"THE MAKING OF RELIGION."
Some twelve years since we read Mr. Tylor's well-known and able work on
_Primitive Culture_, and were much impressed with the evident
fair-mindedness and courageous impartiality which distinguished the
author so notably from the Clodds, the Allens, the Laings, and other
popularizers of the uncertain results of evolution-philosophy. For this
very reason we made a careful analysis of the whole work, and more
particularly of his "animistic" hypothesis, and laid it aside, waiting,
according to our wont, for further light bearing upon a difficulty
wherewith we felt ourselves then incompetent to deal. This further light
has been to some extent supplied to us by Mr. Andrew Lang's _Making of
Religion_, which deals mainly with that theory of animism which is
propounded by Mr. Tylor, and unhesitatingly accepted, dogmatically
preached, and universally assumed, by the crowd of sciolists who follow
like jackals in the lion's wake. Without denying the value of our
conceptions of God and of the human soul, Mr. Tylor believes that these
conceptions, however true in themselves, originated on the part of
primitive man in fallacious reasoning from the data of dreams and of
like states of illusory vision. He assumes, perhaps with some truth,
that the distinction between dream and reality is more faintly marked in
the less developed mind; in the child than in the adult, in the savage
than in the civilized man. Hence a belief arises in a filmy phantasmal
self that wanders abroad in sleep and leaves the body untenanted, and
meets and converses with other phantasmal selves. Nor is it hard to see
how death, being viewed as a permanent sleep, should be ascribed to the
final abandonment of the body by its "dream-stuff" occupant. Whether as
dreaded or loved or both, this ever-gathering crowd of disembodied
spirits wins for itself a certain _cultus_ of praise and propitiation,
and reverence, and is humoured with food-offerings and similar
sacrifices. Nor is it long before the form of an earthly polity is
transferred to that unearthly city of the dead, till for one reason or
another some jealous ghost gains a monarchic supremacy over his
brethren, and thus polytheism gives place to monotheism. It need not be
that this supreme deity is always conceived as a defunct ancestor, once
embodied, but no longer in the body. Rather it would seem that the
primitive savage, having once arrived at the conception of a ghost,
passes by generalization to that of incorporeal beings unborn and
undying, of spirits whose presence and power is revealed in stocks and
stones, or in idols shaped humanwise--spirits who preside over trees,
rivers, and elements, over species and classes and departments of
Nature, over tribes and peoples and nations; until, as before, the
struggle for existence or some other cause gives supremacy to some one
god fittest to survive either through being more conceivable, or more
powerful, or in some other way more popular than the rest of the
pantheon.
Again, it is assumed that the gods of primitive man are non-ethical,
that they do not "make for righteousness;" that they are at most jealous
powers to be feared and propitiated. When the savage speaks of a god as
good, he only means "favourable to me," "on my side;" he does not mean
"good to me if I am good." God is conceived first as power and force;
then as non-moral wisdom, or cunning, and only in the very latest
developments as holy and just and loving.
Starting with the assumptions of evolutionists, the theory is plausible
enough. Nor is it inconceivable that God, without using error and evil
directly as a means to truth and good, should passively permit error for
the sake of the truth that He foresees will come out of it. Astrology
was not incipient astronomy; nor was alchemy primitive chemistry; the
end and aim in each case was wholly different. Yet the pseudo-science
gave birth to the true; as false premisses often lead by bad logic to
sound conclusions. Totemism, "a perfectly crazy and degrading belief,"
says Mr. Lang, "rendered possible--nay, inevitable--the union of hostile
groups into large and relatively peaceful tribal societies.... We should
never have educated the world thus; and we do not see why it should have
been thus done. But we are very anthropomorphic, and totally ignorant of
the conditions of the problem." In like manner it might have been, that
God willed to let men wander through the slums and backways of animism
into the open road of theism.
But our concern is not with what might have been, but with what was.
