THE NON-RELIGION
OF THE FUTURE
_A SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY_
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH
OF
M. GUYAU
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1897
COPYRIGHT, 1897,
BY
HENRY HOLT & CO.
THE MERSHON COMPANY PRESS,
RAHWAY, N. J.
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTION.
I. Sociality the basis of religion—Its definition.
II. The connection between religion, æsthetics, and morals.
III. The inevitable decomposition of all systems of dogmatic
religion; the state of “non-religion” toward which the human mind
seems to tend—The exact sense in which one must understand the
non-religion as distinguished from the “religion of the future.”
IV. The value and utility, for the time being, of religion; its
ultimate insufficiency, 1
Part First.
THE GENESIS OF RELIGIONS IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETIES.
_CHAPTER I._
RELIGIOUS PHYSICS.
IMPORTANCE OF THE PROBLEM OF THE ORIGIN OF RELIGION—UNIVERSALITY
OF RELIGIOUS BELIEFS OR SUPERSTITIONS—VARIABILITY OF RELIGIONS AND
RELIGIOUS EVOLUTION.
I. Idealist theory which attributes the origin of religion to
a notion of the infinite—Henotheism of Max Müller and Von
Hartmann—M. Renan’s Instinct for Divinity.
II. Theory of a worship of the dead and of spirits—Herbert
Spencer—Spencer’s objections to the theory of the attribution of a
soul to natural forces.
III. Answer to objections—Religious physics sociological in
form, and the substitution of relations between malevolent
or beneficent conscious beings for relations between natural
forces—Sociomorphism of primitive Peoples, 21
_CHAPTER II._
RELIGIOUS METAPHYSICS.
I. Animism or polydemonism—Formation of the dualist conception of
spirit—Social relations with spirits.
II. Providence and miracles—The evolution of the dualist
conception of a special providence—The conception of
miracles—The supernatural and the natural—Scientific explanation
and miracles—Social and moral modifications in the character
of man, owing to supposed social relations with a special
providence—Increasing sentiment of irresponsibility and passivity
and “absolute dependence.”
III. The creation—Genesis of the notion of creation—The dualistic
elements in this idea—Monism—Classification of systems of
religious metaphysics—Criticism of the classification proposed by
Von Hartmann—Criticism of the classification proposed by Auguste
Comte, 80
_CHAPTER III._
RELIGIOUS MORALS.
I. The laws which regulate the social relations between gods and
men—Morality and immorality in primitive religions—Extension of
friendly and hostile relations to the sphere of the gods—Primitive
inability in matters of conscience, as in matters of art, to
distinguish the great from the monstrous.
II. The moral sanction in the society which includes gods and
men—Patronage—That divine intervention tends always to be
conceived after the model of human intervention and to sanction it.
III. Worship and religious rites—Principles of reciprocity and
proportionality in the exchange of services—Sacrifice—Principle
of coercion and incantation—Principle of habit and its relation
to rites—Sorcery—Sacerdotalism—Prophecy—The externals of
worship—Dramatization and religious æsthetics.
IV. Subjective worship—Adoration and love; their psychological
origin, 113
Part Second.
THE DISSOLUTION OF RELIGIONS IN EXISTING SOCIETIES.
_CHAPTER I._
DOGMATIC FAITH.
I. Narrow dogmatic faith—The credulity of primitive man: First,
spontaneous faith in the senses and imagination; Second, faith in
the testimony of superior men; Third, faith in the divine word, in
revelation, and in the sacred texts—The literalness of dogmatic
faith—Inevitable intolerance of narrow dogmatic faith—Belief
in dogma, revelation, salvation, and damnation all result in
intolerance—Modern tolerance.
II. Broad dogmatic faith—Orthodox Protestantism—Dogmas
of orthodox Protestantism—Rational consequences of these
dogmas—Logical failure of orthodox Protestantism.
III. The dissolution of dogmatic faith in modern society—Reasons
that render this dissolution inevitable—Comparative influence of
the various sciences; influence of public instruction, of means
of communication, of industry even and of commerce, etc.—The
disappearance of belief in oracles and prophecies—Gradual
disappearance of the belief in miracles, in devils, etc., 136
_CHAPTER II._
SYMBOLIC AND MORAL FAITH.
I. Substitution of metaphysical symbolism for dogma—Liberal
Protestantism—Comparison with Brahmanism—Substitution
of moral symbolism for metaphysical symbolism—Moral
faith—Kant—Mill—Matthew Arnold—A literary explanation of the
Bible substituted for a literal explanation.
II. Criticism of symbolic faith—Inconsequence of liberal
Protestantism—Is Jesus of a more divine type than other great
geniuses?—Does the Bible possess a greater authority in matters of
morals than any other masterpiece of poetry?—Criticism of Matthew
Arnold’s system—Final absorption of religions by morality, 167
_CHAPTER III._
DISSOLUTION OF RELIGIOUS MORALITY.
I. The first durable element of religious morality:
Respect—Alteration of respect by the addition of the notion of the
fear of God and divine vengeance.
II. Second durable element of religious morality:
Love—Alteration of this element by the addition of ideas of
grace, predestination, damnation—Caducous elements of religious
morality—Mysticism—Antagonism of divine love and human
love—Asceticism—Excesses of asceticism—Especially in the
religions of the East—Conception of sin in the modern mind.
III. Subjective worship and prayer—The notion of prayer from
the point of view of modern science and philosophy—Ecstasy—The
survival of prayer, 195
_CHAPTER IV._
RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION AMONG THE PEOPLE.
I. Is religious sentiment an innate and imperishable possession of
humanity—Frequent confusion of a sentiment for religion with a
sentiment for philosophy and morals—Renan—Max Müller—Difference
between the evolution of belief in the individual and the evolution
of belief in the race—Will the disappearance of faith leave a void
behind?
II. Will the dissolution of religion result in a dissolution
of morality among the people?—Is religion the sole safeguard
of social authority and public morality?—Christianity and
socialism—Relation between non-religion and immorality, according
to statistics.
III. Is Protestantism a necessary transition stage between religion
and free-thought?—Projects for Protestantizing France—Michelet,
Quinet, De Laveleye, Renouvier, and Pillon—Intellectual,
moral, and political superiority of Protestantism—Utopian
character of the project—Uselessness, for purposes of morals,
of substituting one religion for another—Is the possession of
religion a condition _sine qua non_ of superiority in the struggle
for existence?—Objections urged against France and the French
Revolution by Matthew Arnold; Greece and Judea compared, France
and Protestant nations compared—Critical examination of Matthew
Arnold’s theory—Cannot free-thought, science, and art evolve their
respective ideals from within? 226
_CHAPTER V._
RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION AND THE CHILD.
I. Decline of religious education—Defects of this education,
in especial in Catholic countries—Means of lightening these
defects—The priest—The possibility of state-action on the priest.
II. Education provided by the state—Primary instruction—The
schoolmaster—Secondary and higher instruction—Should the history
of religion be introduced into the curriculum?
III. Education at home—Should the father take no part in the
religious education of his children—Evils of a preliminary
religious education to be followed by disillusionment—The special
question of the immortality of the soul: what should be said to
children about death, 272
_CHAPTER VI._
RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION AMONG WOMEN.
Are women inherently predisposed toward religion and even toward
superstition?—The nature of feminine intelligence—Predominance
of the imagination—Credulity—Conservatism—Feminine
sensibility—Predominance of sentiment—Tendency to mysticism—Is
the moral sentiment among women based upon religion—Influence
of religion and of non-religion upon modesty and love—Origin of
modesty—Love and perpetual virginity—M. Renan’s paradoxes on
the subject of monastic vows—How woman’s natural proclivities
may be turned to account by free-thought—Influence exercised by
the wife’s faith over the husband—Instance of a conversion to
free-thought, 295
_CHAPTER VII._
THE EFFECT OF RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION ON POPULATION AND THE
FUTURE OF THE RACE.
I. Importance of the problem of population—Antagonism between
numerical strength and wealth—Necessity of numbers for the
maintenance and progress of the race—Necessity of giving the
advantage of numbers to the superior races—Problem of population
in France—Its relation to the religious problem—Are the reasons
for the restriction of the number of births physiological, moral,
or economic?—Malthusianism in France—The true national peril.
II. Remedies—Is a return to religion possible?—Religious
powerlessness and growing tolerance in the matter—The
influence that the law might exercise upon the causes of small
families—Enumeration of these causes—Reform of the law in
regard to filial duty—(Support of parents)—Reform of the law
of inheritance—Reform of the military law for the purpose of
favouring large families and of permitting emigration to the French
colonies.
III. Influence of public education: its necessity as a substitute
for religious sentiment, 315
Part Third.
NON-RELIGION OF THE FUTURE.
_CHAPTER I._
RELIGIOUS INDIVIDUALISM.
I. Is a renovation of religion possible? 1. Is a unification of the
great religions to-day existing possible? 2. Is the appearance of a
new religion to be expected?—Future miracles impossible—Religious
poetry not to be expected—Men of genius capable of sincerely
and naïvely labouring in the creating of a new religion not to
be expected—Impossibility of adding to the original stock of
religious ideas—No new cult possible—Last attempts at a new cult
in America and in France—The Positivist cult—Ethical culture—Can
socialism renew religion?—Advantages and defects of socialistic
experiments.
II. Religious anomy and the substitution of doubt for faith—1.
Will the absence of religion result in scepticism? Will the number
of sceptics increase with the disappearance of religion? 2.
Substitution of doubt for faith—Genuinely religious character of
doubt.
III. Substitution of metaphysical hypothesis for
dogma—Difference between religious sentiment and instinct for
metaphysics—Imperishable character of the latter—Sentiment
at once of the limits of science and of the infinity of our
ideal—Spencer’s attempted reconciliation of science and
religion—Confusion of religion with metaphysics, 350
_CHAPTER II._
ASSOCIATION. THE PERMANENT ELEMENT OF RELIGIONS IN SOCIAL LIFE.
SOCIAL ASPECT OF RELIGIONS—RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES AND
CHURCHES—IDEAL TYPE OF VOLUNTARY ASSOCIATION—ITS DIVERSE FORMS.
I. Associations for intellectual purposes—How such associations
might preserve the most precious elements of religions—Societies
for the advancement of science, philosophy, religion—Dangers to
avoid—Popularization of scientific ideas; propagandism in the
interests of science.
II. Associations for moral purposes—Tendency of religion in the
best minds to become one with charity—Pity and charity will
survive dogma—Rôle of enthusiasm in moral propagandism—Necessity
of hope to sustain enthusiasm—Possibility of propagating moral
ideas: 1. Apart from myths and religious dogmas; 2. Apart from
any notion of a religious sanction—Baudelaire’s conception of a
criminal and happy hero—Criticism of that conception—Worship of
the memory of the dead.
III. Associations for æsthetic purposes—Worship of art and
nature—Art and poetry will sever their connection with religion
and will survive it—Necessity of developing the æsthetic sentiment
and the worship of art, as the religious sentiment becomes more
feeble—Poetry, eloquence, music; their rôle in the future—Final
substitution of art for rites—Worship of nature—Feeling
for nature originally an essential element of the religious
sentiment—Superiority of a worship of nature over worship of human
art—Nature is the true temple of the future, 391
_CHAPTER III._
THEISM.
REVIEW OF THE PRINCIPAL METAPHYSICAL HYPOTHESES WHICH WILL REPLACE
DOGMA.
I. Introduction—Progress of metaphysical hypotheses—Metaphysical
hypotheses destined to increasing diversity in details, and
increasing agreement on essential points—Importance of the
moral element in metaphysical hypotheses—The part played by
conscience in human morality will not diminish, as Mr. Spencer
says—Sympathetic groups under which divers systems of metaphysics
will be ranged.
II. Theism—1. Probable fate of the creation hypothesis—The author
of the world conceived as a prime mover—Eternity of movement—The
author of the world conceived as a creator properly so
called—Illusion involved in the conception of nothing—Criticism
of the creation hypothesis from the point of view of morals: the
problem of evil and of the responsibility of the creator—Attempts
to save optimism—Hypothesis of a God creating free agents,
“workmen” and not “work”—Reciprocal determinism and the illusion
of spontaneity—Immorality of the temptation—Hypothesis of the
fall, its impossibility—God the tempter—Lucifer and God—2.
Probable fate of the notion of Providence—Hypotheses to explain
a special Providence and miracles thus insufficient—Hypothesis
of a non-omnipotent God proposed by John Stuart Mill—The God of
Comtism—Religion should be not solely human but cosmic—The fate
of the philosophical idea of God—Rational religion proposed by the
neo-Kantians—Ultimate transformation of the notion of divinity and
of Providence—Human Providence and progressive divinity in the
world, 424
_CHAPTER IV._
PANTHEISM.
REVIEW OF THE PRINCIPAL METAPHYSICAL HYPOTHESES WHICH WILL REPLACE
DOGMA.—_Continued._
I. Optimistic pantheism—Transformation of transcendent Deism
into immanent theism and pantheism—Disanthropomorphized
God, according to Messrs. Fiske and Spencer—Diverse forms
of pantheism—Optimistic and intellectualistic pantheism of
Spinoza—Objections, Spinoza’s fatalism—The moral significance
that might be lent to pantheism by the introduction of some notion
of a final cause—Qualities and defects of pantheism—Conception
of unity upon which it is founded—This conception criticised—Its
possible subjectivity.
II. Pessimistic pantheism—Pessimistic interpretation of religions
in Germany—1. Causes of the progress of pessimism in the present
epoch—Progress of pantheistic metaphysics and of positive
science—Penalties incident to thought and reflection—Mental
depression and sense of powerlessness, etc.—2. Is pessimism
curable?—Possible remedies—The labour problem and the future
of society—Illusions involved in pessimism—Inexactitude of its
estimate of pleasures and pains—Quotation from Leopardi—Criticism
of the practical results of pessimism—Nirvâna—An experiment in
Nirvâna—Will pessimistic pantheism be the religion of the
future? 452
_CHAPTER V._
IDEALISM, MATERIALISM, MONISM.
REVIEW OF THE PRINCIPAL METAPHYSICAL HYPOTHESES WHICH WILL REPLACE
DOGMA.—_Concluded._
I. Idealism—Different forms of idealism: subjective idealism,
objective idealism: The whole of existence resolved into a mode
of mental existence—Value of idealism considered from point of
view of the religious sentiment—Most specious of contemporary
idealisms: Possibility of universal progress in the hypothesis
of radical spontaneity and of “freedom”—Reconciliation between
determinism and the conception of freedom—Moral idealism as a
possible substitute for religious sentiment: Dependence of the
universe on the principle of goodness.
II. Materialism—Difficulty in defining absolute materialism:
Matter—The atom—Nebular hypothesis—Hydrogen—Necessity of
supplementing materialism by some theory of the origin of
life—The latest conception of materialism: Conception of infinite
divisibility and infinite extensibility.
III. Monism and the fate of worlds—Current of contemporary systems
toward monism—Scientific interpretation of monism—The world
conceived monistically as a becoming and as a life—Scientific
formulæ for life—Progress consists in the gradual confusion
of these two formulæ—That the rise of morality and religion
can be accounted for without the presupposition of any final
cause—Metaphysical and moral expectations in regard to the
destiny of the world and of humanity, it may be, founded on
scientific monism—Facts which appear to be inconsistent with
these expectations—Pessimistic conception of dissolution that is
complementary to the conception of evolution—Is the immanence of
dissolution demonstrable?—Natural devices for the perpetuation of
the “fittest”—Rôle of intelligence, of numbers, etc.—Calculation
of probabilities—Is eternity _a parte post_ a ground of
discouragement or of hope—Probable existence of thinking beings in
other worlds: the planets, possibility of the existence of beings
superior to man—Survival of the conception of gods—Hypothesis of
intercosmic consciousness and of a universal society.
IV. Destiny of the human race—The hypothesis of immortality
from the point of view of monism—Two possible conceptions of
immortality—Eternal or untemporal existence and continuation of
life in some superior forms—I. Hypothesis of eternal life—its
function in antique religions, in Platonism, and in the systems of
Spinoza, Kant, and Schopenhauer—Eternal life and the subsistence
of the individual—Distinction made by Schopenhauer and various
other philosophers between individuality and personality—Eternal
life problematical and transcendent—Aristocratic tendency
of the theory of eternal life—Hypothesis of conditional
immortality—Criticism of the hypothesis of conditional
immortality; incompatibility of this notion with that of divine
goodness—II. Hypothesis of a continuation of the present
life and its evolution into some superior form—What sort
of immortality the theory of evolution permits us to hope
for—Immortality of one’s labours and conduct—True conception of
such immortality—Its relation to the laws of heredity, atavism,
natural selection—Immortality of the individual—Objections
drawn from science—Protestations of affection against the
annihilation of the person—Resulting antinomy—III. Modern
opposition between the conception of _function_ and the conception
of simple substance, in which ancient philosophy endeavours to
find a proof of immortality—Peripatetic theory of Wundt and
modern philosophers on the nature of the soul—Immortality as
a continuation of function, proved not by the simplicity, but
by the complexity of consciousness—Relation between complexity
and instability—Three stages of social evolution—Analogy of
conscience with a society, collective character of individual
consciousness—Conception of progressive immortality—Last product
of evolution and natural selection: (1) No necessary relation
between the compositeness and complexity of consciousness and its
dissolubility: indissoluble compounds in the physical universe—(2)
Relation between consciousnesses, their possible fusion in a
superior consciousness—Contemporary psychology and the religious
notion of the interpenetration of souls—Possible evolution of
memory and identification of it with reality—Palingenesis by
force of love—Problematic character of those conceptions and of
every conception relative to existence, of consciousness and the
relation between existence and consciousness—IV. Conception of
death appropriate to those who, in the present state of evolution,
do not believe in the immortality of the individual—Antique and
modern stoicism—Acceptance of death: element of melancholy and
of greatness in it—Expansion of self by means of philosophical
thought, and scientific disinterestedness, to the point of to some
extent approving one’s own annihilation, 477
INTRODUCTION.
I. Sociality the basis of religion—Its definition.
II. The connection between religion, æsthetics, and morals.
III. The inevitable decomposition of all systems of dogmatic
religion; the state of “non-religion” toward which the
human mind seems to tend—The exact sense in which one
must understand the non-religion as distinguished from the
“religion of the future.”
IV. The value and utility, for the time being, of religion;
its ultimate insufficiency.
I. We shall meet, in the course of this work, many different
definitions that have at one time or another been given to religion.
Some were assigned from the point of view of physics, others from that
of metaphysics, others from that of morals, almost none from that of
sociology. And yet, upon closer scrutiny, the notion of a _social bond_
between man and the powers superior to him, but resembling him, is
precisely the point in which all religious conceptions are at one. Man
becomes truly religious, in our judgment, only when above the human
society in which he lives he superimposes in his scheme of the world
another society, more powerful and more cultured, a universal and, so
to speak, a cosmic society. The sphere of sociality, which is one of
the characteristics of humanity, must be enlarged till it reaches to
the stars. Sociality is the firm foundation of the religious sentiment,
and a religious being might be defined as a being disposed to be
sociable, not only with all living creatures with whom experience makes
him acquainted, but also with the creatures of thought with whom he
peoples the world.
That _religion_ consists essentially in the establishment of a bond—at
first mythical, and subsequently mystic, in the first instance
between man and the forces of the universe, then between man and the
universe itself, and ultimately between man and the elements of the
universe—is distinctly the outcome of every study of religion; but
what we wish especially here to consider is the precise way in which
this bond has been conceived. Well (it may appear more clearly at the
close of this inquiry), the religious bond has been conceived _ex
analogia societatis humanæ_: the relations, amicable and inimical, of
men to each other were employed first for the explanation of physical
phenomena and natural forces, then for the metaphysical explanation
of the world, of its creation, conservation, and government; in
short, sociological laws were universalized, and the state of war
or peace which existed among men, families, tribes, and nations was
conceived as existing also among the volitions which were fancied
to exist beneath or beyond the forces of nature. A mythic or mystic
sociology, conceived as containing the secret of all things, lies at
the basis of all religions. Religion is not simply the expression of an
anthropomorphism—animals and fantastic beings of various sorts have
played no inconsiderable rôle in different cults; it is an imaginative
extension, a universalization of all the good or evil relations which
exist among conscious beings, of war and peace, friendship and enmity,
obedience and rebellion, protection and authority, submission, fear,
respect, devotion, love: religion is a universal _sociomorphism_.
Social relations with animals, with the dead, intellectual and social
relations with good and evil genii, with the forces of nature, are
nothing more nor less than various forms of this universal sociology
in which religion has sought to find the reason of things—of physical
phenomena such as thunder, storm, sickness, death, as well as of
metaphysical relations—the origin and destiny of things, and of moral
relations—virtue, vice, law, and sanction.
If, therefore, we were forced to condense the theory of this book into
a single definition, we should say that religion is the outcome of an
effort to explain all things—physical, metaphysical, and moral—by
analogies drawn from human society, imaginatively and symbolically
considered. In short it is a universal sociological hypothesis,
mythical in form.
To justify this conception we shall review the various definitions
that have been put forth of the religious sentiment; we shall see that
each of them needs completion by the rest, and that, too, from the
sociological point of view.
The definition which has perhaps been most widely adopted of late
years, with divers modifications by Strauss, by Pfleiderer, by Lotze,
and by M. Réville, is that of Schleiermacher. According to him, the
essence of religion consists in the feeling that we all have of our own
absolute dependence. The powers in respect to which this dependence is
felt we call divinities. On the other hand, according to Feuerbach, the
origin, nay the essence even of religion is desire: if man possessed
no needs, no desires, he would possess no gods. If grief and evil did
not exist, says Hartmann later on, there would be no religion; the
gods, even the gods of history, are no more than the powers to whom
man looks for what he does not possess, and wants, to whom he looks
for relief, for salvation, for happiness. The respective definitions
of Schleiermacher and Feuerbach, taken separately, are incomplete; it
is at least necessary, as Strauss suggests, to superpose them. The
religious sentiment is primarily, no doubt, a feeling of dependence;
but this feeling of dependence, really to give birth to religion, must
provoke in one a reaction—a desire of deliverance. To feel one’s own
weakness; to be conscious of limitations of all sorts which bound
one’s life, and then to desire to augment one’s power over one’s self
and over the material universe; to enlarge one’s sphere of action;
to attain once more to a comparative independence in face of the
necessities of every kind which hem one in—such is the course of the
human mind in the presence of the universe.
But here an objection occurs: precisely the same course seems to be
followed by the mind in the establishment of science. In a scientific
period man feels himself as profoundly _dependent_ as in a religious
period, and this feeling of dependence is accompanied by a no less
vivid reaction in the one case than in the other. The man of science
and the believer alike aim at enfranchisement, but by different means.
Must one be content, then, with an external and negative definition,
and say with M. Darmesteter: “Religion embraces all knowledge and all
power not scientific”?[1] A knowledge not scientific possesses all
the attributes of a contradiction in terms, and, as for a power not
scientific, it is indispensable to distinguish it in some positive way
from the power which is afforded us by science. Well, to keep close
to the facts, the power of religion is that which we frankly do not
possess, while the power of science is that which we do possess and
know that we possess. One might indeed fall back on the distinction
between belief and certainty; but the man of science also has his
beliefs, his preferences for such and such a cosmological hypothesis,
which, however, is not a religious belief, properly so called.
Religious and moral “faith,” as opposed to scientific “hypothesis,” is
an ultimate and very complete manifestation of the religious sentiment,
which we shall examine later, though it carries with it no suggestion
of its primitive origin.
[1] See an account given of the _Prolégomènes_ of M. Albert
Réville, by M. Darmesteter, _Revue philosophique_, seventh
year, vol. i. p. 76.
From the sociological point of view the distinction is plain. The
religious sentiment begins at the point where mechanical determinism
seems to offer an opportunity in the world for a sort of _moral_ and
_social_ reciprocity—a possible _exchange_ of _sentiments_ and even
of desires, between man and the powers of the universe, whatever they
may be. That point once reached, man no longer conceives it possible to
measure the consequences of an act—of using an axe, for example, on a
sacred tree—in the exact terms of mere mechanical reaction; for over
and above the simple brute fact of what he has done, the sentiment or
intention that it indicates must be taken into account and the probable
effect of that for good or evil upon the gods. Religious sentiment
is a feeling of dependence, on the part of primitive man, in respect
to the intelligences, the _volitions_, with which he has peopled the
universe and which he believes capable of _being affected agreeably
or disagreeably_ by his conduct. Religious sentiment is not a feeling
of mere physical dependence upon the universal frame of things; it
is more than all a physical dependence, a moral, and in especial, a
social dependence. This relation of dependence consists really of two
reciprocal terms: if man is bound by it in some sort to the powers of
nature, they in turn are bound by it to man; man has more or less of
a hold on them, he can offend them morally, just as he might offend
a fellow-man. If man is in the hand of the gods, he can in a measure
force the hand to open or shut. The divinities are in a sense dependent
also on man; they experience, as the result of his conduct, a measure
of pleasure or of pain. It is only later that this idea of reciprocal
dependence becomes metaphysical; it reaches its ultimate development
in the concept of the “absolute,” and in the sentiment of adoration or
simple “respect.”
Besides the consciousness of dependence and the correlative need
of a liberation of some sort from it, we find in the religious
sentiment the expression of another _social_ need not less important;
the need of affection, of tenderness, of love. Our sensibility,
developed by hereditary instincts of sociality and by the force even
of our imagination stretching out beyond the limits of this world,
instinctively seeks for a person, a commanding figure to lean on, to
confide in. When we are happy we need to bless some one; when we are
wretched, we need some one to complain to, to groan to, even to curse.
It is hard to resign ourselves to the belief that no one hears us,
that no one a long way off sympathizes with us, that this swarming
universe spins in the void. God is the friend with us at the first
hour and at the last, with us always and in all places, even where no
other friend can follow, even in death. To whom can we speak of those
we have loved and lost? Of the people about us, some hardly remember
them, others did not even know them; but in this divine and omnipresent
Being we find the society, which is constantly broken by death, once
more reunited: _In eo vivimus_, in Him we cannot die. From this point
of view, God, the object of the religious sentiment, no longer seems
a guardian and master simply. He is better than a friend; He is a
father; in the beginning a severe father and all-powerful, as very
young children imagine their fathers to be. Children readily believe
that their father can do anything, even work miracles: a word from him
and the world moves; _fiat lux_, and the day is born; the distinction
between evil and good lies in his will; disobedience to him naturally
involves punishment. They judge his power by their weakness; and so the
primitive race of man felt toward God. But later a superior conception
arose; as man developed he developed his God, endowed him with a more
generous list of moral attributes; and this God is ours. We feel the
need of a smile from Him after a sacrifice, the thought of Him sustains
us. Woman especially, who is more immature in this respect than man,
experiences a greater need of a “Father in heaven.” When one wishes
to deprive us of a god, to deliver us from celestial tutelage, we
suddenly find ourselves orphans. One might recognize a profound truth
in the great symbol of Christ, the God, dying for the enfranchisement
of human thought. This modern version of the “passion” is enacted, it
is true, only in the heart, but it is none the less agonizing; it stirs
one’s indignation none the less, it dwells in one like the image of a
father who is dead. One cares less for the promised freedom than for
the protection and affection that are gone. Carlyle—whimsical, unhappy
genius—could eat no bread that his wife’s own hands, nay his wife’s
own heart, had not prepared; and we are all like that; we all have need
of daily bread kneaded with love and tenderness; and they that have no
loving hand from which to look for it, ask it of their god, of their
ideal, of their dream; they create for themselves a family in the realm
of imagination, they fill out the bosom of infinity by the addition of
a heart.
The social need for protection and love was evidently not so dominant
in primitive times. The tutelary functions attributed to divinities
were at first confined to the more or less vulgar accidents of this
life. Later they were more especially directed toward one’s moral
emancipation and extended even beyond the tomb. Need of protection and
affection leads ultimately to considerations on the destiny of man and
the world; and thus it is that religion, nearly physical in origin,
issues in systems of metaphysics.
* * * * *
II. This book is intimately related to two others that we have
published on æsthetics and on morals. We believe that the æsthetic
sentiment is identical with self-conscious life, with life that is
conscious of its own subjective intensity and harmony; beauty we
have said may be defined as a perception or an act that stimulates
life simultaneously on its three sides—sensibility, intelligence,
will—and that produces pleasure by the immediate consciousness of this
general stimulation. Moral sentiment, on the other hand, is identical,
we believe, with a consciousness of the powers and possibilities in
the sphere of practice of a life ideal in intensity and breadth of
interest. The bulk of these possibilities relates to one’s power,
in some form or other, of serving other people. Finally, religious
sentiment appears when this consciousness of the social aspect of life
is extended to the totality of conscious beings, and not only of real
and living, but also of possible and ideal beings. It is, therefore,
in the very notion of life, and of its various individual or social
manifestations, that the essential unity of æsthetics with morals and
religion is to be found.
In the first part of this work we shall trace the origin and evolution
of sociological mythology. In the succeeding portions we shall consider
whether, if we once set aside the mythical or imaginative element which
is essential to religion and which distinguishes it from philosophy,
the _sociological_ theory does not offer the most probable, and most
comprehensive, metaphysical explanation of the universe.[2]
[2] The importance which Auguste Comte attributed to sociology
is well known, but in his horror of metaphysics the founder
of positivism excluded from his science everything really
universal and cosmic that it contained, in order to reduce it
to limits exclusively human. Messrs. Spencer and Lilienfeld,
Schaeffle and Espinas, improving on the sociology of Comte,
have extended social laws and have shown that every living
organism is an embryonic society, and, _vice versa_, that every
society is an organism. A contemporary philosopher goes still
further and attributes to sociology a certain metaphysical
significance. M. Alfred Fouillée says: “Since biology and
sociology are so closely related, may not the laws that are
common to them be expected to suggest still more universal laws
of nature and thought? Is the entire universe anything more
than a vast society in process of formation, a vast system
of conscious and consciously striving atoms which is working
itself out, and little by little falling into shape? The laws
which govern the grouping of individual atoms in the body are,
no doubt, at bottom the same as those that govern the grouping
of individuals in society; and the very atoms themselves, which
are supposed to be indivisible, are, it may be, diminutive
societies. If so, social science, the crown of human sciences,
may some day give us, in its ultimate formula, the secret of
universal life.... It is conceivable that the universal type
of existence of the world may be found in sociology—that the
universe may come to be conceived as a society in process
of formation; miscarrying here and succeeding there, in its
effort to transmute the reign of mechanics into a reign of
justice, and to substitute fraternity for antagonism. If so,
the essential and immanent power at the heart of beings,
always ready to manifest itself as soon as circumstances give
it access to the light of consciousness, might be expressed
by the single word, sociability.” (Alfred Fouillée, _La
Science sociale contemporaine_, 2d edition, introduction
and conclusion.) M. Fouillée has not applied this theory to
religion; he has noted its suggestiveness in the domain of
metaphysics and of ethics simply; we believe, and we shall
endeavour to show, that it is not less suggestive in the domain
of religion.
This book was finished, and in part printed, when there
appeared in the _Revue philosophique_ M. Lesbazeilles’
interesting article on _Les bases psychologiques de la
religion_.
Although the author’s point of view, as the title indicates, is
throughout strictly psychological, he has given his attention
also to social relations and “conditions of collective
adaptation,” which he regards as prefigured, anticipated,
and sanctified by religious rites and myths. This, we think,
implies some confusion between religion and morality. Morality
deals with collective human life, but religion deals with
collective life generally, and undertakes at the same time to
provide a physical and a metaphysical explanation of things. We
shall see that in the beginning religion was a superstitious
physics, in which the forces of nature were regarded simply as
the expression of some unknown person or person’s volitions,
and that it thus naturally assumed a sociological form.
* * * * *
III. It is important that there should be no misunderstanding in regard
to this _non-religion_ of the future, as contradistinguished from
the multitude of _religions of the future_ that have been recently
expounded. It has seemed to us that these various expositions are based
on a number of equivocations. In the first place religion, properly
so-called, has sometimes been confused with metaphysics, sometimes with
morals, sometimes with both; and it is owing to this confusion that
religion has been conceived to be indestructible. Is it not by an abuse
of language that Mr. Spencer, for example, gives the name of religion
to speculations concerning the unknowable and thence readily deduces
the conclusion that religion, by which he means metaphysics, possesses
an impregnable stronghold in the human mind? In the same way many other
contemporary philosophers, like Herr von Hartmann, the theologian
of the unconscious, have not resisted the temptation of describing
for us a religion of the future, which resolves itself simply into
their own system, whatever it may be, of philosophy. Others again,
especially among liberal Protestants, preserve the name of religion
for purely rationalistic systems of thought. There is, of course, a
sense in which one may admit that metaphysics and morals constitute a
religion, or form at least the vanishing point toward which religion
tends. But, in many books, the “religion of the future” is no more
than a somewhat hypocritical compromise with some form of positive
religion. Under cover of the symbolism dear to the Germans, they save
in appearance what they in reality destroy. It is in opposition to
this species of subterfuge that we have adopted the less misleading
term of the “Non-religion of the Future.” Thus we separate ourselves
from Von Hartmann and the other prophets who reveal to us, point by
point, the religion of the fiftieth century. When one approaches an
object of such ardent controversy it is better to employ words with
exactness. Everything, first and last, has been included within the
limits of philosophy; even the sciences, on the pretext that all
scientific researches were in the beginning undertaken by philosophy;
and philosophy, in turn, has been included in religion, on the pretext
that originally religion embraced within its limits the whole of
philosophy and of science. Given a religion of some kind, even that of
the Fuegians, there is nothing to prevent one from reading into its
myths the last dictum of modern metaphysics; by this means a religion
may apparently continue in existence until there is no more left of it
than a mere envelope of religious phraseology covering and discovering
a wholly metaphysical and purely philosophical system. Better still,
on this method, since Christianity is the highest form of religion,
all philosophers must ultimately become Christians; and finally, since
universality and catholicity are the ideal of Christianity, we shall
all be Catholics before we are aware of it.
For the investigator who, without denying such analogies as may
ultimately be found to exist, proposes to take as his point of
departure the specific differences of religion (which is the true
method), every positive and historical religion presents three
distinctive and essential elements: (1) An attempt at a mythical
and non-scientific explanation of natural phenomena (divine
intervention, miracles, efficacious prayers, etc.), or of historical
facts (incarnation of Jesus Christ or of Buddha, revelations, and
so forth); (2) A system of dogmas, that is to say, of symbolic
ideas, of imaginative beliefs, forcibly imposed upon one’s faith as
absolute verities, even though they are susceptible of no scientific
demonstration or philosophical justification; (3) A cult and a system
of rites, that is to say, of more or less immutable practices regarded
as possessing a marvellous efficacy upon the course of things, a
propitiatory virtue. A religion without myth, without dogma, without
cult, without rite is no more than that somewhat bastard product,
“natural religion,” which is resolvable into a system of metaphysical
hypotheses. By these three different, and really organic elements,
religion is clearly marked off from philosophy. Also, instead of
being nowadays what it was at a former period, a popular philosophy
and popular science, mythical and dogmatic religion tends to become a
system of antiscientific and antiphilosophical ideas. If this character
is not always apparent, it is owing to the sort of symbolism of which
we have spoken, which preserves the name and abandons the ideas or
adapts them to the progress of the modern mind.
The elements which distinguish religion from metaphysics or from
ethics, and which constitutes a positive religion properly so-called,
are, in our judgment, essentially caducous and transitory, and, if so,
we reject the religion of the future, as we should reject an alchemy
of the future, or astrology of the future. But it does not follow that
non-religion or a-religion—which is simply the negation of all dogma,
of all traditional and supernatural authority, of all revelation,
of all miracle, of all myth, of all rite erected into a duty—is
synonymous with impiety, with a contempt for the moral and metaphysical
elements of ancient faiths. Not in the least; to be non-religious or
a-religious is not to be anti-religious. More than that, as we shall
see, the non-religion of the future may well preserve all that is
pure in the religious sentiment: an admiration for the cosmos and
for the infinite powers which are there displayed; a search for an
ideal not only individual, but social, and even cosmic, which shall
overpass the limits of actual reality. As it may be maintained that
modern chemistry is a veritable alchemy—but an alchemy shorn of the
presuppositions which caused its miscarriage—as modern contemporary
chemists may pronounce a sincere eulogium upon the ancient alchemists
and their marvellous intuitions; just so it may be affirmed that the
true religion, if the word must be preserved, consists in no longer
maintaining a narrow and superstitious religion. The absence of
positive and dogmatic religion is, moreover, the very form toward which
all particular religions tend. In effect they strip themselves, little
by little (except Catholicism and Turkish Mohammedanism), of their
sacred character, of their antiscientific affirmations; they renounce
the oppressive control that they have traditionally exercised over
the individual conscience. The developments of religion and those of
civilization have always proceeded hand in hand; the developments of
religion have always proceeded in the line of a greater independence
of spirit, of a less literal and less narrow dogmatism, of a freer
speculation. Non-religion, as we here understand it, may be considered
as a higher degree simply of religion and of civilization.
