The Conceptual Dynamics of Person, Religion and Self

The Evolution of Scientific Thought: Augusts Comte, the great French encyclopedist whom many regard as the intellectual father of modern sociology, pointed out over a century ago that all sciences that spring from the mind and mood of man seemed to have passed through three phases of evolution. In the earliest of these phases man, surrounded by a strange, threatening world, attempted to deny his ignorance and allay his anxieties by believing that the universe is controlled by “supernatural” forces, generally embodied in anthropomorphic gods and demons. These Beings were, of course, extremely powerful: they engineered all natural phenomena and dictated the rise and fall of men and nations. Fortunately, however, they were not very clever, since puny man could, by cajolery, bribes, promises or, as a last resort, proper behavior, influence the very gods themselves to machinate in his favor, to remove material and mortal obstacles from his path and destroy his enemies. All of this and more constituted the “mystical” phase of prescientific thinking, a phase which—since it still resonates with the depths of man's needful wishes, has never been really relinquished by humankind.

Nevertheless, as man began to explore his universe farther he found that if he tried hard enough, he could himself “divine” some order other than the caprice of the gods in the universe about him, and that this concept of underlying systematization served to diminish his terror in a cosmos which would otherwise seem to be in unpredictable chaos and turmoil. Whereupon man's intellectual arrogance—still, of course, actuated by his restless anxieties—took a new bent: he added to the deities he had previously created certain “principles”, “postulates”, “axioms”, “essences”, “forms”, or other “universal” categories which, though merely the offspring of man's cerebral wishfulness, were thereafter supposed to pervade and index the entire cosmos. For instance, the savage or barbarian, faced with the phenomeno