public practise is distinguished from private (Ch. V.). “Because these ceremonials are social,” Ames says, “and therefore have the massive and corporate value of the entire community consciousness … they attain the distinctive character which entitles them to be called religious” (p. 72). It would be rash to assert without further discussion that Ames gains all his contentions on these hotly disputed points.[1] The present writer is not qualified to pronounce on many of these moot questions, and seeks simply to point out how far Mr. Ames falls short, even granting his premises, from establishing his conclusion.
On its positive side, this conclusion is, to be sure, so vague that it is almost beyond the range of criticism. Religion is defined as “the consciousness of the highest social values” (p. 168), “a reflection of the most important group interests” (pp. 49, 50; cf. p. 72), “a system for the controlling of the group with reference to the ends which are felt most acutely by the group as a group” (p. 72). Negatively, however, the teaching of Ames gains precision through his opposition to the spiritistic, or personalistic, doctrine that religion consists in man’s awareness of gods or of God. But the view that religious ceremonial is social in origin and in content, so far from disproving the doctrine that religion is conscious relation of human to divine, is perfectly compatible with it. One may admit without a quaver Ames’s account of taboo, of magic, even of prayer, and still hold that the religious consciousness arises out of purely human, social intercourse only when this collective “group consciousness” gains as its object a self conceived as superhuman. Against such a construction Ames would, of course, interpose the considerations by which he seeks to discredit intellectualistic conceptions of religion. The rationalistic view of religion is, he holds, untrue to history and to psychology alike. Primitive man is not “clearly conscious of himself as a spiritual agent or soul” (p. 95); “the notion of the soul does not precede the idea of objects” (p. 96); even the philosopher only “gradually attains a dim, partially organized sense of personality” (p. 972). Ames concludes that because the sense of personality is dim, it plays no rôle in the religious consciousness, and that if it is gained late in racial and in individual experience, the religious consciousness, admitted to be primitive, can not be limited to a personal object. Accordingly, he conceives a spirit as “an object which strikes the attention forcibly” (p. 106); describes the gods of primitive peoples as “central objects in the life processes of man” (p. 311); and says vaguely that “the idea of God serves to generalize
- ↑ Cf., for the opposing view, Wundt, “Völkerpsychologie,” zweiter Band, “Mythus und Religion,” dritter Teil, pp. 690 ff., et al.