The absence of religion thus conceived is one with a reasoned
but hypothetical metaphysics, treating of men and the universe.
One may designate it as religious independence, or _anomy_, or
individualism.[3] It has, moreover, been preached in some degree by
all religious reformers from Sakia-Mouni and Jesus to Luther and
Calvin, for they have all of them maintained liberty of conscience
and respected so much only of tradition as, in the then state of
contemporary religious criticism, they could not help admitting.
Catholicism, for example, was founded in part by Jesus, but also in
part in spite of Jesus; intolerant Anglicanism was founded in part by
Luther, but also in part in spite of Luther. The non-religious man, the
man simply without a religion, may therefore admire and sympathize with
the great founders of religion, not only in that they were thinkers,
metaphysicians, moralists, and philanthropists, but in that they
were reformers of established belief, more or less avowed enemies of
religious authority, of every affirmation which should be that of a
sacred body and not of an individual. Every positive religion possesses
as one of its essential characters that of transmitting itself from
one generation to another, by virtue of the authority which attaches
to domestic or national traditions; its mode of transmission is thus
totally different from that of science and of art. New religions
themselves are obliged more often than not to present themselves in
the guise of simple reforms, in the guise of simple returns to the
rigour of former teaching and precept, to avoid giving too great a
shock to the principle of authority, but in spite of these disguises
every new religion has shaken it; the return to an alleged primitive
authority has always been a real outleap in the direction of ultimate
liberty. There exists, then, in the bosom of every great religion a
dissolving force; namely, the very force which served in the beginning
to constitute it and to enable it to triumph over its predecessor:
the right of private judgment. It is upon this force, this right,
that one may count for the ultimate establishment, after the gradual
decomposition of every system of dogmatic belief, of a final absence of
religion.[4]
[3] See pt. 3, chap. ii.
[4] See pt. 3, chap. i.
Over and above the confusion between the perpetuity of metaphysics
and morals and that of positive religion, there is another tendency
among our contemporaries against which we have wished to protest.
It is the belief, which many profess, in the final unification of
existing religions into a religion of the future, either a perfected
Judaism, or a perfected Christianity, or a perfected Buddhism. To
this predicted religious unity we oppose rather a future plurality of
beliefs, a religious individualism. A pretension to universality is,
no doubt, characteristic of every great religion; but the dogmatic
and mythological element which constitutes a religion positive is
precisely irreconcilable, even under the elastic form of symbolism,
with the very universality to which they aspire. Such a universality
cannot be realized even in metaphysics and morals, for the element
of insolubility and unknowability, which cannot be eliminated, will
always attract different minds in different directions. The notion of
a dogma actually catholic, that is universal, or even a belief actually
catholic, seems to us a belief contrary to the indefinite progress
for which each of us ought to work according to his strength and his
opportunities. A thought is not really personal, does not, properly
speaking, even exist or possess the right to exist, unless it be
something more than a mere repetition of the thoughts of somebody else.
Every eye must have its own point of view, every voice its own accent.
The very progress of intelligence and of conscience must, like all
progress, proceed from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, nor seek
for an ideal unity except in an increasing variety. Would one recognize
the absolute power of the savage chief or the Oriental monarch in the
federative republican government, which, after a certain number of
centuries, will probably be that of all civilized nations? No; and
yet humanity will have passed from the one to the other by a series
of gradations sometimes scarcely visible. We believe that humanity
will progress in the same way generally, from dogmatic religion with
pretensions to universality, catholicity, and monarchy—of which
the most curious type has precisely been achieved in our days with
the dogma of infallibility—toward that state of individualism and
religions, which we consider as the human ideal, and which, moreover,
does not in the least exclude the possibility of diverse religious
associations or federations, nor of free and continuous progress toward
ultimate unity of belief on the most general subjects of human inquiry.
* * * * *
The day when positive religions shall have disappeared, the spirit
of curiosity in matters of cosmology and metaphysics, which has been
more or less paralyzed by an effort to dwell within the unyielding
limits of indomitable formula, will be more vivacious than ever before.
There will be less of faith, but more of free speculation; less of
contemplation, but more of reasoning, of hardy induction, of an active
outleap of thought; the religious dogma will be extinct, but the best
elements of religious life will be propagated, will be augmented in
intensity and extent. For he alone is religious, in the philosophical
sense of the word, who searches for, who thinks about, who loves the
truth. Christ might have said: I came not to bring peace into human
thought, but an incessant battle of ideas; not repose, but movement and
progress of spirit; not universal dogma, but liberty of belief, which
is the first condition of growth.[5]
[5] See pt. 3, chaps. i. and ii.
* * * * *
IV. To-day, when the very value of religion is increasingly called in
doubt, it has been defended by sceptics, who support it, sometimes in
the name of the poetry and beauty of religious legend, sometimes in
the name of its practical utility. There is sometimes a reaction in
the modern mind toward fiction and away from the reality. The human
mind becomes weary of regarding itself as a too passively clear mirror
in which the world throws its image; and takes pleasure in breathing
on the glass and obscuring it; and thence it comes that certain
refined philosophers raise the question whether truth and clearness
are advantageous in art, in science, in morals, in religion; and they
go the length even of preferring religious or philosophical error on
æsthetic grounds. For our part, we are far from antagonizing poetry,
and believe it to be excessively beneficial for humanity, but on
condition that it be not the dupe of its own symbols and do not erect
its intentions into dogmas. At this price, we believe that poetry may
very often be truer, and better, than certain too narrowly scientific,
or too narrowly practical truths. We shall not take ourselves to task
for having frequently, in this book, mingled poetry and metaphysics.
In so doing we preserve, in so far as it is legitimate, one of the
aspects of every religion, its poetic symbolism. Poetry is often more
philosophic, not only than history, but than abstract philosophy, but
on condition of being sincere and of making no pretensions to being
what it is not.
But the partisans of “beneficent error” will object: Why endeavour
to dissipate poetic illusion and to call things by their names? Are
there not for peoples, for men, for children, certain useful errors
and permissible illusions?[6] Surely a great number of errors may
be considered as having been necessary in the history of humanity;
but has not progress precisely consisted in restricting the number of
these useful errors? There have been also organs in the body which
have become superfluous, and have disappeared or been fundamentally
transformed; such, for example, are the muscles which, no doubt, served
our ancestors to move their ears. There exist evidently also, in the
human mind, instincts, sentiments, and beliefs which have already
atrophied and are destined to disappear or to be transformed. To show
the deep roots that religion has sent down into the depths of the human
mind is not to demonstrate the perpetuity of religion, for the human
mind itself is incessantly changing. “Our fathers,” said Fontenelle,
“made the mistake of hoarding up their errors for our benefit”; and
in effect, before arriving at the truth, a certain number of false
hypotheses must be tried; to discover the true is in some sense to have
exhausted the possibilities of the false. Religions have rendered the
human mind this immense service, they have exhausted a whole class of
side-issues in science, metaphysics, and ethics; one must cross the
marvellous to attain the natural, one must cross direct revelation and
mystical intention to attain to rational induction and deduction. All
the fantastic and apocalyptical ideas with which religion has peopled
the human mind once possessed their utility, just as the incomplete
and often grotesque sketches with which the studio of the artist is
filled once possessed theirs. This straying of the human mind was
a sort of reconnoitering, this play of imagination was a veritable
labour, a preliminary labour; but the products of it must not be
presented as final. The false and even the absurd have always played
so great a rôle in human affairs that it would assuredly be dangerous
to attempt abruptly to proceed without them; transitions are useful,
even in passing from darkness into light, and one needs to become
accustomed even to the truth. It is for that reason that society has
always rested in a great measure upon error. To-day this portion of its
foundation is being withdrawn, and conservatives are sadly frightened
lest the whole social equilibrium be destroyed; but we repeat, this
diminution of the number of errors is precisely what constitutes
progress, and in some sort defines it. Progress in effect is not simply
a sensible amelioration of life, it is also the achievement of a better
intellectual formulation of life, it is a triumph of logic; to progress
is to attain to a more complete consciousness of one’s self and of
the world, and by that very fact to a more complete inner consistency
of one’s theory of the world. In the beginning, not only moral and
religious life, but civil and political life, rested upon the grossest
errors, on absolute monarchy, divine right, caste, and slavery; all
this barbarity possessed a certain utility, but its utility precisely
consisted in its leading to its own extinction; it served as a means
of handing us on to something better. What distinguishes the living
mechanism from other mechanisms is that the outer springs precisely
labour to cause themselves to be superseded; that the movement once
produced is perpetual. If we possessed means of projection powerful
enough to rival those of nature, we might convert a cannon ball into
an eternal satellite of the earth, without its being necessary to
impart movement to it a second time. A result accomplished in nature
is accomplished once for all. A step forward if it is real and not
illusory, and in especial if it is completely conscious, renders
impossible a step backward.
[6] See pt. 2, chap. iv.
In the eighteenth century the attack on religion was directed by
philosophical partisans of _a priori_ principles, who were persuaded
that the instant a faith was proved to be absurd that was the end
of it. In our days the attack is led by historians who possess an
absolute respect for fact, which they are inclined to erect into a
law, historians who pass a learned existence in the midst of absurdity
in all its forms, and for whom the irrational, instead of condemning
a belief in which it appears, is often a condition of its duration.
Therein lies the difference between the attitude of the eighteenth
century and that of the nineteenth toward religion. The eighteenth
century hated religion and wished to destroy it. The nineteenth century
endeavours to understand religion and cannot reconcile itself to seeing
so charming an object of study disappear. The historian’s device is,
“What has been, will be”; he is naturally inclined to model his
conception of the future on his knowledge of the past. A witness of the
futility of revolutions, he sometimes forgets that complete evolution
is possible: an evolution which transforms things to their very roots
and metamorphoses human beings and their beliefs to an extent that
renders them unrecognizable.[7]
[7] “You are occupied with religion,” a cultivated unbeliever
writes me. “There is then some such thing! So much the
better for those who cannot do without it.” This witticism
precisely sums up the state of mind of a great many enlightened
Frenchmen: they are profoundly astonished that religion should
still be on its legs, and out of their astonishment they draw
the conviction that it is necessary. Their surprise thereupon
becomes a respect, almost a reverence. Assuredly positive
religions still exist and long will exist; and as long as they
exist they will no doubt do so for reasons; but these reasons
diminish day by day and the number of believers diminishes
along with them. Instead of bowing down before the fact as
before something sacred, one must rather say to one’s self
that by modifying the fact one will modify and suppress the
_raisons d’être_ of that fact; by driving religions before it,
the modern mind demonstrates that they have less and less the
right to live. That certain people have not as yet learned
to do without them is true, and as long as they do not learn
to do without them religions will for them exist; we have
not the least anxiety on that score; and just in so far as
they find their certitude in regard to them shaken, they will
have proved that their intelligence is so far enfranchised as
to have no further need of an arbitrary rule. Similarly for
peoples: nothing is more naïve than to urge the very necessity
of transitions as a bar to progress: it is as if one should
call attention to the shortness of human steps, and conclude
therefrom that movement is impossible; that man stands still
like a shell-fish attached to a stone or a fossil buried in a
rock.
One of the masters of religious criticism, M. Renan, wrote to
Sainte-Beuve: “No, assuredly I did not wish to detach from the old
trunk a soul which was not ripe.” We, also, are not of those who
believe in shaking the tree and gathering a green and bruised crop;
but if one ought not to make the green fruit fall, one may at least
take means to hasten its ripening upon the branch. The human brain is
a transmutation of solar heat; one must dissipate this heat, to become
once more a ray of the sun. Such an ambition is very gentle, is not at
all exorbitant, when one remembers how small a thing a ray of the sun
is and how lost in infinite space; a relatively small portion of these
wandering rays, however, has sufficed to fashion the earth and all
mankind.
I often meet, near my home, a missionary with a black beard, a hard,
sharp eye, lit sometimes by a mystic gleam. He seems to maintain a
correspondence with the four corners of the world; assuredly he works
and works precisely at building up what I am endeavouring to pull down.
And must our opposite strivings therefore be regarded as hostile? Why
so? Are we not both brothers and humble collaborators in the work
of humanity? To convert primitive peoples to Christian dogma and to
deliver those who have arrived at a higher stage of civilization from
a positive and dogmatic faith, are two tasks which, far from excluding
each other, complete each other. Missionaries and freethinkers
cultivate different plants, in different places, but at bottom both are
labouring to make the field of humanity more fertile. It is said that
John Huss, when tied to the stake at Constance, wore a smile of supreme
joy when he perceived a peasant in the crowd, bringing straw from the
roof of his hut to light the fire: _Sancta simplicitas!_ The martyr
recognized in this man a brother in sincerity; he was glad to find
himself in the presence of a disinterested conviction. We are no longer
in the times of John Huss, of Bruno, of Servetius, of St. Justin, or
of Socrates; it constitutes a reason the more for showing ourselves
tolerant, and sympathetic even, toward those whom we regard as being in
error, provided that the error be sincere.
There is an anti-religious fanaticism which is almost as dangerous
as religious fanaticism. Erasmus compares humanity to a drunken man
seated on a horse and lurching first to the right and then to the
left. The enemies of religion have often committed the mistake of
despising their adversaries; it is the worst of faults. There is a
power of elasticity in human beliefs which causes their resistance to
increase in proportion to the compression which is exerted upon them.
Formerly, when a city was attacked by some scourge, the first care of
the notable inhabitants, of the chiefs of the city, was to order public
prayers; to-day the practical means of battling with epidemics and
other scourges are better known, but nevertheless, in 1885, when there
was cholera in Marseilles the municipal council devoted its attention
almost singly to removing the religious mottoes from the walls of the
public schools; it is a remarkable example of what one may call a
counter-superstition. Thus the two species of fanaticism, religious
and anti-religious, may equally distract the timid from the employment
of scientific means against natural evils; an employment which is
after all, _par excellence_, the business of man; these two kinds of
fanaticism are paralyso-motors in the great body of humanity.
Among cultivated people there has now and then taken place a violent
reaction against religious prejudice, and this reaction frequently
persists till death; but in a certain number of cases this reaction is
followed in the course of time by a counter-reaction; it is only, as
Spencer has remarked, when this counter-reaction has been sufficient,
that one may formulate, with anything like completeness, judgments
somewhat less narrow and more comprehensive upon the question of
religion. Time makes us generous, enlarges our minds each year, as it
does the concentric circles in the trunk of a tree. Life also pacifies
us as death does; reconciles us with those who do not think and feel
as we do. When you become indignant at some antique, absurd prejudice,
remember that it has been a travelling companion of humanity for
perhaps ten thousand years, that it has lent men aid when the ways
were bad and has been the occasion of many joys, and has lived, so to
speak, the life of humanity; one might well find a certain element of
fraternity in every human thought.
We do not believe that the readers of this sincere book will be able
to accuse us of partiality or of injustice, for we have not sought to
disguise either the good or the evil aspects of religion, and have
even taken a certain pleasure in setting the former in relief. On the
other hand, we shall hardly be taxed with ignorance of the religious
problem which we have patiently studied on its every side. We shall
perhaps be reproached with belonging something too manifestly to the
country of our birth, with introducing into the solutions here offered
something of the French excess of logic, of an indisposition to yield
to half measures, of the determination to have all or nothing, of the
spirit which was unable to stop midway with Protestantism and which
for the past two centuries has been the home of the most ardent free
thought in the world. We reply that if the French mind has a defect,
this defect is not logic but a certain nimble trenchancy, a certain
narrowness of view which is the reverse of the spirit of logic and
analysis; logic, after all, has always the last word here below.
Concessions to absurdity, or at least to relativity, may sometimes be
necessary in human affairs—and the French Revolutionists were wrong
not to recognize it—but such concessions are always transitory. Error
is not the end and aim of the human mind; if one cannot make up one’s
account with it, if it is useless to disparage it bitterly, it is also
unnecessary to venerate it. Minds at once logical and capacious are
always sure to be followed, provided one gives humanity time enough;
and the truth can wait; it always remains young and is certain some
day to be recognized. Sometimes during long night marches soldiers
fall asleep without ceasing on that account to go forward; they march
on in their dreams and do not awaken till they have reached their
destination on the battlefield. It is thus that ideas advance in the
human mind; they are so drowsy that they seem unable to stand upright,
one discovers their strength and their vitality only by the distance
they traverse, and finally day breaks and they appear on the field and
are victorious.
THE NON-RELIGION OF THE FUTURE.
Part First.
THE GENESIS OF RELIGIONS IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETIES.
CHAPTER I.
RELIGIOUS PHYSICS.
IMPORTANCE OF THE PROBLEM OF THE ORIGIN OF RELIGION—UNIVERSALITY OF
RELIGIOUS BELIEFS OR SUPERSTITIONS—VARIABILITY OF RELIGIONS AND
RELIGIOUS EVOLUTION.
I. Idealist Theory which Attributes the Origin of Religion to
a Notion of the Infinite—Henotheism of Max Müller and Von
Hartmann—M. Renan’s Instinct for Divinity.
II. Theory of a Worship of the Dead and of Spirits—Herbert
Spencer—Spencer’s Objections to the Theory of the
Attribution of a Soul to Natural Forces.
III. Answer to Objections—Religious Physics Sociological in
Form, and the Substitution of Relations between Malevolent
or Beneficent Conscious Beings for Relations between
Natural Forces—Socio-morphism of Primitive Peoples.
[Sidenote: Importance of inquiry into genesis of religion.]
The question of the genesis of religion is more important than any
other historical inquiry. It involves not only the truth or falsity
of past events, but the value or the reverse of our ideas and present
beliefs. Each of us has something at stake in this investigation. The
causes which formerly gave rise to a belief are still, in the majority
of cases, those which maintain it in existence in our days, and to
take stock of these causes is, whether one intends it to be so or not,
to pass judgment on the belief itself. History, if it should ever be
complete, would possess here the power of effacing in the future what
it had failed to justify in the past. Perfectly to ascertain the
origin of religions would be at the same time either to condemn them or
to fortify and preserve them.
[Sidenote: Established fact that every known race of people is
religious.]
One point may legitimately be regarded as attained by contemporary
criticism. After the labours of Herr Roskoff, M. Réville, and M. Girard
de Rialle, it is impossible to maintain that there exist nowadays on
the surface of the earth whole peoples absolutely without religion
or superstition, which among non-civilized people amount to the same
thing.[8] The reason why man is a superstitious or religious being is
simply that he possesses a high degree of intelligence. Megalithic
monuments (menhirs, cromlechs, dolmens), sepulchres, amulets, are
trustworthy evidence of the existence of religion in prehistoric times;
and those fragments of bone detached from the skull and pierced with
holes to pass a string through—“cranial rounds”—belong, no doubt,
to the same category.[9] Manifestations of the religious spirit date
back thus to the age of polished stone. And to pass from facts to
hypotheses it is conceivable that at the beginning of the quaternary
period, perhaps two hundred and fifty thousand years ago, man was
already feeding upon vague and elementary superstitions, though he does
not appear to have felt sufficient respect for his dead to have dug
sepulchres, and although no fetiches belonging to that period have been
discovered.
[8] Herr Roskoff, _Das Religionswesen der rohesten
Naturvoelker_ (Leipzig, 1880); M. Girard de Rialle, _Mythologie
comparée_ (Paris, 1878); M. Réville, _Les religions des peuples
non civilisés_ (Paris, 1880).
[9] See M. G. De Mortillet, _Le préhistorique. Antiquité de
l’homme_ (Paris, 1883).
[Sidenote: Established fact that religion is of natural origin.]
A second point which may be regarded as equally established, and which
results in important consequences in the matter of method of research,
is that religion, being of natural origin, must have developed slowly
and in accordance with universal and regular laws; it must have
originated in simple and vague notions of some sort, accessible to
the most primitive intelligence. And from that starting point it must
have risen by gradual evolution to the complex and precise conceptions
which characterize it to-day. It is in vain for religions to believe
themselves immutable; they have all of them been borne forward
unwittingly by the movement of universal evolution. The great Egyptian
Sphinx, who has not changed her position in the desert these four
thousand years, might believe herself to be stationary, but she has
never ceased for an instant to whirl through space, borne along by the
earth’s motion around the sun.
[Sidenote: Two contrasted theories of its origin.]
It remains to determine what these primary notions that lay at the
bottom of all religions were. And here begins the disagreement among
the principal authorities on the science of religion. Some of them
explain the birth of religion by a sort of mysterious intuition of
supra-sensible verity, by a divination of God; others regard it as an
intellectual error, a false hypothesis, which was natural, however,
and perhaps inevitable to primitive intelligence. The first look upon
religion as an immense leap on the part of the human mind over and
beyond the limits of the physical world in which we are confined,
the second believe it to be born in the beginning of an inexact
interpretation of the commonest phenomena of the world, of objects
of our senses or of our consciousness; for the first, religion is
more than science; for the second, religion is pseudo-science. All
idealists—Strauss, Renan, Matthew Arnold—discover in every religion
the germ of their own especial form of refined idealism, and bow down
before it with a respect that might well appear ironical if they did
not affirm themselves to be quite sincere; they see in religions
generally the noblest and most lasting product of the human mind. Their
extreme adversaries, on the contrary, see no more in the origin of
religions than, as Auguste Comte would have said, the expression of a
gross fetichism.
[Sidenote: Is religion a species of illusion?]
It is evident that the problem of the origin of religion, in the new
form in which it presents itself to-day, is quite as grave as ever it
was; formerly the question was whether religion is revealed or natural;
to-day the question is whether religion is or is not true—whether
it is or is not the product of an intellectual error, of a sort of
inevitable optical illusion which it is the business of science to
explain and to correct; whether, in effect, the god of mythical and
symbolical religion is not simply a magnified idol.
[Sidenote: The positivist theory no longer in possession of the field.]
The positivist theory of religion seemed some years ago close upon its
ultimate triumph.[10] Many had accepted it, but without having fully
perceived all of its consequences. At the present moment it is, on the
contrary, strongly contested. New elements have been introduced into
the problem and the whole question must be gone over again. Max Müller
in especial has made what might be almost called a desperate effort
to make out a case for the objectivity and essential rationality of
religion, which had both been compromised by positivism.[11] From a
different point of view Herbert Spencer also, in his “Sociology,” has
criticised theories which regard fetichism or naturism as the principle
of religion.
[10] We find it adopted or almost so even by spiritualists,
like M. Vacherot, _La religion_, Paris, 1869.
[11] See _Origin and Development of Religion_, by F. Max
Müller, M. A.
[Sidenote: Max Müller’s theory.]
According to Max Müller some notion of divinity, in especial in the
form of a notion of the infinite, must have preceded the conception of
God. Gods are simply subsequent personifications of this great innate
idea; our ancestors kneeled in worship long before they possessed a
name for Him before whom they were kneeling. Even at the present day
we recognize in the last resort the vanity of all the titles of the
unknown God whom we must adore really in silence. Religion, which is
responsible for the origin of the gods of history, may therefore well
survive them. We say religion; for in effect, according to Max Müller,
all religions amount in the end to one, since they may all be traced
back through the long course of their development to a single original
conception, that namely of the infinite, which from the very beginning
was present in the mind of man. This universal conception, however,
Max Müller does not regard as in any sense mystical or innate, in the
old acceptation of that word. He willingly adopts the axiom: _Nihil
in fide quod non antea fuerit in sensu._[12] But in his opinion some
perception of the infinite is logically involved in a perception of
the finite, and this conception of infinity, with its basis at once in
sense and reason, is the true foundation of religion. Given the five
senses of a savage, Max Müller undertakes to make him sensible of or at
least experience some presentiment of the infinite, make him desire it,
feel some aspiration toward it. Take the sense of sight for example:
“Man sees, he sees to a certain point; and then his eyesight breaks
down. But exactly where his eyesight breaks down there presses upon
him, whether he likes it or not, the perception of the unlimited or
the infinite.” “It may be said,” he adds, “that this is not perception
in the ordinary sense of the word. No more it is, but still less is it
mere reasoning.” “If it seems too bold to say that man actually sees
the invisible, let us say that he _suffers_ from the invisible, and
the invisible is only a special name for the infinite.” Man not only
necessarily divines the infinite as existing beyond the limits of the
finite, and as it were enveloping it; he perceives it within the limits
of the finite, and as it were penetrating it; the infinite divisibility
of matter is manifest to the senses, the fact that science seems to
demand the existence of an irreducible atom as a necessary postulate
to the contrary notwithstanding. And what is true of space is equally
true of time, applies equally to quality and quantity. “Beyond, behind,
beneath, and within the finite, the infinite is always present to our
senses. It presses upon us, it grows upon us from every side. What we
call finite in space and time, in form and word, is nothing but a veil
or net which we ourselves have thrown over the infinite.” And let it
not be objected that primitive languages supply no means of expressing
the idea of infinity, of the beyond, which is given in every finite
sensation. Do the languages of antiquity supply a means of designating
the infinite shades and variety of colour? Democritus was acquainted
with but four colours: black, white, red, and yellow. Shall we say,
therefore, that the ancients did not perceive the blue of heaven?
The sky was as blue for them as it is for us, but they had not yet
established a conventional designation for the sensation it afforded
them. And similarly in the case of the infinite for the primitive man;
it existed for him although he had not as yet invented a name for it.
Well, what is this infinite, in the last resort, but the object to
which every religion addresses itself? A religious being is essentially
one who is not satisfied with such and such a finite sensation; who
looks everywhere for the beyond—looks for it in life, in death, in
nature, in himself. To be divinely aware of a vague somewhat that
one cannot quite understand, to feel a veneration for it and then to
endeavour to fit it with a name, to call to it stammeringly, these
are the beginnings of every system of religious worship. The religion
of the infinite comprehends and precedes all others, and since the
infinite itself is given in sensation, it follows that “Religion is
simply another development of sensuous perception, quite as much as
reason is.”[13]
[12] _Origin and Development of Religion_, p. 210.
[13] _Origin of Religion_, p. 25.
[Sidenote: Equally opposed to positivists and orthodox monotheists.]
Max Müller is equally critical in his attitude toward positivists, who
regard fetichism as the primitive religion, and toward the orthodox,
who find in monotheism the natural uncorrupted type of religion. In
his opinion, to name a god or gods implies antecedently the possession
of a notion of the divine, of the infinite; gods are simply the
different forms, more or less imperfect indeed, in which divers peoples
have bodied forth one and the same idea; religion is, so to speak,
a language into which men have endeavoured to translate one and the
same internal aspiration—that of comprehending the great unknown; if
man’s tongue and intelligence have gone astray, if the diversity and
inequality of religions are comparable to the diversity and inequality
of languages, that does not necessarily mean that at bottom the
veritable principle and object of all these different religions, as of
all these different languages, are not very nearly the same. According
to Max Müller a fetich, in the proper sense of the word (_factitius_),
is no more than a symbol which presupposes an idea symbolized; the
idea of God cannot come out of a fetich unless it has already been put
there. Casual objects, such as stones, shells, the tail of a lion,
a tangle of hair, or any such rubbish, do not possess in themselves
a theogonic or god-producing character. The phenomena of fetichism,
therefore, are always historically and psychologically secondary.
Religions do not begin in fetichisms, it is truer to say that they end
in it; not one of them has shown itself capable of maintaining its
original purity in connection with fetichism. Portuguese Catholics who
reproach negroes with the _feitiços_ were the first (were they not?) to
have their rosaries, their crosses, their sacred images, blessed by the
priests, before their departure from their native land.
[Sidenote: Henotheism.]
If fetichism, understood as Max Müller understands it, is not the
primitive form of religion, if self-conscious monotheism is equally
incapable of maintaining its claim to be so, it is more exact to say
that the earliest religion, at least in India, consisted in the worship
of different objects, accepted one after the other as representing _a_
god (εἷς) and not the unique and sole God (μόνος). It is this that
Max Müller calls by a word invented by him: henotheism (εἷς, ἑνός,
in opposition to μόνος), or better, kathenotheism.[14] In ordinary
polytheism the gods are arranged in hierarchies, belong to different
ranks; order reigns in heaven; but in the beginning no such system of
subordination could have existed. Each god must have seemed in turn
the most powerful to whoever invoked him; Indra, Varuna, Agni, Mitra,
Somah were accustomed to hear the same epithets addressed to them;
religious anarchy preceded religious monarchy. “Among you, O Gods,”
says Rishi Manu Vaivasvata, “there is none that is large, there is none
that is small, there is none that is old nor young: you are all great
indeed.” They are all but different symbols of the same idea, of an
adoration for that which overpasses the limits of the human mind, for
the mysterious infinite whose existence our senses prove by their very
incapacity of taking cognizance of it.
[14] This word has met with success in Germany. Hartmann also
adopts a theory of henotheism.
[Sidenote: The evolution of the Hindu faith typical.]
Max Müller endeavours to trace the evolution of Hindu thought from
a period long previous to the birth of Buddhism, which was the
Protestantism of India. The learned philologist sees in the development
of religion in India one of the essential types of the development of
human religions generally. It may be even, he thinks, that the Hindus,
who started from as low a plane as we, have in some respects reached a
more considerable height. Let us follow him in this inquiry, which has
nowhere been conducted more anxiously and indefatigably than in the
great country which may almost be called the home of meditation. Let us
take with him a “bird’s-eye view” of what may be regarded as an epitome
of human history.
[Sidenote: Progress from the semi-tangible to the intangible.]
Πάντες δὲ θεῶν χατέους’ ἄνθρωποι, said Homer. It was not within
the domain of the wholly tangible that India sought for its gods;
understanding by _tangible_ whatever one can touch on all sides,
stones, shells, bones, etc.; and Max Müller sees in this fact (which,
by the way, may be contested) a fresh argument against the fetich
theory. On the contrary, in the presence of his great, snow-capped
mountains, of which our comparatively level Europe can scarcely afford
us even an idea, in the presence of his immense beneficent rivers with
their rumbling cataracts, their eddies, their unknown sources, in the
presence of the ocean, stretching away beyond the line of vision, the
Hindu found himself surrounded by things, of which he could touch
and understand but some inconsiderable portion—of which the origin
and destiny baffled him. It was in the domain of the _semi-tangible_
that India found its _semi-deities_. One step beyond, Hindu thought
domesticated itself in the region of the intangible, that is to say,
in the region of things which, though visible, lie entirely beyond our
reach—the visible heaven, the stars, the sun, the moon, the dawn,
which were regarded in India, as also elsewhere, as true divinities.
Add to these thunder, which for the Hindus also descends from heaven
with a “howl,” the wind sometimes so terrible, which, however, in
the hot days of summer “pours honey” upon man, and the rain, sent
by the beneficent rain god, Indra. Having thus created their deities
and peopled heaven somewhat at haphazard, the Hindus were not slow
to distribute them into classes and families—to invent for them a
necessary background of genealogy. There is a record of certain efforts
to establish in the Hindu heaven, as in the Olympus of the Greeks, a
system of government, a supreme authority; in a number of hymns the
notion of the one God, Creator and Master of the world, is clearly
expressed: He is “the Father that begat us, the Ruler who knows the
laws and the worlds, in Him alone all creatures repose.”
[Sidenote: And from the intangible to the unreal.]
But the Hindu mind was destined to rise at a bound above Greek
polytheism and Hebrew monotheism. It is well to see God in nature.
There lies still a step beyond: to ignore nature. A firm belief in
the reality of this world, in the value of this life, enters as an
essential element into the belief in a personal God, superior to
the world and distinct from it, like the Javeh of the Hebrews. The
distinguishing characteristic of the Hindu mind is precisely a certain
scepticism in regard to the world, a persuasion of the vanity of
nature; so that the Hindu god possesses and can possess nothing in
common with Jupiter or Javeh. He who sees no more in material force
than a play of the senses, will see no more in the power which is
supposed to direct that force than a play of the imagination; faith
in a Creator shares the fate of faith in a creation. It is in vain
for Hindu poets to vindicate _sraddhâ_ faith, for the gods. Indra in
especial, the most popular of the divinities, to whom the supreme
epithet of Visvakarman, the maker of all things, is given, is of all
others most subject to be doubted. “There is no Indra. Who has seen
him? Whom shall we praise?” (Rig. vii. 89, 3.) It is true that the
poet after these bitter words represents Indra as appearing in person,
as in the book of Job. “Here I am, O worshipper! behold me here. In
might I overcome all creatures.” But the faith of the poet and of
the thinker takes fire but for a moment; we enter into a period of
doubt which Max Müller designates by the name of adevism and which he
carefully distinguishes from atheism properly so called. And in effect
Hindus did not reject the very notion of a god, the Greek θεός;
they sought God simply back of and beyond the personal and capricious
deities that up to that time they had adored; such deities became for
them names simply, but names of some thing, of some being, unknown.
“There is only one being, although the poets call him by a thousand
names.” Buddhism itself, which came later and did no more than develop
tendencies already existing in Brahmanism, was not, in Max Müller’s
judgment, originally atheistic. Adevism was no more for India, with
some slight exceptions, than a period of transition; the Hindu mind
passed it as a step toward a higher level. And yet what anxiety, what
incertitude, is expressed in certain hymns which belong, no doubt,
to this unhappy epoch. The Vedic poets no longer glorify the sky nor
the dawn, they do not celebrate the powers of Indra, nor the wisdom
of Visvakarman and Pragâpati. They move about, as they themselves
say, “as if enveloped in mist and idle speech.” Another says: “My
ears vanish, my eyes vanish, and the light also which dwells in my
heart; my mind with its far off longing leaves me; what shall I say,
and what shall I think?... Who knows from whence this great creation
sprang? and whether it is the work of a Creator or not? The most High
Seer, that is in the highest heaven, he knows it, or perchance even
he knows not.” (Rig. x. 129.) There is profoundness in these last
words, and how the problem of the creation has been probed by the human
intellect since that epoch! The evolution of the ideas indicated in
the passages of the hymns reaches its climax in what are called the
Upanishads, the last literary compositions which still belong to the
Vedic period, where all the philosophy of the time is found condensed,
and where one catches glimpses of the modern doctrine of Schopenhauer
and of Von Hartmann. After having meditated a long time the Hindu
believed himself to have succeeded. Max Müller cites the surprising
dialogue between Pragâpati and Indra, in which the latter acquires,
after a long effort, an acquaintance with the “self hidden within the
heart,” the Atman, what Kant would call “the transcendental ego.” In
the beginning Indra supposed this ego to be the visible reflection of
his body, covered with its splendid raiment, in the water. But no;
for when the body suffers or perishes, Atman would perish. “I see no
good in this doctrine.” Indra then entertained the hypothesis that the
Atman reveals itself in dreams, when the mind is given over to the
control of one knows not what invisible power, and forgets the pains
of life. But no, for in dreams one still weeps, still suffers. Or may
not the Atman, the supreme ego, be simply the man in dreamless sleep,
in perfect repose? The ideal of repose, forgetfulness, of profound and
sweet sleep, has always possessed great charm for the Orient. But no,
“for he who sleeps does not know himself (his self), that he is I, nor
does he know anything that exists. He is gone to utter annihilation.
I see no good in this doctrine.” It is only after passing through all
these successive stages, that the Hindu mind comes at last to formulate
what seems to it altogether the most profound truth and the supreme
ideal. Atman is the self, leaving the body and freeing itself from
pleasure and pain, taking cognizance of its own eternity (Upan. viii.
7-12); recognizing the Old, who is difficult to be seen, who has
entered into darkness.... It is smaller than small, greater than great;
hidden in the heart of the creature. (ii. 12, 20.) Atman the “highest
person,” whom the sage finally discovers in himself, lies also at the
bottom of all other beings than himself. Atman, the subjective ego, is
identical with Brahma, the objective ego. Brahma is in us, and we are
in all things, the distinction between individuals vanishes, nature
and its gods are absorbed in Brahma, and Brahma is “the very ether of
our hearts.” “Thou art it, _tat tvam_, is the word of life and of the
whole world.” To find one’s self in everything, to feel the eternity
of everything, is the supreme religion; it is the religion of Spinoza.
“There is one eternal thinker, thinking the non-eternal thoughts; he,
though one, fulfils the desires of many.... Brahma cannot be reached
by speech, by mind, or by eye. He cannot be apprehended, except by him
who says: He is.” This Brahma in whom everything vanishes as a dream,
“is a great terror, like a drawn sword”; but he is also the highest
joy to him who has once found him; he is the appeaser of desire and
intelligence. “Those who know him become immortal.”
[Sidenote: Hindu tolerance.]
