ABSTRACT
We have now to face the question of the religious consciousness and its contents. We shall be dealing largely with metaphysical rather than with purely psychological problems, but here we shall find ourselves less hampered than in any other part of our study by the theories of the New Psychologists, for they have made no contribution of any value to this question. They have contented themselves with trying to show, either that all the phenomena of religious experience and the contents of the religious consciousness can be explained without any religious assumptions whatsoever, or, on the other hand, that they do not point to any agency outside the individual who experiences them. We may apply to this attitude the words of Pratt: "To one who is sure of a vision of God, the scientific Psychologist's theory of religion can be no more than that of a blind man talking about colour." What are we to understand, then, by the religious consciousness, and how does religious experience stand related to it? Thouless, in the first chapter of his book, An Introduction to the Psychology of Religion, gives an explanation which is not wholly satisfactory, but through a consideration of which we may arrive at a satisfactory conception. He says: "The religious consciousness is that part of religion which is present to the mind and is open to examination by introspection. It is the mental side of religious activity." We might perhaps allow this statement to stand, but he then goes on to say, "Religious experience is a vaguer term, and is used to describe the feeling element in the religious consciousness, the feelings which lead to religious belief, or are the effects of religious behaviour. Examples of what is meant by religious experience are: the sense of the presence of God described by the mystics and which also is not uncommon among other people; the feeling of peace after prayer or sacrament; and the less intense, hardly perceptible emotional undercurrent which accompanies ordinary religious life" (chap. i). Now there is grave doubt of the position which limits religious experience thus to the feeling element in consciousness. Experience is never a mere feeling element. If it is a fact of consciousness at all it implies awareness of something, and it has also a dynamic or conative element. It may be that the feeling element predominates, and it may do so to such an extent that it gives colour and tone to the whole experience, so that it may appear to be wholly a feeling experience. But if we analyse it we shall find that in every experience of which we are conscious these three elements are present. We cannot then regard religious experience as the mere feeling aspect of consciousness. We may regard the experience as the fact or element that is present in consciousness, whereas consciousness itself is the background or the basic element that makes this fact of experience possible. Experience, then, may be described as a modification of consciousness, and Crichton-Miller seems to be near the truth when he says that the nucleus of the religious consciousness lies "in the innate sensitiveness of man to the movement of life towards its goal." It would be truer thus to say that consciousness is the basal fact, and that each experience is lived through or constituted by the focussing of consciousness on some interest or effort, and that it becomes thereby an integral factor in the consciousness of that moment. There is implied a self as a unifying factor that fuses all the experiences into one consciousness. We may say, with Selbie, that an infant has a rudimentary religious consciousness which is innate, but we can scarcely say that it has any religious experience. The religious consciousness is really the self in a religious attitude. This is what Pratt means when he defines religion as "an attitude of a self towards an object in which that self genuinely believes." Religious experience is a state of, or a modification within, a conscious mind, and that mind bearing within it the capacity or innate power, not only to have that experience, but to interpret it in a religious sense.
