Among the wonders of our world which custom does not stale is the power so conspicuously operating in the lower creatures to which we give the name of instinct. The marvel is that animals, birds, fishes, and not least insects, while so glaringly inferior to the rational and ethical subject, and seemingly existing for his uses, nevertheless do things in so skilful and prudent a fashion as often to leave man with the impression that by comparison with them he is a groper and a bungler. In olden times this was so keenly felt that species of animals were worshipped as the most palpably sacred objects; and when Totemism decayed, such creatures as the lion, the bull, the eagle and the serpent retained their position as the best available symbols of the power and the wisdom, if not of the beneficence, of the Divine Being. In recent times the wonders of instinct have been realised afresh, and have been found equally interesting by the biologist, the psychologist, the metaphysician and the theologian. There has been much patient study of the operation of instinct in the works of bees and ants and of the higher mammals, followed by much discussion of how the useful attribute was evolved. Psychology has distinguished and analysed the instincts, arranged them in elaborate classifications, and investigated their function in the behaviour of individuals and of social groups. Philosophy has been constitutionally disposed to distrust and despise instinct as inimical to rational thinking no less than to ethical conduct, but in the recent reaction against intellectualism this prejudice has been challenged. Theology was accustomed to cite instinct as giving evidence of a divine power and wisdom, and has seen in newer developments of the doctrine some additional sanctions for religious faith. In this chapter, after an introductory view of the subject, we shall discuss the four instincts to which religion has most strongly and constantly appealed, and examine the case for the existence of a specifically religious instinct; and thereafter we shall touch on the metaphysical implications of the phenomenon.

I

It is agreed that there are natural tendencies which are to be called instincts, and that there is a mode of behaviour which is to be called instinctive, but there is much difference of opinion as to the precise meaning of the terms.1 At the outset of his discussion of the subject, Dr. M’Dougall remarks on the hopeless laxity with which the terms are used, ‘even by cultured authors, with the effect of disguising from the writer the obscurity and incoherence of his thought.’2 It might, however, be retorted by the average person that when he spoke of instinct, he had in mind a traditional doctrine which had been carefully worked out and was easy to understand, and that he did not find that the psychologist and the biologist had replaced this by another doctrine which was equally definite and intelligible, and which they were at one in commending for popular acceptance. In the older period instinct was usually contrasted with reason, and that in regard to the manner of its working and its sphere of influence. Instinctive behaviour, in the first place, had the three notes of blindness, mechanical necessity and unerring efficiency. It was blind—the agent having no prevision of an end or any purpose of attaining it. It was impelled by a mechanical necessity which in its rigidity served as a foil to the plasticity that is shown in the contrivances and the experiments of the reasoning intelligence. And it worked with unerring efficiency in the interests of the individual and especially of the species—avoiding the failures which so often attend on the ventures of the consciously purposive intelligence. Further, instinct was supposed to be the principle of action in the animals, while reason was the monopoly of man as the crown of the terrestrial creation. But this scheme of doctrine has been rudely shaken and largely disintegrated. While for James it was one of the essential moments of the definition that it is ‘the faculty of acting in such a way as to produce certain ends without foresight of the ends,’3 M’Dougall emphasises that instinctive action can be accompanied by ‘awareness of the end towards which it tends.’4 The two other specified notes, it is said, have been much exaggerated. ‘Exact observations on animals,’ says Rivers, ‘have shown that their reactions to their surroundings have not the rigid and mechanical character which was once ascribed to them. Not only do failures occur in the adjustment of action to circumstance, but when those failures occur, or when the conditions are such as would lead to failure if the reactions took their ordinary form, animal behaviour has been found to be capable of modification.’ The conclusion was also reached that the animals have a large share of intelligence, and that man, popularly conceived as the rational animal, is largely under the dominion of instinct. ‘On the one hand,’ says Rivers, ‘it has been found that the behaviour of animals shows many features, such as adaptability to unusual conditions, which can only be explained by qualities of the same order as those belonging to intelligence. On the other hand, we have learnt that the behaviour of mark is far less subject to reason and intelligence than was supposed, and that his reactions to circumstance are often with difficulty to be distinguished from the behaviour of the unreasoning brutes.’5 ‘While there are still great differences of opinion,’ says Dr. M’Dougall, ‘as to the place of instinct in the human mind, the view propounded by Schneider and James has rapidly gained ground that man has at least as many instincts as the animals, and that they have a leading part in determining human conduct and mental process.’6 ‘On the old view,’ says Dr. Drever, ‘the chief psychological problem of human behaviour came to be to explain how it was possible for men sometimes to act unreasonably. The true psychological problem is to explain how they ever came to act reasonably.’7

Of the issues thus raised the most important from the present point of view are the question as to the nature of instinct, and the range of its influence over men. As regards the former, it may be thought that some recent writers have blurred the characteristics of instinct, and that there remains a distinction between instinct and reason which was more justly appreciated by common sense. The difference between instinct and reason is sometimes reduced to the circumstance that one is innate and the other acquired. ‘If an animal or man,’ says Rivers, ‘behaves in a certain way which is quite independent of any experience it can have acquired in its individual existence, the behaviour is regarded as purely instinctive. If on the other hand it were possible to say that the behaviour of an animal or man was wholly determined by the experience of the individual, we should say that the behaviour of the animal or man was purely intelligent. Since, however, it is impossible to exclude innate factors, all that we can do is to recognise as intelligent those components of behaviour which can be ascribed to individual experience.’8 Yet surely there is more in the antithesis of instinct and intelligence than the antithesis of nature and nurture. Experience contributes matter for intelligence to work on, and promotes its development, but intelligence is an independent principle. Rivers’s definition is so wide that it would require us to say that a horse which had been broken in was intelligent though it might be a very stupid horse, and even that an apple-tree became intelligent when it had been pruned and trained to a garden wall, inasmuch as ‘components of its behaviour’ were to be ascribed to its individual experience. Before a child is credited with intelligence something more is required than that its natural propensities have been modified by an education in the home and the school. The additional element surely consists in a mobility and resourcefulness which, in contrast with the repetition of actions that have been learned, are shown by looking at and doing things in new ways. This vital point of contrast was lucidly stated by Dr. Lloyd Morgan: ‘Novelty of the adjustment,’ he has said, ‘and the individuality displayed in these adjustments, seem to be the essential features of intelligent activities. The ability to perform acts in special adaptation to special circumstances, the power of exercising individual choice between contradictory promptings, and the individuality or originality manifested in dealing with the complex conditions of an ever-changing environment—these seem to be the distinctive features of intelligence. On the other hand, in instinctive actions there seems to be no choice; the organism is impelled to their performance through impulse as by a stern necessity; they are so far from novel that they are performed by every individual of the species, and have been so performed by their ancestors for generations; and, in performing the instinctive action, the animal seems to have no more individuality or originality than a piece of adequately wound clockwork.’9

