Man's interest in himself, which had been
sometimes that of the dilettante, largely imaginative and even
sentimental, was reinforced by man's new distress and became concrete
and scientific.
Thus man regarded himself and his own world with a new and urgent
attention. The methods and secondary causes of his intellectual,
emotional and volitional life began to be laid bare. The new situation
revealed the immense part played in shaping the personality and
the fate of the individual by inheritance and environment. The
Freudian doctrine, which traces conduct and habit back to early
or prenatal repressions, strengthens the interest in the physical
and materialistic sources of character and conduct in human life.
Behavioristic psychology, interpreting human nature in terms of
observation and action, rather than analysis and value judgments,
does the same. It tends to put the same emphasis upon the external and
sensationalistic aspects of human experience.
That, then, which is a central force in religion, the sense of the
inscrutability of human nature, the feeling of awe before the natural
processes, what Paul called the mystery of iniquity and the mystery of
godliness, tends to disappear. Wonder and confident curiosity succeed
humility and awe. That which is of the essence of religion, the sense
of helplessness coupled with the sense of responsibility, is stifled.
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