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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The Religious Sentiment," Daniel G. Brinton embarks on a profound exploration of the intrinsic nature of religious feelings and beliefs that have shaped human experience throughout history. Utilizing a blend of philosophical discourse and psychological insight, Brinton elucidates the evolution of religion as an innate human sentiment rather than mere doctrinal adherence. His literary style is characterized by a compelling narrative interspersed with rich historical context, inviting readers to contemplate the multifaceted dimensions of spirituality and morality that intersect with humanity's quest for meaning. Daniel G. Brinton was not only a distinguished American anthropologist and archaeologist but also a prominent figure in the study of Native American cultures. His extensive academic background, exemplified by his involvement in the early fields of anthropology and linguistics, undoubtedly influenced his inquiry into the universal aspects of religious sentiment. Brinton's ability to merge empirical research with philosophical reflection positions him as a pioneer in the understanding of how emotional and psychological underpinnings shape religious beliefs. "The Religious Sentiment" is an essential read for anyone seeking to understand the foundations of spirituality and human existence. Brinton's articulate synthesis of emotion, culture, and religion resonates deeply, making it a vital contribution to both academic and general audiences interested in the complexities of faith and belief systems. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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The Religious Sentiment
Table of Contents
Introduction
At its core, The Religious Sentiment proposes that religion arises from a universal human feeling whose origins and purposes can be examined with disciplined inquiry.
Daniel G. Brinton, an American scholar known for work in ethnology and linguistics, approaches religion here as a subject suitable for scientific and philosophical analysis. The book belongs to the tradition of nineteenth-century intellectual prose, when comparative studies of belief were taking shape alongside emerging social sciences. First appearing in the late nineteenth century, it reflects an era confident that careful observation and reason could illuminate even the most intimate convictions. Readers encounter a learned, secular-leaning study that neither preaches nor dismisses belief, but seeks to understand it as a natural and enduring feature of human life.
The premise is straightforward yet ambitious: to trace the sources of religious feeling and to clarify the ends toward which it strives in individual and collective experience. Brinton writes in an analytical, essayistic voice, drawing connections across cultures and historical periods to outline patterns rather than to catalog curiosities. The mood is reflective and steady, favoring lucid argument over polemics. Instead of devotional exhortation, the book offers a rational, humane inquiry that invites readers to think with it—an experience closer to a wide-ranging seminar than to a sermon or a purely technical treatise.
Key themes include the universality of religious emotion, the interplay of imagination and intellect in forming doctrines and rites, and the ethical direction that religious feeling can take. Brinton examines how symbols, myths, and ceremonies give shape to inner impulses, translating private sentiment into social forms. He treats morality as deeply connected to religious aspiration without reducing one to the other. The result is a portrait of religion as a dynamic human process—neither an accidental superstition nor a fixed set of dogmas, but a living response to needs for meaning, solidarity, and guidance amid the uncertainties of existence.
Methodologically, the book is comparative and synthetic, aligning observations from anthropology, psychology, and history as these fields were then developing. It exemplifies a nineteenth-century confidence in orderly explanation while recognizing the diversity of belief. Rather than arguing for a particular creed, it frames religion as an object of study amenable to the same scrutiny applied to language, custom, or art. Readers should expect measured generalization, careful distinctions, and propositions that aim to be testable by experience. The tone is civil and judicious, focused on clarity and breadth more than on scholastic detail or confessional debate.
For contemporary readers, the work’s value lies in its effort to bridge sensibility and reason—showing how emotions, ideals, and communal practices can be examined without diminishing their significance. Its questions remain timely: What moves people to reverence? How do shared symbols bind communities? Can moral purpose be strengthened through critical understanding rather than weakened by it? Approached as a historical contribution to the study of religion, the book also reveals assumptions typical of its period, making it useful both as argument and as an artifact of intellectual history that prompts reflection on method and perspective.
Reading The Religious Sentiment offers a disciplined encounter with the perennial problem of how to account for faith’s power without appealing to authority alone. Brinton’s steady reasoning and comparative lens provide a framework for thinking about belief as part of ordinary human experience, shaped by feeling, imagination, and social life. The book encourages readers to test ideas against observation, to separate transient forms from enduring impulses, and to reflect on what a mature religious or ethical life might seek. It promises a thoughtful, historically grounded exploration that engages the mind without slighting the depths of the heart.
Synopsis
Daniel G. Brinton’s The Religious Sentiment presents a systematic, non-theological study of religion as a natural human phenomenon. Writing as a physician and anthropologist, Brinton aims to define religion through psychology and comparative observation rather than revelation or dogma. He argues that religion is, at its core, a sentiment—an enduring emotional disposition—that seeks ideal ends. The book proceeds by distinguishing this sentiment from adjacent faculties, then analyzing its manifestations in worship, doctrine, and symbolism. Brinton’s goal is descriptive and explanatory: to trace the source of the religious sentiment, clarify its proper aim, and indicate how it evolves within cultures as knowledge and ethics advance.
