PRIMITIVE FREETHINKING
To consider the normal aspects of primitive life, as we see them
in savage communities and trace them in early literature, is to
realize the enormous hindrance offered to critical thinking in the
primary stages of culture by the mere force of habit. "The savage,"
says our leading anthropologist, "by no means goes through life
with the intention of gathering more knowledge and framing better
laws than his fathers. On the contrary, his tendency is to consider
his ancestors as having handed down to him the perfection of wisdom,
which it would be impiety to make the least alteration in. Hence among
the lower races there is obstinate resistance to the most desirable
reforms, and progress can only force its way with a slowness and
difficulty which we of this century can hardly imagine." [54] Among
the Bantu of South Africa, before the spread of European rule, "any
person in advance of his fellows was specially liable to suspicion
[of sorcery], so that progress of any kind towards what we should
term higher civilization was made exceedingly difficult by this
belief." [55] The real or would-be sorcerer could thus secure the
elimination of the honest inventor; fear of sorcery being most potent
as against the supposed irregular practitioner. The relative obstinacy
of conservatism in periods and places of narrow knowledge is again
illustrated in Lane's account of the modern Egyptians in the first
half of the nineteenth century: "Some Egyptians who had studied for
a few years in France declared to me that they could not instil any
of the notions which they had there acquired even into the minds
of their most intimate friends." [56] So in modern Japan there were
many assassinations of reformers, and some civil war, before Western
ideas could gain a footing. [57] The less the knowledge, in short,
the harder to add to it.
It is hardly possible to estimate with any confidence the relative
rates of progress; but, though all are extremely slow, it would
seem that reason could sooner play correctively on errors of secular
practice [58] than on any species of proposition in religion--taking
that word to connote at once mythology, early cosmology, and ritual
ethic. Mere disbelief in a particular medicine-man or rain-maker
who failed would not lead to any reflective disbelief in all; any
more than the beating or renunciation of his fetish by a savage or
barbarian means rejection of his fetishism, or than the renunciation
of a particular saint by a modern Catholic [59] means abandonment of
prayer to saints for intercession.
The question as to whether savages do beat their idols is a matter
in some dispute. Sir A. B. Ellis, a high authority, offers a
notable denial to the current belief that negroes "beat their
Gods if their prayers are unanswered." "After an experience
of the Gold Coast extending over thirteen years," he writes,
"I have never heard of, much less witnessed, anything of the
kind, although I have made inquiries in every direction" (The
Tshi-speaking Peoples, 1887, p. 194). Other anthropologists have
collected many instances in other races--e.g., Fr. Schultze, Der
Fetischismus, 1871, p. 130. In one case, a priest beats a fetish
in advance, to secure his careful attention. (Id. pp. 90-91,
citing the personal narrative of Bastian.) It seems to be a
matter of psychic stage. The more primitive negro is as it were
too religious, too much afraid of his Gods, who are not for him
"idols," but spirits residing in images or objects. Where the
state of fear is only chronic another temper may arise. Among the
Bataks of Sumatra disappointed worshippers often scold a God;
and their legends tell of men who declared war on a deity and
shot at him from a mountain. (Warneck, Die Religion des Batak,
1909, p. 7. Cp. Gen. ii, 4-9.) A temper of defiance towards
deity has been noted in an Aryan Kafir of the Hindu-Kush. (Sir
G. S. Robertson, The Káfirs of the Hindu-Kush, 1899, p. 182.) Some
peoples go much further. Among the Polynesians, when a God failed
to cure a sick chief or notable, he "was regarded as inexorable,
and was usually banished from the temple and his image destroyed"
(W. Ellis, Polynesian Researches, 2nd ed. 1831, i, 350). So among
the Chinese, "if the God does not give rain they will threaten
and beat him; sometimes they publicly depose him from the rank
of deity" (Frazer, Lectures on the Early History of Kingship,
1905, pp. 98-101. Cp. Ross, Pansebeia, 4th ed., 1672, p. 80).
There are many analogous phenomena. In old Samoa, in the ritual
of mourning for the dead, the family God was first implored to
restore the deceased, and then fiercely abused and menaced. [60]
See, too, the story of the people of Niue or Savage Island
in the South Pacific, who in the time of a great pestilence,
thinking the sickness was caused by a certain idol, broke it in
pieces and threw it away (Turner, Samoa a Hundred Years Ago, 1884,
p. 306). See further the cases cited by Constant, De la religion,
1824, vol. i, ptie. ii, pp. 32-34; and by Peschel, The Races of
Man, Eng. tr. 1876, pp. 247-8, in particular that of Rastus,
the last pagan Lapp in Europe, who quarrelled with his fetish
stone for killing his reindeer in revenge for the withholding
of its customary offering of brandy, and "immediately embraced
Christianity." (Compare E. Rae, The White Sea Peninsula, 1881,
p. 276.) See again the testimony of Herman Melville in his Typee,
ch. xxiv; and that of T. Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, ed. 1858,
i, 236: "Sometimes the natives get angry with their deities, and
abuse and even challenge them to fight." Herodotos has similar
stories of barbarians who defy their own and other deities
(iv, 172, 183, 184). Compare the case of King Rum Bahadur of
Nepaul, who cannonaded his Gods. Spencer, Study of Sociology,
pp. 301-2. Also the anecdote cited by Spencer (Id. p. 160)
from Sir R. Burton's Goa, p. 167. Here there is no disbelief, no
reflection, but simple resentment. Compare, too, the amusing story
of a blasphemy by Rossini, told by Louis Viardot, Libre Examen,
6e éd. pp. 166-67, note. That threats against the Gods are possible
at a semi-civilized stage is proved by various passages in medieval
literature. Thus in Caxton's Charles the Grete, a translation from
an older French original, Charles is made to say: "O lord God,
if ye suffre that Olyver be overcome and that my ryght at thys
tyme be loste and defyled, I make a vowe that al Crystyante shal be
destroyed. I shal not leve in Fraunce chirche ne monasterye, ymage
ne aulter," etc. (Early Eng. Text Soc. rep. 1881, pp. 70-71.) Such
language was probably used by not a few medieval kings in moments
of fury; and there is even record that at the battle of Dunbar
certain of the Scots Presbyterian clergy intimated to their deity
that he would not be their God if he failed them on that day.
