88 PSYCHOLOGY AND PREACHING
tional thrill. A group stand upon the mountain brow gazing at the sunset. The souls of some of them are borne away on a deep tide of aesthetic and religious emotions ; others of them chatter, or giggle, or blink stupidly at the glory. This poverty of emotional experience entailed by ignorance is no where more evident or more lamentable than in the relig ious life. If general culture had no other advantage for the religious character, there would be ample justification of the demand for education in the extension which it affords of the possible range of stimuli for the religious feelings.
In the second place, culture involves a general elevation of the feelings, though this depends, of course, on the char acter of the culture, i.e., upon the content of the mental system and the habits of mental activity formed in its devel opment. Tichenor says, " Affection depends primarily upon the total disposition or arrangement of consciousness," * and Angell remarks, " Emotions are not dependent upon bodily conditions alone for a soil favourable to their development. . . . But another circumstance must be added, if we are to include all the conditioning factors. This additional con sideration is found in trains of ideas which possess our con sciousness at any moment, and particularly in those general habits of thought and reflection which characterize our more distinctly intellectual life." 2 It is clear, then, that a high degree of culture must profoundly modify our emotional life, not only in the way of intensifying its salient incidents and in the multiplication of available emotional stimuli, but in the elevation of the feelings ; for culture is the process of developing the organism into a higher and more complex organization in which it becomes more variously responsive to its environment, and at the same time responsive, not only to its crude physical, but also to its ideal factors. For we must remember that the environment of a human being is not simply the limited, bare, crude world which we immedi ately come in contact with through the bodily senses and to
1 " Text Book of Psychology," p. 258. 2 " Psychology," p. 336.
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