The Thinking Causes Of Personal Gods: The Identical Feeling And The Immaterial Feeling

This paper is devoted to solving the old question of the birth of personal gods from the perspective of primitive thinking.émile Durkheim once pointed out that if religion is attributed to some common feelings(such as the "sense of dependence" called by Schleiermacher and Feuerbach),it is in fact denying the unique value of religion and human beings,and if it is attributed to religious instincts or transcendental(as Rudolf Otto's "mystical sense"),there is no basis for empirical observation,so when we study it,we should try to retain human uniqueness and in the meanwhile put it under experience.However,although Emile's suggestion is very pertinent,we soon found that the experience of human beings is quite limited and many things have gone out of sight in the history.Therefore,this article finally chose to follow Lvy-Bruhl's path,not only does not presuppose a lot of experience in the study,but also tries to enrich and develop such concepts as human thinking or human experience.In the first chapter,through the analysis of mana,we found it is composed of two special feelings in primitive thinking,we named one of it the identical feeling,it means the sense through it people feel the same kind of force in different things,the other one we named it the immaterial feeling,that means through it people feel the same force is different from material.In addition,through the comparison of personal gods and the earlier gods,we found some significant differences between them,which caused the subdivision of our core question to three questions that need to be answered: Why did the earlier gods separate from the things that produced them? Why could these gods combine with each other? How is the unity of personality or ego formed?In the second chapter,we started from the analysis of our two special feelings,and found that even in modern thinking,what they left behind is also accompanied by some other feelings like reverence,so we guess that in the initial state,without any development of human mind or civilization,they would be more likely to mix in even more other feelings,such as happiness,sadness,surprise and so on.Those other feelings are all momentary,so they produced the kind of gods in the primitive world that called momentary deities,and the trades of those gods could still be found in the ancient Greeks.However,the tendency that reflected by our two special feelings is different from those momentary feelings,so in the development of history,they gradually became independent from other feelings.This would make gods become more and more certain but not momentary anymore,and also made the same force behind different things and gods begin to be obscured.With the further development of this independence,the mysterious experience caused by our two special feelings will be separated from the so-called actual experience composed by other feelings,which would lead to the independence of gods from those things they came from.In the third chapter,firstly we refuted the general distinction between the personification of gods and the combination of gods,and demonstrated why we should put these two studies together.Then through a global view on religious issues by Arnold Joseph Toynbee and John Harwood Hick,we found that in the process of the gradual degradation of nature worship,people actually faced many belief options,and these different options are essentially the same,because they all actually worship the things as a combination of religious force or earlier gods.In further research,we found it is the internal contradictions between our two special feelings that caused this change,because in the realization of the identical feeling has the requirement to eliminate any individuality,while the immaterial feeling requires to remain on individual things.But with the help of social progress and other factors,the requirement of the identical feeling was gradually realized,so that the gods before could gradually get rid of the limitations of individual things and combined with each other.However,the immaterial feeling was disappearing,and this would make the identical feeling begin to change,because when it contains the immaterial feeling,it actually refers to something beyond any social form or any material form,but when it lost the immaterial feeling,it would gradually become a kind of social emotion,by which caused mana or gods be seen as society itself.As a social emotion,the identical feeling will vary in the face of different objects,and it would be easy to be influenced by other social emotions,thus people's respect for themselves or their souls would gradually take the chance to trigger changes in the field of religion,it would make the soul more and more assimilated to the previous gods,and the combination of the gods would also more and more be regarded simply as the basic soul said by Durkheim or the first person said by Franz,which is just the symbol of human beings but no longer everything in the world.But although the basic soul or the first person symbolizes greater wholeness,but they are presented in an individual way,so they also are individual souls.Their symbolic connotation gradually changes from the universe to human beings,in fact,it is also a process of the unity from the external objects to itself of the individual soul or ego.