The Psychology Of Religious Belief

Book Summary

The publisher of this book utilises modern printing technologies as well as photocopying processes for reprinting and preserving rare works of literature that are out-of-print or on the verge of becoming lost. This book is one such reprint. General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1908 Original Publisher: The Macmillan company Subjects: Psychology, Religious Mysticism Faith Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHAPTER IV RELIGIOUS BELIEF IN INDIA Although the aim of this book is to discover the form and basis of religious belief rather than its content, it will be necessary to pay considerable attention to the latter if we are to understand the former; it being impossible to discuss intelligently the question why man believes without taking into consideration what he believes. This will be particularly manifest in our treatment of the religions of India and Israel. In each of these religions we shall have to take up in some detail the content of the belief in order to understand its form and the psychological forces at work in its development. Little need be said of the Religion of Primitive Credulity in India. In all races this form of belief is essentially the same. As every one knows, the authority of ancestral tradition has always been one of the dominant forces in the popular religions of the Hindus. What I have said in another connection concerning the nature of this phase of belief is applicable here, so that all I need do is to point out thenature of the gods that were correlative to this type of faith and to trace the gradual decline of the Religion of Primitive Credulity before the advance of the Religion of Thought. This decline is betokened in a general way by the change in the nature of the gods; for although primitive credulity, of course, still plays an important part hi belief even when the gods have ceased to be visible and concrete and have become distant, unseen, and abstract, the change is a sig...

Book Details