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THE SOURCE OF RELIGIOUS NEED
expression ‘religious disposition’ for such special manifestations
of religious life as give us warrant for assuming the existence, in
the persons concerned, of special religious talents or aptitudes.
Innate Religious Sensitivity
Another expression closely analogous to ‘disposition ’is by some
authors given the same meaning. This is the word ‘tendency’.
It is popular with a number of English psychologists, among
them William Brown. He believes that there is in every human
being a primary religious tendency. He says that the human
being is by nature religious.
When we speak of a religious tendency, we mean an innate
religious sensitivity, which is both receptive and expressive;
a tendency that makes the individual both a sender and a
receiver. The personality both asks questions and answers them.
W. Stern! has said that ‘the dispositions are indicators of the
personal functions’. The religious tendency is such an indicator,
and at the same time a condition that makes the personality
receptive to religious ideas. Here as elsewhere the principle of
reciprocity between the self and the environment is applicable.
All explanations of personal behaviour are to be found in the
relations between the creature and its world. If the religious
tendency is not aroused by an encounter with something
spiritually objective it remains latent; a mere potentiality sleeping
in the innermost being of man.
Interests and Sentiments
To understand how an innate religious tendency becomes
transformed into personal religiousness, we must recall the
teaching of psychology about the formation of sentiments.
The term was first employed in a psychologically technical
sense by A. F. Shand in 1896. He defined a sentiment as ‘an
organic system of affective dispositions grouped around the
conception of an object’. Instead of ‘sentiment’ we can use the
term ‘interest-grouping’ or, as Lilius suggests, ‘affect-system’.
All these terms are used to denote the fact that a number of
different feelings may become linked together into a single
1 Die Differentielle Psychologie, Leipzig, 1921.
107
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