implicated: love springs from its own source, the human heart, and runs
its own course. Taboo may have existed from the beginning; but to the
end, whatever its form--duty, obligation, obedience to authority--it
remains in character what it was at first, prohibitive, negative. Love
alone is creative: without it 'was not anything made that was made'.
There seems, therefore, no necessity to regard the 'pre-formation'
theory of evolution, rather than the 'dispersive theory, as essential to
Positivism.
Common to all the views about the evolution of religion that have been
mentioned in this paper is the belief that, the more religion changes,
the more it remains the same thing. If identified with duty, then duty
it was in the beginning, and duty it will remain to the end. For those
who conceive it to be merely magic, magic it was and magic it remains.
Those who define it as belief in a god and communion with him find that
belief in the earliest as well as the latest stages. All would agree in
rejecting Bergson's view of evolution--that in evolution there is
change, but nothing which changes. All would agree that in the evolution
of religion there is something which, change though it may, remains the
same thing, and that is religion itself. But on the question what
religion is, there is no agreement: no definition of religion as
yet--and there have been many attempts to define it--has gained general
acceptance. We may even surmise, and admit, that no attempt ever will be
successful. Such admission, indeed, may at first to some seem equivalent
to admitting that religion is a nullity, and the admission may
accordingly be welcomed or rejected. But a moment's reflection will show
that the admission has no such consequence. None of our simple feelings
can be defined: pleasure and pain can neither be defined; nor, when
experienced, doubted. And some of our general terms, those at any rate
which are ultimate, are beyond our power either to define or doubt: no
one imagines that 'life' can be defined, but no one doubts its
existence. And religion both as a term and as a fact of experience is
ultimate, and, because ultimate, incapable of definition. It is not to
be defined but only to be felt. It is an affair not merely of the
intellect, but still more of the heart.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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