We have at last reached with Max Müller “the end of the long journey
which we undertook to trace.” We have seen the Hindu religion, which
is typical of human religions, develop gradually, endeavour to cope
with the infinite in its various forms, until it attains the height
of conceiving it as Brahma, the eternal thinker, of whom the world
is no more than a transitory thought. The gods are dead; sacrifices,
rites, observances of all sorts are useless; the sole rite which
is appropriate as an offering to the infinite is meditation and
detachment. Do the débris therefore of the earlier stages of the faith
disappear and the temples fall in dust, and Agni, Indra, and all these
splendid titles pass into oblivion? Not at all, and here, following Max
Müller, we may find in the history of the religions of India a lesson
for ourselves in tolerance and generosity. The Brahmans understood
that, as man grows from infancy to old age, the idea of the divine must
grow in him from the cradle to the grave; a religion which does not
live and grow is a dead religion. The Hindus accordingly have divided
the life of the individual into distinct periods—Âsramas, as they say;
in the earlier Âsramas the believer invokes gods, offers sacrifices,
puts up prayers; it is only later, when he has accomplished these
naïve duties and tempered his soul by long contact with the juvenile
aspects of the faith, that in his mature reason he rises above the
gods, and regards all sacrifices and ceremonies as vain forms, and
thenceforth finds his cult in the highest science which is to him the
highest religion, the Vedanta. Thus in the life of the individual the
various stages of religion exist in an harmonious hierarchy. Even in
our days in a Brahman family one may see the grandfather at the summit
of the intellectual ladder looking down without disdain upon his son,
who fulfils each day his sacred duties, and at his grandson learning
by heart the ancient hymns. All generations live in peace, side by
side. The different castes, each of which follows a system of belief
adapted to its degree, do the same. All adore, at bottom, the same
god, but this god takes care to make himself accessible to everyone,
to stoop for those whose station does not lift them above the earth.
“It is thus,” says Max Müller, “that every religion, if it is a bond
of union between the wise and the foolish, the old and the young, must
be pliant, must be high, and deep, and broad; bearing all things,
believing all things, enduring all things.” Let us be as tolerant as
our fathers in India, let us not be indignant against the superstitions
above which we ourselves have risen and which served us in their day as
stepping stones. Let us learn how to discover the element of goodness
and truth in all the creeds of humanity. It may be that all human
religions, if they could once be freed from the legends which drape
them, would unite to furnish for the cultivated portion of mankind a
religion really complete. “Who knows but that their very foundation may
serve once more, like the catacombs, or like the crypts beneath our old
cathedrals, for those who, to whatever creed they may belong, long for
something better, purer, older, and truer than what they can find in
the statutable sacrifices, services, and sermons of the days in which
their lot on earth has been cast.”
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Criticism of Max Müller’s theory.]
Is this elevated theory exact? In the first place it seeks erroneously
to find in Hindu civilization the type of primitive religion; more
than that it inverts the order of evolution by presupposing at the
beginning the existence of complex notions and profound symbols which
have been misconceived, it holds, by later generations only through
an inability correctly to interpret the language in which they lay
embalmed.[15] The capital defect in the theory, however, is that it
discovers the origin of religion in the vaguest and most modern of
metaphysical ideas, that namely of the infinite. Max Müller holds that
this idea is furnished even by the senses; his system presents itself
to us as an effort at a reconciliation between the sensualists and
the idealists. But the doctrine rests upon a confusion. A perception
of relativity is one thing, a perception of infinity is another; some
objects are great, some are small, and any object is great or small
according to the standard of comparison—that is what the senses, or
rather the memory, informs us of; and unless the metaphysical subtlety
of a modern scholar whispers something in their ear, that is all they
tell us. Max Müller seems to believe that the perception of space
supplies us directly with a perception of infinity; but over and above
any question of the psychological inexactitude of this account, it
is irreconcilable with the historical facts. The infinity of space
is an idea which metaphysicians alone, and that too in comparatively
late times, have succeeded in realizing. The horizon is, on the face
of it, a physical limit. The child fancies that he can go close up to
the horizon and touch the beginnings of the celestial dome with his
finger; the ancients conceived the heavens as an inverted bowl of hard
crystal, sown with luminous points.[16] For us who have been told since
we were children that the stars are greater than the earth, and are
separated from us by a distance unimaginably great, the spectacle of
the heavens by a necessary association gives rise to a feeling of the
incommensurable and the infinite. There is no reason to suppose that
anything analogous took place in the mind of primitive man when he
lifted his eyes on high. Primitive man has not the least idea that the
power of vision is limited, that the vault of heaven is the vault of
his incapacity and that infinite space stretches beyond; habitually,
primitive man locates the end of the world at the extremity of his line
of vision, which forms on all sides of him a visible and motionless
sphere. It is difficult for him to understand that heavenly space
is greater than the visible world. He finds it equally difficult to
conceive the infinitely little; the infinite divisibility of matter
of which, according to Max Müller, the senses take cognizance, is a
conception which results only from the most abstract reasoning. Man’s
natural belief is that the divisibility of matter stops at the same
point that his power of taking cognizance of it does—at the visible
atom.
[15] Max Müller, as is well known, goes the length of believing
that the authors of the first myths were perfectly conscious
that they were speaking in parables; and that subsequent
generations misunderstood them, because they personified the
figures and the names by which the Divine was referred to; so
that mythology becomes literally the science of a disease of
language.
[16] Among the most ingenious and least contestable of Max
Müller’s suggestions, we cite the paragraph devoted to the
Vedic deity Aditi, one of the names of the dawn: “You will be
as surprised as I certainly was surprised when the fact first
presented itself to me, that there really is a deity in the
Veda who is simply called the boundless or the infinite, in
Sanscrit A-_diti_. _Aditi_ is derived from _diti_, and the
negative particle _a_. _Diti_, again, is regularly derived from
a root DÂ (dyati), to bind, from which _dita_, the participle,
meaning bound, and _diti_, a substantive, meaning binding
and bound. _Aditi_, therefore, must originally have meant
without bounds, not chained nor inclosed, boundless, infinite,
infinitude.”
This etymology, on the contrary, seems to us rather to be
calculated to show precisely that the conception of infinity is
not primitive, and that the first time the Hindus invoked the
dawn under the name of Aditi, they were far from possessing any
distinction between finite and infinite. The night was for them
a prison-house, the return of day was their deliverance. It is
well known that they represented day as a luminous cow, which
moved slowly out of the stable at night and stepped across
the fields of heaven and of earth. Sometimes these cows are
represented as stolen and confined in sombre caverns. Aurora
herself is retained in the depths of _Rita_; night threatens
to reign without end, but the gods set out in search of her,
Indra discovers and delivers her, and with her aid, the cows
bellowing for liberty are discovered in their cavern. It
seems to us that for one who enters into the spirit of these
primitive legends, it is easy to determine the primitive sense
of Aditi. Aditi is the dawn who, confined one knows not where,
succeeds at last in breaking bonds and appears radiantly in
the open heaven, delivering and delivered, breaking the jail
in which the hours of darkness have confined the world. Aditi
is the dawn, freed and giving freedom. And, by an extension
of meaning, it comes to signify the immortal and imperishable
light which no power can veil or hide for more than a day.
Whereas, Diti signifies what is mortal and perishable and
prisoned in the bounds of matter. This construction is simple,
and what is more, is confirmed by the legends to which we
have just alluded; after having advocated it in the _Revue
philosophique_ (December, 1879), we find it adopted by M.
Réville, _Prolégomènes à l’histoire des religions_, 1881.
[Sidenote: “Suffering from the invisible,” a modern malady.]
As to this “suffering from the invisible” of which Max Müller speaks,
it is an altogether modern disease, which, instead of giving rise
to the idea of the infinite, is, on the contrary, a late product of
this notion which was itself acquired by force of knowledge and of
reasoning; far from marking the point from which religions spring,
the “suffering from the unknown” stamps their insufficiency, is the
beginning of their end. Primitive man troubles himself little about
the infinity of nature and the eternal silence of infinite space; he
constructs a world after the model of his own houses and shuts himself
safely up in it. It is only the visible world that troubles him; he
finds in it an object more than sufficient for his utmost physical
and intellectual activity; he does not go far afield in search of
his gods; he finds them, so to speak, under his hand, touches them
with his finger, lives in their company. The essence of their power
over him lies in the fact that they are neighbours of his. To his
gross intelligence the greatness of the gods is not commensurate with
their intrinsic infinity, but with their power over him; if heaven
neither lighted him nor warmed him with its sun, it would not be the
universal father, the Dyaush-pitâ, the Ζεύς, the Jupiter. We do
not mean to say with Feuerbach that religion strikes root in gross
self-interest and brutal egoism simply; in his relations with the gods,
as in his relations with his fellows, man is partly selfish, partly
unselfish: what we maintain is that primitive man is not an advanced
rationalist of the type of Max Müller, that the conception of infinity
was attained independently of religious faith, and, more than that,
is in conflict with religious faith and will ultimately destroy it.
When in the progress of human thought the universe is once conceived
as infinite, it overpasses the gods and unseats them. This happened
in Greece at the time of Democritus and Epicurus. Positive religion
demands a finite world: primitive people did not rear temples to the
Infinite in the hopes of domesticating Him. Max Müller pronounces
a eulogy upon the Hindus for their adevism; was it really to their
conception of the infinite that they owed their wisdom, and might not
the idea of infinity alone have quite as well led them to atheism?
When one learns to contemplate the world as an eternally lengthening
chain of phenomena, one no longer hopes, by a futile prayer, to stop
or to modify the march of such inflexible determinism; one contents
one’s self with investigating it by science or entering into it in some
field of action. Religion disappears in science or morality. There
remains, it is true, a final hypothesis that one may maintain: one may
apotheosize the infinite, make over to it, after the manner of the
Brahmans, of the ancient and modern Buddhists, of the Schopenhauers
and the Hartmanns, a donation of some mysterious unity of essence;
but if so, prayer expires in meditation, in ecstasy, in a monotonous
rocking of the cradle of thought to the rhythm of the phenomenal
world, and religion becomes a religion of monism. But this religion
does not spring in any proper sense from the notion of infinity, it,
so to speak, hooks on to it rather; it is another example of man’s
need, if not to personify, at least to individualize and to unify the
infinite—so great is man’s need to project his individuality by main
force, if need be, into the world! One is bent on endowing this great
material body that one calls nature with some sort of a soul, one is
bent on conceiving it in some fashion or other on the model of the
human organism; and is not that, too, a species of anthropomorphism?
[Sidenote: The conception of infinity a scientific discovery.]
It is only later that human thought, carried away upon an endless
voyage of discovery analogous to the migration of a primitive people,
after having traversed the length of visible space and leaped the
bound of its own intellectual horizon, attains the presence of the
unfathomable ocean of the infinite. The infinite is for the human mind
such a discovery as the ocean was for peoples who had wandered to its
shores from the mountains and the plains. Just as for the newborn child
the different planes of vision are indistinct and equally near; just
as it is by the sense of touch that one learns little by little to
recognize the depth of space and to acquire the conception of distance;
just as, so to speak, it is with one’s own hand that one opens the
horizon before one; in the same way to the uncultivated intelligence
everything seems finite and limited; and it is only by moving forward
that it perceives the breadth and depth of its domain. It is only to
a mind upon the march that the great perspective of the infinite is
thrown open. At bottom this conception of infinity is less due to any
direct experience of mere things than to a sense of one’s own personal
activity, to a belief in the perpetual progress open to human thought;
action, as somebody has said,[17] is the real infinite or at least what
appears as such. In this sense it may be admitted that there is in
every human thought some vague presentiment of infinity, for there is
a consciousness of a fund of activity which will not be exhausted in
any given act nor in any given thought; to be conscious that one lives
is thus in some sort to be conscious that one is infinite: illusion
or reality, this notion forms a part of all our thoughts, turns up in
every proposition of science; but it does not produce science, it is,
on the contrary, born of it; it does not produce religion, which is
the science of primitive ages, but descends from it. The conception
of infinity in many respects resembles the ignorance of Socrates, the
refined ignorance which was really in disguise the last development of
intelligence. One of the antiscientific traits of existing religions is
precisely that they display no sufficient sentiment of our ignorance
in the presence of the unknowable, that the window they have open
upon the infinite is decidedly too contracted. If, as we have seen,
religious physics tends little by little to transform itself into a
metaphysics; if the gods have retreated from phenomenon to phenomenon,
to the region of the supersensible; if heaven has separated itself
from earth, positive religion nevertheless still lives in fear of
throwing open to human thought a perspective really infinite. Its eyes
are always fixed upon a more or less, determinate being, a creator,
a unity in which the spirit may find repose and safety from the
infinite. Religious metaphysics, like religious physics, has remained
more or less anthropomorphic, and rests more or less on a foundation
of miracle; a foundation, that is to say, which limits and suspends
the exercise of intelligence. And as the object of adoration, in the
majority of religions, is anything rather than the infinite, in the
same way religious faith itself leads to a disposition to arrest the
march of thought and impose upon it an immutable barrier; it leads
to the negation of infinity and of the indefinite progress of human
research. Stricken by an arrest of development the majority of positive
religions settled once for all on the first formulæ that occurred to
them; they erected them into the practical object of a cult and left
the intangible infinite unmolested in outer vagueness.
[17] Alfred Fouillée, _La liberté et le déterminisme, 2e partie_.
[Sidenote: Conception of an all-embracing unity, also modern.]
Over and above the conception of the infinite there is another and
a similar notion that it is equally impossible to discover at the
roots of religious thought; it is that of unity in plurality, of
totality. This pantheistic, monistic concept Von Hartmann believes
to be the starting-point of all religions. As a partial disciple of
Hegel and of Schopenhauer, Von Hartmann inevitably attributes to
humanity and applies to the interpretation of history the formulæ of
his dialectic. “Henotheism,” he says, “is founded on a recognition
of the positive identity at bottom of all the divinities of nature;
an identity which permits one to adore in the person of every god
individually, and principally in the person of each of the leading
gods, absolute divinity, the divine god. It becomes therefore a matter
of indifference, in some measure, under which of its particular aspects
one worships Divinity; when Indra is represented imaginatively in the
form of a buffalo, the right to represent him immediately afterward in
the form of an eagle, or a falcon, is not for an instant abrogated;
when henotheism offers its homage to the supreme deity under the name
of Indra, god of the tempest, it does not incapacitate itself from
adoring him a moment afterward under the name of Surya, god of the
sun; or of Rudra-Varuna, god of the heavens. Henotheism does not owe
its origin, therefore, to a failure in the association of ideas, and
to a chance forgetfulness, an incredible lapse of memory on the part
of polytheists, when they were addressing their homage to Surya as the
supreme god, that there were still other gods in existence who were
adored by other people, and even sometimes by themselves.” Imagine
primitive humanity “up” in the latest developments of the philosophy
of monism, with its symbolism and its notion of conceiving diverse
powers as metaphorical manifestations of the fundamental unity of
things! Even for India, the home of pantheistic metaphysics, such a
philosophy is the reluctant product of a civilization already refined.
People never take the first steps in thought by means of abstractions.
To conceive divinity in general, and subsequently represent it by
Indra, Surya, or Rudra-Varuna, as by aspects, no one of which
exhaust the totality of it—by a sort of litany in which the unity of
things appears successively under diverse names and forms—implies a
subtlety of intelligence and a mastery of the henotheistic conception
of the universe that is one of the latest products of metaphysical
speculation. In the beginning the form and figure of the god was not
distinguished from the god himself. The distinction between body
and mind was one that humanity attained with great difficulty; and,
_a fortiori_, any notion of a unity of the supreme and world soul,
existing under a multiplicity of forms, must of necessity have made its
appearance much later.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: M. Renan’s religious instinct.]
Another and later form of this vague idealism, that Max Müller and Von
Hartmann, and also Strauss, have advocated, is presented in the theory
of M. Renan concerning the “religious instinct,” or the “revelation
of the ideal.” By religious instinct M. Renan understands something
mysterious and mystical, a heavenly voice in one’s bosom, a sudden
and almost sacred revelation. “The construction of a religion,” he
cries, “is for humanity what the construction of a nest is for a bird.
A mysterious instinct awakens in the heart of a being, who heretofore
has lived totally unaware of the existence in himself of any such
possibilities. The bird which has never itself laid an egg nor seen
an egg laid, possesses a secret foreknowledge of the natural function
which it is going to perform. It lends itself with a species of pious
and devoted joy to an end which it does not understand. The birth of
the religious idea in man is something quite analogous. Mankind is
moving forward unsuspectingly in its allotted course, and suddenly
a little period of silence comes upon it, a lapse of sensation, and
it cries to itself: ‘O God, how strange is the destiny of man! Is
it indeed true that I exist? What is the world? Am I the sun, and
does its heat and light feed upon my heart?... O Father, I see thee
beyond the clouds,’ and the noise of the outer world begins again,
and the window, open out upon the infinite, closes once more, but,
from that moment, a being to all appearance egoistic will perform
inexplicable deeds and will experience a need to bow the knee and
to adore.” This charming passage, set off by the unction and the
ecstasy of Gerson and Fénelon, is a capital instance of the mental
attitude of a number of people nowadays who are endeavouring to
transmute a reverence for some tottering religion into a reverence
for the religious sentiment. Unhappily, M. Renan’s account is purely
mythological; primitive man never experienced anything of the kind.
M. Renan completely confounds the ideas and sentiments which he, the
historian of religion, the refined thinker, might have experienced
himself, with those which primitive man was really subject to. This
species of supreme doubt on the matter of our own existence and that
of the world, this sentiment of the strangeness of our destiny, this
communion of the soul with the totality of nature, this outbreak of
refined sensibility, excited and tormented by modern life, possesses
nothing in common with the sentiment of primitive religion, with its
robust and crude faith reposing upon palpable fact and visible miracle.
Mysticism, far from explaining the origin of religion, marks rather
its period, its decomposition. A mystic is a person, who, feeling
vaguely the insufficiency, the void, of a positive and finite religion,
endeavours to compensate himself for the narrowness and poverty of
established dogma by superabundance of sentiment. Mystics, substituting
a more or less personal sentiment and spontaneous outburst of emotion
for a faith in authority, have always played the rôle in history of
unconscious heretics. Sentimental epochs are epochs of inaction, of
concentration upon one’s self, of comparative independence of thought.
On the contrary, there presided nothing sentimental or meditative at
the origin of religion, there was a stampede simply of a multitude of
souls in mortal terror or hope, and no such thing as independence of
thought; it is less of sentiment properly so-called, than of sensation
and of action, that religions have been born. Primitive religion was
not a means of escape out of this world, a port-hole into the blue;
the earliest gods were not in the least ethereal, they were possessed
of solid muscles, of arms capable of dealing blows. To explain the
origin of primitive beliefs by a nascent idealism, is to explain them
by their precise opposite. One becomes an idealist when one is on
the point of ceasing to believe; after having rejected a multitude of
alleged realities one consoles one’s self by adoring, for a time, the
figments of one’s own imagination; the spirit of early times is much
more positive, as the Comtists say. A preoccupation with the infinite,
a divine vertigo, a sentiment of the abysses of life, are wanting to
man in early times. The modern mind with its intenser vision now and
again perceives in nature an endless perspective down which we look
with agony; we feel ourselves carried forward to the verge of a chasm;
we are like navigators who, in the Antilles, under the intense light
of the sun, can see the bottom and the depth of the sea and measure
the gulf above which they hang suspended. But for less enlightened
intelligences nature is opaque, vision is limited to the surface of
things, and one floats upon the rhythm and pulse of the sea without
asking what lies beneath.
[Sidenote: A late phenomenon.]
Before the need for mystical belief can occur to one, one must have
been reared in an atmosphere of faith, or else in an atmosphere of
doubt; and both these states of mind are equally unknown to the
earlier and simpler races of humanity. Or, more accurately, they are
perfectly acquainted with faith, but it is the naïve faith of eye and
ear; they possess the perfect confidence that every sentient being
has in his five senses, and in all that there is nothing religious
properly so-called. I remember the astonishment I felt in my infancy
when I first saw the words doubt and faith; it was in some verses, and
the poet was singing, with much eloquence, all the horrors of doubt.
I perfectly understood what it was to doubt a fact, or to believe in
it, but I bothered my head in vain to discover what one meant by doubt
simply: What was there so terrible about being in doubt on matters with
which one was insufficiently acquainted? The word faith was equally
unintelligible to me, for I had as yet no conception of believing in
anything except what was certain. The case of primitive man is exactly
the same. He no more experiences a mystical need to believe than he
experiences a mystical need to get drunk before having tasted wine.
Religious sentiment does not make its appearance in him suddenly,
does not simply step out on the stage. There are no lacunæ in the
human soul, it is a prey to invincible continuity. Such a sentiment
must come gradually by a slow adaptation of the spirit to the inexact
ideas supplied to one by the senses. Man, imagining himself to live in
the bosom of a society of gods, inevitably accommodates himself to so
novel a habitat. Every society, human or divine, creates the individual
member in its own image; draft the labourer for a soldier, let the
villager become a citizen, they acquire of necessity new gestures and
sentiments which, upon their return to their former habitat, they
once more in a measure lose. The case is inevitably the same for
mankind and religion. As the most sociable of beings, man is also the
most readily subject to the influence of those with whom he lives or
believes himself to live. The gods, whom we create more or less in our
own image, thereupon, by an inevitable reaction, return the compliment.
A religious instinct, such as M. Renan describes, is in a large part
the work of this sort of reaction and of education; if it possesses
profound roots in our being, the reason is that it was planted in us
in our infancy, that it speaks to us with the voice of our childhood,
and takes us back to our earliest years; often a word, a thought with
which we have been struck at some former time, without, however,
having understood it, unexpectedly reawakens in us, reverberates in
our memory; it is but an echo, and it appeals to us as if it were a
voice. The rôle played by heredity in the formation of one’s character
has been noticeably exaggerated; the influence of education is at the
present day not estimated at its full value.[18] Even among animals,
instinct amounts to little without education. A bird, no doubt, does
not actually need to see an egg laid to acquit itself with “devotion”
of that new function; but when it is a question of building the nest,
the case is not so simple: birds reared in a cage, who have never seen
a nest, are often at a loss what to do; instinct whispers indeed to
them still, but its voice is no longer clear, no definite image of
the ideal nest presents itself to their eyes. Nature’s “devotion” is
at fault. Add that these instincts, so “mysterious” in M. Renan’s
opinion, act on the individual by means of a somewhat gross mechanism,
and that it suffices to tamper with the mechanism, to excite the
instinct or to suspend it. To transform, for example, a capon into a
setting hen, it suffices simply to pluck the feathers off the belly;
it then squats upon eggs—or upon pebbles—with pleasure. Really there
is mystery enough in nature without going out of one’s way to add to
it; it is not philosophic to trace everything back to instinct, and
then presently to regard these instincts as unconscious intentions, and
in these intentions to see the proof of a plan, and in this plan the
proof of a god. With a logic so accommodating as that, M. Renan might
well find in the religious instinct a peremptory demonstration of the
existence of God.
[18] See the authors _Morale anglaise contemporaine, 2e partie_.
[Sidenote: The only instincts involved the instincts of
self-preservation and sociability.]
In our judgment there was, in the beginning, no other instinct involved
than the instinct of self-preservation, and the instinct of sociality,
which is closely allied to the former. More than that, the intellectual
procedure upon which primitive men relied was no other than a simple
association by contiguity and similarity, together with such reasoning
by induction or analogy as is inseparably bound up with association.
This species of intellectual procedure is precisely that which, in its
highest stages, gives birth to the scientific explanation of things.
Religion, as we shall show presently, originates as science does, in
a certain astonishment that an intelligent being experiences in the
face of certain phenomena and in the fears and desires which result
therefrom, and in the consequent voluntary reaction.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Müller and Spencer agree in rejecting the fetich hypothesis.]
II. Herbert Spencer, who is almost at the antipodes from Max Müller,
by a conscious return to euhemerism regards the gods simply as heroes
transfigured in the memories of their descendants, reduces religion to
an ancestor worship, and thus implicitly denies that a presentiment
of the divine or of the infinite has played any part in its origin.
Nevertheless, Max Müller and Herbert Spencer, in spite of such
divergences, agree in rejecting the theory which attributes the birth
of religion to the mingled astonishment and fear of an intelligent
being in the face of certain natural phenomena, and to the need of
explanation and protection that he experiences before what is puissant
and powerful.
[Sidenote: Necessity of relying upon a number of principles.]
We willingly concede to Mr. Spencer that ancestor worship has played
its part in the genesis of human beliefs; heroes have been deified not
only after their death, but even in their lifetime. But why rely upon
this single principle for the explanation of so complex a phenomenon
as religion? Why wish to see in every detail a realization of it, even
when no positive fact seems to authorize one’s doing so? Spencer’s
system, which resolves the whole body of our beliefs into one, reminds
one a little of Genesis, and of the theory that all mankind are
descended from the first couple, Adam and Eve, after Eve had herself
been fashioned out of one of Adam’s ribs. If it is an excellent
characteristic of Mr. Spencer’s to look for the origin of heterogeneous
and later beliefs in some vague and homogeneous conception, this
primitive conception must at least be sufficiently ample to be able
fairly to accommodate within its own limits the whole body of its
successors, and Mr. Spencer is somewhat too much inclined to confound
the homogeneity of a notion with its amplitude; it is only by a prodigy
of artifice that he succeeds in extracting from his principle a
completely furnished religious theory of the universe.
[Sidenote: Spencer’s theory wantonly clever.]
Mr. Spencer endeavours, first, to prove, by _three_ examples, that a
cult for the dead exists among three tribes of savages very low in the
scale of civilization and not possessed, so far as has been observed,
of any other form of religion; he thereupon infers that a cult for
the dead is the earliest form of worship. These examples are open to
discussion, but even if they were not, it in nowise follows that all
other forms of religion spring from a cult for the dead. Death is,
no doubt, so frequent and brutal a fact that it early engages the
attention of primitive peoples; some germ of the notion of burial may
be discovered among animals. Ants have frequently been observed, after
their battles, carrying off the corpses of their soldiers; but from the
fact that human intelligence must necessarily have been engaged in one
direction, does it follow that it can have been engaged in no other?
For the manufacture of a god Mr. Spencer requires first a corpse,
second the conception of a spiritual double of the corpse, third a
belief that this spirit is capable of inhabiting, not only the body,
that it has just quitted, but another body, an inanimate effigy, a bee,
a stone, etc. What a complication! One knows Mr. Spencer’s ingenious
device for explaining tree-worship; sometimes he would have us conceive
trees as the resting-places of departed souls, who for some reason or
other have taken a notion to inhabit them; sometimes he would have
us rely on a theory of misinterpreted legend: a tribe that in former
years inhabited the forest, a tribe _come from the forest_, ultimately
believes itself to be descended from trees, ultimately believes that
its ancestors were trees. Really, all that strikes us as particularly
artificial. A tall tree is venerable in and of itself. A certain
“sacred horror” is an essential attribute of a dense forest. Night
and obscurity play a notable part in the genesis of religion; well, a
forest is the very incarnation of eternal night with its element of
the unforeseen, its terrors, the sigh of the wind in the branches like
a voice, the cry of the wild beast which seems sometimes to come from
the trees themselves. And what intense and silent life in and about a
tree, if one but studies it closely! An animal does not observe with
sufficient attention to see plants grow and the sap rise; but how
astonished man must have been when first he remarked that the roots of
trees make their way even into rock, that their trunks break all bonds:
that they rise year by year, and are at the very beginnings of their
maturity at an age when man is old! Forest vegetation is alive, but
with a life so different from ours that it must naturally have filled
our ancestors with surprise and reverence. Remember, too, that the
sap of certain trees, when it flows from a wound, is of the colour of
blood, or of the colour and almost of the taste of milk.
[Sidenote: Superfluity of effort to explain zoolatry by ancestor
worship.]
Similarly, why resort to an ancestor worship to explain zoolatry? What
is more natural, for example, than the universal veneration for the
snake? This mysterious creature which glides away among the shadows,
appears, and disappears, and carries with it power of life and death?
Or instead of a serpent, consider the lion, or any other ferocious
animal. He makes his appearance in a country and creates havoc among
the flocks; one pursues him, but for some reason or other no shot
reaches him; he is invulnerable. He becomes increasingly audacious and
terrible; he disappears for weeks together, nobody knows where; he
reappears suddenly, nobody knows why; he defies the hunters with the
majesty that wild beasts sometimes show, in perfect consciousness of
their power. Behold! a veritable god.
It is well known that the aborigines worshipped the horses which the
Spaniards imported into America; according to Prescott, they preferred
to attribute the invention of firearms to the horses rather than to
the Spaniards. The fact is simply that the Spaniards were men like
themselves, and that the aborigines took their measure accordingly;
but an unknown animal came to them armed with an indefinite power.
Men adore nothing but what they are comparatively ignorant of, and
it is for that reason, whatever Mr. Spencer may say, that nature,
so long imperfectly known, afforded to religion a more generous and
inexhaustible aliment than humanity.
[Sidenote: Narrowness and insufficiency of Spencer’s formula.]
At bottom what Mr. Spencer regards as the true confirmation of his
doctrine is the relation it bears to the rest of his system; it
is for him an example simply of a universal law, a consequence of
evolution. According to this doctrine, everything seems to spring from
a primordial unity, from a single homogeneous belief—the belief in
a power more or less vague, exercised by the souls of the dead; this
belief, once given, undergoes a complete series of integrations and
differentiations, and ultimately becomes a belief in the regular action
of an unknown and universal power. Mr. Spencer seems to us to be right
in pitching upon the one homogeneous belief from which all others arise
by a process of evolution; but the formula of this belief that he
presents us with seems to us altogether too narrow and insufficient.
If one wishes to discover the idea which dominates both the cult for
the dead and the cult for the gods, one will find in it a natural
persuasion that nothing is absolutely and definitively inanimate, that
everything lives and possesses, therefore, intentions and volitions.
Man has deified the phenomena of nature, as he has immortalized his
ancestors, for the sole and only reason that, as a living being
possessed of a will, the most difficult thing in the beginning for him
to understand is the invincible determinism and absolute inertia of the
phenomena of the external world.[19]
[19] See our _Morale anglaise contemporaine_, p. 579.
[Sidenote: Criticism of fetichism commonly a play on words.]
The adoration of natural forces, conceived as more or less analogous
to powerful living beings possessed of volition, has been denominated
sometimes fetichism, sometimes naturism. Messrs. Müller and Spencer
are agreed that fetichism is one of the later forms of religion, and
decline to treat it as primitive. On both sides of this interesting
discussion one desideratum seems to us to be beautifully conspicuous
by its absence, namely, precision of formula and agreement as to the
exact sense of terms. The words _fetich_, _animate being_, _inanimate
being_, and so forth, seem to us to have given rise to a number of
misunderstandings, on the part both of those who are defending the
fetich theory and of those who are attacking it. Let us cite some
examples: Max Müller has undertaken to define the word fetichism;
as was natural for a philologist he went in search of an etymology,
and he found, relying on Tylor, that fetichism (from the Portuguese
_feitiço_, derived from the Latin _factitius_, _artificial_) could not
designate anything but a superstitious reverence felt or shown for
certain knick-knacks that possessed no apparent title to any such
honourable distinction. The definition of Tylor and of Max Müller may
be philologically exact; unhappily, none of the philosophers who have
regarded fetichism as the basis of religion have ever employed that
word in the narrow and rigorous sense which Max Müller puts upon it;
they understood by it, as de Brosses and A. Comte did, the primitive
tendency to conceive external objects as animated by a life analogous
to that of man. They comprehended also, under the title of fetichism,
what Max Müller distinguishes from it so carefully under the names of
_physiolatry_, or the worship rendered to natural objects other than
gimcracks, and of _zoolatry_, or the worship of animals. The result is
that Max Müller’s refutations really do not concern the doctrine which
they are designed to combat, and over against which he sets up his own
doctrine. Similarly in regard to the definitions of M. Réville.[20]
To demonstrate that a cult for knick-knacks is not the primitive and
unique original of all human religions does not help us forward; the
problem remains where it was. Let us consider, therefore, not the
words, but the theory itself of the animation of nature, and let us
examine the objections that have been urged against it.
[20] Fetichism, M. Réville also says, is logically a later
belief. “A fetich is a vulgar object, possessing no value in
itself, but which a negro preserves, venerates, adores, because
_he believes that it is the dwelling place of a spirit_. And
the choice of the said object is not absolutely arbitrary.
A fetich possesses this very special distinction, that it
is the property of the person who adores it. It is in this
element of individual ownership—ownership by the tribe or
the family—that the difference clearly appears between the
object of a naturist religion, and the fetich, properly so
called. However humble it may be—tree, rock, or rivulet—the
first is independent, is accessible to all, to strangers as
to indigenes, on the sole condition that they conform to the
exigencies of the ritual or the cult. The sun shines for
everybody, the mountain is accessible to all who scale its
sides, the spring refreshes the passer-by, whatever be his
tribe; the very tree which rises in the midst of the desert
asks of the traveller some mark of deference, and does not
trouble itself about his origin. One cannot appropriate a
natural object. It is otherwise with a fetich. Once adopted by
a family, it is in some sort in the service of that family and
has nothing to do with others.” This definition of fetichism is
quite special, and in no wise concerns _primitive fetichism_,
conceived as an ascription of something analogous to the human
will in all inanimate things.
[Sidenote: Children and even animals distinguish between animate and
inanimate.]
According to Messrs. Spencer and Müller the savage may legitimately
be compared to a child who mistakes a well-dressed doll for a living
being, or who punishes a door against which he has stumbled; the savage
is not so naïve. The very child is far from possessing all the naïveté
that is ascribed to him, in general he perfectly distinguishes between
the animate and the inanimate; and when he talks to his play-things,
and conducts himself before them as if they were alive he is not a dupe
of his own words, he is composing a diminutive drama simply, in which
he is an actor; he is making poetry and not mythology. “If his doll
should step up to him and bite him, he would be the first person to be
astonished.”[21] In the same way, a dog plays with a stick—the comedy
of the chase—he bites it, he tears it into pieces, he warms to his
game, which is still for him, when all is said, no more than a game.
Even the famous example of a child’s rage at inanimate objects against
which it has stumbled, an example which has done service in the pages
of all those who have written on religion,[22] is seriously damaged by
Mr. Spencer; according to him, mothers and nurses suggest to the child
absurd ideas which, but for them, it would not have; it is they, who,
if it has hurt itself against an inanimate object, affect to be angry;
and, to distract its attention from the pain, endeavour to excite its
anger also. The little comedy of the inanimate object is one in which
the child displays no initiative. In any event the example deals with
an ill-observed psychological phenomenon, which, for the present, can
be employed to support no theory whatever.
[21] Spencer, _Principles of Sociology_.
[22] See, among others, M. Vacherot, _La religion_.
[Sidenote: Savages mistaking a watch, etc., for animate lends no
support to fetichism.]
Similarly, according to Mr. Spencer, no employment can be made of the
mistakes committed by a savage in the presence of certain complex
products of the arts and of civilization; he believes these objects
to be alive, but how should he do otherwise? If he is deceived, it is
rather due to the degree of perfection attained by our art than to any
defect in his own intelligence. When the indigenes of New Zealand saw
Cook’s ship, they took it for a sailing whale. Anderson relates that
the Bushmen supposed that a carriage was an animate being and must be
provided with fodder; the complexity of its structure, the symmetry of
its parts, its moving wheels, naturally suggested no fragment of their
own experience of inanimate things. Just so the Esquimaux believed
that a music-box and a hand-organ were living beings. All these errors
are in a measure rational, but they are errors of a kind that really
primitive man would have no opportunity to commit. To suppose that he
was dominated by a natural tendency to assign life to things which were
not alive, to imagine that he went out of his way to confound things
which animals of a lesser degree of intelligence perfectly distinguish,
is to invert the whole course of evolution.
[Sidenote: Primitive man incurious.]
There are, in Mr. Spencer’s opinion, still other prejudices relative
to primitive man from which we should free ourselves. We believe him
to be voluntarily and incessantly occupied, as the modern infant
is, with the _why_ of things; we fancy him perpetually endeavouring
to satisfy a restless curiosity. Unhappily, if we are to trust our
experience of the lower races of man, it appears that the sentiment
of curiosity decreases directly as one approaches the savage state.
To awaken curiosity demands surprise; Plato was correct in regarding
astonishment as the beginning of philosophy. Well, what produces
astonishment is an unexpected breach in the chain of causation; but
for a primitive intelligence which has not yet achieved scientific
maturity, there is no such thing as natural causation and no such
thing as rational surprise.[23] The Fuegians, the Australians, show
the most complete indifference in the presence of matters for them
absolutely new and essentially surprising. According to Dampier, the
Australians whom he took on board paid no attention to anything in the
vessel except what was given them to eat. The very mirrors did not
succeed in astonishing savages of inferior race; they were amused with
them, but evinced neither surprise nor curiosity. When Park inquired
of the negroes, “What becomes of the sun at night? Is it the same sun
that rises the next day or another?”—they made him no reply and found
the question puerile. Spix and Martius report, that the minute one
begins to question a Brazil Indian about his language he shows signs
of impatience, complains of headache, and proves himself incapable
of mental labour. Similarly the Abipones, when they find themselves
unable to understand anything at a glance, soon become fatigued and
cry, “What, after all, does it amount to?” “It seems,” Sir John Lubbock
says, “as if the mind of the savage lives in a perpetual come and
go of pure feebleness, incapable of fixing itself upon anything. He
accepts what he sees as an animal does; he adapts himself to the world
about him spontaneously; astonishment, admiration, the very conditions
of worship are above him. Accustomed to the regularity of nature he
patiently awaits the succession of such phenomena as he has observed,
mechanical habit overbears all intelligence in him.”
