The Religious Interest

IN accordance with the method of the extended discussions of a work' of which the matter of this paper forms a part, we may take up the psychological aspects of retigion under tde heading of " retigious interest."By the term interest we mean to designate the larger mental dispositions in which the motives of experience and life organize themselves, in certain .specialdirections, and terminate upon certain speciat classes of objects : the aesthetic interest terminating in art, the ttieoreticat interest in truth, the practicat interest in conduct and practicat affairs.The inner organization or interest, on the one hand, stands over against the objective content, on the other hand, to which the intere.stgives form and intettigibility.Considering religion as being in this sense one of the great interests of mankind, found at att stages of racial cutture, and everywhere in individual practice, the aspects under which it may be discussed-and is currently discussed-may be distinguished for convenience as fottows: (i) The retigious experience; (2) the religious object and its meaning; (3) the development of religious meaning : its logic; (4) the social character of religion; (5) the sort of reality that religion discloses.These topics, except the last, are treated in the paragraphs that fottow.'The unifying thread throughout will be seen to be the genetic point of view by which the topic is made part of the whole of the work mentioned. I. THE RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE.The religious interest is universally admitted to tje one that is, so to speak, " pointed outward "; it atways terminates upon an object found by it to tje holy, sacred, divine.Apart from this object, the presence of which it a.ssumes, the interest as such has distinct emotional and conative qualities not found in the 1.Tho«|rht and Things or Genetic Logic, vols.I-III.It is in the final volume (IV) that the religious interest is to be treated.Certain paragraphs of this paper reproduce in somewhat different form matter published from time to time in recent years in more special publications.The treatment givea here serves to set the subordinate topics together in a larger view ci the nature aad development of the religions interest.a.The publicatioas to which reference is made in the preceding note ai«, following the aumbera given to the different headings in the text: oa (1), Social and Ethical Interpretations (ist ed

Epistemology · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Philosophy · Religion, Society, and Development

• Religiosity

  Open Access•R O Poplavsky•Vestnik arheologii, antropologii…•2023

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