The Ethics of Internationalism and the Individual
Jacob R. Kantor
International Journal of Ethics
Vol. 29, No. 1 (Oct., 1918) , pp. 29-38
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2377375
Certain remarks made in the April number of this Journal, in a review of my book, invite discussion of a question of considerable interest. The failure to take proper account of the distinction between a technical and a non-technical conception of God involved in that question, is one of the many indications of the lack of psychological insight apparent in discussions of belief in general and of religious beliefs in particular. I shall best convey my meaning by means of a comparison.
Let us suppose that we desire to find out how many members of a semi-civilized tribe believe in the existence, in a neighboring forest, of a monster that can and at times actually does destroy men who venture into it. Persons that entered the wood are said never to have returned; others came back, dreadfully frightened, with discordant accounts of a devastating creature vaguely seen through intervening foliage.
How are we to formulate the question that is to bring out the fact we desire to ascertain? Shall we have a naturalist prepare with learned minuteness a description of the animal he surmises to be in the wood, and ask the natives to say whether or not they believe in the existence of the animal described? If that which we want to ascertain is whether or not they accept the existence of the animal described by the naturalist and nothing else, the procedure would be adequate. The chances are, however, that the persons with whom we are dealing have not observed the many features by which the monster is characterized; they have not had the opportunity and do not possess the necessary knowledge to do so. Nevertheless, it will be granted, I think, that a great many of them will answer affirmatively, not because they have seen the creature as described to them, but merely because they have seen or heard a terrible ‘The Belief in God and Immortality. A Psychological, Anthropological and Statistical Study. Sherman French and Co., Boston.
The second of the three parts composing this book is a statistical study of two religious beliefs. The figure (750) given in Mr. Kantor’s review as the number of answers to my questionnaire is wrong. It is that of the answers from the physical and the biological scientists only creature and that they know men and animals have disappeared. It turns out, thus, that although the question is properly formulated for the purpose in view, the statistics would not be at all reliable.
But the purpose of the statistician might be another one. He might want to find out not whether the natives believe in, let us say, a python-like monster; but merely whether they believe in any kind of creature that sometimes destroys men venturing into the wood. In that case, the question should not describe any particular animal; it should assume something like this form: “Do you believe in the existence of a creature that sometimes destroys those who enter the forest?” The answers to that question would, as a matter of course, be useless to our imaginary naturalist; it is too general a question. But they would provide the information desired by the inquirer; and, despite the undiscriminating form of the query, that information would be perfectly definite and of substantial value.
The application of this fiction to the statistics published in Part II of my book is obvious. I did not want to find out what proportion of the members belonging to the several classes I selected for investigation (American physical scientists, biological scientists, historians, sociologists, psychologists, and college students of non-technical departments) believed in the Absolute of Bradley or of Royce, or in Bergson’s Elan Vital, or in Rashdall’s limited God, or in any other of the God-conceptions known to the philosophers. Had I entertained that purpose, I should have failed; for, probably not one in a hundred of the men belonging to the classes named would have been in a position to answer the finely discriminating questions that would have been necessary. My purpose had reference not to philosophy but to religion as it actually exists in its organized forms.
I desired to determine with some degree of accuracy the percentages of believers and of nonbelievers (dis-believers and doubters) in personal immortality and in a God able and, under certain undetermined conditions, willing to act upon man or nature or both, at man’s desire, request, or desert. The professional philosophers did not find it possible to express their full ideas of God by means of my statements-it was not intended that they should. Several of them, not understanding my purpose, wrote in substance, ” None of your statements express my belief adequately. Therefore I cannot answer.
These philosophers had before them no more than a circular letter requesting an expression of opinion upon certain statements. There is, therefore, some excuse for their misunderstanding. Mr. Kantor, with the book before him, had no such excuse. When he writes, “There are no indications as to precisely what is believed concerning the matters in question,” he illustrates a complete failure to realize the methodological requirements imposed upon me by the task I had set for myself. I might add that there is hardly any line of cleavage between the many conceptions of God that is of more vital significance to religion than the one drawn in my questionnaire.
The dynamic characteristics by which God is defined in it, are essential to religious worship as now organized. So much for the question of definition. There were other statistical difficulties. If I have succeeded, as I hope, in overcoming them, we are now for the first time in possession of substantially reliable figures, valid for the entire classes mentioned. Mr. Kantor apparently accepts these results, but the explanation of them suggested by the author does not seem to him sufficiently firmly established. The more striking facts discovered are that, regarding the number of believers, the classes arrange themselves in the following descending order, historians, physical scientists, biological scientists, sociologists, and psychologists; that in each class the more distinguished group counts a much smaller number of believers than the less distinguished; and that there is a much larger number of believers among the women than among the men (82 per cent against 56 per cent).
I attempted to explain these facts by reference to two main factors: (1) General knowledge and knowledge in particular fields, such as physics, biology, psychology, cannot fail, it seems, to have a definite influence upon the acceptability of the God defined in my statements. (2) Mental independence and selfreliance obviously play a considerable role in connection with all traditional beliefs. Regarding the first factor, I wrote, ” Psychologists, sociologists, and biologists in very large numbers have come to recognize fixed orderliness in organic and psychic life, and not merely in inorganic existence; while frequently physical scientists have recognized the presence of invariable laws in the inorganic world only.
