I pass from Evolution in general to Natural Selection.

The character in religious language which I have for short called

mechanical was not absent in the argument from design as stated before

Darwin. It seemed to have reference to a world conceived as fixed. It

pointed, not to the plastic capacity and energy of living matter, but

to the fixed adaptation of this and that organ to an unchanging place or

function.

Mr Hobhouse has given us the valuable phrase "a niche of organic

opportunity." Such a phrase would have borne a different sense in

non-evolutionary thought. In that thought, the opportunity was

an opportunity for the Creative Power, and Design appeared in the

preparation of the organism to fit the niche. The idea of the niche

and its occupant growing together from simpler to more complex mutual

adjustment was unwelcome to this teleology. If the adaptation was traced

to the influence, through competition, of the environment, the old

teleology lost an illustration and a proof. For the cogency of the proof

in every instance depended upon the absence of explanation. Where the

process of adaptation was discerned, the evidence of Purpose or Design

was weak. It was strong only when the natural antecedents were not

discovered, strongest when they could be declared undiscoverable.

Paley's favourite word is "Contrivance"; and for him contrivance is

most certain where production is most obscure. He points out the

physiological advantage of the valvulae conniventes to man, and the

advantage for teleology of the fact that they cannot have been formed by

"action and pressure." What is not due to pressure may be attributed to

design, and when a "mechanical" process more subtle than pressure was

suggested, the case for design was so far weakened. The cumulative proof

from the multitude of instances began to disappear when, in selection,

a natural sequence was suggested in which all the adaptations might be

reached by the motive power of life, and especially when, as in Darwin's

teaching, there was full recognition of the reactions of life to the

stimulus of circumstance. "The organism fits the niche," said the

teleologist, "because the Creator formed it so as to fit." "The organism

fits the niche," said the naturalist, "because unless it fitted it

could not exist." "It was fitted to survive," said the theologian.

"It survives because it fits," said the selectionist. The two forms of

statement are not incompatible; but the new statement, by provision of

an ideally universal explanation of process, was hostile to a doctrine

of purpose which relied upon evidences always exceptional however

numerous. Science persistently presses on to find the universal

machinery of adaptation in this planet; and whether this be found in

selection, or in direct-effect, or in vital reactions resulting in large

changes, or in a combination of these and other factors, it must always

be opposed to the conception of a Divine Power here and there but not

everywhere active.

For science, the Divine must be constant, operative everywhere and in

every quality and power, in environment and in organism, in stimulus and

in reaction, in variation and in struggle, in hereditary equilibrium,

and in "the unstable state of species"; equally present on both sides of

every strain, in all pressures and in all resistances, in short in

the general wonder of life and the world. And this is exactly what the

Divine Power must be for religious faith.

The point I wish once more to make is that the necessary readjustment of

teleology, so as to make it depend upon the contemplation of the whole

instead of a part, is advantageous quite as much to theology as to

science. For the older view failed in courage. Here again our theism was

not sufficiently theistic.

Where results seemed inevitable, it dared not claim them as God-given.

In the argument from Design it spoke not of God in the sense of

theology, but of a Contriver, immensely, not infinitely wise and good,

working within a world, the scene, rather than the ever dependent

outcome, of His Wisdom; working in such emergencies and opportunities

as occurred, by forces not altogether within His control, towards an end

beyond Himself. It gave us, instead of the awful reverence due to the

Cause of all substance and form, all love and wisdom, a dangerously

detached appreciation of an ingenuity and benevolence meritorious in aim

and often surprisingly successful in contrivance.

The old teleology was more useful to science than to religion, and the

design-naturalists ought to be gratefully remembered by Biologists.

Their search for evidences led them to an eager study of adaptations

and of minute forms, a study such as we have now an incentive to in the

theory of Natural Selection. One hardly meets with the same ardour in

microscopical research until we come to modern workers. But the argument

from Design was never of great importance to faith. Still, to rid it of

this character was worth all the stress and anxiety of the gallant old

war. If Darwin had done nothing else for us, we are to-day deeply in

his debt for this. The world is not less venerable to us now, not less

eloquent of the causing mind, rather much more eloquent and sacred.

But our wonder is not that "the underjaw of the swine works under the

ground" or in any or all of those particular adaptations which Paley

collected with so much skill, but that a purpose transcending, though

resembling, our own purposes, is everywhere manifest; that what we live

in is a whole, mutually sustaining, eventful and beautiful, where the

"dead" forces feed the energies of life, and life sustains a stranger

existence, able in some real measure to contemplate the whole, of which,

mechanically considered, it is a minor product and a rare ingredient.

Here, again, the change was altogether positive. It was not the escape

of a vessel in a storm with loss of spars and rigging, not a shortening

of sail to save the masts and make a port of refuge. It was rather the

emergence from narrow channels to an open sea. We had propelled the

great ship, finding purchase here and there for slow and uncertain

movement. Now, in deep water, we spread large canvas to a favouring

breeze.

The scattered traces of design might be forgotten or obliterated. But

the broad impression of Order became plainer when seen at due distance

and in sufficient range of effect, and the evidence of love and wisdom

in the universe could be trusted more securely for the loss of the

particular calculation of their machinery.

Many other topics of faith are affected by modern biology. In some of

these we have learnt at present only a wise caution, a wise uncertainty.

We stand before the newly unfolded spectacle of suffering, silenced;

with faith not scientifically reassured but still holding fast certain

other clues of conviction. In many important topics we are at a loss.

But in others, and among them those I have mentioned, we have passed

beyond this negative state and find faith positively strengthened and

more fully expressed.

We have gained also a language and a habit of thought more fit for the

great and dark problems that remain, less liable to damaging conflicts,

equipped for more rapid assimilation of knowledge. And by this change

biology itself is a gainer. For, relieved of fruitless encounters with

popular religion, it may advance with surer aim along the path of

really scientific life-study which was reopened for modern men by the

publication of "The Origin of Species".

Charles Darwin regretted that, in following science, he had not done

"more direct good" ("Life and Letters", Vol. III. page 359.) to his

fellow-creatures. He has, in fact, rendered substantial service to

interests bound up with the daily conduct and hopes of common men;

for his work has led to improvements in the preaching of the Christian

faith.

XXV. THE INFLUENCE OF DARWINISM ON THE STUDY OF RELIGIONS. By Jane Ellen

Harrison.

Hon. D.Litt. (Durham), Hon. LL.D. (Aberdeen), Staff Lecturer and

sometime Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge.

Corresponding member of the German Archaeological Institute.

The title of my paper might well have been "the creation by Darwinism of

the scientific study of Religions," but that I feared to mar my tribute

to a great name by any shadow of exaggeration. Before the publication of

"The Origin of Species" and "The Descent of Man", even in the eighteenth

century, isolated thinkers, notably Hume and Herder, had conjectured

that the orthodox beliefs of their own day were developments from the

cruder superstitions of the past. These were however only particular

speculations of individual sceptics. Religion was not yet generally

regarded as a proper subject for scientific study, with facts to be

collected and theories to be deduced. A Congress of Religions such as

that recently held at Oxford would have savoured of impiety.

In the brief space allotted me I can attempt only two things; first,

and very briefly, I shall try to indicate the normal attitude towards

religion in the early part of the last century; second, and in more

detail, I shall try to make clear what is the outlook of advanced

thinkers to-day. (To be accurate I ought to add "in Europe." I advisedly

omit from consideration the whole immense field of Oriental mysticism,

because it has remained practically untouched by the influence of

Darwinism.) From this second inquiry it will, I hope, be abundantly

manifest that it is the doctrine of evolution that has made this outlook

possible and even necessary.

The ultimate and unchallenged presupposition of the old view was that

religion was a DOCTRINE, a body of supposed truths. It was in fact what

we should now call Theology, and what the ancients called Mythology.

Ritual was scarcely considered at all, and, when considered, it was held

to be a form in which beliefs, already defined and fixed as dogma,

found a natural mode of expression. This, it will be later shown, is

a profound error or rather a most misleading half-truth. Creeds,

doctrines, theology and the like are only a part, and at first the least

important part, of religion.

Further, and the fact is important, this DOGMA, thus supposed to be

the essential content of the "true" religion, was a teleological scheme

complete and unalterable, which had been revealed to man once and for

all by a highly anthropomorphic God, whose existence was assumed. The

duty of man towards this revelation was to accept its doctrines and obey

its precepts. The notion that this revelation had grown bit by bit out

of man's consciousness and that his business was to better it would

have seemed rank blasphemy. Religion, so conceived, left no place for

development. "The Truth" might be learnt, but never critically examined;

being thus avowedly complete and final, it was doomed to stagnation.

The details of this supposed revelation seem almost too naive for

enumeration. As Hume observed, "popular theology has a positive appetite

for absurdity." It is sufficient to recall that "revelation" included

such items as the Creation (It is interesting to note that the very

word "Creator" has nowadays almost passed into the region of mythology.