Mr. Lang contends, first, that belief in spirits and in a circumambient
spiritual world, more probably originated in certain real or imaginary
experiences of supernormal phenomena, than in a fallacious explanation
of dreams; then, that belief in a supreme god is most probably not
derived from or dependent upon belief in ghosts.
Consistently with the whole trend of his thought in his recent work
connected with psychical research, in _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_, in
_Cock-Lane and Common-Sense_, Mr. Lang begins by entering a protest
against the attitude observed towards the subject by contemporary
science, especially by anthropology, which, as having been so lately "in
the same condemnation," might be expected to show itself superior to
that injustice which it had itself so much reason to complain of. Yet
anthropology, abandoning the first principles of modern science, still
refuses to listen to the facts alleged by psychical research, and
justifies its refusal on Hume's oft-exploded fallacy, namely, on an _à
priori_ conviction of their impossibility and therefore of their
non-occurrence.
However wide the range of experience upon which physical generalizations
are based, it can never be so wide as on this score alone to prove the
inherent possibility of exceptions; more especially when we consider the
confinement of the human race to what is relatively a momentary
existence on a whirling particle of dust in a sandstorm. There may
indeed be abundant evidence of a certain impetus or tendency enduring
from a comparatively distant and indefinite past and making for an
equally indefinite future; but there is not, cannot be evidence against
the possibility of interference from other laws whose paths, at points
unknown and incalculable, intersect those followed by the (to us)
ordinary course of events.
And in this wholesome agnosticism we are confirmed when we see that
while some animals are deprived of certain senses which we possess, and
all of them of the gift of reason, others are apparently endowed with
senses unknown to us, and are taught by seeming instincts which surpass
what reason could effect; whence we may infer that the likelihood of our
being _en rapport_ with the greater part of the _possible_ phenomena
amidst which we live, or of our possessing all possible senses or the
best of those possible, is infinitely small. What a magician a man with
eyes would be among a race of sightless men; or a man with ears among a
deaf population! How studiously would the scientists explain the effects
of sight as produced by subtilty of hearing; and those of hearing as due
to abnormal sensitiveness in some other respect!
But though there be no _à priori_ impossibility in deviations from the
beaten track, yet there is a certain _à priori_ improbability which may
seem to justify those who refuse to go into alleged instances of the
supernormal. There is a story against Thomas Aquinas, that on being
invited by a frisky brother-monk to come and see a cow flying, or some
such marvel, he gravely came and saw not, but expressed himself far more
astounded at the miracle that a religious man should say "the thing
which was not." This is certainly a glorious antithesis to Hume's
position. Whether we take it to illustrate the Saint's extreme lack of
humour, or a subtler depth of humour veiled under stolidity, or his
rigorous veracity, or his guileless confidence in the veracity of
others, we certainly cannot approve it as an example of the attitude we
ought to observe with regard to every newly recounted marvel. Truly
there might be more liberality, more enlightenment, more imagination in
such a ready credulity, than in the wall-eyed, ear-stopping scepticism
of popular science; but the mere inner possibility of a recounted marvel
does not oblige us to search into the matter unless the evidence offered
bear some reasonable proportion to the burden it has to support. That
this is the case as regards crystal-gazing, telepathy, possession, and
kindred manifestation, is what Mr. Lang contends; nor would he have any
quarrel with the anthropologists were they not fully impressed with the
importance of similar or even weaker cumulative evidence for conclusions
which happen to be in harmony with their preconceived hypotheses. Where
such evidence exists it must be faced, and at least its existence must
be explained.
