be absolutely misconceived by a community, at some stage of its
history, in such a way that actions of a certain kind are not
condemned by it. The inconsistency of judgment and feeling, thus
displayed, is not the less inconsistent because it is almost, if not
entirely, unconscious. In the same way a community may fail to
recognise a principle of religion, or may misinterpret the idea of
God; still the fact that they misinterpret it is proof that they have
it--if they had it not, they could not interpret it in different ways.
And the different interpretations are the different ways in which its
evolution is carried forward. Its evolution is not in one continuous
line, but is radiative from one common centre, and is dispersive. That
is the reason why the originators of religious movements, and the
founders of religions, consider themselves to be restoring an old
state of things, rather than initiating a new one; to be returning to
the old religion, rather than starting a new religion. But in point of
fact they are not reverting to a bygone stage in the history of
religion; they are starting afresh from the fundamental principles of
religion. From the central idea of religion, the idea of God, they
move in a direction different from any hitherto followed. Monotheism
may in order of time follow upon polytheism, but it is not polytheism
under another name, any more than prayer is spell under another name.
It is something very different: it is the negation of polytheism, not
another form of it. It strikes at the roots of polytheism; and it does
so because it goes back not to polytheism but to that from which
polytheism springs, the idea of God; and starts from it in a direction
which leads to a very different manifestation of the idea of God. And
if monotheism displaces polytheism, it does so because it is found by
experience to be the more faithful interpretation of that idea of God
which even the polytheist has in his soul. In the same way, and for
the same reasons, polytheism is not fetishism under another name. The
gods of a community are not the fetishes of individuals. The
difference between them is not a mere difference of name. Polytheism
may, or may not, follow, in order of time, upon fetishism; but
polytheism is not merely a form of fetishism. The two are different,
and largely inconsistent, interpretations, or misinterpretations, of
the same fundamental idea of God. They move in different directions,
and are felt by the communities in which they are found, to tend in
the direction of very different ends--the one to the good of the
community, the other, in its most characteristic manifestations, to
the injury of the community. In fetishism and polytheism we see the
radiative, dispersive, force of evolution manifesting itself, just as
in polytheism and monotheism. The different lines of evolution radiate
in different directions, but those lines, all point to a common centre
of dispersion--the idea of God. But fetishism, polytheism and
monotheism are not different and successive stages of one line of
evolution, following the same direction. They are lines of different
lengths, moving in different directions, though springing from a
common centre--the soul of man. It is because they have a common
centre, that man, whichever line he has followed, can fall back upon
it and start afresh.
The fact that men fall victims to logical fallacies does not shake our
faith in the validity of the principles of reason; nor does the fact
that false reasoning abounds the more, the lower we descend in the
scale of humanity, lead us to believe that the principles of reason
are invalid and non-existent there. Still less do we believe that,
because immature minds reason often incorrectly, therefore correct
reasoning is for all men an impossibility and a contradiction in
terms. And these considerations apply in just the same way to the
principles of religion and the idea of God, as to the principles of
reason. Yet we are sometimes invited to believe that the existence of
religious fallacies, or fallacious religions, is of itself enough to
prove that there is no validity in the principles of religion, no
reality in the idea of God; that because the uncultured races of
mankind are the victims of error in religion, there is in religion no
truth at all: the religion of civilised mankind consists but of the
errors of the savage disguised in civilised garb. So far as this view
is supposed to be the outcome of the study of the evolution of
religion, it is due probably to the conception of evolution from which
it proceeds. It proceeds on the assumption that the process of
evolution exhibits the continuity of one and the same continuous line.
It ignores the radiative, dispersive movement of evolution in
different lines; and overlooks the fact that new forms of religion
are all re-births, renaissances, and spring not from one another, but
from the soul of man, in which is found the idea of God. It further
assumes not merely that there are errors but that there is no truth
whatever in the lowest, or the earliest, forms of religion; and that
therefore neither is there any truth in the highest. But this
assumption, if applied to the principles of thought, speech or action,
would equally prove thought to be irrational, speech unintelligible,
moral action absurd; and evolution would be the process by which this
fundamental irrationality, unintelligibility and absurdity was worked
out.