For the purposes of our discussion we may accept the general account of the nature of instinct given by M’Dougall, with which Drever substantially agrees. He defines it as ‘an inherited or innate psychophysical disposition which determines its possessor to perceive, and to pay attention to, objects of a certain class, to experience an emotional excitement of a certain quality upon perceiving such an object, and to act in regard to it in a particular manner, or at least to experience an impulse to such action.’10 This definition lays stress on the notes of innateness and mechanical determination, and it has also the merit of giving due prominence to the psychological as compared with the biological aspect of instinct, and of doing justice to the combination and inter-relation of the cognitive and the affective with the conative elements. As regards the rôle of instinct in man there are good grounds for saying that the newer psychological school is in the right in declaring that ‘man has at least as many instincts as the animals,’ and in magnifying the importance of the part which they play in every department of the individual and the collective life. Man is the rational animal, but he is so described in terms of his destiny rather than of his actual condition. Those who desire to get a doctrine believed, or to procure support for a good cause, must also know how to make the truth appear to be true and the cause appear to be good, and this implies the winning of sympathy and the raising of reinforcements from the instinctive elements of the human constitution. Politicians have their principles which they believe to be rational and salutary, but it is difficult to win a General Election unless these principles are set forth in concrete applications which make an arresting appeal—it may be to the danger-instinct, or the tendency to repose, or the instinct of pugnacity, or the constructive instinct, or the acquisitive instinct. And even then the decisive factor may prove to be the feeling that time about is fair play. That individuals, and not least the crowd and the community, are to be managed through their instincts, has been known from of old to kings and statesmen, propagandists and organisers, and also to those who have held the mirror up to human nature in the epic, the drama and the novel. The state of the case was specially appreciated by the great orators of antiquity, and by the thinkers who developed the Art of Rhetoric—which latter consists to a large extent in a study of the instincts, and of the methods by which they may be stimulated and directed. And while many have consciously explored and exploited the field, it is as if religion had utilised, though without calculated effort, the same psychological knowledge; for it has been able to play upon the instincts with the hand of a master who had something to reveal to Shakespeare of the secrets of the human heart, and something to teach Aristotle and Cicero about the means of persuasion.

The catalogue of the instincts given by modern psychologists is large, and additions are constantly being made to the list. The schemes are so elaborate as to leave an impression of bewilderment, and they are at least useful for enforcing the lesson that a dominating religious or ethical principle is needed to take the situation in hand if the soul is not to become a scene of chronic strife and miserable anarchy. The instincts are usually classified according as they work in the interests of the individual or of the species, or in the interests of both. A distinction has also been drawn between the general tendencies and the specialised forms which have these as their roots. Many of the members of this large and varied body have been sensitive to the call of religion and have been impressed into its service, and there are in particular four which have responded to the call with such conspicuous eagerness and energy that they may serve to denominate as many fundamental types of religious experience.

II

Religion has made a strong and constant appeal to the general instinct which stands at the head of the self-regarding group, and which may be said to embody the self-centred spirit. This general tendency may be called the instinct of self-affirmation. It is popularly known as the instinct of self-preservation, but a wider term is needed which comprehends along with the static moment of self-protection the dynamic moment of self-expansion. On the negative side this tendency endeavours after self-preservation in the strict sense—branching out into a number of specialised instincts, which serve to protect the individual against hostile forces, and to supply it with the provision that is needed to maintain it in its existing state of being and well-being. On the positive side it strives for the aggrandisement of the self, giving rise to a second group of specialised instincts which are directed to the enhancement of the well-being of the individual and the advancement of his interests. And it may be said that the most conspicuous and constant feature in the history of religion, especially as presented to and apprehended by the masses of humanity, has been the way in which the religious message has awakened this general self-regarding instinct and engaged its sympathy and support. The religious forms in which this spirit has been predominant constitute the salvation-type of experience.

1. (a) The self-regarding tendency is most prominently represented on the negative or the defensive side by the danger-instinct. This is stimulated by sights and sounds, especially the unfamiliar, which threaten injury. The attendant emotion is fear. The reaction may take the form of escaping from the danger by flight or concealment, or by resort to Immobility (which is also a way of concealment), or by positive methods of frustration. Fear has entered deeply into religion, and that in two ways: it has been inspired by the divine object in whose existence the worshipper has believed, and it has been inspired by the cloud of menaces and terrors which hangs over the life of man, and which has impelled him to seek the protection of higher powers. Fear inspired by the religious object is the prevailing feeling under Animism and Polydaemonism. At the polytheistic stage the popular cult has not seldom been that which was directed to the propitiation of the most hideous and malignant divinities. In the Old Testament the name for religion is the fear of the Lord. The Christian religion also contains many things that have struck terror into the human heart—God in His unutterable majesty and in His wrath against sin, the principalities and powers of darkness, the vision of the Day of Judgment, the punishments of Purgatory and Hell, and the spiritual hell of the sin-possessed and God-forsaken soul. On the other hand religion was welcomed by man as a means of vanquishing the terrors that are bound up with the general conditions of his terrestrial existence. In this world man finds himself in a situation in which he is constantly threatened with loss, injury and even destruction by manifold forces that are beyond his control—by nature in its violent or grudging moods of fire, flood and tempest, of drought and famine, by ravening beasts and lurking serpents, by the power and cunning of human foes, by sickness and disease, and by the inevitable stroke and catastrophe of death. The human being is, in fact, like a hunted creature, pursued by a host of enemies that would despoil him of all that he holds dear—friends and kin, goods and gear, honour and power, the gains of mind and soul, yea and his own life also. And it is a just observation that man in religion has hoped to supplement the means which nature placed at his disposal for coping with the particular problems of the grim situation by casting himself on the protection of a being or beings clothed with a greater power than the menacing and wasting forces, and which can be depended on to put forth their power for the conservation of all the possessions which he values and loves, or at least of those which have a good title to be saved from destruction. While man has by nature a fear of God, he has an even greater fear of the world and of its power to hurt, and this has thrown him into the arms of God—even as a bird, when hard pressed by an enemy, is observed to overcome its natural dread of man, and to turn to him for protection against the more aggressive and dangerous foe. Dr. M’Dougall has raised the question, ‘to what extent the lapse from orthodox religious observances is due to the general softening of religious teaching, to the lapse of the doctrine of divine retribution to a very secondary position, and to the discredit into which the flames of Hell have fallen.’11 He is right in connecting the two observations, and the pulpit may be to blame for not making it clearer that, apart from an eternal Hell, there are terrors enough in life and in the harvest to which it ripens.