True criticism should either account for the seeming breach of
uniformity, by reducing it to law; or else should show how the assertion
if false ever gained credence; but in no case is it scientific to put
aside, on an _à priori_ assumption, evidence that is offered from all
sides in great abundance. Psychic research is daily applying to that
tangled mass of world-wide evidence ancient and modern for the existence
of an X-region of experience, those same critical and historical
principles which created modern science. Men who, as often as not, have
no religion or no superstition themselves, see that both religion and
superstition are universal phenomena, and cannot be neglected by those
who would study humanity historically and scientifically. Even if there
be nothing in hallucinations, apparitions, scrying, second-sight,
poltergeists, and the rest, there is a great deal in the fact that
belief in these things is as wide and as old as the world; it is a fact
to be explained. "Each man," says Meister, "commonly defends himself as
long as possible from casting out the idols which he worships in his
soul; from acknowledging a master-error, and admitting any truth that
brings him to despair;" and indeed a system as complete and compact as
that of Mr. Spencer or Mr. Tylor is apt to become an intellectual idol
forbidding under pain of infidelity all inquiries that might cause it to
totter on its throne, or which might unravel in an instant what has been
woven by years of hard and honest thought. Few of us are in a position
to cast stones on this score; still, recognizing the weakness more
clearly in others than in ourselves, we are justified in reckoning with
it, and in discounting for the unwillingness of men of science to listen
to facts inconsistent with long-cherished theories, and for their
tendency to accumulate and magnify evidence on the other side. "If the
facts not fitting their theories are little observed by authorities so
popular as Mr. Huxley and Mr. Spencer; if _instantiae contradictoriae_
are ignored by them, or left vague; if these things are done in the
green tree, we may easily imagine what shall be done in the dry. But we
need not war with hasty _vulgarisateurs_ and headlong theorists."
We cannot for a moment question the sincerity of purpose and honesty of
intention of many of the leaders of modern scientific enlightenment,
whatever we may think of the said crowd of _vulgarisateurs_--those
camp-followers who bring disgrace on every respectable cause. But beside
wilful bias and unfairness, there is unconscious bias from which none of
us are free, but from which we need to be delivered by mutual criticism;
for, however much a man can see of himself, he can never get behind his
own back. Of such unwitting dishonesty men of thought are abundantly
guilty, when deeming themselves to be governed only by reason, they are
in fact slaves to some intellectual fashion of the day. Not one of them
in a thousand would dare to appear in public with the clothes of last
century, or to face the laughter of a crowd of his compeers. Hence a
certain indocility and rigidness of mind which they only escape who live
out of the fashion or have strength to lead it or to live above it.
Simple, whether from greatness or littleness, they escape the narrowing
influence inseparable from being identified, even in their own mind,
with a school or coterie; and can afford to say things as they see them.
Contemporary fashion says at present that there are to be no miracles,
nothing supernormal; whatever cannot be reduced in any way to known laws
and causes can be flatly denied, for the supposition of unknown causes
and laws is rank heresy. Until more recent years, it was not permitted
to listen to or show any disposition to investigate the narratives of
phenomena which have since been "explained" and reduced to such
legalized causes as hysteria or hypnotism, and even (of late) to
thought-transference. But since this happy reconciliation has been
effected, such stories are allowed to be believed on ordinary evidence,
although the accounts of other "unclassed" supernormal marvels coming
from the same lips with the same attestation are still brushed aside as
traveller's tales, or as the puerilities of hagiography--not worth a
thought. One would think that some kind of apology or reparation were
due to ecclesiastical tradition, which was credited with wholesale lying
so long as its recorded wonders were classed among impossibilities by
the intellectual fashion-mongers, but it seems we have only partly
escaped the reproach of knavery to incur that of wholesale folly for not
having seen that these apparent miracles were but forms of hysteria or
hypnotism.
