What are the handicaps this race will have in building religions?
The greatest is this: they have such small psychic powers. The
over-activity of their minds will choke the birth of such powers,
or dull them. The race will be less in touch with Nature, some
day, than its dogs. It will substitute the compass for its once
innate sense of direction. It will lose its gifts of natural
intuition, premonition, and rest, by encouraging its use of the
mind to be cheaply incessant.
This lack of psychic power will cheat them of insight and poise;
for minds that are wandering and active, not receptive and still,
can seldom or never be hushed to a warm inner peace.
One service these restless minds however will do: they eventually will
uncritically through the religions they themselves have invented.
But ages will be thrown away in repeating this process.
A simian creed will not be very hard thus to pierce. When forming
a religion, they will be in far too much haste, to wait to apply a
strict test to their holy men's visions. Furthermore they will
have so few visions, that any will awe them; so naturally they
will accept any vision as valid. Then their rapid and fertile
inventiveness will come into play, and spin the wildest creeds
from each vision living dust ever dreamed.
They will next expect everybody to believe whatever a few men have
seen, on the slippery ground that if you simply try believing it,
you will then feel it's true. Such religions are vicarious; their
prophets alone will see God, and the rest will be supposed to be
introduced to him by the prophets. These "believers" will have no
white insight at all of their own.
Now, a second-hand believer who is warmed at one remove--if at all
--by the breath of the spirit, will want to have exact definitions
in the beliefs he accepts. Not having had a vision to go by, he
needs plain commandments. He will always try to crystallize creeds.
And that, plainly, is fatal. For as time goes on, new and remoter
aspects of truth are discovered, which can seldom or never be fitted
into creeds that are changeless.
Over and over again, this will be the process: A spiritual
personality will be born; see new truth; and be killed. His new
truth not only will not fit into too rigid creeds, but whatever
false finality is in them it must contradict. So, the seer will
be killed.
His truth being mighty, however, it will kill the creeds too.
There will then be nothing left to believe in--except the dead seer.
For a few generations he may then be understandingly honored.
But his priests will feel that is not enough: he must be honored
uncritically: so uncritically that, whatever his message, it must
be deemed the Whole Truth. Some of his message they themselves will
have garbled; and it was not, at best, final; but still it will be
made into a fixed creed and given his name. Truth will be given his
name. All men who thereafter seek truth must find only his kind,
else they won't be his "followers." (To be his co-seekers won't do.)
Priests will always hate any new seers who seek further for truth.
Their feeling will be that their seer found it, and thus ended all
that. Just believe what he says. The job's over. No more truth
need be sought.
It's a comforting thing to believe cosmic search nicely settled.
Thus the mold will be hardened. So new truths, when they come, can
but break it. Then men will feel distraught and disillusioned, and
civilizations will fall.
Thus each cycle will run. So long as men interwine falsehoods with
every seer's visions, both perish, and every civilization that is
built on them must perish too.