Instead we have "L'Evolution Creatrice".) of the world out of nothing in

six days; the making of Eve from one of Adam's ribs; the Temptation by

a talking snake; the confusion of tongues at the tower of Babel; the

doctrine of Original Sin; a scheme of salvation which demanded the

Virgin Birth, Vicarious Atonement, and the Resurrection of the material

body. The scheme was unfolded in an infallible Book, or, for one section

of Christians, guarded by the tradition of an infallible Church, and on

the acceptance or refusal of this scheme depended an eternity of weal or

woe. There is not one of these doctrines that has not now been recast,

softened down, mysticised, allegorised into something more conformable

with modern thinking. It is hard for the present generation, unless

their breeding has been singularly archaic, to realise that these

amazing doctrines were literally held and believed to constitute the

very essence of religion; to doubt them was a moral delinquency.

It had not, however, escaped the notice of travellers and missionaries

that savages carried on some sort of practices that seemed to be

religious, and believed in some sort of spirits or demons. Hence, beyond

the confines illuminated by revealed truth, a vague region was assigned

to NATURAL Religion. The original revelation had been kept intact only

by one chosen people, the Jews, by them to be handed on to Christianity.

Outside the borders of this Goshen the world had sunk into the darkness

of Egypt. Where analogies between savage cults and the Christian

religions were observed, they were explained as degradations; the

heathen had somehow wilfully "lost the light." Our business was not to

study but, exclusively, to convert them, to root out superstition and

carry the torch of revelation to "Souls in heathen darkness lying." To

us nowadays it is a commonplace of anthropological research that we

must seek for the beginnings of religion in the religions of primitive

peoples, but in the last century the orthodox mind was convinced that

it possessed a complete and luminous ready-made revelation; the study of

what was held to be a mere degradation seemed idle and superfluous.

But, it may be asked, if, to the orthodox, revealed religion was

sacrosanct and savage religion a thing beneath consideration, why did

not the sceptics show a more liberal spirit, and pursue to their logical

issue the conjectures they had individually hazarded? The reason is

simple and significant. The sceptics too had not worked free from

the presupposition that the essence of religion is dogma. Their

intellectualism, expressive of the whole eighteenth century, was

probably in England strengthened by the Protestant doctrine of an

infallible Book. Hume undoubtedly confused religion with dogmatic

theology. The attention of orthodox and sceptics alike was focussed on

the truth or falsity of certain propositions. Only a few minds of rare

quality were able dimly to conceive that religion might be a necessary

step in the evolution of human thought.

It is not a little interesting to note that Darwin, who was leader and

intellectual king of his generation, was also in this matter to some

extent its child. His attitude towards religion is stated clearly, in

Chapter VIII. of the "Life and Letters". (Vol. I. page 304. For Darwin's

religious views see also "Descent of Man", 1871, Vol. I. page 65; 2nd

edition. Vol. I. page 142.) On board the "Beagle" he was simply orthodox

and was laughed at by several of the officers for quoting the Bible as

an unanswerable authority on some point of morality. By 1839 he had come

to see that the Old Testament was no more to be trusted than the sacred

books of the Hindoos. Next went the belief in miracles, and next Paley's

"argument from design" broke down before the law of natural selection;

the suffering so manifest in nature is seen to be compatible rather with

Natural Selection than with the goodness and omnipotence of God. Darwin

felt to the full all the ignorance that lay hidden under specious

phrases like "the plan of creation" and "Unity of design." Finally, he

tells us "the mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us;

and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic."

The word Agnostic is significant not only of the humility of the man

himself but also of the attitude of his age. Religion, it is clear,

is still conceived as something to be KNOWN, a matter of true or

false OPINION. Orthodox religion was to Darwin a series of erroneous

hypotheses to be bit by bit discarded when shown to be untenable. The

ACTS of religion which may result from such convictions, i.e. devotion

in all its forms, prayer, praise, sacraments, are left unmentioned.

It is clear that they are not, as now to us, sociological survivals

of great interest and importance, but rather matters too private, too

personal, for discussion.

Huxley, writing in the "Contemporary Review" (1871.), says, "In a dozen

years "The Origin of Species" has worked as complete a revolution in

biological science as the "Principia" did in astronomy." It has done

so because, in the words of Helmholtz, it contained "an essentially

new creative thought," that of the continuity of life, the absence of

breaks. In the two most conservative subjects, Religion and Classics,

this creative ferment was slow indeed to work. Darwin himself felt

strongly "that a man should not publish on a subject to which he has

not given special and continuous thought," and hence wrote little on

religion and with manifest reluctance, though, as already seen, in

answer to pertinacious inquiry he gave an outline of his own views. But

none the less he foresaw that his doctrine must have, for the history

of man's mental evolution, issues wider than those with which he was

prepared personally to deal. He writes, in "The Origin of Species"

(6th edition, page 428.), "In the future I see open fields for far

more important researches. Psychology will be securely based on

the foundation already well laid by Mr Herbert Spencer, that of the

necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation."

Nowhere, it is true, does Darwin definitely say that he regarded

religion as a set of phenomena, the development of which may be studied

from the psychological standpoint. Rather we infer from his PIETY--in

the beautiful Roman sense--towards tradition and association, that

religion was to him in some way sacrosanct. But it is delightful to see

how his heart went out towards the new method in religious study which

he had himself, if half-unconsciously, inaugurated. Writing in 1871 to

Dr Tylor, on the publication of his "Primitive Culture", he says ("Life

and Letters", Vol. III. page 151.), "It is wonderful how you trace

animism from the lower races up the religious belief of the highest

races. It will make me for the future look at religion--a belief in the

soul, etc.--from a new point of view."

Psychology was henceforth to be based on "the necessary acquirement of

each mental capacity by gradation." With these memorable words the

door closes on the old and opens on the new horizon. The mental focus

henceforth is not on the maintaining or refuting of an orthodoxy but

on the genesis and evolution of a capacity, not on perfection but on

process. Continuous evolution leaves no gap for revelation sudden and

complete. We have henceforth to ask, not when was religion revealed

or what was the revelation, but how did religious phenomena arise and

develop. For an answer to this we turn with new and reverent eyes to

study "the heathen in his blindness" and the child "born in sin." We

still indeed send out missionaries to convert the heathen, but here

at least in Cambridge before they start they attend lectures on

anthropology and comparative religion. The "decadence" theory is dead

and should be buried.

The study of primitive religions then has been made possible and even

inevitable by the theory of Evolution. We have now to ask what new facts

and theories have resulted from that study. This brings us to our second

point, the advanced outlook on religion to-day.

The view I am about to state is no mere personal opinion of my own.

To my present standpoint I have been led by the investigations of such

masters as Drs Wundt, Lehmann, Preuss, Bergson, Beck and in our own

country Drs Tylor and Frazer. (I can only name here the books that

have specially influenced my own views. They are W. Wundt,

"Volkerpsychologie", Leipzig, 1900, P. Beck, "Die Nachahmung", Leipzig,

1904, and "Erkenntnisstheorie des primitiven Denkens" in "Zeitschrift

f. Philos. und Philos. Kritik", 1903, page 172, and 1904, page 9. Henri

Bergson, "L'Evolution Creatrice" and "Matiere et Memoire", 1908, K. Th.

Preuss, various articles published in the "Globus" (see page 507, note

1), and in the "Archiv. f. Religionswissenschaft", and for the subject

of magic, MM. Hubert et Mauss, "Theorie generale de la Magie", in

"L'Annee Sociologique", VII.)

Religion always contains two factors. First, a theoretical factor, what

a man THINKS about the unseen--his theology, or, if we prefer so to call

it, his mythology. Second, what he DOES in relation to this unseen--his

ritual. These factors rarely if ever occur in complete separation; they

are blended in very varying proportions. Religion we have seen was

in the last century regarded mainly in its theoretical aspect as a

doctrine. Greek religion for example meant to most educated persons

Greek mythology. Yet even a cursory examination shows that neither

Greek nor Roman had any creed or dogma, any hard and fast formulation

of belief. In the Greek Mysteries (See my "Prolegomena to the Study of

Greek Religion", page 155, Cambridge, 1903.) only we find what we should

call a Confiteor; and this is not a confession of faith, but an avowal

of rites performed. When the religion of primitive peoples came to be

examined it was speedily seen that though vague beliefs necessarily

abound, definite creeds are practically non-existent. Ritual is dominant

and imperative.

This predominance and priority of ritual over definite creed was first

forced upon our notice by the study of savages, but it promptly and

happily joined hands with modern psychology. Popular belief says, I

think, therefore I act; modern scientific psychology says, I act (or

rather, REact to outside stimulus), and so I come to think. Thus there

is set going a recurrent series: act and thought become in their turn

stimuli to fresh acts and thoughts. In examining religion as envisaged

to-day it would therefore be more correct to begin with the practice

of religion, i.e. ritual, and then pass to its theory, theology or

mythology. But it will be more convenient to adopt the reverse

method. The theoretical content of religion is to those of us who are

Protestants far more familiar and we shall thus proceed from the known

to the comparatively unknown.

I shall avoid all attempt at rigid definition. The problem before the

modern investigator is, not to determine the essence and definition of

religion but to inquire how religious phenomena, religious ideas and

practices arose. Now the theoretical content of religion, the domain of

theology or mythology, is broadly familiar to all. It is the world of

the unseen, the supersensuous; it is the world of what we call the soul

and the supposed objects of the soul's perception, sprites, demons,

ghosts and gods. How did this world grow up?