The belief in a personal God as defined for the purpose of Vol. XXVIII.-No. 1. 8 our investigation is, therefore, less often possible to students of psychic and of organic life than to physical scientists. The place occupied by the historians next to the physical scientists would indicate that for the present the reign of law is not so clearly revealed in the events with which history deals as in biology, ‘sociology, and psychology. A large number of historians continue to see the hand of God in human affairs.
The influence, destructive of Christian belief, attributed in this interpretation to more intimate knowledge of organic and psychic life, appears incontrovertibly, so far as psychic life is concerned, in the remarkable fact that whereas in every other group the number of believers in immortality is greater than that in God, among the psychologists the reverse is true; the number of believers in immortality among the greater psychologists sinks to 8.8 per cent. One may affirm, it seems, that, in general, the greater the ability of the psychologist, the more difficult it becomes for him to believe in the continuation of individual life after bodily life.”
The second factor, mental independence and self-reliance, works against beliefs that are not sufficiently supported by “reason.” It seemed to me that mainly to this factor should be referred the difference between men and women students; for, since these persons are of approximately the same ages and belong to the same college classes, their knowledge should not be very different. I have also drawn attention to the fact that the more strongly affective nature with which women are usually credited is intimately related in its effect to mental independence. One is less hospitable to ideas threatening estrangement from the circles in which one has been reared when one clings to them in affection.
This same trait opposes, direct resistance to the surrender of God when loving relations have been established with him. If few will deny the existence of the differential traits to which I have just referred (whether they are true sex-differences or the product of education, is not one of my present concerns), none will gainsay me when I affirm that mental independence, a readiness to “prove all things,” makes for eminence in the vocations with which we are concerned. In view of the statistical differences between men and women students, and in the absence of other plausible factors,
I ascribed to mental independence and initiative the marked differences observed in each class between the more and the less eminent men. Mr. Kantor remarks, supercritically as it seems to me, that this would be a suitable explanation did I actually show that the greater men reject these beliefs because of a critical examination of them. If it be agreed that the greater men are more critical than the lesser men, why not of their religious as well as of their other traditional beliefs? And even though both lesser and greater men should spend the same amount of time and the same effort upon a critical consideration of their beliefs, would not the greater men, because of this trait possessed by them in a higher degree, give up more readily than the lesser men, beliefs that do not seem to stand the test?
JAMES H. LEUBA. Bryn Mawr College.
It sounds like irony for Professor Leuba, in replying to my review of his book, to suggest that there was a failure to distinguish properly between various concepts of God, when that lack of distinction was the theme of my criticism. One is constrained to ask what kind of psychological insight is required to request scientists and philosophers to reply unconditionally to such questions as Professor Leuba asked them. It does not require much psychological insight to understand that such persons when asked about God or immortality, would put content into these concepts which I insist Professor Leuba made no provision for.
It is impossible that the questions should be answered unless content is put into the concepts asked about. Such lack of provision of course invalidates the type of study made. My criticism would have been even more severe had I thought that Professor Leuba meant to insist that the scientists limit themselves to such primitive questions, as the reply to my review indicates. It seems unbelievable that a study would be instituted which allows for no development of fundamental concepts. It seems that Professor Leuba offered a concession in saying that scientists are ordinary men (p. 223) when they really may be compared to semi-civilized natives.
My point is that philosophical conceptions (in Professor Leuba’s sense) aside, when one wishes to know what men believe with respect to religious matters, one must take into account the meanings of the ideas forming the basis of the inquiry. Replies of yes and no to questions formulated as in this study, cannot yield any worth-while information. The difficulties that were experienced in answering the questions (p. 227 if.) indicate that Professor Leuba did not allow for such meanings.
God and immortality have more meanings than the two Professor Leuba grants them, and each person will have some one of them in mind in answering questions. I cannot, therefore, plead guilty of illustrating “a complete failure to realize the methodological requirements imposed” upon Professor Leuba by the task he set for himself. My difficulty is rather in completly failing to realize how Professor Leuba could set himself such a meaningless task involving so unscientific a methodology.
Another point of difficulty which I find in Professor Leuba’s work is this, that with the clear cut attempt to rule out any interpretation on the part of his subjects, he still insists upon some intellectual superiority as an explanation of unbelief. If Professor Leuba wants to show that the more critical a person is of his experiences, the less belief has that person in religious matters, the least that can be asked of him is that he should ascertain something of the subjects’ beliefs. In this study, for example, there is absolutely no clue as to why the physicist should be more liable to believe in the type of God that Professor Leuba indicates than any other type of presumably informed person.
It is easy to see that Professor Leuba wants his concepts to be so defined as to fall below the critical horizon of any informed individual. On this basis his results might be formally true, but entirely irrelevant. The entire statistical study then, in its emphasis of a primitive concept with the intellectual criterion of rejection, illustrates an attempt to break logic with the usual disastrous consequences.
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