Mystery God and Olympian God
That man's social instincts and emotions have been intimately bound up with his religious emotions and ideas is, happily, in no danger of being forgotten. Through the cumulative impact of many motives, we are learning to look to man's social experience for such insight as the analysis of i...
| Published in: | Harvard theological review |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
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| Published: |
Cambridge Univ. Press
1916
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| In: |
Harvard theological review
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| Online Access: |
Volltext (JSTOR) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | That man's social instincts and emotions have been intimately bound up with his religious emotions and ideas is, happily, in no danger of being forgotten. Through the cumulative impact of many motives, we are learning to look to man's social experience for such insight as the analysis of individual experience seemed not to afford. Thus far, the most striking instance of this—at least in the popular mind—is in the domain of morals. Conscience, when viewed as the possession and experience of the individual alone, has every appearance of something sacred and imperious, absolute and inexplicable. But once let conscience be put into the crucible of anthropology and social psychology, and its mysteriousness and absoluteness seem to have vanished. We see its function and we comprehend its genesis. It is simply the echo within the individual of the past experience of the race, an inherited instinct, which has a definite survival value in the struggle for existence. It would hardly be fair to say that every question about the meaning and worth of conscience is forthwith settled. Concerning the ultimate inferences to be drawn from the undoubted fact that conscience has had a history within man's social experience, there is much which may easily escape us in our first enthusiasm for the concepts of history, development, and social experience. |
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| ISSN: | 1475-4517 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Harvard theological review
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1017/S0017816000004478 |