[23] Spencer, _Principles of Sociology_.
[Sidenote: Inexactitude of facts on which the fetich theory is founded.]
In effect, according to Mr. Spencer, all of the observed facts upon
which the old fetichistic theory was founded are chargeable with
inexactitude; they were taken from the narratives of the earlier
travellers, who rarely came into contact with any but races already
debauched and half civilized. Little by little, he says, the idea
that fetichism is primordial took possession of men’s minds and, as
prepossession constitutes nine-tenths of belief, it has rested master
of the field almost without a contest; I myself accepted it, although,
as I remember, with a vague feeling of discontent. This discontent
became positive doubt when I was better informed with regard to the
ideas of the savage. From doubt I passed to negation when I had once
tabulated the whole body of the facts relating to the most degraded
races.
[Sidenote: A priori demonstration of the priority of animism.]
Mr. Spencer undertakes even to demonstrate _a priori_ the falsity
of the fetich theory. What, he asks, is a fetich? An inanimate
object supposed to contain a being, of which the senses do not take
cognizance; such a conception is extremely complex, and above the
reach of primitive minds. The savage is so incapable of abstraction
that he can neither conceive nor express a colour as distinct from
some coloured object, a light as distinct from some light object—star
or fire, an animal which shall be neither a dog nor a cow nor a
horse; and he is asked to imagine an animate being in the heart of an
inanimate thing, an invisible power in the heart of a visible object,
in effect, a soul! Nothing less than the conception of a soul, in Mr.
Spencer’s judgment, will serve the fetich hypothesis; and primitive man
certainly could not attain the notion of a soul by mere observation of
nature. Before projecting this complex idea into the heart of things,
he must previously have constructed it, and as preparation for that,
Mr. Spencer says, he must have supplied himself with a theory of
death, and conceived the mind as surviving the body, and therefore as
separable from the body and as the motive principle of the body. It
is to his notions on death that man must look for any conception of
life in inanimate nature. Every fetich is a spirit, no spirit can be
for a primitive intelligence anything else than the spirit of someone
who is dead. Necessarily, therefore, a cult for the dead, spiritism,
must precede fetichism; the latter is no more than an extension, a
by-product, of the former.[24]
[24] Mr. Spencer’s _Principles of Sociology_.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Spencer’s attack not against a vital spot.]
III. Such is the theory of Mr. Spencer. And he would be right if the
partisans of primitive fetichism understood by fetich, as he does, a
material object at the heart of which the adorer imagines the existence
of a mysterious agent _distinct from this object itself_. But is this
notion of distinctness a necessary part, at least in the beginning, of
fetichism, or, as one says to-day, of naturism? Imagine a rock which
should detach itself unexpectedly from the mountain side, and roll
down to the hut of a savage; it stops suddenly just as it is on the
point of crushing his dwelling, it remains there pendent, menacing, to
all appearance ready at an instant’s notice to begin rolling again;
the savage fairly trembles at the sight of it. Do you believe that he
needs really to suppose the presence of some foreign agent, of a soul,
of an ancestral spirit in that stone to regard it as an object of fear
and of respect? Not at all. It is the rock itself which constitutes
his fetich, it is to the rock that he bows; he venerates it precisely
because he is far from supposing it, as you do, essentially and
eternally inert and passive; he ascribes to it possible intentions,
a maleficent or beneficent will. He says to himself: “It is asleep
to-day, but it was awake yesterday; yesterday it could have killed
me, and it did not want to.” Let the lightning strike a savage’s hut
three times in succession within a month, and he will easily recognize
that the thunder is ill-disposed toward him and, quite without any
preliminary need of personification in the way of endowing it with a
departed soul, he will set about adoring the thunder and conjuring it
not to do him harm. Mr. Spencer does not perceive that, at the very
beginning of his exposition, he ascribes to primitive man a conception
of nature analogous to the abstract mechanism of Descartes. Such a
conception once pre-supposed, it is plain that to regard an object or
a natural phenomenon as the centre of a cult, some new conception must
be added to it, and this new conception may well be that of a spirit.
Mr. Spencer, as he himself admits, looks upon fetichism as quite
analogous to modern spiritualism, which sees in turning tables and
oscillating chairs the work of disembodied souls; but nothing could be
more arbitrary than this analogy. It is quite impossible that primitive
man should stand in the same position that we do in the face of any
natural phenomenon; as he does not possess the modern metaphysical
idea of inert matter, he experiences no need to invent an indwelling
spirit before he can ascribe volition to it. If a savage should see a
table turn, he would say simply that the table was turning, no doubt,
because it wanted to turn, and that, for him, would be the end of it;
and if by chance it should be a matter of interest to him whether the
table turned or not, it would immediately become a fetich to him. The
conception of a fetich does not in the least presuppose, as Mr. Spencer
maintains, the conception of a soul; there is no such metaphysical
element in fetichism, and it is precisely on that account that this
form of religion must have preceded spiritism, which is always founded
on a more or less rudimentary metaphysics.
[Sidenote: For savages and children nature a society.]
For animals and savages, as for very young children, nature is
absolutely the opposite of what it appears to be nowadays to the
scholar and the philosopher: for them it is not a cold and neuter
habitat, in which man alone possesses aims and bends everything to
the fulfilment of his wishes; it is not a physical laboratory full
of inert instruments for the service of man. On the contrary, nature
is a society; primitive people see intention in everything. Friends
or enemies surround them on all sides; the struggle for existence is
one long pitched battle with imaginary allies against adversaries not
infrequently only too real. How should they understand that there is
a profound unity in nature which rigidly excludes from the chain of
things anything like individuality or independence? The only cause of
movement with which they are acquainted is desire; they reckon desire
or intention as the cause of every movement in nature, as of every
movement in their fellow-men and in animals; and they conceive that the
intentions of all of the diverse beings by which they find themselves
surrounded may be equally modified by prayer and offerings. Their
conception of nature is at once anthropomorphic and sociomorphic, as
is subsequently their conception of God. Nothing is more natural and
inevitable than this fashion of modeling the external world on the
internal, and the relations of things on the relations of men.
[Sidenote: Panthelism.]
If the word fetichism is too vague to designate this primitive state
of mind and gives rise to confusion, take another word; if the word
_panthelism_ were not a little barbarous it would better express this
stage of human intelligence in which one is inclined to ascribe to all
the phenomena of nature not indeed souls, as distinct from bodies, but
simply intentions, desires, volitions, as naturally inhering in the
objects themselves.
[Sidenote: English classification of things.]
But here we shall perhaps be reminded that, as Mr. Spencer says, the
distinction between things animate and inanimate is quite clear even
to the brute, and, _a fortiori_, to primitive man; so that primitive
man will not attribute desire or volition to a thing which he knows
to be inanimate—_animate_, _inanimate_; how we do come back to the
vague! Under each of these terms the modern man ranges a group of ideas
absolutely inaccessible to primitive man and to the lower animals.
Personally we deny that the distinction between animate and inanimate
was present in the earliest stages of intellectual evolution. Certainly
both the animal and the savage recognized a division of the phenomena
of nature into two classes; one is composed of the things which are
disposed to do them good or evil, the other is composed of those
which ignore them simply; that is the primitive distinction. As to an
acquaintance with animate and inanimate they are innocent of anything
of the kind; on this point, as on all others, they confine themselves
to the grossest sense-experience. Their senses inform them that certain
objects are beings who are altogether inoffensive, who eat nobody and
are not themselves good to eat; one gives them no further attention;
practically they do not exist. I one day asked a peasant woman the
name of a small plant. She looked at me with frank astonishment and
replied, with a shake of the head, “_Ce n’est rien_—it is nothing;
it is not good to eat!” That woman was on a level with primitive man.
In the eyes of the latter, as in the eye of an animal, one-half the
phenomena of nature are _nothing_—they do not count; one scarcely
sees them. The fruits on a tree, on the contrary, are _good to eat_.
The savage, however, perceives immediately that the fruit makes no
active resistance, does not cry out when he bites into it; and he
considers it, therefore, as on all accounts absolutely indifferent,
except that it is good to eat. But given a fruit that poisons him, he
promptly fears it and venerates it. Similarly with animals: stones
and vegetation hold equally aloof from the carnivora, are practically
as distant as the moon and the stars. The herbivora, on the contrary,
pay no attention to anything but vegetation. Natural objects being
thus parcelled off into two classes, the class of the indifferent and
inoffensive, and the class of the useful and hurtful, the animal soon
learns to recognize that in the second class the most important objects
are those which possess spontaneity of movement. But in his eyes—and
this is a fact of capital importance—spontaneity of movement is not
the exclusive sign of _life_, of interior activity; it is a sign simply
of utility, or of heightened danger for him. He is wholly preoccupied
with personal and practical consequences; he indulges in no superfluity
of inference in regard to the object itself; he does not speculate.
Moreover, a moving object which in nowise affects his sensibility
rapidly becomes quite as indifferent to him as a motionless object.
Animals soon become accustomed to the passage of railway trains: cows
browse tranquilly, partridges on the brow of a hill scarcely lift their
heads; and why? Because they have recognized in the locomotive an
inanimate mechanism?[25] Not in the least; they observe simply that the
locomotive never goes out of its way to damage them.
[25] According to Mr. Spencer, the movement of a train does not
appear spontaneous to animals because it is continuous; and
therein lies the ground of their exemption from fright. On this
reasoning, animals who live in the neighbourhood of stations
should display fright at the arrival and departure of trains.
Nothing of the kind is observable. They are equally incurious
in regard to horses harnessed to wagons on a high-road.
Speculative disinterestedness is altogether lacking in animals
and savages; they live locked in the arms of sensation and
desire; they spontaneously draw a circle about their ego, and
whatsoever lies beyond lies beyond their intelligence.
[Sidenote: Belief that all things are animate natural to animals.]
This being the primitive conception of the world, we believe that the
more incapable an uncivilized being is of observing and reasoning
the more natural it should be for him to acquire the conviction that
objects which at first struck him as indifferent are not genuinely
inanimate, but are sometimes malevolent in their intentions toward him,
sometimes benevolent; that they possess in effect over him a quite
respectable degree of power. In other words the more intelligent an
animal or a savage becomes, the more superstitious he will be, and thus
by the very progress of mental evolution the primitive distinction
of objects into two classes will become dim—the distinction of
objects into those which are altogether indifferent and outside of the
society in which one lives, and those which are more or less worthy
of attention, more or less closely in practical relations with us.
Mental evolution has proceeded, believe us, in precisely the opposite
direction to that imagined by Mr. Spencer.
[Sidenote: Motion a material sign of life in them.]
Let us speak first of the more intelligent animals, before passing
to man. The more intelligent animals are often obliged to give their
attention to a class of objects in appearance indifferent to them
and to modify the imperfect ideas which they had at first conceived
in regard to them. Generally speaking, objects of this sort are
motionless; if immobility be not their essential distinguishing
characteristic, it is at least one of their principal distinguishing
characteristics. The instinct of self-preservation in a being
inevitably bestirs itself in the presence of every movement that looks
like a menace. Well, an animal is soon obliged to recognize that
indifferent objects possess in certain circumstances the attribute
of spontaneous movement, an attribute which is for him so vitally
interesting. I remember the surprise a kitten once showed when it
perceived the dead leaves rise in the wind and circulate about it;
at first it ran away, and then came back and pursued the leaves, and
smelt them, and touched them with its paw. Darwin relates that a dog
was one day lying near an open parasol on the lawn; the parasol moved
in the breeze, the dog began to bay, to growl furiously, and, every
time that the parasol moved again, began to growl afresh. Evidently it
was a new thing to Darwin’s dog that such an object as a parasol might
change its place without the visible intervention of some person; all
the dog’s classifications were thrown into disorder, he was no longer
certain whether he must class the parasol with things indifferent or
with things harmful. He would have experienced an analogous impression
if he had seen a paralytic patient, always theretofore motionless in
his armchair, suddenly rise and walk. An animal’s surprise is still
more strong when an object regarded as till then indifferent approaches
him and manifests its activity by an infliction of sudden pain. I
witnessed the astonishment of a cat which, having seen a red-hot coal
roll out of the stove door, leaped forward to play with it; he caught
it simultaneously with snout and paw, gave a cry of pain, and fled in
such fear that it was two days before he returned to the house. Mr.
Spencer himself cites another example which he has observed. The beast
was a formidable creature, half mastiff, half hound, who was playing
with a cane; he was leaping and gambolling, and holding it by the
ferule end. Suddenly the handle of the cane touched the ground and the
ferule was pushed forcibly back toward the dog’s palate. The animal
groaned, let the cane fall, and fled some distance away; and there
he manifested, it appears, a degree of alarm truly comic in a beast
apparently so ferocious. It was only after many cautious approaches
and much hesitation that he yielded to the temptation of taking hold
of the cane. Mr. Spencer, who supplies us with this fact, with great
impartiality concludes from it, as we also do, that it was the unusual
conduct of the cane which suggested to the dog the notion that it was
animate; but he hastens to add that before the vague idea of animation
thus given rise to in an animal could become definite in a man,
the intervention of some spiritualistic theory would be absolutely
necessary. One may well ask one’s self what spiritualism has to do with
the case.[26]
[26] _Principles of Sociology._
[Sidenote: Instruments supposed to be animate by animals.]
One may learn from the preceding example something like what animals
conceive the inert instruments to be which they see us handling and
with which we sometimes strike them. The notion of an instrument, as
such, is relatively modern and was altogether unknown in the early
stages of evolution. An instrument, in the eyes of an animal as in
the eyes of primitive man, is almost a companion and an accomplice;
neither the one nor the other possesses any other notion in especial
of causation than that of a co-operation, mute agreement between two
associated beings. A lion, which Livingstone shot at and did not hit,
ran first to bite the stone which the bullet had struck; it was only
subsequently that he threw himself upon the hunter; the ball, the
gun, the hunter, were so many distinct and separate enemies that he
was bent on punishing in succession. Similarly, in an ancient list of
pains and penalties, one finds that the warrior is to lose his hand,
the blasphemer his tongue, the spy his ears. At this moment my dog
is at my side; the whip with which I corrected him this morning lies
upon a chair; the dog walks about that chair sniffing the air with
defiance and respect, and I do not believe he would have the courage
to touch it. He is aware, however, that when the whip hurt him, the
circumstances were quite different, that I was holding that dangerous
object in my hand, and that I was, in a sense, the first cause of his
chastisement. Still he is not perfectly reassured, as he would be in
the presence of an inert object. The impression he seems to have got
strikes me as comparable to that which a child receives from a serpent
behind a pane of glass; the child knows perfectly that under the actual
circumstances he is safe, but he cannot help saying to himself, “If the
circumstances were otherwise!”[27] Recollect that the Australian savage
treats the white man’s gun as a living and powerful being which he
adores and crowns with flowers and supplicates not to kill him. Legend
attributes a magic power to the swords of great captains, to Joyeuse
or to Durandal. In our own days, even, one sees combatants spend their
force not only against their enemies but against everything which
pertains to them; it is as if something were supposed to have passed
from the man into everything he possesses. Nothing is more difficult to
recognize than the profound indifference of nature.
[27] Add that when an animal or primitive man has recognized
that a certain object possesses a particular attribute, he
often finds it difficult to recognize that simply analogous
objects possess the same attribute. I was one day making a
kitten run after a wooden ball as a dog would do; the ball
struck it and hurt it; it cried out and I petted it and then
wanted to begin playing once more; it would run willingly even
after large stones when I threw them, but obstinately refused
to run after the ball. So that it evidently conceived that
the ball alone possessed the attribute of power to injure it;
the kitten looked upon the ball, no doubt, with an evil eye,
regarded it perhaps as an evil being who was unwilling to play;
by a fault of generalization the kitten created for itself a
sort of fetich which it did not adore indeed, but which it
feared, and fear is a step toward adoration.
Mr. Spencer himself admits in savages a certain inaptitude
for generalization. This opinion, paradoxical as it may seem,
is perhaps an important truth. If primitive intelligences,
as M. Taine among others remarked, are especially prompt at
noticing the superficial resemblances of things, that fact is
not always a mark of genuine perspicacity, for the resemblance
perceived between two sensations may be explicable less as
an intelligent generalization than as a sort of confusion of
the sensations themselves; if sensations are analogous or
indistinct, they may naturally be mistaken for each other
without any exercise whatsoever of intelligence. Thence the
comparative insignificance of many examples taken from the case
of language. True generalization seems to consist, more than
anything else, in the reduction of facts to law; that is to
say, in a conscious abstraction of differences, in a conscious
recognition of the fundamental determinism which binds things
up together and which precisely eludes both savages and animals.
Note finally that the majority of animals and of savages, when
they have once been deceived, are slow to recover from their
error, are for a long time distrustful toward the object which
has deceived them. A dog, coming home one evening, perceived
an empty cask in an unusual place. He was extremely frightened
and barked for a long time; it was only by day that he dared
approach near the object of his alarm, and he examined and
moved about it, and finally, like the frog in La Fontaine’s
fable, recognized that the thing was inoffensive. If the cask
in question had disappeared during the night, the dog would
evidently have remembered it as a redoubtable being seen the
evening before in the yard. A monkey, which I left in the room
with a cardboard sheep one entire day, proved unable to the
end entirely to satisfy itself that the sheep was inanimate. I
believe, however, that this persuasion was ultimately achieved,
for the monkey began finally to pluck the sheep’s wool and to
treat it something too familiarly. But nature seldom permits us
equally extended _tête-à-tête_ with objects that alarm us.
Messrs. Spencer and Müller will call our attention to the fact,
it is true, that cardboard sheep, no more than hand-organs
or watches, exist _in rerum natura_. We reply that nature
supplies primitive man with things much more astonishing: with
rocks, and forests which can talk (the echo), with springs of
hot water, with intermittent fountains. Mr. Fergusson (_Tree
and Serpent Worship_) relates that in India he saw with his
own eyes a tree which saluted the rising and setting sun, by
lifting or lowering its boughs. Temples had formerly been
reared in its neighbourhood. People came from all sides to
see the marvellous tree. This tree was an old date-palm, half
decayed, which hung above the road; in order to pass below it,
it had been held back by a rope; but during this operation the
fibres which composed the trunk were twisted like the threads
in a rope. These fibres contracted toward midday in the heat of
the sun; the tree untwisted and rose. It relaxed under the dew
at evening and once more bowed down. (See M. Girard de Rialle,
_Mythologie comparée_, t. i.)
[Sidenote: Conduct generates beliefs that justify it.]
Mr. Spencer, who denies that the child spontaneously strikes the table
which has wounded him, is not, however, unaware that a savage—the
Indian Tupis, for example—if he has bruised his foot against a stone,
leaps against it in fury and bites it like a dog. Mr. Spencer sees in
such facts a phenomenon wholly physical, the need for spending one’s
rage in violent muscular action; but this very need can but favour
the birth of a psychological illusion, of which the tenacity will be
proportionate to the intensity of the sentiment. The physical and the
moral are too closely bound up together for a physical expression of
anger not to be accompanied by a moral belief corresponding to the
action; if a powerful instinct induces us to treat a stone as an enemy,
we shall very really see an enemy in this stone.
[Sidenote: Romanes’ experiments.]
Mr. Romanes made some observations, of the same kind as those of Mr.
Spencer, upon a very intelligent Skye terrier. This terrier, like many
other dogs, was accustomed to play with dried bones, throwing them
into the air and endowing them with an appearance of life, for the
pleasure of chasing them afterward. Mr. Romanes attached a long slender
thread to a dried bone which he gave the dog to play with. After he had
played for some time Mr. Romanes chose an opportune moment, when the
bone had fallen to the ground some distance away, and the terrier was
approaching it; he drew the bone gently away, by means of the thread
attached to it. The attitude of the terrier changed entirely. The
bone, which he had been pretending to regard as living, appeared to
him to be really so, and his surprise knew no bounds. He approached it
nervously and cautiously, as Mr. Spencer describes in the observation
which he made; but the slow motion of the bone continued, and the dog
became more and more certain that the movement could not be explained
as resulting from the impulsion which he had communicated; his surprise
became terror, and he ran away and hid himself under the table, to
study from a distance the disconcerting spectacle of dried bones coming
to life again!
[Sidenote: Soap-bubble experiment.]
Another of Mr. Romanes’ experiments on the same dog shows that the
sentiment of the mysterious was, in this animal, quite powerful
enough to serve as an explanation of his conduct. Having taken the
terrier into a carpeted room, Mr. Romanes rolled some soap-bubbles
which an unsteady draft of air blew about the carpet. The dog took a
great interest in the matter, and seemed unable to decide whether the
bubbles were alive or not. At first he was very prudent, and followed
the bubbles at a distance, but as he was encouraged to examine them
more closely, he approached them with his ears up and his tail down,
in evident apprehension; the instant the bubble moved he drew back.
After a time, however, during which there was at least one bubble on
the floor, he took courage, and, the scientific spirit gaining the
upper hand over the sentiment of mystery, he became brave enough to
draw slowly near one of them and to put his paw upon it, not without
anxiety. Naturally the bubble burst, and his astonishment was vivid in
the extreme. Mr. Romanes made other bubbles, but could not persuade
the dog to approach them for a long time. After a while, however, he
started again in pursuit of one, and endeavoured with much caution
to put his paw upon it. The result was the same as before. After the
second attempt it was impossible to induce him to make a third, and
he ultimately ran out of the room and could not be coaxed back. The
same experiment, tried by Professor Delbœuf on his dog Mouston, gave
a still more striking result. At the blowing of the fourth bubble,
his wrath knew no bounds, but he no longer sought to seize it, he
contented himself with barking at it, in all the accents of rage, until
it burst. Professor Delbœuf wished to continue the experiment, and
attempted to do so, but, to his great regret, was obliged to break off
because of the frenzy into which the dog had worked himself. The moment
that Professor Delbœuf laid his hand upon the vessel containing the
soap-suds, the dog was no longer under his control. His condition was
evidently due, Professor Delbœuf says, to a contradiction between the
fact and his experience, that everything which is coloured is tangible.
He was in the presence of the unknown, with all its mysteries and
menaces; the unknown, which is the source of fear and of superstition.
[Sidenote: Fear of thunder in animals due to sense of mystery.]
According to Mr. Romanes the fear that many animals have of thunder
is due, in some sort, to a sentiment of mystery. He once possessed a
setter, which, he says, had not heard thunder until it had reached the
age of eighteen months, when it almost died of fear. He has observed
the same phenomenon in other animals, in diverse circumstances. The
fright of the setter in question was so strong that, subsequently,
when he heard some artillery practice and mistook it for thunder, his
aspect was positively pitiable, and in the midst of the chase he
endeavoured to hide himself, or to gain the house. After two or three
experiences of thunder his horror of cannon became greater than ever,
so much so that, in spite of his love for the chase, it was impossible
to coax him out of his kennel, so great was his fear that the artillery
practice might recommence and he be distant from the house. But the
keeper, who had had a wide experience of dogs, assured Mr. Romanes
that, if the dog were once taken to the battery and shown the veritable
cause for a noise analogous to that of thunder, he would become once
more fit for the hunt. Mr. Romanes does not doubt that such would have
been the case, for once, when sacks of apples were being emptied, it
made a noise in the house like distant thunder; the setter was very
restless, but when Mr. Romanes took him where the sacks were being
opened and showed him the real cause of the noise, his terror left
him, and on his return to the house he listened to the low rumbling in
perfect quietude.
[Sidenote: All natural phenomena tend to seem artificial to primitive
man.]
When one looks close one is surprised to see how many causes would
naturally lead one to attribute life, and life of an extraordinary and
mysterious character, to such and such really passive objects. Such
causes act evidently with greatly additional power upon the savage, the
primitive man, the man of the quaternary epoch, or upon the anthropoid,
as yet undiscovered, whose instruments have been found in the tertiary
period. Common animals, in effect, are almost lacking in attention;
from which it results that to produce any durable mental effect on
them, a prolonged repetition of the same sensation is necessary; they
must be accustomed to it. Moreover their crude intelligence takes
no impression from evanescent facts, they are unacquainted with the
external world except by averages. Exceptional facts strike them for
an instant, but presently glance off into oblivion. In this imperfect
machine, wear and tear is very rapid and the traces of phenomena
inevitably blur and become confounded. If animals possess a memory
for sensations, they lack an intellectual memory altogether; they are
capable of surprise, but not of remembering a surprise. To produce
in them a tenacious memory demands a setting of pain or pleasure, and
even then, if they recollect the sensation they experienced, they
readily forget the grounds of it. They feel passively, instead of
observing. From the moment where, with man, the spirit of observation
enters upon the scene everything is different; an exceptional fact,
for the same reason that it becomes rapidly effaced in an animal
intelligence, penetrates the more deeply into the memory of a man.
Moreover, man’s sphere of action is much wider than that of any animal,
and consequently the field of his experience is much more vast; the
more he modifies, voluntarily, the face of nature, the more capable he
becomes of recognizing and observing the variations which it presents,
independently of his interventions. Man possesses a notion unknown to
animals, the notion of _artificial_ things, of results deliberately
attained by self-conscious volition. One remembers that _fetich_ comes
from _factitius_, artificial. Man, being acquainted with the use of
fire, will regard, for example, a forest set ablaze by lightning from
entirely a different point of view from what any animal could: the
animal will flee without any other sentiment than that of alarm; the
man will naturally suppose the existence of some person who set it on
fire—who was acting, who was doing on a grand scale what he himself
sometimes does. Similarly with a boiling spring; this phenomenon lies
too far beyond the limits of animal intelligence to be especially
striking; but a man, on the other hand, who habitually goes to some
trouble to provide himself with boiling water, infers the existence of
some subterranean person who is heating water for purposes of his own.
All natural phenomena tend thus to appear artificial to the eyes of a
being who has once familiarized himself with the notion of artifice.
I was present recently among some members of the lower classes at the
flowing of an intermittent spring; not one of them was inclined to
believe the phenomenon a natural one, they regarded it as an effect
of some mechanism, of some artifice. The same belief is evidently
common among primitive people, with this difference, that artificial,
instead of suggesting mechanics, implies the notion of a superhuman and
marvelous power.
[Sidenote: Fetichism a logical theory to primitive man.]
Just as the animal finds the rationale of all things in a notion of
life and of activity, man tends to find a rationale of all things in a
conception of art and of scheming intelligence. For the one, surprising
phenomena are simply inexplicable conduct; for the other, they are the
complex effects of deliberative intelligence, they are master-pieces.
But the notion of activity, far from becoming effaced in the progress
of evolution, becomes simply more definite and more precise. Given
his incomplete experience, primitive man is perfectly logical in
attributing intelligence and consciousness to nature, he could not
rationally do otherwise; his mind is imprisoned in a blind alley, and
superstition is the sole outlet. At a given moment in human evolution,
superstition was perfectly rational.
[Sidenote: Seeming immanence of conscious life in nature.]
Even in our days, men of science are greatly embarrassed by their
inability to point out the precise line of demarcation between the
animate and the inanimate; and how should primitive man have grappled
with this problem? How distinguish, for example, between sleep and
death during one entire portion of life; during sleep, living bodies
lie inert, and why should not inert bodies sometimes prove to be alive?
At night especially, the whole becomes transformed, everything becomes
animate, a breath of wind suffices to make everything palpitate; it
seems as if all nature awakened after its day’s sleep; it is the hour
when wild beasts go in search of prey, and mysterious noises fill the
forest. The calmest imagination, under such circumstances, yields to
a temptation to see fantastic objects that are not. One night I was
walking on the sea-shore, and saw distinctly a gigantic beast moving
some distance away; it proved to be a perfectly motionless rock, in
the midst of others like it, but the waves, which alternately covered
and discovered it in part, lent it, to my eyes, some portion of
their own mobility. How many things in nature borrow thus from some
circumstance—from the wind, from a more or less uncertain light—an
appearance of life![28] Even when the eyes themselves would be
incapable of self-deception, the influence of the foolish terrors so
frequent among children and beings habituated to savage life would
count enormously. Emotional susceptibility is the more highly developed
among savages, in that it forms for them frequently a means of safety.
And primitive man is much more subject than we are to hallucinations
of the sort that are due to terror, and are not wholly fantastic, but
result from a fantastic interpretation of some genuine sense stimulus.
The traveller Park met two negroes on horseback; they fled from him at
a gallop in extreme terror, and meeting his followers in the course of
their flight reported that they had seen him dressed in the floating
robes of some redoubtable spirit. One of them affirmed that at sight
of Park he had felt himself enveloped in a breath of cold air from
heaven, which was like a jet of cold water. Suppress the word spirit in
this passage, which implies a pre-existing belief in the soul, and you
will perceive how hallucinations due to terror may well give birth to
beliefs all the more tenacious for the element of truth they contain.
[28] Mr. H. Russell, the explorer of the Pyrenees, remarks the
fantastic effects produced by the moonlight in the mountains.
As the moonlight replaced the previous shadow on the faces
and the angles of the rocks, he says, in an account of the
ascension of the peak of Eriste, they seemed so plainly to
move that once he mistook one of them for a bear and cocked
the revolver at his side. The same explorer remarks also the
surprising transformations which natural objects undergo at
nightfall and at daybreak. At dawn, he says, there is a sort of
universal shiver which seems to animate everything; the sound
of the neighbouring cascade changed frequently; at break of
day, after having groaned and thundered alternately, it begins
to scold. For in the morning in the mountains, he says, sounds
gain magnitude, they swell, and torrents in especial lift their
voices as if angry; with the arrival of the day the air becomes
sonorous and sound carries farther. He has experienced this, he
says, frequently, but does not understand the cause.—_Alpine
Club_, 1887.
[Sidenote: Dreams.]
Dreams also have played a considerable rôle in the genesis of
superstitions, as Epicurus and Lucretius remarked, and the labours of
Messrs. Tylor and Spencer have proved. Primitive language supplies
no means of saying, “I dreamt that I saw”; one must say simply, “I
saw.” Well, in the dreams which the savage himself can scarcely
distinguish from reality, he sees nothing but a perpetual series of
metamorphoses, of the transformation of men into ferocious beasts,
and of ferocious beasts into men; he dreams that he picks up a stone,
and that it comes to life in his hand; he looks out upon a motionless
lake, and it becomes suddenly a crawling mass of crocodiles and of
serpents.[29] How can Mr. Spencer maintain, after that, that primitive
man can distinguish with some degree of certainty the animate from the
inanimate? Not only during dreams, but during wakefulness, everything
suggests to primitive man the notion of changes of substance and magic
metamorphoses. Eggs, which are inanimate, change into birds or insects;
dead flesh becomes living worms; an effigy, under the influence of
memory, seems to live again and to respire.[30]
[29] Spencer’s _Sociology_.
[30] Savages imagine that they see the eyes of portraits move.
I myself saw a child of two years old, accustomed to play
with engravings, one day in a great fright snatch away its
grandmother’s finger, which was resting on the picture of a
ferocious beast. “Big beast bite grandmamma!” These ideas,
which totally ignore the profound and definitive difference
between animate and inanimate, are fixed in the human mind.
A man of distinguished education once maintained to me quite
seriously that certain petrifactive springs in the Pyrenees
possessed the power of changing sticks into serpents. For one
capable of imagining that a bit of wood might thus become a
serpent, what difficulty would there be in believing that
the bit of wood is alive (even a bit of dead wood), that the
spring is alive (in especial a spring with such marvellous
properties), and finally that the mountain itself is alive;
everything is animate to eyes like that, and possessed of magic
power.
[Sidenote: Primitive man humanizes nature.]
An animal is not sufficiently master of its sensations to follow their
course throughout their successive modifications; it is not in any
proper sense a witness, as man is, of the progress, of the perpetual
movement and transformation of all things; nature is, for it, a
series of detached pictures of which it does not seize the contrasts.
When man, on the contrary, follows attentively the more or less slow
evolution of things, he perceives the effacement of every fundamental
difference between the animate and the inanimate, he observes a
process of blind mechanical labour, which produces life in objects in
appearance quite inert. Is there not something rationally profound
and justifiable in the very naïveté with which he interprets nature?
Poetry is often philosophy in its most penetrating form. Who has not
asked himself sometimes if a puissant and hidden spring of life does
not circulate unknown to us in the high mountains, in the still trees,
and in the restless ocean, and if mute nature does not live in one long
course of meditation upon themes unknown to us? And since even nowadays
we ourselves are full of such vague doubts as that, do we imagine that
it would be easy to convince one of these primitive men of his error,
when he fancies that he feels the beating of what the Germans call the
“heart of nature”? After all is the primitive man wrong? Everything
about us does live, nothing is inanimate except in appearance, inertia
is a word simply; all nature is one universal aspiration, modern
science alone can measure with some approach to accuracy the activity
with which all things are saturated, and show it to us, here existent
in a state of diffusion, there in a state of concentration, and
self-conscious, and make us acquainted with the difference between
the higher organisms and the lower organisms, and between the latter
and mechanisms and rudimentary groupings of bits of matter. For
primitive man, to whom all these distinctions, all the gradations are
impossible, there is but one thing evident, and that is that the whole
of nature lives; and he naturally conceives this life on the model of
his own, as accompanied by self-consciousness, by an intelligence the
more astonishing in that it is mysterious. Moreover he is a man, and
_humanizes_ nature; he lives in society with other men, and conceives
all things in terms of social relations of friendship or of enmity.
[Sidenote: And divinizes it.]
From the humanization to the divinization there is but one step; let us
endeavour to make it. Whoever says _god_, means a living and powerful
being worthy, in some especial degree, of fear, of respect, or of
gratitude. Primitive man possesses already, let us suppose, some notion
of life; he needs now to be supplied with some notion of power, which
alone is capable of inspiring him with reverence, and this notion it
does not seem difficult for a being to obtain, who sees in all nature
an expression of a manifold conscious life, and who must recognize in
certain great phenomena the manifestation of a will much more powerful
than that of any man, and consequently more redoubtable and worthy of
respect. Here also, however, we encounter serious objections from Mr.
Spencer and from anthropologists like M. Le Bon; the question becomes
more complex.
[Sidenote: Natural phenomena quite striking enough to be adored on
their own account.]
According to Mr. Spencer, as we have seen, the most important phenomena
of nature, and among others the rising and the setting of the sun,
are precisely those which must be least striking to primitive man;
they cannot appear to him to be _extraordinary_ because they happen
every day; so that he experiences before them neither surprise nor
admiration. This argument is very ingenious, but is it not also a
little sophistical? If it were pushed to the end it would amount simply
to the fact that there is nothing surprising or unusual in nature,
nothing which breaks with the preconceived association of ideas,
nothing which seems to manifest the sudden intervention of strong
or violent powers. The fact, however, is quite the contrary; nature
is full of surprises and of terrors. The day may be fine; suddenly
the clouds gather and the thunder rolls—the fear of thunder felt by
animals has already been spoken of; in the mountains especially the
rumbling, re-echoing, fills them with unspeakable terror. Droves of
cattle lose all control of themselves and throw themselves headlong
down precipices. It is with great difficulty that the herdsman by
his presence and exhortations keeps his herd in order; probably the
beasts see in the herdsman a powerful friend, capable of protecting
them against this terrible being whom the Hindus call the “howler.” If
animals tremble thus before the thunder, it is unlikely that primitive
man should see nothing in it abnormal and extraordinary. Similarly
with the hurricane, which seems like an enormous respiration, as of
a universe out of breath. Similarly with the tempest: one knows the
Basque proverb: “If you want to learn to pray, go to sea.” Everyone
who finds himself in the hands of a victorious enemy is naturally
inclined to beg for mercy. Let there supervene a sudden calm; at the
moment when the tempest was about to break, let the sun reappear like
a great smiling face, chasing away the cloud with his arrow of gold,
and will it not seem a benevolent auxiliary; will it not be received
with cries of joy and enthusiasm? Nature is incessantly showing us thus
some unexpected change of scene, producing some theatrical effect which
inevitably suggests some anthropomorphic drama, in which the elements
and the stars are the actors. How many strange things happen in the sky
when once the attention is directed thither! Eclipses of the moon and
of the sun, and the very phases of the moon, are abundantly calculated
to astonish the very savages whom Messrs. Spencer and Müller declare to
be incapable of astonishment. Note, too, that the simple view of the
stars at night provokes a lively admiration in anyone who is accustomed
to sleep under a roof. I remember still my surprise, when, as a child,
I was awake for the first time in the night and lifted my eyes by
chance on high and perceived the heaven glittering with stars; it was
one of the most striking impressions of my life.[31]
[31] Let us remember in this connection that, according to
Wuttke, J. G. Müller, and Schultze, a cult for the moon and
nocturnal stars must have preceded that of the sun, contrary
to the weight of opinion heretofore. The moon’s phases were
calculated to take the attention of primitive people, and must
early have done so. One must, however, in this connection be on
one’s guard against generalizing too quickly and believing that
the evolution of human thought has in all places followed the
same route. Habitats differ too widely for there not to have
been in the beginning an infinite diversity in the religious
conceptions entertained by different peoples. In Africa, for
example, it is evident _a priori_ that the sun does not possess
all the characteristics of a divinity. It is never desired or
regretted, as in a northern country; it is, to all appearance
at least, rather maleficent than beneficent; and the Africans
adore by preference the moon and stars, the gentle radiance of
which affords them light without oppressive heat, refreshes
and reposes them from the fatigues of the day. The moon is
considered by them as a male and all-powerful being, of which
the sun is the female. It is when the new moon arises, after
its period of absence from the heavens, and begins once more
the round of its visible phases, that it is received and
saluted with an especial demonstration of cries and dances.
