Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy by Josephine A. Jackson;Helen M. Salisbury
page 64 of 353 (18%)
page 64 of 353 (18%)
![]() | ![]() |
|
|
doubt that religion is a compound reaction, made up of
love,--sympathetic response to the parental love of God,--fear, negative self-feeling, and positive self-feeling in the shape of aspiration for the desired ideal of character; all woven into several compound emotions such as awe, gratitude, and reverence. It goes almost without saying that religion, if it be vital, is one of the greatest sources of moral energy and spiritual dynamic, and that it is and always has been one of the greatest aids to sublimation that man has found. A force like the Christian religion, which sets the highest ideal of character and makes man want to live up to it, and which at the same time says, "You can. Here is strength to help you"; which unifies life and fills it with purpose; which furnishes the highest love-object and turns the thought outward to the good of mankind--such a force could hardly fail to be a dynamic factor in the effort toward sublimation. This book, however, deals primarily with those cases for which religion has had, to call science to her aid in order to find the cause of failure, to flood the whole subject with light, and to help cut the cords which, binding us to the past, make it impossible to utilize the great resources that are at hand for all the children of men. =Where We Keep Our Instincts.= It must have been impossible to read through these two chapters on instinct without feeling that, after all, we are not very well acquainted with ourselves. The more we look into human nature, the more evident it becomes that there is much in each one of us of which we are only dimly aware. It is now time for us to look a little deeper,--to find where we keep these instinctive tendencies with which it is possible to live so intimately without even suspecting their existence. We shall find that they occupy a |
|