We turn to our savages. Intelligent missionaries of bygone days used to

ply savages with questions such as these: Had they any belief in God?

Did they believe in the immortality of the soul? Taking their own

clear-cut conceptions, discriminated by a developed terminology, these

missionaries tried to translate them into languages that had neither the

words nor the thoughts, only a vague, inchoate, tangled substratum, out

of which these thoughts and words later differentiated themselves. Let

us examine this substratum.

Nowadays we popularly distinguish between objective and subjective;

and further, we regard the two worlds as in some sense opposed. To

the objective world we commonly attribute some reality independent of

consciousness, while we think of the subjective as dependent for its

existence on the mind. The objective world consists of perceptible

things, or of the ultimate constituents to which matter is reduced by

physical speculation. The subjective world is the world of beliefs,

hallucinations, dreams, abstract ideas, imaginations and the like.

Psychology of course knows that the objective and subjective worlds are

interdependent, inextricably intertwined, but for practical purposes the

distinction is convenient.

But primitive man has not yet drawn the distinction between objective

and subjective. Nay, more, it is foreign to almost the whole of ancient

philosophy. Plato's Ideas (I owe this psychological analysis of the

elements of the primitive supersensuous world mainly to Dr Beck,

"Erkenntnisstheorie des primitiven Denkens", see page 498, note 1.), his

Goodness, Truth, Beauty, his class-names, horse, table, are it is true

dematerialised as far as possible, but they have outside existence,

apart from the mind of the thinker, they have in some shadowy way

spatial extension. Yet ancient philosophies and primitive man alike

needed and possessed for practical purposes a distinction which served

as well as our subjective and objective. To the primitive savage all his

thoughts, every object of which he was conscious, whether by perception

or conception, had reality, that is, it had existence outside himself,

but it might have reality of various kinds or different degrees.

It is not hard to see how this would happen. A man's senses may mislead

him. He sees the reflection of a bird in a pond. To his eyes it is a

real bird. He touches it, HE PUTS IT TO THE TOUCH, and to his touch it

is not a bird at all. It is real then, but surely not quite so real as

a bird that you can touch. Again, he sees smoke. It is real to his eyes.

He tries to grasp it, it vanishes. The wind touches him, but he cannot

see it, which makes him feel uncanny. The most real thing is that which

affects most senses and especially what affects the sense of touch.

Apparently touch is the deepest down, most primitive, of senses. The

rest are specialisations and complications. Primitive man has no formal

rubric "optical delusion," but he learns practically to distinguish

between things that affect only one sense and things that affect two or

more--if he did not he would not survive. But both classes of things are

real to him. Percipi est esse.

So far, primitive man has made a real observation; there are things that

appeal to one sense only. But very soon creeps in confusion fraught with

disaster. He passes naturally enough, being economical of any mental

effort, from what he really sees but cannot feel to what he thinks

he sees, and gives to it the same secondary reality. He has dreams,

visions, hallucinations, nightmares. He dreams that an enemy is beating

him, and he wakes rubbing his head. Then further he remembers things;

that is, for him, he sees them. A great chief died the other day and

they buried him, but he sees him still in his mind, sees him in his

war-paint, splendid, victorious. So the image of the past goes together

with his dreams and visions to the making of this other less real,

but still real world, his other-world of the supersensuous, the

supernatural, a world, the outside existence of which, independent of

himself, he never questions.

And, naturally enough, the future joins the past in this supersensuous

world. He can hope, he can imagine, he can prophesy. And again the

images of his hope are real; he sees them with that mind's eye which

as yet he has not distinguished from his bodily eye. And so the

supersensuous world grows and grows big with the invisible present, and

big also with the past and the future, crowded with the ghosts of the

dead and shadowed with oracles and portents. It is this supersensuous,

supernatural world which is the eternity, the other-world, of primitive

religion, not an endlessness of time, but a state removed from full

sensuous reality, a world in which anything and everything may happen,

a world peopled by demonic ancestors and liable to a splendid vagueness,

to a "once upon a time-ness" denied to the present. It not unfrequently

happens that people who know that the world nowadays obeys fixed laws

have no difficulty in believing that six thousand years ago man was

made direct from a lump of clay, and woman was made from one of man's

superfluous ribs.

The fashioning of the supersensuous world comes out very clearly in

primitive man's views about the soul and life after death. Herbert

Spencer noted long ago the influence of dreams in forming a belief in

immortality, but being very rational himself, he extended to primitive

man a quite alien quality of rationality. Herbert Spencer argued that

when a savage has a dream he seeks to account for it, and in so doing

invents a spirit world. The mistake here lies in the "seeks to account

for it." (Primitive man, as Dr Beck observes, is not impelled by an

Erkenntnisstrieb. Dr Beck says he has counted upwards of 30 of these

mythological Triebe (tendencies) with which primitive man has been

endowed.) Man is at first too busy LIVING to have any time for

disinterested THINKING. He dreams a dream and it is real for him. He

does not seek to account for it any more than for his hands and feet. He

cannot distinguish between a CONception and a PERception, that is all.

He remembers his ancestors or they appear to him in a dream; therefore

they are alive still, but only as a rule to about the third generation.

Then he remembers them no more and they cease to be.

Next as regards his own soul. He feels something within him,

his life-power, his will to live, his power to act, his

personality--whatever we like to call it. He cannot touch this thing

that is himself, but it is real. His friend too is alive and one day he

is dead; he cannot move, he cannot act. Well, something has gone that

was his friend's self. He has stopped breathing. Was it his breath? or

he is bleeding; is it his blood? This life-power IS something; does it

live in his heart or his lungs or his midriff? He did not see it go;

perhaps it is like wind, an anima, a Geist, a ghost. But again it comes

back in a dream, only looking shadowy; it is not the man's life, it is

a thin copy of the man; it is an "image" (eidolon). It is like that

shifting distorted thing that dogs the living man's footsteps in the

sunshine; it is a "shade" (skia). (The two conceptions of the soul, as a

life-essence, inseparable from the body, and as a separable phantom seem

to occur in most primitive systems. They are distinct conceptions but

are inextricably blended in savage thought. The two notions Korperseele

and Psyche have been very fully discussed in Wundt's "Volkerpsychologie"

II. pages 1-142, Leipzig, 1900.)

Ghosts and sprites, ancestor worship, the soul, oracles, prophecy; all

these elements of the primitive supersensuous world we willingly admit

to be the proper material of religion; but other elements are more

surprising; such are class-names, abstract ideas, numbers, geometrical

figures. We do not nowadays think of these as of religious content, but

to primitive men they were all part of the furniture of his supernatural

world.

With respect to class-names, Dr Tylor ("Primitive Culture", Vol. II.

page 245 (4th edition), 1903.) has shown how instructive are the first

attempts of the savage to get at the idea of a class. Things in which

similarity is observed, things indeed which can be related at all are

to the savage KINDRED. A species is a family or a number of individuals

with a common god to look after them. Such for example is the Finn

doctrine of the haltia. Every object has its haltia, but the haltiat

were not tied to the individual, they interested themselves in every

member of the species. Each stone had its haltia, but that haltia was

interested in other stones; the individuals disappeared, the haltia

remained.

Nor was it only class-names that belonged to the supersensuous world. A

man's own proper-name is a sort of spiritual essence of him, a kind

of soul to be carefully concealed. By pronouncing a name you bring the

thing itself into being. When Elohim would create Day "he called out to

the Light 'Day,' and to the Darkness he called out 'Night'"; the great

magician pronounced the magic Names and the Things came into being. "In

the beginning was the Word" is literally true, and this reflects the

fact that our CONCEPTUAL world comes into being by the mental process of

naming. (For a full discussion of this point see Beck, "Nachahmung" page

41, "Die Sprache".) In old times people went further; they thought that

by naming events they could bring them to be, and custom even to-day

keeps up the inveterate magical habit of wishing people "Good Morning"

and a "Happy Christmas."

Number, too, is part of the supersensuous world that is thoroughly

religious. We can see and touch seven apples, but seven itself, that

wonderful thing that shifts from object to object, giving it

its SEVENness, that living thing, for it begets itself anew in

multiplication--surely seven is a fit denizen of the upper-world.

Originally all numbers dwelt there, and a certain supersensuous sanctity

still clings to seven and three. We still say "Holy, Holy, Holy," and in

some mystic way feel the holier.

The soul and the supersensuous world get thinner and thinner, rarer and

more rarified, but they always trail behind them clouds of smoke and

vapour from the world of sense and space whence they have come. It is

difficult for us even nowadays to use the word "soul" without lapsing

into a sensuous mythology. The Cartesians' sharp distinction between res

extensa non cogitans and res cogitans non extansa is remote.

So far then man, through the processes of his thinking, has provided

himself with a supersensuous world, the world of sense-delusion, of

smoke and cloud, of dream and phantom, of imagination, of name and

number and image. The natural course would now seem to be that this

supersensuous world should develop into the religious world as we know

it, that out of a vague animism with ghosts of ancestors, demons,

and the like, there should develop in due order momentary gods

(Augenblicks-Gotter), tribal gods, polytheism, and finally a pure

monotheism.

