The psychology of religious belief / [James Bissett Pratt].

  • Pratt, James Bissett, 1875-1944.
Date:
1907
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The psychology of religious belief / [James Bissett Pratt]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    tion and refuses to be sorted and labelled and dock¬ eted in any cunningly devised system of pigeon¬ holes. “Nor are the things that are in one universe divided or cut off from one another with a hatchet.” 1 Life, the real world of our immediate experience, is a very different thing from any account of it; and a description which should be perfectly true in the sense of distorting and exaggerating nothing and leaving out nothing, would simply give us life back again, with no clearer insight into its elements and their rela¬ tive importance than we had before. This, for ex¬ ample, is what Shakespeare does for us, who is of all poets the closest to reality just because he is the least analytic. Any investigation which, like the present one, seeks to analyze a portion of reality into its essential parts, in order to make its more important aspects capable of being grasped by the intellect, must, at the start, lay aside all pretensions to presenting the world as it really is in immediate experience. It must plead guilty to the spirit’s indictment in Faust, “Thou hast destroyed the beautiful world.” But it does so only that it may thereby attempt to obey the behest of the same spirit, “ In thine own bosom build it again, mightier and more beautiful.” For our in¬ terests, as intelligent beings, are by no means confined to the immediate and primary experience, but dwell rather in a region made anew by our theoretical powers, a world of distinctions, defi- 1 Anaxagoras, fragment 13.