Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T16:27:24.518Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Mystery God and Olympian God

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2011

George P. Adams
Affiliation:
University of California

Extract

That man's social instincts and emotions have been intimately bound up with his religious emotions and ideas is, happily, in no danger of being forgotten. Through the cumulative impact of many motives, we are learning to look to man's social experience for such insight as the analysis of individual experience seemed not to afford. Thus far, the most striking instance of this—at least in the popular mind—is in the domain of morals. Conscience, when viewed as the possession and experience of the individual alone, has every appearance of something sacred and imperious, absolute and inexplicable. But once let conscience be put into the crucible of anthropology and social psychology, and its mysteriousness and absoluteness seem to have vanished. We see its function and we comprehend its genesis. It is simply the echo within the individual of the past experience of the race, an inherited instinct, which has a definite survival value in the struggle for existence. It would hardly be fair to say that every question about the meaning and worth of conscience is forthwith settled. Concerning the ultimate inferences to be drawn from the undoubted fact that conscience has had a history within man's social experience, there is much which may easily escape us in our first enthusiasm for the concepts of history, development, and social experience.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1916

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Guyau; The Non-Religion of the Future, p. 209.

2 Durkheim's chief work on religion is Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. Paris, 1912.

3 Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion; Jane E. Harrison, Cambridge, 1903. And above all, Themis; A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion. Cambridge, 1912. There should also be mentioned the book of F. M. Cornford; From Religion to Philosophy. London, 1912.

4 Themis, p. xvii.

5 The Religion of the Semites, p. 32.

6 Durkheim; Les Formes élémentaires, pp. 50, 56.

7 Hocking; The Meaning of God in Human Experience, p. 222.

8 Characteristics. Works, Vol. I, p. 340.

9 Themis, p. 28.

10 Levy-Bruhl; Les Fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures, p. 77.

11 Durkheim, p. 322.

12 Themis, p. 122.

13 Themis, p. xvii.

14 Themis, p. 447.

15 Ibid. p. 450.

16 Themis, p. 12.

17 Ibid. pp. 45–46.

18 Themis, p. 48.

19 Ibid. p. 467.

20 Ibid. p. 467.

21 Themis, p. 467.

22 Ibid. p. 468.

23 Moore; The History of Religions, p. 444.

24 Themis, p. 476.

25 Themis, p. 355.

26 The Democratic Conception of God; Professor H. A. Overstreet. Hibbert Journal, Vol. XI, p. 409.

27 J. Adam; The Religious Teachers of Greece, p. 117.