Brinton begins by identifying the religious sentiment as a universal feature of human nature, distinguishable from intellectual belief and moral obligation. He characterizes it as a steady tendency of feeling rather than a transient passion, giving it persistence across personalities and societies. The sentiment is not identical with fear, hope, or curiosity, though these may accompany it. It relates to a sense of value and elevation that impels individuals beyond immediate interests. By delineating religion as a sentiment, Brinton separates it from theology (systems of propositions) and ceremonial practice (habits and institutions), emphasizing the inward, affective foundation from which those outward forms arise.
Turning to sources, Brinton surveys common explanations—fear of the unknown, awe before nature, desire for protection, love of ancestors, and hope for justice. He regards each as contributory but insufficient to explain religion’s persistence and breadth. He argues that the sentiment springs from an inherent capacity to idealize: to perceive and seek what is true, right, and beautiful beyond present experience. This impulse toward the ideal, intensified by imagination and social life, shapes religious conceptions across cultures. The analysis situates religion within general psychology, linking it to the mind’s tendency to synthesize meaning and to unify disparate experiences under higher, enduring purposes.
With the source clarified, Brinton outlines the aim of the religious sentiment as orientation toward the ideal—truth, duty, and beauty—rather than toward material advantage or supernatural intervention. He treats moral progress and intellectual integrity as natural expressions of genuine religiosity. In his framework, the idea of God functions as a symbol or focus of ideal unity, gathering values into a single, elevating object of devotion. Concepts such as immortality appear as responses of the sentiment to the demand for moral continuity and meaning. The aim, therefore, is not speculative certainty, but steadfast aspiration and conduct aligned with the highest discernible ends.
Brinton then distinguishes religion from theology, contending that doctrinal systems crystallize sentiment into propositions that may aid or hinder its growth. He evaluates popular creeds, miracles, and authoritative revelations as historical products that can preserve insight yet risk substituting belief for inward elevation. The test he applies is practical: whether forms and teachings promote clearer knowledge, stronger virtue, and a deeper sense of the ideal. He urges freedom of inquiry and adaptation of formulas to advancing understanding. In this view, theology is provisional and secondary, while the religious sentiment remains primary, seeking expression that harmonizes with evidence and ethical demands.
Examining worship, Brinton centers on prayer as the typical expression of sentiment. He differentiates petitionary prayer, aimed at external results, from aspirational or contemplative prayer, aimed at inner alignment with ideals. The latter, he contends, is most consistent with the sentiment’s aim, cultivating resolve, humility, and moral clarity. He surveys historical and cross-cultural forms of prayer, noting their psychological effects and social functions. Efficacy, in his account, lies in the transformation of the person rather than in alteration of natural laws. Worship thus becomes a discipline of feeling and intention, reinforcing the pursuit of truth, duty, and beauty.
The book proceeds to sacrifice and sacraments as institutional expressions of the sentiment. Brinton traces sacrifice from early propitiatory offerings to ethical interpretations emphasizing self-control, service, and renunciation of lower aims. He treats sacraments as symbolic acts that consolidate communal values and intensify personal commitment. Their power, he argues, resides in shared meaning and the shaping of character, not in supernatural mechanisms. He considers the priesthood and ritual as historical supports that may preserve the sentiment’s aims, provided they adapt to knowledge and morality. When forms detach from purpose, they risk becoming impediments rather than vehicles of religious life.
Brinton’s analysis of mythology and symbolism positions them as imaginative expressions of the religious sentiment. Myths, in his account, translate ideals into narrative, personifying forces and values to render them vivid and memorable. He examines how metaphor, language, and tradition generate pantheons, rites, and sacred histories that encode ethical and cosmological insights. Comparative observations highlight recurring patterns—animistic attributions, heroic cycles, and moral allegories—while emphasizing variation shaped by culture and environment. Myths are not literal statements of fact but vehicles for meaning, guiding conduct and consolidating social cohesion. As understanding advances, symbolic interpretations replace literalism without negating the sentiment’s core aims.
In conclusion, Brinton forecasts a religion increasingly allied with science and ethical culture. He envisions a future where the religious sentiment persists as devotion to ideals, while doctrines, rites, and institutions evolve to support knowledge, justice, and beauty. The measure of progress remains practical: clearer truth, higher standards of duty, and richer aesthetic appreciation. By treating religion as a natural sentiment with a rightful aim, the book proposes continuity across change, honoring historical forms yet subjecting them to evidence and moral judgment. Its overarching message is that religion endures as aspiration toward the ideal, guiding personal and social life toward enduring goods.