Yet what is hysteria and what does it really explain? [1] Surely the
etymology throws no light on the subject! Is it then merely a name for
the unknown cause of phenomena every whit as strange as those which were
held incredible till their like had been actually witnessed and forced
upon the unwilling eyes of science beyond all possibility of denial? Is
it that science blindly refused even to weigh the evidence for abnormal
facts till the same or similar had become matters of personal
observation? Is it that every reported breach of her assumed
uniformities is incredible, because impossible, until the possibility
has been proved by some fact which is then named, erected into a class,
a cause, a law, and used to explain away similar facts formerly denied,
and is thus taken into that bundle of generalizations called the "laws
of nature"? The ancients assumed all heavenly motion to be circular of
necessity, and where facts gave against them, they patched the matter up
with an epicycle or two. Are not hysteria, hypnotism, and
thought-transference of the nature of epicycles? It is now confessed
that the mind can so affect and dominate the body as to produce blisters
and wounds by mere force of suggestion and expectancy; that a like
"faith" can cure, not only such ailments as are clearly connected with
the nerves, but others where such connection is not yet traceable. And
this is supposed to tell in some way against like marvels reported by
hagiology, as though they were explained by being observed and named.
Yet what did that supposed marvellousness consist in, except in a
seeming revelation of the power and superiority of mind over matter, and
of things unseen over things seen and palpable; and in proving that
there were more wonders in heaven and earth than were dreamt of by a
crude and self-satisfied materialism? They were taken as evidence of a
circumambient X-region where the laws of mechanics were set at defiance
and where the fetters of time and place were loosened or cast aside.
Such an X-region being supposed by every supernatural religion and
denied by most of those who deny religion, and on the same grounds, its
establishment by any kind of experiment is rightly considered in some
sort to make for religion. Indeed, it is just on this account that the
evidence for it is so opposed by those who are pre-occupied by the
anti-religious bias of contemporary science. But unless hysterical
effects can be shown to be ultimately due, not to mind, but to matter
acting on matter, according to methods approved by materialism, hysteria
remains a word-cause and no more, like the meat-cooking quality of the
roasting-jack.
Hypnotism is a kindred cause in every way. It means sleep-ism; yet
manifestly it deals with characteristics which are utterly unlike those
of sleep; and it is precisely these that need to be explained away in
conformity with received laws, unless we are to find in these phenomena
evidence of such modes of being and operation as every kind of religion
postulates. "Possession" is of course a fable; the superabundant
world-wide, world-old evidence for the phenomenon was thrust aside
without a glance, till hypnotic experiments brought to light what is
called "alternating personality." As though this name had explained
everything in accordance with materialism, forthwith it was permitted to
believe the aforesaid evidence, provided one laughed loudly enough at
the theory of "possession." It is allowed that the hypnotic patient may
in some sense be said to be "possessed" by the hypnotiser for the time
being; nay, even a certain chronic possession of this kind is
observable. But an invisible hypnotiser and possession by a disembodied
spirit is still out of fashion, notwithstanding all Mrs. Piper's efforts
and Dr. Hodgson's audacious declaration of his not very willing belief
that those who speak through her "are veritably the personalities they
claim to be, and that they have survived the change we call death."
Thought-transference, however, promises to be a potent and popular
solvent of psychic problems. Thought-transference was a supremely
ludicrous supposition till comparatively recently; nor could there be
any credible testimony for what was known antecedently to be quite
impossible. But some way or other, facts which demanded a name were
forced upon the direct observation of science, and so Mr. F. Podmore has
written a book in which, assuming thought-transference to be a
scientifically recognized possibility, he proceeds to reduce many of the
marvels collected by the S.P.R. to that simple and obvious cause, and to
reject the residue on the sound old principle that what is known to be
impossible cannot be true. Hallucinations, solitary and collective, and
other perplexing instances are tortured into cases of thought-transfer
with an ingenuity which we should smile at in a mediaeval scholastic
explaining the universe by the four elements and the four temperaments.
But is not thought-transference itself lamentably unscientific? No;
because we see that unconnected magnets affect one another
sympathetically; and the brain being a sort of magnet may well affect
distant brains. Thought is a kind of electricity, and electricity, if
not exactly a fluid, yet may some day be liquefied and bottled. At all
events, science has seen something very remotely analogous to
thought-transference and every whit as unintelligible and antecedently
incredible till observed; and therefore it is permissible to listen to
the evidence for it, and forced thereto, to accept the fact.