Either this is the conclusion, or some means must be sought whereby to
distinguish the evolution of religion from the evolution of thought,
speech and morals, and to show that--whereas in the case of the
latter, evolution is the process in which the principles whereon man
should think, speak and act, tend to manifest themselves with
increasing clearness--in the case of religion, there is no such
progressive revelation, and no first principle, or fundamental idea,
which all forms of religion seek to express. But any attempt to show
this is hopeless: the science of religion is engaged throughout in
ascertaining and comparing the ideas which the various races of men
have had of their gods; and in tracing the evolution of the idea of
God.
The science of religion, however, it may be said, is concerned
exclusively with the evolution, and not in the least with the value or
validity, of the idea. But neither, we must remember, is it concerned
to dispute its value or to deny its validity; and no man can help
drawing his own conclusions from the established fact that the idea is
to be found wherever man is to be found. If, however, by the idea of
God we mean simply an intellectual idea, merely a verbal proposition,
we shall be in danger of drawing erroneous conclusions. The historian
of religion, in discussing the idea of God, its manifestations and its
evolution, is bound to express himself in words, and to reduce what he
has to say to a series of verbal propositions. Nothing, therefore, is
more natural than to imagine that the idea of God is a verbal,
intellectual proposition; and nothing is more misleading. If we start
from this misleading notion, then, as words are but words, we may be
led to imagine that the idea of God is nothing more or other than the
words: it is mere words. If however this conclusion is, for any
reason, displeasing to us, and if we stick to the premiss that the
idea of God is a verbal proposition, then we shall naturally draw a
distinction between the idea of God and the being of God; and, having
thus fixed a great gulf between the idea and the being of God, we
shall be faced with the difficulty of crossing it. We may then feel it
to be not merely difficult but impossible to get logically to the
other side of the gulf; that is to say, we shall conclude that the
being of God is an inference, but an inference which never can be
logically verified: the inference may be a correct or an incorrect
inference, but we cannot possibly know which it is. From the idea of
God we can never logically infer His being. Since then no logic will
carry us over the chasm we have fixed between the idea and the being
of God, if we are to cross it, we must jump it: we must take the leap
of faith, we must believe the passage possible, just because it is
impossible. And those who take the leap, do land safely--we have their
own testimony to that--as safely as, in _King Lear_, Gloucester leaps
from the cliff of Dover; and they well may
'Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours
Of men's impossibilities, have preserv'd them.'
But, in Gloucester's case, there was no cliff and no abyss; and, in
our case, it may be well to enquire whether the great gulf between the
idea and the being of God has any more reality than that down which
Gloucester, precipitating, flung himself. The premiss, that the idea
of God is a mere verbal proposition, may be a premiss as imaginary as
that from which Gloucester leaped. If the idea of God is merely a
proposition in words, and if words are but words, then the gulf
between idea and being is real. If the being of God is an inference
from the idea of God, it is merely an inference, and an inference of
no logical value. And the same remark holds equally true, if we apply
it to the case of any finite personal being: if the being of our
neighbours were an inference from the idea we have formed of them, it
also would be an inference of no logical value. But, fortunately,
their being does not depend on the idea we have formed of them: it
partially reveals itself to us in our idea of them, and partially is
obscured by it. It is a fact of our experience, or a fact experienced
by us. We interpret it, and to some extent misinterpret it, as we do
all other facts. If this partly true, and partly false, interpretation
is what we mean by the word 'idea,' then it is the idea which is an
inference from the being of our neighbour--an inference which can be
checked by closer acquaintance--but we do not first have the idea of
him, and then wonder whether a being, corresponding more or less to
the idea, exists. If we had the idea of our fellow-beings
first--before we had experience of them--if it were from the edge of
the idea that we had to leap, we might reasonably doubt whether to
fling ourselves into such a logical, or rather into such an illogical,
abyss. But it is from their being as an experienced fact, that we
start; and with the intention of constructing from it as logical an
idea as lies within our power. What is inference is not the being but
the idea, so far as the idea is thus constructed.