The Congo blacks go the length of seeing in the moon a symbol
of immortality (M. Girard de Rialle, _Mythologie comparée_,
p. 148). America, on the contrary, has been the centre of the
worship of the sun. In general it seems that agriculture must
of necessity result in the triumph of sun worship over moon
worship, for the labourer is more dependent upon the sun than
the hunter or the warrior. According to J. G. Müller, savage
and warlike races have displayed a preference for the moon.
In effect, earth and sky incessantly furnish mankind with new
impressions capable of stimulating the most torpid imagination, and
of appealing to the whole round of human and social sensibilities:
fear, respect, gratitude. With these three elements it is easy to
account for the genesis of the religious sentiment.[32] If, then, our
ancestors adored the dawn, we do not believe, with Max Müller, that it
was because it seemed to open the gates of heaven and reveal to them a
vision of the infinite; we do not admit, with Mr. Spencer, that a cult
for the stars is reducible in the last resort to a simple confusion of
names, and was originally but an off-shoot from ancestor worship due
originally to the soul of some ancestor, who was metaphorically called
in his lifetime by the name of the sun or of some star. It seems to us
that one might quite well worship the sun and the stars on their own
account, or rather on account of the relation they bear to us.
[32] As has been remarked, the adoration of natural forces has
been observed under two forms. It has been addressed sometimes
to regular and calm phenomena (Chaldeans, Egyptians), sometimes
to changing and portentous phenomena (Jews, Indo-Europeans). It
almost always results in the personification of these forces.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Summary.]
To sum up, the simplest, the most primitive conception that man can
form of nature is to regard it, not as a manifold of interdependent
phenomena, but as a multitude of conscious and voluntary beings, more
or less independent and endowed with extreme power, capable of acting
upon each other and upon mankind. Scientific determinism cannot but be
a much later conception, incapable of suggesting itself in the early
stages of human thought. The world once conceived thus as a collection
of physically powerful, voluntary beings, man comes, in the course
of time, to endow these beings, morally and socially, with qualities
according to the manner in which they conduct themselves toward him.
“The moon is naughty this evening,” a child said to me; “it will not
show itself.” Primitive man said also that the hurricane was naughty,
the thunder was naughty, and so forth, whereas the sun, the moon, the
fire, when they gave him pleasure, were good and beneficent. Well,
given a world of voluntary beings sometimes good, sometimes evil, armed
with irresistible power, easy to irritate, prompt to take vengeance as
man is himself, are they not gods? And if primitive man thus possesses
gods, does he not also possess a religion as the ceremonial which
regulates his social relations with the gods? To create a religion we
need, in effect, to add but one idea to those already dealt with—the
idea that it is possible by such and such conduct, by offerings, by
supplications, to influence the superior beings with which nature
is peopled; but this idea, which seems to us quite simple, did not,
however, appear before a relatively advanced stage of intellectual
evolution. A savage animal is scarcely acquainted with any other means
of influencing other beings than biting, growling, and menacing;
if these means fail, he counts on flight. A mouse has no hope of
influencing a cat in any manner whatsoever; once between the cat’s
paws, it knows there is but one resource, to run away; still the animal
ultimately, and in especial at the period of courtship, learns to
recognize the power of caresses and attentions; it does not, however,
occur to him to employ these means toward any but individuals of the
same species. Moreover, the animals must be social before the language
of manners can attain even a very humble degree of development; the
animal confines itself generally to caresses with the tongue, with the
head, with the tail. Evidently, also, such means would be inappropriate
in regard to beings which did not possess a hide and coat of hair; an
animal would not lick a tree or a stone, even if it attributed to them
an unwonted degree of power. So that even if the brute, as Auguste
Comte supposed, really possessed fetichistic conceptions more or
less vague, it would experience a complete inability to manifest its
goodwill in any manner whatsoever toward its rudimentary fetiches.
Superstitious fear is one of the elements of religion which, after
all, is well within the capacity of an animal, but this fear cannot
in an animal produce even the first steps of an embryo cult. An
animal is ignorant of the means of touching, of captivating, of the
infinitely complex language of affection and reverence. Comparatively
inaccessible to pity himself, he has no notion how to act to excite
pity in another; the conception of a gift, of an offering, so essential
to the relations of men to each other and to their gods is, save in
rare instances, to it unknown. The most primitive cult is always
essentially a counterfeit of an advanced social state; an imitation,
in an imaginary commerce with the gods, of a commerce already existing
among men united by complex ties. Religion implies a nascent art of
sociability, an elementary acquaintance with the springs which regulate
the conduct of beings in society; there is a certain rhetoric in
prayer, in genuflections and prostrations. Everything of that kind
is far beyond the range of the lower animals. One may discover among
them, however, some traces of the process of evolution which man
must have followed. It is, in especial, under domestication that an
animal’s manners reach their highest development. Their association
with a superior being resembles, more closely than anything else in
nature, the state in which primitive man believed himself to live with
his gods. The dog seems at times to put up a veritable prayer to the
master who is beating it, when it crawls at his feet and whimpers.
This attitude, however, provoked by the fear of a blow, is perhaps in
a large measure instinctive and not reflectively designed to excite
pity. The true prayer of the dog consists in licking the hand which
wounds him; the story is well known of the dog that licked the fingers
of his master while the latter was pitilessly practising upon him an
experiment in vivisection. I myself observed an analogous fact in an
enormous dog from the Pyrenees whose eye I had to cauterize; he might
have crushed my hand, and he simply licked it feverishly. It is almost
an example of religious submission; the sentiment which is observable
in embryo in the dog is the same as that which in its complete
development appears in the Psalms and the book of Job. The lower
animals display such a sentiment toward no other being but man. As to
man himself, he displays it only toward his gods, toward an absolute
chief or a father. Profound, however, as this sentiment is in some
animals, their expression of it is quite imperfect; though I remember a
case in which the action of licking, so habitual with dogs, was almost
like a human kiss. I was embracing my mother, at the door of the house,
before leaving for a journey, when my Pyrenees dog ran up to us, and,
placing his paws upon our shoulders literally kissed both of us. From
that time on (we have tried the experiment) he never sees us embrace
each other without coming to demand his kiss.
[Sidenote: Notion of Compensation.]
Another well-known fact, and worthy of remark, is the following: when a
dog or even a cat has committed some reprehensible act, has eaten the
roast or done something clumsy, it comes toward one with a thousand
little attentions; in so much that I have found myself able to divine
when my dog had committed a peccadillo simply by observing his unwonted
demonstrations of friendship. The animal hopes therefore, by force of
his social graces and attentions, to prevent his master from holding a
grudge against him, to deprecate the wrath that his culpable conduct
ought legitimately to arouse, and to awaken in its stead some degree
of benevolence by his demonstrations of submission and affection.
This notion of compensation becomes later an important element in the
religious cult. The Neapolitan brigand who dedicates a wax candle to
the altar of the Virgin; the mediæval lord, who, after having killed
his next of kin, rears a chapel to some saint, the hermit who lacerates
his chest with his hair shirt in order to avoid the more redoubtable
pangs of hell, reason precisely after the same fashion as my dog, they
are endeavouring, like him, to conciliate their judge, and, to be quite
frank, to corrupt him; for superstition rests in a great measure upon
the belief that it is possible to corrupt God.
[Sidenote: Notion of conscious gift.]
The most difficult notion to discover among animals is that of the
voluntary and conscious gift; the solidarity observed among certain
insects, for example the ant, which causes them to hold all their
goods in common, is something too instinctive and irreflective; a
veritable gift must address itself to some determinate person, and not
to an entire society; it must possess a degree of spontaneity that
excludes any hypothesis of pure instinct; and finally, it must be as
far as possible a sign of affection, a symbol. And the more symbolic
its character, the more religious, properly speaking, it will be;
religious offerings are more than anything else a symbolic testimony of
respect; piety scarcely plays a part in them, one does not in general
believe that they answer to any real need on the part of the gods,
one believes that they will be rather accepted by them than seized
upon with avidity. The notion of a gift, therefore, presupposes a
certain delicacy and refinement. Some germ of this sentiment, however,
we discover precisely in a dog observed by Mr. Spencer. This dog, a
very intelligent and very valuable spaniel, met one morning, after an
absence of some hours, a person of whom he was very fond. He amplified
his ordinary greeting by an addition which was not habitual; he drew
back his lips in a sort of smile, and, once out of doors, offered other
demonstrations of fidelity. As a hunter he had been trained to bring
game to his master. He no doubt regretted that there was no game at the
moment for him to bring as a means of expressing his affection; however
he rummaged about, and seizing presently a dead leaf, carried it to
his master with a multitude of caressing gestures.[33] Evidently the
leaf possessed for the dog no more than a symbolic value; he knew that
it was his duty to retrieve game, and that the action of retrieving
gave pleasure to his master, and he wished to accomplish this action
under his eyes, as to the object itself it made little difference; it
was his goodwill that he wished to show. The dead leaf was a veritable
offering, it possessed a sort of moral value.
[33] H. Spencer, _Appendix to the Principles of Sociology_.
[Sidenote: Elements of which religion is compounded within the reach of
the lower animals.]
Thus animals may acquire, by contact with man, a certain number of
sentiments which enter later into human religion. The monkey in
this respect, as in all others, seems much in advance of the other
animals. Even in the savage state a number of simiæ display gestures of
supplication to deprecate the firing of a gun at them:[34] They possess
the sentiment of pity, since they ascribe it to others. Who knows but
that there may be in this mute prayer more of real religious sentiment
than exists sometimes in the psittacism of certain believers? Animals
in general employ in their relations with man the maximum of the means
of expression at their disposal, and it is not their fault if the means
are limited; they seem to consider man as a really royal being, a thing
apart in nature.[35] Must one conclude, as is sometimes done, that man
is a god in the eyes of the rest of the animal kingdom? Not altogether;
the lower animals see man too close; even in an embryonic religion one
must not be able to touch God with one’s finger; in religion as in art,
there is an advantage in perspective. My dog and I are companions;
sometimes he is jealous, sometimes he pouts. I am unhappily in no
respect, in his eyes, on a pedestal. There are, however, evidently
exceptions, cases in which the master seems to preserve his prestige.
I believe that under certain circumstances man has appeared to some
members of the lower animals as endowed with a power so extraordinary
that he must have awakened some vague religious sentiments; if man
is sometimes a god to his fellow-men, he may well be so to the lower
animals. I am aware that in the judgment of certain philosophers, and
even of certain men of science, religion is the exclusive appanage
of the human race, but up to this point we have found in primitive
religion no more than a certain number of simple ideas, not one of
which, taken separately, is above the reach of the lower animals. Just
as industry, art, language, and reason, so religion also has its roots
in the nebulous and confused consciousness of the animal. The animal,
however, rises to such ideas only at moments. He is unable to maintain
himself at their level, to synthesize them, to reduce them to a system.
His attention is too mobile for him to regulate his conduct by them.
Even if an animal were quite as capable of conceiving a god as is the
lowest of savages, he would remain forever incapable of a religious
cult.
[34] Brehm, _Revue scientifique_, p. 974, 1874.
[35] Espinas, _Sociétiés animales_, p. 181.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Primitive religion a paraphysics.]
We have seen that the birth of religion is not a species of theatrical
effect in nature, that preparation is being made for it among the
higher animals, and that man himself achieves it gradually, and
without shock. In this rapid effort to trace the genesis of primitive
religions, we have found no need to rely upon the conceptions of
the soul, of spirit, of the infinite, of a first cause, nor upon
any metaphysical sentiment. These ideas are of later date; they are
the product of religion, rather than the roots of it. The basis of
religion was in the beginning quite positive and natural; religion is
simply a mythical and sociomorphic theory of the physical universe,
and it is only at its summit, at an advanced degree of evolution,
that it comes into contact with metaphysics. Religion lies beyond
and at the side of science. Superstition, in the strict sense of
the word, and primitive religion were one, and it is not without
reason that Lucretius compares the two: _relligio_, _superstitio_.
To be present at the birth of religion is to perceive an erroneous
scientific conception, gathering other errors or incomplete verities
to itself, entering into one body of belief with them, and ultimately,
little by little, subordinating them. The earliest religions were
systematized and organized superstitions. Be it added that in our
judgment superstition consists simply in an ill-conducted scientific
induction, in a mistaken effort of human reason; and we do not wish to
be understood as intending by that the mere play of the imagination;
we do not wish to be understood as holding that religion is founded
in the last resort on a species of recreation of the mind. How often
the birth of religion has been attributed to an alleged appetite for
the marvellous, for the extraordinary, which is supposed to seize upon
young peoples as upon infants! A singularly artificial explanation for
a very natural and profound tendency. To say the truth, what primitive
peoples were in search of when they built up their different religions
was an explanation, and the least surprising explanation possible,
the explanation most in harmony with their rude intelligence, the
most rational explanation. It was infinitely less marvellous for an
ancient to suppose that the thunder came from the hand of Indra or
of Jupiter, than to believe it to be the product of a certain force
called electricity; the myth was for him a much more satisfying
explanation; it was the most plausible one that he could hit upon,
given his intellectual habitat. So that if science consists in relating
things, Jupiter and Jehovah may be regarded as rudimentary scientific
conceptions. If they are no longer such, the reason is simply that we
have discovered the natural and regular laws which supersede them.
When a task, so to speak, begins to perform itself, one dismisses the
employee who had previously been charged with it; but one should be
careful not to say that he was previously good for nothing, that he
had been stationed there by caprice or by favour. If our gods seem
nowadays to be purely honorary, the fact was otherwise at a previous
period. Religions are not the work of caprice; they correspond to an
invincible tendency in man, and sometimes in the lower animals, to try
to understand what passes before his eyes. Religion is nascent science,
and it was with purely physical problems that it at first essayed to
grapple. It was a physics _à côté_, a paraphysics, before becoming a
science _au delà_, a metaphysics.
CHAPTER II.
RELIGIOUS METAPHYSICS.
I. Animism or polydemonism—Formation of the dualist
conception of spirit—Social relations with spirits.
II. Providence and miracles—The evolution of the dualist
conception of a special providence—The conception of
miracles—The supernatural and the natural—Scientific
explanation and miracles—Social and moral modifications
in the character of man owing to supposed social relations
with a special providence—Increasing sentiment of
irresponsibility and passivity and “absolute dependence.”
III. The creation—Genesis of the notion of creation—The
dualistic elements in this idea—Monism—Classification
of systems of religious metaphysics—Criticism of the
classification proposed by Von Hartmann—Criticism of the
classification proposed by Auguste Comte.
_I. Animism._
[Sidenote: Legitimate and illegitimate metaphysics.]
The upshot of the preceding chapter is that every religion in its
beginning consisted of a mistaken system of physics; and between a
mistaken system of physics and certain forms of metaphysics there
is often no difference but one of degree simply. Magnify some
scientific error, reduce it to a system, explain heaven and earth
by it, and it will be a metaphysics—in the bad sense. Whatever one
universalizes—error or truth—acquires metaphysical significance, and
possibly it is more easy to universalize in this way the false than
the true; truth possesses always a greater concreteness than error,
and therefore offers greater resistance to arbitrary fashioning. Let a
modern man of science develop his knowledge as he will, and enlarge the
circle of known phenomena; so long as he holds vigorously by scientific
methods he will never be able to pass at a bound from the sphere of
phenomena to the sphere of things in themselves. The conscientious
man of science is prisoned within the limits of knowledge, his
thought has no outlet. But let him once break the chain of logic which
confines him, and behold him free. His false hypothesis grows without
obstacle or check from reality; he lands at a bound up to his neck in
metaphysics. The fact is, one may arrive at a system of metaphysics
in two ways—incontinently, by a logical solecism and an exaggeration
of some false premise _ad infinitum_, or by following the chain of
known truth to the point at which it disappears in eternal night, and
by endeavouring to peer into the darkness by the light of hypothesis:
in the first case metaphysics is simply a logically developed mistake
which gains in magnitude what it loses in reality, an illegitimate
negation of science; in the second case it is a hypothetical extension
of truth, in some sort a legitimate supplement to science.
We are approaching the moment when religious physics became transformed
into metaphysics; the period when the gods retreated from phenomenon
to phenomenon, and took refuge ultimately in the supersensible; the
period when heaven and earth first became distinct and separate;
although, to be quite accurate, the distinguishing characteristic of
religion even at the present day is an incoherent mixture of physics
and metaphysics, of anthropomorphic or sociomorphic theories in regard
to nature and to the supernatural. The foundation of every primitive
religion is reasoning by analogy, that is to say, the vaguest and least
sound of logical methods. At a later date the mass of naïve analogies
constituting any one religion is criticised and systematized and
completed by tentative induction or regular deduction.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Primitive metaphysics a fetichistic monism.]
Man, as we have seen, begins by creating a natural society, including
animals, plants, and even minerals, which he endows with a life similar
to his own: he believes himself to be in communication with them in
matters of volition and intention, just as he is in communication with
other men and animals. But in thus projecting something analogous to
his own life, to his power of volition and of his social relations and
responsibilities, into the existence of external things, he does not,
at first, dream of any distinction between the animating principle and
the body which it animates; he conceives as yet no such distinction in
his own case. The earliest stage of religious metaphysics, therefore,
is not a sort of vague monism relative to the divine principle, the
indwelling divinity of things, τὸ θεῖον, as Messrs. Müller and Von
Hartmann affirm, but a vague monism in regard to the soul and body,
which at first are conceived as one. The whole world is a society of
living _bodies_.
[Sidenote: Becomes a dualistic animism. Separate existence of the soul.]
The conception which is most analogous to the preceding is that of
distinct and separate souls animating each its body, of spirits capable
of quitting each its dwelling-place. It is this that historians of
religion mean by animism. What is remarkable in this conception is its
dualistic character. It contains the germ of the opposition between
soul and body. The dualistic conception arises slowly from a number of
naïve analogies. The first are borrowed from the fact of respiration.
Does not one fairly hear the departure of the breath animating a living
body, in what one calls the last gasp? Other analogies are borrowed
from the physical fact of the shadow cast by the sun; one seems to see
the spirit marching side by side with the body, and even changing its
place when the body is motionless. Shadow has played a large rôle in
the paraphysics of primitive peoples; shadows people the other world.
In the third place, during sleep it is incontestable, on the premises
that primitive man has at his disposal, that the spirit sometimes makes
long journeys, for the sleeper often recollects wandering, hunting,
or making war in distant countries, at a time when his companions are
perfectly aware that his body has lain motionless. Fainting also seems
to be a case in which something dwelling in us suddenly leaves and
presently comes back again. Lethargy is a more striking example of the
same thing. Visions in delirium, hallucinations in madness, or even
in dreams, deal with beings who are invisible to others; fantastic
beings who appear to savages as real as any others. Also it is well
known that fools and innocents were regarded, until modern times, as
inspired and sacred. Other nervous maladies—hysteria, “possession,”
somnambulism—add their quota of precision to the conception of a
spirit animating the body, dwelling in it, quitting it more or less at
will, tormenting it, etc.
Thus, by degrees, there arises the conception of a subtle mode of being
eluding touch, and commonly vision even, capable of a life independent
of the body it inhabits, and more powerful than the body. Man comes to
believe himself to be living in a society with beings other than those
who appeal directly and grossly to his senses; he believes himself to
be living in a society of spirits.
[Sidenote: Ghosts.]
That is not all. The problem of death early engaged the attention of
primitive people. They considered it altogether as a physical affair;
they explained it, as Messrs. Tylor and Spencer (following Lucretius)
have shown, by a number of inductions drawn from observations on sleep,
lethargy, and dream. A sleeping body awakes, it seems to follow that a
dead body will awake; that is the line of reasoning. Moreover, the dead
come back in dreams, or in the demi-hallucinations of the night and of
fear. The modern conception of pure spirit is an indirect and later
consequence of a belief in immortality, it is not itself the principle
of it. A cult for the dead, for the manes, as the Romans said, is
partly explicable on moral or psychological grounds, as, for example,
by a prolongation of filial respect and fear, and partly on grounds
altogether material and gross. A cult for the dead rests on a naïve
theory based on sentiment; it is semi-physical and semi-psychological.
The nature of a departed soul has been conceived in very different
ways. Among the Dakota Indians of North America, one’s double goes up
into the air, one’s _third_ rejoins the spirits, one’s fourth and last
soul stays by the body; an instance of a very complicated theory formed
out of elements altogether primitive. In general, the belief is that
the souls of the dead go to join ancestral souls in another world,
which is commonly a distant land from which the tribe has migrated
in former times—affording an example of a social tie which survives
death. The Greeks and Romans believed that, if the body was deprived
of sepulture, its shadow could not penetrate into its proper place of
abode; it remained on earth and haunted the living—a remnant of former
beliefs in the necessity of sepulture and the maintenance of friendly
relations with the society of the dead.[36]
[36] See the author’s _Morale d’Épicure_ (_Des idées antiques
sur la mort_) 3d edition, p. 105.
[Sidenote: Analogies between ghosts and living people.]
The dead were to be conciliated by the same means as the living, by
supplications and gifts. The gifts were the same as those which are
acceptable to the living—food, arms, costumes, horses, servants. In
Dahomey, when a king dies, a hundred of his soldiers are immolated on
his tomb as a body guard. Much the same thing was done among the Incas
of Peru. At Bali all the women of the harem are immolated upon the
grave of the defunct sultan. In Homer, Achilles slaughtered his Trojan
prisoners on the funeral pyre of Patroclus, together with the horses
and the dogs of his dead friend. The Fiji islanders used to immolate a
man at the foot of each pillar in the home of a chief, as a guard for
the edifice. In our days, spirits are still so numerous, in the eyes
of certain people, that an Arab, for example, when he throws a stone,
breathes an apology to such spirits as he may strike.[37] The universe
is populated by anthropomorphic societies.
[37] See Le Bon, _L’Homme et les Sociétés_, t. ii.
[Sidenote: Care of vengeance committed to ghosts.]
It was to spirits that the care of one’s vengeances was confided.
According to Tylor, two Brahmans, believing that a man had robbed them
of fifty rupees, took their own mother and, with her consent, cut off
her head in order that her shadow might torment and pursue the robber
till death. Among the Alfourous of Moluccas children are buried alive
up to the neck, and left there under the scorching sun with their
mouths full of pepper and salt, so that, dying in an agony of thirst,
their souls may go in a state of fury in search of the enemy against
whom they have been sent. It is always some social exigency, some
hatred, some vengeance, some punishment, that leads one to enter into
commerce with spirits.
[Sidenote: Summary.]
In effect, all historical treatises unite to show that animism or
polydemonism has at one time or other been universal. It immediately
succeeded fetichism or concrete naturism, the primitive belief, in
which animating soul and animated body were not distinguished.
A belief in separately existing spirits, or spiritism, as Mr. Spencer
calls it, which contains the germ of the belief in revisitants from
the other world, constitutes the primitive origin of the more refined
metaphysical system called spiritualism. This last system, founded also
upon the notion of the fundamental duality of man, and of every living
being, leads to the notion of a society of spirits.
Let us now consider the inherent necessity under which animism lies of
developing into theism.
_II. Providence and Miracles._
[Sidenote: From ghosts to divinity a single step.]
From the notion of a spirit to that of a divinity is but one step.
It suffices to conceive the spirit as sufficiently powerful and
redoubtable to reduce us in some considerable measure to a state of
dependence. Spirits, manes, gods, subsist in the beginning on an
indistinct sentiment of terror. The instant that spirits can separate
themselves from the body and perform mysterious actions of which we are
incapable, they begin to be divine; it is for this reason that death
may change a man into a species of god.
[Sidenote: Development of notion of special providence.]
Spirits are not only powerful, however; they are also clairvoyant,
prevoyant—they are acquainted with things that lie beyond our
knowledge. More than that, they are benevolent or hostile; they
are related to us in various social or antisocial ways. Here we
have the elements of the notion of divine providence. The second
semi-metaphysical idea, which lies in germ at the bottom of every
religion, is, therefore, this of perspicacious spirits, of favouring
or unfavouring deities, of providences. “This being is well or ill
disposed toward me; he may work me good or harm.” Such is the first
naïve formulation of the theory of divine providence. One must
not expect to find, in the beginning, the notion of a general,
directing intelligence, but simply that of a social tie between
particular voluntary, well-disposed or ill-disposed beings. The notion
of providence, like all other religious notions, was at first a
superstition. A savage, on his way to some undertaking, meets a serpent
and succeeds in his enterprise; it was the serpent that brought him
luck: behold a providential accident! Gamblers at the present time
are quite as superstitious. The fetich theory of providence still
subsists, in the belief in medals, scapularies, and so forth.[38]
Observation inevitably results in the perception of causal relations
among phenomena; the trouble is, simply, that to the primitive mind
every coincidence appears to be a cause; _post hoc, ergo propter hoc_.
Any object that is a party to any such coincidence is a lucky object,
good to have in one’s power, a portable providence, so to speak. Thus
there arises the notion of a destiny, a bias in phenomena toward good
or evil, which imposes itself upon the previously existing conception
of nature as animated or peopled by spirits. The _post hoc, ergo
propter hoc_—that is to say, the belief in the influence of phenomena
immediately preceding or concomitant to the main event, and in the
influence of a present action upon some future event—is the germ of
superstitions both in regard to providence and to destiny. And out of
the idea of destiny, of fortune, of necessity, grows in process of time
the scientific notion of determinism and universal reciprocity.
[38] A belief in relics, pushed so far by the earlier
Christians and by so many Catholics to-day, is, too, a sort
of faith in fetiches or amulets. From the earliest period of
Christianity the faithful were accustomed to go to the Holy
Land to obtain water from the Jordan, and gather dust from the
soil that the feet of Christ had trod, and to break pieces from
the true cross, which St. Paulin of Nole says, “possesses in
all its parts a vital force in so much that although its wood
be every day clipped off by innumerable pilgrims, it remains
intact.” Relics are supposed not only to cure the body, but
the soul of those who touch them: Gregory sent to a barbarous
king the chains that had served to manacle the apostle Paul;
assuring him that the same chains which had manacled the body
of the saint could deliver the heart from sin.
This superstition for relics, common in the Middle Ages, was
held in all its naïveté by Bishop Gregory of Tours. He relates
that one day when he was suffering from a pain in the temples,
a touch from the hangings about the tomb of St. Martin cured
him. He repeated the experiment three times with equal success.
Once, he tells, he was attacked by a mortal dysentery; he
drank a glass of water in which he had dissolved a pinch of
dust scraped up on the tomb of the saint, and his health was
restored. One day a bone stuck in his throat, he began praying
and groaning, and kneeled before the tomb; he stretched out
his hand and touched the hangings and the bone disappeared.
“I do not know,” he says, “what became of it, for I neither
threw it up nor felt it pass downward into my stomach.” At
another time his tongue became swollen and tumefied; he licked
the railing of the tomb of St. Martin and his tongue became
of its natural size. St. Martin’s relics go the length even
of curing toothache. “Oh, ineffable theriac!” cries Gregory
of Tours, “ineffable pigment! admirable antidote! celestial
purge! superior to all the drugs of the faculty! sweeter than
aromatics, stronger than all unguents together! Thou cleanest
the stomach like scammony, the lungs like hyssop; thou purgest
the head like pyrethrig.”
[Sidenote: Systematic subordination among the gods.]
Little by little, by the growth of experience, man achieves the
conception of an orderly subordination among the different voluntary
beings with whom he peoples the earth, a sort of unification of
special providences, a more or less regular organization of the world.
Responsibility for current events retreats from cause to cause into the
distance, from powerful being to still more powerful being; primitive
man still insists on believing that every event is still the sign,
the expression of a volition. Once more his faith is dualistic: he
conceives the world as dependent upon the will of some one or more
superior beings who direct it, or suspend at need the ordinary course
of things.
[Sidenote: Development of belief in miracle.]
It is at this stage in the evolution of religion that the conception
of miracles appears. The notion of miracles is at first very vague in
primitive religions; the period at which this notion begins to become
definite marks the initiation of a further step in the development
of religion. If, in effect, the marvellous has in all times formed
a necessary element in the constitution, it did not possess in the
beginning the same character as nowadays; it was not so definitely
distinguished from the natural order of things. Human intelligence
had not yet distinguished scientific determinism and supernaturalism.
A natural phenomenon! The bare idea is almost modern; that is to
say, the idea of a phenomenon subject to immutable laws, bound up
together with the whole body of other phenomena and forming with them
a single unit. What a complex conception, and how far above the reach
of primitive intelligence! What we call a miracle _is_ a natural
phenomenon to a savage, he sees miracles every hour; properly speaking,
he sees nothing else but miracles, that is to say, surprising events.
Primitive man, in effect, takes no notice of what does not surprise
him (surprise, it has been said, is the father of science), and one of
the immediate characteristics, in his opinion, of what surprises him,
is that it is intentional.[39] That it should be so no more shocks
him, than a paradox shocks a philosopher. The savage is not acquainted
with the laws of nature, he has no notion of their being universal
to prevent his admitting exceptions to them. A miracle is simply to
him a sign of a power like his own, acting by methods unknown to him
and producing effects above the limits of his own capacity. Are such
effects _infinitely_ above his capacity? No such notion enters into the
question; it suffices that they be above it at all to make him bow down
and adore.
[39] Etymologically, miracle signifies simply surprising. The
Hindus do not even possess a special word for a supernatural
event; miracle and spectacle in their language are one. The
supernatural, that is to say, is for them simply an object
of contemplation and admiration, an event which stands out
prominently from the general monotony which attracts the eye.
[Sidenote: Marks a degree of intellectual progress.]
The belief in miracles, so anti-scientific nowadays, marks a
considerable progress in the intellectual evolution. It amounts, in
effect, to a limitation of divine intervention to a small number of
extraordinary phenomena. A conception of universal determinism is, in
fact, beginning to make its appearance. The belief in dualism, in the
separation between spirit and body, becoming constantly more marked,
ends in the belief in distinct and separate powers.
[Sidenote: Conception of God as Providence more essential than that of
Him as First Cause.]
Belief in a power miraculously distributing good and evil, in a
Providence, is the most vital element in religion. The most important
act in every religion, indeed, is propitiation and entreaty; well,
this act is not simply directed toward God as such, but toward God as
a presiding divinity, a power capable of favouring or disfavouring
us. And the great Oriental religions have reached their present state
of perfection without any special effort to make the notion of God
precise, without specially insisting upon any of his distinguishing
attributes except such as are subsidiary to this notion of a Providence
awarding good and evil; and popular fancy hastens to ascribe the
accomplishment of this distribution to genii, to good and evil spirits;
it need go no further, it need not penetrate to the Great Being, to
the infinite, so to speak, to the noumenon, and to the abyss which,
in effect, is to it a comparative matter of indifference. Even in
religions of Christian origin—in especial, in Catholicism, and the
Greek Church—God is not always addressed directly; saints, angels,
the Virgin, the Son, the Holy Spirit, are much more frequently invoked
as mediators. There is something vague, and obscure, and terrible,
in God the Father; He is the creator of heaven and hell, the great
and somewhat ambiguous principle of goodness, and, in some dim way,
of evil. One may see in Him the germ of an indirect personification
of nature, which is so indifferent to man, so hard, so inflexible.
Christ, on the contrary, is the personification of the best elements
of humanity. The responsibility for ferocious laws, maledictions,
eternal punishments, is laid upon the shoulders of the Old Testament
Deity hidden behind His cloud, revealed only in the lightning and
the thunder, reigning by terror, and demanding the life even of His
Son as an expiatory sacrifice. At bottom, the real God adored by the
Christians is Jesus, that is to say, a mediating Providence whose
function is to soften down the asperities of natural law, a Providence
who distributes nothing but good and happiness, whereas nature
distributes good and evil with equal indifference. It is Jesus we
invoke, and it is to the personification of Providence rather than to
that of the first cause of the world that humanity has kneeled these
two thousand years.
[Sidenote: Increasing opposition between notion of Providence and
science.]
A belief in miracles and in a Providence comes, in the course of its
development, into sharper and sharper conflict with a belief in the
order of nature. Man gives himself up to an exclusive preoccupation
with what he supposes to be the means of ameliorating his destiny and
that of his fellows: providential interference with the course of
nature, sacrifice, and prayer are his great means of action on the
world. He lives in the supernatural. There exists always, in the early
stages of every religion, a certain sentiment of evil, of suffering,
of terror; and to correct it the believer takes refuge in miracles.
Providence is thus the primitive means of progress, and man’s first
hope lay in the superhuman.
[Sidenote: Practical evil of belief in Providence.]
Fear of evil, and belief that it can be cured by divine intervention,
were the origin of prayer. A positive religion, even in our days, can
scarcely rest content with the conception of a God who simply sits at
a distance and watches the march of a world which he regulated, once
for all, at the beginning of time. He must absolutely show himself
from time to time in our midst, we must feel the proximity of his hand
ready to sustain us, he must be able to suspend the course of nature to
our profit. Piety requires the stimulus of a belief in the immediate
and present possibility of miracles, in their past existence, in their
present existence even, and in one’s power of invoking them by prayer.
Thus the believer opposes to the conception of ordinary determinism,
as the regulating principle of the external world, a faith in a being
capable at any moment of tampering with it; and he counts upon this
power being exercised, he counts upon invoking it, he puts his hope in
supernatural means not less than in natural means, and sometimes even
to the neglect of the latter.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Miracles not frauds.]
As Littré remarked, the mind may behave in three ways in regard to
miracles: adore them, reject them as a mystification, or explain them
by natural means. Primitive times, Antiquity, and the Middle Ages
adored miracles; the eighteenth century rejected them as impostures
and made game of them. It was then that the theory, that the founders
of religion were impostors simply, was generally prevalent. One of
the most necessary and most serious incidents in the human drama was
simply mistaken for a bit of comedy. It was forgotten that men do not
devote a whole lifetime to falsehood; the theory of imposture was a
psychological as well as historical error. A man—even an actor or a
politician—is always sincere on some side or other; at some period or
other a man inevitably says what he thinks, even if only by mistake.
Even certain palinodes, provoked by self-interest, are explicable by an
unconscious deviation, under the influence of some passion, rather than
by an altogether conscious and brazen determination to deceive; and
even when one lies with all one’s heart, one inevitably believes, or
soon comes to believe, some part of one’s own falsehood. The reproach
of hypocrisy, of comedy and falsehood, has been uttered a hundred
times in the course of history, and it has usually been a mistake.
In the eighteenth century the same men who prepared and achieved the
French Revolution were fond of accusing the prophets and Apostles,
the revolutionists of an early date, of insincerity and fraud. To-day
such an accusation can no longer be sustained against the sacred
books, and the men of the eighteenth century are themselves accused
of hypocrisy. For M. Taine, for example, almost all the leaders of
the French Revolution lie under the reproach of insincerity, and the
very people who sustained them were not, in his judgment, moved by
the ideas which they proclaimed, but by the grossest self-interest.
The fact is, there are always two points of view from which historic
events may be regarded: that of personal interests, which come to the
surface as seldom as possible, and that of the general and generous
ideas which, on the contrary, are complacently given prominence in
public speeches and writings. If it is useful for the historian to
divine the interested motives which contributed to the production of
a historical event, it is irrational to refuse to lend some measure
of credence to the higher motives which justified it and which may
well have lent their influence to that of self-interest. The human
heart is not a one-stringed instrument. The revolutionists had faith
in the Revolution, in the rights which they were vindicating, in
equality and fraternity; they even believed, sometimes, in their own
disinterestedness, as the Protestants believed in the Reformation, as
Christ and the prophets believed in their own inspiration; as even in
our days, by a belated superstition, the Pope believes in his own
infallibility. There is in every faith some element of the naïveté
which a child shows in its little semi-conscious hypocrisies, in its
caresses which mask a demand and its smiles which are the efflorescence
of satisfied desire. But without a certain element of genuineness,
a certain element of real naïveté in the faith of the believers, no
religion could exist, no revolution would be achieved, no important
change would be produced in the life of humanity. Intellectual
affirmation and action are always proportionate: to act is to believe
and to believe is to act.
[Sidenote: But illusions.]
In our days, miracles are beginning to be scientifically explained.