This course of development is usually assumed, but it is not I think

quite what really happens. The supersensuous world as we have got it so

far is too theoretic to be complete material of religion. It is indeed

only one factor, or rather it is as it were a lifeless body that waits

for a living spirit to possess and inform it. Had the theoretic factor

remained uninformed it would eventually have separated off into its

constituent elements of error and truth, the error dying down as a

belated metaphysic, the truth developing into a correct and scientific

psychology of the subjective. But man has ritual as well as mythology;

that is, he feels and acts as well as thinks; nay more he probably feels

and acts long before he definitely thinks. This contradicts all our

preconceived notions of theology. Man, we imagine, believes in a god

or gods and then worships. The real order seems to be that, in a sense

presently to be explained, he worships, he feels and acts, and out

of his feeling and action, projected into his confused thinking,

he develops a god. We pass therefore to our second factor in

religion:--ritual.

The word "ritual" brings to our modern minds the notion of a church

with a priesthood and organised services. Instinctively we think of a

congregation meeting to confess sins, to receive absolution, to pray,

to praise, to listen to sermons, and possibly to partake of sacraments.

Were we to examine these fully developed phenomena we should hardly get

further in the analysis of our religious conceptions than the notion

of a highly anthropomorphic god approached by purely human methods of

personal entreaty and adulation.

Further, when we first come to the study of primitive religions we

expect a priori to find the same elements, though in a ruder form. We

expect to see "The heathen in his blindness bow down to wood and stone,"

but the facts that actually confront us are startlingly dissimilar.

Bowing down to wood and stone is an occupation that exists mainly in the

minds of hymn-writers. The real savage is more actively engaged. Instead

of asking a god to do what he wants done, he does it or tries to do

it himself; instead of prayers he utters spells. In a word he is busy

practising magic, and above all he is strenuously engaged in dancing

magical dances. When the savage wants rain or wind or sunshine, he does

not go to church; he summons his tribe and they dance a rain-dance or

wind-dance or sun-dance. When a savage goes to war we must not picture

his wife on her knees at home praying for the absent; instead we must

picture her dancing the whole night long; not for mere joy of heart

or to pass the weary hours; she is dancing his war-dance to bring him

victory.

Magic is nowadays condemned alike by science and by religion; it is

both useless and impious. It is obsolete, and only practised by malign

sorcerers in obscure holes and corners. Undoubtedly magic is neither

religion nor science, but in all probability it is the spiritual

protoplasm from which religion and science ultimately differentiated.

As such the doctrine of evolution bids us scan it closely. Magic may

be malign and private; nowadays it is apt to be both. But in early days

magic was as much for good as for evil; it was publicly practised for

the common weal.

The gist of magic comes out most clearly in magical dances. We think of

dancing as a light form of recreation, practised by the young from sheer

joie de vivre and unsuitable for the mature. But among the Tarahumares

(Carl Lumholtz, "Unknown Mexico", page 330, London, 1903.) in Mexico the

word for dancing, nolavoa, means "to work." Old men will reproach young

men saying "Why do you not go to work?" meaning why do you not dance

instead of only looking on. The chief religious sin of which the

Tarahumare is conscious is that he has not danced enough and not made

enough tesvino, his cereal intoxicant.

Dancing then is to the savage WORKING, DOING, and the dance is in its

origin an imitation or perhaps rather an intensification of processes of

work. (Karl Bucher, "Arbeit und Rhythmus", Leipzig (3rd edition), 1902,

passim.) Repetition, regular and frequent, constitutes rhythm and rhythm

heightens the sense of will power in action. Rhythmical action may even,

as seen in the dances of Dervishes, produce a condition of ecstasy.

Ecstasy among primitive peoples is a condition much valued; it is often,

though not always, enhanced by the use of intoxicants. Psychologically

the savage starts from the sense of his own will power, he stimulates

it by every means at his command. Feeling his will strongly and knowing

nothing of natural law he recognises no limits to his own power; he

feels himself a magician, a god; he does not pray, he WILLS. Moreover

he wills collectively (The subject of collective hallucination as an

element in magic has been fully worked out by MM. Hubert and Mauss.

"Theorie generale de la Magie", In "L'Annee Sociologique", 1902--3, page

140.), reinforced by the will and action of his whole tribe. Truly of

him it may be said "La vie deborde l'intelligence, l'intelligence c'est

un retrecissement." (Henri Bergson, "L'Evolution Creatrice", page 50.)

The magical extension and heightening of personality come out very

clearly in what are rather unfortunately known as MIMETIC dances. Animal

dances occur very frequently among primitive peoples. The dancers

dress up as birds, beasts, or fishes, and reproduce the characteristic

movements and habits of the animals impersonated. (So characteristic is

this impersonation in magical dancing that among the Mexicans the

word for magic, navali, means "disguise." K. Th. Preuss, "Archiv f.

Religionswissenschaft", 1906, page 97.) A very common animal dance is

the frog-dance. When it rains the frogs croak. If you desire rain you

dress up like a frog and croak and jump. We think of such a performance

as a conscious imitation. The man, we think, is more or less LIKE a

frog. That is not how primitive man thinks; indeed, he scarcely thinks

at all; what HE wants done the frog can do by croaking and jumping, so

he croaks and jumps and, for all he can, BECOMES a frog. "L'intelligence

animale JOUE sans doute les representations plutot qu'elle ne les

pense." (Bergson, "L'Evolution Creatrice", page 205.)

We shall best understand this primitive state of mind if we study

the child "born in sin." If a child is "playing at lions" he does not

IMITATE a lion, i.e. he does not consciously try to be a thing more or

less like a lion, he BECOMES one. His reaction, his terror, is the same

as if the real lion were there. It is this childlike power of utter

impersonation, of BEING the thing we act or even see acted, this

extension and intensification of our own personality that lives deep

down in all of us and is the very seat and secret of our joy in the

drama.

A child's mind is indeed throughout the best clue to the understanding

of savage magic. A young and vital child knows no limit to his own will,

and it is the only reality to him. It is not that he wants at the outset

to fight other wills, but that they simply do not exist for him. Like

the artist he goes forth to the work of creation, gloriously alone. His

attitude towards other recalcitrant wills is "they simply must." Let

even a grown man be intoxicated, be in love, or subject to an intense

excitement, the limitations of personality again fall away. Like the

omnipotent child he is again a god, and to him all things are possible.

Only when he is old and weary does he cease to command fate.

The Iroquois (Hewitt, "American Anthropologist", IV. I. page 32, 1902,

N.S.) of North America have a word, orenda, the meaning of which is

easier to describe than to define, but it seems to express the very soul

of magic. This orenda is your power to do things, your force, sometimes

almost your personality. A man who hunts well has much and good orenda;

the shy bird who escapes his snares has a fine orenda. The orenda of the

rabbit controls the snow and fixes the depth to which it will fall. When

a storm is brewing the magician is said to be making its orenda. When

you yourself are in a rage, great is your orenda. The notes of birds

are utterances of their orenda. When the maize is ripening, the Iroquois

know it is the sun's heat that ripens it, but they know more; it is the

cigala makes the sun to shine and he does it by chirping, by uttering

his orenda. This orenda is sometimes very like the Greek thumos, your

bodily life, your vigour, your passion, your power, the virtue that is

in you to feel and do. This notion of orenda, a sort of pan-vitalism, is

more fluid than animism, and probably precedes it. It is the projection

of man's inner experience, vague and unanalysed, into the outer world.

The mana of the Melanesians (Codrington, "The Melanesians", pages 118,

119, 192, Oxford, 1891.) is somewhat more specialised--all men do not

possess mana--but substantially it is the same idea. Mana is not only a

force, it is also an action, a quality, a state, at once a substantive,

an adjective, and a verb. It is very closely neighboured by the idea

of sanctity. Things that have mana are tabu. Like orenda it manifests

itself in noises, but specially mysterious ones, it is mana that is

rustling in the trees. Mana is highly contagious, it can pass from a

holy stone to a man or even to his shadow if it cross the stone. "All

Melanesian religion," Dr Codrington says, "consists in getting mana

for oneself or getting it used for one's benefit." (Codrington, "The

Melanesians", page 120, Oxford, 1891.)

Specially instructive is a word in use among the Omaka (See Prof.

Haddon, "Magic and Fetishism", page 60, London, 1906. Dr Vierkandt

("Globus", July, 1907, page 41) thinks that "Fernzauber" is a later

development from Nahzauber.), wazhin-dhedhe, "directive energy, to

send." This word means roughly what we should call telepathy, sending

out your thought or will-power to influence another and affect his

action. Here we seem to get light on what has always been a puzzle, the

belief in magic exercised at a distance. For the savage will, distance

is practically non-existent, his intense desire feels itself as

non-spatial. (This notion of mana, orenda, wazhin-dhedhe and the like

lives on among civilised peoples in such words as the Vedic brahman in

the neuter, familiar to us in its masculine form Brahman. The neuter,

brahman, means magic power of a rite, a rite itself, formula, charm,

also first principle, essence of the universe. It is own cousin to the

Greek dunamis and phusis. See MM. Hubert et Mauss, "Theorie generale de

la Magie", page 117, in "L'Annee Sociologique", VII.)

Through the examination of primitive ritual we have at last got at one

tangible, substantial factor in religion, a real live experience, the

sense, that is, of will, desire, power actually experienced in person

by the individual, and by him projected, extended into the rest of the

world.

