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The University of Chicago
FOUNDED BY JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER
A Consideration of Prayer from the Standpoint
of Social Psychology
}
A DISSERTATION
Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Literature
in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
(Department of Philosophy)
BY
ANNA LOUISE STRONG
CHICAGO
1908
NOTE
The writer wishes to express her gratitude to Pro-
fessors Tufts and Mead, and Dr. Ames, of the Uni-
versity of Chicago: to Dr. Ames for the material
which originally suggested the problem; to Professor
Mead for the course in which the point of view
here assumed was first outlined; and to Professor
Tufts for his unfailingly sympathetic aid in the ar-
rangement of the final form of the thesis and its
preparation for the press.
190935
A CONSIDERATION OF PRAYER FROM THE
STANDPOINT OF SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
I. INTRODUCTION. THE ESSENTIALLY SOCIAL
CHARACTER OF THE SELF.
The self as a construct in consciousness. How self-con-
sciousness is attained. The "Imaginative Social Process,"
in the child as type of the total process of reflection, in the
adult as type of the initial stage of reflection, that of "emo-
tional evaluation." A difference of degree, not of kind. The
question of objective reference stated in general.
Prayer as a form of the "Imaginative Social Process," i.
e., a means for the construction of a self. The completely
social type of prayer arising through the gradual discrimina-
tion in consciousness between personal and non-personal
means and ends. The two tendencies in the completely so-
cial type. The contemplative or "aesthetic." The practical
or "ethical."
II. UNDISCRIMINATING FORMS OF PRAYER. THE
CHILD AND THE PRIMITIVE MAN...
The undiscriminating nature of the immature conscious-
ness; no clear distinction of personal and non-personal, re-
ligious and non-religious needs. The beginnings of the “sci-
entific" discrimination, based on efficiency. The ethical dis-
crimination, based on the distinction between the needs of a
partial self and those of the widest "social" self. The needs
of the partial self satisfied either by magic as vs. religion,
or by a non-ethical polytheism.
III. INTERMEDIATE TYPES. THE GROWTH OF DIS-
CRIMINATION
Prayers in which so-called "objective" results are sought,
and attained indirectly, through social means not explicitly
recognized as such, by (1) the establishment of a more con-
9
25
45
6
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
fident self, (2) a different interpretation of the environment,
(3) various specific forms of subconscious activity. Prayers
for the cure of disease.
IV. THE COMPLETELY SOCIAL TYPE OF PRAYER.
ITS GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.
Prayer is a social relation between two selves arising
simultaneously in consciousness, and has as end the estab-
lishment of a wider self. The fundamentally social nature
of consciousness, illustrated by the demand for strengthening
sympathy, self-expression, ethical criteria.
V. THE TWO TENDENCIES IN THE COMPLETELY
THE CONTEMPLATIVE OR
SOCIAL TYPE.
"AESTHETIC"
The two tendencies in every social act-the aesthetic and
the practical, i. e.. the tendency to rest in the experience
itself and the tendency to pass as quickly as possible into
action. The social nature of the aesthetic satisfaction,
Einfühlungs-theorie. Nirvana, the mystic trance; the ex-
treme at which prayer passes first into aesthetic contempla-
tion and thence into unconsciousness. Less extreme ex-
amples of this tendency. Ritualistic Prayer. The general
psychological characteristics of this form; surrender of the
self of immediate desire and the consequent attainment of
peace through reliance on a specific organization of sub-
conscious activities.
VI. THE TWO TENDENCIES IN THE COMPLETELY
SOCIAL TYPE. THE PRACTICAL OR "ETH-
ICAL"
The tendency in every social act to pass as quickly as pos-
sible into action. The limiting of the function of prayer to
the production of a strictly ethical result. The extreme at
which prayer passes first into moral action and thence into
habitual, i. e., unconscious activity. Less extreme examples
of this tendency. Prayers for conversion. Moral reinforce-
ment through the establishment of a wider, more truly
ethical self. Indirect attainment of this end through the
61
71
93
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
7
idea of a mighty ally. Direct increase of strength through
unification of aim, and reliance on the more regularly effi-
cient subconscious activities.
VII. THE TYPE OF REALITY AND THE OBJECTIVE
REFERENCE INVOLVED IN PRAYER..
The "Personal Idea" as ultimate social reality. The con-
ditions under which the subject-object distinction arises and
the nature of the objective reference. The "object" as neces-
sary conditioning means to a required end. Extent to which
a dynamic unity may be posited of the "object" in prayer.
110
1
Prayer from the Standpoint of Social Psychology
I
THE ESSENTIALLY SOCIAL CHARACTER OF THE SELF
1
In this discussion of the psychology of prayer I
shall use as point of view not the standpoint of
physiological psychology, which may appropriately
be termed "individual" psychology, but the stand-
point of the so-called "social psychology": I
shall first state what I take to be the essential re-
quirements of this point of view and then outline the
general effects which it has on the psychology of
prayer, before proceeding to a consideration of those
effects in detail.
From the standpoint of consciousness, man begins
as a social being; he does not acquire society. This
was not recognized by some of the older psycholo-
gists, according to whom the child first acquired a
perception and knowledge of the world around him,
and then, discerning certain objects in that world
which did not seem to come under the usual laws of
the place, attributed personality to them. Anthro-
¹This view of "social psychology" is drawn partly from Cooley's
"Human Nature and the Social Order," and finds most of its ultimate
foundations in the published works of Professors Dewey, Baldwin,
and occasional passages in James, together with unpublished lec-
tures by Professor Mead.
10
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
}
J
pologists, following this view, deduced man's re-
ligion from primitive attempts to solve various theo-
retical problems which were supposed to cause great
perplexity to the mind of savage man: as for in-
stance, why certain natural forces acted irregularly,
or why he himself could be in one place in his dreams
when his companions assured him that he had passed
the night in another place.
This point of view was reasonable as long as the
mind was regarded as a separable individual sub-
stance, capable of "having states", dowered with
certain inalienable possessions, among which a most
important one was the craving for philosophic ex-
planation. Each primitive man, then, became a
Descartes, deducing the universe about him from the
one assured fact of the existence of his self, a self
of which apparently he had full cognizance.
As a matter of fact, the self, for the child and
for primitive man, is as truly a construct in con-
sciousness as is the physical world. We recognize
as much in our adult introspection, which assures
us that we progressively define ourselves only by
defining other parts of the total content of con-
sciousness. The self, at least any "self" which we
define and distinguish from the other facts of our
world, is not something which "has" consciousness,
but something which arises in consciousness.
And the consciousness in which it arises is of a
social type. We do not begin with a consciousness
of a physical world, and infer personalities; we
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
11
begin with social phenomena. It is natural that this
should be the case. For the point at which conscious-
ness first arises in the stream of unconscious activ-
ity is at the point of tension, the place where the
instincts fail to meet the satisfaction toward which
they point, where something which cannot be con-
trolled by the immediate reflexes, meets the activity.
This is most often produced by the presence and
opposing activity of another person; it brings up a
problem and a problem is the beginning of conscious-
ness, since it is the first place in the life-process
where there is any demand for it.
From what we know of our adult consciousness,
this conflict first takes the form of an emotional dis-
turbance. It is a conflict of ends, that is to say, of
differing tendencies towards action. These ten-
dencies can either of them be identified with the
activity which until now has gone on unchecked; this
fact gives them the peculiar proprietary feeling
which is associated with an emotion. The conflict
is not merely between two impersonal ends, but
between two different selves. Out of this conflict
arises the self which is to be the real one, the actu-
alized self. It is not as though the real self were
there all along and chose to identify itself with one
of two alternatives; rather, it comes to existence
only afterward, and is the result of the conflict. It
is the beginning of a self-consciousness, arising out
of a conflict of activities.
This is not merely a conflict which happens once
12
1
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
1
1
for all, somewhere back in the life of primitive man
or of the child. Self-consciousness is not attained
at any given period in the history of either the race
or the individual. Rather, as activity goes on, we
are continually attaining self-consciousness, and each
time it is the consciousness of a slightly different
self. If we do not fall back on the mechanical life of
habit, if consciousness exists at all in us, it is only
through this constant conflict, which takes the form
of a conflict of different selves and which results in
another hitherto non-existent self. That is to say,
the form of the conflict is always social in its nature.
This point must be insisted on. We do not per-
ceive the world because we have eyes and ears and
other instruments of sense-perception plus an inborn
desire to look at and listen to the world; we reach
even as far as sense-perception only through a
thwarting of impulsive activities which demands
that we "sit up and take notice." And this thwart-
ing comes about largely through social and personal
means.
It would perhaps be too much to say that the con-
sciousness thus arising is in any developed sense
social rather than physical. But this much is evi-
dent. The consciousness of a social world is at
least as early as the consciousness of a physical
world. Even as we learn gradually to mark off our
physical selves from the physical universe, defining
that universe by the relation in which it stands to us,
so we learn to mark off our social selves from the
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
13
social environment of other selves or "personal
ideas" that threaten to affect us.
Not only is the social problem at least as early
as the physical problem, but it receives, in the earlier
stages of development, a much stronger emphasis.
The more important problems and the more import-
ant emotional responses are called forth by the pres-
ence of persons. Hence the social world stays per-
sistently and forcefully in consciousness. We ob-
serve the signs of this in the mythological expres-
sion of the world of primitive men. Science and
the scientific temper is a very late development and
there are even now few people for whom it possesses
the importance of the world of personal relations.
And however elaborate may be the systems of sym-
bols which we finally employ in complex activities,
however abstractly scientific may become the ideas
which supersede the more concrete, less analyzed
personal ideas in the working out of a problem, the
beginning of that problem is always in a stage of
emotional tension, which is in its nature a conflict
of selves. The more intense the problem, the more
we realize the fact that the ideas contained in it are
personal ideas. The difference between myself as
going into the next room and myself as staying
here is not an enormous one, though under some
conditions it might easily become so. But the differ-
ence between myself as scientist and myself as artist
is great enough to become a very real conflict of
selves. All strongly felt problems pass in their be-
14
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
}
ginnings through this stage of emotional tension and
evaluation, which takes the form of an imaginative
social process.
For the child, however, the imaginative social
process is not only the type of emotional evaluation,
but the type of the total working out of his prob-
lems. Difficulties he cannot solve for himself are
solved for him by persons. He has not himself that
development of personality which would enable him
to solve his own difficulties. For this would mean
a highly complex organization of ideas, complex
enough to enable a long process of reflection to go
on inside of that organization without reference to
the world outside. Such a system the adult devel-
ops; the abstract symbols of reasoning take for him
the place of the more concrete, less manageable per-
sonal ideas, which are relegated to the beginning of
his problem. But the child's world is a deus ex
machina world; when things can go no further a
fairy steps in and sets them right. This is no miracle
to the child; it is the natural method of solution.
Things have to be "fixed" in some way; he does not
possess a sufficiently organized personality to fix
them himself; it is done for him by the imaginative
social process of which he distinguishes himself as
one part. The difference is one of control. The
novelist who cannot invent a situation which works
out its own inevitable solution is the novelist who
must introduce a deus ex machina.
Yet even here the process of solution is different
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
15
in degree rather than in kind. The ideas which for
the developed consciousness take the place of exter-
nal persons still possess traces of their origin as
personal ideas. But they are less concrete and more
specialized in function than the persons of the child.
Instead of being endowed, as is the fairy, with wings
and wand and golden hair and gauzy raiment, and a
lot of other perfectly irrelevant things, they have
only the amount of content necessary to the per-
formance of their function. This function per-
formed they sink out of consciousness and other
ideas take their place, each expressing one tendency
in the total conflict. The more abstract this process
is, or, in other words, the longer the process of
reflection before the resultant act, the more refined
and specialized do these ideas become, until they are
mere shadowy symbols of the "selves" which once
they were. When an idea has only one function and
performs that function with perfect and regular
adequacy, we are no longer conscious of it as a per-
sonal idea. And in our consideration of prayer, we
shall see how the social relation, usually present in
prayer, may, by the loss of content in one or other
of the selves involved, be resolved into an aesthetic
satisfaction or a moral action, which, while social in
its origin, is no longer social for consciousness.
We have seen that when the unity of unconscious
activity is broken up by a problem of some kind, the
first result is an emotional disturbance. This dis-
turbance is social in nature, being a conflict of dif-
16
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
i'
ferent selves, or personal ideas. There follows the
process of readjustment, of solution. This, for the
undeveloped personality, takes place also in terms of
personal ideas. Not that the child's consciousness
is in the last analysis more social than the adult's.
Both are occupied with the mechanics of the con-
struction of selves. But for the adult the process
is more complex. The immature consciousness is
one in which the process of reflection stops short of
complete adjustment, and hence gives mentally to
the elements of its world the concrete form of selves,
in so far as they are isolated elements. For in so
far as any object or phase of consciousness is not
made part of some larger systematic whole, it tends
to take on a personal form, the form of a self.
We begin here to see the reason why the imag-
inative social process is, as we have said, for chil-
dren the form of the total process of solution, while
for adults it is the form taken by a problem in its
initial statement and emotional evaluation. For the
mature consciousness goes from this stage to the
stage of reflection, and in reflection the elements
are no longer isolated contents and hence selves, but
are organized as parts of a larger systematic whole.
This merely means that they are under better con-
trol. The whole of which they are parts is still a
resultant act which gets its complete reality in per-
sonal form, that is to say, in a self. But a part is
not given mentally the value of a self.
It is merely
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
17
a means with a definitely marked function. The
process of abstraction has begun.
From this point on in the solution of the problem,
we part company with personal ideas, definitely rec-
ognized as such. What follows is a process of the
type of reasoning, in which systems of ideas and
habits carry on the problem to its ultimate solu-
tion.
Yet, even in this case, the process of solution
goes on under a social form. Thinking, even ab-
stract thinking, is in its very nature a conversation.
Most of our concepts of abstract thought are de-
pendent on language symbols. Until we take the
trouble to carry on a careful introspection, we are
largely unaware of the extent to which we use this
form of imagery. "The imaginary dialogue passes
beyond the thinking aloud of little children into
something more elaborate, reticent and sophisticated,
but it never ceases." "The mind lives in perpetual
conversation.
99 1
With further abstraction the definiteness even of
the word-imagery disappears. In a field with which
the reasoner is familiar it is no longer necessary to
go through even so long a process as is employed
in the complete conversation setting forth both sides
of the argument. The beginning of a sentence is all
the task allowed to one of the conflicting selves, be-
fore the answer is flashed back from the other. These
1
Cooley, "Human Nature and the Social Order," p. 52.
18
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
selves become the most shadowy things possible, the
correlates of imperceptible articulatory disturbances.
But as long as the reasoning remains reasoning, it
has the social form, however attenuated the social
content may become.
The end finally reached by this conflict is a solu-
tion expressed in an act. And action again is def-
initely social in nature. That is, it is the action of
a self, and of a particular self, a different self from
the selves that have been in conflict. It is a new self,
the resultant of the others. For it has become the
actualized self as over against the possible ideational
selves. We think of it as our own real self; we
even read it back into the struggle and think of it as
deciding the issue, because it appeared in the deci-
sion.
These final processes are not, however, consciously
social. Yet the difference is one of degree, not of
kind. The problem of the adult is capable of longer
reflective treatment and hence of a more symbolic
and abstract handling. For him the imaginative so-
cial process remains only as the type of emotional
evaluation, that is, of the beginning and definition
of his problem.
Yet even with the adult, there are relatively few
problems which run through this entire gamut: dis-
turbance, emotional evaluation, reflection, act. This
is the type of the complete process of solution, but
there are many short cuts in mental life. The emo-
tional evaluation is often the only evaluation
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
19
reached; action may follow quickly enough to make
any introspective search for an intermediate proc-
ess of reflection quite gratuitous. This is the type
of conflict which is given mentally the value of a
conflict of selves. It may still be compared, if we
so desire, with the type of reasoning of the imma-
ture mind. But there is this difference with the
adult: he does not use this imaginative social proc-
ess, this emotional evaluation, for all of his prob-
lems, as does the child. Greater discrimination pre-
vails. All problems of personal relations are solved
by this imaginative social process, followed or not,
as the case may be, by the logical process of re-
flection.
The question then remains: What part of the to-
tal situation in consciousness is set apart as "ob-
ject" and under what conditions is it so objectified?
And, secondly, under what conditions is the "object"
defined for consciousness as a self? In answer to
the first of these questions I shall refer especially to
Dr. Stuart's article in Dewey's "Studies in Logical
Theory," assuming with Cooley that when the dis-
tinction of subject and object arises, that which we
call subject is "some form of purposeful activity."
As long as "no conflict develops between motor re-
sponses prompted by different parts or aspects of
the same situation", consciousness "will not present
the distinction of objective and subjective". But
as soon as this conflict arises, it takes the form of a
20
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
tension between a purposeful activity and certain
conditioning means. Neither the activity nor the
means is at first fully defined; the process of solu-
tion is a process in which they mutually define each
other. The purposeful activity is, however, felt
throughout as subject; the conditioning means as
object. The latter must be regarded both as the ob-
stacle which interrupts the course of the activity,
and as the means through which the activity must
reach its end. It is the one because it is the other.
