ABSTRACT

The first of the specific subjects that we have to consider is that of the bearing of the New Psychology on the consciousness of sin, and it will perhaps be best to approach the subject by noting briefly the position of Psychology in general regarding sin. Broadly speaking, Psychology, when it keeps strictly within its province, has nothing to do with sin as a fact. Psychology is a descriptive science. Its task is to examine, describe, and systematize the facts of conscious experience, and it can only, within its own limits, deal with facts in so far as they can be experienced in terms of conscious life. When it sets itself to pass an ethical judgment on facts, and that is what we do when we say something is a sin, or when it proceeds to evaluate any fact and to examine its importance and its ethical result, it is really passing beyond its own sphere. What Psychology is concerned with—and here it is quite within its own province— is not sin as such, but the consciousness of sin, the experience of a person in sinning and the results of that sin on his subsequent experience and on his conscious life as a whole. It is not concerned with the question of what sin is. It really does not matter to the Psychologist qua Psychologist whether a fact of consciousness or experience is a good one or a bad one, any more than it matters to the scientist whether the object which he is examining is a cancerous growth or a piece of healthy flesh. He is concerned with the fact without asking the further question whether it is good or bad. Of course, just because he is a man and has a moral sense he cannot ignore these ultimate questions and they will force themselves on him, but as a Psychologist, taking the purely psychological standpoint, he is not concerned with them. He goes outside his province in pronouncing on the ethical value of these facts. It is quite different, however, with the consciousness of sin. That is a fact of experience and, as such, Psychology has to examine it. The question as to how this consciousness arises in the individual, or in the race, is within its purview. Again, if sin makes any modification in the mental outlook of man, or in the fact of his freedom, that is, if it makes any difference in his conscious life and experience, the Psychologist has a perfect right to try and discover what that difference is. Psychology is concerned with sin as an experience, as a fact of consciousness, and not with sin from the point of view of its ethical valuation.