The idea, thus constructed, may be constructed correctly, or
incorrectly. Whether it is constructed correctly or incorrectly is
determined by further experience. What is important to notice is first
that it is only by further experience, personal experience, that we
can determine how far the construction we have put upon it is or is
not correct; and, next, that so far as the construction we have put
upon it is correct, that is to say is confirmed by actual experience,
it is thereby shown to be not inference--even though it was reached by
a process of inference--but fact. The process of inference may be
compared to a path by which we struggle up the face of a cliff: it is
the path by which we get there, but it is not the firm ground on which
eventually we rest. The path is not that which upholds the cliff; nor
is the inference that on which the being of God rests. The being of
God is not something inferred but something experienced. It is by
experience--the experience of ourselves or others--that we find out
whether what by inference we were led to expect is really something of
which we can--if we will--have experience. And that which is
experienced ceases, the moment it is experienced, to be inferential.
The experience is fact: the statement of it in words is truth. But
apart from the experience, the words in which it is stated are but
words; and, without the experience, the words must remain for ever
words and nothing more than words.
If then by the idea of God we mean the words, in which it is
(inadequately) stated, and nothing more, the idea of God is separated
by an impassable gulf from the being of God. Further, if we admit that
the idea is, by its very nature, and by the very facts of the case,
essentially different from the being of God, then it is of little use
to continue to maintain that the being of God is a fact of human
experience. In that case, the supposed fact of experience is reduced
to something of which we neither have, nor can have, any idea, or
consciousness, whatever. It thereby ceases to be a fact of experience
at all. And it is precisely on this assumption that the being of God
is denied to be a fact of experience--the assumption that being and
idea are separated from one another by an impassable gulf: the idea we
can be conscious of, but of His being we can have no experience. We
must therefore ask not whether this gulf is impassable, but whether it
exists at all, or is of the same imaginary nature as that to which
Gloucester was led by Edgar.
That there may be beings, of whom we have no idea, is a proposition
which it is impossible to disprove. Such beings would be _ex hypothesi_
no part of our experience; and if God were such a being, man would
have no experience of Him. And, having no experience of Him, man could
have no idea of Him. But the experience man has, of those beings whom
he knows, is an experience in which idea and being are given together.
Even if in thought we attend to one rather than to the other of the two
aspects, the idea is still the idea of the being; and the being is
still the being of the idea. So far from there being an impassable gulf
between the two, the two are inseparable, in the moment of actual
experience. It is in moments of reflection that they appear separable
and separate, for the memory remains, when the actual experience has
ceased. We have then only to call the memory the idea, and then the
idea, in this use of the word, is as essentially different from that of
which it is said to be the idea, as the memory of a being or thing is
from the being or thing itself. If we put the memory into words, and
pronounce those words to another, we communicate to him what we
remember of our experience (modified--perhaps transmogrified--by our
reflections upon it) but we do not communicate the actual experience,
simply because we cannot. What we communicate may lead him to actual
experience for himself; but it is not itself the experience. The memory
may give rise, in ourselves or in others to whom we communicate, to
expectation and anticipation; and the expectation is the more likely
to be realised, the less the memory has been transmogrified by
reflection. But, both the memory and the anticipation are clearly
different from actual experience. It is only when they are confused
with one aspect of the actual experience--that which we have called the
idea--that the idea is supposed to be detachable from the being of whom
we have actual experience. The idea is part of the experience; the
memory obviously is not.
