hygienic measures, mental regimen, superstitious objects or practices, shrines, religious acts, philosophical beliefs, divine persons, and metaphysical principles. These and many other things have therapeutic reality.

Inasmuch, however, as there are grades of such reality and man's faith or the power to evoke the operation of the psychotherapeutic principles must be proportional (to some extent at least, and we may believe a very considerable one in course of time as experience tends to evaluate) to the object of his faith, and all relative or partial reality points to an absolute one, or at least an overindividual and an oversocial one, we must look further, in our discussion of reality, to see whether such a higher reality can be established and maintained. This will be our task in the following chapter.

CHAPTER VI

RELIGIOUS REALITY

VALUE, as has been shown in the previous chapter, has many grades in any particular realm of reality and varies as men vary. A man's values practically will depend much on his environment, his views of life, his culture, his disposition, his physical constitution. His philosophy may go a very short way but far enough to give him the persuasion that certain things are of value because they lead to the pursuit and possession of other things of value. He sees that some things maintain themselves; that by careful thought supported by provident conduct, certain ideals continue and become capable of control; that out of the accidents of life and out of a world at odds, he can make a new world, where, at least, some established order reigns. Does not the savage with his charms and incantations do this as well as the philosopher? The former may need to revise his beliefs, knowledge, and practice more and oftener than the latter but, from the fact that he succeeds in his ventures in his restricted life and as a tribe, maintains himself if he is not overborne by conquerors who seek to impose upon him values which he does not appreciate and in his heart scorns; but from this success and this maintenance, we repeat, we see the validity of the reality to which he clings. Psychotherapy among primitive peoples has great reach and power.

We may ask, therefore, whether a crude superstition and a strong belief, though ignorant, will not heal as well as a full-reasoned philosophic or intelligent religious belief, or, if we may state the case between a psychotherapeutic treatment which lays no claim whatever to religious character and which, in fact, in some cases, entirely repudiates the truth and power of religion on the one hand, and a psychotherapy based on religious belief on the other hand, which is of greater advantage in promoting the return to normal conditions? What kind of reality or by what approach to reality can we best secure the operation of our psychotherapeutic principles? In the light of our discussion, what can be said of Jesus' healing? Is there justification for the spread of religious healing, or should the practice of psychotherapy be limited to scientifically trained men? These are some of the questions that arise with or grow out of our discussion of religious reality, and to these questions it is proposed to give answer.

Before proceeding to answer such questions, however, let us critically examine value from the religious point of view.

There are different methods of approach to the subject of religious reality as will be seen from the statements of those who have made careful study of it.

Professor S. Alexander of the University of Manchester, in the Hibbert Journal, October, 1904, "Mind in the Universe," makes the religious idea of the world, the response which the mind sets up when the actual world as a whole operates on us through feeling, revealing itself in this indirect way. The developed sentiment of religion finds its object in the conservation of values. God is revealed to man not directly through the senses, nor discovered in the first instance by reflection, but as

the object of a sentiment which demonstrates its justice by the persistence of its object. All values conserved are contained in God. The teachers of religions are those who through religious genius are more sensitive than other men to this reality. And directed by their instinct to God they describe Him in virtue of their insight in terms of his relation to man's moral affairs and nature. Once discovered by religion, we may take this object and go on to discern its relation to the objects of science and recognize it as whatever in nature or in Mind or in those higher phases of existence, for which we must leave room for permanence, reproduces itself and establishes itself. Man's dependence upon God and his worship of Him is part of man's own contribution to the conservation of values.

According to Urban, religious construction of value, like the æsthetic, is concerned with the projection of social worth into ideal personalities; but the demand that religion makes for a completely overindividual object is from the point of view of valuation not borne out. All that can be allowed is that "the personal and impersonal values fuse in an intrinsic value which, as immediate, is over personal and oversocial in its meaning.” “But still it remains a personal value in the sense that it is only as a practical absolute, as the limit of a series of personal experiences, that it has axiological meaning and validity." "Experience has shown the remarkable power of religious beliefs to recuperate and readjust themselves, and from this vitality we may probably infer that, until the values of men themselves change, the value judgments of religion need fear nothing from the appearance of new judgments of fact and truth."

Coe on Religious Value emphasizes its double character, viz. its immanence in and partial identity with all values, and its transcendence of them as their ideal unity and consummation. Thus are afforded two opposed notions of religious value, one of which represents

it as merely transcendent of other values, the other as merely immanent in them. On the one hand religion is said to deal with the spiritual rather than the temporal, or with reality as distinguished from phenomena, or with unity as distinguished from multiplicity. On the other hand there is a tendency to identify religion with the æsthetic or ethical or intellectual life. He concludes: "Any kind of value may be a religious value, but only on condition of a certain inner selftranscendence whereby the particular value demands complete organization of itself with other values and ideally complete realization of the unitary whole. This implies the conservation of values, but only through the conservation of personalities. It implies also completeness of social value in an ideal social being who satisfies, on the one hand, our desire to be completely understood and, on the other hand, our impulse to give ourselves in utter devotion to an object completely worthy of such ethical love." Religious value "is ethical value itself in its ideal completion and in union with all other values similarly ideal and complete." The sphere of religious life is social life, and it differs from ethical value in that ethics of itself "takes into purview only a part of the social ideal that religion accepts."

Professor Tawney, in his article "Kinds of Value or Consistency," Psychological Bulletin, Oct. 15, 1909, says:

"Religious value is neither identical with other values nor is it merely more of the same kind as either or all of these. It is neither constitutive nor demanded of the world. Religious value is purposive without being deliberately so, and in this sense it is true that religion means the conservation of all values, as Höffding says. Esthetic and economic values are also purposive, but religion has to do primarily with the purposive aspect of the entire life of purpose and conation.