At this stage it may fairly be asked, though the question cannot with

any certainty be answered, "at what point in the evolution of man does

this religious experience come in?"

So long as an organism reacts immediately to outside stimulus, with a

certainty and conformity that is almost chemical, there is, it would

seem, no place, no possibility for magical experience. But when the

germ appears of an intellect that can foresee an end not immediately

realised, or rather when a desire arises that we feel and recognise as

not satisfied, then comes in the sense of will and the impulse magically

to intensify that will. The animal it would seem is preserved by

instinct from drawing into his horizon things which do not immediately

subserve the conservation of his species. But the moment man's

life-power began to make on the outside world demands not immediately

and inevitably realised in action (I owe this observation to Dr K. Th.

Preuss. He writes ("Archiv f. Relig." 1906, page 98), "Die Betonung des

Willens in den Zauberakten ist der richtige Kern. In der Tat muss der

Mensch den Willen haben, sich selbst und seiner Umgebung besondere

Fahigkeiten zuzuschreiben, und den Willen hat er, sobald sein Verstand

ihn befahigt, EINE UBER DEN INSTINKT HINAUSGEHEN DER FURSORGE fur

sich zu zeigen. SO LANGE IHN DER INSTINKT ALLEIN LEITET, KONNEN

ZAUBERHANDLUNGEN NICHT ENSTEHEN." For more detailed analysis of the

origin of magic, see Dr Preuss "Ursprung der Religion und Kunst",

"Globus", LXXXVI. and LXXXVII.), then a door was opened to magic, and

in the train of magic followed errors innumerable, but also religion,

philosophy, science and art.

The world of mana, orenda, brahman is a world of feeling, desiring,

willing, acting. What element of thinking there may be in it is not yet

differentiated out. But we have already seen that a supersensuous world

of thought grew up very early in answer to other needs, a world of

sense-illusions, shadows, dreams, souls, ghosts, ancestors, names,

numbers, images, a world only wanting as it were the impulse of mana to

live as a religion. Which of the two worlds, the world of thinking or

the world of doing, developed first it is probably idle to inquire. (If

external stimuli leave on organisms a trace or record such as is known

as an Engram, this physical basis of memory and hence of thought is

almost coincident with reaction of the most elementary kind. See Mr

Francis Darwin's Presidential Address to the British Association,

Dublin, 1908, page 8, and again Bergson places memory at the very root

of conscious existence, see "L'Evolution Creatrice", page 18, "le

fond meme de notre existence consciente est memoire, c'est a dire

prolongation du passee dans le present," and again "la duree mord dans

le temps et y laisse l'enpreint de son dent," and again, "l'Evolution

implique une continuation reelle du passee par le present.")

It is more important to ask, Why do these two worlds join? Because,

it would seem, mana, the egomaniac or megalomaniac element, cannot get

satisfied with real things, and therefore goes eagerly out to a false

world, the supersensuous other-world whose growth we have sketched. This

junction of the two is fact, not fancy. Among all primitive peoples dead

men, ghosts, spirits of all kinds, become the chosen vehicle of mana.

Even to this day it is sometimes urged that religion, i.e. belief in

the immortality of the soul, is true "because it satisfies the deepest

craving of human nature." The two worlds, of mana and magic on the one

hand, of ghosts and other-world on the other, combine so easily because

they have the same laws, or rather the same comparative absence of law.

As in the world of dreams and ghosts, so in the world of mana, space and

time offer no obstacles; with magic all things are possible. In the one

world what you imagine is real; in the other what you desire is ipso

facto accomplished. Both worlds are egocentric, megalomaniac, filled to

the full with unbridled human will and desire.

We are all of us born in sin, in that sin which is to science

"the seventh and deadliest," anthropomorphism, we are egocentric,

ego-projective. Hence necessarily we make our gods in our own image.

Anthropomorphism is often spoken of in books on religion and mythology

as if it were a last climax, a splendid final achievement in religious

thought. First, we are told, we have the lifeless object as god

(fetichism), then the plant or animal (phytomorphism, theriomorphism),

and last God is incarnate in the human form divine. This way of putting

things is misleading. Anthropomorphism lies at the very beginning of

our consciousness. Man's first achievement in thought is to realise that

there is anything at all not himself, any object to his subject. When

he has achieved however dimly this distinction, still for long, for very

long he can only think of those other things in terms of himself; plants

and animals are people with ways of their own, stronger or weaker than

himself but to all intents and purposes human.

Again the child helps us to understand our own primitive selves. To

children animals are always people. You promise to take a child for a

drive. The child comes up beaming with a furry bear in her arms. You say

the bear cannot go. The child bursts into tears. You think it is because

the child cannot endure to be separated from a toy. It is no such thing.

It is the intolerable hurt done to the bear's human heart--a hurt not

to be healed by any proffer of buns. He wanted to go, but he was a shy,

proud bear, and he would not say so.

The relation of magic to religion has been much disputed. According to

one school religion develops out of magic, according to another, though

they ultimately blend, they are at the outset diametrically opposed,

magic being a sort of rudimentary and mistaken science (This view held

by Dr Frazer is fully set forth in his "Golden Bough" (2nd edition),

pages 73-79, London, 1900. It is criticised by Mr R.R. Marett in "From

Spell to Prayer", "Folk-Lore" XI. 1900, page 132, also very fully by

MM. Hubert and Mauss, "Theorie generale de la Magie", in "L'Annee

Sociologique", VII. page 1, with Mr Marett's view and with that of MM.

Hubert and Mauss I am in substantial agreement.), religion having to do

from the outset with spirits.

But, setting controversy aside, at the present stage of our inquiry

their relation becomes, I think, fairly clear. Magic is, if my view

(This view as explained above is, I believe, my own most serious

contribution to the subject. In thinking it out I was much helped by

Prof. Gilbert Murray.) be correct, the active element which informs a

supersensuous world fashioned to meet other needs. This blend of

theory and practice it is convenient to call religion. In practice the

transition from magic to religion, from Spell to Prayer, has always been

found easy. So long as mana remains impersonal you order it about; when

it is personified and bulks to the shape of an overgrown man, you drop

the imperative and cringe before it. "My will be done" is magic,

"Thy Will be done" is the last word in religion. The moral discipline

involved in the second is momentous, the intellectual advance not

striking.

I have spoken of magical ritual as though it were the informing

life-spirit without which religion was left as an empty shell. Yet the

word ritual does not, as normally used, convey to our minds this notion

of intense vitalism. Rather we associate ritual with something cut

and dried, a matter of prescribed form and monotonous repetition. The

association is correct; ritual tends to become less and less informed by

the life-impulse, more and more externalised. Dr Beck ("Die Nachahmung

und ihre Bedeutung fur Psychologie und Volkerkunde", Leipzig, 1904.)

in his brilliant monograph on "Imitation" has laid stress on the almost

boundless influence of the imitation of one man by another in the

evolution of civilisation. Imitation is one of the chief spurs to

action. Imitation begets custom, custom begets sanctity. At first all

custom is sacred. To the savage it is as much a religious duty to tattoo

himself as to sacrifice to his gods. But certain customs naturally

survive, because they are really useful; they actually have good

effects, and so need no social sanction. Others are really useless;

but man is too conservative and imitative to abandon them. These become

ritual. Custom is cautious, but la vie est aleatoire. (Bergson, op. cit.

page 143.)

Dr Beck's remarks on ritual are I think profoundly true and suggestive,

but with this reservation--they are true of ritual only when uninformed

by personal experience. The very elements in ritual on which Dr

Beck lays such stress, imitation, repetition, uniformity and social

collectivity, have been found by the experience of all time to have

a twofold influence--they inhibit the intellect, they stimulate and

suggest emotion, ecstasy, trance. The Church of Rome knows what she is

about when she prescribes the telling of the rosary. Mystery-cults and

sacraments, the lineal descendants of magic, all contain rites charged

with suggestion, with symbols, with gestures, with half-understood

formularies, with all the apparatus of appeal to emotion and will--the

more unintelligible they are the better they serve their purpose of

inhibiting thought. Thus ritual deadens the intellect and stimulates

will, desire, emotion. "Les operations magiques... sont le resultat d'une

science et d'une habitude qui exaltent la volonte humaine au-dessus de

ses limites habituelles." (Eliphas Levi, "Dogme et Rituel de la haute

Magie", II. page 32, Paris, 1861, and "A defence of Magic", by Evelyn

Underhill, "Fortnightly Review", 1907.) It is this personal EXPERIENCE,

this exaltation, this sense of immediate, non-intellectual revelation,

of mystical oneness with all things, that again and again rehabilitates

a ritual otherwise moribund.

To resume. The outcome of our examination of ORIGINES seems to be that

religious phenomena result from two delusive processes--a delusion of

the non-critical intellect, a delusion of the over-confident will. Is

religion then entirely a delusion? I think not. (I am deeply conscious

that what I say here is a merely personal opinion or sentiment,

unsupported and perhaps unsupportable by reason, and very possibly quite

worthless, but for fear of misunderstanding I prefer to state it.) Every

dogma religion has hitherto produced is probably false, but for all that

the religious or mystical spirit may be the only way of apprehending

some things and these of enormous importance. It may also be that the

contents of this mystical apprehension cannot be put into language

without being falsified and misstated, that they have rather to be felt

and lived than uttered and intellectually analysed, and thus do not

properly fall under the category of true or false, in the sense in which

these words are applied to propositions; yet they may be something

for which "true" is our nearest existing word and are often, if not

necessary at least highly advantageous to life. That is why man through

a series of more or less grossly anthropomorphic mythologies and

theologies with their concomitant rituals tries to restate them.