When, then, has this object a social character?
Under what conditions does it take on the charac-
teristics of selfhood? We have already seen that in
so far as any object in consciousness is not made
part of a larger system, it tends to take on a per-
sonal form. That is, any concrete whole, any object
which cannot be resolved into its relations with other
parts of consciousness, is given mentally the form
of a self. Some relations with those other objects
it must have, else it could not appear in conscious-
ness at all. But a self is not merely a part in a sys-
tem;
it is to some extent an isolated element, due to
a lack of complete adjustment in consciousness.
Complete adjustment depersonalizes the world;
moreover, complete adjustment passes over very
quickly into unconsciousness. But there are always
new problems, demanding new emotional evalua-
tions, new conflicts of selves; thus it is that con-
sciousness goes on.
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
21
Prayer is a form of this imaginative social process
which we have said was the type of solution for all
the problems of the child, and the type of emotional
evaluation for the problems of the adult. Prayer is
the direct interaction of two selves, or "personal
ideas," arising simultaneously in consciousness as
the result of a tension. The end sought and at-
tained is the establishment of a wider self One of
these selves or personal ideas is the me, or self of
immediate purpose and desire; the other is objecti-
fied as alter. The alter is, as object, the necessary
means to the desired end, and this end is always an-
other self, differing both from the me and the alter,
and varying infinitely as the particular problem
varies. The alter is, as personal object, an isolated
element, not yet a part of an effectively systema-
tized whole. The alters are not all the same alter;
neither are the me's the same me.
In children's prayers, primitive prayers, and a
small percentage of the prayers occurring among
adults, no distinction is maintained between per-
sonal and impersonal means and ends. The growth
of this distinction marks a stage in the discrimina-
tion of the use of prayer. And this discrimination
may take place in either or both of two ways. The
use of prayer in certain fields may cease because it
is not found to "work", or because there is a gradu-
ally growing sense of shame in connection with such
a use. These two methods of discrimination we shall
call the scientific and the ethical.
22
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
J
The child and the primitive man do not make such
distinctions. The prayers they use are not, from
our standpoint, the most effective means to the end
desired. Yet even here they are perhaps as effi-
cient and direct a means as any means present to the
consciousness of the child or the primitive man.
His science is as undiscriminating as his religion:
he has as yet no thorough correlation of means and
ends. And even for the adult the distinction be-
tween personal and impersonal is not at all com-
pletely made. There are fields which are still
claimed for both concepts,--especially the field of
therapeutics. In fields of this type we occupy much
the same position as that occupied by the primitive
man in regard to all his activities. We try now one
means, now another; prayer is sometimes efficient,
sometimes not; and we do not know precisely when
or how it is going to prove efficient.
Meantime another form of discrimination is con-
stantly going on with regard to prayer. Certain
needs are seen to be the needs of a partial self,
others of the larger, unlimited "social" self. And
when, as in the case of an ethical religion, the alter
is given the value of the highest, most inclusive self
conceivable, there arises a sense of shame in the
employment of a relation with such an alter for the
attainment of trivial ends. We shall trace the grad-
ual growth of this discrimination in the next section.
The completely discriminating forms of prayer
vary almost infinitely. But they may be conven-
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
23
iently classified according to the predominance in
them of one or the other of the two tendencies in
every social relation. One of these is a tendency to
take into consciousness the largest amount of social
content possible, to rest in the experience itself; the
second is the tendency to hurry as quickly as possi-
ble into action. The first of these we shall call the
contemplative or "aesthetic" tendency; the second
the practical or "ethical" tendency.
66
Prayers of adoration, of meditation, of joy in the
greatness of God, come under the first head. "Thou,
O Lord, art from everlasting to everlasting", is a
form of adoration in which the narrower finite self
finds joy in the contemplative sharing of a wider,
a mightier, an infinite life. In prayers of this type
the me aims to lose itself completely in a sympa-
thetic participation in the life of the alter, in such
a way as to give up entirely all thought of an ac-
tivity or problem of its own. This form is seen, at
its extreme, in the Buddhist meditations, the aim of
which is complete forgetfulness of the finite self.
It is seen in less extreme forms in all types of re-
ligious-æsthetic absorption; it is seen when the
psalmist¹, after mentioning with much lamentation
his own trials, finds comfort in the fact, not that
Jehovah will deliver him, but that Jehovah is mighty
in Israel, and will ultimately win the day in the
succeeding generations,. Such prayer finds its chief
1
¹ Ps. 102.
24
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
:
end in the prayer-state, in the enlargement of the
self through the contemplative sharing of a wider
life, and in the peace, rest and joy therefrom result-
ing.
At the other extreme from this type is a form of
prayer-relation which is more exclusively practical.
Prayer is sought for assistance in some moral aim,
either for the sake of giving enough incentive to
carry the action through, or in order to furnish an
ethical test in the decision between various possi-
ble lines of action. Kant illustrates this ethical em-
phasis in prayer when he declares that religion is
useful chiefly as giving divine authority to the moral
imperative. Just beyond the position occupied by
Kant we reach the extreme at which prayer ceases
to be a recognizably social relation, and hence ceases
to be prayer as such. We reach this extreme, as we
have previously suggested, by a loss of social con-
tent in the alter. A similar extreme may also be
reached in the case of the "aesthetic" type of prayer,
by loss of content in the me.
✓ The prayers of the typical religious consciousness
vary between these two extremes. At the limit either
of aesthetic contemplation or of moral action, there
ceases to be any mentally recognized relation of
selves, and we find accordingly that the average re-
ligious person will deny religious content to these
extremes. Yet they are merely the limiting forms
of the same relationship observed in prayer, and
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
25
result from the exclusive emphasis on one or the
other of the two tendencies in any social relation.
We have seen, then, that prayer is a social rela-
tion arising in consciousness, and that the result of
this relation is the establishment of a wider self.
We have seen that as the growing consciousness
learns to distinguish between personal and imper-
sonal means and ends, and between the needs of a
partial self and those of a completely social self,
these distinctions are applied in the use of prayer
And we have seen, finally, that even in the completely
discriminating type of prayer there are manifest
two tendencies, leading respectively to two extremes
between which prayers may vary infinitely. We
shall proceed to take up a general survey of the dif-
ferent forms of prayer, beginning, in section two,
with the undiscriminating reactions of the immature
consciousness, passing, in section three, to types of
prayer in which gradual discrimination is at present
taking place, and finally, in the remaining sections,
to a consideration of the completely social forms of
prayer.
TI
UNDISCRIMINATING FORMS OF PRAYER.
THE PRIMITIVE MAN
THE CHILD AND
Prayer is, then, as we have seen, a social relation
which has as aim the attainment of a wider, less
partial self, a more confident self, a self more
strong to endure, a self of larger sympathies, a more
t
!
:
26
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
truly ethical, more completely social self. This is
the need, the "problem" of the religious conscious-
ness.
But in the beginnings of religion, as we should
expect from the vaguer, less discriminating type of
earlier consciousness, there was no marked division
between religious needs and needs of any kind. Irv-
ing King has shown this in his thesis, "The Differ-
entiation of the Religious Consciousness". All ac-
tivities might partake of the religious character;
none were religious in the modern sense of the term.
Ceremonies which might be called either religious or
magical or artistic, and which have indeed been
classed as all three, were performed at the recog-
nized crises of life. Birth, the attainment of ma-
turity, marriage, and death, were the recognized
crises in the life of the individual; while seed-time
and harvest or the expeditions of hunting and war-
fare marked tribal crises which demanded cere-
monial preparation of a religious nature.
What is true of primitive races in this connection
is also true of the child. The child who attaches
any really vital meaning to the term God, makes use
of that meaning in order to satisfy any need that
can possibly occur to him. This fact is somewhat
obscured, as might be expected, from the way in
which religious education is given to children. The
child may learn to repeat the conventional formula
that we must pray to God "to make us good". But
any one who attempts to discover just what the
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
27
child means in this connection, finds a striking blank-
ness of content. The words are words and are sel-
dom exchangeable, even for other words, unless
the teacher himself has furnished one or two handy
synonyms. The child does not distinguish his re-
ligious needs from other needs. He has therefore
no specifically religious needs. He wants some-
thing, and he makes use of any and every means he
can think of; prayer is one of those means. And
prayer is a means not very alien to the general
content of his mental life, which is made up largely
of personal ideas, to be influenced in "personal"
ways. He will use in prayer the same kind of whin-
ing entreaty, or the same attempts at bargaining,
which mark his attempts to control other personal
forces. "Please, God, please let" such and such a
thing happen, or "I won't ask for anything else for
a long time if I can just have this", or "I'll do thus
and so, if you will do thus and so", are types of en-
treaty which the writer has heard in the spontaneous
parts of the evening prayers of several children.
The child in the tale who said: "Please, God, take
care of cousin Ann now, but we don't need you any
more here, for mother's come home", showed the
exact kind of need which he felt, and the exact kind
of a being which he posited to satisfy that need.
God as a person had for him the same function that
other persons, more especially one other person, had;
there was as yet no distinction between religious
needs and the other needs of life.
9.
28
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
Nor is this state of mind confined to children. It
finds a very dogmatic expression in a certain type
of adult religious consciousness. It is here some-
times due to a rather disorganized feeling that God
should pervade all the life; yet it must not be con-
fused with the more organized, rational expression
of that same feeling which will be treated later.
There is a difference between the conscious appli-
cation of ethical and religious values to common ex-
perience, which comes after an analysis of conscious-
ness and is the result of a will to make experience
ethically and religiously valuable; and the unthink-
ing confusion between religious needs and any other
kind of needs. It is only such confusion which could
lead to the attitude of mind of a revivalist whom I
heard relate the manner in which God gave him, in
answer to prayer, a particular suit of clothes which
he wanted but could not afford. He saw the sample
in the store; he haggled over the price; he decided
that he could not get it; he went away and prayed
about it; he came back and found that a suit of the
same material had just been returned and that he
could have it for a price well within his means; he
tried it on and "by the Providence of God" it fitted.
In hearing this tale as an example of the "way in
which God provides for all the wants of his chil-
dren", a religious person of the more completely so-
cial type is conscious of a feeling of disgust at what
seems to him irreverence; while the psychologist
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
29
notes simply the undiscriminating childishness of
the position.
There is, then, for the immature consciousness, no
clear distinction of the field in which prayer shall
be considered both effective and appropriate. So
that from the standpoint of the adult we are apt to
wonder at a blindness which could find the means
employed effective, at least effective enough to
warrant its continued application.
We must, however, notice one thing at once, look-
ing at the matter from the standpoint of the con-
sciousness which made the prayers.
If prayer did not always prove an adequate means
to the attainment of the desired end, neither did any-
thing else. The primitive man's science was not
more efficient than his religion. He had no definitely
organized system of means and ends; if the need
was urgent he tried every kind of means he could
think of, until one of them apparently "worked."
If he distinguished between the personal and im-
personal at all, he did not distinguish so carefully
but that he felt himself able to use impersonal means
to accomplish directly personal results, and vice
versa. Thus, on the one hand, he might use a potion
to procure the love of his hesitating mistress, or
on the other hand, he might use verbal petition
as a means of obtaining rain. The distinctions be-
tween personal and impersonal, material and spir-
itual, are distinctions which do not exist at all
levels of consciousness. They have been slowly
30
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
evolved and are even now not made with definite-
ness. Or perhaps it would be more exact to say
that in the case of some problems we have
reached a fair degree of organization in the use of
these differences, while in the case of other prob-
lems we either do not choose to raise the distinc-
tion, because other distinctions are more fruitful for
our purposes, or else we are unable to raise it, and
'make it adequately definite. The discussions con-
stantly going on with regard to the amount of effect
which faith may have on bodily ailments, and, from
the other side, the amount of relief which physical
means can "minister to a mind diseased" prove
that even the most thorough generalizations of
science have given us as yet no final system of means
and ends, completely organized.
With a more primitive type of consciousness, the
organization of cause and effect was of course even
looser. When a man wanted a thing, he went through
all kinds of contortions, mental and physical, to ob-
tain it. And if he got it, he felt it necessary to go
through as many of those contortions as he could
remember, every time he wanted it again. The
omission of the most trifling accompaniment of his
first success was held to vitiate the whole perform-
ance. Thus, in the snake dance of the Moqui In-
dians, designed to bring rain, the slightest variation
from the prescribed ritual, a ritual extending over
many days, makes necessary the repetition of the
ceremony. And if the rain does not come, the most
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
31
natural conclusion is that there has been some un-
noticed omission of an important element. This is
the immediate conclusion in all cases in which an
expected sequence does not occur; the scientist in
his laboratory, failing to get the expected reaction,
inevitably assumes that the means he used in this
case, though apparently the same as the means used
in the case when the reaction did follow, must in
reality have varied from it in some unnoticed but
important particular. He repeats the sequence with
increased care; so did the Indian. And the discrimi-
nation which the scientist consciously seeks and the
Indian gropes for, comes gradually to both.
1
The primitive lack of discrimination appeared in
many views of the cause and effect relation. Fre-
quently it is quite possible to trace the line of as-
sociation. Thus, as Josiah Tyler relates: "One of
the first missionaries to the Zulus was accustomed to
take his overcoat to the religious service whenever
there was a probability of rain. A drought having
come he was importuned by no means to leave be-
hind his 'rain-producing garment' ". Frequently,
moreover, the various activities associated with the
attainment of a given end, contained one or more
elements which were really significant. The Malay
preparation for an elephant hunt, which consisted in
smearing the body with four kinds of aromatic
leaves and uttering a charm in the process, was
¹ Josiah Tyler, "Forty Years Among the Zulus," p. 106.
..
32
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
efficacious in destroying the scent of the approach-
ing hunters.
The same thing is true of the prayers of the child.
Prayer is one of many means he employs toward
the desired end. If he gains the end, he is not likely
to try the experiment next time of leaving out any
of the factors in his previous success in order to
satisfy a theoretical curiosity as to which factor
produced the result. The theoretical curiosity is
not so strongly developed as this would imply. And
the child usually does succeed,-in time, and after
he has tried enough variety of means. If he does
not succeed, it is because his attention has wandered
off to fields and pastures new. In other words, the
times when his prayer preceded a success remain
in his mind more than the times in which his prayer
preceded a failure, and this for the reason that the
problems which were important enough to hold his
attention were important enough to hold his efforts,
and thus eventually to reach a satisfactory solu-
tion.
So prayer is, for the immature consciousness, one
of many elements in an undiscriminating attempt
to solve a problem. It is used to obtain the satis-
faction of many kinds of desires. Sometimes it
works; sometimes it does not; for some things it
works especially well, and for others not so well.
But how is the child to know the cause of its work-
ing when it works, and the cause of its failing when
it fails, analyzing in each case the psychological ele-
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
33
ments which make the prayer efficacious for some
things and not for others? Such isolation of the ele-
ments of a causal sequence, is one of the highest
achievements of an advanced science, and even as
yet has proved possible only in a limited sphere,
which sphere becomes for us, it is worth noting, our
sphere of the impersonal.
The beginnings of this scientific discrimination
come when the causal relation between the prayer
and the result is broken in one of two ways. Either
the prayer does not bring the result or the result
comes without the prayer. The latter of these two
events is likely to occur only in matters of little
importance. For in important matters, the experi-
ment of omitting any elements of a hitherto suc-
cessful sequence is not likely to be tried. But occa-
sions come, in these important matters, when the
desired result is not forthcoming. And on such oc-
casions different sorts of experiments are tried.
The sequence may be repeated more carefully, as in
the case of the Snake dance already mentioned; or
the sequence may be varied. The gods may even be
deliberately changed, if they have not given the
desired result. Thus in the case of the tutelary
deities of China, "when the sacrificial victims are
perfect, the corn in the vessels pure, the sacrifices
at their proper times, and yet there arises drought
or flood, then the tutelary spirits may be changed".¹
1
¹ Faber, "Mind of Mencius," p. 72.
34
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
1
This is a beginning of a discrimination which takes
the form of a restriction of the place in which cer-
tain gods may be effectively used.
*
A similar limitation of the power of the gods is
found in the tribal nature of many of the deities.
Thus, among the Ewe-speaking peoples, the gods are
supposed to be completely "indifferent to acts of
sacrilege on the parts of Europeans, which they
avenge with death when committed by natives"¹
Some such assumption has been found necessary to
account for the fact, evident enough in their experi-
ence, that the Europeans do not suffer from these
acts of sacrilege, and cannot be made so to suffer,
either through fear of the god, or through fear of
the vengeance of the priest.