They are phenomena simply; frequently they were witnessed and described
in good faith, but with insufficient knowledge. Everyone is acquainted,
for example, with the biblical miracle according to which Isaiah
“brought again the shadows of the degrees, which was gone down in the
sun dial of Ahaz, ten degrees backward”; indeed the miracle has been
reproduced. Mr. Guillemin[40] demonstrates by geometrical reasonings
that, by inclining the dial slightly toward the horizon, the shadow
may be made gradually to creep a certain distance backward. In the
same way, the successive appearances of Jesus after his burial have
been paralleled by a recent event in the United States: a criminal,
at whose execution all his fellow-prisoners were present, appeared to
all of them successively the next day, or the day after. The latter is
a remarkable instance of collective hallucination, which shows that
a group of individuals living in, so to speak, the same emotional
habitat may well be struck at the same time by the same vision, without
there being, on their part, either conscious or unconscious fraud or
collusion. A third miracle, of an altogether different kind, has also
been scientifically explained: I mean the colouring of the fleece of
the flocks of Laban and of Jacob; the effect was obtained by a process
well-known to the Egyptians, and mentioned by Pliny. Matthew Arnold
believes that the miraculous cures also are not pure legend simply,
that they bear witness to the great influence of mind over matter.
Jesus really did exorcise devils, that is to say, the mad passions
which howled about him. And thus may be understood in their true sense
the words: “What does it matter whether I say, _Thy_ sins are forgiven
thee! or whether I say Arise and walk?” and again: “Thou art made
whole; sin no more, lest a worse thing befall thee.” Jesus himself
must have known, as Socrates and Empedocles did, though even in a more
extraordinary degree, that he possessed a moral and physical power, a
virtue, which he himself did not understand and which seemed to him a
divine gift. He knew himself to be morally and symbolically the healer
of the deaf, the blind, the paralytic, a physician of souls; and the
cures that he wrought in cases of hysteria, more or less temporary but
real, forced him to attribute to himself a superhuman power over the
body also.
[40] _Actes de la Société helvét. des sc. nat._, August, 1877.
[Sidenote: Usually explicable by the science of nervous phenomena.]
The science of the nervous system, which dates almost entirely from our
days, may be taken as a perpetual running commentary on the history
of miracles. Perhaps a full quarter of the marvellous facts observed
and revered by humanity fall into place within the limits of this
new science. A physician, or observer, in the midst of his subjects
is like a prophet; those who surround him are incessantly obliged to
recognize in him an occult power, which he himself does not understand;
physician and patient, observer and observed, live equally in the realm
of the extraordinary. The facts of partial insensibility, of catalepsy
followed by a reawakening like a rising from the dead, of mental
suggestion taking place even at a distance, all these facts, which are
well known, and are each day becoming more and more explicable, are
even for us at the present moment on the confines of the miraculous;
they are detaching themselves, under our very eyes, from the sphere of
religion, and falling within the compass of science. The observer who
notices for the first time that he can transmit an almost compulsive
command by a look, by a pressure of the hand, and even, it appears
nowadays, by a simple tension of his will, must experience a species of
surprise, even of fright, of almost religious disquietude at finding
himself armed with such a power. He must begin to understand that
the mythical and mystical interpretation of such facts is an affair
of delicate discrimination, that lay beyond the stretch of primitive
intelligence.
[Sidenote: Often by less recondite knowledge.]
Even the miracles which do not belong simply to the less explicable
phenomena of the nervous system tend increasingly to appear to the
historian as having been possessed of some foundation in fact. All
that was subjective in them is the element of the marvellous and the
providential. The miracles really were produced, but in the human
heart; and instead, in any proper sense, of engendering faith they
proceeded from it and are explicable by it. An English missionary[41]
who made a journey in Siberia relates that at the moment of his
arrival at Irkutsk a fire was consuming three-fourths of the town; a
chapel, however, had been spared and the Russian clergy saw in this
fact a miracle; the English missionary explained it very simply by the
observation that the rest of the town had been built up of wood, and
that the chapel was of brick. But the missionary, who denies anything
like providential intervention in the above mentioned case, admits
providential intervention the same day in regard to another point; for
he relates that but for one of his horses having run away he would have
arrived too soon at Irkutsk, and would have had his baggage burned in
the fire, and offers thanks to God because his horse had been inspired
to break the traces. The same natural causes which suffice, according
to this excellent gentleman, to explain why the Russian church was
spared, suffice no longer when the luggage of an Anglican missionary,
the special _protégé_, is involved. Every believer is inclined thus to
interpret miraculously the mercies that have been shown to him. From
the height of a stall or the pulpit of a church one sees the events of
this world at a particular angle; from the stall or pulpit of another
church one sees them at another angle, and for purposes of scientific
verity the events must be looked down upon from the stalls and pulpits
of every church—unless one rejects churches altogether.
[41] _Through Siberia_, by Henry Lansdell, with illustrations
and maps; London, 1882.
[Sidenote: Miracles essential to religion.]
Religions create miracles by the very need that they themselves feel
for them, they create them as evidence in their own support; miracles
enter as a necessary element into the process of mental evolution which
engenders religion. The distinguishing mark of the word of God is that
it alters the order of natural phenomena. Mohammedanism alone made its
way in the world without the assistance of visible and gross evidence
in its favour, appealing not to the eyes but to the spirit, as Pascal
would say; and in this respect it may perhaps claim an intellectual
elevation that Judaism and Christianity cannot. But if Mohammed refused
the gift of miracles, with a good faith that Moses seems not to have
possessed, his disciples hastened to force it upon him, and have
supplied his life and death with an appropriate setting of marvellous
legend. Ground of belief must be had; the messenger of God must present
some visible sign by which he may be recognized.
[Sidenote: Prevalence of belief in special providence.]
It is evident that divine providence or protection must have been
conceived in the beginning as quite _special_, and not as acting by
general laws. The course of the world was one continual series of
divine interventions in the natural order of things, and in the affairs
of men; divinities lived in the midst of mankind, in the midst of
the family, in the midst of the tribe. This result may be explained
as due to the very character of primitive humanity. Primitive man,
who is the most credulous, is evidently also the least responsible
of mankind; incapable of governing himself, he is always willing
to abandon himself to the management of somebody else; in every
circumstance of life he needs to share some part of his burden. If a
misfortune happens to him, he relies on anybody or anything rather
than on himself. This characteristic, which has been remarked in a
number of races of mankind, is especially visible in infants and in
infant peoples. They lack patience to follow without skipping a link
in the chain of cause and effect; they do not understand how any
human action can produce any great effect, and are, in general, much
astonished at the disproportion which exists between effects and their
causes—a disproportion which is only explicable in their eyes by the
intervention of some foreign cause. Hence the need, so remarkable in
feeble minds, to discover some other than the real explanation for
a phenomenon; the real explanation is never, in their eyes, truly
sufficient. For a vanquished soldier, the defeat is never sufficiently
explained by scientific grounds; for example, by his own cowardice, by
the ill-management of the men on the field, by the ignorance of the
leaders; before the explanation is complete the notion of treason must
always be added. Just so, if one of the lower classes has an attack
of indigestion, he will not admit that he has eaten too much; he will
complain of the quality of the food, and perhaps even suggest that
somebody has tried to poison him. In the Middle Ages, when there was
pestilence, it was the fault of the Jews; at Naples the people beat the
images of the saints when the harvest is not good. All these facts are
explicable in the same way; an uncultivated mind cannot bring itself
to accept a result which is disagreeable to it, cannot resign itself
to having been unexpectedly disconcerted by the mere brute course of
things, to say with Turenne, when he was asked how he lost a battle:
“By my own fault.” The notion of a special providence allies itself
with his natural disposition; it permits man to wash his hands of all
responsibility, no matter what happens. A result which it would be
too much trouble to foresee, and to obtain by mere natural means, can
always be demanded at the hand of Providence; one waits for it instead
of working for it; and if one is deceived in one’s expectations one
lays the blame on the Deity. In the Bible, kings are never guilty
except toward God, their incapacity is simply impiety; but it is always
easier to be pious than to be capable.
[Sidenote: Belief in Providence tames people for absolute monarchy.]
At the same time that the naïve irresponsibility of primitive people
thus accommodates itself to the providential government of the world,
it accommodates itself no less to the despotic government of a monarch
or of an aristocracy. The principle of despotism is at bottom identical
with that of a supernatural, external providence; the latter also
demands a certain renunciation or abdication in the direction of
events. One lets one’s self go, one confides one’s self to someone
else, and by this means one winks at the cruellest of frauds, the
defraudment of one’s own volition; another wills and determines in
one’s stead. One limits one’s self to desiring and hoping, and prayers
and supplications take the place of action and of work. One floats with
the stream in a state of relaxation; if things turn ill there is always
someone for one to blame, to curse, or to wheedle; if, on the contrary,
things turn out well, one’s heart overflows with benedictions, not to
mention that one secretly attributes some part (man is so made) of
the result obtained to one’s self. Instead of saying, “I determined
that it should be so,” one says, “I asked, I prayed for it.” It is so
easy to believe that one is helping to manage the state, or govern
the earth, when one has murmured two words into the ear of a king
or a god—when, like the fly in the fable, one has simply buzzed an
instant about the great rolling wheel of the world. Propitiatory prayer
possesses a power which is great in proportion to its vagueness; it
seems to be able to do everything precisely because it cannot ever do
anything in especial. It exalts man in his own eyes because it enables
him to obtain the maximum of effect with the minimum of effort. What a
penchant the people have always felt for destiny and men of destiny!
How every appeal to the people, in behalf of men of destiny, has in all
times succeeded in taking the suffrage of the masses! A sentiment of
submission to the decrees of Providence, who is destiny personified,
has been the excuse of every form of indolence, of every cowardly
adherence to custom. And if one carries it to its logical conclusion,
to what else does the indolent sophism of the Orientals amount? It is
true that the precept, “Heaven will aid thee,” is habitually corrected
by the precept, “Aid thyself.” But efficiency to aid one’s self demands
initiative, and audacity, and a spirit of revolt against an unwelcome
course of things; efficiently to aid one’s self one must not say,
“God’s will be done,” but “My will be done”; one must be a rebel in
the midst of the passive multitude, a sort of Prometheus or Satan. It
is difficult to say to one, “Whatever happens, whatever exists, is what
it is, by the irresistible and special will of God,” and nevertheless
to add, “Do not submit to the accomplished facts.” In the Middle Ages
men consoled themselves in the midst of tyranny and poverty by thinking
that it was God himself who was oppressing them, and dared not rise
against their masters for fear they might be rising really against God.
To preserve social injustice it had to be apotheosized. What was really
no more than a human right had to be made divine.
[Sidenote: Personal initiative a defiance of the gods.]
The sentiment of personal initiative, like that of personal
responsibility, is quite modern and incapable of being developed in
the atmosphere of bigotry and narrowness in which man has long lived
with his gods. To say to one’s self, “I can undertake something new;
I shall have the audacity to introduce a change into the world; to
make an advance; in the combat against brute nature I shall shoot the
first arrow, without waiting, like the soldier of antiquity, till the
auspices have been consulted”—would have looked like an enormity to
men of former times; to men who did not take a step without consulting
their gods and carrying their images before them to show the way.
Personal initiative was, on the face of it, a direct offence against
Providence, an encroachment on His rights; to strike the rock as Moses
did, before having received the order to do so from God, would have
been to expose one’s self to His wrath. The world was the private
property of the Most High. It was not permitted to a man to employ
the forces of nature without special leave; man was in the position
of a child, who is not allowed to play with the fire; except that the
reason for prohibiting the child is not the same—we do not prohibit
children from playing with the fire because we are “jealous” of them.
The jealousy of the gods is a conception which has survived till the
present day, although it is incessantly retreating before the progress
made by human initiative. Machinery, the product of modern times, is
the most powerful enemy that the notion of a Providence has ever had to
wrestle with. One knows how the innocent winnowing machine was cursed
by the priests, and looked upon with an eye of hatred by the peasants,
because it imprisoned and employed in the service of man an essentially
providential force—that of the wind. But malediction was useless,
the wind could not refuse to winnow the wheat; the machine vanquished
the gods. There, as everywhere, human initiative carried the day.
Science found itself in direct opposition to the special intervention
of Providence, and appropriated and subdued the forces of nature to
an end, in appearance, not divine but natural. A man of science is a
disturbing element in nature, and science an anti-providence.
[Sidenote: Man practically a domestic animal in the house of the gods:
resulting enfeeblement of character.]
Before the earliest developments of science, primitive man found
himself, as a result of his imagination, in a state of domesticity
in the world, analogous to that to which he had himself reduced
certain animals; and this state exerted a profound influence upon
the character of such animals, deprived them of certain capacities
and endowed them, in turn, with others. Some of them—certain birds,
for example—become under domestication almost incapable of finding
and providing themselves with their necessary food. More intelligent
animals like the dog, who might in a case of absolute necessity rely
upon himself for indispensables, contract nevertheless a habit of
subjection to man which creates a corresponding need: my dog is not
at ease except when he knows that I am near; if anything causes me
to go away, he is restless and nervous; in the presence of danger he
runs between my legs, instead of taking refuge in flight, which would
be the primitive instinct. Thus every animal which knows itself to be
watched and protected in the details of its life by a superior being,
necessarily loses its primitive independence, and if its primitive
independence should be once more restored, it would be unhappy, would
experience an ill-defined fear, a vague sentiment of enfeeblement.
Just so in the case of primitive and uncultivated man: once he is
habituated to the protection of the gods, this protection becomes
for him a veritable need; if he is deprived of it, he falls into
a state of inexpressible discomfiture and inquietude. Add that, in
this case, he will soon provide himself with a substitute; to escape
from the intolerable solitude which doubt creates within him, he
will take refuge in his gods or his fetiches, under the influence of
a sentiment identical with that which sends the dog to take refuge
between the legs of his master. To attain some idea of the force of
such a sentiment among primitive human beings, one must remember that
the surveillance of the gods is much more extended and more scrupulous
even than that of man over domestic animals, or of a master over his
slaves. Primitive man feels his god or his genii at his side at every
step, in all the circumstances of life; he is accustomed to being
never alone, to the presence of someone by him keeping step with him;
he believes that every word that he says and every act that he does
is witnessed and judged. No domestic animal is accustomed to so high
a degree of subjection; he knows perfectly that our protection is not
always efficacious and that we are sometimes mistaken about him, that
we caress him when he ought to be punished, etc. Cats, for instance,
know that man cannot see in the dark: one evening a white cat made
ready to commit an abominable misdemeanour within two steps of me,
not suspecting that its colour would betray it to an attentive eye,
even in the obscurity. Primitive men sometimes practised an analogous
cunning in regard to their gods; they did not yet believe in the
complete sovereignty, in the absolute ubiquity, of Providence. But by
a process of logical development, Providence is ultimately believed
to extend to everything, to envelop one’s whole life; the fear of God
becomes to man a perpetual prohibition against his passions, a hope in
God’s aid his perpetual recourse. Religion and science possess this
much in common, that they result in enveloping us equally in a network
of necessities; but what distinguishes science is that it makes us
acquainted with the real order and causes of phenomena, and by that
fact permits us to modify that order at will; by showing us the fact
and nature of our dependence, science supplies us with the means of
conquering a comparative independence. In religion, on the contrary,
the mythical and miraculous element introduces an unforeseen factor,
the divine will, a special providence, into the midst of events, and
by that fact deceives one as to the true means of modifying the real
course of things. The instant one believes one’s self to be dependent
upon Jupiter or Allah, one ascribes a greater efficacy to propitiation
than to action; and it follows that the greater one perceives one’s
dependence to be the more completely one believes one’s self to be
without defence against it; the more complete the submission is to God,
the more complete one’s resulting submission becomes to the established
fact. The feeling of an imaginary dependence upon supernatural beings
thus increases the general dependence of man in relation to nature.
Thus understood, the notion of a special providence, of a divine
tutelage, has resulted in the protracted maintenance of the human
soul in a state of genuine minority; and this state of minority,
in its turn, has rendered the existence and surveillance of divine
protectors a necessity. When, therefore, the believer refuses an offer
of emancipation from the dependence which he has voluntarily accepted,
the reason is that he feels a vague sentiment of his own insufficiency,
of his irremediably belated coming of age; he is a child, who does not
dare stray far from the paternal roof; he does not possess the courage
to walk alone. The child who should show a precocious independence,
and should early learn to go its own road, would not improbably become
simply dissipated; his precocity might well be depravity in disguise.
Similarly in history, the irreligious, the sceptics, the atheists,
have been frequently spoiled children, precocious in the bad sense;
their freedom of spirit was only a high form of mischief. The human
race, like the individual, long needed surveillance and tutelage; so
long as it experienced this need it leaned inevitably upon a belief
in a providence external to itself and to the universe, capable of
interfering in the course of things, and of modifying the general laws
of nature by particular acts of volition. Subsequently, by the progress
of science, Providence has been deprived day by day of some of its
special and miraculous powers, of its supernatural prerogatives. By
the evolution of human thought piety has been transformed; it tends
to-day to regard as an object of filial affection what was formerly an
object of terror, of deprecation, of propitiation. Science, enveloping
Providence in a network of inflexible laws, is day by day reducing it
to a state of immobility and, so to speak, paralyzing it. Providence
is becoming like an old man whom age has rendered incapable of
movement—who but for our aid could not raise a hand or foot, who lives
with our assistance, and who, nevertheless, is only the more beloved,
as if his existence became to us more precious in proportion to its
uselessness.
_III. Creation._
[Sidenote: Conception of creation dualistic.]
After the notion of Providence one must deal, in running through the
metaphysical principles of religion, with the notion of a creator,
which has acquired in our days an importance that it did not possess
formerly. This conception, like that of the soul and of a special
providence, presented itself originally under the form of dualism. Man
conceived in the beginning a god as fashioning a world more or less
independent of himself, out of some pre-existing material. It was only
later that this crude dualism was refined into the notion of creation
_ex nihilo_, which represented the traditional duality as produced by
a primitive unity—God, who had at first existed alone, created out of
nothing a world distinct and separate from himself.
[Sidenote: Conception of creation natural.]
The following conversation, of which I can guarantee the authenticity,
affords an example of naïve metaphysic. The two interlocutors were
a little peasant girl, four years old, who had always lived in the
country, and a young girl from town, the daughter of the owner
of the farm. They had gone out into the garden where a number of
flowers had opened that morning; the little peasant girl admired
them enthusiastically, and addressing her companion, for whom she
had long entertained a species of cult: “It is you, mistress, is it
not,” she cried, “who makes these flowers?” This interrogation did
not embody an incipient speculation in a sphere of physics; the child
simply attributed an unknown power to a visible and palpable being.
Her mistress replied laughingly, “No, not I. I haven’t the power.”
“Who does it then?” the child asked. One perceives the persistence,
in primitive intelligences, of the impulse to explain things by the
direct action of somebody’s volition, the impulse to place somebody
behind every event. “It is God,” replied the elder girl. “And where
is God? Have you ever seen Him?” No doubt the little peasant, who
regarded the city as a very surprising place, supposed one might meet
God there, face to face, and God did not, as yet, represent to her
anything supra-physical. But how admirably disposed she was for the
reception of a more or less illegitimate metaphysic! “I have never
seen God,” replied her mistress, “and nobody has ever seen Him. He
lives in heaven, and at the same time lives among us; He sees us and
hears us; it is He who made the flowers, who made you and me, and
everything that exists.” I shall not report the child’s replies, for
I believe that she was too much astonished really to say anything.
She was in a situation such as a savage finds himself in when a
missionary comes and talks with him about God, the supreme being,
creator of all things, a spirit existing without a body. Savages
sometimes refuse to understand, and point to their heads and declare
that they suffer; sometimes they believe that one is making fun of
them, and even among our children there is a good deal of persistent
and mute astonishment, which wears off slowly with the lapse of
time. What is striking in the little conversation reported above,
is the way in which the metaphysical myth necessarily rises out of
the scientific error. An inexact induction first gives rise to the
notion of a human being acting by means to us unknown and mysterious;
this notion, once obtained, fastens upon the body of such and such
an individual, the object antecedently of especial veneration; from
this individual it retreats in course of time to another more distant,
from country to town, from earth to heaven, from visible heaven to the
invisible essence of things, the omnipresent substratum of the world.
Simultaneously with this retrograde movement, the being endowed with
marvellous powers becomes increasingly vague and abstract. The human
intelligence, in developing its conception of the supernatural being,
employs what theologians call _the negative method_, which consists
in abstracting one known attribute after another. If men and races of
men have always followed this procedure, it is less because of any
refinement of thought on their part than in obedience to the pressure
of an external necessity. Directly as man becomes acquainted with
nature, he sees all traces of his god fly before him; he is like a
miner who, thinking that he recognizes the presence of gold in the soil
beneath his feet, begins to dig, and finding nothing, cannot make up
his mind to believe that the earth contains no treasure; he sinks his
shafts deeper and deeper in an eternal hopefulness. Just so, instead
of breaking with his gods, man exiles them to a greater and greater
distance as he advances in knowledge. What nature excludes tends to
take on a metaphysical character; every error which persists in spite
of the progress of experience takes refuge in heaven, in some sphere
more and more completely inaccessible. Thus the somewhat gross origins
of religions are not irreconcilable with the refined speculations
incident to their period of development. Human intelligence, once
launched into infinite space, inevitably describes a wider and wider
orbit about reality. A mythical religion is not a completely rational
and _a priori_ construction; it always rests upon alleged experience,
upon observations and analogies, which are tainted with error; it is,
therefore, false _a posteriori_, and therein lies the explanation of
the invincible and increasing divergence between myth and verity.
[Sidenote: God conceived as orderer rather than as creator.]
In the beginning men conceived God rather as an orderer of the
universe, as a workman fashioning a pre-existing matter, than as a
creator; we find this notion still predominant among the Greeks.
Its genesis was probably something as follows: Whoever supposes the
existence of God regards the world as an instrument in His hands; God
employs the thunder, the wind, the stars for purposes of his own, as
man employs his arrows and his hatchet. Does it not naturally result
from that conception that God fashions these marvellous instruments
just as man fashions his arrows and hatchet? If the little peasant
girl, of whom we spoke above, had not seen her father repair or make
his tools, make a fire, make bread, till the soil, she would never
have asked who made the flowers in the garden. The child’s first
_why_ involves the following reasoning: Somebody has acted on this
thing as I myself have acted on such and such another thing; who,
then, in the present case is it? The abstract notion of causality is
a consequence of the practical development of our own causality; the
greater the number of things that one can make one’s self, the greater
one’s astonishment at seeing things done by other people with greater
rapidity or on a larger scale. The more bound down one is one’s self,
to the employment of tedious artifice, the more one admires what is
produced suddenly by a power which is apparently extraordinary. So that
the notion of a miracle thus more naturally arose from one’s experience
of the practical arts, than, so to speak, from brute experience, and
for the rest contained no element which was contradictory to the naïve
science of the earliest observers. Every question presupposes a certain
kind and amount of action on the part of the questioner; one does
not demand the cause of an event until one has one’s self been the
conscious cause of such and such another event. If man possessed no
influence in the world, he would not ask himself who made the world.
The mason’s trowel and carpenter’s saw have played a considerable part
in the development of religious metaphysics.
[Sidenote: Notion of creation ex nihilo of empirical origin.]
Remark, also, how easy it is, even at the present day, to confound the
word make with the word create, which indeed did not exist in primitive
times. How should one distinguish precisely what one fashions from what
one creates? There is a certain element of creation in fashioning;
and this element sometimes positively assumes a magical character,
seems to rise _ex nihilo_. What a marvel, for example, is a spark of
fire obtained from stone or wood! The Hindus see in it the symbol of
generation. In fire the earliest races of men laid their fingers on
the miraculous. In appearance the pebble one strikes or the dried wood
one rubs to produce a spark is not itself consumed; it gives without
loss, it creates. The first man who discovered the secret of producing
fire seemed to have introduced something genuinely new into the world,
to have ravished the power of creation from the gods. In general, what
distinguishes the artist, properly so called, from the simple workman
is the feeling that he possesses a power which he does not understand,
that he produces in some sense more than he aims at, that he is lifted
above himself; genius is not fully conscious, as simple talent is, of
its resources; it contains an element of the unforeseen, a force which
is not calculable in advance, a creative power; and therein lies the
secret of the true artist’s personal pride. Even in a matter of purely
physical power a superexcitation of the nervous system may place at
one’s disposal an amount of muscular energy one did not suppose one
possessed: the athlete, no more than the thinker, at such times knows
the limits of his own strength and the marvels of which he is capable.
Each of us possesses thus, during certain hours of his existence,
the consciousness of a more or less creative power, of the direct
production of something out of nothing. One feels that one has produced
by force of will a result that one’s intelligence cannot wholly account
for, that one cannot rationally explain. Therein lies the foundation
and in a measure the justification of a belief in miracles, in the
extraordinary power of certain men, and, in the last analysis, in a
power of creating. This indefinite power that man sometimes feels well
up within him, he naturally ascribes to his gods. Since he conceives
them as acting upon the world in a manner analogous to himself, he
conceives them as capable of giving rise to new elements in the world;
and this notion of creative power once introduced continuously develops
till the day when it leads one, from induction to induction, to the
belief that the entire world is the work of a divinity, that the
earth and the stars have been fashioned and created by a supernatural
volition. If man can strike fire out of a stone, why might not God
strike a sun out of the firmament? The conception of a creator, which
seems at first a remote consequence from a chain of abstract reasoning,
is thus one of the innumerable manifestations of anthropomorphism;
one of the ideas which, at least originally, seems to have been rather
paraphysical than metaphysical. It rests at bottom upon an ignorance
of the possible transformation and actual equivalents of forces, owing
to which every apparent creation is resolvable into a substantial
equivalence and every apparent miracle into an exemplification of
immutable order.
[Sidenote: Summary.]
To sum up, the creative power once ascribed to God is in our opinion
an extension of the notion of special Providence, which itself is of
empirical origin. When theologians nowadays begin by establishing the
creation, in order therefrom to deduce a special Providence, they
are precisely inverting the order of things as they appeared in the
beginning. It is only through the continually increasing preoccupation
of abstract thought and metaphysical speculation with the question
of the first cause, that the idea of a creative deity has acquired
thus a sort of preponderance, and constitutes in our day an essential
element in religion. Dualism, as we have seen, is of the essence of
this notion; dualism is the principal form under which the union of
souls and bodies, the relation of a special providence to natural laws,
the relation of creator to created has been conceived. The notion,
however, of a supreme unity running through all things has been caught
more or less vague glimpses of, from remote times down to the present
day. And it is on this notion that pantheistic and monistic religions,
principally those of India, are based. Brahmanism and Buddhism tend to
what has been called “absolute illusionism” for the benefit of a unity
in which the supreme being takes for us the form of non-existence.
[Sidenote: Dangers of effort to classify systems of religious
metaphysics.]
The temptation is natural systematically to class diverse systems of
religious metaphysics and to represent them as evolving, one after the
other in a regular order, conformable to a more or less determinate
scheme; but one must be on one’s guard here against two things: first,
the seduction of a system, with the metaphysical abstractions to which
it leads; second, the pretense of finding everywhere a regular progress
constantly headed toward religious unity. Religious philosophers have
erred in both these respects; Hegel, for example, yielded to the
temptation of imposing upon the history of religion his monotonous
trilogy, of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. In Von Hartmann the
Hegelian spirit, influenced by Schopenhauer, still survives. We have
seen Von Hartmann borrowing from Max Müller the abstract conception
of a divinity at once unified and multiple, a species of primitive
synthesis out of which historical religions were to arise by a process
of differentiation: out of henotheism, as out of matter still void
and without form, was to arise polytheism, and then by a process of
degenerescence was to arise polydemonism or animism, and finally
fetichism.[42] This order of development, as we have seen, is contrary
to matter of fact.
[42] “Henotheism,” says Von Hartmann, “rests upon a
contradiction. Man goes forth in search of divinity, and finds
gods. He addresses each of these divinities in succession in
the hope that he may be the divinity sought for, and confers
upon him a multitude of predicates which call in question the
divinity of the other gods. Obliged, however, as he is to
look to different gods for the fulfilment of his respective
demands he is unable to remain faithful to any one of them;
he changes his object of adoration repeatedly and each time
acts toward the god he is addressing as if he were god _par
excellence_, without indeed himself observing at the time that
he is denying the supreme divinity of any god by attributing it
in turn to each of them. What renders the origin of religion
possible is that this contradiction is not at first remarked;
a persistent failure to recognize such a contradiction would
not be possible in the midst of the progress of civilization,
except in the case of an extreme intensity of religious
sentiment, which shields all religious subjects from rational
criticism. Such intensity of religious sentiment neither exists
in all places nor at all times, and a spirit of intellectual
criticism, operating intermittently, suffices in the long run
to render the point of view of henotheism untenable. Two ways
of avoiding the contradiction in question offer themselves.
One may maintain the unity of God at the expense of the
plurality, or, on the contrary, plurality of God at the expense
of the unity. The first way leads to abstract monism, the
second to polytheism; and out of polytheism, by a process of
degeneration, arise polydemonism or animism and then fetichism.”
Fetichism, understood simply as the ascription of life to natural
objects, is primitive. Animism, or the conception of indwelling spirit,
arises subsequently. Polytheism, or the worship of a certain number
of analogous objects, such as the trees of a forest, implies some
distinction between the deity and the forest, whereas fetichism limits
itself strictly to the animation of each particular tree, and finally
henotheism, or the vague conception of an indwelling divinity in all
things, is ulterior and derivative. Monistic pantheism or monism lies
but one step beyond.
[Sidenote: Logically posterior often historically prior.]
Remark also that Von Hartmann, who endeavours to prove that a vague
monism is the primitive form of religion, regards the Vedas as a fair
example of the earliest form of natural religion, traces of which
remain more or less distinctly manifest in all mythologies. But this
is positively to forget that for an anthropologist the Vedas are
quite modern compositions, and that Hindu literature belongs to a
period of high refinement and civilization. Monistic metaphysics may
be the ultimate goal toward which all religions tend, but it is at
least not the point of departure. Finally, Von Hartmann endeavours to
establish the fact of a certain logical order in religious development,
a _progress_. This progress does not exist in history nor anywhere
outside of the abstract system constructed by Von Hartmann; it is
dialectic, not historic. The divers religious points of view have often
coincided in history; and sometimes a logically superior point of view
has even preceded an inferior.
[Sidenote: Comte’s classification logical, not psychological.]
Another classification, not less open to suspicion than that of Von
Hartmann, is the celebrated Comtist progression from fetichism to
polytheism and from polytheism to monism. In this classification the
framework no longer consists of metaphysical abstractions, but of
numbers. But numbers also possess their artificial and superficial
side; they do not express the most fundamental aspects of religion.
In the first place, it is a matter of extreme difficulty to perceive
any radical difference between naturistic fetichism and polytheism.
Multiplicity of divinities is a characteristic common to both. The
sole difference that Comte was able to establish is that in polytheism
a whole class of objects, for example all the trees of a forest, or a
whole class of phenomena, as lightning and storm, is represented by
one divinity. But this species of abstraction and generalization is
much less important, much more exterior and purely logical, than the
psychological and metaphysical progression from a grossly unitarian
and concrete naturism to a dualistic animism. This latter line of
development is in the direction of naturalistic and spiritualistic
metaphysics, which possess a deeper significance than a system of
mathematical enumeration and logical generalization. The passage from
polytheism to monotheism is also conceived by Comte somewhat too
mathematically. Polytheism early resulted in a certain hierarchy and
subordination of the whole body of individual deities to some one
powerful god: Jupiter, Fate, etc. On the other hand, monotheism has
always provided some place for secondary divinities—angels, devils,
spirits of every kind, to say nothing of the trinitarian conception of
the Godhead itself. Mathematical terms, in this connection, obscure
profound problems which belong really to metaphysics and to morals.
[Sidenote: The real classification.]
From the point of view of metaphysics the great question is that of the
relation which exists between the divinity and the world and mankind;
a relation of immanence or of transcendence, of duality or of unity.
We have seen that, from this point of view, religions have passed from
an extremely vague primitive immanence to a relation of transcendence
and of separation, ultimately to return, sometimes with comparative
rapidity (as in India), sometimes very slowly (as among Christian
nations), to the notion of an immanent God in whom we live and move and
have our being.
[Sidenote: Progressive encroachment of deterministic conception.]
Along with this difference of conception there necessarily goes
a corresponding difference in the parts ascribed respectively to
determinism and natural law, and to the arbitrary will of the deity or
deities. That is to say, the conflict between religion and science,
or what will one day become such, exists implicitly in the earliest
conceptions of the world. In the beginning, to be sure, there being
no such thing as science properly so called, no conflict is apparent;
one explains whatever one chooses as the product of an arbitrary will,
then little by little the regularity, the determinism, the orderliness
of certain phenomena are remarked. Divinities cease to be absolute
princes, and become more or less constitutional sovereigns. Therein
lies the law of religious evolution, which is much more significant
than the law promulgated by Comte; humanity tends progressively to
restrict the number of the phenomena with the natural course of which
the gods are supposed to interfere; the sphere of natural law tends
progressively to become more and more nearly all-comprehensive. The
Catholic nowadays no longer believes that a goddess brings his crops to
maturity or that a particular god launches a thunder-bolt, though he
is still profoundly inclined to imagine that God blesses his fields or
punishes him by destroying his house by a flash of lightning; arbitrary
power tends to be concentrated in a single being placed on a height
above nature. At a still further stage in the course of evolution, the
will of this being is conceived as expressed in the laws of nature
themselves without allowing for the existence of miraculous exceptions;
Providence, the Divinity, becomes _immanent_ in the scientific ordering
and determinism of the world. In this respect the Hindus and the Stoics
are far in advance of the Catholics.
[Sidenote: Unification of creeds incidental to that encroachment.]
The absorption of the respective worships of a number of deities into
the worship of one deity has been an incidental consequence of the
progress of science. Humanity began by offering up a multitude of
special services to a multitude of special gods. If one were to believe
certain linguists, it is true, natural objects—the sun, fire, the
moon—were at first adored as impersonal entities; their subsequent
personification being due to a too literal interpretation of figurative
impressions habitually employed to designate them, such as Ζεύς,
the brilliant. Certain myths, no doubt, did spring from this source:
_nomina, numina_; but humanity does not usually progress from the
general to the particular. Primitive religion, on the contrary, was
at first subdivided or rather simply divided into cults of all sorts;
it was only later that simplifications and generalizations arose. The
passage from fetichism to polytheism and to monotheism was simply the
consequence of a progressively scientific conception of the world; of
the progressive absorption of the several transcendent powers into a
single power immanent in the laws of the universe.
[Sidenote: Development of sociological and moral sides of religion.]
More important still than this metaphysical and scientific evolution
of religion is the sociological and moral evolution. What is really
important in a religious theory is less the conceived relation of the
primary substance to its manifestations in the universe, than the
attributes ascribed to this substance and to the inhabitants of the
universe. In other words, what sort of a society does the universe
constitute? What sort of social relation more or less moral between
the various members are derivable from the fundamental tie which binds
them to the principle which is immanent in all of them? That is the
great problem for which the others simply constitute a preparation. The
problem is to interpret the true foundation of beings and of being,
independently of numerical, logical, and even metaphysical relations.
Well, such an interpretation cannot be other than psychological and
moral. Psychologically, power was the first and essential attribute of
divinity, and this power was conceived as redoubtable. Intelligence,
knowledge, foreknowledge, were only at a later period ascribed to
the gods. And finally, divine morality, under the twofold aspects of
justice and goodness, is a very late conception indeed. We shall see it
develop side by side with the development of the systems of practical
morals that are incident to religion.
CHAPTER III.
RELIGIOUS MORALS.
I. The laws which regulate the social relations between
gods and men—Morality and immorality in primitive
religions—Extension of friendly and hostile relations to
the sphere of the gods—Primitive inability in matters of
conscience, as in matters of art, to distinguish the great
from the monstrous.
II. The moral sanction in the society which includes gods and
men—Patronage—That divine intervention tends always to
be conceived after the model of human intervention and to
sanction it.
III. Worship and religious rites—Principles of
reciprocity and proportionality in the exchange
of services—Sacrifice—Principle of coercion and
incantation—Principle of habit and its relation to
rites—Sorcery—Sacerdotalism—Prophecy—The externals of
worship—Dramatization and religious æsthetics.
IV. Subjective worship—Adoration and love; their
psychological origin.
_I. The laws which regulate the social relations between gods and men._
[Sidenote: Religion and morals not originally related.]