Meantime we need not despair. Serious psychology is yet young and has

only just joined hands with physiology. Religious students are still

hampered by mediaevalisms such as Body and Soul, and by the perhaps

scarcely less mythological segregations of Intellect, Emotion, Will. But

new facts (See the "Proceedings" of the Society for Psychical Research,

London, passim, and especially Vols. VII.-XV. For a valuable collection

of the phenomena of mysticism, see William James, "Varieties of

Religious Experience", Edinburgh, 1901-2.) are accumulating, facts about

the formation and flux of personality, and the relations between the

conscious and the sub-conscious. Any moment some great imagination may

leap out into the dark, touch the secret places of life, lay bare the

cardinal mystery of the marriage of the spatial with the non-spatial. It

is, I venture to think, towards the apprehension of such mysteries,

not by reason only, but by man's whole personality, that the religious

spirit in the course of its evolution through ancient magic and modern

mysticism is ever blindly yet persistently moving.

Be this as it may, it is by thinking of religion in the light of

evolution, not as a revelation given, not as a realite faite but as a

process, and it is so only, I think, that we attain to a spirit of real

patience and tolerance. We have ourselves perhaps learnt laboriously

something of the working of natural law, something of the limitations of

our human will, and we have therefore renounced the practice of magic.

Yet we are bidden by those in high places to pray "Sanctify this water

to the mystical washing away of sin." Mystical in this connection spells

magical, and we have no place for a god-magician: the prayer is to us

unmeaning, irreverent. Or again, after much toil we have ceased, or

hope we have ceased, to think anthropomorphically. Yet we are invited

to offer formal thanks to God for a meal of flesh whose sanctity is the

last survival of that sacrifice of bulls and goats he has renounced.

Such a ritual confuses our intellect and fails to stir our emotion. But

to others this ritual, magical or anthropomorphic as it is, is charged

with emotional impulse, and others, a still larger number, think that

they act by reason when really they are hypnotised by suggestion and

tradition; their fathers did this or that and at all costs they must do

it. It was good that primitive man in his youth should bear the yoke of

conservative custom; from each man's neck that yoke will fall, when and

because he has outgrown it. Science teaches us to await that moment with

her own inward and abiding patience. Such a patience, such a gentleness

we may well seek to practise in the spirit and in the memory of Darwin.

XXVI. EVOLUTION AND THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. By P. Giles, M.A., LL.D.

(Aberdeen),

Reader in Comparative Philology in the University of Cambridge.

In no study has the historical method had a more salutary influence

than in the Science of Language. Even the earliest records show that the

meaning of the names of persons, places, and common objects was then, as

it has always been since, a matter of interest to mankind. And in every

age the common man has regarded himself as competent without special

training to explain by inspection (if one may use a mathematical phrase)

the meaning of any words that attracted his attention. Out of this

amateur etymologising has sprung a great amount of false history, a kind

of historical mythology invented to explain familiar names. A single

example will illustrate the tendency. According to the local legend the

ancestor of the Earl of Erroll--a husbandman who stayed the flight of

his countrymen in the battle of Luncarty and won the victory over the

Danes by the help of the yoke of his oxen--exhausted with the fray

uttered the exclamation "Hoch heigh!" The grateful king about to ennoble

the victorious ploughman at once replied:

"Hoch heigh! said ye

And Hay shall ye be."

The Norman origin of the name Hay is well-known, and the battle of

Luncarty long preceded the appearance of Normans in Scotland, but the

legend nevertheless persists.

Though the earliest European treatise on philological questions which

is now extant--the "Cratylus" of Plato,--as might be expected from its

authorship, contains some acute thinking and some shrewd guesses, yet

the work as a whole is infantine in its handling of language, and it

has been doubted whether Plato was more than half serious in some of

the suggestions which he puts forward. (For an account of the "Cratylus"

with references to other literature see Sandys' "History of Classical

Scholarship", I. page 92 ff., Cambridge, 1903.) In the hands of the

Romans things were worse even than they had been in the hands of Plato

and his Greek successors. The lack of success on the part of Varro and

later Roman writers may have been partly due to the fact that, from the

etymological point of view, Latin is a much more difficult language than

Greek; it is by no means so closely connected with Greek as the ancients

imagined, and they had no knowledge of the Celtic languages from which,

on some sides at least, much greater light on the history of the

Latin language might have been obtained. Roman civilisation was a late

development compared with Greek, and its records dating earlier than

300 B.C.--a period when the best of Greek literature was already in

existence--are very few and scanty. Varro it is true was much more of

an antiquary than Plato, but his extant works seem to show that he was

rather a "dungeon of learning" than an original thinker.

A scientific knowledge of language can be obtained only by comparison

of different languages of the same family and the contrasting of their

characteristics with those of another family or other families. It never

occurred to the Greeks that any foreign language was worthy of serious

study. Herodotus and other travellers and antiquaries indeed picked up

individual words from various languages, either as being necessary

in communication with the inhabitants of the countries where they

sojourned, or because of some point which interested them personally.

Plato and others noticed the similarity of some Phrygian words to Greek,

but no systematic comparison seems ever to have been instituted.

In the Middle Ages the treatment of language was in a sense more

historical. The Middle Ages started with the hypothesis, derived

from the book of Genesis, that in the early world all men were of one

language and of one speech. Though on the same authority they believed

that the plain of Shinar has seen that confusion of tongues whence

sprang all the languages upon earth, they seem to have considered that

the words of each separate language were nevertheless derived from this

original tongue. And as Hebrew was the language of the Chosen People,

it was naturally assumed that this original tongue was Hebrew. Hence

we find Dante declaring in his treatise on the Vulgar Tongue (Dante "de

Vulgari Eloquio", I. 4.) that the first word man uttered in Paradise

must have been "El," the Hebrew name of his Maker, while as a result of

the fall of Adam, the first utterance of every child now born into this

world of sin and misery is "heu," Alas! After the splendidly engraved

bronze plates containing, as we now know, ritual regulations for certain

cults, were discovered in 1444 at the town of Gubbio, in Umbria, they

were declared, by some authorities, to be written in excellent Hebrew.

The study of them has been the fascination and the despair of many a

philologist. Thanks to the devoted labours of numerous scholars, mainly

in the last sixty years, the general drift of these inscriptions is

now known. They are the only important records of the ancient Umbrian

language, which was related closely to that of the Samnites and,

though not so closely, to that of the Romans on the other side of

the Apennines. Yet less than twenty years ago a book was published in

Germany, which boasts itself the home of Comparative Philology,

wherein the German origin of the Umbrian language was no less solemnly

demonstrated than had been its Celtic origin by Sir William Betham in

1842.

It is good that the study of language should be historical, but the

first requisite is that the history should be sound. How little had been

learnt of the true history of language a century ago may be seen from a

little book by Stephen Weston first published in 1802 and several

times reprinted, where accidental assonance is considered sufficient to

establish connection. Is there not a word "bad" in English and a word

"bad" in Persian which mean the same thing? Clearly therefore Persian

and English must be connected. The conclusion is true, but it is drawn

from erroneous premises. As stated, this identity has no more value

than the similar assonance between the English "cover" and the Hebrew

"kophar", where the history of "cover" as coming through French from a

Latin "co-operire" was even in 1802 well-known to many. To this day,

in spite of recent elaborate attempts (Most recently in H. Moller's

"Semitisch und Indogermanisch", Erster Teil, Kopenhagen, 1907.) to

establish connection between the Indo-Germanic and the Semitic families

of languages, there is no satisfactory evidence of such relation between

these families. This is not to deny the possibility of such a connection

at a very early period; it is merely to say that through the lapse

of long ages all trustworthy record of such relationship, if it ever

existed, has been, so far as present knowledge extends, obliterated.

But while Stephen Weston was publishing, with much public approval, his

collection of amusing similarities between languages--similarities which

proved nothing--the key to the historical study of at least one family

of languages had already been found by a learned Englishman in a distant

land. In 1783 Sir William Jones had been sent out as a judge in the

supreme court of judicature in Bengal. While still a young man at Oxford

he was noted as a linguist; his reputation as a Persian scholar had

preceded him to the East. In the intervals of his professional duties

he made a careful study of the language which was held sacred by

the natives of the country in which he was living. He was mainly

instrumental in establishing a society for the investigation of language

and related subjects. He was himself the first president of the society,

and in the "third anniversary discourse" delivered on February 2, 1786,

he made the following observations: "The Sanscrit language, whatever be

its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the GREEK,

more copious than the LATIN, and more exquisitely refined than either,

yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots

of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been

produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine

them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common

source, which, perhaps, no longer exists: there is a similar reason,

though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and

the Celtick, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same

origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same

family, if this was the place for discussing any question concerning the

antiquities of Persia." ("Asiatic Researches", I. page 422, "Works of

Sir W. Jones", I. page 26, London, 1799.)

