions, strengthens the interest in the physical
and materialistic sources of character and conduct in human life.
Behavioristic psychology, interpreting human nature in terms of
observation and action, rather than analysis and value judgments,
does the same. It tends to put the same emphasis upon the external and
sensationalistic aspects of human experience.
That, then, which is a central force in religion, the sense of the
inscrutability of human nature, the feeling of awe before the natural
processes, what Paul called the mystery of iniquity and the mystery of
godliness, tends to disappear. Wonder and confident curiosity succeed
humility and awe. That which is of the essence of religion, the sense
of helplessness coupled with the sense of responsibility, is stifled.
Whatever else the humane sciences have done, they have deepened man's
fascinated and narrowing absorption in himself and given him apparent
reason to believe that by analyzing the iron chain of cause and effect
which binds the process and admitting that it permits no deflection
or variation, he is making the further questions as to the origin,
meaning and destiny of that process either futile or superfluous. So
that, in brief, the check to speculative thinking and the repudiation
of central metaphysical concepts, which the earlier movement brought
about, has been accentuated and sealed by the humane sciences and the
new and living problems offered them for practical solution. Thus the
generation now ending has been carried beyond the point of combating
ancient doctrines of God and man, to the place where it has become
comparatively indifferent, rather than hostile, to any doctrine of
God, so absorbed is it in the physical functions, the temporal needs
and the material manifestations of human personality.
Finally, as the natural and humane sciences mark new steps in the
expanding humanistic movement, so in these last days, critical
scholarship, itself largely a product of the humanistic viewpoint, has
added another factor to the group. The new methods of historical and
literary criticism, of comparative investigation in religion and the
other arts, have exerted a vast influence upon contemporary religious
thought. They have not merely completed the breakdown of an arbitrary
and fixed external authority and rendered finally invalid the notion
of equal or verbal inspiration in sacred writings, but the present
tendency, especially in comparative religion, is to seek the source
of all so-called religious experience within the human consciousness;
particularly to derive it all from group experience. Here, then, is
a theory of religious origins which once more turns the spirit of man
back upon itself. Robertson Smith, Jane Harrison, Durkheim, rejecting
an earlier animistic theory, find the origin of religion not in
contemplation of the natural world and in the intuitive perception
of something more-than-world which lies behind it, but in the group
experience whose heightened emotional intensity and nervous energy
imparts to the one the exaltation of the many. Smith, in the _Religion
of the Semites_,[9] emphasizes, as the fundamental conception of
ancient religion, "the solidarity of the gods and their worshipers as
part of an organic society." Durkheim goes beyond this. There are
not at the beginning men and gods, but only the social group and the
collective emotions and representations which are generated through
membership in the group.
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