REL I GION AND THE INTELLEOTUALS
245
1. Yes. The social, political and economic conditions you list
in your questions have all contributed to the religious trend. But you
fail to mention any specific psychological causes. The mass neuroses
of modern society are probably the most important.
2. Since convictions are not independent of circumstantial in–
fluences, the above should answer for the gain in credibility to the
modern mind of certain religious ideas. But here naturalism, or at
least its reputation, is also to blame. I imagine that for many intel–
lectuals naturalism has come to mean something like Chataqua or
single-tax, a lot of lost ideas, about as helpful as cupping the dead.
Helpful is the important word-also consoling. Naturalism won't help
or console anyone, it isn't meant to, its business being solely to present
truth; but in the course of doing so it must touch on living concerns.
But the way naturalistic philosophies are taught in many of our
schools, making them a matter exclusively of professional technicali–
ties with no end of words about methodology in which nothing gets
said, the subject loses all significance. I don't blame people for ob–
jecting to this. It shows that they have more life than the profe8.'!0rs.
Meanwhile, religious doctrines, which are all consolatory, score
their gains. TheJ have an emotional appeal, the issues, as presented,
are of love, salvation, brotherhood, humility, sacrifice- and these
themes, for a great variety of reasons, not all of them neurotic, exert
a tremendous drawing force.
If
a man stands in need of consola–
tion (practically, this means nearly every man almost all the time),
he wiII much sooner be reached by a doctrine in which such themes
are heavily represented, than by one in which they are scattered or
absent. Religion, furthermore, can be given an urgent tone, it can
be made to appear a matter of life or death. The consolations of
religion, in other words, offer themselves soothingly or melodramatic–
ally, and there is as much solace in the latter, possibly even more, as
in the former. Religious existentialism is a case in point. It ,stresses
absurdity, the incommensurability of man and God, human loneliness,
the difficulties of communication-it is, on the face of it, a "realistic"
philosophy, and it consoles men by allowing them to believe that they
are not seeking consolation, by letting them think that they are brave.
Unfortunately for some present-day versions of naturalism, there is
more emotional immediacy in this than in an abstract aping of
physical science, in method-chopping, in endless talk about values