;
A similar discrimination between the things which
God is likely to perform and those that he is not,
took place in the experience of a small boy of my
acquaintance. He had been brought up with a sense
of the extreme closeness of the relation of God to
the minute events of daily life. One day, in a fit
of exasperation he uttered the word, "Damn". He
ran into the house, terror-stricken. When he grew
calm enough to tell his tale to his mother, he added:
"I thought God was going to strike me dead, as he
used to do with people in the Bible. But he didn't”.
He had begun to discriminate, and to set certain
spheres of life aside as not exposed to direct divine
1
¹ A. B. Ellis, "Ewe-Speaking Peoples of the West Coast," p. 81,
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
35
interference. Such an experience, if the incident in
question involves a large enough part of life to make
a strong impression, might easily lead to a total
rejection of the hypothesis of any God at all, unless
he is furnished by some older person with a ready-
made distinction which answers his purpose.
But such a rejection is not likely to happen at
once. It takes an event of great emotional signifi-
cance to upset the habits already formed. There
are so many possible ways of explaining exceptions;
and their number is multiplied a hundred-fold when
personal factors enter into the problem. Moreover,
it is a psychological commonplace that that which
we expect to see is much more easily taken into our
minds than that which we do not expect, and that
which accords with our habitual methods of classi-
fication is much more easily held there than that
which does not. So it usually requires many in-
stances of God's non-interference to induce the child
to make radical changes in his point of view.
Then, too, both in the case of the primitive man
and in that of the child, there are certain types of
problem in which prayer has a very real effect. They
are the types which, partly on this very account and
through this very means, are distinguished later as
the social and personal problems. A Zulu exercises
certain charms against the life of a certain man; he
lets the man know of it; and the man actually does
die. For the Zulu, and we must confess for the an-
thropologist also, though in a different way, the
36
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
death is the result of his enemy's prayer. Cere-
monies for the sake of healing may also be classed
with those for the sake of destroying.
Besides those religious rites which produced their
effect through their influence on the mind of an-
other person, there are those which reached the de-
sired end by affecting the mind of the worshipper
himself. And here the result is even more certain.
We find accounts of it especially, in dealing with
primitive society, in the preparations for war. By
ceremonies which were as religious as anything else.
the tribe did, and religious too in the same sense,
however far a war-dance may seem from religion
to the twentieth century mind, the tribe worked it-
self up to a pitch of frenzied self-confidence which
made failure almost impossible. Naturally the other
tribe might do the same. But in this case, fate was
on the side of the most "religious", granting that
the numbers were fairly equal, since they were the
most fearless and ferocious.
In the case of the child, also, discrimination comes
slowly for the same reason, namely, that prayer
seems successful in many of the cases in which he
uses it, and hence justifies itself for him. He prays
for a thing and lets his parents know of his prayer;
he gets what he prays for, as they do not want to
disappoint his faith. Or he goes to school and comes
to his first examination. He prays that he may not
fail. The calm of mental assurance produced by
such a prayer is of course the best possible guar-
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
37
antee of success. So entirely does prayer seem to
justify itself in such matters as these that I have
even known many college girls who confessed, al-
though with a little shame, that they always prayed
for success in examinations. Prayer for such things
is so efficient that when discrimination finally comes,
as it usually does in the higher types of the religious
consciousness, it is likely to be based, not on the
scientific criterion of efficiency, but on the ethical
criterion of value, which we shall next proceed to
consider.
So far, then, this much seems evident: that for
the immature consciousness there is no clear dis-
tinction between the ends for which prayer and
other religious means may appropriately be em-
ployed, and those for which it may not. Nor is
there any such discrimination in the case of any
other means. And since the use of religious cere-
monies seemed to justify itself as much as the use
of any other means known, scientific discrimination,
that is, a discrimination that would restrict the re-
ligious means to a certain type of problems on the
ground of recognized inefficiency in other types,
came very slowly.
Another form of discrimination was, however, also
taking place. Irving King, in his thesis "The Dif
ferentiation of the Religious Consciousness", speaks
of it as the discrimination between magic and re-
ligion. But this seems only one aspect of the entire
distinction between activities necessary for the at-
38
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
tainment of the widest, most social self, and those
necessary for the attainment of some partial self.
Certain needs are found to be especially import-
ant for the tribe as a whole. The ceremonies for
their attainment are performed by the entire group,
or later by a priest or medicine man representing
the group. And these ceremonies receive the au-
thority and social reinforcement of the group. They
are group-activities. The gods to whom they appeal
are the "high gods" of a tribe, and care for the
tribe's interests. The members of the tribe have,
however, desires which do not concern the good of
the group and which may even be hostile to the wel-
fare of some other member. In these desires they
do not receive the authority and social reinforce-
ment of the group. In other words, they cannot
appeal to the gods who care for the tribe; they
cannot make use of the ritual and prayer in which
the tribe takes part as a whole.
Thus there arises a distinction between the wider
social ends, attained by the religious rites of the
tribe, and the narrower ends of individual desires.
The former of these are the ends which with later
discrimination come to be known as ethical and re-
ceive the authoritative sanction of the ethical re-
ligions. For the latter there are two ways open.
They seek their fulfillment either through perform-
ances which become recognized as "magical" and
so inimical to the purpose of the more "social" re-
ligion, or through the creation of lesser gods who
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
39
are not so indifferent to individual desires as are the
gods of the tribe, and who may therefore be bribed
for individual ends. These methods run into each
other; "magical" practices of all kinds are carried
on in connection with the lesser gods; and on the
other hand, one religion is apt to stigmatize as
"magic" the dealings with gods of other religions.
Thus the early Christians did not deny reality to
the gods of Greece and Rome, but considered them
demons whom it was unlawful to worship.
6
These two methods of supplying the individual
with satisfaction for his more partial ends, while
not absolutely distinguished, are yet in some par-
ticulars different. The use of magic has always im-
plied a distinct conflict with the religious authority
of the time. The attitude of the, author of I Samuel
toward Saul's consultation of the Witch of Endor¹
and that of the Middle Ages toward the black art
are examples of this. Saul could no longer obtain
the favor of the god of his people; he resorted to
magic. And magic was a distinct affront to the re-
ligion of his nation
The second method, the method of polytheism, is
found in connection with less ethical religions, and
does not imply a moral affront to the chief gods of
the people. It seems more a matter of economic
convenience that the gods who care for the interests
of the whole tribe should not be bothered with small
¹I Samuel 28.
40
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
affairs. Thus Hirata, the exponent of Shintoism,
writes:1"
"The gods are not to be annoyed by greedy peti-
tions, for the Mikado offers up petitions daily for
his people, which are far more effectual than those
of his subjects." Many religions contain the con-
ception of a god too high to be of use in the affairs
of men, supplemented by a host of lesser gods who
serve the needs of the day. Such is the Shang-Ti
of the Chinese, who is worshipped by the emperor
alone, but who is supplemented by local deities, an-
cestral spirits, domestic gods, and gods of particular
callings. Such is also Mawu, the chief god among
the Ewe-speaking peoples on the west coast of
Africa, who, A. B. Ellis declares,2 is ignored by the
natives as too great and distant; for "to the native
mind, a god that works no evil to man and is indif-
ferent to his welfare", as this high god of the sky
is supposed to be on account of his greatness, "is
one that it would be a work of supererogation to ap-
pease, while there are so many others who either
work evil and have to be appeased or are special
guardians and have to be lauded". It is worth
noting that the natives commonly identify the new
god of the missionaries with this Mawu, and take the
message of the missionary as meaning in essence
that Mawu does really interfere in the affairs of men
and hence requires worship. When this claim is ap-
1
9
1
¹ Quoted in Griffis, "The Religions of Japan," p. 87.
2
A. B. Ellis, "Ewe-Speaking Peoples of the West Coast," p. 34.
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
41
!
1
parently contradicted by the results of their ex-
perience in trying to get certain favors from Mawu,
they are apt to relapse into their former belief in
his indifference. They have simply added a god
to the number of gods they must placate, and then
dropped him again after due trial. They have not
in such cases reached any more developed stage of
religious consciousness by any careful distinction
of the place of God in experience.
Psychologically, a religion of many gods for the
many different desires gives extreme emphasis to
the element of difference in the selves constantly
arising in the stream of consciousness, but fails to
give any emphasis on the side of unity. Psycho-
logically it is correct to say that there is a different
self for every new locality and every new kind of
crisis. Whether it is equally correct to give a re-
ligious value to all of these selves is a matter of
ethics rather than of psychology. Ethically the criti-
cism of such a type of religion would be that it
focussed attention on and gave religious value to
activities indifferent or even hostile to the highest
social ends.
For these lesser deities are not, in most cases,
used for moral support and encouragement; they
are used for all sorts of trivial ends, even less worthy
than the afore-mentioned coat of the revivalist. And
they are so used with more logical justification than
in the case of the revivalist. For the conception of
a God universal enough to be vitally interested in
42
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
the fate of all men, would naturally operate to ex-
clude foolish and irrelevant petitions. It may, as
in the case of the Ewe-speaking peoples already
noticed, entirely remove petition to and interest in
such a god. Or, if the idea of God has sufficient
vitality, the prayer may remove for the time being
the desire for the trivial things for which the peti-
tioner feels it foolish to pray. But, at any rate,
such a conception identifies religion with the ethical
side of man's nature, the more inclusive social side.
But in the case of the lesser gods of a polytheistic
religion there is no such ethical appeal. And this is
just because they are identified with the needs of a
small particular self out of the many selves which
make up the individual. Hence while the so-called
ethical religions change their conception of God with
the developing conception of society, always striv-
ing to find the highest unity, the most inclusive so-
cial self, the worship of many minor deities misses
the powerfully compelling ethical force of a wide
social self and finds in its connection with immediate
desires an emotional and psychological compensa-
tion for this loss.
In the case of a child brought up under the influ-
ence of an ethical religion, this discrimination ar-
rives more easily, being given to it largely ready-
made. It may even come so early that the other
kind of discrimination, the scientific, never arises
at all. Thus the child may cease to pray for "ma-
terial" objects not because he finds that his prayer
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
43
is useless, but because even before making that dis-
covery he comes to have a sense of shame in "both-
ering God with such little things". This is the
explanation of the shame felt by the college girls
already mentioned in their prayer for success in
examinations. The prayer "worked" beautifully;
the criticism of its use was not scientific but ethical.
Other girls have told the writer that they some-
times prayed for success in athletic contests. But
here the ethical criticism came still more forcibly
into play. They were demanding, at least implicitly,
the defeat of another. And they had not the sublime
confidence of David which could assume that the god
of battles was inevitably on his side. As one girl
said: "I don't dare ask any more that the other
team may be beaten, but I ask that our team may
play its best, and," with a slight laugh, "I guess I
rather hope the other team will forget to ask.'
99
The same attitude of ethical discrimination came
out in a discussion with another girl concerning the
efficacy of prayer. "I have asked for all kinds of
things," she said, "and I have usually got them, as
far as I remember, but I always feel so horribly
ashamed afterwards to think that I bothered God
with such trifles. I don't do it much now." Dis-
crimination had apparently come in her case, not
because of a recognized inadequacy of prayer in any
department of life, but because with moral growth
there came a sense of shame in the use of a social
relation as means to a trivial end.
44
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
1
St. Teresa admirably illustrates the attitude taken
by the developed religious consciousness towards
such trivial petitions,-trivial from the ethical point
of view: "I laugh and grieve," she says, "at the
things people come to ask our prayers for. They
should rather beg of God that he would enable them
to trample such foolery under their feet."" Never-
theless she finds a value in their turning to God, even
under such circumstances. So her convent accepts
the prayers and offers them, though "I am per-
suaded our Lord never heard me in these matters,
-for persons even request us to ask His Majesty
for money and revenues".
With this ethical distinction between the things
which may properly be asked and those which may
not, we naturally pass to the consideration of the
more discriminating types of prayer. Ethically, this
attitude points to a clearer and higher conception
of the moral ideal; practically, it undoubtedly means
the loss of a certain power which might produce
results. For the ethical and the scientific discrim-
inations do not exactly coincide here. Practically,
prayer and the confidence resulting therefrom would
be of very distinct use in the winning of a basket-
ball game; but the ethically developed consciousness
would be very careful in making such a use of it.
This loss of practical power may doubtless be com-
pensated by a growth in self-confidence due to a
1
¹ St. Teresa, "The Way of Perfection," p. 4.
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
45
more intimate and organized knowledge of the means
needed for the desired result;-in the examination,
by a conscious realization of the value of calm and
confidence and by a consciously acquired self-control,
and in the game, by a conscious realization of the
need of courage and self-reliance and the application
of that knowledge.
Whether the loss is made good or not, the fact
remains that in all cases in which a desired result
may be obtained by an effect on the individual con-
cerned, prayer is a means of decided efficiency. And
this leads to the discussion of the more discriminat-
ing types of prayer, in which the use of prayer as
a means is gradually limited to just this kind of an
effect.
III
INTERMEDIATE TYPES. THE GROWTH OF DISCRIMINATION
We have said that prayer is a social relation be-
tween two selves arising simultaneously in con-
sciousness, having for its end the establishment of
a wider, more complete self. This definition has not
seemed to hold entirely in the case of the immature
consciousness, because, with more mature discrim-
ination, we no longer identify our "selves" with
the type of things there prayed for. There has been
a progressive limitation of the field to which the
imaginative social process may apply. Yet, even
for the adult consciousness, the line between the
personal and the impersonal is a shadowy one. So,
46
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
1
although as we saw at the close of the last section,
prayer is gradually confined, as the worshipper be-
comes more discriminating, to the establishment of
a completer self, yet there are several types of
prayer more or less widely employed at the present
day, which lie on the border between the primitive
prayers and the completely social prayers. Some
of these were mentioned at the close of the last sec-
tion, but they are varied and numerous enough to
deserve special consideration before we turn to the
prayers which confessedly aim at the development
of a self. For the prayers to be next considered do
not, from one standpoint, aim at such a development.
They are rather prayers for so-called "objective”
results. Among them may be counted the prayers
of those suppliants already noticed, whose material
petitions St. Teresa bewailed, declaring with a scien-
tific skepticism rather remarkable in a woman noted
for her reliance on prayer: "I am persuaded my
Lord never heard me in such matters.""
2
In an article by F. O. Beck, dealing with the re-
sults of a questionnaire on the subject of prayer,
only five per cent of the respondents, all of whom
habitually prayed, claimed that "objective" answers
to prayer, that is, answers which affected conditions
outside the subject, were possible. This is very
instructive, as showing the extent to which the re-
ligious consciousness is willing to confine the results.
1 "The Way of Perfection," p. 4.
2 Amer. Jour. of Rel. Psych. and Education, I, 1906, p. 107.
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
47
}
of prayer to an effect upon the individual who prays.
If the respondents had been children, without doubt
a greater proportion would have been observed.
Yet this doubt in the objectivity of prayer-answers
is not due to a general decrease of belief in the
efficacy of prayer, on account of numerous trials
which have failed. For most of the respondents, to
judge from the answers given, were people of strong
religious conviction. The doubt represents rather,
as we have maintained, a gradual distinction of the
field in which prayer may appropriately be applied
as a means.
Even in the cases referred to as objective answers
to prayer, we shall see that there was a social rela-
tion employed as means and a social end attained.
But while the social nature of the means was recog-
nized, the social nature of the end was not so recog-
nized. The result was said to have taken place in
the world "outside the self". We shall see, how-
ever, that this supposition is due to lack of psycho-
logical analysis. The result took place first in a
social form, producing a new self, which had there-
fore inevitably a new environment.
We have already noticed, in the case of the exam-
ination and the basket-ball game, one division of
such prayers,-those in which a more confident self
was established. There are other cases which come
under this head. And we must notice that in the
attainment of any end, the part played by confidence
is enormous. First in its effect on the person con-
}
48
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
cerned, next in its effect upon others. We call to
mind the case of George Müller,¹ and others like
him, who let the Christian world know of their needs,
of the missionary character of their work, and of
their complete dependence on prayer to furnish all
their necessities. The fact of their trust makes the
strongest kind of an appeal,-not only their trust in
God, but also in the willingness of the Christian
world to help. Such confidence it is almost impos-
sible to disappoint. Even in cases in which the
external knowledge of the prayer is lacking, confi-
dence, in its direct effect upon the person concerned
and its indirect effect through him on others, is the
strongest assurance of success.
In addition to the fact that prayer induces a sub-
jective attitude well qualified to bring about new
objective results, it also induces an attitude ready
to interpret to its own end those results which it did
not bring about. Sensations from without can only
come into a consciousness prepared to receive them
and can only be arranged in the forms which that
consciousness furnishes. This is of course a com-
monplace both in philosophy and psychology.
