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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 November 2011
The individual's 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 individual's 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?
1 Psychologie de la Croyance en l'Immortalité, Revue Philosophique, LVI, 278.
2 Leuba sums up the causes for this loss of desire as he views them in the following words: “A weariness of existence, temperamental or the fruit of age or of other circumstances; a disposition to enjoy the mood that informs Bryant's noble poem, Thanatopsis; and especially, perhaps, an inability to picture in intelligible and acceptable form a future life, suffice to make of a death that ends all a satisfactory, even a desirable goal.” (The Belief in God and Immortality, p. 301.)
3 Katho Upanishad I. 1. I have discussed this question at greater length in my “India and Its Faith.” Pp. 105–107.
4 Thanatophobia and Immortality. American Journal of Psychology, October, 1915, p. 579.
5 Educational Problems. New York; Appleton. 1911. Vol. I, p. 144.
6 Op. cit. Chap. IX.
7 The Philosophy of Religion, p. 14 — et passim.