sentiment includes within its system another sentiment, the love of family. Often the zest of business competition, which I believe to be a manifestation of the play impulse, and hence a modified form of the pugnacious instinct, also enters in those instances where a man delights in commercial strife for its own sake, and finds it more absorbing than anything else that he could do.[1] The acquirement of property therefore becomes a value, supported by a strongly organized system of instincts and emotions.
The laws of demand and supply, cost of production, increasing and diminishing returns, marginal utilities, and the like, are descriptive formulations of processes in which economic value is quantitatively increased or diminished. They therefore have their place in an account of values. But, after all, these laws and the whole economic process as it is studied by the economists rest upon the instinctive and sentimental basis just indicated; commodities could have no market values at all if it were not for the fact that they either directly or indirectly satisfy instincts and sentiments.
To a large extent religious values, like economic values, are concerned with objects associated with instincts, and appreciated as agencies that secure their satisfaction. Primitive religious sacrifice and prayer invariably have for their purpose the satisfaction of some instinctive or other innate impulse, e.g., food, water, victory in war (pugnacity), safety from storms and other physical dangers (fear), sex, children, etc. The search for an innate religious instinct has been futile; there is none.[2] Even in spiritual religions the religious interest as a rule remains mediate.[3] Only in extreme cases of aesthetic prayer[4] and the highest stage of the mystic way, the unitive life,[5] does the ego in religious
- ↑ McDougall, Introduction to Social Psychology, pp. 110-116.
- ↑ King, op. cit., pp. 25-30. J. H. Leuba, A Psychological Study of Religion, pp. 7-9.
- ↑ J. H. Leuba ("The Contents of the Religious Consciousness," Monist, XV. pp. 536-573) has shown how strikingly true this is of American Protestants to-day, even if he has exaggerated his point.
- ↑ Anna L. Strong, Psychology of Prayer, Chap. V.
- ↑ Evelyn Underbill, Mysticism.