But have we really disposed of ghosts if we prove the appearance to be
caused by a subjective modification of the perceiver's sensorium and not
by a modification of the external medium--the air or the ether? Since it
is a question of a spiritual substance independent of spatial dimensions
and relations, said to be present only so far and where its effects and
manifestations are present, what does it matter whether it reports
itself by an effect outside or inside the percipient--whether it be a
"vision sensible to feeling, as to sight," or but "a false creation
proceeding from a heat-oppressed brain"? Is not this very distinction of
outside and inside in the matter of perceptions open to no slight
ambiguity? The savage, familiar with the electric sparks caused by the
friction of deer-skins, ascribes the _aurora borealis_ to the friction
of a jostling herd of celestial deer. "Nonsense," says science, after
centuries of false hypotheses, "it is nothing more nor less than
electricity." This is very much the way she is dealing with the
supernormal at present; brushing aside as wholly nonsensical, beliefs
that envelope a core of useful fact in a wrapping of crude explanation,
and then receiving the same facts as new discoveries, because she has
fitted them into an involucre more to her own liking, though perhaps but
little less crude. "Not deer-skin," says science, "but amber; not
miracle, but faith-cure; not prophetic insight, but thought-transference;
not apparition, but hallucination." And so with the rest.
Considering then the bias of the dominant scientific school, which makes
it refuse even to examine the carefully gathered evidence of the S.P.R.;
we need not wonder if the reports of travellers concerning the existence
of like phenomena among savages and barbarians all over the world are
dismissed with a certain _à priori_ superciliousness. Yet surely, on
evolutionist principles, the only possible clue to the mode in which
belief in spirits and in God may have originated with "primitive man,"
is the mode in which those beliefs are actually now sustained, and, so
to say, "proved" by the most primitive specimens of existing humanity;
by, for example, those bushmen of Australia whose facial angle and
cerebral capacity is supposed to leave no room for much difference
between their mind and that of the higher anthropoids. Doubtless it is
hard to get anything like scientific evidence out of people so
uncultivated, whose language and modes of conception are so alien to our
own. Individual travellers, moreover, have been the victims of their own
credulity, stupidity, self-conceit, and prejudice. "But the best
testimony of the truth of the reports as to the actual belief in the
facts, is the undesigned coincidence of the evidence from all quarters.
When the stories brought by travellers, ancient and modern, learned and
unlearned, pious or sceptical, agree in the main, we have all the
certainty that anthropology can offer."
From this ever-growing mass of evidence, it would appear that the
universal belief among savages in a spirit-world is mainly strengthened
and sustained, not by the phenomena of dreaming but by what Mr. Spencer
would call "alleged" supernormal manifestations, such as those of
clairvoyance, crystal-gazing, apparitions, miracles, prophecies,
possession, and the like. For belief in such marvels exists beyond
doubt, and furnishes a very obvious and logical basis for the further
belief in the invisible causes of these visible effects; nor should we
have recourse to an hypothetical and more indirect explanation of belief
in a spirit-world when an actual and direct explanation is at hand. If
we see the branch growing out of the tree, we need not inquire what
trunk it sprang from, unless we have strong evidence that it is only a
graft. All investigation tends to show that savages believe in spirits
and in the spirit-world because they witness, or firmly believe they
witness, supernormal phenomena.
Besides this, it must be allowed that together with the _normal_
phenomena of dreaming, there are abnormal dreams which even to
cultivated minds seem at times as supernormal as second-sight or
prophecy. But it is not on supernormal, but on normal dreams that
animists base their explanation. We need not deny that dreams and
delirium may have given palpable shape to the conception of a ghost, and
may also have helped forward the notion of a spirit by furnishing
something intermediary between the grossness of our waking
sense-experiences, and the altogether elusive and difficult thought of
unembodied will and intelligence independent of space and time.