These two forms of fear, now, have been accompanied in religion by the same forms of reaction which are familiar in other fields. When the object of fear has been the Divine Being itself, there has been an endeavour to escape by flight—as exemplified by the prohibition to touch sacred objects, or the warning to flee from the presence of God; to escape by concealment—as in resort to sacrifice for the purpose of ‘covering’ the guilty person or his guilt; above all, to escape by the method of frustration as in the animistic policy of outwitting and baffling the ghosts and demons, or in the widespread employment of sacrifice as a means of placating an incensed Deity and transforming him into a friend. When the dreaded object—the more normal presupposition—has been the world and its manifold powers of danger and destruction, the measures taken have followed the same lines of reaction. God has been welcomed as ‘a refuge from the storm and a covert from the tempest,’ or as a deliverer who hides the fugitive ‘in the secret of his pavilion.’ At the highest the divine power has been confidently relied on as able to confound the counsels and to frustrate the assaults of every hostile power, whether things present or things to come, which threatens the soul with bondage, impoverishment and suffering, or with any other evils that are the elements or harbingers of death.

There is a rest-instinct which works towards a similar result. Sleep is included by Drever among the specific ‘appetite tendencies,’12 and there is undoubtedly an impulse towards repose which asserts itself in many diverse spheres of experience. It has affinities with the instinct of self-protection. In the religious sphere deliverance from danger, whether as the result of flight or of frustration, is often described in terms of rest or repose. There may be such a sense of the oppressiveness of life—with its burden of heavy and monotonous toil, its thronging cares and anxieties, its clamorous wants, above all with the chronic and humiliating solicitations to evil that come from the side of the world and the flesh—that it may seem that there is nothing better for a man than that he should take the wings of a dove, and fly away and be at rest. This mood is common in Indian religion, which showed favour towards the opinion which is perhaps commoner than is supposed, that the best hours out of the twenty-four are those in which a man escapes from labour and sorrow into a dreamless sleep, and that nothing better could befall a man than that there should be no awakening on the morrow. In all types of New Testament doctrine the sovereign good can be spoken of on occasion as peace or rest—which is to be possessed amid the shocks of life and the tempests of time, and which will be consummated in the perfected bliss of a personal immortality.

(b) It has been said that the general tendency of self-affirmation also branches out into the specialised instinct of self-expansion, and religion has promised no less satisfaction to the positive than to the negative aspiration. Höffding was clearly wrong in supposing that the function of religion was merely an endeavour after ‘the conservation of values.’ Man is usually at least equally bent on the augmentation of his values, and he has been equally confident that in his religion he possessed a provision which ensured that his desire would be fulfilled. The savage relies on spirits or demons, not merely to ward off injury, but to help him to smite and to despoil his enemies; at the stage of national religion prayers are offered, not merely for immunity from calamity, but for the increase of the power, the prosperity, and the well-being of a people; and the preacher who proclaims the Christian gospel relies on it, not merely to save individual souls from forfeiting the spiritual values which they already possess—which values he may deem very inconsiderable—but to bring new and higher values into existence in their souls in the form of faith, repentance and new obedience. The truth is that religion has appealed with extraordinary force to the instinct of self-expansion, and has also fostered and developed it by opening to it new worlds in which it could take a vastly wider sweep and also make the boldest demands on eternity. It has in fact seemed to man, as he has gazed upon the divine, that in union and alliance with God he might not merely procure certain improvements of his natural condition, but that he might attain to the possession and enjoyment of all that enters into the noblest conception of the chief end of his being and the perfection of his condition. It is true that at different periods and at different levels of culture, human opinion has varied widely as to the nature of the possessions that are supremely valuable and that make up a salvation; but it has at least been the common belief that by the help of a divine power he is destined to come into possession of the best that he is capable of possessing, and of becoming the best that he is capable of becoming; and it would be the deepest tragedy of history if it should turn out that this hope was shattered on the forces and the laws of a soulless universe, and discredited by the facts of a more prolonged racial experience. The instinct of self-expansion, when reacting to the stimuli of the everyday world, makes use of a variety of means adapted to secure its ends, and these means have religious counterparts in the provision that has been employed for cultivating the mystic intercourse with the divine. It has been a chief function of religion to make known the conditions under which the God-given salvation is bestowed, and along with this it has opened a way of access through worship to the divine presence, and has provided means of grace to create or cement the divine relationship that is the foundation of man’s all-conquering desires and all-embracing hopes.