If such flights be reckoned possible for Christian kings
and clerics in the Christian era, there would seem to be no
unlikelihood about the many stories of God-beating and God-defying
among contemporary savages, though so good an observer as Sir
A. B. Ellis may not have witnessed them in the part of Africa best
known to him. The conclusion reached by Sir A. B. Ellis is that
the negroes of the Gold Coast are not properly to be described
as fetishists. Fetishism, on his view, is a worship of objects as
in themselves endowed with magical power; whereas the Gold Coast
negro ascribes no virtue to the object commonly called his fetish,
regarding it simply as inhabited by a supernatural power. This
writer sees "true fetishism" in the attitude of Italian peasants
and fishermen who beat and ill-treat their images when prayers
are not answered, and in that of Spaniards who cover the faces of
their images or turn them to the wall when about to do anything
which they think the saint or deity would disapprove of. On this
view, fetishism is a later yet lower stage of religious evolution
than that of the negro. On the other hand, Miss Kingsley takes
fetishism to be the proper name of the attitude of the negro
towards particular objects as divinely inhabited, and represents
it as a kind of pantheism (West African Studies, 2nd ed. 1901,
ch. v). And since, by her definition, "Gods of fetish" do not
necessarily "require a material object to manifest themselves in"
(p. 96), the term "fetish" is thus detached from all of its former
meanings. It seems expedient, as a matter of terminology, to let
fetishism mean both object- or image-worship and the belief in the
special inhabiting of objects by deities, with a recognition that
the beliefs may be different stages in an evolution, though, on the
other hand, they are obviously likely to coalesce or concur. In
the "Obeah" system of the negroes of the West Indies the former
belief in the indwelling spirit has become, or has coalesced with,
belief in the magical powers of the object (Keane, Man, Past and
Present, 1900, p. 57).
As to defiance or contumely towards the Gods, finally, we have the
testimony of the Swiss missionary Junod that the South African
Thonga, whom he studied very closely, have in their ritual "a
regular insulting of the Gods." (Life of a South African Tribe,
ii, 1912, p. 384.) Why not? "Prayers to the ancestors ... are
... absolutely devoid of awe" (p. 385), though "the ancestor-Gods
are certainly the most powerful spiritual agency acting on man's
life" (p. 361); and "the spirits of the ancestors are the main
objects of religious worship" (p. 344). The Thonga, again, use
"neither idolatry nor fetishism," having no "idols" (p. 388),
though they recognize "hidden virtues" in plants, animals, and
stones (p. 345). They simply regard their ancestor-Gods very
much as they do their aged people, whom they generally treat with
little consideration. But the dead can do harm, and must therefore
be propitiated--as savages propitiate, with fear or malice or
derision in their hearts, as the case may be. (Cp. p. 379.) On the
other hand, despite the denial of their "fetishism," they believe
that ancestor-Gods may come in the shape of animals; and they so
venerate a kind of palladium (made up like a medicine-man's amulet)
as to raise the question whether this kind of belief is not just
that which Miss Kingsley called "fetish." (Junod, pp. 358, 373-74.)
Whatever may be the essence, or the varieties, of fetishism, it
is clear that the beating of idols or threatening of Gods does not
amount to rational doubt concerning the supernatural. Some general
approach to that attitude may perhaps be inferred in the case of an
economic revolt against the burdens of a highly specialized religious
system, which may often have occurred in unwritten history. We shall
note a recorded instance of the kind in connection with the question
whether there are any savage tribes without religion. But it occurs
in the somewhat highly evolved barbarism of pre-Christian Hawaii;
and it can set up no inference as to any development of critical
unbelief at lower levels. In the long stage of lower savagery, then,
the only approach to freethinking that would seriously affect general
belief would presumably be that very credulity which gave foothold
to religious beliefs to begin with. That is to say, without anything
in the nature of general criticism of any story or doctrine, one such
might to some extent supersede another, in virtue of the relative gift
of persuasion or personal weight of the propounders. Up to a certain
point persons with a turn for myth or ritual-making would compete,
and might even call in question each other's honesty, as well as each
other's inspiration.
Since the rise of scientific hierology there has been a disposition
among students to take for granted the good faith of all early
religion-makers, and to dismiss entirely that assumption of fraud
which was so long made by Christian writers concerning the greater
part of every non-Christian system. The assumption had been passed
on from the freethinkers of antiquity who formulated the view that
all religious doctrine had been invented by politicians in order to
control the people. [61] Christian polemists, of course, applied it to
all systems but their own. When, however, all systems are seen to be
alike natural in origin, such charges are felt to recoil on the system
which makes them; and latterly [62] Christian writers, seeing as much,
have been fain to abandon the conception of "priestcraft," adroitly
representing it as an extravagance of rationalism. It certainly
served rationalistic purposes, and the title of the supposititious
medieval work on "The Three Impostors" points to its currency among
unbelievers long ago; but when we first find it popularly current in
the seventeenth century, it is in a Christian atmosphere. [63] Some
of the early deists and others have probably in turn exaggerated the
amount of deliberate deceit involved in the formation of religious
systems; but nevertheless "priestcraft" is a demonstrable factor in
the process. What is called the psychology of religion has been much
obscured in response to the demand of religious persons to have it so
presented as to flatter them in that capacity. [64] Such a claim cannot
be permitted to overrule the fair inductions of comparative science.