In the main then it seems more plausible to maintain that the idea of
unembodied or disembodied spirits was shaped by that instinctive law of
our mind which makes us argue from the nature of effects to the nature
of the agency. The first impulse would be to ascribe every intelligent
effect to some human agency, but other circumstances would subsequently
incline the savage reluctantly to divest the agent of one or more of the
limitations of humanity, and to clothe him with preter-human attributes.
Nearly all the supernormal phenomena believed in by primitive man--so
far as we can judge of him from contemporary savagery--would suggest the
agency of an invisible man; clairvoyance, and other manifestations of
preternatural knowledge, would suggest independence of the senses in the
acquisition of knowledge; every kind of "miracle" would bespeak an
extension of power over physical nature beyond human wont; while all
these together would point to that freedom from the trammels of space
and time, which is of the very essence of immaterial or spiritual
subsistence. Thus, by a gradual process of dehumanization, the mind
would be instinctively led from the notion of a man magnified in all
excellences and refined from all limitations, to the conception of
spirit. But coexistently with this progress of the reason, the
imagination would ever strain to clothe the thought in bodily form as
far as possible, and would cling to the notions suggested by dreams and
waking hallucinations, while language, after its wont, would speak of
the spirit as the _umbra_, the _imago_, the shadow, the breath, the
attenuated replica of the body. Thus we find among all men, savage and
civilized, a certain unsteadiness in their notion of spirit, whether
created or divine--a continual tendency to corruption and
anthropomorphism, due to the conflict between reason and imagination,
resulting so often in the domination of the latter.
For this view of the subject it is not necessary that we should admit
the preternatural character of the phenomena which form the
subject-matter of psychical research, but only that we should
acknowledge the hardly disputable fact that belief in such marvels is
universal and persistent among savages--a fact which science is bound by
its own principles to explain, and not to ignore. Whether, as Mr. Lang
seems inclined to think, among much illusion, chicanery, and ignorance,
there may not be truth enough to make the inference of an X-world
legitimate, whether the said universality, persistence, and
recrudescence of this seeming credulity can be accounted for in any
other satisfactory way, is a further consideration. If in some dim
fashion the Northern Indians anticipated modern science in their
explanation of the _aurora borealis_, connecting it with familiar
electric manifestations, may it not be, asks Mr. Lang, that in their
inference from supernormal facts which experimental science refuses to
hear of or to examine, they have again been sagaciously beforehand?
Doubtless their explanation is crude and inadequate in both cases; but
is it much more so than that offered by supposing electricity to be a
fluid subject to currents; or by assigning many inexplicable psychic
phenomena to "hysteria"--a mere word-cause?
The supposition is somewhat favoured if we give ear to that crowd of
witnesses whose combined evidence, duly discounted and tested, makes it
clear that even among those who ought to have been civilized out of all
belief in aught behind the veil, the very same superstitions break out,
or creep in, time after time, with new names perhaps, new clothes, new
faces, but in substance identical with those held by what we esteem the
most benighted races.
Further, it is evident that savages pay attention--over-attention, no
doubt--to these supernormal phenomena, being free from hostile
philosophic bias in the matter, and bent the other way; and that in
consequence they have everywhere observed, classified, and systematized
them in their own rude, simple way, and have thus forestalled what the
S.P.R., in the teeth of science, is now endeavouring to do
scientifically. With us, moreover, it is mere chance that reveals a
"medium," or hypnotic subject here and there: but with savages they are
sought out diligently, and all who have any latent aptitude that way are
detected and utilized; and thus the field of their experience is
considerably widened.
But besides all this, it seems more than plausible to suppose that among
primitive and undeveloped races such preternatural phenomena either
occur, or seem to occur, much more frequently and extensively; and that
apparently supernormal faculties are more often developed.