(c) The general instinct of self-affirmation has as one of its special forms or modes of expression the tendency to self-elevation. This figures in M’Dougall’s list as the instinct of self-assertion or self-display, with the accompanying emotion of positive self-feeling. It is a restless and avid instinct which has given infinite trouble to spiritual religion, though it has also received from it unexpected satisfactions. The instinct is that which has its physical symbols in the expanded chest, the erect form, and the firm and confident step. On the psychological side it takes the form of self-admiration, attended by a joyful emotion and also by a proneness to aggressiveness and choler. ‘As derived or diverse aspects of this emotion,’ says Ribot, ‘we find pride, vanity, contempt, the love of glory, ambition, emulation, courage, audacity, boldness.’13 The tendency to self-assertion is the root of many forms of anti-social and unethical conduct, and also of impiety towards God, while it is also a fruitful source of disappointments and mortifications in a world that is very far from being disposed to honour the individual in accordance with his own estimate; and it has therefore been an important part of the message of the ethical religions that the pride of the natural man is a deadly sin which has its appropriate penalty in humiliation, and that there is a self-abasement which is the condition of rising to true greatness and also of finding abiding rest of soul. On the other hand the higher religions have fostered self-elation in a spiritualised form—this being a natural consequence of the promises of a rich and enduring salvation. Since the religious man was made to feel that, in union with God, he became, in Luther’s phrase, lord of all things, it was a psychological necessity that this conviction should be accompanied by a self-consciousness that bore some resemblance to pride, and that had its own way of self-elation which St. Paul was not ashamed to speak of as glorying or boasting. Buddhism gave to the enlightened, Islam to the believer, a sense of immeasurable superiority to them that were without; their proud sense of being the chosen people enabled the children of Israel to endure, and to preserve their individuality, through the centuries when they were hammered on the anvil; Christians were described in apostolic times as ‘an elect race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession’ (1 Peter ii. 9), and in the early centuries they were wont to speak of themselves as a people which had enriched the world of Jews, Greeks, and barbarians with an aristocracy of Heaven. Within the religious community the sentiment of positive self-feeling has legitimately asserted itself as the natural accompaniment of the possession of assured truth and the attainment of an authentic religious experience, while it has also contributed to the ill repute of religiosity by its tendency to develop into the Pharisaic forms of spiritual arrogance and sectarian exclusiveness.

2. It might be maintained that there is a general impulse to self-abnegation which is the counterpart of the general instinct of self-affirmation. Psychology has, however, contented itself with the recognition of the special form of self-abnegation which is the counterpart of the instinct of self-display. This is the instinct to which M’Dougall gives the name of self-abasement or self-subjection, with the accompanying emotion of negative self-feeling. It would be convenient as well as legitimate to appropriate to it the more familiar name of humility. ‘The emotion of self-feeling in its negative form,’ says Ribot, ‘has as its base a feeling of feebleness or impotence. It betrays itself by a diminution or an arrest of movements, its mimicry is concentric, and it consists in diminishing instead of enlarging, in abasing instead of elevating. It is related on one side to sadness and on the other to fear.’14 The specific emotion is aroused by the presence of an object of uncontested superiority, and the instinctive reaction consists in tendering expressions of homage and rendering some form of obedience. When the instinct is described in elementary terms, with illustrations drawn from the animal world, it may be thought that the only course consonant with human dignity is to endeavour to extirpate it. ‘The impulse,’ says M’Dougall, ‘expresses itself in a slinking, crestfallen behaviour, a general diminution of muscular lone, slow restricted movements, a hanging down of the head and sidelong glances. In the dog the picture is completed by the sinking of the tail between the legs.’15 But this self-abasement was merely the forerunner of a spirit of humility which has found admission to every department of the higher life of mankind, and which has a justification in the circumstance that the human lot is crowded with experiences of utter subjection and dependence, and also with Impressions of the overwhelming superiority of other beings. Humility is the spirit of the virtues on which Confucius set chief store, such as filial submission and obedience, and the reverent loyalty of the subject. The instinct is awakened in ordinary persons by con-tact with men of very exceptional force of ability and weight of character. It is a potent factor in the mental equipment of the crowd, and it is characteristic of the nation that, whatever may be its political form of government, its cry is as in Israel of old, ‘We will have a king over us.’ A people is constitutionally in quest of the great man whom it may at least crown with a halo, and whom it can wholly trust and blindly follow. The moral life also is largely bound up with the awakening and quickening of the instinct of humility. It is stirred by the majesty of the moral law which creates a general disposition, apart from considerations of profit or credit, to honour it by an adequate obedience. To it also is due the remarkable influence which is possessed by those who are known, and by those who are believed, to be superlatively good. And the instinct of humility has been an important handmaid or coadjutor of religion. It has been readily stimulated by the great objects which were proposed to religious faith. In no religion have impressive objects been wholly lacking, and in the great faiths the Divinity has possessed a grandeur and an elevation, and has been invested with a commanding authority, that have evoked profound awe and reverence, and also engendered the penitential humility which makes the soul to bow under a sense of utter unworthiness before a holy God. The instinct as thus consecrated has found scope for its congenial reactions in the exercises and services of religious devotion. On the one hand the sense of the overwhelming greatness of the Divine Being has found its satisfaction in the offices of worship, in which through the reverent postures of prayer, the honorific sacrifice, and the utterances of adoration and self-dedication, man has tendered the homage felt to be the due of the Almighty. On the other hand his sense of the unspeakable greatness and majesty of God has disposed the worshipper to place himself entirely and unreservedly at the disposal of the divine will. On the negative side this takes the form of resignation—of unrepining acquiescence in all events and circumstances, however untoward and seemingly cruel and meaningless, which it may seem good to the all-wise dispenser of events to permit or ordain. On the positive, side this aspiration of the religious soul has been reinforced by the moral nature, and it has dutifully asked to be used as an instrument for the accomplishment of the divine purposes. Religion has in this case been construed as coinciding in great measure with moral obedience: the best to which a man can aspire, it is conceived, is to know the will of God, and knowing it to do it; and if aught be asked as a gift from God, it is that His will may be more fully known, and that power may be vouchsafed for a more perfect obedience as well as for a more willing and complete submission. When the instinct of humility has been thus intimately blended with man’s moral, religious nature, it has given rise to the obligation-type of religion which is well entitled to rank as of fundamental importance.

3. Religion has also had close associations with, as it has had not a little advantage from, the instinct which it is now generally agreed to call tender emotion. It would be more natural, as is done in popular usage, to call this love, were it not that a term is required of the utmost latitude, and also that there is a natural feeling against the degradation of one of our greatest words by making it do duty in lowly biological relations. Moreover, the term love has recently been claimed for a ‘sentiment’ or complex of emotions which is built up by love as its organising principle.16 Tender emotion is met with throughout the widest range of animal life and of human experience, and may be thought to be the redeeming feature of a lower creation that is subject to the grim law of the war of all against all, and also of human societies that conduct their affairs on the competitive basis. Among the animals it is most strikingly manifested in a mother’s love and care for her offspring, but the lower creatures can show affection and kindness to other members of their own species, while the dog seems to have for man a natural affection which can deepen into passionate devotion. In the human sphere it is the soul of the family, and the element of friendship; as love of country it is a spring of the heroic and self-sacrificing virtues which have been some compensation for the destructions, the vices and the crimes of war; and as love of our human kind it has brought into existence an ever-extending machinery of philanthropy which has laboured to assuage the woes of nations, and has been going on to take the whole earth for its province. As the chief altruistic member of the self-centred community of the instincts, tender emotion has seemed to be a somewhat bewildering anomaly, and there has been much controversy as to its origin and heredity. It may now be confidently said that the arguments for the selfish origin of the instinct have failed to carry conviction, and that it has established a claim to be regarded as primitive, or irreducible to any other elements of human nature. The emotion is hard to define, but happily also too familiar to require it. The conative reaction is somewhat complex. It prompts to seek or maintain contact with its object, and its most obvious and constant endeavour is to cherish the beloved object, to lavish on it marks of affection, and to render to it every kind of needed service that the benefactor is able to bestow. It has also an appropriating impulse, as we shall see later, and the combination makes of love a striking paradox.