Historical Context
Daniel G. Brinton’s The Religious Sentiment (published in 1876 in Philadelphia) emerged in the United States’ postbellum milieu, when scientific institutions, industrial progress, and pluralist religious debates converged. Philadelphia, host of the Centennial Exposition that year, was a center of learned societies such as the Academy of Natural Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, where comparative inquiry flourished. The nation grappled with Reconstruction politics, immigration, and urbanization, even as print culture and lecture circuits popularized new ideas. In this urban, industrial, and scholarly environment, Brinton sought to ground religion in psychology and science rather than ecclesiastical authority, framing belief as a natural human sentiment consistent with late nineteenth-century American claims to progress and rational public life.
The American Civil War (1861–1865) shattered the antebellum order, beginning with secession in 1860–1861 and ending with Confederate surrender in April 1865. The conflict claimed an estimated 620,000–750,000 lives, led to the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), and culminated in the Thirteenth Amendment (1865). Brinton served as a Union Army surgeon, confronting mass suffering, battlefield medicine, and the ethical urgency of human solidarity. The book’s insistence that religion springs from shared human sentiment rather than sectarian dogma echoes lessons drawn from wartime experience: that moral feeling precedes creed, and that civic cohesion requires an ethical, not merely confessional, foundation in a nation newly redefined by emancipation and national citizenship.
Reconstruction (1865–1877) recast the constitutional order through the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) and the Fifteenth Amendment (1870), the Freedmen’s Bureau (1865), and the Civil Rights Act of 1875, even as white supremacist reaction, including the Ku Klux Klan (founded 1865), violently resisted. The contested presidential election of 1876 and the Compromise of 1877 ended federal occupation, ushering in Jim Crow. Brinton’s work, while theoretical, responds to this climate: by portraying religion as a universal sentiment grounded in human nature, it tacitly supports a civic ideal above sectarian and racial divisions. His emphasis on ethical law over theological exclusivism mirrors Reconstruction-era attempts to imagine national belonging beyond denominational and regional loyalties.
The rise of evolutionary thought and scientific naturalism transformed intellectual life. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), defended by figures like Thomas H. Huxley (notably at the 1860 Oxford debate) and interpreted in the United States by Asa Gray, encouraged historical, natural explanations of mind, morals, and culture. Herbert Spencer’s First Principles (1862) offered a systematic evolutionary philosophy. Brinton’s The Religious Sentiment explicitly aligns with this scientific shift, proposing religion as a natural psychological function shaped by experience and development, not supernatural decree. By recasting ritual, myth, and worship as adaptive, comparative phenomena, the book imports evolutionary causation and empirical method into the “science and philosophy of religion.”
A new comparative study of religion and culture coalesced in the 1870s. Max Müller’s Introduction to the Science of Religion (1873) and E. B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871) established methods for cross-cultural analysis of myth, ritual, and belief. In the United States, the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology (founded 1879 under John Wesley Powell) institutionalized ethnographic research. Brinton, already author of The Myths of the New World (1868), drew on Native American languages and religious practices to argue for shared structures of religious feeling across cultures. The Religious Sentiment relies on this comparative corpus: it treats so-called “primitive” rites and modern liturgies as data in a continuous spectrum, thereby translating eclectic ethnological evidence into a general theory of religious motivation.
Liberal religious ferment in America gave organizational form to freethought. The Free Religious Association, founded in Boston in 1867 by Octavius B. Frothingham with an inaugural address by Ralph Waldo Emerson, championed freedom from dogma, ethical religion, and open inquiry. Parallel currents included biblical criticism (from David Strauss’s 1835 work to later scholarship) and Unitarian-led calls for a “religion of humanity.” Brinton’s 1876 treatise reflects this ambiance: it locates the authority of religion in inner moral sentiment and empirical insight rather than creed, priesthood, or miracle. By arguing that reverence arises from human cognitive and emotional life, he articulates a program consistent with the Association’s aim to reconcile spiritual aspiration with modern science and democratic society.
Industrial transformation and national display formed the backdrop. The Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia (May–November 1876) drew roughly 10 million visitors and showcased the Corliss steam engine, Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, and ethnological exhibits that framed “civilizational” stages. The Panic of 1873 and the Long Depression (1873–1879) destabilized labor and finance, presaging the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Mass immigration and rapid urban growth complicated national cohesion. Brinton’s confidence in a rational, comparative “science of religion” mirrors the Exposition’s narrative of progress: he treats religion as an evolving human faculty responsive to knowledge and social need. Displays of global cultures and technologies reinforced his conviction that comparative evidence could ground a universal account of religious life.
As a social and political critique, The Religious Sentiment challenges sectarian monopolies over moral authority and proposes an ethic accessible to citizens across creed, class, and origin. By naturalizing religion, Brinton implicitly deflates clerical power and argues for freedom of conscience consonant with Reconstruction-era constitutionalism and pluralist urban society. He exposes how dogmatic conflict impedes civic solidarity amid industrial upheaval and widening class tensions, urging a public morality rooted in shared human feeling rather than denominational law. In elevating comparative evidence over revelation, the book contests exclusionary doctrines and offers a civic, ethical framework designed to stabilize a diverse republic navigating science, migration, and postwar redefinition.