Anthropological evidence suggests that, while religion clearly
begins in primordial fear and fancy, wilful fraud must to some
extent have entered into all religious systems alike, even in the
period of primeval credulity, were it only because the credulity
was so great. One of the most judicial and sympathetic of the
Christian scholars who have written the history of Greece treats
as unquestionable the view that alike in pagan and Christian cults
"priestcraft" has been "fertile in profitable devices, in the invention
of legends, the fabrication of relics, and other modes of imposture";
[65] and the leading hierologist of the last generation pronounces
decisively as to an element of intentional deceit in the Koran-making
of Mohammed [66]--a judgment which, if upheld, can hardly fail to be
extended to some portions of all other sacred books. However that
may be, we have positive evidence that wilful and systematic fraud
enters into the doctrine of contemporary savages, and that among some
"primitives" known myths are deliberately propounded to the boys
and women by the male adults. [67] Indeed, the majority of modern
travellers among primitives seem to have regarded their priests
and sorcerers in the mass as conscious deceivers. [68] If, then, we
can point to deliberate imposture alike in the charm-mongering and
myth-mongering of contemporary savages and in the sacred-book-making
of the higher historical systems, it seems reasonable to hold that
conscious deceit, as distinguished from childlike fabrication, would
chronically enter into the tale-making of primitive men, as into their
simpler relations with each other. It is indeed impossible to conceive
how a copious mythology could ever arise without the play of a kind
of imaginativeness that is hardly compatible with veracity; and it is
probably only the exigencies of ecclesiastical life that cause modern
critics still to treat the most deliberate fabrications and forgeries
in the Hebrew sacred books as somehow produced in a spirit of the
deepest concern for truth. An all-round concern for truth is, in fact,
a late intellectual development, the product of much criticism and much
doubt; hence, perhaps, the lenity of the verdicts under notice. Certain
wild tribes here and there, living in a state of great simplicity, are
in our own day described as remarkably truthful; [69] but they are not
remarkable for range of supernatural belief; and their truthfulness is
to be regarded as a product of their special stability and simplicity
of life. The trickery of a primitive medicine-man, of course, is a
much more childlike thing than the frauds of educated priesthoods;
and it is compatible with so much of spontaneous pietism as is implied
in the common passing of the operator into the state of convulsion
and trance--a transition which comes easily to many savages. [70]
But even at that stage of psychosis, and in a community where simple
secular lying is very rare, the professional wizard-priest becomes
an adept in playing upon credulity. [71]
It belongs, in short, to the very nature of the priestly function,
in its earlier forms, to develop in a special degree the normal bias
of the undisciplined mind to intellectual fraud. Granting that there
are all degrees of self-consciousness in the process, we are bound to
recognize that in all of us there is "the sophist within," who stands
between us and candour in every problem either of self-criticism
or of self-defence. And, if the instructed man recognizes this
clearly and the uninstructed does not, none the less is the latter
an exemplification of the fact. His mental obliquities are not any
less real because of his indifference to them than are the acts of
the hereditary thief because he does them without shame. And if we
consider how the fetish-priest is at every turn tempted to invent
and prevaricate, simply because his pretensions are fundamentally
preposterous; and how in turn the priest of a higher grade, even
when he sincerely "believes" in his deity, is bound to put forward
as matters of knowledge or revelation the hypotheses he frames to
account for either the acts or the abstentions of the God, we shall
see that the priestly office is really as incompatible with a high
sincerity in the primitive stages as in those in which it is held
by men who consciously propound falsities, whether for their mere
gain or in the hope of doing good. It may be true that the priestly
claim of supernatural sanction for an ethical command is at times
motived by an intense conviction of the rightness of the course of
conduct prescribed; but none the less is such a habit of mind fatal
to intellectual sincerity. Either there is sheer hallucination or
there is pious fraud.
Given, however, the tendency to deceit among primitive folk, distrust
and detection in a certain number of cases would presumably follow,
constituting a measure of simple skepticism. By force partly of this
and partly of sheer instability of thought, early belief would be apt
to subsist for ages like that of contemporary African tribes, [72]
in a state of flux. [73] Comparative fixity would presumably arise
with the approach to stability of life, of industry, and of political
institutions, whether with or without a special priesthood. The
usages of early family worship would seem to have been no less rigid
than those of the tribal and public cults. For primitive man as for
the moderns definite organization and ritual custom must have been a
great establishing force as regards every phase of religious belief;
[74] and it may well have been that there was thus less intellectual
liberty of a kind in the long ages of what we regard as primitive
civilization than in those of savagery and barbarism which preceded
them. On that view, systems which are supposed to represent in the
fullest degree the primeval spontaneity of religion may have been in
part priestly reactions against habits of freedom accompanied by a
certain amount of skepticism. A modern inquirer [75] has in some such
sense advanced the theory that in ancient India, in even the earlier
period of collection of the Rig-Veda, which itself undermined the
monarchic character of the pre-Vedic religion, there was a decay of
belief, which the final redaction served to accelerate. Such a theory
can hardly pass beyond the stage of hypothesis in view of the entire
absence of history proper in early Indian literature; but we seem
at least to have the evidence of the Veda itself that while it was
being collected there were deniers of the existence of its Gods. [76]
The latter testimony alone may serve as ground for raising afresh
an old question which recent anthropology has somewhat inexactly
decided--that, namely, as to whether there are any savages without
religious beliefs.