Events which to one mind will be interpreted in
scientific terms will to another be interpreted in
aesthetic, to another in religious terms. Thus Rob-
ert Lyde, an Englishman who lived in the good old
days when God was a god of battles and favored
1 "The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings
with George Müller." New Amer. edi., Crowell, New York,
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
49
1
individual parties, makes a religious statement of
events which a modern writer would relate from an
entirely different standpoint. He tells of an en-
counter with two Frenchmen in which one of them
lifted a weapon against him: "Through God's
wonderful providence it either fell out of his hand
or he let it drop. And at this time the Almighty
God gave me strength enough to take one man and
throw him at the other's head,"-thus effectually
disposing of both. A perfectly coherent account of
an incident, in terms which, however foreign to our
method of organization of the same facts, are never-
theless true for their own particular purpose,-that
of giving an account of exactly what happened to
the consciousness and experience of the man Robert
Lyde.
But it is not only in the terms used that the sub-
jective attitude affects the material received into
consciousness. There may be a vital difference in
the effect and use of the same material. To a per-
son confidently expecting the intervention of a good
God in certain difficulties, and a person expecting
the worst possible outcome, or merely doubting what
the outcome may be, the same objective stimuli may
be productive of widely differing results. When a
person goes through the world, as does the char-
acter in a modern novel, "The Dawn of a Tomor-
row", in the confident expectation of "Good's com-
1 ¹ Arber's English Garland, Vol. 7, p. 440.
50
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
ing, good's coming", and the firm determination
to interpret whatever happens as good, or at least
as possessing the potentialities of good, if she can
make use of them; her prayer for "good things"
is certain to be answered, as far as her own inter-
pretation of her life is concerned, and that is, in the
last analysis, all we have to deal with here. He
who can say with Marcus Aurelius: "Oh, Universe,
all that Thou wishest, I wish," is quite certain to
obtain his wishes. But this is carrying us away
already from the use of prayer for definite external
objects into the conscious application of it in the
attainment of a larger self.
Prayers which reach their end through the estab
lishment of a strongly confident self will be taken up
again in the consideration of the more highly ethical
prayers, where the confidence is in matters purely
ethical. Here we will next consider a type of cases
in which the effect of the prayer relation is not a
general expansion of the self in the manner just
considered, but an increase of the power of the self
along some very specific line. The relation arising
between the me, or self of immediate desire, and the
alter, which is in this case a temporarily dissociated
part of the stream of consciousness, brings to the
solution of the problem associations which the me
was incapable of arousing.
One incident will show the type of prayer here
meant. A college girl related this experience to the
writer: She had lost her physics note-book and
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
51
the time of examination was approaching. She let
it go till the last minute, hoping to find it. Then
being in some concern, she made it a matter of
prayer, saying: "If it is Your will that I try the
examination without this book as a punishment for
my carelessness, very well; I will do my best that
way. But it would make things much easier if I
could find it." She immediately felt an impulse to
go to a certain store in the village. She reasoned
with herself, saying: "I haven't been there for
over a month. I remember distinctly the last time
I was there and that was before I lost the book.”
The impulse continued, and taking it as an answer
to her prayer, she went. As she entered, a clerk
approached her with the book, saying: "You left
this here ten days ago, and I could not send it, not
knowing your address." Then and not till then the
memory of a special visit made to the store by an
unusual road, flashed across her mind. But that
memory had been latent all the time in the subcon-
scious activities of her self, potent enough to induce
action, but not strong enough to come to conscious-
ness in the shape of definite recollection. The fact
that the impulse appeared with the relinquishment
of the conscious striving is also significant as show-
ing a characteristic of subconscious action. It is
like the remembering of a name by giving up the
strenuous effort for it or the attainment of sleep
by ceasing the arduous pursuit of it. These latter
achievements are not given a religious sanction, but
52
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
1
the psychological process is the same. The strenu-
ously striving self of momentary desire and the self
of long-established habit are the two selves con-
cerned in this relation. But the two selves are not
completely connected, hence the appearance of mu-
tual isolation. In this case, however, a conscious
and reflective connecting of the two selves as part
of one self followed in the recollection which came
after the girl had entered the store. Such a con-
scious establishment of connection does not always
occur.
In the history of prayer there are probably many
cases of the kind just described, in which a mere re-
liance on the laws of subconscious activity does the
work, and in which the alter is not necessarily of
any higher ethical value than the me. For the self
to which petition is made for specific objective ends
of a material kind is not necessarily the highest
moral self. It is never, in fact, upon its high moral
aspects that the emphasis is being laid at the time
of petition. It is merely a more powerful, more
adequate self upon which the me relies. It is, in
the cases just mentioned, the self of organized habit
in relation to some particularly desired event. We
should hesitate to call it "the subconscious self",
lest we should seem to postulate some continuously
existing being containing in itself all organized hab-
its and containing them all equally. It is rather a
self made up, not of all organized habits, but of
certain particular organized habits. Which habits
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
53
these are, which part of the subconscious activities
here function together as a self, depends on the par-
ticular problem in hand.
One more large department of prayer must be
noted, before we pass to a consideration of the com-
pletely social type,-the use of prayer for the cure
of disease. We might indeed consider this use of
prayer as coming under the completely social type,
in which prayer is recognizably used for the estab-
lishment of a wider self. In that case we should
be considering disease as an affection of the "self",
and the end to be achieved through prayer as per-
fect "wholeness" in every particular. But there is
in this field so much confusion between the use of
"self" to designate the entire psycho-physical or-
ganism and its use for an organization of purposes
and desires quite sharply discriminated from the
"body", that it seems best to treat these cases by
themselves, as cases in which the distinctions of
personal and impersonal means and personal and
impersonal ends are not yet clearly made.
Prayer for the cure of disease has been almost
universally practised in primitive religions. This
is not remarkable, since prayer, including under
this head ceremony as well as verbal statement, was
used for every variety of crisis. Nor is it surpris-
ing that prayer should have been used for this pur-
pose long after its undiscriminating application to
many other kinds of problems ceased; for this is a
more unusual problem and one less susceptible, in
54
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
the state of primitive science, of coming under uni-
form treatment. But that prayer should have con-
tinued to our own day as a recognized means of
treatment for physical ills, is somewhat more re-
markable, and would seem to indicate some closer
causal connection than one is apt to assume at first
sight. Luther¹ believed in prayer for the sick; he
reports that it had in his own experience saved
three lives, his own, his wife's and a friend's, at a
time when they were "nigh unto the very gates of
death". St. Augustine¹ reports the cure of a tooth-
ache. Almost every religious leader who has, as all
religious leaders have, lived a life of prayer, reports
cases of the cure of disease through its means.
Andrew Murray tells of the progress of healing
by prayer." "At first it took him eighteen months of
much prayer and labor before the final victory was
gained. Afterwards he had such ease of access to
the throne that when letters came asking for prayer
for sick people he could, after looking upward for
a single moment, obtain the answer as to whether
they could be healed." While we may quite easily
doubt the basis of this extreme confidence in each
particular case, this apparent sureness of knowl-
edge,—it is nevertheless quite true that cures were
effected. It is important to note in these cases the
growth of self-confidence by the habitual use of
prayer for healing, and the growth of the confidence
¹ cf. Amer. Jour. of Rel. Psych. and Edu., I, 1906, p. 107.
"With Christ," p. 126 et seq.
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
55
of the people who came to be healed. The first case
took him eighteen months; afterwards he did not
need so much time. The growth of confidence, of
"faith", is an important part of all such phenomena
of prayer and faith-healing.
Torrey relates an experience of cure by prayer.¹
A fit of illness came upon him when alone in his
study. He was in such pain that he was unable to
arise and seek help. Fearing lest he should be left
alone and unaided for an entire night unless he se-
cured the strength to care for himself, he prayed,
and in a few moments was greatly relieved. Cases
of this type are common, not only in the printed
biographies of religious leaders, but in the lives of
some of the friends of most of us, sometimes con-
fessed, sometimes not. The writer knows person-
ally half a dozen people who habitually make use of
prayer in this manner. The success of such a use
rests of course only on the testimony of single indi-
viduals and is extremely subjective in nature, yet
that testimony occurs with sufficient frequency to
give it weight.
There are also more "objective" cases, cases in
which the prayer was for another individual, who,
however, knew that he was being prayed for. (Theré
are very few cases mentioned in which such knowl-
edge was not included in the preconditions of re-
covery.) Father John Sergieff, a Russian priest, re-
1
¹ Torrey, "How to Pray," p. 18.
56
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
"
lates such occurrences as a matter of course. In
"My Life in Christ", phrases of this kind are fre-
quent: "Paul and Olga, in accordance with my un-
worthy prayers, have been cured of the infirmity
with which they were attacked.”¹
The examples hitherto given have been taken from
the lives of people who laid no especial emphasis on
faith-healing as a part of their creed. They show
that for the typical religious consciousness of the
past the healing of disease has been a use of prayer
frequently taken for granted, even when not empha-
sized as a particularly and peculiarly appropriate
use.
But when we consider the tremendous emphasis
which this use of prayer has been receiving within
the last few years, in various types of religious
movements from Christian Science down,2-and
up; when we realize that for many people and many
sects it has become the most vital issue in religion
at the present moment; then we see that this form
of prayer is more fundamentally connected with the
social forms which we shall discuss later, than is
the totally undiscriminating use which we have al-
ready discussed. The exact limits of its application
are yet to be determined. Yet here also our thesis
holds good: that the end of prayer is the establish-
¹ Father John Sergieff, "My Life in Christ,” p. 202.
2 The Emmanuel Movement, beginning at Emmanuel Church, Bos-
ton. is the most widespread movement taking place within the church
itself, and in connection with a recognized "orthodox" religion. See
"Religion and Medicine," Emmanuel Church Publications, Boston.
1
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
57
ment of a larger self. The unsolved question is not
so much with regard to the ultimate aim of prayer
as with regard to the types of diseases and disord-
ers which shall be considered affections of the
"self". And here we find, psychologically and thera-
peutically, a live issue. There has probably never
been a time when this use of prayer has aroused
more public discussion than at the present day, be-
cause the world has never before passed through an
era like that of the last fifty years, in which all de-
pendence on mental and spiritual means in the cure
of disorders was so rigorously excluded. Up to that
time those who used prayer used it as a matter of
course and with little discrimination, in connection
with other means. Now the whole matter is under
strenuous discussion, a discussion which will proba-
bly result in more adequate distinctions than have
as yet obtained concerning the employment of prayer
in this field.
The value of prayer for certain parts of this field
is not at all hard to find. Indeed it is rather sur-
prising, in view of the great use which has been
made of prayer in disease and the greatness of its
success when compared with the use of prayer for
other "material" ends; in view moreover of the
closeness of the connection between the organism
to be cured and the consciousness in which the
prayer or the faith in another's prayer arises;-it
is surprising that more deductions have not been
made from these two facts concerning the essential
58
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
nature of prayer as a means arising in conscious-
ness for the sake of the development of that con-
sciousness.
Three things must be briefly mentioned in con-
sidering the psychological connection between
prayer and health. First, that an attitude of confi-
dence towards the universe, an absence of worry, is
an element in all perfect health, and tends to pro-
duce health through a right functioning of the
psycho-physical organism. The poisonous effect of
the depressing emotions is too well known to need
comment. The healthy mood is the mood of confi-
dent action. The removal of perplexing inhibitions
makes the processes of life move more easily. The
main thing for health is that these processes shall be
let alone, undisturbed by the worries which arise,
more in some temperaments than in others, unless
held in check by some positive confidence. Confi-
dence in almost anything would do. Thus we find
diseases cured by prayers and religious ceremonials
in religions which we should characterize as com-
pletely non-ethical. And we find cures produced by
other types of confidence than the religious.
Closely connected with this negative effect of
prayer in producing a confident self, is the positive
stimulation resulting from the contemplation of a
pleasurable idea. More especially the sympathetic
sharing of a completer, more wholesome, more ade-
quate life, has an effect like that of a stimulant or
tonic. "The object is to absorb the consciousness in
Y
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
59
the thought of the divine presence, since no other
realization is therapeutically so effectual."1
In addition to the purely general psychic accom-
paniments of the prayer-state, we must notice the
perfectly definite effect which suggestion of all
kinds has in the removal of certain diseases. It
would not be in place here to discuss the extent of
that power. In fact, we should hardly have gone at
all into this brief consideration of the physiological
effects of mental states, if those effects had not re-
ceived so much recent emphasis in connection with
religious movements. The relation of prayer to
health is as yet incompletely determined. Any dis-
ease at all affected by the nervous condition comes
of course well within its province. That is to say,
any problem which is "social" in nature, which de-
mands for its solution the establishment of a differ-
ent self, is a problem which comes within the field
of prayer, as we have defined it.
Yet we have not included this form of prayer
among the completely developed forms for the rea-
son that neither the scientific nor the ethical discrim-
inations discussed in the preceding section have as
yet succeeded in placing it there. From the stand-
point of the scientific discrimination, the exact limits
of the efficiency of prayer in this field are unde-
termined. And from the standpoint of the ethical
discrimination we must notice the fact that this par-
1
¹ H. W. Dresser, "Health and the Inner Life," p. 203.
60
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
ticular type of prayer does not of necessity posit a
self of higher ethical value than the me. We have
already seen that a confidence of almost any sort
will do the work. For the result depends princi-
pally upon the extent to which the immediate self of
depression, anxiety and low vitality can be given up.
"To lose self that we may find it is, in fact, the es-
sence of spiritual healing; for invariably there is
too great consciousness of self whenever there is ill-
ness and trouble.'”¹
Yet it must not be inferred that the nature of the
alter in the relation does not in any way affect the
result. The more strongly joyous, the more potent,
the more confidently healthful the life thus shared
through contemplation or suggestion, the more will
the resultant self possess those qualities, and the
greater will be the tonic effect upon the nervous
organism. And for an ethical religion there has
been established in the minds of a majority of peo-
ple an intrinsic connection between the morally ideal
self and the ideally powerful self. Due to this as-
sociation at least, if to no more fundamental con-
nection, the relation with the morally and religiously
ideal self has a peculiarly important place in the
field which we have been discussing. It is also due
to this association that prayers for the cure of dis-
ease frequently result, in the case of an ethical re-
ligion, in moral and religious gains. Thus Torrey,
}
¹H. W. Dresser, "Health and the Inner Life," p. 203.
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
61
in the incident quoted above, concludes: "The joy
of the healing was not so great as the joy of thus
meeting God.''1
This leads at once to the consideration of the
fully discriminating type of prayer.
IV
THE COMPLETELY SOCIAL TYPE OF PRAYER. ITS GENERAL
CHARACTERISTICS
"It would be," says Herrmann, "a shameful mis-
use of prayer, if trifles which have really no signifi-
cance for our inner life were to be made the objects
of our prayers." This is, as we have seen, the at-
titude taken by the discriminating religious con-
sciousness toward any other use of prayer than the
social one of establishing a wider self. This atti-
tude is not, as we have already indicated, the result
of a definite removal of prayer from certain well
defined fields in which it was formerly employed;
the earlier forms of prayer were undiscriminatingly
social; but with greater discrimination has come
greater definiteness in the content implied by a com-
pleter and wider self.
The imaginative social process, of which prayer
is an example, is the one means to this enlargement
of the self. "There is no possibility of being good,'
says Cooley, "without living, imaginatively of
course, in good company." "Mankind needs the
1
Torrey, "How to Pray," p. 18.
62
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
I
991
highest vision of personality, and needs it clear and
vivid, and in the lack of it will suffer a lack in the
clearness and cogency of moral thought. The
end of all personal association is just this-the es-
tablishment of a larger self. Emerson's criterion of
friendship holds throughout: "The only joy I have
in his being mine is that the not-mine is mine.
There must be very two before there can be very
one." The self lives and grows only through this
continual incorporation into itself of new selves.
"The ideal persons of religion are not fundament-
ally different, psychologically or sociologically, from
other persons. So far as they work on life, they are
real, with immediate social reality." For "the im-
mediate social reality is the personal idea". "The
vaguely material notion of personality, which does
not confront the social fact at all but assumes it to
be the analogue of the physical fact, is a main source
of fallacious thinking about ethics, politics, etc.-It
is the mental fact that we love or hate and that in-
fluences us." "All our conceptions of personality
are one in kind, as being imaginative interpretations
of experience," in the form of selves arising in
consciousness.
The value of the association with the morally ideal
self has been felt so intensely by religious writers
that many of them have sought to limit the imagina-
tive social process to this one relation, by shutting
¹ Cooley, "Human Nature and the Social Order," p. 371.
2 Ibid., pp. 281, 89, 98.
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
63
out other companions. "Desire to be familiar only
with God and His angels," says Thomas à Kempis,
"and flee the society of men." "
2
1
St. Teresa mentions three things as necessary for
obtaining perfection in prayer. First, love for one
another; second, "disengagement from every creat-
ure"; third, humility. More admirably efficient
means from the psychological point of view could
hardly have been devised. First, create a need for
companionship by emphasizing the social nature of
the self; second, deprive this need of its usual satis-
faction, that all the energy of desire may go into the
outlet which is allowed. Third, determine the outlet
which this companion-seeking shall take by assum-
ing an attitude of mind which could only admit as
alter a self great enough to inspire "humility".