Religious thought, which has dared to face the facts of human nature, and to say the worst that could be said of man, has not been blind to the elements of nobility that are bound up with his capacity of loving. The ethical religions recognised in the natural emotion that which was akin to their own spirit, and an earnest of the revelations and the gifts which were announced from on high, and offered to the instinct new and worthier objects, at the same time that they pressed it into their service and thus invested the spiritual life with characters of greater warmth and intensity. At every religious level, indeed, there has been offered to faith some object which has captured the heart, and unsealed the springs of devotion. The animist has possessed that which he could love in the ghost of the departed chief that haunted the old scenes, or of the mother who revisited him in his dreams; the totemist could feel a genuine affection for the members of his sacred species of beasts or birds; and among the gods of the polytheist there have been those who, like Indra and Thor, were also popular heroes. It is a common note of the ethical Religions that they introduced impressive figures which, while they compelled reverence by their greatness, at the same time evoked sympathy by their sufferings. The Buddhist gives his heart to the deliverer who out of love to man made the great renunciation; the Brahmanist can concentrate his devotion on Krishna or other incarnation of the Divine; and the Moslem, if he does not find what he can greatly love in the fierce and somewhat carnally-minded Mhammed, has love and tears for the martyred Hosain. The claim of Christianity to be the perfect and final religion has been conceded by a large section of the human race, and one weighty reason was that it set forth as the objects of faith the adorable Being in whom all the might of infinite Godhead is united with all the tenderness and the loving care of which human fatherhood at its best is our least imperfect symbol, and Jesus Christ His Son, who, while in the form of God, took upon Him the form of a servant, and was obedient unto death, even the death of the Cross, and who stirred the human heart to its depths as the victim of the most unforgivable of human crimes. And while the objects of faith have been those to which the hearts of common folk could warm, the mystics have found in God, as transcendent or incarnate, a Being who could be laid hold on with a love which passed the love of bridegroom and bride, and which was accompanied by the mysterious tides of the soul in which the ineffable joys of love alternate with the pangs of estrangements and desertions. The most characteristic reaction of love, as has been said, is to cherish and to serve the object beloved. As the spring of active service love coincides to a large extent in its endeavours with the sense of obligation, but it is not content merely to do that which is its duty toward a master and lord, but is rather impelled to offer the self as its chiefest gift, and to add to this all other things as the inevitable corollary. In religion the impulse to service which is rooted in the tender emotion has in some degree been universally operative. On the lower levels, gifts were believed to be much needed and appreciated. In the higher faiths, the difficulty has been felt to be that the religious object was too great to need anything that the worshipper could render, and sometimes that it was too remote to be reached by any form of loving service. Religion as love may be reckoned the third fundamental type of religious experience.

4. Curiosity falls to be included as the fourth of the instincts which have been the chief associates and supports of religion. The elements of curiosity are the feeling of wonder, which is excited by the appearance of the unfamiliar or the extraordinary, and the conative impulse which prompts to investigate the strange fact, and to bring it within the range of the known by some form of identification or explanation. The instinct of curiosity primarily subserves practical Interests of protection and well-being, but there is also in it an element of theoretical interest. Even the animal, which is compelled to investigate because knowledge means safety or food, can be actuated by a pure curiosity which may cost it its life. It is probable that man, so long as he has been man, has felt pleasure in knowing for the sake of knowing. In his religious life man has chiefly desired to know for the sake of attaining and becoming, but the theoretical interest has been a concomitant, and in some periods an extremely influential factor. Man as man has always been interested in the explanation of the strange conditions and happenings of his lot; and the great religious communities have produced and maintained a special class which has chiefly occupied itself with the knowledge of divine things, and which has been disposed to value the accompanying gift of a revelation as the most signal of the benefactions rendered by religion. Curiosity has been satisfied by religion in two ways. The conception of the Divine Being and of divine power has been welcomed as a means of illuminating the darkness which envelops the world, and solving the manifold riddles which are presented by the scheme of things, and especially by the drama of human existence. But also the realm of the divine was itself a dimly discerned and mysterious region which as such made a strong appeal to the inquiring mind, and led to earnest efforts to penetrate the secrets of its nature and its operations. For the satisfaction of the natural human curiosity about God and divine things religion has favoured two methods—to seek knowledge at first hand, and to depend on those who have special means of knowing and who can speak with authority. The possession of first-hand knowledge of God and divine things has been claimed by two classes—the class of prophetic men who have had a sense of immediate contact with the divine, and the class of reasoning men who have investigated the evidence for a religious view of the world, and have given forth the results of their critical and speculative thinking. The way of the mass of mankind has been to look to the inspired men or the inspired institution for enlightenment about God and divine things; and religions have responded to this need on the one hand by claiming to be the vehicles of a special or supernatural revelation, on the other by taking measures for the provision of instruction in connection with the offices of worship. The general sense of mankind supports the view that a religion which has no real light to throw on existence and destiny is worthless. We may therefore regard the experience for which religion is light as the fourth fundamental type.

In a complete study of the subject it would be desirable to take account of a number of other instincts which have played a considerable part at different stages of religious history. It may be sufficient now to refer briefly to two. The instinct of pugnacity, which is rebuked by the ethical religions, has been somewhat conspicuously in evidence within their sphere of influence, and not least in the older Christendom. It has been plausibly said that the faith which put in the forefront the message of peace on earth has done more than any, with the exception of Islam, to make nation rise against nation, and that much more frequently than Islam it has disposed one part of a nation to rise against another in civil war, or to seek to crush it by persecution. So far as this is true the apology may be offered that human nature is so constituted that when a society or an individual intensely believes a creed, whether religious or political, and values it as a gospel, there has been an instinctive outbreak of wrath, reinforced by the instinct of repulsion and the emotion of disgust, against those who denied the creed and set at naught the gospel.

