VI

Let us consider this history a little.

Consciousness of feeling, psychologists are agreed, is prior to

consciousness of the objects of feeling. The will's inward strain,

intense throbs of sensation, pangs and pulses of pleasure and pain make

up the bulk of the undifferentiated primal sum of sentience. The soul is

aware of herself before she is aware of her world. A childish or

primeval mind, face to face with an environment actual, dreamt, or

remembered, does not distinguish from its privacy the objective or the

common. All is shot through with the pathos and triumph which come

unaccountably as desired good or evaded evil; all has the same tensions

and effects ends in the same manner as the laboring, straining,

volitional life within. These feelings, residuary qualities, the last

floating, unattached sediment of a world organized by association and

classified by activity, these subtlest of all its beings, finally termed

mind and self, at first suffuse and dominate the whole. Even when

objects are distinguished and their places determined these are not

absent; and the so-called pre-animistic faiths are not the less suffused

with spirit because the spiritual has not yet received a local

habitation and name. They differ from animism in this only, not in that

their objects are characterized by lack of animation and vital tonality.

And this is necessary. For religion must be anthropopathic before it

becomes anthropomorphic; since feeling, eloquent of good and evil, is

the first and deepest essence of consciousness, and only by its

wandering from home are forms distinguished and man's nature separated

from that of things and beasts.

When practice has cooerdinated activity, and reflection distinguished

places, animism proper arises. First the environment is felt as the

soul's kindred; then its operations are fancied in terms dramatic and

personal. The world becomes almost instinctively defined as a hegemony

of spirits similar to man, with powers and passions like his, and

directed for his destruction or conservation, but chiefly for their own

glory and self-maintenance. The vast "pathetic fallacy" makes religion

of the whole of life. It is at this point indistinguishable from science

or ethics. It is, in fact, the pregnant matrix of all subsequent

discourse about the universe. Its character is such that it becomes the

determinating factor of human adaptations to the conditions imposed by

the environment, by envisaging the enduring and efficacious elements

among these conditions as persons. The satisfaction of felt needs is

rendered thereby inevitably social; and in a like manner fear of their

frustration cannot be unsocial. Life is conceived and acted out as a

miraculous traffic with the universe; and the universe as a band of

spirits who monopolize the good and make free gifts of evil, who can be

feared, threatened, worshiped, scolded, wheedled, coaxed, bribed,

deceived, enslaved, held in awe, and above all, used for the prosecution

of desiderated ends and the fulfilment of instinctive desires. The first

recorded cognized order is a moral order in which fragmentary feelings,

instinctive impulsions, and spontaneous imaginings are hypostatized,

ideas are identified with their causes, all the contents of the

immature, sudden, primitive, blundering consciousness receive a vital

figure and a proper name. So man makes himself more at home in the world

without,--that world which enslaves the spirit so fearfully and with

such strangeness, and which just as miraculously yields such ecstasy,

such power, such unaccountable good! In this immediate sense the soul

controls the world by becoming symbolic of it; it is the world's first

language. It is, however, an inarticulate, blundering, incoherent thing

and the cues which it furnishes to the nature of the environment are as

often as not dangerous and misleading. When bows and arrows, crystals

and caves, clouds and waters, dung and dew, mountains and trees, beasts

and visions, are treated as chiefs and men must be treated, then the

moral regimen initiated, taking little account of the barest real

qualities manifested by these things, and attributing the maximum

importance to the characters postulated and foreign, is successful

neither in allaying evil nor in extending good. Its benefits are

adventitious and its malfeasance constant. Food buried with the dead was

food lost; blood smeared upon the bow to make it shoot better served

only to make the hands unskilful by impeding their activity. Initiation,

ceremony, sacrificial ritual, fasting, and isolation involved

privations for which no adequate return was recovered, even by the

medicine-man whose absolute and ephemeral power needed only the betrayal

of circumstances for its own destruction, taking him along with it,

oftener than not, to disgrace or death.

As the cumulus of experience on experience grew greater, chance

violations of tradition, or custom, or ritual, or formula achieving for

the violator a mastery or stability which performance and obedience

failed to achieve, the new heresy became the later orthodoxy, for in

religion, as in all other matters human, nothing succeeds like success.

An impotent god has no divinity; a disused potency means a dying life

among the immortals as on the earth. And as the gods themselves seemed

often to give their worshipers the lie, the futility of the personal and

dramatic definitions of the immediate environment became slowly

recognized, the recognition varying in extent, and clearer in practice

than in discourse.

Accordingly the most primitive of the animisms underwent a necessary

modification. The plasticity of objects under destructive treatment, the

impotence of _taboo_ before elementary needs, the adequate satisfactions

which violations of the divine law brought,--these killed many gods and

drove others from their homes in the hearts of things. The objects so

purged became matters of accurate knowledge. Where animation is denied

the _whole_ environment, wisdom begins to distinguish between

spirit-haunted matter and the purely material; knowledge of person and

knowledge of things differentiate, and science, the impersonal and more

potent knowledge of the environment, properly begins. Familiarity leads

to control, control to contempt, and for the unreflective mind,

personality is not, as for the sophisticated, an attribute of the

contemptible. The incalculable appearance of thunder, the magic greed of

fire, the malice, the spontaneity, the thresh and pulse as of life which

seems to characterize whatever is capricious or impenetrable or

uncontrollable are too much like the felt throbs of consciousness to

become dehumanized. To the variable alone, therefore, is transcendent

animation attributed. Not the seasonal variation of the sun's heat, but

the joy and the sorrow of which his heat is the occasion made him

divine. When the gods appear, to take the place of the immanent spirits

immediately present in things, they appear, therefore, as already

transcendent, with habitations just beyond the well-known: on high

mountains, in the skies, in dark forests, in caves, in all regions

feared or unexplored. But chiefly the gods inhabit those spaces whence

issue the power of darkness and destruction, particularly the heaven, a

word whose meaning is now, as it was primitively, identical with

divinity. The savage becomes a pagan by giving concrete personality to

the dreadful unknown. Thence it is that the ancient poet assigns the

gods a lineage of fear; and fear may truly be said to have made the

gods, in so far as the gods personify the fear which made them.

