The Relation of Religion to Instinct

Abstract

There is a general recognition today that the elements common to the religions and those common to the sciences are psychological. The facts of religious experience and the facts of scientific experience are so multiform that the only place to discover a common basis is in the attitudes of consciousness giving rise to the variant concrete expressions. Furthermore, there is a general recognition among psychologists that the genesis of the religious and scientific attitudes is localizable in the instinctive behavior of the psycho-physical organism. This has led some scholars to posit the existence of a specific religious instinct and of a specific scientific instinct. Others again have endeavored to account for the rise of religion and science by reference to specific instincts with which they are identified. The criticism of such hypotheses is that they proceed too frequently on the basis of a definition of instinct that is biologically unsound. Biologically speaking, an instinct is a congenital co-ordination of reflexes, neurally integrated, and effecting an organic response, characteristic of and serviceable to the species, and in some manner capable of subsequent modification. It is a term descriptive of certain types of reactions, and is more correctly used in its adjectival than its substantive form.