[For old discussions on the subject see Cicero, De natura
deorum, i, 23; Cumberland, Disquisitio de legibus naturæ, 1672,
introd. (rejecting negative view as resting on inadequate
testimony); Locke, Essay on the Human Understanding, Bk. I,
ch. iii, § 9; ch. iv, § 8 (accepting negative view); protests
against it by Vico (Scienza Nuova, 1725, as cited above, p. 26);
by Shaftesbury (Letters to a Student, 1716, rep. in Letters, 1746,
pp. 32-33); by Rev. John Milne, An Account of Mr. Lock's Religion
(anon.), 1700, pp. 5-8; and by Sir W. Anstruther, Essays Moral
and Divine, Edinburgh, 1701, p. 24; further protests by Lafitau
(Moeurs des sauvages ameriquains comparées aux moeurs des premiers
temps, 1724, i, 5), following Boyle, to the effect that the very
travellers and missionaries who denied all religion to savages
avow facts which confute them; and general view by Fabricius,
Delectus argumentorum et Syllabus scriptorum, Hamburghi, 1725,
ch. viii. Cp. also Swift, Discourse Concerning the Mechanical
Operation of the Spirit, § 2.
Büchner (Force and Matter, ch. on "The Idea of God"); Lord Avebury
= Sir John Lubbock (Prehistoric Times, 5th ed., pp. 574-80;
Origin of Civilization, 5th ed., pp. 213-17); and Mr. Spencer
(Principles of Sociology, iii, § 583) have collected modern
travellers' testimonies as to the absence of religious ideas in
certain tribes. Cp. also J. A. St. John's (Bohn) ed. of Locke,
notes on passages above cited, and on Bk. IV, ch. x, § 6. As Lord
Avebury points out, the word "religion" is by some loosely or
narrowly used to signify only a higher theology as distinct from
lower supernaturalist beliefs. He himself, however, excludes from
the field of "religion" a belief in evil spirits and in magic--here
coinciding with the later anthropologists who represented magic
and religion as fundamentally "opposed"--a view rejected even by
some religionists. Cp. Avebury, Marriage, Totemism, and Religion,
(1911), p. 116 sq.; Rev. E. Crawley, The Mystic Rose, 1902, p. 3;
Prof. T. Witten Davies, Magic, Divination, and Demonology, 1898,
pp. 18-24. The proved erroneousness of many of the negative
testimonies has been insisted on by Benjamin Constant (De la
Religion, 1824, i, 3-4); Theodore Parker (Discourse of Matters
Pertaining to Religion, 1842 and 1855, ed. 1877, p. 16); G. Roskoff
(Das Religionswesen der rohesten Naturvölker, 1880, Abschn. I
and II); Dr. Tylor (Primitive Culture, 3rd ed., i, pp. 417-25);
and Dr. Max Müller (Introd. to the Science of Religion, ed. 1882,
p. 42 sq.; Hibbert Lectures, p. 91 sq.; Natural Religion, 1889,
pp. 81-89; Anthropological Religion, 1892, pp. 428-35.)
The Rev. H. A. Junod (Life of a South African Tribe, vol. ii,
1913, p. 346) shows how easily misconception on the subject may
arise. Galton (Narrative of an Explorer, ch. viii, ed. 1891,
p. 138) writes: "I have no conception to this day whether or
no the Ovampo have any religion, for Click was frightened and
angry if the subject of death was alluded to." The context shows
that the native regarded all questions on religious matters with
suspicion. Schweinfurth, again, contradicts himself twice within
three pages as to the beliefs of the Bongo in a "Supreme Being"
and in a future state; and thus leaves us doubting his statement
that the neighbouring race, the Dyoor, "put no faith at all in
any witchcraft" (The Heart of Africa, 3rd ed. i, 143-45). Much
of the confusion turns on the fact that savages who practise no
worship have religious beliefs (cp. Max Müller, Hibbert Lectures,
ed. 1878, p. 17, citing Monsignor Salvado; and Carl Lumholtz, Among
Cannibals, 1889, p. 284). The dispute, as it now stands, mainly
turns on the definition of religion (cp. Chantepie de la Saussaye,
Manual of the Science of Religion, Eng. tr. 1891, pp. 16-18,
where Lubbock's position is partly misunderstood). Dr. Tylor,
while deciding that no tribes known to us are religionless,
leaves open the question of their existence in the past.
A notable example of the prolongation of error on this subject
through orthodox assumptions is seen in Dr. A. W. Howitt's
otherwise valuable work on The Native Tribes of South Australia
(1904). Dr. Howitt produces (pp. 488-508) abundant evidence to show
that a number of tribes believe in a "supernatural anthropomorphic
being," variously named Nurrundere, Nurelli, Bunjil, Mungan-ngaua,
Daramalun, and Baiame ("the same being under different names,"
writes Dr. Howitt, p. 499). This being he describes as "the
tribal All-Father," "a venerable kindly Headman of a tribe,
full of knowledge and tribal wisdom, and all-powerful in magic,
of which he is the source, with virtues, failings, and passions
such as the aborigines regard them" (pp. 500-1). But he insists
(p. 506) that "in this being, though supernatural, there is
no trace of a divine nature," and, again, that "the Australian
aborigines do not recognize any divinity, good or evil" (p. 756),
though (p. 501) "it is most difficult for one of us to divest
himself of the tendency to endow such a supernatural being [as
the All-Father] with a nature quasi-divine, if not altogether
so." Dr. Howitt does not name any European deity who satisfies
him on the point of divinity! Obviously the Australian deities
have evolved in exactly the same way as those of other peoples,
Yahweh included. Dr. Howitt, indeed, admits (p. 507) that the
Australian notions "may have been at the root of monotheistic
beliefs." They certainly were; and when he adds that, "although
it cannot be alleged that these aborigines have consciously any
form of religion, it may be said that their beliefs are such that,
under favourable conditions, they might have developed into an
actual religion," he indicates afresh the confusion possible from
unscientific definitions. The sole content of his thesis is,
finally, that a "supernatural" being is not "divine" till the
priests have somewhat trimmed him, and that a religion is not
"actual" till it has been sacerdotally formulated. Dr. Howitt's
negations are as untenable as Mr. Andrew Lang's magnification of
the Australian All-Father into a perfect Supreme Being.