If then it be said that the being of God is always an inference and is
never anything more, the reply is that the being of anything whatever
that is remembered or expected is, in the moment of memory or of
anticipation, inferential; but, in the moment of actual experience, it
is not inferred--it is experienced. And what is experienced is, and
from the beginning has always been, in religions of the lower as well
as of the higher culture, at once the being and the idea of God.
INDEX
Aaron, 11
Adoration, 108 ff., 126, 144
Aeschylus, 37
Aetiological myths, 50, 53
Africans, 59
Allegory, 47
Animism, 17, 35, 50
Anthropomorphism, 18 ff., 27
Anti-social character of fetishism, 8, 14
Anu, 136
Aristotle, 121
Assyria, 134 ff.
Atonement, 54, 75
Australians, 57, 58, 59, 86-89, 113, 114
Awe, 24
Axe-heads, 11
Aztecs, 77, 78, 88
Babylonian psalms, 145
Basutos, 143
Being, and idea, 161 ff.
Bergson, 123, 125
Black-fellows, 57
Bow, and arrow, 42
Bull-roarer, 42
Burnt-offerings, 72
Calamity, 73, 97, 103
Ceres, 84
Chicomecoatl, 84
Child (the), and the community, 1, 14
Child (the), and self-consciousness, 3
Children, their toys, 41;
and tales, 41;
community of, 42
Chota Nagpur, 63, 64, 65, 83, 85, 88
Christ, 100
Christianity, 19, 26, 57, 148, 151
Commerce, 69
Common consciousness, capable of emotion and purpose, 2, 3, 14;
the source and the criterion of the individual's speech, thought and
action, 2, 3;
its attitude towards magic, 9 ff., 18;
and tales, 31;
and mythology, 37, 38, 48
Communion (Christian), 77
Communion, 110, 111, 147
Corn-deities, 82 ff.
Counter-spells, 134 ff.
Covenant, the old and the new, 100
Covenant-theory, 92 ff., 98 ff.
Cuneiform inscriptions, 134 ff., 147
Custom, 41, 42, 98
Desire (and prayer), 118 ff.
Desires, of individual and community, 7, 8, 9
Digging-stick, 43
Di indigites, 51-53, 56, 58, 83, 88
Dionysius Thrax, 121
Disease of language, 33, 34
Dog, and master, 25
_Do ut des_, 68
Eating with the god, 74, 77, 91
Ecstasy, 110
Elijah, 13, 119
Emotion, 2, 3, 7, 23, 54, 55
Emperor, of Japan, 93, 95
Euripides, 37
Europe, 57
Evolution, and revelation, 29, 122, 150, 152 ff.
Exodus, 93
Expectation, 164
Experience, 44, 161 ff.
Faith, 62
Fallacies, 127, 128, 157
Fear, 25, 103
Feast, sacrificial, 74 ff.
Ferrier, 121
Fetishism, 4-8, 13-15, 20, 21, 27, 30, 31, 36, 120, 123, 126,
129-131, 156
Fiction, 31, 32
Finno-Ugrians, 143
Fire-god, 136
First-fruits, 80 ff., 90, 115
Folk-lore, 57
Food-offerings, 72, 78, 89
Food-supply, 12, 13
Foraminifera, 124
Forms, of speech and of religion, 106
Gesture-language, 66, 114
Gift-theory, 68 ff., 95
Gloucester, 160
Godhead, unity of, 23;
a personal being, 26
Gods, 4-6, 8, 12, 14, 16, 21, 22, 25, 26, 44
Gold-coast, 143
Grammar, 121
Gravitation, 153
Greece, 104, 111
Harvest-gods, 94 ff.
Harvest-offerings, 114, 115
Harvest-rites, 81, 85
Hero, of tales, 30;
of myths, 31
History of religion, 23, 27, 28, 29, 30
Idea, and being, 161 ff.