The moral level of these figments alters with the level of their

habitation; their power varies with their remoteness; Zeus lives in the

highest heaven and is arbiter of the destiny of both gods and man. To

him and to his like there cannot be the relation of equality which is

sustained between men and spirits of the lower order. His very love is

blasting; interchange of commodities, good for good and evil for evil is

not possible where he is concerned. Gods of the higher order he

exemplifies, even all the gods of Olympus, of the Himalayas, of

Valhalla, are literally beings invoked and implored, as well as dwellers

in heaven. To them man pays a toll on all excellence he gains or finds;

libations and burnt-offerings, the fat and the first fruits: he exists

by their sufferance and serves their caprice. He is their toy, born for

their pleasure, and living by their need.

But just because men conceive themselves to be play-things of the gods,

they define in the gods the ideals of mankind. For the divine power is

power to live forever, and the sum of human desire is just the desire to

maintain its humanity in freedom and happiness endlessly. And exactly

those capacities and instruments of self-maintenance,--all that is

beauty, or truth, or goodness, the very essence of value in any of its

forms,--the gods are conceived to possess and to control: these they may

grant, withhold, destroy. They are as eternal as their habitations, the

mountains; as ruthless as their element, the sea; as omnipresent as the

heavens, their home. To become like the gods, therefore, the masters and

fathers of men, is to remain eternally and absolutely human: so that who

is most like them on earth takes his place beside them in heaven.

Hercules and Elias and Krishna, Caka-Muni and Ishvara, Jesus and Baha

Ullah. Nay, they are the very gods themselves, manifest as men! The

history of the gods thus presents a double aspect: it is first a

characterization of the important objects and processes of nature and

their survival-values,--the sun, thunder, rain, and earthquakes;

dissolution, rebirth, and love; and again it is the narration of

activities native and delightful to mankind. Zeus is a promiscuous lover

as well as a wielder of thunderbolts; Apollo not only drives the chariot

of the sun; he plays and dances, discourses melody and herds sheep.

But while the portrait of the heart's desire in fictitious adventures of

divinity endears the gods to the spirit, the exploration of the elements

in the environment whose natures they dramatically express, destroys

their force, reduces their number, and drives them still further into

the unknown. Olympus is surrendered for the planets and the fixed stars.

With remoteness of location comes transmutation of character. The forces

of the environment which were the divinity are now conceived as

instrumental to its uses. Its power is more subtly described; its nature

becomes a more purely ideal expression of human aspiration. Physical

remoteness and metaphysical ultimacy are akin. God among the stars is

better than God on Olympus. If, as with the Parsees, the unfavorable

character of the environment is expressed in another and equal

being,--the devil, then the god of good must, in the symbolic struggle,

become the ultimate victor and remain the more potent director of man's

destiny. In religion, therefore, when the mind grows at all by

experience, monism develops spontaneously. For the character of the god

becomes increasingly more relevant to hope than to the conditions of

hope's satisfaction. And what man first of all and beyond all aspires

to, is that single, undivided good,--the free flow of his unitary life,

stable, complete, eternal. There is hence always to be found a chief and

father among the gods who, as mankind gain in wisdom and in material

power, consumes his mates and his children like Kronos or Jahweh,

inherits their attributes and performs their functions. The chief

divinity becomes the only divinity; a god becomes God. But divinity, in

becoming one and unique, becomes also transcendent. Monotheism pushes

God altogether beyond the sensible environment. Personality, instead of

being the nature of the world, has become its ground and cause, and all

that mankind loves is conserved, in order that man, whom God loves, may

have his desire and live forever. Life is eternal and happiness

necessary, beyond nature,--in heaven. Finally, in transcendental

idealism, the poles meet; what has been put eternally apart is eternally

united; the immaterial, impalpable, transcendent heaven is made one and

continuous with the gross and unhappy natural world. One _is_ the other;

the other the one. God _is_ the world and transcends it; _is_ the evil

and the good which conquers and consumes that evil. The environment

becomes thus described as a single, eternal, conscious unity, in which

all the actual but transitory values of the actual but transitory life

are conserved and eternalized. In a description of God such as Royce's

or Aristotle's the environment is the eternity of all its constituents

that are dearest to man. Religion, which began as a definition of the

environment as it moved and controlled mankind, ends by describing it

as mankind desires it to be. The environment is now the aforementioned

ideal socius or self which satisfies perfectly all human requirements.

Pluralistic and quarrelsome animism has become monistic and harmonious

spiritism. Forces have turned to excellences and needs to satisfactions.

Necessity has been transmuted to Providence, sin has been identified

with salvation, value with existence, and existence with impotence and

illusion before Providence, salvation, and value.