No such epoch-making discovery was probably ever announced with less

flourish of trumpets. Though Sir William Jones lived for eight years

more and delivered other anniversary discourses, he added nothing of

importance to this utterance. He had neither the time nor the health

that was needed for the prosecution of so arduous an undertaking.

But the good seed did not fall upon stony ground. The news was speedily

conveyed to Europe. By a happy chance, the sudden renewal of war between

France and England in 1803 gave Friedrich Schlegel the opportunity of

learning Sanscrit from Alexander Hamilton, an Englishman who, like many

others, was confined in Paris during the long struggle with Napoleon.

The influence of Schlegel was not altogether for good in the history of

this research, but he was inspiring. Not upon him but upon Franz Bopp,

a struggling German student who spent some time in Paris and London

a dozen years later, fell the mantle of Sir William Jones. In Bopp's

Comparative Grammar of the Indo-Germanic languages which appeared in

1833, three-quarters of a century ago, the foundations of Comparative

Philology were laid. Since that day the literature of the subject has

grown till it is almost, if not altogether, beyond the power of any

single man to cope with it. But long as the discourse may be, it is but

the elaboration of the text that Sir William Jones supplied.

With the publication of Bopp's Comparative Grammar the historical study

of language was put upon a stable footing. Needless to say much remained

to be done, much still remains to be done. More than once there has been

danger of the study following erroneous paths. Its terminology and its

point of view have in some degree changed. But nothing can shake the

truth of the statement that the Indo-Germanic languages constitute in

themselves a family sprung from the same source, marked by the same

characteristics, and differentiated from all other languages by

formation, by vocabulary, and by syntax. The historical method was

applied to language long before it reached biology. Nearly a quarter of

a century before Charles Darwin was born, Sir William Jones had made the

first suggestion of a comparative study of languages. Bopp's Comparative

Grammar began to be published nine years before the first draft of

Darwin's treatise on the Origin of Species was put on paper in 1842.

It is not therefore on the history of Comparative Philology in general

that the ideas of Darwin have had most influence. Unfortunately, as

Jowett has said in the introduction to his translation of Plato's

"Republic", most men live in a corner. The specialisation of knowledge

has many advantages, but it has also disadvantages, none worse perhaps

than that it tends to narrow the specialist's horizon and to make it

more difficult for one worker to follow the advances that are being made

by workers in other departments. No longer is it possible as in earlier

days for an intellectual prophet to survey from a Pisgah height all the

Promised Land. And the case of linguistic research has been specially

hard. This study has, if the metaphor may be allowed, a very extended

frontier. On one side it touches the domain of literature, on other

sides it is conterminous with history, with ethnology and anthropology,

with physiology in so far as language is the production of the brain and

tissues of a living being, with physics in questions of pitch and stress

accent, with mental science in so far as the principles of similarity,

contrast, and contiguity affect the forms and the meanings of words

through association of ideas. The territory of linguistic study

is immense, and it has much to supply which might be useful to the

neighbours who border on that territory. But they have not regarded her

even with that interest which is called benevolent because it is not

actively maleficent. As Horne Tooke remarked a century ago, Locke had

found a whole philosophy in language. What have the philosophers done

for language since? The disciples of Kant and of Wilhelm von Humboldt

supplied her plentifully with the sour grapes of metaphysics; otherwise

her neighbours have left her severely alone save for an occasional

"Ausflug," on which it was clear they had sadly lost their bearings.

Some articles in Psychological Journals, Wundt's great work on

"Volkerpsychologie" (Erster Band: "Die Sprache", Leipzig, 1900. New

edition, 1904. This work has been fertile in producing both opponents

and supporters. Delbruck, "Grundfragen der Sprachforschung",

Strassburg, 1901, with a rejoinder by Wundt, "Sprachgeschichte" and

"Sprachpsychologie", Leipzig, 1901; L. Sutterlin, "Das Wesen der

Sprachgebilde", Heidelberg, 1902; von Rozwadowski, "Wortbildung

und Wortbedeutung", Heidelberg, 1904; O. Dittrich, "Grundzuge der

Sprachpsychologie", Halle, 1904, Ch. A. Sechehaye, "Programme et

methodes de la linguistique theorique", Paris, 1908.), and Mauthner's

brilliantly written "Beitrage zu einer Kritik der Sprache" (In three

parts: (i) "Sprache und Psychologie, (ii) "Zur Sprachwissenschaft", both

Stuttgart 1901, (iii) "Zur Grammatic und Logik" (with index to all three

volumes), Stuttgart and Berlin, 1902.) give some reason to hope that, on

one side at least, the future may be better than the past.

Where Charles Darwin's special studies came in contact with the Science

of Language was over the problem of the origin and development of

language. It is curious to observe that, where so many fields of

linguistic research have still to be reclaimed--many as yet can hardly

be said to be mapped out,--the least accessible field of all--that

of the Origin of Language--has never wanted assiduous tillers.

Unfortunately it is a field beyond most others where it may be said that

"Wilding oats and luckless darnel grow."

If Comparative Philology is to work to purpose here, it must be on

results derived from careful study of individual languages and groups of

languages. But as yet the group which Sir William Jones first mapped out

and which Bopp organised is the only one where much has been achieved.

Investigation of the Semitic group, in some respects of no less moment

in the history of civilisation and religion, where perhaps the labour

of comparison is not so difficult, as the languages differ less among

themselves, has for some reason strangely lagged behind. Some years ago

in the "American Journal of Philology" Paul Haupt pointed out that if

advance was to be made, it must be made according to the principles

which had guided the investigation of the Indo-Germanic languages to

success, and at last a Comparative Grammar of an elaborate kind is in

progress also for the Semitic languages. (Brockelmann, "Vergleichende

Grammatik der semitischen Sprachen", Berlin, 1907 ff. Brockelmann and

Zimmern had earlier produced two small hand-books. The only large work

was William Wright's "Lectures on the Comparative Grammar of the

Semitic Languages", Cambridge, 1890.) For the great group which includes

Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish and many languages of northern Asia, a

beginning, but only a beginning has been made. It may be presumed from

the great discoveries which are in progress in Turkestan that presently

much more will be achieved in this field. But for a certain utterance

to be given by Comparative Philology on the question of the origin of

language it is necessary that not merely for these languages but also

for those in other quarters of the globe, the facts should be collected,

sifted and tabulated. England rules an empire which contains a greater

variety of languages by far than were ever held under one sway before.

The Government of India is engaged in producing, under the editorship of

Dr Grierson, a linguistic survey of India, a remarkable undertaking and,

so far as it has gone, a remarkable achievement. Is it too much to ask

that, with the support of the self-governing colonies, a similar survey

should be undertaken for the whole of the British Empire?

Notwithstanding the great number of books that have been written on the

origin of language in the last three and twenty centuries, the results

of the investigation which can be described as certain are very meagre.

The question originally raised was whether language came into being

thesei or phusei, by convention or by nature. The first alternative, in

its baldest form at least, has passed from out the field of controversy.

No one now claims that names were given to living things or objects or

activities by formal agreement among the members of an early community,

or that the first father of mankind passed in review every living thing

and gave it its name. Even if the record of Adam's action were to be

taken literally there would still remain the question, whence had he

this power? Did he develop it himself or was it a miraculous gift with

which he was endowed at his creation? If the latter, then as Wundt says

("Volkerpsychologie", I. 2, page 585.), "the miracle of language is

subsumed in the miracle of creation." If Adam developed language of

himself, we are carried over to the alternative origin of phusei. On

this hypothesis we must assume that the natural growth which modern

theories of development regard as the painful progress of multitudinous

generations was contracted into the experience of a single individual.

But even if the origin of language is admitted to be NATURAL there may

still be much variety of signification attached to the word: NATURE,

like most words which are used by philosophers, has accumulated

many meanings, and as research into the natural world proceeds, is

accumulating more.

Forty years ago an animated controversy raged among the supporters of

the theories which were named for short the bow-wow, the pooh-pooh and

the ding-dong theories of the origin of language. The third, which was

the least tenacious of life, was made known to the English-speaking

world by the late Professor Max Muller who, however, when questioned,

repudiated it as his own belief. ("Science of Thought", London, 1887,

page 211.) It was taken by him from Heyse's lectures on language which

were published posthumously by Steinthal. Put shortly the theory is

that "everything which is struck, rings. Each substance has its peculiar

ring. We can tell the more or less perfect structure of metals by their

vibrations, by the answer which they give. Gold rings differently

from tin, wood rings differently from stone; and different sounds are

produced according to the nature of each percussion. It may be the same

with man, the most highly organised of nature's work." (Max Muller as

above, translating from Heyse.) Max Muller's repudiation of this theory

was, however, not very whole-hearted for he proceeds later in the same

argument: "Heyse's theory, which I neither adopted nor rejected, but

which, as will be seen, is by no means incompatible with that which for

many years has been gaining on me, and which of late has been so clearly

formulated by Professor Noire, has been assailed with ridicule and torn

to pieces, often by persons who did not even suspect how much truth was

hidden behind its paradoxical appearance. We are still very far from

being able to identify roots with nervous vibrations, but if it should

appear hereafter that sensuous vibrations supply at least the raw

material of roots, it is quite possible that the theory, proposed by

Oken and Heyse, will retain its place in the history of the various

attempts at solving the problem of the origin of language, when other

theories, which in our own days were received with popular applause,

will be completely forgotten." ("Science of Thought", page 212.)

