Category: Psychiatry/Psychology
Accepting Professor Tylor's famous minimum definition of religion as "the belief in Spiritual Beings," it is safe to say that religious belief constitutes one of the largest facts in human history. No other single subject has occupied so large a share of man's conscious life,...
Accepting Professor Tylor's famous minimum definition of religion as "the belief in Spiritual Beings," it is safe to say that religious belief constitutes one of the largest fac...
2. Chapter 2Ever since the time of Aristotle it has been an accepted truth that man is a social animal. Not only is individual human nature such that it craves for intercourse with its kind...
3. Chapter 3"It is an interesting problem," says Professor J. H. Leuba, "to determine what influences have led theologians to anchor their beliefs upon the proposition that religious experi...
4. Chapter 45. Chapter 5The connection between sexual feeling and religious belief is ancient, intimate, and sustained. It has impressed itself on many observers who have approached the subject from wi...
6. Chapter 6In the preceding chapter we have been concerned with the various ways in which the phenomena attendant on the sexual life of man and woman become associated with religious belie...
7. Chapter 7It should hardly need pointing out that the facts presented in the last chapter are not offered as an attempt at the--to use Professor William James's expression--"reinterpretat...
8. Chapter 8From what has been already said, it should be clear that a complete understanding of religious phenomena--whether legitimately or wrongly so called--involves acquaintance with a...
9. Chapter 9Under pressure of scientific analysis the old distinction between the individual and society bids fair to break down, or to maintain itself as no more than a convenience of clas...
10. Chapter 10It is not easy to overestimate the influence of monasticism on subsequent religious history. The lives of its votaries provided examples of almost every conceivable kind of self...
11. Chapter 11In all stages of religious history the witch and the wizard are familiar figures. It is of no importance to our present enquiry whether magic precedes religion or not. It is at...
12. Chapter 12that doubt of these do not only deny them, but spirits; and are obliquely and upon consequence, a sort, not of infidels, but atheists."[197] Henry More, the great Platonist, ass...
13. Chapter 13The study of religion falls naturally and easily into two parts. The first is a question of origin. Under what conditions did the hypothesis that supernatural beings control the...