The gregarious instinct, which prompts human beings to collect in masses, and disposes the individual to join the herd and to take his guidance from its suggestions, has been a still more important factor in the religious history of the race. In savage and semi-savage life the individual follows the lead of the tribe as a matter of course. It was a maxim of Confucius that a man should conform to the customs of the society in which he lived, and walk in the ways that had been traversed by the innumerable company of his ancestors. In our civilised world, and even among peoples who pride themselves on their individualism, no argument carries more weight than that such and such is the opinion of an overwhelming majority, and in religious matters the argument from general consent has always been felt to be very materially strengthened when the bygone generations could be counted into the majority. The Roman Catholic Church owes no small part of its credit to the notes which Bellarmine puts in the forefront—the name catholic, antiquity, permanence, and the vast multitude of its members representing all countries, nations and conditions.17 The rejoinder made to this claim in the old Scots’ Confession was that antiquity ought to be discounted as Cain was older than Abel or Seth, and that a multitude approving need carry no weight as a much greater multitude followed the Scribes, Pharisees and priests than approved of Jesus Christ and His doctrine. But a later Protestant generation found it necessary to supplement this reasoning by developing the argument—as happily it could do with a good conscience—that not only the authors of New Testament Scriptures but the most revered of the fathers, and with them a great multitude in all the Christian centuries, had professed and lived by the fundamental truths of the evangelical system, and that Rome had been the great innovator upon the faith and practice of antiquity.18

III

We have next to inquire whether religion, besides stimulating and controlling the ordinary instinctive tendencies, has been served by a special instinct impelling man towards God. In Theology it has been maintained that man has a specifically religious instinct, or at least that he has a disposition or Anlage which impels him to organise his experience from a religious point of view. Dr. M’Dougall declares that the theory of a religious instinct is untenable, ‘and is not now seriously maintained by any psychologist.’19 The chief reason which he gives for rejecting the view is that ‘if we accept the doctrine of the evolution of man from animal forms we are compelled to seek the origin of religious emotions and impulses in instincts that are not specifically religious.’20 And doubtless if nothing may be called an instinct which did not exist in our pre-human ancestors, the objection is fatal. But man as we now know him, and as he has been known for thousands of years, is much more than an animal; and the question of real moment is whether on the human plane he has shown congenital tendencies of a higher kind which are similar in structure to the instincts, and react in similar ways. It seems undeniable that man, whatever may have been the precise factors and stages of his development as a moral being, is now endowed with a moral instinct, in virtue of which he forms judgments and experiences emotions of a special kind, and is impelled to special lines of action. And man, however he may have acquired them, is certainly moved now by religious tendencies of the instinctive sort. It has been the testimony of the schools of the converts and the saints that they found the soul to be the seat of a divine restlessness and longing, and of a secret impulsion towards God. There is also good ground for saying that this tendency, though in a much weaker and more intermittent form, and operating in large measure below the threshold of consciousness, has been an important factor in the general human experience. The age-long duration and the world-wide prevalence of religion raise a presumption that it has had a root in human nature, and that man has felt an inward constraint to lift up his eyes to the hills, and to set his feet in the way to some Jerusalem. Moreover, the religious preoccupations of mankind invite such obvious criticism from common sense, and the disappointments of the natural man with the results of his service of God have been so frequent and bitter, that it is highly improbable that religion would have maintained its hold as it has done upon the human race unless the voice of tradition and authority had been supported by a Godward attraction of the human spirit. The existence of the religious propensity in historical man has been as obvious to many psychologists as it has been to the theologian. ‘The passion for God,’ says Professor Alexander, ‘is no less a real appetite of our nature than the passion for ‘food.’21 Dr. Lloyd Morgan, observing that new constitutive properties have emerged in the case of the moral and religious sentiments, declares them to be instinctive in the broader sense of the term. ‘They appear,’ he says, ‘to be distinctive of man in virtue of his inherent constitution as human; they appear to be in large measure beyond volitional control; from the ethical point of view they appear to be the outcome of character; and on such grounds it can scarcely be denied that the moral and religious sentiments so widely prevalent in mankind, though they assume varied forms under varied conditions, have an instinctive basis in the human constitution.’22

The religious instinct has usually been described as a form of appetite, akin to hunger and thirst. The soul of the Psalmist thirsted for the living God in ‘a dry and weary land, where no water is’ (Ps. lxiii. 1). A want and craving of this appetitive kind is implied in some of the great promises of Jesus: ‘He that cometh to Me shall not hunger; and he that believeth on Me shall never thirst’ (John vi. 35). ‘There is an eternal hunger for God,’ says John of Ruysbroeck. ‘And since the spirit longs for fruition, and is invited and urged thereto by God, it must always desire its fulfilment. The inward stirring and touching of God makes us hungry and yearning; for the Spirit of God haunts our spirit; and the more it touches it the greater our hunger and our craving.’23 The affinity thus asserted of the bodily and the spiritual appetites extends to all the particulars of Dr. M’Dougall’s analysis. In virtue of innate disposition man has been determined to pay attention to a class of divine or sacred objects, he has experienced a peculiar emotional excitement, and he has been instigated to act in a characteristic way. On the cognitive side there is a close correspondence: bodily hunger is accompanied by a general reference to the world of foods, and can also be stimulated by the sight of a particular food; and similarly man has a general sense of the existence of a higher world which promises him satisfaction, while the spiritual appetite may also be quickened by the perception of objects possessed of what Otto has called numinous quality, in which he has recognised the presence or the manifestation of the Divine. That there is a religious feeling which contains something more than in found in fear, or awe or reverence, is a position which has already been maintained. The conative reaction characteristic of the religious instinct is the impulse to draw near to the divine object for the satisfaction of desire, but as in the case of hunger this primary impulse may be overborne by other influences and the result may be indifference or even repulsion.