Idol, and fetish, 4, 13
_Iliad_, 41
Imagination, in tales and myths, 49, 50, 51
Immorality, of mythology, 47
Immortality, 105
Individual (the), 4, 14, 132 ff.
Indo-Europeans, 47, 48
Inference, 162 ff.
Israel, 93, 100
Italy, 51, 56
Japan, 92 ff.
Jehovah, 93
Jews, 26
_King Lear_, 156 ff.
Language, 101, 102, 106, 107
Law, 153 ff.
Locutius, 52
Logic, 121
Love, 26, 100, 105, 150
Magic, 8 f., 9, 10, 11 f., 12, 91, 116, 119, 120, 123, 125, 133 ff.
Maize-mother, 77, 88
Maklu tablets, 134 ff.
Mamit, 145
Max Mueller, 33, 34
Meal, sacrificial, 74 ff.
Memory, 164
Mexico, 77, 78, 88, 91, 110, 111
Miracles, 10 ff.
Monotheism, 58, 61, 155
Moods, 119
Morality, 21, 22, 25, 26, 41, 44-46, 125, 141 ff., 154
Moses, 93, 119
Mysteries, 104 ff., 111
Mysticism, 110
Myths, 20-22, 30 ff., 39, 40, 43, 47, 48-52, 55-58, 60
Names, 16, 52, 57, 64, 82 ff.
Narratives, and myths, 33, 40, 49, 51
Negroes, 15
Nursery-tales, 41
Obedience, 98, 100, 101
Oblations, 65, 66, 73, 97, 98
Offerings, 67 ff., 85 ff.
Optative sentences, 139 ff.
Orbona, 52
Origin, of gods and of mythology, 34
Ossipago, 51
Penitential Psalms, 145, 147
Personality, 3, 4, 11, 17, 20, 28, 29, 45, 54, 55, 82, 83, 86
Peruvians, 143
Petitions, 126, 128, 130 ff.
Plague, 52
Plato, 92
Polydaemonism, 16 ff.;
change to polytheism, 18, 30;
and mythology, 31, 32
Polytheism, 4, 7, 16, 18, 22, 30-32, 35, 36, 40, 61, 155
Possession, 110
Power, man of, 12 ff.
Prayer, 108 ff.
Priests, 120
Principles, 121, 123, 128, 153 ff.
Prophet and magician, 10 ff.
Protoplasm, 124
Psalms of David, 146, 147
Quietism, 112
Rain-making, 9, 12, 13, 119
Reconciliation, 98
Reflection, 33, 36, 53-56, 60, 96
Religion, 8 ff., 35, 39, 54-56, 104 ff.
Revelation, 29, 58
Reverence, 24
Ritual, 31, 57, 61-63, 101 ff., 114
Romans, the, 52, 53
Sacrifice, 52, 63, 64, 67 ff., 72, 73, 79 ff., 85, 97 ff.
Salvation, 105
Samoans, 143
Search, for God, 59
Seed-time, 115
Self, 3, 4, 7, 104, 132 ff., 137, 148
Self-renunciation, 149
Shinto, 92 ff.
Sign (of the cross), 116
Sin, 103, 104, 145 ff.
Socrates, 55
Sophocles, 37
Species, 83 ff., 91, 92
Speech, 3, 121, 153 ff.
Spells, 115 ff., 134 ff., 150, 151
Survivals, 38, 56, 57, 58, 59
Taboo, 145
Tales, and myths, 31-33, 49, 51
Totems, 84 ff.
Tylor, Professor, 15
Vagitanus, 51
Vegetation-deities, 81 ff.
Veneration, 151
Viriplaca, 52
Water, 135
Way of the Gods, 92 ff.
Western Africa, 8, 15
Will, of God, 149 ff.
Wind, spirits of, 93 ff.
Witches, 134 ff.
Worship, 19, 55, 57, 58, 60-63
Xilonen, 84
Zulus, 143
CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A. AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.