The really important part of Dr. Howitt's survey of the problem
is his conclusion that the kind of belief he has described exists
only in a specified area of Australia, and that this area is "the
habitat of tribes ... where there has been the advance from group
marriage to individual marriage, from descent in the female line
to that in the male line" (p. 500). Messrs. Spencer and Gillen's
denial of the existence of any belief in a personal deity among
the tribes of Central Australia (Northern Tribes, 1904, p. 491)
appears to stand for actual fact.
As to the "divinity" of the ancestor-gods of the primitives,
see Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. p. 41 sq.]
The problem has been unduly narrowed to the question whether there are
any whole tribes so developed. It is obviously pertinent to ask whether
there may not be diversity of opinion within a given tribe. Such
testimonies as those collected by Sir John Lubbock [Lord Avebury]
and others, as to the existence of religionless savages, are held to
be disposed of by further proof that tribes of savages who had been
set down as religionless on the evidence of some of themselves had in
reality a number of religious beliefs. Travellers' questions had been
falsely answered, either on the principle that non-initiates must not
be told the mysteries, or from that sudden perception of the oddity
of their beliefs which comes even to some civilized people when they
try to state them to an unbelieving outsider. Questions, again, could
easily be misunderstood, and answers likewise. We find, for instance,
that savages who scout the idea that the dead can "rise again" do
believe in the continued disembodied existence of all their dead,
and even at times conceive of them as marrying and procreating! On
the whole, they conceive of a continuity of spirit-life on earth in
human shape. To speak of such people as having no idea of "a life
beyond the grave" would obviously be misleading, though they have no
notion of a judgment day or of future rewards or punishments. [77]
Undoubtedly, then, the negative view of savage religion had in a number
of cases been hastily taken; but there remains the question, as a
rule surprisingly ignored, whether some of the savages who disavowed
all belief in things supernatural may not have been telling the
simple truth about themselves, or even about their families and their
comrades. As one sympathetic traveller notes of the Samoyedes: "There
can be no such thing as strict accuracy of grammar or expression among
an illiterate people; nor can there be among these simple creatures
any consistent or fixed appreciation even of their own forms of
... belief.... Having no object in arriving at a common view of such
matters, each Samoyede, if questioned separately, will give more or
less his own disconnected impression of his faith." [78] And this holds
of unfaith. A savage asked by a traveller, "Do you believe" so-and-so,
might very well give a true negative answer for himself; [79] and the
traveller's resulting misconception would be due to his own arbitrary
assumption that all members of any tribe must think alike.
A good witness expressly testifies: "In the tribe [of Australians]
with which I was best acquainted, while the blacks had a term
for ghost and believed that there were departed spirits who were
sometimes to be seen among the foliage, individual men would tell
you upon inquiry that they believed that death was the last of
them" (Eaglehawk and Crow: A Study of the Australian Aborigines,
by John Mathew, M.A., B.D., 1899, p. 146). As to the risk of
wrong negative inferences, on the other hand, see pp. 145, 147.
One of the best of our missionary witnesses, H. A. Junod, in his
valuable study of the South African Thonga, testifies both to
the commonness of individual variation in the way of religious
fancy and the occurrence of sporadic unbelief, usually ended by
fear. Individuals freely indulge in concrete speculations--e.g.,
as to the existence of animal souls--which do not win vogue
(Life of a South African Tribe, vol. ii, 1913, p. 342 sq.),
though the reporter seems to overlook the possibility that
such ideas may be adopted by a tribe. Freethinking ideas have,
of course, by far the least chance of currency. "The young
folks of Libombo used to blaspheme in their hearts, saying,
'There are no Gods.' But," added the witness, "we very soon saw
that there were some, when they killed one of us," who trod on
a snake (work cited, pp. 354-55). That testimony illustrates
well the difficulties of rational progress in a primitive
community. But at times the process may be encouraged by the
environment. The early missionary Ellis gives an instance of a
community in Hawaii that had abandoned all religious practices:
"We asked them who was their God. They said they had no God;
formerly they had many: but now they had cast them all away. We
asked them if they had done well in abolishing them. They said
'Yes,' for tabu had occasioned much labour and inconvenience,
and drained off the best of their property. We asked them if it
was a good thing to have no God.... They said perhaps it was;
for they had nothing to provide for the great sacrifices, and were
under no fear of punishment for breaking tabu; that now one fire
cooked their food, and men and women ate together the same kind
of provisions." (W. Ellis, Tour Through Hawaii or Owhyhee, 1827,
p. 100.) The community in question had in their own way reached
the Lucretian verdict, Tantum relligio potuit suadere malorum.
