CHAPTER III

THE ELEMENTS IN THE NUMINOUS

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Creature-Feeling.

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THE reader is invited to direct his mind to a moment of

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deeply-felt religious experience, as little as possible qualified

by other forms of consciousness. Whoever cannot do this,

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whoever knows no such moments in his experience, is requested

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to read no further for it is not easy to discuss questions of
;

religious psychology with one who can recollect the emotions

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of his adolescence, the discomforts of indigestion, or, say, social

feelings,but cannot recall any intrinsically religious feelings.

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We do not blame such an one, when he tries for himself to

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advance as far as he can with the help of such principles of

explanation as he knows, interpreting Aesthetics in terms of
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sensuous pleasure, and Religion as a function of the gre

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garious instinct and social standards, or as something more

But the artist, who for his part has an intimate
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primitive still.

personal knowledge of the distinctive element in the aesthetic

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experience, will decline his theories with thanks, and the

man will reject them even more uncompromisingly.
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religious
Next, in the probing and analysis of such states of the soul
as that of solemn worship, it will be well if regard be paid to
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what is unique in them rather than to what they have in

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common with other similar states. To be rapt in worship is

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one thing; to be morally uplifted by the contemplation of

a good deed is another and it is not to their common features,
;

but to those elements of emotional content peculiar to the first

thatwe would have attention directed as precisely as possible.

As Christians we undoubtedly here first meet with feelings
familiar enough in a weaker form in other departments of

experience, such as feelings of gratitude, trust, love, reliance,

humble submission, and dedication. But this does not by any
 THE ELEMENTS IN THE NUMINOUS 9

means exhaust the content of religious worship. Not in any

of these have got the we
special features of the quite unique
and incomparable experience of solemn worship. In what does
this consist 1

Schleiermacher has the credit of isolating a very important

element in such an experience. This is the feeling of de- .

pendence . But important discovery of Schleiermacher

this

open to criticism in more than one respect.

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is

In the first place, the feeling or emotion which he really

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has in mind in this phrase is in its specific quality not a feel
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ing of dependence in the natural sense of the word. As
such, other domains of life and other regions of experience

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than the religious occasion the feeling, as a sense of personal

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insufficiencyand impotence, a consciousness of being determined
by circumstances and environment. The feeling of which
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Schleiermacher wrote has an undeniable analogy with these
states of mind they serve as an indication to it, and its nature
:
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may be elucidated by them, so that, by following the direction

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in which they point, the feeling itself may be spontaneously

felt. But the feeling is at the same time also qualitatively
different from such analogous states of mind. Schleiermacher
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himself, in a way, recognizes this by distinguishing the feeling

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of pious or religious dependence from all other feelings of

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dependence. His mistake is in making the distinction merely

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that between absolute and relative dependence, and there

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fore a difference of degree and not of intrinsic quality. What

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he overlooks is that, in giving the feeling the name feeling of

dependence at all, we are really employing what is no more
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than a very close analogy. Any one who compares and con
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trasts the two states mind irrespectively will find out,

of
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I think, what I mean. It cannot be expressed by means of any

thing else, just because it is so primary and elementary a datum

in our psychical life, and therefore only definable through itself.
It may perhaps help him if I cite a well-known example, in
which the precise moment or element of religious feeling of
which we are speaking is most actively present. When
Abraham ventures to plead with God for the men of Sodom,
he says (Genesis xviii. 27) : Behold now, I have taken upon
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me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes.

There you have a self-confessed feeling of dependence which ,

is yet at the same time far more than, and

something other than,
merely a feeling of dependence. Desiring to give it a name of
its own, I propose to call it creature-consciousness or creature-

feeling. It is the emotion of a creature, abased and overwhelmed

by its own nothingness in contrast to that which is supreme

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above all creatures.
It is easily seen that, once again, this phrase, whatever it is,

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isnot a conceptual explanation of the matter. All that this

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new term, creature-feeling can express, is the note of self-
,

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abasement into nothingness before an overpowering, absolute

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might of some kind whereas everything turns upon the
;

character of this overpowering might, a character which

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cannot be expressed verbally, and can only be suggested
indirectly through the tone and content of a man s feeling-
And this response must be directly experienced
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response to it.

in oneself to be understood.
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We have now to note a second defect in the formulation of

Schleiermachers principle. The religious category discovered
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by him, by whose means he professes to determine the real

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content of the religious emotion, is merely a category of self-

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valuation, in the sense of self-depreciation. According to him

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the religious emotion would be directly and primarily a sort

of se//-consciousness, a feeling concerning one s self in a special,
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determined relation, viz. one s dependence. Thus, according

to Schleiermacher, I can only come upon the very fact of God
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as the result of an inference, that is, by reasoning to a cause

beyond myself to account for my feeling of dependence

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But this is entirely opposed to the psychological facts of the

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case. Rather, the creature-feeling is itself a first subjective

concomitant and effect of another feeling-element, which casts
it like a shadow, but which in itself indubitably has immediate
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and primary reference to an object outside the self.

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This so manifestly borne out by experience that it must be about
is

the firstthing to force itself upon the notice of psychologists analysing

the facts of religion. There is a certain naivete in the following
passage from William James s Varieties of Religious Experience (p. 58),
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Now this object is just what we have already spoken of as

the numinous For the creature-feeling and the sense of
.

dependence to arise in the mind the numen must be

experienced as present, a numen praesens,
as in the case of
Abraham. There must be felt a something numinous ,

O the character of a numen

^ bearing
something to which the ,

mind turns spontaneously or (which is the same thing in

;

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other words) these feelings can only arise in the mind as
accompanying emotions when the category of the numinous

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is called into play.

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The numinous is thus felt as objective and outside the self.
We have now to inquire more closely into its nature and the

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modes of its manifestation.

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where, alluding to the origin of the Grecian representations of the gods,
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he says As regards the origin of the Greek gods, we need not at pre
:

sent seek an opinion. But the whole array of our instances leads to a
conclusion something like this: It is as if there were in the human con
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sciousness a sense of reality, a feelimj of objective presence, a perception of

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what we may call something there", more deep and more general than
"

any of the special and particular senses" by which the current psycho
"

logy supposes existent realities to be originally revealed. (The italics

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are James s own.) James is debarred by his empiricist and pragmatist

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stand-point from coming to a recognition of faculties of knowledge and

potentialities of thought in the spirit itself, and he is therefore obliged
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to have recourse to somewhat singular and mysterious hypotheses to

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explain this fact. But he grasps the fact itself clearly enough and is
-

sufficient of a realist not to explain it away. But this feeling of reality ,

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the feeling of a numinous object objectively given, must be posited as

a primary immediate datum of consciousness, and the feeling of depen
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dence is then a consequence, following very closely upon it, viz. a

depreciation of the subject in his own eyes. The latter presupposes the
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former,
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