第40章

This is by no means all that has to be said for such protests. There isa deeper meaning in them. They do not simply express the natural repugnanceto a revolution of belief, here made specially intense by the vital importanceof the belief to be revolutionized; but they also express an instinctiveadhesion to a belief that is in one sense the best -- the best for thosewho thus cling to it, though not abstractedly the best. For here it is tobe remarked that what were above spoken of as the imperfections of Religion,at first great but gradually diminishing, have been imperfections as measuredby an absolute standard, and not as measured by a relative one. Speakinggenerally, the religion current in each age and among each people, has beenas near an approximation to the truth as it was then and there possible formen to receive. The concrete forms in which it has embodied the truth, havebeen the means of making thinkable what would otherwise have been unthinkable;and so have for the time being served to increase its impressiveness. Ifwe consider the conditions of the case, we shall find this to be an unavoidableconclusion. During each stage of progress men must think in such terms ofthought as they possess. While all the conspicuous changes of which theycan observe the origins, have men and animals as antecedents, they are unableto think of antecedents in general under any other shapes; and hence creativeagencies are almost of necessity conceived by them in these shapes. If, duringthis phase, these concrete conceptions were taken from them, and the attemptmade to give them comparatively abstract conceptions, the result would beto leave their minds with none at all; since the substituted ones could notbe mentally represented. Similarly with every successive stage of religiousbelief, down to the last. Though, as accumulating experiences slowly modifythe earliest ideas of causal personalities, there grow up more general andvague ideas of them; yet these cannot be at once replaced by others stillmore general and vague. Further experiences must supply the needful furtherabstractions, before the mental void left by the destruction of such inferiorideas can be filled by ideas of a superior order. And at the present time,the refusal to abandon a relatively concrete consciousness for a relativelyabstract one, implies the inability to frame the relatively abstract one;and so implies that the change would be premature and injurious. Still moreclearly shall we see the injuriousness of any such premature change, on observingthat the effects of a belief upon conduct must be diminished in proportionas the vividness with which it is realized becomes less. Evils and benefitsakin to those which the savage has personally felt, or learned from thosewho have felt them, are the only evils and benefits he can understand; andthese must be looked for as coming in ways like those of which he has hadexperience. His deities must be imagined to have like motives and passionsand methods with the beings around him; for motives and passions and methodsof a higher character being unknown to him, and in great measure unthinkableby him, cannot be so represented in thought as to influence his deeds. Duringevery phase of civilization, the actions of the Unseen Reality, as well asthe resulting rewards and punishments, being conceivable only in such formsas experience furnishes, to supplant them by higher ones be fore wider experienceshave made higher ones conceivable, is to set up vague and uninfluential motivesfor definite and influential ones. Even now for the great mass of men, unableto trace out with clearness those good and bad consequences which conductbrings round through the established order of things, it is well that thereshould be depicted future punishments and future joys -- pains and pleasuresof definite kinds, produced in ways direct and simple enough to be clearlyimagined. Nay still more must be conceded. Few are as yet wholly fitted todispense with such conceptions as are current. The highest abstractions takeso great a mental power to realize with any vividness, and are so inoperativeon conduct unless they are vividly realized, that their regulative effectsmust for a long period to come be appreciable on but a small minority. Tosee clearly how a right or wrong act generates consequences, internal andexternal, that go on branching out more widely as years progress, requiresa rare power of analysis. And to estimate these consequences in their totalityrequires a grasp of thought possessed by none. Were it not that throughoutthe progress of the race, men's experiences of the effects of conduct havebeen slowly generalized into principles -- were it not that these principleshave been from generation to generation insisted on by parents, upheld bypublic opinion, sanctified by religion, and enforced by threats of eternaldamnation for disobedience -- were it not that under these potent influenceshabits have been modified, and the feelings proper to them made innate; disastrousresults would follow the removal of those strong and distinct motives whichthe current belief supplies. Even as it is, those who relinquish the faithin which they have been brought up, for this most abstract faith in whichScience and Religion unite, may not uncommonly fail to act up to their convictions.

Left to their organic morality, enforced only by general reasonings difficultto keep before the mind, their defects of nature will often come out morestrongly than they would have done under their previous creed. The substitutedcreed can become adequately operative only when it becomes, like the presentone, an element in early education, and has the support of a strong socialsanction. Nor will men be quite ready for it until, through the continuanceof a discipline which has partially moulded them to the conditions of socialexistence, they are completely moulded to those conditions.