In view of the emphasis already given by modern
psychologists to the social nature of the self, we
hardly need to state further that the self lives only
in companionship, and that prayer is one expression
of the constant social intercourse through which con-
sciousness goes on.
The shadowy beginnings of
such a social intercourse, in the consciousness of a
woman who had spent most of her life in the auto-
matic performance of "impersonal" tasks, is ad-
mirably expressed by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps: "I
see it now,' she said aloud to the only consciousness
1 "Imitation of Christ," ch. 8.
2 "The Way of Perfection," p. 23 et. seq.
"His Soul to Keep," in Harpers, 1908, September, p. 501.
3
1
64
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
she could address on so intimate a topic. By de-
grees, very quietly but very plainly, it had become
apparent to the denied woman that something an-
swered; not always, not explicitly, but sometime
and in some way. She had begun to be aware of a
soft encroachment upon her loneliness, a movement
of spirit toward her own. She did not go so far as to
call it an interchange of intelligence; she was chiefly
conscious of it as a delicate blender of feeling blur-
ring the outlines of her solitude.'
""
But the religious consciousness does not stop with
this indefinite "blurring of solitude". It goes on to
a much more definite social relation with a much
more definite alter. Its "method of forming an ideal
of God is to take the highest and most purified affec-
tions, and the noblest moral sentiments, and con-
ceive of the Divine nature through them." And
with the self thus conceived, it enters into com-
munion. "Confession, supplication, thanksgiving and
praise all go and blend to form the great whole.”¹
"I can imagine some to object," says Granger, "that
God can never be so realized by us as to be the ob
ject of love in the same way human beings are. The,
reason is plain; such persons regard God as an in-
tellectual ideal."" And the answer is equally plain;'
the religious consciousness does actually succeed in
regarding God, and in making use of him, as friend,
judge, inspiration, companion in every sense.
¹ Beecher, "A Treasury of Illustration," pp. 241, 383.
2 Granger, "The Soul of a Christian," p. 190.
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
65
A few of the ways in which this social relation-
ship is used must be noticed. Augustine finds com-
fort and strength in suffering through the thought:
"Thou didst know what I was suffering and no man
knew. Thou findest pleasure in us and so regard-
est each of us as though Thou hadst him alone to
care for."" Browning makes David bring Saul back
to the uses of life by promising him:
"A face like my face that receives thee; a man like to me
Thou shalt love and be loved by forever; a hand like this hand
Shall throw open the gates of new life to thee."
2
Oates, in a devotional book entitled "The Sorrow
of God", lays great stress on the fact that "He is
touched with the feeling of our infirmities", and
asks "what the practical value of such a truth is”.
He comes to the conclusion that it is "the essence
of consolation". It changes the whole situation "to'
know that God is not indifferent to the tragedy but
is involved in the suffering" On the other hand,
the psalmist in one place finds his chief consolation
in the fact that God is untouched by his sufferings,
because so infinitely greater than they. This latter
type of attitude will be taken up in greater detail
later. But the difference between the two may be
briefly noticed here. In the former case, the suf-
fering self, the me, which may mean simply a nar-
rowly individual pain or a wider sense of all the
1
2
3
Augustine, "Confessions," 12:7; 3:11.
Oates, "The Sorrow of God,” pp. 6, 7.
Psalm 102.
66
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
1
tragedy contained in human existence, is prominent
enough in the conflict to color the finally resulting
self very strongly. God must overcome the suffer-
ing not simply by blotting it out of the realm of
facts worth noticing,—the me is too insistent for
such a result to be possible, but by sharing it and
still overcoming it in a large reality. Yet the desired
comfort is obtained in both cases through a par-
ticipation in a life greater than the suffering, be-
cause capable, in the one case of ignoring it, and in
the other of containing it without being overwhelmed
by it.
The fundamental desire to share an emotion is not
even entirely dependent on a rational belief in the
possibility of response. A man who believes that
there is no response may cease, and must, as a ra-
tional being, cease, from the overt attempt to com-
municate; but he will feel the need of communica-
tion none the less, and times of crisis may become
too strong for his rational processes. As Voltaire
said: "If there were no God, we should have to
create one." For "thought, especially vivid
thought, tends irresistibly to take on the form of
communication". This is its normal outlet. A
man will talk to an utterly indifferent listener merely
for the sake of working off the emotion which is
bothering him. Prayers of confession could fre-
quently be brought under this type of classification
"1
Cooley, p. 57.
|
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
67
-the alter furnishing a mere listener. But in an
ethical religion a prayer of confession usually passes
over into another type of relation in which the alter
serves the function of moral authority and judge.
For the relief thus experienced in mere self-
expression is by no means continuously satisfying
to the normal human being. As we have remarked,
he craves the response of a genuine social relation-
ship. So when Cooley, in his discussion of the real-
ity of personal ideas, says that "a favorite author
is more with us in his book than he could have been
in the flesh; we therefore do not desire intercourse
with him", he overlooks this desire for response
which is, for some temperaments at least, an inte-
gral part of a personal relationship. It is true that
as far as getting a definite contribution of new ideas,
actual intercourse with the author might give us
nothing, yet there is in the minds of most of us a
feeling of being a little cheated if we are compelled
by an author's books to feel a really personal love
for him, because we realize the impossibility of mak-
ing him feel the same for us. There is a recognition
of our own private selves, our own particular point
of view, which we want and do not get. The best
we can do is to share our enthusiasm over the au-
thor's brilliant passages with some other friend,
and we feel lost indeed if this consolation is denied
us. This fact indicates the character of any social
¹ Ibid., p. 82.
68
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
relation in which the me is a noticeable factor and
is yet not self-sufficient. There is a demand for
response. So in a letter recently sent to a theo-
logical school in answer to a circular describing the
course of study, a man enumerated as chief among
the things on which he desired to know the best
modern thought, the question "Whether there is
any answer to prayer other than that supplied by
the individual's own imagination". If there is no
belief in such a response, a vast number of indi-
viduals cease to pray, in spite of the numerous
spiritual advantages which they know will accrue
from the practice.
The religious consciousness posits a real social
relation, and for that relation it finds many uses.
We have noticed several, none of which has, except
by implication, demanded an ethically ideal self as
alter. Such a demand is, however, a very prominent
one. A recent writer in the Congregationalist¹ ex-
presses the need of the religious consciousness for
such an ideal self. "If the meditations of my heart
constitute the one place where I may deal inclu-
sively with my life, is there any one great test to
which I may subject my meditations? I cannot test
them by the judgment of my friends, even the most
intimate. I want some authoritative, searching, just
and vastly compassionate test;-objective in that
its standards are without and above me; subjective
Congregationalist. 1908, Sept. 12, G. G. Atkins,
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
69
in that it reaches depths deeper than my own self-
knowledge." Such a test is found in the judgment
passed by the morally ideal alter.
A few more prayers expressive of this need of
companionship may be noticed, before passing on
to a more definite inspection and classification of
the prayers of the developed religious conscious-
ness. I will take three characteristic examples from
Mrs. Tileston's collection of prayers.¹
"O Thou Author of all good,-may Thy mercies
be our daily song and may the light of Thy counte-
nance in this world of power and beauty move our
hearts to great thankfulness and a sweet trust."
In this the joy of social intercourse is touched also
with the delight of æsthetic contemplation. In the
following prayer of Christina Rossetti's, the need
of companionship is more unmixed: "O Lord, show
forth Thy loving kindness, I entreat Thee, to all
persons who in this world feel themselves neglected,
or little loved, or forgotten. Be Thou their beloved
companion, and let communion with Thee be to them
more dear than tenderest earthly intercourse." And
the following prayer by George Matheson: "Lord,
I thank Thee for Thy constraining love. I thank
Thee that Thou art not repelled by my bitterness,
that Thou art not turned aside by the heat of my
spirit. There is no force in the universe so glorious
as the force of Thy love; it compels me to come in."
1 Mrs. Tileston, "Prayers Ancient and Modern," p. 203. R. Ellis;
p. 207, Christina Rossetti; p. 215, George Matheson.
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PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
The Hymns of the Veda express some of this joy
in personal association, in a poetic fashion which
is yet marked by some of the earlier, more ma-
terialistic conceptions of worship.
"O Indra, lover of the song; our chants have
strengthened thee." "Indra, whose succour never
fails, accept these viands thousand-fold, wherein all
manly powers abide." "Come, Indra, and delight
thee with the juice at all the soma feasts." "Take
pleasure in our friendship and drink-offerings."
"Him, him we seek for friendship, him for riches
and heroic might.""
There is no need to repeat examples of this type
of prayer; they can be found everywhere. In fact,
the use of prayer for the sake of a pleasant com-
panionship enjoyed as an end in itself, has been
almost too exclusively recognized by certain psy-
chological writers, notably in the discussion of the
relation between sex and religion. Such exclusive
emphasis on the closeness of that relation overlooks
not only the fact that every existing type of per-
sonal association finds some type of prayer as cor-
relate, but also the fact that a very large depart-
ment of prayer is made use of, not as an end in
itself, but solely to emphasize the moral judgment
and to further moral action.
To conclude: in the cases here mentioned we
have seen how prayer is a means in the establish-
¹Griffith, "Hymns of the Rigveda," V, IX, X.
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
71
ment of a larger self, a self more strong to bear
suffering, a self more open to the beauty of the
universe, a self more widely "social". This self
has arisen, as all selves arise, out of a social rela-
tion between a me and an alter, the me representing
a need and a desire, and the alter the means of its
satisfaction. We have called this type of prayer a
completely social type, because in it the conception
of what we mean by a self has developed at least
as far for the prayer relation as it has developed
for the other personal relations of life. We have
a distinctly social end proposed and a social process
as means; the normal means for the end desired.
We will next consider more closely the different
tendencies which may be distinguished within this
completely social type.
V
THE TWO TENDENCIES IN THE COMPLETELY SOCIAL TYPE.
66
THE CONTEMPLATIVE OR ÆSTHETIC",
In every social relation there are two tendencies.
One is the tendency to enjoy all the possibilities of
the relation, to obtain the largest emotional expres-
sion; we shall call this the contemplative or æsthetic
tendency, since it rests content with the apprecia-
tion of an object without attempting to employ it
for a definite end. There is also, however, a ten-
dency to use as little as possible of the social con-
tent and to pass on into action; this we shall call
the practical tendency. In prayer, as in every social
72
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
act, these tendencies are present: one to make
prayer an end in itself, and the other to make it
a quick bridge to moral action.
Herrmann says: "In the struggle of a prayer
that really comes before God, joy in God necessarily
pushes into the place that was at first filled with
passionate desire, and so such desire is moderated.
The natural desire that is born of the passion of
the creature and the joy in God and His will which
He Himself awakens, must be blended together in
a Christian prayer. But no advice, however care-
ful, can direct us how to balance the two in any
individual instance." It must be noted that in the
case of the prayers we are considering, the desire
is an ethical one, and that the question then be-
comes how to maintain the proper balance between
the æsthetic and emotional enjoyment of the prayer-
experience itself, and the strictly practical employ-
ment of prayer as an aid to action. The proper
proportion of worship and service is an old prob-
lem in religion.
We notice at once this psychological distinction.
When the me is relatively exhausted, possessing no
Very definite desire save possibly the desire for rest,
the prayer is apt to pass into an æsthetic absorp-
tion, a contemplative enjoyment. We find this type
very strongly in the mystics, and in men and women
who have retired from the world and who conse-
¹ Herrmann, "Communion with God," p. 341.
Y
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
73
quently do not feel the pressure of the immediate
life of action with its demands and desires. The
me seeks only to lose itself in the alter, and no
definite course of conduct need be the result of the
prayer. Peace, rest and recuperation are sought
and obtained.
When, however, the me brings to the relation a
strongly defined desire, asking only moral evalua-
tion, sanction and encouragement for that desire,
prayer merges almost immediately into action. This
is the type of prayer found among the more self-
reliant characters, or at least in the more self-reliant
moods. And these two types of prayer seem about
evenly divided. Out of a number of respondents
examined by Coe,¹ thirty-seven named the results of
prayer and the religious life as consisting of "vari-
ous kinds of satisfactory feeling", while forty men-
tioned "help, invigoration of the will or something
connected with duty". It is these forty who, as we
saw in the last section, are almost entirely left out
of account by those writers who make a too exclu-
sive correlation of religion and sex-feeling.
These two types must not be taken as mutually
exclusive or even as rigidly exact divisions. The
prayers mentioned in the last section might many
of them belong to either type. The question is
rather a question of degree, consisting in the rela-
tive emphasis on the two tendencies in any social
act, the aesthetic and the practical.
¹ Coe, "The Spiritual Life," p. 254.
74
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
We will take up here a consideration of the first
of these two types of prayer, reserving the second
for the next section. And we shall notice how each
of the types passes, at its extreme, altogether out of
the social relationship, in the one case by giving up
the self of desire, and in the other case by passing
so quickly from desire to action that a real social
process can hardly be said to take place. Thus in
one direction we reach a pure æsthetic contempla-
tion, in which the me is lost; in the other a mere
moral action, in which the alter is lost.
From one point of view the aesthetic satisfaction
may not appear altogether social in nature. One
may obtain this kind of satisfaction, it is argued,
from a beautiful flower or a lovely sunset, or any
"impersonal" object. The relationship need not be
a social one. But, as is being pointed out by the
"Einfühlings-theorie" at present agitated in Ger-
many by Lipps and others, the satisfaction we get
in such a case is not a satisfaction in the object as
impersonal, as dead object; it is rather a satisfac-
tion produced by the reading of some specialized
fragment of our own life into the object, and an
enjoyment of the harmonious organization of the
self thus projected. Harmony, order, unity in dif-
ference, are social categories, applicable only in re-
lations in consciousness, that is to say, as we have
already pointed out, in relations of selves. Even
the appreciation of the sublime, as Kant shows, is
an appreciation of a social relation, an appreciation
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
75
of the transcendent magnitude of the "rational”
self as over against the "sensible" self. It is
“pleasurable to find every standard of Sensibility
inadequate to the Ideas of Understanding". This
"respect for our own destination" we attribute "by
a certain subreption" to the objects of nature.
Even that scientific-æsthetic pleasure in the or-
ganization of the universe which is quite consciously
disconnected from any religious significance and
which may make a deliberate attempt to get rid of
social meaning altogether, delighting solely in the
accuracy of measurement and the beauty of definite
calculation and rejecting any such practical concep-
tion as that of design and designer, even this does
not succeed in getting rid of the social aspect of
æsthetic enjoyment. The satisfaction reached is a
satisfaction in the order and harmony which the
scientist has himself succeeded in creating out of
the mass of facts hurled at him; a satisfaction in
the completeness of his organizing power. For how-
ever little we may take any idealistic interpretation
of the nature of material facts as facts, the world
which the scientist points out and in which he takes
satisfaction is a world produced by consciousness,
the result of a very complex organization of num-
berless past selves of the scientist into a coherent
whole. His "purposiveness without purpose",—for
that is indeed the proper characterization of his
Kant, "Kritik of Judgment," trans. by J. H. Bernard, p. 119.
76
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
world of organized law without definite design,-
is not something foreign to the purpose he rejects,
but rather a highly conscious and highly specialized
development out of that very category.
66
If the æsthetic satisfaction is thus so personal
when put consciously in the "impersonal" form, it
is much more so in the average religious conscious-
ness. For the religious person even the enjoyment
felt in a sunset may contain a conscious reference to
the activity of another self. This may vary all the
way from a crudely material objectification of the
other self, as of the child who thinks, as the writer
has been told by two children, that God, represented
as a man above the sky, makes cracks through the
floor of heaven whenever there is lightning, to the
'subjective" attitude of Berkeley, who thought of
the physical universe as an impression given directly
to our spirits by the spirit of God. Or the concept of
God may be a more immanent one than this view
of Berkeley's suggests, and the satisfaction experi-
enced more like that of the above-mentioned scien-
tist, a satisfaction in the sudden expansion of a nar-
rower self into the larger self of creative percep-
tion and imagination. In any of these cases the sat-
isfaction is a social satisfaction, an enjoyment in the
increase of life through contemplative sharing in the
life of a wider self.
Of this particular type of relation, taken in the
field of religion and of prayer, the Buddhist contem-
plation gives the most extreme example. Many
1
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
77
classifications of religions deny that Buddhism has,
strictly speaking, any prayer connected with it; the
place of prayer being taken by what is termed "med-
itation". Even in the so-called "prayer-wheels”,
the particular phrase most often used is simply a
phrase of adoration: ""Om, Mami Padme, hung",
translated by W. Simpson as "Adoration to the
Jewel in the Lotus, Amen", a sentence of highly
mystical, symbolic meaning. And in the Buddhist
Suttas this type of exercise is prescribed for the
man who would be religious: "Let him be devoted
to that quietude of heart which springs from within,
let him not drive back the ecstasy of contemplation,
let him look through things, let him be much alone.