Unless, again, such witnesses as Moffat be unfaithful reporters as
well as mistaken in their inferences, some of the natives with whom
they dealt were all but devoid of the ordinary religious notions [80]
which in the case of other natives have enabled the missionaries to
plant their doctrines. Nor is there anything hard of belief in the idea
that, just as special religious movements spread credence in certain
periods, a lack of active teachers in certain tribes may for a time
have let previously common beliefs pass almost out of knowledge. If
it be true that the Black Death wrought a great decline in the
ecclesiastical life of England in the fourteenth century, [81] a long
period of life-destroying conditions might eliminate from the life of
a savage tribe all lore save that of primary self-preservation. Moffat
incidentally notes the significant fact that rain-makers in his time
were usually foreigners to the tribes in which they operated. [82]
The explanation is partly that given by him later, that "a rain-maker
seldom dies a natural death," [83] most being executed as impostors
for their failures. To this effect there are many testimonies. [84]
Among the Bushmen, says Lichtenstein, when a magician "happens to
have predicted falsely several times in succession, he is thrust out
of the kraal, and very likely burned or put to death in some other
way." [85] "A celebrated magician," says Burton again, "rarely if
ever dies a natural death." [86] And it is told of the people of
Niue, or Savage Island, in the South Pacific, that "of old they had
kings; but as they were the high priests as well, and were supposed
to cause the food to grow, the people got angry with them in times
of scarcity, and killed them; and as one after the other was killed,
the end of it was that no one wished to be king." [87] So, in Uganda,
if a chief and his medicine-men cannot make rain, "his whole existence
is at stake in times of distress." One chief was actually driven out;
and the rain-doctors always live on sufferance. [88] In such a state
of things religion might well lose vogue.
Among some peoples of the Slave Coast, it appears, the regular
priests, despite their power and prestige, are always under suspicion
by reason of their frequent miscarriages; and they are--or were--not
unfrequently put to death. [89] Here there is disbelief in the priest
without disbelief in the God. But a disbelief in the priest which
tended to exterminate him might well diminish religion.
On the other hand, a relative indifference to religion in a given
tribe might result from the influence of one or more leading men who
spontaneously doubted the religious doctrine offered to them, as many
in Israel, on the face of the priestly records, disbelieved in the
whole theocratic polity. In modern times preachers are constantly
found charging "unbelief" on their own flocks, in respect not of
any criticism of religious narrative or dogma, but of simple lack
of ostensible faith in doctrines of prayer and Providence nominally
accepted. [90] Among peasants who have never seen a freethinking book
or heard a professed freethinker's arguments may be heard expressions
of spontaneous unfaith in current doctrines of Providence.
This is but a type of variations possible in primitive
societies. Despite the social potency of primitive custom, variation
may be surmised to occur in the mental as in the physical life at all
stages; and what normally happens in savagery and low civilization
appears to be a cancelment of the skeptical variation by the total
circumstances--the strength of the general lead to supernaturalism,
the plausibility of such beliefs to the average intelligence, and
the impossibility of setting up skeptical institutions to oppose
the others. In civilized ages skeptical movements are repeatedly
seen to dwindle for simple lack of institutions; which, however,
are spontaneously set up by and serve as sustainers of religious
systems. On the simpler level of savagery, skeptical personalities
would in the long run fail to affirm themselves as against the
institutions of ordinary savage religion--the seasonal feasts,
the ceremonies attending birth and death, the use of rituals,
images, charms, sorcery, all tending to stimulate and conserve
supernatural beliefs in general. Only the abnormally courageous would
dare outspokenly to doubt or deny at all; and their daring would put
them in special jeopardy. [91] The ancient maxim, Primus in orbe deos
fecit timor, is verified by all modern study of primitive life. [92]
It is a recent traveller who gives the definition: "Fetishism is the
result of the efforts of the savage intelligence seeking after a theory
which will account for the apparent hostility of nature to man." [93]
And this incalculable force of fear is constantly exploited by the
religious bias from the earliest stages of sorcery. [94]
The check to intellectual evolution would here be on all fours with
some of the checks inferribly at work in early moral evolution,
where the types with the higher ideals would seem often to be
positively endangered by their peculiarity, and would thus be the
less likely to multiply. And what happened as between man and man
would further tend to happen at times as between communities. Given
the possible case of a tribe so well placed as to be unusually little
affected by fear of enemies and the natural forces, the influence
of rationalistic chiefs or of respected tribesmen might set up for
a time a considerable anti-religious variation, involving at least
a minimizing of religious doctrine and practices. Such a case is
actually seen among the prosperous peoples of the Upper Congo, some of
whom, like the poorer tribes known to Moffat, have no "medicine-men"
of their own, and very vague notions of deity. [95] But when such a
tribe did chance to come into conflict with others more religious, it
would be peculiarly obnoxious to them; and, being in the terms of the
case unwarlike, its chance of survival on the old lines would be small.
Such a possibility is suggested with some vividness by the familiar
contrast between the modern communities of Fiji and Samoa--the
former cruel, cannibalistic, and religious, the latter much less
austerely religious and much more humane. The ferocious Fijians
"looked upon the Samoans with horror, because they had no religion,
no belief in any such deities [as the Fijians'], nor any of the
sanguinary rites which prevailed in other islands" (Spencer,
Study of Sociology, pp. 293-94, following J. Williams, Narrative
of Missionary Enterprise in the South Sea Islands, ed. 1837,
pp. 540-41; cp. the Rev. A. W. Murray, Forty Years' Mission Work,
1876, p. 171). The "no religion" is, of course, only relatively
true. Mr. Lang has noticed the error of the phrase "the godless
Samoans" (cp. Turner, Samoa a Hundred Years Ago, 1884, pp. 16-17);
but, while suggesting that the facts are the other way, he admits
that in their creed "the religious sentiment has already become
more or less self-conscious, and has begun to reason on its own
practices" (Myth, Ritual, and Religion, ii, 34; 2nd ed., ii, 58).