Like a good deal else that has been written on the origin of language,

this statement perhaps is not likely to be altogether clear to the plain

man, who may feel that even the "raw material of roots" is some distance

removed from nervous vibrations, though obviously without the existence

of afferent and efferent nerves articulate speech would be impossible.

But Heyse's theory undoubtedly was that every thought or idea which

occurred to the mind of man for the first time had its own special

phonetic expression, and that this responsive faculty, when its object

was thus fulfilled, became extinct. Apart from the philosophical

question whether the mind acts without external stimulus, into which it

is not necessary to enter here, it is clear that this theory can neither

be proved nor disproved, because it postulates that this faculty existed

only when language first began, and later altogether disappeared. As we

have already seen, it is impossible for us to know what happened at the

first beginnings of language, because we have no information from any

period even approximately so remote; nor are we likely to attain it.

Even in their earliest stages the great families of language which

possess a history extending over many centuries--the Indo-Germanic and

the Semitic--have very little in common. With the exception of Chinese,

the languages which are apparently of a simpler or more primitive

formation have either a history which, compared with that of the

families mentioned, is very short, or, as in the case of the vast

majority, have no history beyond the time extending only over a few

years or, at most, a few centuries when they have been observed by

competent scholars of European origin. But, if we may judge by the

history of geology and other studies, it is well to be cautious in

assuming for the first stages of development forces which do not operate

in the later, unless we have direct evidence of their existence.

It is unnecessary here to enter into a prolonged discussion of the other

views christened by Max Muller, not without energetic protest from their

supporters, the bow-wow and pooh-pooh theories of language. Suffice it

to say that the former recognises as a source of language the imitation

of the sounds made by animals, the fall of bodies into water or on

to solid substances and the like, while the latter, also called the

interjectional theory, looks to the natural ejaculations produced by

particular forms of effort for the first beginnings of speech. It would

be futile to deny that some words in most languages come from

imitation, and that others, probably fewer in number, can be traced

to ejaculations. But if either of these sources alone or both in

combination gave rise to primitive speech, it clearly must have been a

simple form of language and very limited in amount. There is no reason

to think that it was otherwise. Presumably in its earliest stages

language only indicated the most elementary ideas, demands for food

or the gratification of other appetites, indications of danger, useful

animals and plants. Some of these, such as animals or indications of

danger, could often be easily represented by imitative sounds: the need

for food and the like could be indicated by gesture and natural cries.

Both sources are verae causae; to them Noire, supported by Max Muller,

has added another which has sometimes been called the Yo-heave-ho

theory. Noire contends that the real crux in the early stages of

language is for primitive man to make other primitive men understand

what he means. The vocal signs which commend themselves to one may not

have occurred to another, and may therefore be unintelligible. It may be

admitted that this difficulty exists, but it is not insuperable. The

old story of the European in China who, sitting down to a meal and being

doubtful what the meat in the dish might be, addressed an interrogative

Quack-quack? to the waiter and was promptly answered by Bow-wow,

illustrates a simple situation where mutual understanding was easy.

But obviously many situations would be more complex than this, and to

grapple with them Noire has introduced his theory of communal action.

"It was common effort directed to a common object, it was the most

primitive (uralteste) labour of our ancestors, from which sprang

language and the life of reason." (Noire "Der Ursprung der Sprache",

page 331, Mainz, 1877.) As illustrations of such common effort he cites

battle cries, the rescue of a ship running on shore (a situation not

likely to occur very early in the history of man), and others. Like Max

Muller he holds that language is the utterance and the organ of thought

for mankind, the one characteristic which separates man from the

brute. "In common action the word was first produced; for long it was

inseparably connected with action; through long-continued connection it

gradually became the firm, intelligible symbol of action, and then in

its development indicated also things of the external world in so far

as the action affected them and finally the sound began to enter into a

connexion with them also." (Op. cit. page 339.) In so far as this theory

recognises language as a social institution it is undoubtedly correct.

Darwin some years before Noire had pointed to the same social origin

of language in the fourth chapter of his work on "The Expression of the

Emotions in Man and Animals". "Naturalists have remarked, I believe with

truth, that social animals, from habitually using their vocal organs

as a means of intercommunication, use them on other occasions much more

freely than other animals... The principle, also, of association, which

is so widely extended in its power, has likewise played its part. Hence

it allows that the voice, from having been employed as a serviceable

aid under certain conditions, inducing pleasure, pain, rage, etc., is

commonly used whenever the same sensations or emotions are excited,

under quite different conditions, or in a lesser degree." ("The

Expression of the Emotions", page 84 (Popular Edition, 1904).

Darwin's own views on language which are set forth most fully in

"The Descent of Man" (page 131 ff. (Popular Edition, 1906).) are

characterised by great modesty and caution. He did not profess to be a

philologist and the facts are naturally taken from the best known works

of the day (1871). In the notes added to the second edition he remarks

on Max Muller's denial of thought without words, "what a strange

definition must here be given to the word thought!" (Op. cit. page

135, footnote 63.) He naturally finds the origin of language in "the

imitation and modification of various natural sounds, the voices of

other animals, and man's own instinctive cries aided by signs and

gestures (op. cit. page 132.)... As the voice was used more and more,

the vocal organs would have been strengthened and perfected through the

principle of the inherited effects of use; and this would have reacted

on the power of speech." (Op. cit. page 133.) On man's own instinctive

cries, he has more to say in "The Expression of the Emotions". (Page 93

(Popular Edition, 1904) and elsewhere.) These remarks have been utilised

by Prof. Jespersen of Copenhagen in propounding an ingenious theory of

his own to the effect that speech develops out of singing. ("Progress in

Language", page 361, London, 1894.)

For many years and in many books Max Muller argued against Darwin's

views on evolution on the one ground that thought is impossible without

speech; consequently as speech is confined to the human race, there is a

gulf which cannot be bridged between man and all other creatures.

(Some interesting comments on the theory will be found in a lecture

on "Thought and Language" in Samuel Butler's "Essays on Life, Art and

Science", London, 1908.) On the title-page of his "Science of Thought"

he put the two sentences "No Reason without Language: No Language

without Reason." It may be readily admitted that the second dictum is

true, that no language properly so-called can exist without reason.

Various birds can learn to repeat words or sentences used by their

masters or mistresses. In most cases probably the birds do not attach

their proper meaning to the words they have learnt; they repeat them in

season and out of season, sometimes apparently for their own amusement,

generally in the expectation, raised by past experience, of being

rewarded for their proficiency. But even here it is difficult to prove

a universal negative, and most possessors of such pets would repudiate

indignantly the statement that the bird did not understand what was said

to it, and would also contend that in many cases the words which it used

were employed in their ordinary meaning. The first dictum seems to be

inconsistent with fact. The case of deaf mutes, such as Laura Bridgeman,

who became well educated, or the still more extraordinary case of Helen

Keller, deaf, dumb, and blind, who in spite of these disadvantages

has learnt not only to reason but to reason better than the average of

persons possessed of all their senses, goes to show that language and

reason are not necessarily always in combination. Reason is but the

conscious adaptation of means to ends, and so defined is a faculty which

cannot be denied to many of the lower animals. In these days when so

many books on Animal Intelligence are issued from the press, it seems

unnecessary to labour the point. Yet none of these animals, except by

parrot-imitation, makes use of speech, because man alone possesses in a

sufficient degree of development the centres of nervous energy which are

required for the working of articulation in speech. On this subject much

investigation was carried on during the last years of Darwin's life

and much more in the period since his death. As early as 1861 Broca,

following up observations made by earlier French writers, located the

centre of articulate speech in the third left frontal convolution of

the brain. In 1876 he more definitely fixed the organ of speech in

"the posterior two-fifths of the third frontal convolution" (Macnamara,

"Human Speech", page 197, London, 1908.), both sides and not merely the

left being concerned in speech production. Owing however to the greater

use by most human beings of the right side of the body, the left side of

the brain, which is the motor centre for the right side of the body, is

more highly developed than its right side, which moves the left side

of the body. The investigations of Professors Ferrier, Sherrington and

Grunbaum have still more precisely defined the relations between brain

areas and certain groups of muscles. One form of aphasia is the result

of injury to or disease in the third frontal convolution because the

motor centre is no longer equal to the task of setting the necessary

muscles in motion. In the brain of idiots who are unable to speak,

the centre for speech is not developed. (Op. cit. page 226.) In the

anthropoid apes the brain is similarly defective, though it has been

demonstrated by Professors Cunningham and Marchand "that there is a

tendency, especially in the gorilla's brain, for the third frontal

convolution to assume the human form... But if they possessed a centre

for speech, those parts of the hemispheres of their brains which form

the mechanism by which intelligence is elaborated are so ill-developed,

as compared with the rest of their bodies, that we can not conceive,

even with more perfect frontal convolutions, that these animals could

formulate ideas expressible in intelligent speech." (Op. cit. page 223.)