112
If prayer is to be confined to a definite asking of
particular benefits, or even to a consciously assumed
relationship between two selves, this type of reli-
gious exercise cannot be classed as prayer. It seems
as anti-social as the Nirvana of the Buddhist seems
anti-conscious. But the contradiction of terms in-
volved in an "enjoyment of nothingness" has been
pointed out too often to need further discussion.
Unconsciousness can only be experienced and en-
joyed as a state of relative peace after the weari-
ness of a conscious being. In the same way, the
Buddhist contemplation is no transcending of social
relationships. The alter is a more highly abstract
1
Simpson, "Buddhist Praying Wheel," p. 28.
2 Max Müller, "Sacred Books of the East." XI, The Buddhist
Suttas, p. 211.
78
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
self, but it is still a self. The end sought is rest,
that rest which comes to the self of immediate de-
sire through appreciative sharing in a self which
symbolizes the movements of infinite ages of time,
-the self of widest æsthetic contemplation. For,
as we have remarked above, the Buddhist form of
meditation is the type of "prayer" which most re-
sembles the æsthetic experience, and like that ex-
perience it is best interpreted as a social relation,
by means of the doctrine of Einfühlung already dis-
cussed.
This type of prayer-relation is not confined to
Buddhism. It marks the completion of the mystic
ecstasy in any form. It is what St. Teresa calls the
"stage of contemplation". It is a stage which has
passed beyond the strife of selves.
For the time being, the alter completely dominates
the consciousness. If the me, the self of definite
purpose and striving, is sufficiently given up, there
ceases, for the time being, to be any distinction of
objective or subjective. For as we saw above,¹ this
distinction only arises when the activities of on-
going consciousness meet some check which calls
out a dualism between a purpose and a conditioning
means. In the mood of æsthetic contemplation there
is no such check. The extreme of this mode of con-
sciousness is the mystic trance, or unconsciousness,
due to a complete absence of the conflict which is
1
¹ Section I.
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
79
essential to conscious life. Thus this type of prayer
reaches its final limit first in æsthetic contempla-
tion and finally in complete absence of conscious-
ness. We shall find a similar limit reached in the
other type of prayer which we shall consider later.
Consciousness returns again after the mystic
trance as soon as the life-activities meet with a
check. This may be due to some external interrup-
tion or to needs of the organism. The self which
finally issues to meet the next conflict is determined,
not by the fact that there has been a trance or a
sleep, but by the nature of the last two selves and
the relations sustained by them. It follows that any
ethical value which may be attributed to the mystic
trance is to be accorded to it on account of effects
produced in the resulting self, rather than on the
ground of the trance itself. Neither is it to be con-
demned on that ground.
There are many prayers which do not go to the
extreme of the mystic trance which are yet to be
classed as belonging to the æsthetic type of prayer.
All prayers which lay stress on the peace to be at-
tained by the giving up of the individual self, rather
than on any resultant efficiency in action, come un-
der this head. Adoration, rather than petition, is
the keynote of prayers of this kind. And when
there is petition, it is for deliverance from weakness,
weariness and sin-the result again of a wish to
abandon the old self. In the Vedic prayers we find
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PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
examples of this type, which recur again throughout
the history of prayer.
"Hail to thee, mighty Lord, all-potent Vishnu!
Soul of the Universe, unchangeable,
Holy. eternal, always one in nature,——
Whether revealed as Brahma, Hari, S'iva
Creator or Preserver or Destroyer,"
and thus for several pages of pure adoration, con-
cluding,
"Lord of the Universe, the only refuge
Of living beings, the alleviator
Of pain, the benefactor of mankind,
Show me Thy favor and deliver me
From evil.”
Then, after six lines of descriptive adoration, this
statement follows:
"I come to Thee for refuge
Renouncing all attachment to the world,
Longing for fulness of felicity,
Extinction of myself, absorption into Thee."
This adoration is not, as Ellis says it is with the
African tribes he mentions,2 and as several of the
narrowly utilitarian writers have assumed it to be
in the case of all such prayer, a lively sense of
benefits to come, and a method of placating the
deity in order to obtain them; there is a distinct
satisfaction found in the adoration itself. For sat-
isfaction always accompanies the solution of any
conflict in consciousness, and here the solution means
¹ Monier Williams, "Indian Wisdom," pp. 518, 520; Puranas.
2 A. B. Ellis, "Ewe-Speaking Peoples of the West Coast," p. 80.
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
81
giving up the weary and dejected me and obtaining
in place of it a share in a wider and completer life,
through that projection of feeling which we have
known as Einfühlung. All emphasis on the infinite
character of that other life brings increased satis-
faction, since it is a life in which the worshipper
has at least a contemplative share.
A
This type of prayer is found in all religions.
more modern example of it, essentially the same in
tone and even in words, is the following from George
Matheson: "In that light let me lose myself, O
Lord. Not the unconsciousness of self which comes
from emptiness, but that which comes from deeper
fulness. Not in death, not in apathy, not even in
self-depreciation, would I forget myself, but only
in Thee."'1 This is again an example of that ac-
tivity of the social self which we have called Ein-
fühlung, the process of living in a life which you
recognize as in a sense not your own, but which for
the moment at least you live more intensely than
you are living the life which you call yours.
means a weariness on the me side of consciousness,
and a consequent transfer of emphasis to the alter
side.
It
St. Teresa thus describes the completely passive
state of the “finite" self, in her account of "perfect
contemplation": "The Divine Master stands teach-
ing him without the noise of words, and suspends
1 "Times of Retirement," p. 272.
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PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
his faculties, because should they operate they would
rather hinder than help him. They enjoy without
understanding how they enjoy. The soul is burn-
ing with love, yet does not understand how she loves.
She understands sufficiently that it is not an enjoy-
ment which the understanding obtains by desiring
it. It is a gift of the Lord of Heaven, who gives
like Himself." 1
Prayer literature is full of prayers of this kind,
in which the need is not a narrowly practical need
of any particular external object, but a need of ref-
uge and rest in a larger experience. This is ac-
companied, as we have seen before, by frequent ex-
pression of weakness and sin, and by a desire, part-
ly to receive new energy, though such desire takes
us over into our second division, and partly to have
the past self blotted out, to lose it, to find rest from
it, the kind of rest which Schopenhauer declared
was only to be found in temporary forgetfulness of
desire through æsthetic contemplation. Many of
the psalms are of this order, hardly asking for any
individual comfort, but taking refuge in the con-
templation of a power that is untouched and un-
moved. Thus the one hundred and second psalm
begins with a description of the psalmist's miseries:
"My days consume like smoke, and my bones are
burned as a fire-brand. My heart is smitten like
grass and withered and I forget to eat my bread,'
1 "The Way of Perfection," p. 142.
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
83
and so on for eleven verses. Then there follows no
request for individual blessing; there is no adora-
tion for the sake of the benefits to be obtained by
such praise of the deity; the psalmist finds his own
comfort in remembering the greatness of Jehovah.
"But Thou, O Jehovah, wilt abide forever, and Thy
memorial name unto all generations. Thou wilt
arise and have mercy upon Zion;-This shall be
written for the generation to come; and a people
which shall be created shall praise Jehovah."
This same mood is expressed in the lines of
Clough:
"It fortifies my soul to know
That though I perish, Truth is so."
99 1
It is suggested also by the classic test of our
fathers which demanded that a man should be will-
ing to be damned for the glory of God. Assertion
of such willingness must be regarded, not as bra-
vado, nor as a sneaking attempt to get something
out of God by being so subservient, but, at least in
its purest form, as a very real tribute to the tri-
umphant power of Einfühlung, resulting in a de-
sire to contribute to the glory of the greater self
even at the cost of tremendous expense to the lesser
one.
The ritualistic form of prayer, as against the "in-
dividualistic", may also be classed with the as-
thetic type. It is again a relation of selves, but
this time it is the community-self which takes the
¹ Page, "British Poets of the Nineteenth Century," p. 702.
84
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
place of the me, and enters into relation with the
ideal alter. For the individual participant, the re-
sult is of the type already noticed in the prayers we
have been considering.
His private desires, even his private sins,—his
private self, in other words,-is lost in the larger
community-self which needs help and regeneration.
The needs of this community-self are more constant
in character; hence we find the use of set forms of
prayers. There is less emotional stress, except in
times of great public need. Under ordinary circum-
stances the ritualistic prayer is not a prayer of high
tension. Any emotion attending it is not of the
violent kind which attends a crisis in the emergence
of a new self, but rather the steady and cumulative
type which attends an emphasized repetition of
some part of a chain of habit. The constant repeti-
tion by an entire congregation of the refrain "We
beseech thee to hear us, O God," has undoubtedly an
emotional accompaniment, but not the cataclysmic
accompaniment which occurs in an ethical revolution
within the self of immediate desire.
To completely carry out the discussion of the ritu-
alistic type of prayer, it would be necessary to go
exhaustively into the subject of group-psychology.
The influence of a surrounding religious "commu-
nity" gives great reinforcement to the religious
strivings of the self. "When we live in the midst of
Christian people, the sense is awakened by which we
Y
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
85
may see God." 1
We have ranked the ritualistic
prayer, however, under the æsthetic type, because
the individual loses himself and his own desires in
a wider self, and emerges, not with a strong incen-
tive to any particular action, but calmed and soothed
by the momentary forgetfulness of his narrower
self in the face of a wider reality. The difference
between this type and the other æsthetic type we
have been describing is that the me loses itself, not
directly in the perfect alter, but first in the larger
but still finite alter which we have called the com-
munity-self. In this connection we note that the
ritualistic form of worship flourished most in times
and communities in which the possibility of individ-
ual access to God was not so emphasized and indi-
vidual responsibility to God not so insisted upon.
Moreover, the efforts of the ritualistic churches
aim at securing conformity with the religious life
and habits of the community, through confirmation
and religious education, rather than at any individ-
ual religious experience of the type emphasized by
the churches which insist on conversion. We shall
see later, in connection with prayers for conversion,
the intensely emotional nature of the crisis attend-
ing the sudden formation of a practically new self.
In times of revolt, of non-conformity, of democratic
insistence on the rights of the individual soul, that
soul's personal relation to God assumes an impor-
Herrmann. "Communion with God," p. 190.
86
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
tance which for other times and other temperaments
may seem egoistic in the extreme. The personal
nature of prayer-meeting "testimonies", the com-`
mon assumption that all the powers of good and evil
in the universe were intensely concerned in the out-
come of the fight, and that God would have suf-
fered a permanent lack if victory had not been at-
tained, these things are usually regarded with de-
cided aversion by a more ritualistic temperament.
For him the individual is but one member of a com-
munity, and it is God's care for the community
which is the important thing. The part of the indi-
vidual is to learn, gradually and without violent up-
heaval, through the processes of training, confirma-
tion, and a regulated form of worship, the duty of
conforming to the tradition which the community
has found to be of value. This is the significance of
the ritualistic type of prayer. Although it aims
ultimately at a practical result, we class it under
the æsthetic form, because the end is, for the indi-
vidual self, a cessation rather than an accentuation
of striving.
Prayers of thanksgiving also come under this gen-
eral classification. They belong to a form more
like ordinary social intercourse, but verging on the
æsthetic type of prayer in their contemplation of
ideal beauty and goodness. But the me is here
more prominent; it has a definite part to play; it
does not merely lose itself.
Prayers of the æsthetic type, the type we have
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
87
2
been considering, aim then at a definite social end-
the widening of the self, not necessarily through
ethical activity, but through the contemplative shar-
ing of the life of a larger self. The need of prayer
of this kind is felt at moments of depression and
despair; this fact has led Guimaraens to claim that
the "prayer-mood" is at twilight, when the bodily
need for rest and recuperation is felt.¹ And in the
attainment of the desired end, the one thing em-
phasized by all religious teachers is the giving up
of the individual will. St. Teresa says, as we have
already seen, that the Divine Master "suspends the
faculties, because should they operate they would
hinder rather than help him." The religious per-
son, according to her, is to give up all striving, even
the striving to control wandering thoughts. "The
understanding torments them, running after worldly
things; let it go and laugh at it. He who strives to
gain much, loses all at once." In another place she
describes the mood of prayer as one of such quietude,
such suspension of the individual's faculties that
"they would not have the body move because they
think that they should lose that peace and therefore
they dare not stir. Speaking is painful to them,-
they do not wish even to breathe." Prayer is for
St. Teresa "the settling of the soul in peace. As
an instructive contrast to this mood we might no-
tice an extreme example of the other form of prayer
¹"Le Besoin de Prier," Revue Philosophique, liv. 291.
2 "The Way of Perfection," pp. 142, 182, 176.
99
88
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
1
which we shall consider in detail later-taken from
the revivalist Finney: "The burden of his soul
was so great that he was unable to stand, and would
writhe and groan in agony.
99 1
Returning to the form of prayer which we have
been discussing, we notice as an example of the con-
dition of mind attained the statement of the psalm-
ist: "I will lay me down in peace and take my
rest, for it is Thou, Lord, that makest me dwell in
safety."2
And as an account of the way in which
such peace is attained, take George Matheson:*
"In the hour of perturbation thou canst not hear
the answer to thy prayers.-The heart got no re-
sponse at the moment of its crying,-in its thunder,
its earthquake and its fire. But when the crying
ceased and the stillness fell, when thy hand de-
sisted from knocking on the iron gate, then ap-
peared the long-delayed reply.-It is only in the cool
of the day that the voice of the Lord God is heard
in the garden." In other words, the results desired
by this kind of religious consciousness,--peace, con-
fidence, and the "sweetness of God in the soul"
are obtained by the relinquishment of conscious
striving.
Surrender the giving up of the feeling of re-
sponsibility—is a fundamental form of human ex-
¹Cited in Torrey, "How to Pray," p. 117.
2 Psalm, 4:8.
3 "Times of Retirement," p. 60.
* Father John Sergieff, "My Life in Christ," p. 26.
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
89
perience. Put in psycho-physiological terms, it is
the giving up of the strain of conscious choice and
concentrated action, and a reliance on the habitual
activities of the organism. This brings with it the
needed rest and peace. This mood may also have
a practical function to play in furthering achieve-
ment simply by giving up the too strenuous en-
deavor for that achievement. As Clough adds, in
the poem already quoted:
"I steadier step when I recall
Howe'er I slip, Thou canst not fall."
The removal of too great concern for one's own
slipping is often the surest way to prevent that
slipping.
But this general statement, which is the explana-
tion frequently given to cover this type of prayer,
is not adequate for two reasons. In the first place,
prayer may give up conscious striving for the par-
ticular end hitherto desired without thereby giving
up consciousness altogether. The problems and con-
flicts which were causing weariness and despair are
turned over to the habitual activities, and rest en-
sues; but this is done, not by the complete relinquish-
ment of consciousness, but by the shift of attention
to another field. And, second, even in the case of
the trance, in which consciousness is entirely given
up, we do not depend on subconscious activities in
general. We must again emphasize the fact that
we do nothing "in general". The subconscious ac-
90
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
tivities do not always act to the same end, because
they are not always given the same kind of mate-
rial to start with. Hence the results obtained in
prayer are not necessarily the results that would be
obtained by any and every kind of self-surrender.
The strivings of the individual self may be given
up on account of hopeless despair in face of an
overwhelmingly hostile environment; the subcon-
scious activities of the organism keep life going in
this case also, until the consciousness is sufficiently
restored in energy to take up the fight again. Un-
der such conditions rest and recuperation undoubt-
edly take place, but hardly "peace"-not at least
that highly enjoyable state of peace accompanying
the self-surrender of prayer, although even in the
extreme of despair there may sometimes be a kind
of negative enjoyment resulting from the cessation
of effort.
Thus the result which will issue from self-sur-
render depends upon the nature of the alter to which
surrender is made. This fact gives especial point
to the admonition of Torrey to pray "after all great
achievements", or, as another writer puts it, "after
an exhausting series of duties when body and mind
are tired". At such a time some relinquishment of
conscious striving is sure to come through sheer
exhaustion; a surrender to some sort of organized
subconscious activity will occur. Whether this sur-
render is to be pleasurable or painful, whether it is
to bring moral uplift or merely the despair of ex-
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
91
haustion, depends on the direction given to the as-
sociative processes by the last conscious contribu-
tion. If prayer be the form the surrender takes,
then it is a surrender to a "self", not only wider
and of surer action,-the subconscious self is al-
ways that,--but also higher and of more ideal action.
The result is not simply rest and recuperation, but
also a heightening of the moral tone.
There are, of course, in the contemplative types
of prayer, many "prayers" which lay little stress
on this moral aspect, and in which surrender to the
contemplation of an æsthetic ideal or even to a
sheer "unconscious" rest from striving, is the end
attained. The Buddhist search for Nirvana is the
most perfect example of the surrender of the in-
dividual me to a completely generalized form of
subconscious activity. There is not even an attempt
on the part of the me to give a suggestion around
which the subconscious associations shall gather;
the subconscious "self" in this case is the most gen-
eralized one possible. In the perfect type of this
contemplation, there would be no moral or æs-
・thetic emphasis whatever; simply absolute rest on
subconscious activities. A result analogous to this
is attained for a part of the mystic's trance of ec-
stasy, in the complete blotting out of conscious-
But there is this difference in the case of
most at least of the Christian mystics, that the self
to which surrender is made is, up to the last mo-
ment of consciousness, a moral ideal, and appears
ness.
