James Bissett Pratt

The Psychology of Religion

As every one knows, psychology is a word to conjure with. We have today the Psychology of Art, the Psychology of Business, the Psychology of Advertising, the Psychology of Childhood, of Adolescence, and of Old Age, the Psychology of various great men and of various centuries and epochs, until one stands quite aghast at the psychological insight of our times, and feels that the key to everything and anything worth knowing must surely be in the hands of the omniscient psychologist. In fact, psychology would seem to have enlarged her bounds at the expense of every other subject, and to have chosen all knowledge to be her province; so that he who desires his book or treatise on any subject whatever to be regarded as strictly “modern” and “scientific” must needs endow it with a psychological title. This is indeed a short and easy method of becoming a psychologist; and the result is— as one might expect—that all the psychology contained in many of these works is spread, usually in large letters, upon the titlepage. All is not gold that glitters; neither is every treatise psychological which bears that mystic word upon its cover. In no field of serious inquiry are these remarks more pertinent than in that of religion. Our book-shelves and our periodicals are laden with works on “religious psychology,” most of which prove on examination to be hardly more psychological than anatomical or geographical. Treatises on theology and statistics, on Church history and Sunday-school methods, as well as that large and amorphous class of writings which twenty years ago would have appeared under the title “Philosophy of Religion”—all these are now pressing themselves upon our attention by the use of that potent shibboleth, “Psychology.” And yet, though one-half the works with titles of this nature have not much more to do with genuine psychology than with the weather, there is, I believe, a young branch of scientific inquiry which rightly deserves the name Psychology of Religion.

God and the Moral Law

The subject for our annual conference this year — Ethics and Theology — forces us to face one of the most difficult problems of religious thought, — the relation between God and morality. To this problem several solutions — all quite familiar — have been proposed and it will not be the purpose of my paper to suggest a new one of my own. In fact, as the sequel will show, I am very uncertain whether any completely satisfactory solution to the problem be possible. My aim is the much less ambitious one of placing the matter, with some of its difficulties, before the Society for discussion, in the hope that your collective wisdom may be able to throw more light upon this dark theme than the Societys benighted president for this year — who is no theologian — is able to contribute. One of the simplest and most popular modes of conceiving the relation between God and the laws of morality is to equate righteousness with obedience to the divine will. God is good, we are told, and our goodness is to be defined as conformity to the will of God. One relatively superficial and pragmatic difficulty in accepting this view consists in the obvious fact that it is by no means easy to know with certainty what the will of God may be. Different philosophers, different prophets, different religions give us different and sometimes quite contradictory answers to this question.

Natural Religion; Consciousness and its Implications

Eighteen years ago, when Emerson Hall was nearing its completion, the motto chosen for its portal was that insistent query of the psalmist, “What is man that Thou art mindful of him?” No words could have been more appropriate for a building devoted to philosophy and psychology; and if we knew the answer to the question they propound we should have at least the key to the more fundamental problems of Natural Religion.

Some Psychological Aspects of the Belief in Immortality

The individuals attitude toward the Determiner of Destiny, which is religion, has always an essentially practical coloring. It involves a belief, to be sure, but this belief is never a matter of pure theory; it bears a reference, more or less explicit, to the fate of the individuals values. Hence in nearly every religion which history has studied or anthropology discovered, the question of the future in store for the individual believer has been one of prime importance. The content of this belief is a question for the theologian and the historian of religion; the psychologist, however, may be able to throw some light on the related question why people believe, or fail to believe, in immortality at all. What, in short, are the psychological sources from which this belief springs, and what are the leading types of this belief?

The Subconscious and Religion

There is no subject about which popular psychology just now has so much to say as the “subconscious.” Since the name came into wide use a dozen years ago, it has come to be regarded as something so definite and well understood as to be itself the explanation of many other things. Its bearing upon questions of religious experience has been particularly emphasized, and, in fact, it is largely on this account that it has aroused so much popular interest. In short, the word “subconscious” is spoken so glibly and taken to be the self-evident solution of so many spiritual problems that it will be worth our while to consider what we really know about it, and especially what its actual relation to religion may be. For, though often misused, there can be no doubt that the term stands for something very fundamental in our mental life, and that its connection with religion is in one way or another extremely important.