The religious instinct has also an affinity with the tie which binds many creatures to the place of their nativity and with the influence which continues to haunt them amid other scenes and asserts the claims of home. It has been likened to the call of the upland stream that is heard by the salmon in the sea, and to the spell that has been laid on the homing pigeon; and again to the homesickness of the child and of the exile. It also has its counterpart in the ethical life when a man who has fallen under the dominion of the world and the flesh realises the lost paradise of his early innocence, and feels that it would be better to return if only he could find the power. That the human soul has a similar homesickness whose object is God, Was expressed in words that have gone through the ages, and gone round the world, “because they have been felt to have revealed a secret of the universal heart—‘Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless until it find rest in Thee.’24 But perhaps the closest affinity is with the gregarious instinct. There is in fact the same evidence for holding that man has the one instinct that there is for crediting him with the other. The conative reaction is the same: in one instance he feels the attraction of the herd, and is disposed to follow its lead; in the other he feels the drawing of God, and is disposed to yield to the impulsion. In both instances, also, there is the accompaniment of a specific feeling, though the gregarious emotion has not attracted sufficient notice to receive a name. It is true, as was already observed, that the divine does not invariably attract and fascinate—but of the gregarious instinct also all that can be said is that it inclines a man to live and march with the crowd, while yet painful experiences in his earlier dealings with his kind, or a peculiarity of temperament, may lead him to turn his back upon society with indifference and contempt, and even to vent on it the hatred of the misanthrope. That the same interpretation is not put upon the two classes of similar facts—that a gregarious instinct is asserted in view of the observed gravitation of the individual to the herd, while a religious instinct is not asserted notwithstanding a similar gravitation towards God—is due to the fact that the human herd can be seen and heard and touched, while in the religious field nothing similarly palpable can be registered. And yet the fact that the object of the impulse is super-sensible is a bad reason for denying the existence of the impulse. It may be added that if there be a God, it was only to be expected that there would be a religious instinct in man. If a God exist, in whom we live and move and have our being, it is very unlikely that the unique intimacy of this relationship would not find expression in instinctive forms of premonition, feeling and conation. If there be a God who is the Father of our spirits, the divine heredity is doubtless as potent a factor in our constitution as the earthly heredity which links us in mystic union with generations of human and sub-human ancestors. Nay, the divine relationship might be expected to contribute influences which hold us even more firmly in their grip, and to carry a reminder of our relation to the source of our being. And further, if there be a God who is immanent in the world and in all finite creatures, it seems incredible that we human beings, who respond with such sensitiveness to the spirit of the communities of which we are constituent members, and to the spirit of our age, should have no similar experience of the attraction and of the pervading influence of a Divine Spirit which is in some sense ‘the soul of all souls.’

IV

The discussion of the theological or metaphysical implications of instinct has formed a considerable chapter in the history of thought. In the older period the debate largely turned on the evidential value of the phenomenon as a manifestation of the power and wisdom of the Almighty. The common view was thus expressed by Addison: ‘I look upon instinct as upon the principle of gravitation in bodies, which is not explained by any known qualities inherent in the bodies themselves, nor from any laws of mechanism, but is an immediate impression from the first mover and divine energy acting in the creatures.’25 The argument was that the prodigies of instinctive behaviour must be due to intelligence, that they are not due to the intelligence of the humble creatures, and that they must therefore be referred to God, who endowed these with an extraordinary mechanical provision by a primeval miracle of creation. The conception of the creative miracle was thereafter rejected on two grounds—first that instinct has not the notes of unerring wisdom and efficiency which could be thought the hall-marks of a special creation, and especially that the evolutionary doctrine has made the resort to the miraculous explanation unnecessary. According to the Lamarckian theory, instinct is lapsed intelligence. ‘It was originally a character consciously acquired and established as a habit, in successful adaptation to our environment, and then transmitted to descendants, the inherited character being subsequently modified by new successful adaptations which are in turn transmitted.’ This theory presupposes the transmission of acquired characters, and has therefore been shaken by the doubts that have been cast on the doctrine with which it is vitally bound up. The Darwinian view is that ‘the instincts were built up of accidental variations of a useful kind which were transmitted by inheritance.’26 The difficulty in this case is to see how the fortuitous variations could be accumulated into a mechanism that would do the intricate and detailed things that are performed, say, by the paralysing wasp, which does work that seems as highly specialised as that of the surgeon operating for appendicitis. The attempt has therefore been made to combine the two theories in a doctrine of ‘organic selection.’ The one thing that is clear to an outsider is that a satisfactory explanation has not been formulated; and one may venture to think that were it not for the scientific aversion to all speculations of the kind, the theory would be favoured that each species possesses a collective intelligence which issues directions to the individual members out of its accumulated resources of knowledge and skill. It may be added that a naturalistic explanation, while it is an alternative to the notion that instinct was a miracle of creation, is quite compatible with the idea that it is a marvel of providence; and that as a providential wonder it can still contribute to support the faith that the universe is the habitation and the workshop of intelligence.

A new phase of the discussion was initiated by M. Bergson, who emphasised the contrast between instinct and intelligence, and ascribed to instinct a distinctive and effective method of grasping reality. ‘If the consciousness which slumbers in instinct were to awake,’ he observes, ‘if it should realise itself inwardly in the form of knowledge instead of realising itself externally in action, if we knew how to interrogate it and it were able to reply, it would reveal to us the most intimate secrets of life.’27 The theory has been expounded by Mr. Carr as follows:—

‘The fundamental difference between intelligence and instinct,’ he says, ‘is one of kind, and lies in the mode of apprehension of reality, and the kind of knowledge that serves the activity of each.… Intelligence is the power of using categories, it is knowledge of the relations of things. Intelligence is an outward view of things, never reaching the actual reality it seeks to know. Instinct is the very opposite of intelligence, an inward looking, a knowledge of things seen from within. We too have a power of intuition, a direct vision that is not clothed with the categories of the understanding. The difficulty in describing instinctive knowledge lies in the fact that we can only communicate by using intellectual categories, and we have to describe that which, if it exists, is distinguished by the fact that it does not take the external form which the category imposes. Bergson has proposed the word “sympathy” in its original, or at least its technical, meaning to express the essentially internal nature of instinctive apprehension. It corresponds to the aesthetic faculty, the feeling-in of a state of one’s own into an aesthetic object, that exists in us side by side with our faculty of normal perception.’28

The view thus expounded has been energetically controverted by Professor Stout, on the ground that ‘there is nothing in the instinctive behaviour of animals which cannot be accounted for by the combination of certain purely biological adaptations with psychical processes marked by intelligence fundamentally akin in nature to all other intelligence.’29