92
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
again as this ideal as soon as the moments of un-
consciousness are over. Thus a moral reinforce-
ment may take place as ultimate result which would
not have been possible in the other case.
So we see that in the prayers in which the æs-
thetic ideal is prominent moral reinforcement may'
or may not occur. The result obtained depends on
how far the individual in question identifies the
perfectly sublime and perfectly beautiful with the
perfectly good.
In an ethical religion, this identification is made.
Hence the normal prayer of such a religion includes
not merely peace and rest but moral uplift; the
prayer finds its justification, for that religious con-
sciousness, not only in the enjoyment of the pres-
ence of God, as an end in itself, but in the practical
consequences of that presence in the furtherance of
moral action, which, however long delayed, must
at last follow. This will take us over into our next
discussion. We conclude our survey of the æs-
thetic type of prayer with the description given by
Herrmann, which, though taken from the religious
point of view, makes use of almost the same terms
which we have employed in our psychological analy-
sis: "Prayer is an inward conflict, which should nor-
mally bring the Christian up to a higher plane of the
inner life; the sign of the attainment of this goal is
the dying away of the storm of desire into stillness
before God."'1
¹ Herrmann, "Communion with God," p. 338.
1
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
93
Aria.
VI
THE TWO TENDENCIES IN THE COMPLETELY SOCIAL TYPE.
THE PRACTICAL OR "ETHICAL”
We saw that in any social act there are two tend-
encies, the aesthetic and the practical, one aiming
to include as much social content as possible in con-
sciousness, the other to pass as quickly as possible
into action. We saw that the æsthetic type of
prayer was one in which the emphasis was laid on
the experience itself, rather than on any ethical
results to be obtained. Bunyan remarks: "I had
two or three times, at or about my deliverance from
this temptation, such strange apprehensions of the
grace of God that I could hardly bear up under it,
it was so out of measure amazing, when I thought
it could reach me. I do think, if that sense of it had
abode long upon me, it would have made me inca-
pable for business." But the prevailing religious
sentiment declares against any form of prayer so ex-
treme as to make a man "incapable for business".
The prevailing religious sentiment of our day, that
is; for the dictum of the Middle Ages on this mat-
ter was less authoritative. But no normal type of
mind, unless it be the Oriental, desires repose and
inactivity for any permanent stretch of time. It
is only in moments of weariness and weakness, com-
paratively speaking, that the western mind is con-
tent with this loss of his individual striving; the
1
¹ Bunyan, "Grace Abounding," par. 252.
94
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
prayer which is mere adoration is a recurring but
not a continuous phenomenon in any life. And it is
not merely a question of satisfaction with such an
experience; it is a question of the impossibility of
a consciousness without the recurrence of the con-
flict of selves. Without this conflict consciousness
would quickly sink into the activities of habit; in
other words, it would become unconscious. It is lit-
erally and psychologically true that the absorption
into another life, unless that life were also a chang-
ing one, changing as ours does by conflicts of selves,
would mean, as the Buddhists claim that it does,
unconsciousness.
So we find that the more active religious leaders
give constant warning against a type of prayer
which tends to absorption in the experience itself.
"If faith is not to be a mere play of words con-
cerning God," says Herrmann," it must pass into the
form of prayer; and if prayer is not to be a play of
fancy or an unmeaning travail, it must be the appli-
cation of faith to the affairs of the moment." "The
moral activity of the Christian forms part of his
communion with God." "Religious experience must
come to its natural completion in the moral will."1
Fénelon also closes his admonitions to prayer by
adding: "I assume that you will always proceed to
make some practical resolution, ending with an act
of self-abandonment to God, and of thanksgiving for
'Herrmann, "Communion with God," pp. 336, 298, 309.
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
95
99 1
the help he has given you.' For, as Cooley says,
"the vital question in leadership or personal as-
cendency is not, What are you? but What do you
enable me to be? What self-developing ideas do you
enable me to form?" This is true of all forms of
social relation. It is especially true of that phase of
the religious life in which emphasis is placed on the
results of prayer for character and action.
2
Those who make this emphasis, who pass as
rapidly as possible through the social imaginative
process to the stage of action, realize that in so do-
ing they are sacrificing a fullness of emotional satis-
faction and æsthetic enjoyment which they might
otherwise obtain. But they not only make this sacri-
fice willingly; they frequently demand it as impera-
tive for true religion. Thus Fénelon says: "Ac-
custom yourself to seek God within you; it is there
you will find his kingdom. Men delude themselves
into seeking it far away; aiming rather to taste the
sweetness of holiness than to submit reason to faith
and their own will to that of God." And again:
"Prayer is not at all the same thing as the conscious
pleasure which is often its accompaniment. St.
Teresa observes that many souls give up prayer di-
rectly that they cease to find sensible pleasure in it,
whereas this is to give up prayer just when it is in
the way to be perfected." And still again he warns
against a judgment of religion based on the amount
1 "Letters to Men," trans. by Sidney Lear, p. 63.
2Cooley, p. 313.
?
96
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
of enjoyment it yields. "The chief thing is the love
of God. It is not a question of warm sensible love.
You cannot win that for yourself and it is not nec-
essary. God oftener gives it to the weak as a sup-
port than to stronger souls whom he proposes to
lead by a purer faith. Indeed, men are apt to de-
ceive themselves in such love, to cling to its enjoy-
ment instead of to God only.-True love of God
often consists in a dry firm resolution to give up
everything to him.”¹
Herrmann also takes deliberate issue with the ad-
vocates of mysticism: "Life in the Eternal is laid
open before us when we understand moral necessity,
and we share that life in the Eternal when we choose
with joy, and so of our own free will, to do what is '
morally necessary. The power that helps us to do
this is our God.-Whether in this case the inner life
is richer than one lived in blind devotion to the In-
finite, and whether it means more to men to live in
the Eternal or to disappear before its presence,-
these are questions on which we shall never agree
with the advocates of mysticism." 2
We do not need to resort to the assertion of the
Epistle of James that "faith without works is
dead", nor to the insistence of Paul that spiritual
ecstasy such as that described in "the gift of
tongues" should be tested by its contribution of
¹ Fénelon, pp. 70, 78, 144.
2 Herrmann, p. 197.
S James 2:17.
'I Corinthians 14.
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
97
good to the community, nor to the constant ethical
emphasis of Jesus,-to prove our statement that an
ethical religion always demands that a life of prayer
shall justify itself, not only by the peace and joy
it gives, but by actually lifting "men out of the life
according to the flesh". And although the average
religious person asserts that while the joy of the
prayer life is not its supreme test, yet such joy is to
be expected, there is, nevertheless, frequent insist-
tence in prayer literature that a truly religious life
"will have nothing to do with strained emotion, or
with the working up of feeling for its own sake"?
The extent to which religion is limited to the
producing of an ethical result varies enormously
with different temperaments. The prevailing mod-
ern tendency has been to so limit it. This may reach
the denial of man's right to any other kind of reli-
gious or even philosophic satisfaction, as in San-
tayana's
"Amid the world's long striving, wherefore ask
What reasons were or what rewards shall be?
The covenant God gave us is a task.””
And Kant, with his tremendously developed em-
phasis on the ethical demand, feels that religion
adds nothings to morality other than the sense that
the commands of duty are vested with a divine sanc-
¹ Herrmann, p. 355.
2 Henry Churchill King, "Theology and the Social Consciousness,"
p. 83.
3
Santayana, "Sonnets and Other Poems,” p. 12.
98
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
tion. But with this statement of Kant's we reach
the farthest limit to which we may go, while still re-
taining a bona fide social relationship in conscious-
ness. It is a question, indeed, whether we have not
already passed that limit. When the entire social
content of the alter is reduced to a mere emphasis
on a certain aspect of the me, the imaginative social
process passes so quickly into the next stage, either
of action or, in case the details of action are as yet
undetermined, of reflection, that it is hardly given,
mentally, the value of a relation of selves. A de-
velopment of this kind is very common with the pass-
ing of the intensely emotional life of youth, which
is, as Cooley suggests, preeminently "the time for
personal ideals. Later, the personal element in these
ideals, having performed its function of suggesting
and vivifying them, is likely to fade out of the con-
sciousness and leave only habits and principles
whose social origin is forgotten" The result is,
of course, as it always is when any activities are
passed over to the control of habit, a loss in emo-
tional and social content in those activities, but an
increase in regularity and certainty of action. The
social imaginative process may change its storm-
center to other problems which are still felt as emo-
tionally vital, or it may pass almost entirely out
of consciousness, leaving an efficient automaton in-
stead of a growing person. There are "innumer-
¹ Cooley, p. 212.
1
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
99
able people of much energy but sluggish intellect
who will go ahead, but what direction they take is a
matter of the opportune suggestion.-At some epoch
in the past, perhaps in some hour of emotional ex-
altation, something was printed on their minds to
remain till death, and be read and followed daily"."
1
At this limit of the religious consciousness, then,
prayer passes, through loss of social content, first
into moral action and finally into unconscious activ-
ity, just as at the other limit it was seen to pass in
a similar way into unconsciousness, through the
stage of æsthetic contemplation.
✓
As long, however, as prayer remains prayer,
it is a social process, aiming, as we have constantly
said, at the establishment of a wider self,-in this
case a self of greater ethical power and enthusiam.
Examples might be indefinitely multiplied. For in
ethical religions the object of adoration and the
"great companion" has always been the embodi-
ment of the ethical ideal, the supreme judge of con-
duct. And from this combination of characters it
is but a step to the demand for assistance in the
moral conflict. The fixing of the ethical ideal and
the giving of strength to attain it,-this is the of-
fice of the alter in this type of prayer. God "makes
no offer to take the soul out of the storm. Indeed,
it is in the furious center of the storm that He is
to be met. He knows and shares all.-He believes
¹ Cooley, p. 43.
100
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
in what the soul may become. He believes that He
can restore the ruin.-This is the soul's safety, the
pledge of ultimate victory"1
992
Several prayers may be briefly noted as character-
istic examples of this type. "Create in me a clean
heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me.
"We beseech Thee that our hearts may be so kindled
with heavenly desires and Thy love so shed abroad
in us that we may continually seek the things that
are above." "O Lord God, in whose hand are the
wills and affections of men, kindle in my mind holy
desires, and repress sinful and corrupt imagina-
tions." :
3
294
"Unite your soul to God by means of hearty faith,
and you will be able to accomplish anything,
says Father John Sergieff. On investigation, what
he means by "everything" is found to be the "con-
quest of invisible enemies, of passions, of sorrows, of
despondency". In other words, moral reinforcement
is the thing demanded, and according to his testi-
mony obtained, through prayer. Prayers for the
more specific virtues also come under this head. St.
Francis prayed for the "active virtues". Practi-
cally all who make much use of prayer employ it in
preparation for special crises, for which they ask
strength or patience, or the particular virtue that
¹ Vance, "The Rise of the Soul," p. 113.
2 Psalm 51:10.
'Mrs. Tileston, "Prayers, Ancient and Modern," pp. 262, 302.
* Father John Sergieff, "My Life in Christ,” p. 45.
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
101
1
seems to them most necessary for the coming trial.
We even find certain magazines of the "New
Thought" offering, in return for prayer, not only
an ethical advance in the narrow sense but the most
seductive promises of "remarkable ability, extraor-
dinary talent and rare genius"! "The attitude
of conscious prayer places the mind in such close
touch with Supreme power that it actually feels that
power, and when the mind feels Supreme power
there is a decided increase in capacity, ability and
efficiency." "Whatever the conditions or circum-
stances of a person today, he can steadily, through
the use of real prayer, cause all things to steadily
change for the better.-Real prayer is the direct
path to the heights."1
Prayers for conversion come also under this gen-
eral type. The social conflict is often a very acute
one in such prayers. The end in view is not simply
a wider self, but an almost completely new self. The
old self must be given up; the old will must be
"broken down". This is not a surrender of all
willing, as in the æsthetic type of prayer, though
if the conflict becomes unbearably intense it may
pass through very weariness into that type; it is,
essentially, a change of one form of willing for an-
other-the fiercest kind of conflict known. Add to
this the fact that the alter and the me are by the
very nature of this relation set over against each
¹ Eternal Progress. Published by C. D. Larson, Cincinnati, 1908,
August; p. 28, article on Constructive Imagination.
102
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
other as antagonistic, and the greatness of the ten-
sion is immediately seen. Torrey, speaking of Fin-
ney, says: "The burden of his soul would often
be so great that he was unable to stand, and he
would writhe and groan in agony.
991
A frequent experience in prayers for conversion is
that the lower will must be broken down at some par-
ticular point of resistance, which may be in itself
ridiculously insignificant. The essential nature of
it in the experience is simply that it has become iden-
tified in the mind with the old unyielding, "lower"
self;
around it the resistance focuses. When this oc-
curs, the point must always be yielded, however in-
significant it may intrinsically be, if the conflict is
to result in the formation of the desired higher
self.
Thus at the time when Finney's preaching was
making many converts, it became a custom for those
who were "struggling with the Spirit of God" to go
up into the woods to pray. They usually came
away rejoicing and with things completely settled.
One young man, Finney relates, was unwilling
through pride to be seen going into the woods for
this purpose. Gradually that unwillingness came
to be the point of tension in his experience. He
prayed, but could not persuade himself that his
prayer was heard. One night he prayed all night in
his parlor, but in the morning was more distressed
than ever. Once, in order to convince himself and
¹ Torrey, "How to Pray," p. 117.
*
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
103
God that it was not through pride that he kept out
of the woods, he actually knelt in a mud-puddle to
pray. After weeks of this struggle he gave in,
went to the woods and found peace immediately. ¹
The conflict of selves was resolved.
2
1
Finney recognizes quite fully the immaterial na-
ture of the particular obstacle in this case; other
evangelists are not always so sane. Thus Torrey
relates with an almost triumphant glee the story
of a man who obtained no relief in prayer till he .
brought himself to say the words "For Jesus' sake."
This he would not do at first, having had Unitarian
antecedents, and this one reserve became the point
of tension and separation between the two selves,
preventing their union.
When the new self has finally been established,
succeeding conflicts are less intense. The habit of
yielding to a certain moral ideal has been formed.
There may even ensue a complete cessation of all
further social growth, as in the type of person al-
ready quoted from Cooley, upon whose mind some-
thing was "printed to remain until death and be fol-
lowed daily". This will occur unless some new
situation brings up again a significant problem of
ends, or unless the person is of the sensitive reli-
gious nature which sees in the most trivial events
questions of value involved. Persons of this type
make moral problems out of a small amount of ex-
1 "Autobiography of Finney," p. 32.
Torrey, "How to Pray," p. 51 et seq.
104
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
1
ternal material; hence the social nature of their
prayer does not suffer from the difficulties usually
attending the habitual use of prayer in an unevent-
ful moral life. For their moral life is not unevent-
ful.
These are the people who "sweep a room as by
God's laws". Often this may mean a waste of
mental energy, this constant use of the most in-
clusive social ideal for purely minor ends. That
consciousness may succeed in relating the widest
ideal and the most trivial details of life is not here
questioned. But the old problem of the relation of
means to ends comes up here again on a different
level. We have already noticed that the immature
consciousness makes use of prayer for any kind of
end, because religious ends are not yet clearly de- ·
fined. At this stage those ends have been defined
and then emphasized in such a way as to make evi-
dent the possibility of their connection, by means of
the will, with every aspect of life. The actual truth
of such connection for a strongly religious conscious-
ness is undoubted. Its economic utility is not so
certain. For this again raises the old problem of the
two tendencies: one to rest content with an experi-
ence, the other to pass quickly into action.
From the standpoint of the former, the giving of
religious values to every action is undoubtedly an
enrichment of consciousness. From the standpoint
of the latter it might occasionally prove less wear-
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
105
ing, to one's self and to others, to "sweep the room"
by habit.
A consciousness which demands a frequent and an
emotionally rich renewal of the social relationship
of prayer, and which does not succeed in "making
moral problems out of everything", inevitably meets
with severe discouragements. Father John Sergieff
records the great difficulty of habitually attaining
the mood of ardent prayer.¹ "The evil spirit tries
to scatter prayer as it were a sand-heap; to make it
without fervor of heart; such prayer brings no
profit." And again, "even during prayer there
sometimes occur moments
moments of deadly darkness
and spiritual anguish, arising from unbelief of
the heart." And he concludes that "we
'we can
pray only through the strengthening of the Holy
Spirit" All religious leaders have recognized
these periods of "dryness" in habitual prayers.