Taking the phenomena all along the line of evolution, we are led to the
generalization that the rationalistic tendency, early or late, like
the religious tendency, is a variation which prospers at different
times in different degrees relatively to the favourableness of the
environment. This view will be set forth in some detail in the course
of our history.
It is not, finally, a mere surmise that individual savages
and semi-savages in our own time vary towards disbelief in the
supernaturalism of their fellows. To say nothing of the rational
skepticism exhibited by the Zulu converts of Bishop Colenso, which was
the means of opening his eyes to the incredibility of the Pentateuch,
[96] or of the rationalism of the African chief who debated with
Sir Samuel Baker the possibility of a future state, [97] we have the
express missionary record that the forcible suppression of idolatry and
tabu and the priesthood by King Rihoriho in the island of Hawaii, in
1819, was accomplished not only "before the arrival of any missionary,"
but on purely common-sense grounds, and with no thought of furthering
Christianity, though he had heard of the substitution of Christianity
for the native religion by Pomare in Tahiti. Rihoriho simply desired
to save his wives and other women from the cruel pressure of the tabu
system, and to divert the priests' revenues to secular purposes;
and he actually had some strong priestly support. [98] Had not the
missionary system soon followed, however, the old worship, which
had been desperately defended in battle at the instigation of the
conservative priests, would in all probability have grown up afresh,
though perhaps with modifications. The savage and semi-savage social
conditions, taken as a whole, are fatally unpropitious to rationalism.
A parallel case to that of Rihoriho is that of King Finow of the Tonga
Islands, described by Mariner, who was his intimate. Finow was noted
for his want of religion. "He used to say that the Gods would always
favour that party in war in which there were the greatest chiefs and
warriors"--the European mot strictly adapted to Fiji conditions. "He
did not believe that the Gods paid much attention in other respects
to the affairs of mankind; nor did he think that they could have any
reason for doing so--no more than men could have any reason or interest
in attending to the affairs of the Gods." For the rest, "it is certain
that he disbelieved most of the oracles delivered by the priests,"
though he carefully used them for political and military purposes;
and he acquiesced in the usage of human sacrifices--particularly on
his own account--while professing to deplore the taste of the Gods
in these matters. His own death seems to have been the result of
poisoning by a priest, whom the king had planned to strangle. The
king's daughter was sick, and the priest, instead of bringing about
her recovery by his prayers, hardily explained that the illness was
the act of the Gods in punishment of the king's frequent disrespect
to them. Daughter and father were alternately ill, till the former
died; and then it was that the king, by disclosing his resolve to
strangle the priest, brought on his own death (1810). A few warriors
were disposed to take revenge on the priest; but the majority, on
learning the facts, shuddered at the impious design of the late king,
and regarded his death as the natural vengeance of the Gods. But,
though such "impiety" as his was very rare, his son after him decided
to abolish the priestly office of "divine chieftain," on the score
that it was seen to avail for nothing, while it cost a good deal;
and the chiefs and common people were soon brought to acquiesce in
the policy. [99]
Such cases appear to occur in many barbarous communities. It is
recorded of the Kaffir chief Go that he was perfectly aware of the
hollowness of the pretensions of the magicians and rain-makers of his
tribe, though he held it impolitic to break with them, and called them
in and followed their prescriptions, as did his subjects. [100] Of the
Galeka chief Segidi it is similarly told that, while his medicine-men
went into trances for occult knowledge preparatory to a military
expedition, he carefully obtained real information through spies,
and, while liberally rewarding his wizards, sent his sons to school
at Blythswood. [101] Yet again, in Bede's Ecclesiastical History,
we have the story of King Edwin's priest, Coifi, naïvely avowing that
he saw no virtue in his religion, [102] inasmuch as many men received
more royal favours than he, who had been most diligent in serving the
Gods. [103] Such a declaration might very well have been arranged
for by the Christian Bishop Paulinus, who was converting the king,
and would naturally provide for Coifi; but on any view a process of
skepticism had taken place in the barbarian's mind. [104]
Other illustrations come from the history of ancient Scandinavia. Grimm
notes in several Norse sagas and songs expressions of contempt
for various Gods, which appear to be independent of Christian
influence; [105] and many warriors continued alike the Christian
and the Pagan deities. In the saga of King Olaf Tryggvason, who
enforced Christianity on Norway, it is declared by one chief that
he relied much more on his own arm than on Thor and Odin; while
another announced that he was neither Christian nor Pagan, adding:
"My companions and I have no other religion than the confidence of
our own strength and in the good success which always attends us in
war." Similar sentiments are recorded to have been uttered by Rolf
Krake, a legendary king of Denmark (circa 500); [106] and we have in
the Æneid the classic type--doubtless drawn from barbaric life--of
Mezentius, divum contemptor, who calls his right arm his God, and in
dying declares that he appeals to no deity. [107] Such utterances,
indeed, do not amount to rational freethinking; but, where some
could be thus capable of anti-theism, it is reasonable to surmise
that among the more reflective there were some capable of simple
atheism or non-belief, and of the prudence of keeping the fact to
themselves. Partial skepticism, of course, would be much more common,
as among the Aryan Kafirs of the Hindu-Kush, with whom, before their
conquest by the Ameer of Afghanistan, a British agent found among
the younger men an inclination to be skeptical about some sacred
ceremonies, while very sincere in their worship of their favourite
deity, the God of war. [108]
It is thus seen to be inaccurate to say, as has been said by
an accomplished antagonist of apriorism, that "under the yoke of
tribal custom skepticism can hardly arise: there is no place for the
half-hearted: as all men feel alike, so all think alike: skepticism
