ABSTRACT
The authors whom I have selected for discussion in the foregoing pages have, as we have seen, assailed Theism as, on the one hand, exalting our human nature overmuch by envisaging the ultimate power in the universe in the likeness of man and, on the other hand, degrading this same human nature of ours by refusing to recognize it as, in its kind, the most exalted thing within our experience, with nothing above it to which that kind of respect which we are accustomed to pay to it might be due in a higher degree. These arguments of theirs against belief in God, mutually opposed, though perhaps not mutually contradictory, do not appear to depend upon any particular theory of the origin of that belief. But I do not think it can be reasonably denied that the wide acceptance with which such a rejection of Theism as they champion undoubtedly meets among our educated contemporaries is gready promoted by the general prevalence of an impression that psychologists, exploring (whether by the method specifically known as psycho-analysis or otherwise) the constitution of the human mind, have found an adequate explanation of the origin of the belief in a God or gods and of the consensus gentium to which that belief can unquestionably appeal, as an illusion almost inevitably generated at a certain stage of culture by the circumstances affecting that mind’s development. The present chapter will be devoted to a brief consideration of this alleged explanation and of its sufficiency to invalidate the conviction of which it professes to exhibit the genesis.