They attribute them to differing causes. Psycho-
logically they are due to the nature of habitual activ-
ity, which when it becomes actually "habitual” in
the technical sense of that term, becomes uncon-
scious. The attention cannot keep the morally ideal
self in consciousness as long as it is the same morally
ideal self. The nature of selves is to pass and change.
And if there is not enough event in the life to keep
the ideal self constantly changing in content, it be-
gins to fade from consciousness, and "unbelief of
1
1"My Life in Christ," pp. 14, 11.
106
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
;
91
the heart", as Sergieff distinguishes it, sets in.
Thus it happens that hermits and men of intensively
religious but otherwise inactive lives, have suf-
fered most from the pain of this "dryness". They
suffer from the pain of trying to hold an object in
consciousness by sheer effort of the attention, while
the object changes insufficiently to make this feat
possible. It is an attempt to force a relationship
which can arise in consciousness only out of the
needs of an actual problem.
{
To sum up the characteristics of this type of
prayer, we find that it, like all the other types dis-
cussed, is a social relation and has a social end. As
opposed to the types of prayer which we have called
undiscriminating, this type gives clear recognition
to the fact that the relation is a relation of selves
and that the result is a result in a self. As opposed
to the other completely social type of prayer, the
æsthetic, this type lays emphasis, not on the amount
of content which can be taken into the social rela-
tionship, but on the capacity developed for moral
action. It does not rest in prayer as an end in it-
self, but makes use of it as ethical reinforcement.
From the standpoint of the experiencing con-
sciousness, this reinforcement seems to come in two
ways, which may for convenience' sake be distin-
guished. There is the additional strength which
comes to the moral life from the mere idea of a
mighty ally. "To work with the universe is the
most tremendous incentive that can appeal to an
!
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
107
individual will." Religion holds forth such an in-
centive. "To seek the truth, wherever it leads, to
live the life of love, whatever it costs,-this is to be
the friend and helper of God."2 Closely connected
with this incentive, religion brings the encourage-
ment of inevitable ultimate success. "God believes
in us,
says Vance. "He believes in what the soul
may become. He believes that He can restore the
ruin.” ³
This is a powerful reinforcement for the
fainting strength-simply this belief, taken apart
from any experience in which renewed strength
seems to come directly, in answer to the prayer.
But cases of prayer are not lacking in which the
experience seems to be more intimate than this,-
is less traceable to the conscious use of an idea of
confidence. Father John Sergieff says: "By our
own experience we know that during our communion
with God, our mind is enlightened in an extraor-
dinary manner, and acquires the widest scale of ac-
tion." Torrey urges the need of prayer especial-
ly "when one is particularly busy", since the prayer
"gives greater efficiency in work" This direct in-
crease of power and capacity, in addition to any con-
scious accession of confidence, is noted by many
writers beside these.
4
The causes for this are various, differing as the
'Perry, "The Religious Experience," Monist, xiv, 752-766.
"Gladden, "Where Does the Sky Begin?" p. 334.
³ Vance, "The Rise of a Soul," p. 113.
"My Life in Christ," p. 474.
5 Torrey, "How to Pray," ch. 10, 5.
108
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
nature of the particular selves into which conscious-
ness has divided may differ. Before the prayer,
various conflicting tendencies interfered with each
other. Thus when, as Torrey notes "one is partic-
ularly busy", or when one is especially puzzled,
the interference of differing tendencies makes ef-
fective action very difficult. The religious person
desires "in place of clashing passions, one supreme
passion'', and he obtains it, at least for the time of
the prayer and immediately following. The uni-
fying of aim resulting from this, and the better or--
ganization of all work and problems in the light of
a controlling purpose, contribute to greater efficiency
and bring about "the manifestation of unusual
power to accomplish ends".
Moreover, if the prayer be of the type which
serves to relieve the individual of some of the press-
ing weight of responsibility, and there are few
prayers, even of those most definitely employed to
obtain increased strength for the struggle, which do
not have in them some element of "casting the bur-
den on the Lord" and removing the too intense
strain from the individual at least for the moment,
-if the prayer have in it this element, there is yet
a further way in which it may make accomplish-
ment easy. There are many things, as we noticed
in connection with the aesthetic type of prayer,
which can be accomplished better by giving up the
strain of conscious choosing and allowing the sub-
conscious and habitual activities to work out the
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
109
end unhampered by the efforts of the mind, which
only serve to confuse action. Aside, then, from the
indirect effect which prayer may have through the
growth of the individual's confidence in himself be-
cause of his belief in another's confidence for him,
prayer may give greater efficiency in the accomplish-
ment of moral ends in two ways: first by the reor-
ganization of the conflicting aims of consciousness in
accordance with the highest moral ideal, and second
through the additional ease of action which comes
from giving up the worry of conscious striving and
relying on the habitual life-activities to carry out
the course in which they have once been started.
1
Prayer of this type is then, to repeat, a social
relationship between two selves arising in conscious-
ness. And the end attained is a wider, more efficient,
more truly ethical self. In contrast to the quota-
tion given at the end of the last section in illustra-
tion of the æsthetic type of prayer, we might de-
scribe this use of prayer in the words of Vance:
"What is a man's God but his faultless and inspir-
ing ideal? What is religious aspiration but the cry
of the soul for life's completeness? Will there ever
come a time when there are no higher heights for
the soul to climb? If not, God abides as the lofty
and inspiring goal of the soul's eternal quest."
¹ Vance, "The Rise of a Soul,” p. 237.
110
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
}
VII
THE TYPE OF REALITY AND THE OBJECTIVE REFERENCE
INVOLVED IN PRAYER
Three questions remain in our consideration of
the subject of prayer. What type of reality can
we posit, psychologically speaking, for the selves
engaged in this relation? Second, what psycholog-
ical warrant have we for any objective reference?
Third, in case we find some kind of objective ref-
erence, what content can be given to the object?
"
Taking up the first of these questions, "the per-
sonal idea is", as we have maintained all along,
"the immediate social reality". "Society, in its
immediate aspect, is a relation between personal
ideas." "Corporeal reality has nothing to do with
the reality of the personal idea."1 There is no
separation, as far as personal ideas go, between
real and imaginary people. All are imaginative
interpretations of certain parts or aspects of ex-
perience which we succeed in organizing into one
concrete whole for the purposes of a given prob-
lem. Both the alter and the me possess this type of
reality, that of an imaginative organization of cer-
tain phases of consciousness for the purpose of
the ongoing of that consciousness.
Moreover, the alter is an organization of content
not included in the me. Thus when the statement
is made, as it often is, that there is no assurance of
¹ Cooley, p. 57.
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
111
any result in prayer beyond that arising in the in-
dividual himself; that, in other words, "God"
makes no contribution that can be scientifically
known, the statement is inadequate. It is true in
one sense and in another sense not. From outside
the total process of experience there is indeed no
proof that anything enters. Nevertheless, on retro-
spect, we see from the psychological analysis that
the process itself consisted of two selves, each of
which made a contribution to the final result.
Prayer existed as a real communication between
them. It is not as though there were one self,
which had the consciousness, which contained with-
in itself the entire process. In this case it would
be necessary to place any other self outside the
process and then to inquire whether the process
gave any sure sign of the existence of that other
self. This it would clearly be impossible to obtain;
from the time of Kant it has been recognized that
the process of experiencing must find its criteria.
within itself. So if we posit first a self which has
this process of experience, a tendency from which
few even of the newer psychologists have altogether
escaped, it is, of course, necessary to state that
this process gives no sure knowledge of any other
self. But if the self is, as we have said before,
itself a construct in experience, the alter has, from
the standpoint of that experience, the same kind of
reality as has the me, namely, a "social" reality.
In one sense, of course, the only self which can
112
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
be said to be real is the final self which arises out
of the conflict, since that alone becomes "realized”
by taking part in the construction of the world. Yet
this is a matter of emphasis, for, as we have seen,
that self becomes again the starting point of a new
problem, a new "problematic" self, and out of the
new conflict arises still another "realized" self.
But both the me and the alter have the type of real-
ity which belongs to the stage preceding the con-
structing stage of experience. Both contribute to
the final result, which is a self expressed in act. The
self which finally issues has not existed throughout,
deliberately choosing to be influenced by certain
ideas of its own; it has only arisen out of the re-
lation of those personal ideas and has become real-
ized as actual only through them. This is the com-
mon function of both the me and the alter.
The me and the alter do, however, differ in one
vital respect. As we have seen, when consciousness
arises as the result of a tension, a distinction be-
tween subject and object, which has hitherto not
existed, also arises. This distinction is between
some form of purposeful activity and the means
through which that activity must reach its end. The
conditioning means is the "object" for conscious-
ness. That this is the typical form of all objective
reference has been shown by Stuart in his paper in
Dewey's "Studies in Logical Theory". And this
is also the type of objective reference which is given
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
113
the alter in the prayer relation-that of necessary
means to an end. The criterion of that objective
reference is the same as in all other cases: does the
means actually produce the end for which it
was employed? We have seen that in many of the
cases of prayer of which we have been treating
the means did produce the end. Some reality must
then be posited, objective in the sense in which we
posit anything as objective, in that it is outside the
self of immediate purpose. This does not neces-
sarily mean that it is outside of the subconscious
activities connected with that self of immediate pur-
pose; in fact, a connection of some sort with the
purposing self must inevitably be assumed; but it
does assert, for the particular moment of experi
ence of which we are speaking, the same essential
type of psychological fact to which we give objec-
tive reference under any circumstances.
"object", as psychological fact, is a conditioning
means in the fulfilment of a purpose, which purpose
is always given a subjective reference.
An
But we have seen that the alters in the various
prayer relations are not always the same alter;
that, in fact, the alter is, strictly speaking, a dif-
ferent one for every particular relation. So also do
other "objects" differ for every problem in which
they are used as means. The poet who says "I
have the same blue sky as God, I have the same God
114
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
ง
as the saint",¹ was equally wrong in both of his
assertions.
So we come to our final question: just what con-
tent and how much coherence and unity can we
assert of the alter. And this depends on the amount
of organization which we are able to make in con-
sciousness. At first the alter is disorganized; so is
the me. With further organization there may be
some connection maintained between the alter, con-
fidence in which cures disease, and the alter to which
recourse is had for moral evaluations. If so, the
term "God" will probably be used to include both
realities; if not, the two realities will be treated as
fundamentally different and designated as different
gods, or else ascribed, one to science, the other to
religion.
Thus, in a real sense, God is becoming progres-
sively more organized by the process of conscious-
ness even as the individual me is. The end which a
philosophical soul usually desires most ardently is a
complete organization which shall make unity of the
widest, most infinite variety. This unity once at-
tained can be called God, the universe, or any other
name desired. But as a matter of fact, it would
include the me's as well as the alters and would
throw us back upon the same problem.
Any final solution cannot, of course, be attained
through a psychological consideration. What is the
¹ Frederic R. Torrence, in "American Anthology," compiled by
Clarence Stedman, p. 753.
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
115
nature of this "consciousness" in which the self
as we know it arises? What is the significance of
this continually changing relation between a me and
an alter, this process by which consciousness goes
on? These are problems for metaphysics. But in
their consideration one very important factor must
be psychological data of the type we have been
considering, data so complexly social in character
that they would seem to indicate the futility of any
easy-going mechanical attempt at ultimate solution.
So much at least we would seem to have discovered:
that both the me and the alter are real as having a
part in the final result; that both of them, while
varying in different situations, may be unified and
called "one" to as great an extent as connection
and association can be established and maintained
for experience. This organizing and reorganizing
is constantly going on and the limits of me and al-
ter are constantly shifting. Yet since both originate
in consciousness, and since consciousness, whether
essentially unified or not, at least furnishes material
for continual attempts at unifying, we seem justi-
fied in the statement that some sort of dynamic unity
can be maintained in the alter as in the me.
116
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books of general reference for the standpoint of Social Psychology
in its application to the study of religion:
Baldwin, James Mark. Social and Ethical Interpretations of Men-
tal Development, New York, 1897.
Cooley, Charles Horton. Human Nature and the Social Order,
New York, 1902.
Wundt, Wilhelm M. Volkerpsychologie, vol. ii, Leipsic, 1900.
Coe, George A. The Spiritual Life, New York, 1900. Education
in Religion and Morals, Chicago, 1904. The Religion of a Mature
Mind, Chicago, 1902.
King, Henry Churchill. Theology and the Social Consciousness,
New York, 1902. Rational Living, New York, 1905.
Jones, Rufus M. Social Law in the Spiritual World, Philadel-
phia, 1904.
Books and articles dealing with the psychology of religion, with
especial reference to prayer:
Beck, Frank O. Prayer, A Study of Its History and Psychology.
American Journal of Religious Psychology and Education, ii, 1906.
107-121.
Colvin, S. S. The Psychological Necessity of Religion. American
Journal of Psychology, xiii, 1902, 80-87.
Farnell, L. R. The Evolution of Religion, New York and Lon-
don, 1905.
Flournoy, Theodore. Observations de la Psychologie Religieuse.
Archives de Psychologie, ii, 1903, 327-366.
Guimaraens, Da Costa. Le Besoin de Prier. Revue Philosophique,
liv, 1902. 391-412.
New York,
Hall, G. Stanley. Adolescence, esp. vol. 2, pp. 281-363.
1904. Address on the Religious Content of the Child-Mind, in Prin-
ciples of Religious Education, New York, 1900.
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience, London,
1903.
King, Irving. The Differentiation of the Religious Consciousness.
Psychological Review, Monograph Supplements No. 27.
Leuba, James H. Introduction to a Psychological Study of Re-
ligion. Monist, xi, 195-225. Contents of the Religious Conscious-
ness. Monist, xi, 536-573. Religion. Its Impulses and Its Ends,
Bibliotheca Sacra, Iviii, 757-769. The Field and Problems of the
Psychology of Religion. Amer. Jour. of Rel. Psych. and Edu., i,
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
117
155-167. Religion as a Factor in the Struggle for Life. Amer.
Jour. of Rel. Psych. and Edu.. ii, 307-343.
Marett. From Spell to Prayer. Folk-Lore, xv, 1904, 132-165.
Murisier, Ernst. Les Maladies du Sentiment Religieux. Paris,
1901.
Perry. The Religious Experience. Monist, xiv, 752-766.
Pratt, James Bissell. The Psychology of Religious Belief, New
York, 1907.
Ranson, S. W. Studies in the Psychology of Prayer. Amer. Jour.
of Rel. Psych. and Edu., i, 1904, 129-142.
Starbuck. The Psychology of Religion, London, 1903.
Woolston, H. B. The Religious Emotion.
xiii, 1902, 62-79.
Amer. Jour. of Psych.,
Certain of the more prominent source-books of prayers and devo-
tional literature, including certain typical manuals of prayer and de-
votion referred to in this thesis:
The Bible.
The Koran.
The Book of Common Prayer.
Tileston, Mary W. Prayers Ancient and Modern, Boston, 1906.
(Also for a bibliography of source-books.)
Max Müller, F. Sacred Literature of the East, esp. vols. xxxii,
xlvi. Vedic Hymns, Oxford, 1879-1894.
Griffith, Ralph. Hymns of the Rigveda, Benares, 1889.
Augustine. Confessions, "A Revised Translation," London, 1886.
Bunyan, John. Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, 1st
Hudson edition, Hudson, 1905.
Eddy, Mary Baker G. Science and Health, Boston, 1897.
Dresser, Horatio W. Health and the Inner Life, New York and
London, 1907. Man and the Divine Order, New York and London,
1903.
Fénelon. Letters to Men, trans. by Sidney Lear, London, New
York and Bombay, 1903.
Finney, Charles Grandison.
Autobiography, New York, 1876.
Fox, George. Journal, Philadelphia, 1800.
Granger, Frank. The Soul of a Christian, London, 1900.
Herrmann, Wilhelm. The Communion of the Christian with God,
trans. by J. S. Stanyon, New York, London, 1906.
à Kempis, Thomas. l'Imitation de Jesus-Christ, trans. by Fabre,
Paris, 1906.
Matheson, George. Times of Retirement, New York, Chicago, To-
ronto, 1901.
118
PSYCHOLOGY OF PRAYER
Murray, Andrew.
1895.
With Christ, New York, Chicago, Toronto,
The Life of Trust; Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings with
George Müller, New Amer. Edi., New York, 1898.
Religion and Medicine. Publications of the Emmanuel Church,
Boston, 1908.
Sergieff, Father John Iliytch. My Life in Christ, trans. by E. E.
Goulaeff, London, Paris, Melbourne, 1897.
St. Teresa. The Way of Perfection, trans. by John Dalton, Lon-
don, 1901. Autobiography, trans. by David Lewis, London, 1904.
Torrey, R. A. How to Pray, New York, Chicago, Toronto, 1900.
Trine, R. W. In Tune with the Infinite, New York, 1899.
Vance, James.
The Rise of a Soul, New York, 1902.
Upham, T. C. Life and Religious Experiences of Madame de la
Mothe Guyon, New York, 1877.
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