We are to-day inclined to see everywhere a very intimate relation
between religion and morals, since Kant recognized in ethics the aim
and sole foundation of the conception of God. In the beginning nothing
of the sort existed. It is plain from the preceding chapters that
religion was at first a physical explanation of events, and above all
of events in their relation to the interests of mankind, by a theory
of causes acting for ends of their own after the manner of the human
will; an explanation, that is to say, by causes at once efficient and
final; and theology is the development of a primitive teleology. Man
imagined himself to be living in society with beneficent or maleficent
beings, at first visible and tangible, then progressively invisible and
separate from the objects they inhabited. Therein, as we have said,
lay the first step of religion. Religion was in the beginning nothing
more than an imaginative extension of human society; the explanation of
things by a theory of volitions analogous to the volitions by means of
which man himself acts on the world, but of another order, of a higher
degree of power. Well, these volitions are sometimes good, sometimes
evil, sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile: friendship and hatred are
the two categories under which man inevitably classified the superior
powers with whom he believed himself to be in relations. Morality was
in no sense one of the distinguishing characteristics of these powers;
man was quite as naturally inclined to attribute to them wickedness as
goodness, or rather he felt vaguely that the rules of conduct by which
he was himself bound were not necessarily those by which these beings,
at once analogous to men and so different from them, were themselves
bound. Also in his relations with the gods, with the powers of nature,
man in nowise believed that the rules of mere human society, of the
family, of the tribe, of the nation, were always and in every respect
applicable. Thence it came that to render the gods propitious, man had
recourse to practices which he would have blamed in mere human morals:
human sacrifices, anthropophagy, sacrifices of virginity, etc.[43]
[43] It has been remarked that peoples who for centuries
have renounced anthropophagy have long persisted in human
sacrifices: that thousands of women in certain sanctuaries
have offered the painful sacrifices of their chastity to gods
of a furious sensuality. The gods of paganism are dissolute,
arbitrary, vindictive, pitiless, and still their adorers
rise little by little to a conception of moral purity, of
clemency, and of justice. Javeh is vindictive and ferocious,
and yet it is in the midst of his people that the religion
_par excellence_ of benignity and forgiveness took its rise.
Also the real morality of men was never proportionate to the
frequently fanatic intensity of their religious sentiments. See
M. Réville (_Prolégomènes_, p. 281).
[Sidenote: Religion much less moral than society.]
If one stops to recollect that moral laws are in a great measure
the expression of the very necessities of human life, and that the
generality of certain rules is due to the uniformity of the conditions
of life on the surface of the globe, one will understand why it was
that one’s relations to the gods, that is to say to creatures of
the imagination, were not dominated so directly as one’s relations
to one’s fellow-men by the exigencies of practical life, but were
regulated by much more variable and fantastic laws containing often
a visible germ of immorality. The divine society was an imaginary
extension of human society, not an imaginative perfection of it. It was
physical fear, _timor_, and not moral reverence, which gave being to
the first gods. The human imagination, labouring thus under the empire
of fear, naturally gave birth to a prodigy more often than to an ideal.
For the primitive conscience, as for primitive art, the distinction
between the great and the monstrous was by no means sufficiently
marked. The germ of immorality, therefore, not less than of morality
lies at the root of every religion. Once more, it would be an error to
believe that religions are immoral in that they are anthropomorphic, or
sociomorphic; rather the contrary is true, they are not moral except
in so far as they are sociomorphic. Mutilation, for example, cruelty,
obscenity are foreign to the conceptions which dominate human conduct.
One may verify in every religion what is observed in Christianity,
that the truly moral God is precisely the man-God, Jesus, whereas God
the Father, who pitilessly sacrifices his own son, is anti-human and
immoral, precisely in that he is superhuman.
[Sidenote: Summary.]
In effect we find our fundamental proposition confirmed afresh:
religion is a sociology conceived as a physical, metaphysical, and
moral explanation of all things; it is the reduction of all natural,
and even supernatural forces to a human type, and the reduction of
their relations to social relations. Also the progress of religion
has been exactly parallel to the progress in social evolution, which
has itself been dominated by the progress of subjective morals and
conscience. The gods were at first divided into two classes: the
beneficent and the maleficent, who ultimately came to be recognized
as respectively virtuous and wicked. Then these two classes were
absorbed into their respective chiefs, into Ormuzd and Ahriman, into
God and Satan, into a principle of good and a principle of evil. Thus
by a fresh dualism spirits themselves were separated and ranged into
classes, as the spirit itself had previously been separated from the
body. Finally the principle of goodness subsisted victoriously under
the name of God. He became the personification of the moral law and
the moral sanction, the sovereign legislator and judge, in a word, the
living law of universal society, as a king is the living law in a human
society. To-day God tends to be identified with the human conscience
purified _ad infinitum_, and adequate with the universe. For these
last and most subtle representations of the religious sentiment, God
is no more than a symbol of the moral and the ideal. One may see in
this evolution of religious ideas the gradual triumph of sociomorphism,
since it is characterized by an extension to the universe at large of
social relations which are incessantly progressing toward perfection
among men.
_II. The moral sanction in the society which includes gods and men._
[Sidenote: The gods inevitably become protectors of social justice.]
To the personification of the law, religious morals inevitably
joined that of the sanction which plays so capital a rôle in every
human society. The celestial government has always been a projection
of the human government, with a penalty at first terrible and
subsequently softened. To say the truth, the theory of a sanction
is the systematization of that of a providence. The distinguishing
characteristic of a providence is that it awards or recompenses,
insomuch that one may bring down upon one’s self or avoid its anger,
by such and such conduct. Well, the instant a man admits that a divine
power is governing him, this power will inevitably appear to him to be
exercising a control over his conduct, and, as it were, sanctioning
it. This control will at first be exercised only in regard to the
personal relations of the individual, with his god and his gods. But
the individual will soon recognize that if the gods take an interest
in him they may well take an interest also in the other members of the
tribe, provided that these last know how to render them propitious;
and to injure the other worshippers of a god would be indirectly to
injure the god himself, and provoke his anger. All the members of a
tribe therefore find themselves protected against each other by their
association with the gods, religion lends support to social justice,
and whoever violates social justice expects the gods to punish him.
This expectation also must have been confirmed by the facts, for if
antisocial and unjust conduct had habitually prevailed among men,
social life would have been impossible. Injustice must then always on
an average have carried its sanction with it, and this sanction must
have appeared to be the direct work of the gods, passing judgment from
on high on the social conduct of their clients, as Roman patrons did,
seated beneath the columns of the atrium.
[Sidenote: And of human justice.]
As religions intermingled and grew in extent, the clientage of a god,
at first extended to the members of a single tribe, passed beyond its
bounds. Men, of no matter what origin, might become citizens of the
celestial city, of the superhuman association which took charge of each
of its members, so that the divine sanction tended increasingly to
become confounded with the moral sanction, and one understood that God
protected justice not only within the bosom of a tribe, but everywhere
within the limits of humanity.
[Sidenote: Natural desire to have the scales loaded on the side of
rectitude.]
While in the matter of the sanction the sociomorphic conception of the
world tended thus to become a moral conception, morality itself must
have tended, in order to eke out its own insufficiency, to ally itself
with religion. Human society, powerless to make itself always respected
by every one of its members, inevitably invoked the aid of the
society of superior beings which enveloped it on all sides. Man being
essentially a social animal, ζῶον πολιτικόν, could not be resigned
in the presence of the success of antisocial conduct, and whenever
it seemed that such conduct had succeeded humanly, the very nature
of mankind tended to make it turn toward the superhuman to demand a
reparation and a compensation. If the bees should suddenly see their
hives destroyed before their eyes without there being any hope of ever
reconstructing them, their whole being would be shaken, and they would
instinctively await for an intervention of some kind, which should
re-establish an order as immutable and sacred for them as that of the
stars is for us. Man, by virtue of the moral nature with which heredity
has furnished him, is thus inclined to believe that wickedness ought
not to have the last word in the universe; the triumph of evil and of
injustice always stirs his indignation. This species of indignation
is observable in infants almost before they can talk, and numerous
traces of it may be found even among animals. The logical result of
this instinctive protest against evil is a refusal to believe in its
definitive triumph.[44]
[44] See the author’s _Esquisse d’une morale_ (I., iii.);
_Besoin psychologique d’une sanction_.
[Sidenote: Results in victory being given in heaven to principle of
light.]
Man, in whose eyes the society in which the gods live corresponds so
closely to human society, must almost inevitably imagine the existence
among them of antisocial beings, of Ahrimans and Satans, protectors of
evil in heaven and on earth, but it is natural that he should give the
victory in the end to the “principle of good” over the “principle of
evil.” Of all things it is the most repugnant to him to believe that
the universe is fundamentally indifferent to the distinction between
good and evil; a divinity may be irascible, capricious, and even
intermittently wicked, but man cannot understand an impassible and cold
nature.
[Sidenote: Gods legitimated by alliance with the moral forces of
society.]
The most powerful of the gods had thus served to reconcile force and
justice, a barbarous justice appropriate to the spirit of primitive man.
Through the idea of sanction grafted thus upon that of providence,
religion assumes a really systematic character, and becomes attached
to the very fibres of the human heart. As instruments of goodness
in the universe, the gods, or at least the sovereign gods, serve to
confirm human morality; they become in some sort the life of morality.
Their existence is no longer simply a physical fact; it is a physical
fact, morally justified by a social instinct which relies upon it as
its main safeguard. Henceforth the power of the gods is legitimate. A
divine king, like a human king, requires a certain mystic consecration;
it is religion which consecrates human kings, it is morality which
consecrates the king of the gods.
[Sidenote: Importance of conception of immortality in the moral
evolution of religion.]
The notion of a divine intervention to trim the balance of the social
order, to punish and to recompense, was at first altogether foreign to
the belief in a continuation of life after death; it became allied to
this belief much later. Even among a people so advanced as the Hebrews
in matters of religious evolution, reward and punishment beyond this
life played no rôle, and yet there has scarcely ever been a people
who believed more heartily in the will of God as directing the life
of mankind; but in their eyes God achieved his victory in this life;
they possessed no need for an immortality as a means of redressing the
moral balance of the world.[45] It was only later, when the critical
sense had attained a higher development, that it was recognized that
the sanction did not always come in this life; the chastisement of
the culpable, the hoped-for recompense of the virtuous, gradually
retreated from the present world into a distant future. Hell and heaven
were thrown open to correct the manifest imperfections of this life.
The notion of immortality thus assumed an extraordinary importance,
insomuch that it seemed as if modern life would be destroyed if it were
deprived of this belief, which former times had, however, succeeded in
doing without. At bottom a clear and reflective conception of a life
after death, in which one is rewarded or punished for one’s life here,
is a very complex and remote deduction from the notion of sanction.
[45] The question whether the Hebrews believed in the
immortality of the soul has long been discussed, and M. Renan
has been reproached with his negative attitude in the matter;
but M. Renan never denied the existence, among the Hebrews, of
a belief in a sojourn for the shadows or manes of the dead; the
whole question was whether the Hebrews believed in a system
of reward and punishment after death, and M. Renan was right
in maintaining that any such notion is foreign to primitive
Judaism. It is equally foreign to primitive Hellenism. Though
the living endeavoured to conciliate the dead, they did not
envy their fate which, even in the case of the just, was worse
than the fate of the living. “Seek not to console me for death,
noble Ulysses,” Achilles says, when he arrives in Tartarus. “I
would rather be a hired labourer and till a poor man’s field
than reign over all the regions of the dead.” (See _Morale
d’Épicure_, 3d ed.; _Des idées antiques sur la mort_.)
[Sidenote: Religious sanction at first conceived as a vengeance.]
The religious sanction, being fundamentally an extension of human
social relations to the life of the gods, successively assumed the
three forms of human penalty. At first it was only vengeance, as in
the case of the lower animals and of savage man. It is evil rendered
in return for evil. The sentiment of vengeance has subsisted, and
still subsists, in the bosom of every religion which admits a divine
sanction; vengeance is confided to God, and becomes only the more
terrible. “Do not avenge yourselves,” St. Paul says, “but rather give
place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay,
saith the Lord. Therefore, if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he
thirst, give him to drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of
fire on his head.” “Our patience,” St. Cyprian wrote, “comes from our
certainty that we shall be avenged; it heaps coals of fire upon the
heads of our enemies. The day on which the Most High shall number the
faithful shall see the culpable in Gehenna, and our persecutors shall
be consumed in eternal fire! What a spectacle for my transports, my
admiration, and my laughter!” And by way of a refinement, one of the
martyrs at Carthage told the pagans to look him well in the face so
that they might recognize him on the day of judgment at the right
hand of the Father, while they were being precipitated into eternal
flame.[46]
[46] The most orthodox theologians, of course, mean by fire a
veritable flame.
[Sidenote: Then as an expiation.]
The notion of vengeance, as it becomes more subtle and passes, so
to speak, from the domain of passion into that of intelligence is
transformed into the notion of expiation, which is exclusively
religious, although spiritualistic philosophers believe that it
contains moral and rational elements. Expiation is a sort of naïve
compensation by which one fancies one may counterbalance moral evil by
accepting physical evil along with it. Expiation is a penalty which
possesses no utility in the way of benefiting the culprit or those who
might follow his example; it is neither corrective nor preventive;
it is an alleged satisfaction of the law, the re-establishment of
an apparent symmetry for the delight of pure intelligence, a public
prosecution pure and simple. In a singular passage in the _Pensées
chrétiennes_, Father Bouhours has clearly and innocently set in relief
the inutility of religious expiation: “Penitence of the damned, thou
art rigorous, and how useless; could the anger of God go further than
to punish pleasure so brief by torments which shall never end? When
a damned soul shall have shed tears enough to fill all the rivers of
the world, even if he should only have shed one a century, he will be
no farther ahead after so many millions of years; he will only have
begun to suffer, and even when he shall have recommenced as often as
there are grains of sand upon the shores of the sea, he shall even
then have done nothing.” The highest degree of the notion of expiation
is in effect this of eternal damnation. In this theory of the penalty
of damnation, and the pains of fire without end, one recognizes the
barbarism of former time and the torments inflicted on the vanquished
by the vanquisher, on the rebel by the chief of the tribe. A sort
of atavism attaches even to the religion of love in this perpetual
inheritance of hatred, of the customs of a savage period erected into
an eternal and divine institution.
_III. Worship and religious rites._
[Sidenote: The cult an expression of supposed reciprocity between gods
and men.]
The cult, which, so to speak, is no more than the religion become
visible and tangible, is, like the religion itself, simply the
apotheosis of a certain social relation: the exchange of services
between men living in society. Man, who believes himself to receive
benefits from the gods, feels himself obliged to give something in
exchange. He conceives a sort of reciprocity of action as appropriate
between God and man, a possible return in good or evil conduct; man
possesses a certain hold on his God, he is capable of procuring Him a
certain satisfaction or causing Him a certain pain, and God will reply
a hundred fold in kind—pain for pain, pleasure for pleasure.
[Sidenote: Is so, even to-day.]
One knows how gross the external forms of worship in the beginning
were. They simply consisted in a practical application of the social
economy: the gods were given to eat and drink; an altar was a
butcher’s stall or the stall of a wine merchant, and the cult was a
veritable commerce between heaven and earth—a sort of a market, in
which man offered lambs or sheep and received in exchange riches and
health. In our days, the cult is refined; the exchange has become
more and more symbolic, the gift is simply an expression of moral
homage, for which the worshipper expects no immediate return; still the
principle of the cult is always the same, one believes that an act on
man’s part possesses a direct influence on the will of God, and this
act consists in offerings or prayers fixed on beforehand.
[Sidenote: Governed by the law of the market.]
Another principle of primitive cult is proportionality. One can expect
no more from another than a proportionate return; bow three times
before him, and he will be better disposed toward you than if you bow
but once; offer him a beef, and he will be more grateful than if you
offer an egg. Accordingly, to an uncultivated and superstitious mind,
it follows that quantity and number should regulate our relations with
the gods as they regulate our relations with our fellow-men; multiply
your prayers, and you will multiply your chances of favours; three
Paternosters go farther than one, a dozen candles will produce a much
greater effect than a single candle. A prayer that you go to a temple
to say in public, a cantique chanted in a sonorous voice, will attract
more attention than a silent demand formulated at the bottom of one’s
heart. Similarly, if one wishes to obtain rain or sun for the crops,
it is into the fields that one must go to offer up one’s prayer, in a
motley file of chanting worshippers; it is always serviceable to point
one’s finger at what one wants, and to make the demand in person.
The better to stimulate the memory of one’s idol primitive man was
accustomed to drive a nail into him, and the custom still survives in
Brittany in the form of thrusting pins into the bodies of the saints.
Out of sight, out of mind, holds good both of gods and saints. To
simple minds it would be contrary to the law of proportionate exchange
for a simple thought, a silent prayer, to receive such favour in the
eyes of the gods as an overt act.
[Sidenote: Embodied in fixed forms.]
Every religion insists upon some quite determinate exterior form of
worship, a precise manifestation, a creed; it endeavours to incorporate
itself into a certain number of rites and customs, which are numerous
and inviolable in proportion as the religion is primitive. The
universality of an external form of worship in the different religions
of the world is the consequence and the most striking proof of their
sociomorphic origin. Man has always believed that he might be useful
and agreeable to his gods so long as he has conceived them as analogous
to himself and to his neighbours.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Which soon came to be conceived as coercive.]
Add that to the notion of seducing the gods that of constraining is
soon joined. To the conception of an exchange of services is soon
joined that of a species of coercion exercised in some vague manner by
the intermediation of some friendly god or even by some simple magic
formula which has once succeeded, once procured the object demanded!
Formulæ consecrated by custom appear to be equally binding on gods
and men. Accordingly the cult, at first more or less loose, more or
less arbitrary, ultimately becomes minutely regulated; ultimately
becomes what one knows as a rite. A rite, at its lowest, is simply
the result of a tendency to repeat indefinitely an act which, at some
time or other, has seemed to render a god or a fetich propitious.
After propitiation comes mechanical custom. Religion, as Pascal well
said, is to a large extent habit. Rites are born of the need to
perform again and again the same act, under the same circumstances;
a need which is the foundation of custom, and without which all life
would be impossible. Moreover, there is something sacred in every
habit whatsoever, and every act, whatever it may be, tends to become
a habit and by that fact to become respectable, to be in some sort
self-consecrated. Rites, therefore, strike root in the very foundations
of our being; the need for rites manifests itself very early in
the life of the child. Children not only imitate other people and
themselves, repeat other people and themselves, but exact a scrupulous
precision in these repetitions; in general they do not distinguish the
end from the means by which, and the circumstances under which, it is
pursued; they do not yet possess a sufficiently exercised intelligence
to understand that the same line of action may lead to the same result
in different ways and under different circumstances. I once observed
a child of from eighteen months to two years old: if I got up from my
armchair and paraded about the room for its amusement, and stopped, it
was necessary before beginning once more that I should return to my
seat; the child’s pleasure was much diminished if the repetition was
not exact. The child was accustomed to be fed by a number of people
indifferently; still if I had given it some one thing—milk to drink,
for example—a number of times, it was no longer satisfied to receive
milk from anybody else, and insisted that the same person should always
give it the same thing. If, on leaving the house, I took another cane
than my own, the child would take it away from me to put it back where
it belonged. It was unwilling that one should wear one’s hat in the
house or go bare-headed out of doors. And finally, I saw it achieve a
veritable bit of ceremonial on its own account. It had been accustomed
to be told to call a domestic at the top of the servants’ stairway;
one day the domestic was in the room when the child was told to call
her; the child looked at her, turned about, went to the top of the
stairway where it usually called her, and there only shouted out her
name. All the conduct of life, in effect the most important as the most
insignificant, is classified in a child’s head, rigorously defined,
and modelled on the type of the first act of that kind that has caught
its attention, without the child’s ever being able to distinguish the
object of an act from its form. This confusion between purpose and
form exists in a no less striking degree among savages and primitive
peoples, and it is upon this very confusion that the sacred character
of religious rites is founded.
[Sidenote: Primitive man possesses a repugnance not to novelty but to a
breach of custom.]
The trouble that is apparent in a child or an uncultivated man in the
presence of whatever deranges his established association of ideas,
has been explained by a pure and simple horror of novelty. Lombroso
has even coined a word to designate this psychological state; he has
called it _misoneism_. But let us not confound two quite distinct
things, a horror of a breach of custom and a horror of novelty; there
are new perceptions, and habits that may be added to the whole body
of already existing perceptions and habits without deranging them
much or at all; and against these neither the savage nor the child
rebels. Though the child never wearies of listening to the same
tale and becomes irritated the moment one alters its least detail,
it will listen no less passionately to a new tale; and new toys and
new walks delight it. The same taste for novelty is observable among
savages, just in so far as it can be gratified without disturbing
their preconceived ideas. Primitive man is like the miser who will
not part with any of his acquired treasure, but asks nothing better
than to increase it. He is naturally curious, but he has no desire to
push his curiosity to the point of contradicting what he knows already
or believes he knows. And in a measure he is right, he is simply
obeying the powerful instinct of intellectual self-preservation; his
intelligence is not sufficiently supple constantly to knit and unknit
the associations of ideas which experience has established in him. A
black, out of an attachment for Livingstone, wished to accompany him to
Europe; a few days on the steamer drove him insane. It is, therefore,
in obedience to a certain branch of the instinct of self-preservation
that primitive peoples are so conservative in their customs and rites;
but they show themselves no less willing to appropriate the customs and
rites of other people whenever they can do so without abandoning their
own. The Romans ultimately came to accept the cult of all the peoples
in the world without, however, any abandonment of their national cult;
and fêtes, which are properly survivals of paganism, subsist even at
the present day; one acquires superstition, and customs, much more
easily than one loses them.
[Sidenote: Worship in public confirms cult.]
The power of example contributes also to lend an additional stability
to the public cult; an individual becomes hardened in a practice which
he finds universal in the society in which he lives. Thence comes the
importance of public worship; the practice of public worship makes
those who abstain from it conspicuous. Public worship is a _viva voce_
poll. Everyone sits in judgment upon you, all of your acquaintances
become your accusers, and all men who worship God are your enemies.
Not to think as everybody else does is comprehensible—but not to act
as everybody else does! To wish to break away from the servitude of
action which, once established, tends to perpetuate itself! In the
end the machine bends; one becomes brutalized. Even among people of
superior minds the force of habit is incredible. In the hours of doubt,
in his youth, M. Renan wrote to his adviser: “I recite the Psalms; I
could pass hours and hours, if I but followed my own inclination, in
the churches.... I experience lively returns of devotion.... At times
I am simultaneously both Catholic and rationalist! When one cuts loose
from such beliefs, beliefs which have become a second nature to one,
it seems as if one has severed one’s self from one’s whole past. One
has in some sense lived them, and one is attached to them as to one’s
own life; to abandon them is to resolve to die to one’s self. It seems
as if one’s entire strength had come from them and that one will be as
feeble as a child when one has lost them; they are to one what Samson’s
hair was to him. Happily they will grow again.”
[Sidenote: Priesthood a consequence of established rites.]
Priesthood is a consequence of the establishment of rites. The priest
is the man supposed to be most capable of influencing the divinity
by a minute and learned observation of the sacred rites. Rites, in
effect, the moment they become complicated by an accumulation of
diverse customs lie beyond the knowledge and power of the ordinary man;
it requires a special education to talk to the gods in the complex
language which alone they understand, in the formulæ which coerce their
wills. Whoever possesses this imagination is a species of magician or
sorcerer; and the priesthood arose out of sorcery, of which it was
simply the regular organization.[47]
[47] “Sorcery, in the beginning purely individual and
fantastic,” says M. Réville, “gradually develops into
sacerdotalism and by that change, having become a permanent
public institution, sacerdotal sorcery becomes systematic,
develops a ritual which becomes traditional, imposes upon
those who aspire to the honour of conducting the conditions
of initiation, proof of efficiency, a novitiate, receives
privileges, defends them if they are attacked, endeavours
to augment them. This is the history of all sacerdotal
institutions, which are certainly descended from a capricious,
fantastic, disorderly, practice of sorcery in previous ages.”
[Sidenote: Tendency of priest to become a sacred person.]
The externals of worship remain to-day, in special in the Catholic and
Greek religions, a collection of traditional, inflexible formulæ, which
could not be trusted to produce their effect if a word or a gesture in
them were changed; certain ceremonies are really veritable traditional
forms of incantation. Rites resemble the invisible bonds in which Faust
held the Devil; but it is God himself in this case that is enchanted,
charmed, and overpowered. At bottom the belief which makes the Chinese
priest turn his praying machine, the belief which makes the devotee
tell her beads, the belief which makes the priest thumb his breviary
or say salaried masses for unknown peoples, which in the Midi makes
rich people pay beggars to mumble prayers before their doors, all rest
upon one and the same principle: they all rest on a faith in a power of
the rite, of the traditional formula in and of itself, no matter who
pronounces it. The efficacity of the interested prayers does not seem
to depend solely on the legitimacy of what one demands but on the form
employed in demanding them; and this form has been determined at bottom
by experience; the majority of devotees perform minute experiments
on the comparative virtue of individual prayers, masses, offerings,
pilgrimages, miraculous waters, etc.; they amass the result of their
observations and transmit them to their children. The invocation of
certain privileged Madonnas, such as the Madonna at Lourdes, is even
to-day a vestige of primitive sorcery. The priest inherits all these
naïve experiments as to the conditions appropriate to induce a miracle,
and he systematizes them. Priests being men picked for their capability
in the function which was regarded as the most useful of all others for
the preservation of society, necessarily came to constitute a really
superior caste and to be personally in some sense the object of the
cult which they administered. The perfect type of sacerdotal privilege
is hereditary priesthood as it existed in ancient Judaism, as it still
exists in India; every Brahman is born a priest and needs no special
education. The thirty-seven great priests of Vishnu in Gujerat are
honoured even to-day as the visible incarnation of Vishnu.[48]
[48] It is an honour for which one pays dear to be permitted
to consecrate to them one’s soul, one’s body, or the soul and
body of one’s wife. One pays five rupees for the privilege of
contemplating them, twenty for the privilege of touching them,
thirteen for the privilege of being whipped by them, seventeen
for the privilege of eating betel that they have chewed,
nineteen for the privilege of drinking the water in which they
have bathed, thirty-five for the privilege of washing their
great toes, forty-two for the privilege of rubbing them with
perfumed oil, and from one hundred to two hundred for tasting
in their company the essence of delight.
[Sidenote: Antagonism between priest and prophet.]
Historically the priest has always found a rival, sometimes an
adversary, in the prophet, from Buddha to Isaiah and Jesus. The prophet
is not a priest bound to a sanctuary and slave to a tradition, but
an individual. “Prophecy,” says M. Albert Réville, “is to religion
what lyrism is to poetry.” The prophet and the lyric poet, in effect,
both speak in the name of their own inspiration. The prophet is often
a revolutionist, the priest is essentially a conservative; the one
represents innovation, the other custom.
[Sidenote: Dramatic element in cult.]
Exterior forms of worship and rites allying themselves with refined
and elevated sentiments have in all religions taken on a symbolic
and expressive character that they did not possess in the practice
of primitive sorcery; they have become æsthetic and by that fact
rendered durable. For whoever looks upon the most ancient religious
ceremonies with the eye of an artist, they consist in the reproduction,
nowadays too mechanically and unconsciously, of a work of art which
once was not without its significance and its beauty. They are
nowadays like a hand-organ playing admirable compositions by some
old master. Pfleiderer, in his “Philosophy of Religion,” has shown
that the dominant element in the externals of worship is dramatic,
the dramatization of some mythological or legendary scenes. It is
especially among the Aryans that this element predominates; the Aryans
are especially susceptible to the charm of great epics and dramas.
The Semites are lyric rather, and thence arises the importance of
prophecy among them; although the lyric element was also represented
among the Greek poets and Pythonesses. The dramatic element, on the
contrary, is visible in certain symbolic ceremonies of Christianity
and Judaism. The Mass was formerly a veritable drama of the Passion in
which the spectators also took part; the half pagan, half Christian
processions that still subsist to-day possess for the crowd something
of the attractiveness of the opera. The Communion is a dramatization
of the Lord’s Supper. Catholicism especially is distinguished by
the possession of dramatic and æsthetic (too often gross) elements,
which explain, not less than historical reasons, its victory over
Protestantism among the nations of southern Europe, which are more
artistic than those of the north, and more sensually artistic. The
æsthetic superiority of a religion is not to be disdained by the
thinker. It is the æsthetic element in every rite which, as we shall
see, is its most respectable characteristic. Moreover, religious
sentiment and æsthetic sentiment have always gone hand in hand;
and this union has been one of the most important factors in the
development of the æsthetic sentiment; it is thus that dramas and
epics dealt in the beginning with gods and demi-gods rather than with
men; the earliest romances were religious legends; the first odes were
sacred chants and songs. Music and religion have always been allied.
But in the end, the æsthetic element becomes feeble and is replaced,
as religion loses its vitality, by a species of mechanical routine. In
the East, even more than among us, this phenomenon is manifest, the
whole tendency there is toward monotonous and interminable ceremonials.
The Parsees, the representatives of the oldest existing religion,
pass six hours a day in prayer. And according to the _Indian Mirror_
the following is a description of the festival of the Lord, a part
of the cult of Brahmaism, the altogether modern and wholly deistical
religion founded by Ram Mohun Roy and Keshub: “At precisely six o’clock
a hymn was intoned in chorus in the upper gallery of the _mandir_ to
announce the day’s solemnity. Others followed to the accompaniment of
the harmonium, and thus, after a succession of hymns, the sacred office
was reached, which, counting in the sermon, lasted from seven to ten
o’clock. A part of the congregation then retired to take some rest,
but those who remained intoned the _vedi_ to demand of the minister
explanations in regard to several points of his sermon. At noon, the
assembly having convened, four _pundits_ came out successively and
recited Sanskrit texts. At one o’clock the minister gave a conference.”
Then came the exposition of a number of philosophical and religious
theses, delivered by their respective authors. Hymns, meditations, and
prayers in common lasted till nearly seven o’clock, when the initiation
of seven new Brahmaists was celebrated. This ceremony, including a
sermon, lasted not less than two hours, and the assembly, which, if one
may believe the reporter, did not show any sign of fatigue after these
fifteen hours of continuous devotion, separated with a hymn to the
effect that it had not yet had enough: “The heart wishes not to return
home.”
_IV. Subjective worship—Adoration and love._
[Sidenote: Subjective worship a refinement on public and external
worship.]
Subjective worship has grown out of, and been a refinement upon, the
external cult, which in the beginning was in the eyes of mankind much
the more important of the two. To the incantation, to the material
offering, to the sacrifices of the victims succeeded subjective prayer
and the subjective offering of love, and the subjective sacrifice
of egoistic passion. To external homage, to evidences of fear and
respect by which one was supposed to recognize the superior power of
the gods, as one bows down in recognition of the superior power of
kings, succeeded a mental adoration, in which a god is recognized as
all-powerful but also as all-beneficent. The mental bowing down of the
entire soul before God is the last refinement of ritual; and ritual
itself in the higher religions comes to be the simple sign and symbol
of this adoration.[49] Thus the primitive sociomorphic character of
the cult becomes progressively more subtle: the semi-material society,
consisting of gods and men, becomes a wholly moral society, composed
of men and the principle of goodness, which still continues to be
represented as a person, as a master, as a father, as a king.
[49] Among the Hindus, _Tapas_, that is to say fire, the ardour
of devotion, and of voluntary renouncement, signified in the
beginning simply the incantation intended to constrain the
Devas to obedience, and to deprive them of a part of their
power. Out of a crude conception has grown an extremely refined
one. See _Manuel de l’Histoire des religions_, par C. P. Tiele,
p. 19 (translated by Maurice Vernes).
[Sidenote: The love of God an outlet for the surplus of human love.]
The highest form of subjective worship is love of God, in which all the
duties of religious morality may be regarded as summed up. Adoration
contains in it a vitiating element of respect for power; love is a more
intimate union. The love of God is a partial manifestation of the need
to love which exists in every human being. This need is so great that
it cannot always find satisfaction in real life; it tends therefore to
stretch beyond, and not finding upon earth an object which completely
suffices for it, it seeks one in heaven. The love of God appears thus
to be an expression of the superabundance of the love of man. Our heart
sometimes feels too big for the world and seeks to overpass its limits.
Let us not forget, for the rest, that the world has been strangely
contracted by religious ignorance, intolerance, and prejudice; the
sphere left open to the need of loving was formerly a very narrow one:
it is not astonishing that the latter should have stretched out its
arms toward a celestial and supernatural being.
[Sidenote: Nourished by isolation, feebleness, and misfortune.]
The same thing happens when human affections are shipwrecked in us,
lose their object, no longer find anything to which they can attach
themselves. In France, as in England and America, the habitual devotion
of spinsters has long since been observed, though it often coincides
with a certain pining away of the heart. In our times a virtuous
unmarried woman is, so to speak, predestined to devotion; divine love
is for her (on an average, of course) a necessary compensation. Remark
also that old men are generally more inclined to devotion than young.
There are, no doubt, a number of reasons for it: the approach of death,
the enfeeblement of the body and of the intelligence, the increasing
need for a support, etc.; but there exists also a more profound reason.
The old man, always more isolated than the young, and deprived of the
excitations of the sexual instinct, possesses a smaller outlet for his
instinct for affection and for love. Thus there accumulates in him an
amount of treasure which he is free to apply as to him seems best;
well, the service of God is that which demands least effort, which
is most appropriate to the natural indolence of the old, to their
preoccupation with themselves; they become therefore devotees, partly
out of egoism, partly out of a need for some disinterested occupation.
A grain of incense burns in every heart, and when the perfume of it
can no longer be given to the earth we let it mount to heaven. Note
also that the loss of beloved beings, misfortunes of every sort, and
irreparable infirmities all provoke an expansion of the heart toward
God. In the Middle Ages unhappiness was frequently one of the most
important factors of piety; when a great and unmerited misfortune
happened to a man, the chances were that he would enter the Church or
else become an atheist; it depended often on his strength of mind, his
habits, and his education. When one strikes an animal it is equally
possible that it may bite one or crouch at one’s feet. Every time the
heart is violently bruised there comes an inevitable reaction; we
must reply from within to the blows from without, and this reply is
sometimes revolt and sometimes adoration. The feeble, the disinherited,
the suffering, all those to whom misfortune has not left strength
enough for rebellion, have but one resource: the sweet and consoling
humility of divine love. Whoever does not love, or is not loved
completely and sufficiently, on earth will always turn toward heaven:
the proposition is as regular as the parallelogram of forces.
[Sidenote: Power of mysticism a perversion of love.]
Just as we have seen in an error of the senses one of the objective
principles of religious physics, so perhaps may we find in a perversion
of love one of the most essential subjective principles of mysticism.
It is by love that this unction, this penetrating sweetness which makes
the mystic tremble to the marrow of his bones, is to be explained.
Profound love, even the most terrestrial, tends to envelop the object
with respect and veneration; an effect which is due to a number of
causes, and among others to the psychological law according to which
desire magnifies the desired object. To love is always a little to
adore. If it is a human being that is the object of the love, the
divinization incidental to it will be confined within certain limits,
but if the love stretch up from the earth into heaven, it may command
the full powers of the imagination; the soul, seeking at a distance
for some vague object to which to attach itself, will go out in mystic
outbursts of emotion and ecstasy. The soul will personify its ideal,
will supply it with figure and speech: its ideal will be Jesus with
Mary Magdalene at his feet, or the Virgin weeping at the foot of the
cross, or Moses in the midst of the clouds, or the child Buddha before
whom the statues of the gods rose and made obeisance. Thus mystical
religions are formed of great images and passionate sentiments and the
heart of man, the very life blood of which they turn to their profit.
What appears often to be the most intellectual of tastes is only love
in disguise. The most earthly love is often a religion in its earliest
stages. Henri Beyle, visiting the salt-mines at Salzburg, found in a
shaft a branch covered with incomparable diamonds scintillating in
the light. It was a dead timber on which the salt had crystallized;
in the timber thus transformed Beyle saw the symbol of what happens
in every loving heart; every object one finds there has taken on an
extraordinary brilliancy, a marvellous beauty. He calls this phenomenon
crystallization; we should prefer to call it divinization. Love always
divinizes its object; partially and provisionally when this object
is placed upon earth and close to one’s eyes, but definitively when
this object is lost in the distance of heaven. Our gods are like those
mysterious beings who spring, in legend, from a drop of generous blood
or a loving tear let fall upon the earth; it is with our own substance
that we nourish them; their beauty, their goodness come out of our
love, and if we love them as we do, the reason is that we must love
something; must lift up to the four corners of the horizon, even if
they be deaf, a supreme appeal. This outcome of love and religious
sentiment is most visible in exalted minds, both in the Middle Ages
and in our own days. The true element of originality in Christian
literature is that one there finds, for the first time, a sincere
and warm accent of love, scarcely divined, here and there, by the
great spirits of antiquity, by Sappho and Lucretius. In a page of St.
Augustine one finds the expression of a franker and more profound
ardour than in all the elegant affectations of Horace or the languors
of Tibullus. Nothing in pagan antiquity is comparable to the chapter
in the “Imitation” on love. The passion, confined and held in check,
mounts to heights till then unknown, like a dammed river; but it is
no less genuinely itself. What shall we say of the visionary mystics
of the people like St. Theresa, and Chantal, and Guyon? Among them
piety, in its most exaggerated form, verges upon the madness of love.
St. Theresa might have been a courtesan of genius equally as well as
a saint. Physiologists and physicians have often observed, in our
days, analogous pathological cases, in which the religious effusion is
simply, so to speak, a case of mistake in identity.[50]
[50] Ribot, _de l’Hérédité_, 364; Moreau de Tours, _Psych.
morbide_, 259.
[Sidenote: Worship of Christ to a considerable extent a perversion of
love.]
