The Religious Experience of Mankind by Ninian Smart, The Bhagavad Gītā by Eliot Deutsch

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 783 the Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines, with its rationalistic reconstruction of the genesis of human language; the De L'Art d'ecrire, with its aesthetic combining French classicism as the highest form of art with an openness to the aesthetic values of other cultures; the Cours d'etude, embodying the results of Condillac's theories and practice in tutoring the Prince of Parma for nine years; and Le Commerce et le g01wernement, a highly original essay on economic theory and the origin of political systems. Miss Knight does more than merely paraphrase Condillac. She investigates his sources, provides an excellent historical background, and furnishes a helpful critical commentary. The fourteen-page bibliography with critical notes is carefully done. Still, there is a nagging problem about the whole book: why spend so much time, energy, and talent on a strictly second-rate philosopher whose influence on the direction of philosophical study has been so slight as to be almost non-existent? Perhaps to establish his uninfluential, second-rate status-or, perhaps, by contrast, to give us a new appreciation of the real giants of philosophical thought? But, whatever the intention, The Geometric Spirit supplies a well-written, scholarly, and at times brilliant study of a figure about whom the historian of philosophy will always be led to ask the sorts of questions Miss Knight answers. San Diego State College San Diego, Calif. RosEMARY LAUER The Religious Experience of Mankind. By NINIAN SMART. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969. Pp. 576. $10.00. The Bhagavad G'itii. Translated, with introduction and critical essays by ELIOT DEUTSCH. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968. Pp. 19~. $4.95. In The Religious Experience of Mankind, Smart discusses the nature of religion and describes the formulations and cultural manifestations of the variety of religious experiences from the days of our earliest evidence on through the present writings. There is a great wealth of material in this book, and it will be of significant help to most undergraduate students of comparative religion. The comprehensive nature of the work makes complete evaluation an impossible task, and so this reviewer will make a general evaluation of each chapter and indicate what he sees as assets and deficiencies in terms of the particular elements. The book is an overly 784 BOOK REVIEWS ambitious project, one that simply cannot live up to the promise of its title. The stronger parts are those dealing with ancient themes and perspectives, the weaker are those parts dealing with medieval and contemporary areas. The first chapter is a discussion of the nature of religion. The author maintains that the study of religion can be a scientific discipline by reason of the many technological advances both in research and communication. Smart recognizes difficulties " in our appreciating fully the content and quality of prophetic, mystical, and other forms of religious experience," but maintains that " there is a sense in which we can deal with them objectively." One problem here is the choosing of what to include in the reports of such experience. This reviewer agrees with Smart that Paul's " shattering experience in the Damascus Road " is germain to a " proper account of Paul's apostolate," but other reports are not so clearly authentic in terms of what is included or omitted. For example, the early imprisonment (?) of Thomas Aquinas is included, whereas the acceptance of Christianity by the father of Karl Marx is omitted. In his discussion of religion the author presents 5ix dimensions: ritual, mythology, doctrine, ethics, the social, and the experiential. These elements do present a good framework for a comparison of religious differences. "Prehistoric and Primitive Religions " is the title of the second chapter. This is a good report on historical material, but the interpretive elements are sources of dissatisfaction. Freud seems to have been rather arbitrarily introduced and even more arbitrarily dismissed, whereas Jung is not even mentioned. Tyler, Schmidt, and Fraser are cited in the discussion about the origins of religion, but Albright is ignored even though his From The Stone Age To Christianity is the first book listed by the author in his bibliography for the sixth chapter. Chapter Three, " The Indian Experience...