_Religion's First Postulate: the Quasi-Human God_
It is with purpose that I use the word _assumption_. As a matter of
history, the existence of a quasi-human God has always been an
assumption or postulate. It is something which men have all along taken
for granted. It probably never occurred to anybody to try to prove the
existence of such a God until it was doubted, and doubts on that subject
are very modern. Omitting from the account a few score of ingenious
philosophers, it may be said that all mankind, the wisest and the
simplest, have taken for granted the existence of a Deity, or deities,
of a psychical nature more or less similar to that of Humanity. Such a
postulate has formed a part of all human thinking from primitive ages
down to the present time. The forms in which it has appeared have been
myriad in number, but all have been included in this same fundamental
assumption. The earliest forms were those which we call fetishism and
animism. In fetishism the wind that blows a tree down is endowed with
personality and supposed to exert conscious effort; in animism some
ghost of a dead man is animating that gust of wind. In either case a
conscious volition similar to our own, but outside of us, is supposed to
be at work. There has been some discussion as to whether fetishism or
animism is the more primitive, and some writers would regard fetishism
as a special case of animism; but it is not necessary to my present
purpose that such questions should be settled. The main point is this,
that in the earliest phases of theism each operation of Nature was
supposed to have some quasi-human personality behind it. Such phases we
find among contemporary savages, and there is abundant evidence of
their former existence among peoples now civilized. In the course of
ages there was a good deal of generalizing done. Poseidon could shake
the land and preside over the sea, angry Apollo could shoot arrows
tipped with pestilence, mischievous Hermes could play pranks in the
summer breezes, while as lord over all, though with somewhat fitful
sway, stood Zeus on the summit of Olympus, gathering the rain-clouds and
wielding the thunderbolt. Nothing but increasing knowledge of nature was
needed to convert such Polytheism into Monotheism, even into the strict
Monotheism of our own time, in which the whole universe is the multiform
manifestation of a single Deity that is still regarded as in some real
and true sense quasi-human. As the notion of Deity has thus been
gradually generalized, from a thousand local gods to one omnipresent
God, it has been gradually stripped of its grosser anthropomorphic
vestments. The tutelar Deity of a savage clan is supposed to share with
his devout worshippers in the cannibal banquet; the Gods of Olympus
made war and love, and were moved to fits of inextinguishable laughter.
From our modern Monotheism such accidents of humanity are eliminated,
but the notion of a kinship between God and man remains, and is rightly
felt to be essential to theism. Take away from our notion of God the
human element, and the theism instantly vanishes; it ceases to be a
notion of God. We may retain an abstract symbol to which we apply some
such epithet as Force, or Energy, or Power, but there is nothing
theistic in this. Some ingenious philosopher may try to persuade us to
the contrary, but the Human Soul knows better; it knows at least what it
wants; it has asked for Theology, not for Dynamics, and it resents all
such attempts to palm off upon it stones for bread.
Our philosopher will here perhaps lift up his hands in dismay and cry,
"Hold! what matters it what the Human Soul wants? Are cravings,
forsooth, to be made to do duty as reasons?" It is proper to reply that
we are trying to deal with this whole subject after the manner of the
naturalist, which is to describe things as they exist and account for
them as best we may. I say, then, that mankind have framed, and for long
ages maintained, a notion of God into which there enters a human
element. Now if it should ever be possible to abolish that human
element, it would not be possible to cheat mankind into accepting the
non-human remnant of the notion as an equivalent of the full notion of
which they had been deprived. Take away from our symbolic conception of
God the human element, and that aspect of theism which has from the
outset chiefly interested mankind is gone.
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V
_Religions Second Postulate: the undying Human Soul_
That supremely interesting aspect of theism belongs to it as part and
parcel of the general belief in an Unseen World, in which human beings
have an interest. The belief in the personal continuance of the
individual human soul after death is a very ancient one. The savage
custom of burying utensils and trinkets for the use of the deceased
enables us to trace it back into the Glacial Period. We may safely say
that for much more than a hundred thousand years mankind have regarded
themselves as personally interested in two worlds, the physical world
which daily greets our waking senses, and another world, comparatively
dim and vaguely outlined, with which the psychical side of humanity is
more closely connected. The belief in the Unseen World seems to be
coextensive with theism; the animism of the lowest savages includes
both. No race or tribe of men has ever been found destitute of the
belief in a ghost-world. Now, a ghost-world implies the personal
continuance of human beings after death, and it also implies identity of
nature between the ghosts of man and the indwelling spirits of sun,
wind, and flood. It is chiefly because these ideas are so closely
interwoven in savage thought that it is often so difficult to
discriminate between fetishism and animism. These savage ideas are of
course extremely crude in their symbolism. With the gradual civilization
of human thinking, the refinement in the conception of the Deity is
paralleled by the refinement in the conception of the Other World. From
Valhalla to Dante's Paradise, what an immeasurable distance the human
mind has travelled! In our modern Monotheism the assumption of kinship
between God and the Human Soul is the assumption that there is in Man a
psychical element identical in nature with that which is eternal. Belief
in a quasi-human God and belief in the Soul's immortality thus appear in
their origin and development, as in their ultimate significance, to be
inseparably connected. They are part and parcel of one and the same
efflorescence of the human mind. Mankind has always entertained them in
common, and so entertains them now; and were it possible (which it is
not) for science to disprove the Soul's immortality, a theism deprived
of this element would surely never be accepted as an equivalent for the
theism entertained before. The Positivist argument that the only worthy
immortality is survival in the grateful remembrance of one's fellow
creatures would hardly be regarded as anything but a travesty and trick.
If the world's long cherished beliefs are to fall, in God's name let
them fall, but save us from the intellectual hypocrisy that goes about
pretending we are none the poorer!
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