Nor can this be explained solely on the score of their readier credulity
and their lack of criticism; for there is good evidence to show that the
development of the rational and self-directive faculties is at the
sacrifice of those instinctive and intuitional modes of operation which
do duty for them while man is yet in a state of pupilage. Memory, for
example, is fresher and more assimilative in childhood, but deteriorates
very often as the higher faculties come into use; and indeed we cannot
fail to see how the introduction of printing, writing, and mnemonic arts
and artifices of all kinds, has lowered the average power of civilized
memory, and made the ordinary feats of more primitive times seem to us
magical and incredible. We also notice the high development of hearing,
sight, and other forms of perception among savages who live by their
five senses rather than by their wits. When we descend to the
animal-world we are confronted by cognitive faculties whose effects we
see, but of whose precise nature we can form no conjecture whatever.
That which guides the migratory birds in their wanderings, and simulates
polity in the bee-hive and ant-hill, is not reason, but is something for
practical purposes far better than reason. Putting a number of these and
of similar considerations together seems to suggest that development in
the direction of self-instruction (which is reason) and self-management
and independence, is loss as well as gain.
What we gain is no doubt our own in a truer sense than that we had when
we hung upon Nature's breast, and were guided passively by instincts and
intuitions to purposes that reason can never reach to.
By far the most wonderful and seemingly intelligent work of the soul is
that by which it builds up, nourishes, repairs, developes, and finally
reproduces the body it dwells in. Yet in all this it is almost as
passive and unconscious as a vegetable. The effect is (as far as our
comprehension of it goes) altogether preternatural and inexplicable; yet
it is far less _our_ effect than what we do by reason and by taking
thought. What we pay for in dignity we lose in efficiency. While Nature
carries us in her arms we move swiftly enough, but when she sets us on
our feet to learn independence and self-rule, we cut a sorry figure. In
our helplessness she does all for us as though we were yet part of her;
but in the measure that we are weaned and begin to fend for ourselves as
responsible agents, we are deprived of the aids and easements befitting
the childhood of our race.
If this be true, if man in his primitive state possessed intuitive
powers which have sunk into abeyance, either through the diversion of
psychic energy to the development of other powers, or through desuetude,
or as the instincts of the new-born babe are lost when their brief
purpose is fulfilled; if the occasional recrudescence of these powers
among civilized peoples is really a survival of an earlier state; then
indeed we can understand that the evidence, or apparent evidence, for
the existence of an X-region, or spirit-world, may have been
immeasurably more abundant in the infancy of the human race, than it is
now even among contemporary savages.
Put it how we will, it cannot be denied that belief in divination, in
diabolic possession, and in magic, has largely contributed to belief in
spirits; and that to ignore this contribution by throwing the whole
burden on ordinary dreams is unscientific. During sleep Mr. Tylor
himself is as much a prey to delusion as the most primitive savage; but
the criteria by which on waking we condemn _most_ of our dreams as
illusions, seem really as accessible and obvious to the child or savage
as to the philosopher; though the former through carelessness or poverty
of language will perhaps say: "I saw," instead of: "I dreamt I saw."
Children will speak as it were historically of even their day-dreams
and imaginings, not from any untruthfulness or wish to deceive, but from
that romancing tendency rightly reprehended in their elders, who should
be alive to the conventional value of language. But the first and most
natural use of speech is simply to express and embody the thought that
is in us, not to assert, or affirm, or to instruct others. The child's
romancing is not intended as assertion, although so taken by prosaic
adults. It is from the same instinct which lies at the back of his
eternal monologue, of the "Let's pretend" by which he is for the moment
transformed into a soldier, or a steam-engine, or a horse. Eye-reading
without articulation is impossible for the beginner, and thought that is
not talked and acted is impossible for the child. Yet deeply as the
child is wrapped up in his dreams, there is nothing more certain than
that he is as clear as any adult as to the difference between romance
and fact; and so it is no doubt with the savage, who can hardly be
denied to have at least as much reason as an average child.
