Page:Psychology and preaching.djvu/109

 FEELING QI

his effectiveness in his proper function is evidence of the fact that his own religious life is poor, barren and destitute of the spiritual riches that might be his ; for, looked at sub jectively, spiritual values consist in the emotional realiza tion of spiritual verities.

(2) While culture lifts the religious feelings to higher levels, it contributes also another important advantage. It tends to bring about a more even, regular, continuous flow of the feelings in general. In a man of low mental organ ization life tends to differentiate into two clearly marked types of experience. On the one hand, his ordinary re actions are on the habitual plane, and are attended by states of dim and diffused consciousness. His daily life is a monotonous series of actions controlled for the most part by simple reflexes, instincts and habits. On the other hand, his emotional life is likely to be in strong contrast with this habitual regularity, i.e., to be of the discontinuous, ebullient type. As a whole his life will be characterized by stretches of dreary, feelingless monotony punctuated at irregular intervals by outbursts of excessive emotional manifestation, attended by what, in comparison with his ordinary experiences, may be called intense states of con sciousness. This is certainly true of the religious life of this class of people. In the man of culture, on the contrary, reflexes, instincts and habits play a large role, indeed ; but in his ordinary activities these unconscious or partially conscious controls of conduct are not nearly so dominant. To a far greater extent they are in him modi fied by the rational processes. And while his ordinary reactions are thus lifted in large measure above the merely habitual plane, his emotional life tends to move with fewer violent variations or fluctuations along a general level. Other things equal, he is less spasmodic in his feelings. The very multiplicity and variety of the emotional stimuli which play their part in his experience conduce to this result, and so does the higher complexity of his mental organiza tion with its mutually inhibiting motor tendencies. These

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