When we consider the extraordinary efficiency of the tools which have been put at the disposal of the creatures as the result of the evolutionary process, it is not surprising if by the exercise even of a very low degree of intelligence of the ordinary kind they are able to achieve very remarkable results. Something similar is observed in a factory in which a work-man may be rather stupid, and may only be required to exercise a few simple movements, is nevertheless able, thanks to the wonders of modern machinery, to turn out highly finished products. At same time there is a good deal of implicit or latent knowledge in the mind of the workman, including a knowledge of the end for which the factory exists, and the market which it supplies, and there is reason thinking that a similar knowledge, which serves generally for stimulus and guidance, and becomes more and less explicit in different minds, pervades the realm of instinctive action. It is probable that there is a dim presentiment of the end to which the instinctive actions are directed in connection with many forms of instinctive behaviour—as in the preparations made by the mother for the appearance of her offspring; and there are some activities, notably those connected with the migratory and the homing instincts, which it is difficult to explain except on the assumption that some presentation is made to the bird-mind of an unseen land of promise, accompanied by some assurance that it would be good for it to be there, and also by some directions for guiding it on the journey. The mode of apprehension which Bergson calls intuition or sympathy was better described by Fries under the name of Ahnung—which might be rendered premonition or presentiment, were it not that the English terms are narrowed down to anticipations of the future. It is characteristic of this mode of apprehension that it is a combination of knowledge and ignorance. There is indubitable knowledge of the existence of a reality and of its promise and beckoning, but it might equally be called ignorance, because so little is known of the nature of the reality and of how it will fulfil expectations. It may seem an unsatisfactory species of knowledge, but at least it plays a very important part in human experience. It is the kind of apprehension that the youth has of the world on the threshold of his career—much is unknown and unknowable, but he at least knows that it will be good to go into it, to do the work of a man in it, and to deserve its prizes, and so he chooses his calling, and goes forward with good heart in his great enterprise. He also has the premonition that there is a bright realm to be found within this world, which has for its sun the love of man and woman, and with the same confidence he makes his second great adventure, trusting chiefly to the voice of hope and the guidance of his heart. And these things seem a parable of the way in which man has apprehended God. He has had the presentiment of the existence of the reality, though the divine was shrouded, even as our future is shrouded, in cloud and mist, and he had also the Godward impulse which would not suffer him to forget God, or to cease to hope in God.

If the religious instinct, as has been maintained, be an elemental fact of the spiritual constitution of man, the fact has undeniable theoretical significance, For the existence of an instinct is naturally thought to be the indication and the pledge of the existence of an objective reality in which its craving will find satisfaction. It would in fact be a manifestation of a sardonic irony of which it would be unjust and ungrateful to suspect the world-order if it should prove to be the case that while hunger can depend on its stop, and thirst on its draught, there is nothing answering to the craving of the soul that has hungered and thirsted for the living God. The probable view is that man was endowed with a religious instinct to the end that he might enjoy a useful constraint and guidance in the times of his irrationality and ignorance, and that reason was given for use in manhood, not that it might destroy, but that it might fulfil and justify the monitions and the expectations of the period of childhood. And even if there were no special religious instinct, it would still be a fact of no little significance that the common instincts have responded to the call of religion even as, in the Greek legend, the beasts were subdued by the harping of Orpheus and followed him whithersoever he led. It cannot be without good cause that religion has evoked a general and sustained response from the instinctive forces that form so important a part of the mental constitution of man. For, unruly and contentious as the instincts are, and to this extent blind or purblind, that they make little account of any end save the business which specially concerns them, they have at least so much in common that they are in touch with the realities of the environment and attempt nothing in their ordinary exercise which does not work towards a very practical and palpable result.

And their spirit being thus essentially realistic and practical, it must seem improbable that they would have reacted with the unanimity and energy with which they have responded to the appeal of religion, had it been the case that what was presented to them in religion was a body of unsubstantial figments and precarious guesses which had no better claim to belong to the world of reality than that they had achieved a certain ghostly and fleeting existence as phantasms of the human mind. Rather is the presumption that their extraordinary response has been due to the circumstance that the ideas touching God and divine things which called them into play have been apprehensions, dim and chaotic oftentimes, but still apprehensions of a realm of spiritual realities which overarches and interpenetrates the world of terrestrial experience, and that they were given a commission to make some contribution towards keeping man in relations with God, and making him to strive, however dimly he might discern the goal, towards the chief end of his existence.

• 1.

  For a history of the doctrine of instinct, see Drever, Instinct in Man, 1921, chaps, ii., iii.

• 2.

  An Introduction to Social Psychology, 15, 1920, p. 21.

• 3.

  Textbook of Psychology, 1904, p. 391.

• 4.

  Op. cit., p. 31.

• 5.

  Instinct and the Unconscious², 1922, p. 39.

• 6.

  Op. cit., p. 23.

• 7.

  The Psychology of Everyday Life, 1921, p. 21.

• 8.

  Op. cit., P. 41.

• 9.

  Animal Life and Intelligence, 1891, p. 458.

• 10.

  Op. cit., p. 29.

• 11.

  Op. cit., p. 312.

• 12.

  Instinct in Man, ‘Classification of Instincts,’ p. 169.

• 13.

  La Psychologie des Sentiments, 1922, p. 248.

• 14.

  Op. cit., p. 248.

• 15.

  Op. cit., p. 64.

• 16.

  Shand, The Foundations of Character, 1920, pp. 35 ff.

• 17.

  Opera, 1721, ii. 4. ‘De notis Ecclesiae.’

• 18.

  John Forbes, Instructiones historico-theologicae, 1645.

• 19.

  Op. cit., chap. xvi.

• 20.

  Op. cit., p. 302.

• 21.

  Op. cit., ii. p. 432.

• 22.

  Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, art. ‘Instinct.’

• 23.

  The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage (Eng. tr.), 1919, p. 121.

• 24.

  Augustine’s Confessions, chap. i.

• 25.

  The Spectator, No. 120.

• 26.

  Drever, Instinct in Man, p. 79.

• 27.

  L’ Évolution Créat rice,⁴, 1908, p. 179.

• 28.

  British Journal of Psychology, vol. iii. pp. 232–4.

• 29.

  British Journal of Psychology, vol. iii. p. 243.