Closer study of the savage points to the conclusion that the civilized
man falls into the same error in his regard as many adults do with
respect to children, whom they fail hopelessly to interpret through lack
of imagination, and to whom they are but tedious and ridiculous when
they would fain be instructive and amusing; forgetting that the
difference between the two stages of life is rather in the size of the
toys played with, than in the way they are regarded. So too we are apt
to look on foreign, and still more on savage language, symbolism, ways,
and customs, as indicative of a far more radical difference and greater
inferiority of mental constitution and ethical instincts than really
exists. Mr. Kidd, in his book on Social Evolution, has contended with
some plausibility that the brain-power of the Bushman and of the Cockney
is much on a par at starting, and that the subsequent divergence is due
chiefly to education and moral training; and certainly much of the
evidence brought forward in Mr. Lang's volume seems to look that way. If
the aboriginal Australian has a faith in the immortality of the soul and
in a supreme God, the rewarder of righteousness, if he summarizes the
laws of God under the precept of unselfishness; if in all this he is but
a type of the universal savage, surely it were well if some of the
missionary zeal which is devoted to supplying the heathen with Bibles
which they cannot understand, were turned to the work of bringing our
own godless millions up to their religious level.
But this takes us to the second and still more interesting part of _The
Making of Religion_, which we shall have to discuss in the next section.
At present we only wish to insist that it is a mistake to assume that
because savages and children are, when compared with ourselves, so
little, therefore their thoughts and ideas can be understood with little
difficulty. Contrariwise, as the apparent difference in life and
language is greater, the deeper and more patient investigation will it
need to detect that radical sameness of mental and moral constitution
which binds men together far more than diversity of education and
environment can ever separate them. It is, therefore, exceedingly
unlikely that either the child or the savage should, by failing to
distinguish between dream and reality, introduce into his whole life
that incoherence which is just the distinguishing characteristic of
dreaming and lunacy. And, as a fact, do we really find the savage as
depressed, on waking, by a dreamt-of calamity as by a real one; or as
elated after a visionary scalping of foes as after a real victory? Does
he on waking look for the said scalps among his collection of trophies,
and is he perplexed and incensed at not finding them? Even if, like
ourselves, he has occasionally a very vivid and coherent dream
reconcilable with his waking circumstances, will he not judge of it by
the vast majority of his dreams which are palpable illusions, and not by
the few exceptional cases? If at times we ourselves doubt whether we
witnessed something or dreamt it, yet we do so not because the seeming
fact is one which makes for the existence of another world of a
different order to this, but for the very contrary reason. If the savage
only dreamt of the dead, he might find in this an evidence of their
survival, but he dreams far more often of the living, and that, with
circumstances which make the illusion manifest on waking. Seeing the awe
and terror which all men have of the supernatural region, we ought, on
the animistic hypothesis, to find among savages a great reluctance to go
to bed--"to sleep! Perchance to dream--aye, there's the rub!" But we do
not. Finally, just as the Chinese, who are supposed to mistake epilepsy
for possession, have, unfortunately for the supposition, got two
distinct words for the two phenomena, so it will doubtless be found that
there is no savage who has not some word to express illusion; or whose
language does not prove that he knows dreams are but dreams. We may well
doubt if even animals on waking are affected by their dreams as by
realities, or if a dog ever bit a man for a kick received in a dream. In
short the dream-theory of souls is plausible only in the gross, but
melts away under closer examination bit by bit.
Whether the S.P.R. will ever succeed in bottling a ghost, and in
submitting it to the tests necessary to convince science, matters
little. The real fruit of its labours will be to "convince men of sin,"
to convict science of being unscientific, and criticism of being
uncritical--of being biassed by fashion to the extent of refusing to
examine evidence which must be either admitted or explained away.
Scepticism and credulity alike are hostile both to science and religion,
and it is the common interest of these latter to secure a full
recognition, on the one side of the principle of faith, that with God
all things are possible; and on the other, of the principle of science
which is: to prove all things, and hold fast that which is good.
Credulity tends to make the actual co-extensive with the possible; while
scepticism would limit the possible to the known actual. The true mind
would be one in which faith and criticism were so tempered as to secure
width without slovenliness, and exactitude without narrowness.