arises when beliefs are put into formal propositions." [109] It is
broadly true that "there is no place for" the doubter as such in
the tribal society; but doubters do exist. Skepticism--in the sense
in which the term is here used, that of rational disbelief--may
even be commoner in some stages of the life of tribal customs than
in some stages of backward civilization loaded with formulated
creeds. What is true is that in the primitive life the rationalism
necessarily fails, for lack of culture and institutions, to diffuse
and establish itself, whereas superstition succeeds, being naturally
institution-making. Under such conditions skepticism is but a recurrent
variation. [110]
It is significant, further, that in the foregoing cases of unbelief
at the lower levels of civilization it is only the high rank of the
doubter that secures publication for the fact of the doubt. In Hawaii,
or Tonga, only a king's unbelief could make itself historically
heard. So in the familiar story of the doubting Inca of Peru, who
in public religious assembly is said to have avowed his conclusion
that the deified Sun was not really a living thing, it is the
status of the speaker that gives his words a record. The doubt had
in all likelihood been long current among the wise men of Peru;
it is indeed ascribed to two or three different Incas; [111] but,
save for the Incas' promulgation of it, history would bear no trace
of Peruvian skepticism. So again in the Acolhuan State of Tezcuco,
the most civilized in the New World before the Spanish conquest,
the great King Netzahualcoyotl is found opposing the cults of human
sacrifice and worshipping an "unknown God," without an image and with
only incense for offering. [112] Only the king in such an environment
could put on record such a conception. There is, in fact, reason to
believe that all ancient ameliorations of bloody rites were the work
of humane kings or chiefs, [113] as they are known to have been among
semi-savages in our own day. [114] In bare justice we are bound to
surmise that similar developments of rationalism have been fairly
frequent in unwritten history, and that there must have been much of
it among the common folk; though, on the other hand, the very position
of a savage king, and the special energy of character which usually
goes to secure it, may count for much in giving him the courage to
think in defiance of custom. In modern as in early Christian times,
it is always to the chief or king of a savage or barbarous tribe
that the missionary looks for permission to proceed against the
force of popular conservatism. [115] Apart from kings and chiefs,
the priesthood itself would be the likeliest soil for skepticism,
though, of course, not for the open avowal of it.
There are to be noted, finally, the facts collected as to marked
skeptical variation among children; [116] and the express evidence
that "it has not been found in a single instance that an uneducated
deaf-mute has had any conception of the existence of a Supreme
Being as the Creator and Ruler of the Universe." [117] These latter
phenomena do not, of course, entitle us to accept Professor Gruppe's
sweeping theorem that it is the religious variation that is abnormal,
and that religion can have spread only by way of the hereditary
imposition of the original insanity of one or two on the imagination
of the many. [118] Deaf-mutes are not normal organisms. But all
the facts together entitle us to decide that religion, broadly
speaking, is but the variation that has chiefly flourished, by
reason of its adaptation to the prevailing environment thus far;
and to reject as unscientific the formulas which, even in the face
of the rapidly-spreading rationalism of the more civilized nations,
still affirm supernaturalist beliefs to be a universal necessity of
the human mind.
On the same grounds, we must reject the claim--arbitrarily set up by
one historian in the very act of showing how religion historically
oppugns science--that all sacred books as such "are true because they
have been developed in accordance with the laws governing the evolution
of truth in human history; and because in poem, chronicle, code,
legend, myth, apologue, or parable, they reflect this development
of what is best in the onward march of humanity." [119] In this
proposition the opening words, "are true because" are strictly
meaningless. All literature whatever has been developed under the
same general laws. But if it be meant that sacred books were specially
likely to garner truth as such, the claim must be negated. In terms of
the whole demonstration of the bias of theology against new truth in
modern times, the irresistible presumption is that in earlier times
also the theological and theocratic spirit was in general hostile
to every process by which truth is normally attained. And if the
thesis be limited to moral truth, it is still less credible. It is,
in fact, inconceivable that literature so near the popular level as
to suit whole priesthoods should be morally the best of which even
the age producing it is capable; and nothing is more certain than
that enlightened ethic has always had to impeach or explain away the
barbarisms of some sacred books. The true summary is that in all cases
the accepted sacred books have of necessity fallen short not only of
scientific truth and of pure ethic, but even of the best speculation
and the best ethic of the time of their acceptance, inasmuch as they
excluded the criticism of the freethinking few on the sacred books
themselves. There is sociological as well as physical science, and
the former is flouted when the whole freethinking of the human race in
the period of Bible-making is either ignored or treated as worthless.
It is probable, for instance, that in all stages of primitive religion
there have been disbelievers in the value of sacrifice, who might or
might not dare to denounce the practice. The demurrers to it in the
Hebrew prophetic literature are probably late; but they were in all
likelihood anticipated in early times. Among the Fijians, for whom
cannibalism was an essentially religious act, and the privilege of
the males of the aristocracy, there were a number of the latter who,
before and apart from the entrance of Christianity, abominated and
denounced the practice, reasoning against it also on utilitarian
grounds, while the orthodox made it out to be a social duty. There
were even whole towns which revolted against it and made it tabu;
and it was by force mainly of this rationalistic reaction that the
missionaries succeeded so readily in putting down the usage. [120]
It is impossible to estimate how often in the past such a revolt of
reason against religious insanity has been overborne by the forces
of pious habit.