Deity and the Religious Sentiment

Abstract

The metaphysical notion of a reality which is the whole world in its endeavour towards a new and higher empirical quality than the highest we know is verified by the religious sentiment itself. Various emotions enter into the full constitution of the religious sentiment—fear, admiration, self-abasement—but its distinctive constituent is the feeling of our going out towards something not ourselves and greater and higher than ourselves, with which we are in communion, a feeling whose object is not that of any of these subsidiary or suggesting emotions, nor of any combination of them. Like the other sentiments, it is fed from many sources, but it gathers around some distinctive constituent as its primary nucleus. The nucleus of the sentiment of love is the tender emotion, around which gather in a system which is dominated by that emotion all manner of other emotions—fear for the safety of what is loved, anger against those who injure it, joy in its success, depression at its misfortunes.1 Even in the aesthetic, moral, and logical sentiments there is a dominating and distinctive passion—the passion for production, the passion of sociality, and the passion of curiosity.