Related to Material relating to the history of emotions
Description:

'The metaphysical notion of a reality which is the whole world in its endeavour towards a new and higher empirical  quality than the highest we know is verified by the religious sentiment itself. Various emotions enter into the full constitution of the religious sentiment — fear, admiration, self-abasement — but its distinctive constituent is the feeling of our going out towards something not ourselves and greater and higher than ourselves, with which we are in communion; a feeling whose object is not that of any oFthese subsidiary or suggesting emotions, nor of any combination of them. Like the other sentiments, it is fed from many sources, but it gathers around some distinctive constituent as its primary nucleus. The nucleus of the sentiment of love is the tender emotion, around which gather in a system which is dominated by that emotion all manner of other emotions — fear for the safety of what is loved, anger against those who injure it, joy in its success, depression at its misfortunes. Even in the aesthetic, moral, and logical sentiments there is a dominating and distinctive passion — the passion for production, the passion of sociality, and the passion of curiosity. Without this distinctive element, a sentiment would be a mere composite without its peculiar flavour.

Moreover, it is this distinctive religious appetite, comparable to the appetite for food or drink, which though it does not make its object discovers it. Here too the religious sentiment is in line with the other emotional tendencies. We do not first learn to know the objects to which we respond, but in responding to objects we discover the properties which they possess.' (373-374)

Related to Speculation regarding the future evolution of mind (c.1850-1940)
Description:

Book IV, 'Deity' (Vol. II, pp. 341-430):

 

'Now since Time is the principle of growth and Time is infinite, the internal development of the world, which before was described in its simplest terms as the redistribution of moments of Time among points of Space, cannot be regarded as ceasing with the emergence of those finite configurations of space-time which carry the empirical quality of mind. We have to think upon the lines already traced by experience of the emergence of higher qualities, also empirical. There is a nisus in Space-Time which, as it has borne its creatures forward through matter and life to mind, will bear them forward to some higher level of existence. There is nothing in mind which requires us to stop and say this is the highest empirical quality which Time can produce from now throughout the infinite Time to come. It is only the last empirical quality which we who are minds happen to know.' (346)

 

'Deity is some quality not realised but in the process of realisation, is future and not present. How then, it may be asked can the future make itself felt energetically in our minds, draw them towards itslef and satisfy them? Now we must remember that deity is not as such cognised, is not before our minds as a matter of contemplation. The reflective contemplation embodies the feeling and follows on it. All we have for cognition is the world of cognition interpreted byt he noton of infinitude and of its tendency to deity. The world which works upon our religious suggestibility is the actual world, but the actual world contains the seed of its future, though what future forms it will assume is hidden from us, except so far as we can forecast them in spatio-temoral terms. What acts upon us is what is to bring forth deity.' (379)

'Deity is... the next higher empirical quality to mind, which the universe is engaged in bringing to birth. That the universe is pregnant with such a quality we are speculatively assured. What that quality is we cannot know; for we can neither enjoy nor still less contemplate it. Our human altars still are raised to the unknown God. If we could know what deity is, how it feels to be divine, we should first have to have become as gods. What we know of it is but its relation to the other empirical qualities which precede it in time. Its nature we cannot penetrate. We can represent it to ourselves only by analogy. It is fitly described in this analogical manner as the colour of the universe. For colour, we have seen, is a new quality which emerges in material things in attendance on motions of a certain sort. Deity in its turn is a quality which attends upon, or more strictly is equivalent to, previous or lower existences of the order of mind which itself rests on a still lower basis of qualities, and emerges when certain complexities and refinements of arrangement have been reached.' (347)

 

'We cannot tell what is the nature of deity, of our deity, but we can be certain that it is not mind, or if we use the term spirit as equivalent to mind or any quality of the order of mind, deity is not spirit, but something different from it in kind. God, the being which possesses deity, must be also spirit, for according to analogy, deity pre-supposes spirit, just as spirit or mind presupposes in its possessor life, and life physico-chemical material processes. But though God must be spiritual in the same way as he must be living and material and spatio-temporal, his deity is not spirit. To think so would be like thinking that mind is purely life, or life purely physico-chemical. The neural complexity which is equivalent to mind is not merely physiological, but a selected physiological constellation which is the bearer of mind, though it is also physiological, because it has physiological relations to what is purely physiological. That complexity and refinement of spirit which is equivalent to deity is something new, and while it is also spirit it is not merely spirit.' (349)

 

'though the parts are not transformed in the whole, the conception of transformation when understood in a certain sense is legitimate and corresponds to facts. Finites of a lower order are combined to produce a complex which carries a quality of a higher order. Thus physiological complexes of a sufficient complexity carry mind or consciousness. They may be said to be ' transformed' in the consciousness they carry. This is the empirical fact. But in the complex which thus acquires a new quality the parts retain their proper character and are not altered. The physiological elements remain physiological. So does the complex of them; though since it is also psychical, it is not merely physiological but something empirically new. All the chemical substances which exist in the organic body perform their chemical functions. The water in our bodies remains water still. It is the physico-chemical constella- tion which carries life. Thus even when we go beyond bare spatio-temporal forms which are the basis of all finites and consider things with their empirical qualities of colour, life, and the rest, we see that the parts are used up to produce something different from them and transcending them, but, used up as they are, they are not altered or superseded but subserve. In this special sense there is 'transformation ' of the parts in building up a higher existence, but the parts remain what they were.

In the same way a complex of parts which are of the nature of mind becomes the bearer of a quality of deity higher than mind or spirit. In this sense there is transformation of lower quality into deity.' (370)

 

'The religious emotion or appetite has no specific organ through which it works... [it] depends upon the whole make-up or constitution of the mind and body, and is the response of it to the whole of  reality in its nisus towards a new quality. In that forward movement due to the onward sweep of time our minds with their substructure of body are caught, and our religious response is at once the mar that we are involved in that nisus, and that our minds contribute in their part towards it. The world in its bearing towards a new empirical quality may be concealed from the cognitive mind, for though we are always in cognitive compresence with what is outside us, neither can the new empirical quality be contemplated, for we know not what it is, nor even enjoyed, since it is higher than mind. It makes itself felt in the religious sense which thus discovers the world it sees to be clothed in divinity. For the world is not merely what it is for intellect alone; its nisus towards what is higher enters into its constitution, and as impregnated with this tendency it affects the mind by ways other than cognition, though interpretable in the ways of cognition. The whole world with its real tendency to deity stirs in us from the depths of our nature a vague endeavour or desire which shadows forth its object. Then intellect comes into play, and discovers in detail the characters of this object, and finds at last what it truly is, the tendency of the world forwards towards a new quality.' (377)