In Christianity the conception of Jesus, the beautiful, gentle young
man, the Holy Spirit incarnate in the purest and most ideal form,
favours more directly than any corresponding conception in any rival
religion this particular perversion of love. Christianity is the most
anthropomorphic belief in existence, for it is the one of all others
which, after having conceived the most elevated idea of God, abases
it, without degrading it, to the most human of human conditions. By
a much more refined, much more profound paganism than the paganism
of antiquity, the Christian religion has succeeded in making God the
object of an ardent love, without ceasing to make Him an object of
respect. By a myth much more seductive and poetic even than that of
Psyche, we see God, the true God, descended upon earth in the form of
a blond and smiling young man; we hear him speak low in the ear of
Mary Magdalene at the fall of evening; and then this vision suddenly
disappears and we see in the gathering shadow two mutilated arms
extended toward us, and a heart which bleeds for humanity. In this
legend all the powers of the imagination are called in play, all the
fibres of the heart are moved; it is an accomplished work of art. What
is there astonishing in the fact that Christ has been and is still the
great seducer of souls? In the ears of a young girl his name appeals
at once to all her instincts, even to the maternal instinct, for Jesus
is often represented as a child with the dimpled, rosy cheeks which
the Greeks ascribed to Eros. The heart of the woman is thus besieged
on all sides at once: her wavering and timid imagination wanders from
the cherub to the youth, and from the youth to the pale figure, with
the bowed head, upon the cross. It is possible that from the birth of
Christianity down to the present day there has not been one single
woman of an exalted piety whose heart has not first beat for her God,
for Jesus, for the most lovable and loving type that the human mind has
ever conceived.
[Sidenote: Moral element in the law of God.]
Side by side with its somewhat sentimental element the love of God
contains a moral element, which is progressively detaching itself
with the march of ideas. God being the very principle of goodness,
the personification of the moral ideal, the love of God ultimately
becomes a moral love properly so called, the love of virtue, of
sanctity at its height. The subjective act of charity thus becomes
the religious act _par excellence_, in which morality and subjective
worship are identified; good works and the externals of worship are
simply a translation into the outer world of the moral consciousness.
At the same time, in the highest speculations of philosophic theology,
charity has been conceived as embracing simultaneously all beings in
the divine love, and by consequence as beginning to realize the sort of
perfect society in which “all exist in all and all in every part.” The
social and moral character of religion thus attains its highest degree
of perfection and God appears as a sort of mystic realization of the
universal society, _sub specie æterni_.
Part Second.
THE DISSOLUTION OF RELIGIONS IN EXISTING SOCIETIES.
CHAPTER I.
DOGMATIC FAITH.
I. Narrow dogmatic faith—The credulity of primitive man:
First, spontaneous faith in the senses and imagination;
Second, faith in the testimony of superior men; Third,
faith in the divine word, in revelation, and in the sacred
texts—The literalness of dogmatic faith—Inevitable
intolerance of narrow dogmatic faith—Belief in dogma,
revelation, salvation, and damnation all result in
intolerance—Modern tolerance.
II. Broad dogmatic faith—Orthodox Protestantism—Dogmas of
orthodox Protestantism—Rational consequences of these
dogmas—Logical failure of orthodox Protestantism.
III. The dissolution of dogmatic faith in modern
society—Reasons that render this dissolution
inevitable—Comparative influence of the various sciences:
influence of public instruction, of means of communication,
of industry even and of commerce, etc.—The disappearance
of belief in oracles and prophecies—Gradual disappearance
of the belief in miracles, in devils, etc.
_I. Narrow dogmatic faith._
If faith has not varied especially in and of itself as a mode of
feeling, the objects with which it is concerned have differed from
generation to generation. Hence the various forms of doctrine which we
shall pass in review as showing the evolution and dissolution of faith.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Primitive faith more properly a credulity.]
In primitive religions, faith was altogether experimental and physical;
it was not opposed to scientific belief, which, to say the truth, did
not exist. It was a credulity rather than a faith; and religious faith,
in our day, is still a credulity, an obligatory credulity, primarily in
the authority of superior men, secondarily in that of God himself.
[Sidenote: Subordination of the marvellous in primitive faith.]
The origin of religious faith has been attributed solely to an appetite
for the marvellous and the extraordinary; but we have already shown
that religions do everything in their power to regulate the imagination
even in the very act of stimulating it, and to bring the unknown to the
touchstone of the known. The marvellous must aid in making something at
least apparently comprehensible; with marvel for marvel’s sake religion
holds no commerce. So much so, that primitive people have sought in
religion, less to multiply the marvellous, in the modern sense of
the word, than partially to suppress it; they have been in search of
an explanation of some sort. An explanation by superior powers, by
spirits, by occult virtues, seemed clearer to them than an explanation
by scientific law.
[Sidenote: Rationale of primitive man’s faith in the marvellous.]
For the rest, any explanation once given, primitive man never dreamed
of disputing it, he was essentially a “man of faith.” The delicate
shades of thought we designate as verisimilitude, probability,
possibility, were as little known to primitive man as to children.
The voluntary suspension of judgment that we call doubt indicates
an extremely advanced state of mind. With children and savages, to
conceive and to believe are one; they know nothing about reserving
their approbation, or mistrusting their own intelligence or that of
others. A certain humility, which young minds do not possess, is
necessary before one can say: That may be true but also it may not,
or in other words, I don’t know. And also one must have patience to
verify with care what one believes, and patience is courage of the most
difficult kind. Finally, man always feels the need to declare that what
is attractive, what satisfies his mind, is real: when one tells an
interesting story to a child, he says, “It is true, is it not?” If, on
the contrary, it is a sad story he will cry out: “That is not true!” A
man of the people to whom one should demonstrate, with the evidence in
one’s hand, that a thing he thought true was false, would reply with a
shake of the head, “If it is not true, it ought to be.” All primitive
people were like that. In a memorandum on The Development of Language
and Intelligence among Children, E. Egger characterized this state of
mind as “rebellion against the notion of doubt and even that of simple
probability.” Felix, a child of five and one-half years, took a lively
interest in sacred history, but he could not understand why all the
lacunæ had not been filled in, or why doubtful points should be marked
as such. “The actual state of his mind,” adds E. Egger, “corresponds in
a manner to that of the Greek mind during the period when the effort
was made painfully to set in order the chaos of ancient legend.” Two
years later the same child received a present of a collection of
stories. He found in the preface that the author gave the stories out
as true; he asked nothing further, and was promptly astonished to find
anybody else in doubt. “His trustfulness displayed no disposition to go
behind the letter of his text, in especial as the stories sounded to
him sufficiently probable.” In my own experience with children, I have
noticed that nothing irritates them like uncertainty; a thing must be
true or false, and generally they prefer that it should be true. For
the rest, a child does not know the limits of his own power, and still
less that of others; and too, he has no clear sense of the marvellous
and the improbable. A child saw a horse galloping by one day, and said
to me seriously, “I could run as fast as that.” Thus again the little
peasant girl, of whom we spoke above, asked her mistress why she might
not have made the flowers in the garden. A sense of the possible is
lacking in primitive intelligences: because you seem to a child or
a savage to be able to do more things than he, he readily comes to
believe that you can do everything; so that what we call miracles seem
to primitive people simply the visible and necessary sign of superior
power; so much so, indeed, that to them a man of mark ought to be
able to perform miracles; they expect them from him as their due, and
become indignant if they are not forthcoming, as a child is indignant
when one does not help him carry a burden that is too heavy for his
strength. The Hebrews precisely expected Moses to perform miracles and,
so to speak, obliged him to do them. The people believe in their great
men, and the belief in miracles is but a corollary from their general
confidence.
[Sidenote: Absoluteness of primitive faith.]
Moreover, faith reaches a height among primitive nations that it never
does among cultivated intelligences: they believe immeasurably things
that it is out of all measure to believe at all; the happy _inter
utrumque_ is as lacking in the belief itself as in the thing believed.
Mr. Spencer, in his “Sociology,” cites the example of a young woman who
attributed to a certain amulet the magical virtue of preserving her
against injuries. She thought herself as invulnerable as Achilles. The
chief of the tribe, astonished that so precious an amulet should exist,
and wishing no doubt to acquire it, asked to have its virtues verified
before his eyes. The woman was brought to him, a warrior prepared his
hatchet, and in perfect confidence she put out her arm. The blow fell
and the woman uttered a cry of astonishment not less than of pain as
her hand fell to the ground. Who in our day has such absolute faith?
Very few among us would risk his life, or even his hand, to maintain
such and such a dogma. This woman belonged to the race of martyrs; her
intense credulity bordered on heroism.
[Sidenote: Confusion of sincerity with verity by primitive man.]
Man’s natural confidence in his fellow-men, especially when there is no
very evident reason why the latter should mislead him, is the origin
of the credence we give to the testimony and authority of those who
claim to be inspired; which all seemed very human and natural in the
beginning, and only later came to be regarded as supernatural. This
spontaneous disposition to believe is an elementary instinct which
plays a large rôle in religious sociomorphism. Suspicious as primitive
man is when his material interests are at stake, in all other matters
he is apt to be credulous to a fault. Moreover, he scarcely knows what
one means by _error_, and does not distinguish it from deception; he
puts trust in his own judgment and in that of other people. When you
tell him something extraordinary, his first thought is that you are
making sport of him; he is less inclined to believe that you have
deceived yourself, that you have reasoned falsely; sincerity and verity
are confused in his mind. It has taken all the experience of modern
life to make clear to us the difference between these two things; to
induce us to verify the affirmations even of those whose characters we
esteem most highly; to contradict, without offending, those who are
dearest to us. Primitive man never distinguished his belief in the
“law” from his faith in the “prophets.” Those whom he esteemed and
admired seemed to him of necessity to know the facts. Add that man is
always inclined to make much of anything that is a material fact, of
anything that appeals to his eyes and to his ears. The sacred word, and
the sacred writings that embody it, are to him not merely indications,
but _proofs_ of what they affirm. I overheard it given in a church one
day as an incontestable proof that Moses conversed with the Lord that
Mt. Sinai is still in existence; that is the sort of argument that is
successful with the people. Livingstone says that the negroes listened
and believed from the moment he showed them the Bible and told them
that the celestial Father had written His will on the pages of that
book; they touched the pages and believed at once.
[Sidenote: Inference from reality of the sign to reality of the thing
signified the essence of faith in revelation.]
In effect, blind confidence in a word, in a sign—precipitate induction
from which one infers from the reality of the sign to the reality of
the thing signified: a second induction to the effect that any doctrine
relatively elevated, from the social and moral point of view, and put
forth by men one respects, is probably true, even if it be in many
points irrational—these are the principal elements of the primitive
faith in revelation. And this faith, in all its crudity, exists at the
present day. It wins its way through the eyes and ears; therein lies
its power. It is much less mystical than we are inclined to fancy; it
is incarnate in its monuments, its temples, its books; it walks about
and breathes in the person of its priests, its saints, its gods; we
cannot look about us without realizing its existence in one form or
another. It has been of great service to human thought, in spite of its
pitfalls, thus to have been able to express itself, to fashion objects
in its own image, to penetrate marble and stone, to provide that it
shall itself be borne back in upon us from without. How can one doubt
what is visible and tangible?
[Sidenote: Results in “credo quia ineptum.”]
Faith in testimony and authority leads to faith in sacred texts and in
the very letter of these texts. This is what one means by _literal_
faith. It exists still in our day, among many civilized people. It
constitutes the basis of the Catholicism of the masses. “In order
to silence restless spirits,” said the council of Trent, “it is
decreed that no one may, in the interpretation of the Scriptures, ...
deviate from the construction sanctioned by the Church, to seek for a
supposedly more exact rendering.” Faith lies thus in a renunciation
of thought, an abdication of liberty; imposes upon itself a rule not
of logic but of morals, and subjects itself to dogmas as to immutable
principles. It restricts intelligence beforehand to precise limits,
and imposes a general direction on it, with instructions not to swerve
from it. It is at this point that faith comes really to be opposed
to scientific belief for which in the beginning it was a substitute.
According to the council of the Vatican, those who have faith do not
believe “because of the intrinsic truth of the things revealed,” but
“because of the divine _authority_ that revealed them.” If you reason
with a person of that stamp, he will listen, understand, and follow
you—but only to a certain point; there he stops, and nothing in the
world can make him go beyond. Or rather from that point he will declare
himself inexpugnable, and will assure you that you have absolutely
no hold on him; and in effect, no scientific or philosophical reason
could turn him from his belief, since he places the object of his
faith in a sphere superior to reason, and makes his faith an affair of
“conscience.” Nothing can force a man to think rightly when he does not
propose rectitude of thought to himself as a supreme aim, and nothing
can oblige him to follow the dictates of reason to the bitter end,
if he believes that the instant he calls certain dogmas and certain
authorities in question he is committing a sin. Thus, faith gives a
certain sacred and inviolable character to what it sanctions,—converts
it into a sacred ark that one may not touch without sacrilege or
danger, neither may one look at it too closely nor touch it with one’s
fingers, even to lend it support now and then when it seems ready
to fall. Free-thought and science never consider a thing as true
except provisionally, and so long as it is not seriously doubted by
someone. Dogmatic faith, on the contrary, affirms as true not only the
things that are uncontested, but those which, according to it, are
conclusively presumed, and therefore above discussion. It follows that,
if reasons for belief diminish, faith must be none the less strong. It
was this that Pascal endeavoured to demonstrate. In effect, the less
a belief seems rational to our finite minds, the more merit there is
in lending credence to “divine authority.” It would be too simple to
believe no more than what one sees or what sounds probable to one; to
affirm the improbable, to believe in what seems incredible, is much
more meritorious. Our courage rises in proportion as our intelligence
becomes humble; the more absurd one is the greater one is—_credo quia
ineptum_; the more difficult the task, the greater the merit. The
strength of our faith is estimated, in the mysticism of Pascal, by
the weakness of its “reasons.” The ideal, on this theory, would be to
possess no more than the metaphysical minimum of reason for belief,
the weakest conceivable of motives, a mere nothing; that is to say,
one should be attached to the supreme object of one’s faith by the
slenderest of bonds. The Albigensian priests, the _parfaits_, wear a
simple white cord around their waists as an emblem of their vow; all
mankind wears this cord, and it is in reality more solid and often
heavier than any chain.
[Sidenote: Complete intellectual rest incident to faith.]
Scepticism tends toward a complete intellectual indifference with
regard to all things; dogmatic faith produces a partial indifference,
an indifference limited to certain points, determined once for all;
it is no longer anxious on these heads, but rests and delights in
established dogma. The sceptic and the man of faith abandon themselves
thus to a more or less extensive abstinence from thought. Religious
faith is a determination to suspend the flight of the imagination,
to limit the sphere of thought. We all know the Oriental legend that
the world is held up by an elephant, which stands on a tortoise,
which floats on a sea of milk. The believer must always refrain from
asking what supports the sea of milk? He must never notice a point of
which there is no explanation; he must constantly repeat to himself
the abortive incomplete idea that has been given him without daring
to recognize that it is incomplete. In a street through which I pass
every day, a blackbird whistles the same melodic phrase; the phrase
is incomplete, ends abruptly, and for years I have heard him lift his
voice, deliver himself of his truncated song, and stop with a satisfied
air, with no need to complete his musical fragment, which I never hear
without a feeling of impatience. It is thus with the true believer;
accustomed as he is in the most important questions to dwell within
the limits of the customary, without any curiosity about the beyond,
he sings his monotonous little note without dreaming that it lacks
anything—that his phrase is as clipped as his wings are, and that the
narrow world of his belief is not the universe.
[Sidenote: Wilful blindness of faith.]
The people who still hold to this kind of faith represent the antique
world endeavouring to perpetuate itself without a compromise in the
bosom of the new world, the world of modern society. The barbarian
does not wish to yield to the progress of ideas and of manners; if
such people formed the majority of the nation they would constitute
the greatest danger to human reason, to science, and to truth. Literal
faith, in effect, makes naked truth a subject of pudicity; one does
not dare to look it in the face or lift the sacred veil that hides its
beauty; you find yourself in the midst of a conspiracy, mysterious
beings surround you, putting their hands before your eyes and a finger
on your lips. Dogma holds you, possesses you, masters you in spite of
yourself; it is fixed in your heart and petrified in your intelligence:
it is not without reason that faith has been compared to an anchor
that has caught on the bottom and checked the vessel in its course,
while the open and free ocean stretches beyond as far as the eye can
reach. And who shall break the anchor from his heart? When you shake
it loose in one place, faith settles to its hold somewhere else; you
have a thousand weak points at which it attacks you. You can completely
abandon a philosophical doctrine; but you cannot break away absolutely
from a collection of beliefs in which blind and literal faith has
borne sway; there is always something left; you will carry the scars
and marks from it as slaves who are freed still carry on their flesh
the signs of their servitude. You are branded in the heart, you shall
feel the effects of it always; you shall have moments of dread and
shuddering, of mystic enthusiasm, of distrust of reason, of need to
represent things as being other than they really are, to see what is
not, and not to see what is. The fiction that was early forced upon
your soul shall often seem to you sweeter than the sound and rugged
truth, you need to know; you shall hate yourself for the sin of
knowledge.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Intolerance incident to faith.]
There is a story of a Brahman who was talking with a European of his
religion, and among other dogmas mentioned the scrupulous respect due
to animals. “The law,” said he “not only forbids one’s doing evil,
voluntarily, to the smallest creature even for the purpose of supplying
one’s self with food, it even bids one walk with extraordinary
circumspection with one’s eyes down, that one may avoid stepping on the
humblest ant.” Without trying to refute this naïve faith the European
handed the speaker a microscope. The Brahman looked through the
instrument and saw on everything about him, on the fruits that he was
about to eat, in the beverage that he was about to drink, everywhere
that he might put his hand or foot, the movement of a multitude of
little animals of whose existence he had never dreamed: creatures that
he had totally left out of account. He was stupefied and handed the
microscope back to the European. “I give it to you,” the latter said.
The Brahman with a movement of joy took it and threw it on the ground,
and broke it, and departed satisfied; as if by that stroke he had
destroyed the truth and saved his faith. Happily, in our day, one may
without great loss destroy an optical or physical instrument, it can
be replaced; but what is to become of an intelligence in the hands of
the fanatical believer? Would he not crush it, in case of need, as the
instrument of glass was crushed, and sacrifice it the more gaily that
a more limpid gleam of truth might well filter through it? In India
we have an example of the philosophical doctrine, very inoffensive in
appearance and upheld, with various modifications, by great thinkers,
of the transmigration of souls, becoming a religious dogma, producing
as a direct result intolerance, contempt of science, and all the
usual effects of blind dogmatism. Dogmatic and absolute faith in its
every form tends to check thought; thence springs its intolerance—a
consequence that may well be insisted on.
[Sidenote: And even logically resulting from it.]
Intolerance is only an outward realization of the tyranny exercised
within by dogmatic faith. Belief in a _revelation_, which all religion
rests upon, is the very opposite of progressive _discovery_; the
instant one affirms that the first exists, the latter becomes useless,
dangerous, and ends in being condemned. Intolerance, first theoretic,
then practical, is the legitimate offspring of absolute faith of every
kind. In all revealed religion doctrine first appears in the form of
_dogma_, then of dogmatic and categorical commandment. There have
always been things that must be believed, and practices that must be
observed, under pain of perdition. The sphere of dogmas and sacred
rites may be widened or narrowed, the discipline may be loose or so
strict that it extends to the very items of one’s diet; but there is
always at least a minimum of dogma that is absolute and of practice
that is rigidly obligatory, without which no truly religious church
could exist. And this is not all. Theological sanction is by its
very nature always in extremes; it presents one with no mean between
absolute good and absolute evil, both conceived as eternal. And this
being granted, how should believers, who are dominated by an exclusive
preoccupation with an ardent and profound faith, hesitate to employ
constraint in case of need when the matter at stake is so great—is of
absolute and eternal good or of absolute and eternal evil? For them the
only value of free-will lies in its use—in its use toward its proper
object, which is the fulfilment of the divine will. In the presence of
an eternity of penalties to be avoided, everything seems permissible;
any means seems good provided it be successful. Possessed of that
implicit certitude which is inseparable from an absolute and explicit
faith, what really enthusiastic soul would hold back before the
employment of force? Accordingly, as a matter of fact, every religion
which is at once new and powerful is intolerant. The appearance of
tolerance marks a decline of faith; a religion which allows for the
existence of another is a religion in decay. One cannot believe
anything “with all one’s heart” without a sentiment of pity and even of
horror for those who believe differently. If I were absolutely certain
of possessing the supreme and ultimate verity, should I hesitate to
turn the world upside-down to make it prevail? One puts blinkers on a
horse to keep him from seeing to the right or left; he looks straight
ahead and runs forward under the whip with the hardiness and vigour of
ignorance; it is in the same fashion that the partisans of an absolute
dogma move through life. “Every positive religion, every immutable
form,” says Benjamin Constant, “leads directly to intolerance,
providing one reasons logically.”
[Sidenote: Use of force as justifiable in a priest as in a physician.]
The reply to Benjamin Constant is that it is one thing to believe that
one knows the way to salvation and another thing to force others to
walk in that way. The priest looks upon himself as the physician of the
soul; to wish to minister by violence to an ailing soul, “is quite as
if,” it has been said, “the physician of the body for greater certainty
should take the precaution of having his patient condemned to death
or to hard labor in case of disobedience to his prescriptions.”[51]
Assuredly it would involve a contradiction in terms for the physician
of the body to wish to bring it to death; but it in nowise involves a
contradiction for the physician of the soul to wish to put constraint
upon the body. The objection falls of its own weight. For the rest,
let us not deceive ourselves; if the physicians of the body leave
their patients free, it is sometimes that they cannot help so doing,
simply; in certain grave cases they insist on having the patient under
their control in a hospital, which is, after all, a sort of prison.
If a European physician had to prescribe for one of those American
Indians, whose habit it is in an attack of smallpox, when the fever
reaches forty degrees, to plunge into the water to refresh themselves,
the first thing he would do would be to strap his patient to his cot.
And every physician would like really to be able to proceed after the
same fashion, even in Europe, even at the present day, with people
like Gambetta, Mirabeau, and many others less illustrious, who kill
themselves by negligence.
[51] M. Franck, _Des rapports de la religion et de l’État_.
[Sidenote: Intolerance a perverted charity.]
Besides, one must not reason as if the believer could isolate himself
and act only for himself. For example, to a Catholic what is the
meaning of absolute liberty of choice in education? It means the right
of parents to damn their children. Is this right thus permissible in
their eyes? There are books calculated to destroy faith; books by
Voltaire, or Strauss, or Renan; books which, if circulated, result
in our losing our souls, “a thing far more grave than the death of
the body,” as Théodore de Bèze said, after St. Augustine. Can a
nation truly penetrated by a Christian charity allow such books to
be circulated on the pretext of liberty of conscience? No; one must
before all else deliver the very will from the bonds of heresy and
error; it is on this condition only that it can be free. Moreover, one
must prevent the corrupt conscience from corrupting others. We see
plainly that charitable intolerance is justified from an exclusively
theological point of view. It rests on logical reasonings of which the
point of departure alone is vicious.[52]
[52] It is easy to understand the high ecclesiastical
authorities in the Catholic Church, who maintain as an article
of faith the right to repress error. Recollect the well-known
pages in which St. Augustine speaks of what good effects he
had observed to result from the employment of constraint in
religious matters. “A great many of those who have been brought
back into the Church by force confess themselves to be greatly
rejoiced at having been delivered from their former errors,
who, however, by I know not what force of custom, would never
have thought of changing for the better if the fear of the
law had not put them in mind of the truth. Good precepts and
wholesome fear must go together so that not only the light of
truth may drive away the gloom of error, but that charity may
break the bonds of bad custom, so that we may rejoice over the
salvation of the many.... It is written: ‘Bid them to enter
in.’ ... God Himself did not spare his son, but delivered
Him for our sake to the executioners.” Schiller makes the
great inquisitor in _Don Carlos_ say the same thing. See St.
Augustine, _Epist._ cxiii. 17, 5—St. Paul, _Ephes._, vi. 5,
6, 9. Lastly, recollect also the reasoned decision of the
doctors and councils. “Human government,” said St. Thomas,
“is derived from _divine government_ and should _imitate_
it. Now although God is all-powerful and infinitely good, He
nevertheless permits in the universe that He has made the
existence of evils which He could prevent; He permits them for
fear that in suppressing them more than equivalent goods might
be suppressed incidentally along with them and greater evils
provoked in their stead. The same is true in human government;
_rulers naturally tolerate certain evils for fear of putting
an obstacle in the way of certain goods, or of causing greater
evils_, as St. Augustine said in the treatise on _Order_. It
is thus that _infidels_, though they sin in their rites, may
be _tolerated, either because of some good coming from them,
or to avoid some evil_. The Jews observe their rites, in which
formerly the truth of the faith that we hold was prefigured;
the result is advantageous in this, that we have the testimony
of our enemies in favour of our faith, and that the object
of our faith is, so to speak, shown in a reflected image. As
for the worship of the other unbelievers, which is opposed in
every way to truth and is entirely useless, _it would merit
no tolerance_ if it were not to avoid some evil, such as the
scandal or _the trouble which might result from the suppression
of this worship_; or again as an impediment to the salvation
of those who, under cover of this species of tolerance, come
little by little into the faith. It is for that reason that
the Church has occasionally tolerated even the worship of
heretics, and heathens, when the number of infidels was great.”
(_Summa theol._, 2 a; q. x, a. II.) One readily perceives the
nature of _tolerance_ in that sense. It does not in the least
recognize the right of those who are the object of it: if it
does not maltreat them, it is simply to _avoid a greater evil_,
or rather because its power is too small, and the number of
infidels is too large.
A professor of theology at the Sorbonne has recently contested
the charge of Catholic intolerance. (M. Alfred Fouillée had
just spoken of it in his _Social Science_.) He did so for
reasons that may be cited as further proof. “Neither to-day,
nor _ever, in any epoch of its history_, has the Catholic
Church intended to _impose acceptance of the truth by
violence_. All great theologians have taught that the act of
faith is a voluntary act, which presupposes an illumination
of the mind; _but they have also taught that constraint may
favour this illumination, and in especial may preserve others
from_ a bad example, from a contagious darkness. The Christian
Church has had no need of the sword to evangelize the nations;
if it has shed blood in its triumph, it has been _its own_.”
Has it, then, not shed the blood of others? If one counts all
the murders committed by intolerance in the name of absolute
dogma, in every country in the world; if one could measure
all the bloodshed; if one could gather together all the dead
bodies—would the pile not mount higher than the spires of
the cathedrals and the domes of the temples, where man still
goes, with unalterable fervour, to invoke and bless the “God
of Love”? Faith in a God who talks and acts, who has a history
of His own, His Bible, His prophet and His priest, will always
end by being intolerant. By adoring a jealous and vengeful God,
one becomes in the end His accomplice. One tacitly approves all
the crimes committed in His name and often (if one believes the
Holy Scriptures) commanded by Him. One endeavours to forget
these things when they are too stained with blood and filth.
The monuments of such bloody scenes have been razed, and the
places to which the strongest memories are attached have been
purified and transformed: the partisans of certain dogmas need
to wash their hearts also in lustral water.
[Sidenote: And a half-caste public spirit.]
In order to understand how legitimate religious intolerance appears
from its own point of view, we must remember with what perfect calm
we forbid and punish acts that are directly contrary to the actual
conditions of our social life (for example, the public outrage of
good morals, etc.). Now we know that all religion superposes another
society upon the actual one; it conceives men’s life as enveloped and
bounded by the life of the gods; it must therefore seek to maintain
the conditions of this supernatural society with not less energy than
we employ to maintain our human society, and the conditions of this
superior society lead to the multiplication of all the prohibitive
rules that we have previously imposed on our existence with our
fellows; imaginary walls cannot avoid being added to the walls and
ditches already impeding circulation on the earth’s surface; if we
live with the gods, we must expect to be jostled by them, and curbed
in their name. This state of things cannot disappear entirely until we
cease to believe we are co-members of a society with the gods, until we
see them transmuted into simple ideals. Ideals never necessitate the
exclusiveness and intolerance that realities do.
[Sidenote: Tolerance highly intellectual.]
On the whole, one must distinguish two kinds of virtue on which
religion has influence. The first are the virtues that may be called
positive and active, of the heart and of instinct, like charity and
generosity; at all times and in all countries they have existed among
men; religion exalts them, and to Christianity the honour is due of
having developed them to their highest degree. The second category
includes the purely intellectual virtues, whose operation consists
rather in checking and confining than in extending the sphere of
one’s activity—the virtues of self-possession, of abstinence, and of
tolerance, which are quite modern really and the result of science,
which has brought about a clearer knowledge of its own limitations
even. Tolerance is a very complex virtue, much more intellectual than
charity; it is a virtue of the head rather than of the heart; the
proof of it is that charity and intolerance are often found together,
forming an alliance rather than opposing each other. When tolerance
is not philosophical and wholly reasoned, it takes on the aspect of
a simple good-humour that greatly resembles moral weakness. Really to
demonstrate the greatness of tolerance, one must put to the front the
objective reasons drawn from the relativity of human knowledge and
not the subjective reasons drawn from our own hearts.[53] Up to the
present time tolerance has been founded on _respect_ for the person
and the will of another: “It is necessary,” it is said, “for man to
be free—free to deceive himself and to do evil, if need be;” and
nothing is truer, but there is another source of tolerance which is
more substantial and tends to gain ground more and more rapidly as
dogmatic faith disappears. This source is distrust of human thought and
conscience, which are not free not to deceive themselves, and to which
every article of absolute _faith_ must necessarily be also an article
of error. So that, at the present day, tolerance is no longer a virtue,
but simply an affair of the intelligence; the further one goes, the
more one sees that one does not in the least understand; the more one
sees that the beliefs of one’s neighbour are a complement to one’s own,
that no one of us can be right alone, to the exclusion of all others.
By the mere development of the intelligence which makes us aware of the
infinite variety of the world and the impossibility of any one solution
of eternal problems, each individual opinion comes to have a value in
our eyes: it is nothing more nor less than a bit of evidence bearing
on the theory of the universe, and it goes without the saying that no
one item of evidence can be made the basis of a definitive judgment, a
dogmatic conclusion, without appeal.
[53] See A. Fouillée, _Systèmes de morale contemporains_.
_II. Broad dogmatic faith._
[Sidenote: Conflict between intelligence and dogmatism.]
“The aim of most men,” as an English writer says, “is to pass through
life with as little expenditure of thought as possible:” but what is
to become of those who think, and of intellectual men in general? Even
without suspecting it, one will ultimately allow an interpretation more
or less broad of the texts to which one has seemed to cling in a narrow
and _literal_ faith. There is almost no such thing as a perfectly
orthodox believer. Heresy enters by one door or another, and strange
to say it is that precise fact that keeps traditional faith alive in
face of the progress of science. An absolute and immutably literal
faith would be too offensive to last long. Orthodoxy either kills the
nations in which it entirely stifles freedom of thought or it kills
faith in itself. Intelligence can never stand still; it is a light that
moves, like that cast by the sun on the dripping oars as the boat is
being lustily rowed along.
[Sidenote: Dogmatism doubly irrational.]
The partisans of literal interpretation and authority seem sooner
or later to accept two irrational hypotheses instead of one; it is
not enough for them that there have been certain revelations from on
high, they insist that the very terms in which the divine thought is
incorporated shall be divine, sacred, and immutable, and of an absolute
exactitude. They divinize human language. They never think of the
difficulties that someone might feel who was not a god but simply a
Descartes, a Newton, or a Leibnitz, to express his great thoughts in
an unformed and half-savage tongue. Genius is always superior to the
language that it makes use of, and the words themselves are responsible
for many of the errors in its thoughts; and a “divine inspiration,”
brought down to the level of our language, would be perhaps more
embarrassed than an even purely human inspiration. Nothing therefore
can be stranger, to those who examine the matter calmly, than to see
civilized nations seeking for a complete expression of the divine
thought in the literatures of ancient peoples and semi-barbarous
nations, whose language and intelligence were infinitely inferior
to ours; their god, talking and dictating, would nowadays hardly
be given a certificate of competency in a primary examination. It
is the grossest anthropomorphism to conceive a divinity not in the
type of an ideal man but in the type of a barbarous man. Also, it is
not simply that a literal faith (the primitive form of all revealed
faith) ultimately appears to be entirely irrational; it is that this
characteristic becomes constantly more marked, for the reason that
faith stands still, or tries to stand still, while humanity marches on.
[Sidenote: Dogmatism is intellectual indifference or death.]
But for a certain number of heresies born and circulated among them,
but for a constant stream of fresh thought, people holding by a
literal religion would be a _caput mortuum_ in history, a little
“like the faithful Tibetians of Dalaï-lama,” as Von Hartmann says.
Literal religions cannot last and perpetuate themselves except by a
series of compromises. There are always in the minds of the sincere
and intelligent believer periods of advancement and of reaction, steps
forward followed by a recoil. Confessors know these sudden changes
well, and are prepared to deal with them and keep them within certain
limits. They themselves are subject to such changes; how many of them
have thought they believed and been suspected of heresy! If we could
see into the bottom of their minds what reconciliations should we not
perceive, what secret accommodations and compliances! There is in every
one of us something that _protests_ against literal faith, and if this
protestation is not explicit, it is often none the less real. No one
can hope to read more exactly than he who reads between the lines. When
one venerates and admires everything, it is generally what one simply
does not understand. Very many minds positively like vagueness and
accommodate themselves to it, they believe in gross and arrange the
details to suit themselves; sometimes even, after accepting a thing as
a whole, they eliminate one by one all its parts. Generally speaking,
those who aspire to literal faith nowadays are divisible into three
classes: the indifferent, the blind, and unconscious Protestants.
[Sidenote: Protestantism and liberty of conscience.]
The Protestantism of Luther and Calvin was a compromise replacing
a despotism; it was a broad faith, although it is at the same time
intolerant and orthodox; for there are certain things even in
Protestantism which do not admit of compromise; it contains _dogmas_
that it is impious to reject, and which, to the free-thinker, seem
scarcely less contrary to calm reason than the dogmas of Catholicism;
it contains a system of metaphysical or historical theses regarded
not as merely human, but as divine. The most desirable thing in a
religion that is to be progressive is that the sacred texts should be
ambiguous; and the text of the Bible is not ambiguous enough. How are
we to doubt, for example, the divinity of Christ’s mission? How doubt
the miracles? A belief in the divinity of Christ, and the genuineness
of the miracles, are the very foundation of the Christian religion;
Luther was obliged to accept them, and in our day even they bear
down with their full weight on orthodox Protestantism. So that what
seemed at first a generous concession to liberty of thought amounts
in the end to little. The circle one moves about in is so contracted!
Protestants, too, are fettered; the chain is simply longer and more
flexible. Protestantism has rendered services of great importance to
law and to liberty of conscience; but alongside of the concessions to
liberty that it enforced, it contains dogmas from which the use of
“charitable constraint” may logically be deduced. These dogmas which
are essential to true Protestantism are: original sin, conceived as
even more radical than it appears in Catholicism, and as destructive
of freedom of the will; the redemption, which recognizes the death of
God the Son as necessary to redeem man from the vindictiveness of God
the Father; predestination in all its rigour; grace and election in
their most fatalistic and mystical form; and last and most important,
an eternity of suffering without purgatory! If all these dogmas are
simply philosophical myths, Christian is a purely verbal title, and one
might as well call one’s self a heathen, for all the myths of Jupiter,
Saturn, Ceres, Proserpine, and the “divinities of Samothrace,” are also
susceptible of becoming symbols of higher metaphysics; we refer the
reader to Jamblicus and Schelling. We must thus assume that orthodox
Protestants believe in hell, redemption, and grace; and if so, the
consequences that we have deduced from these dogmas become inevitable.
Also Luther, Calvin, Théodore de Bèze, have preached and practised
intolerance for the same reasons as did the Catholics. They claimed the
right of private judgment for themselves alone, and only in so far as
they felt need of it; they never raised it to the level of an orthodox
doctrine. Calvin burned Servetius, and the Puritans in America in 1692
punished witchcraft with death.
[Sidenote: Every heresy serves liberty of conscience.]
If Protestantism has in the long run served the cause of liberty of
conscience, the reason is simply that every heresy is an instance of
liberty and of that enfranchisement which brings in its train a series
of additional heresies. In other words, heresy is the victory of
doubt over faith. By doubt Protestantism serves the cause of liberty;
by faith it would cease to serve it and would menace it—if it were
logical. But the characteristic of certain minds is precisely to come
to a halt halfway between freedom and liberty, between faith and
reason, between the past and the future.
[Sidenote: Protestantism a mark of logical feebleness in those who hold
it.]
Over and above the dogmas admitted in common, the true Protestant
demands further some fixed objective expression of his belief: he
attempts—he also—to incorporate it in a certain number of customs
and rites which create the need they satisfy and incessantly give
fresh life to a faith incessantly on the point of a decline; he
demands temples, priests, a ceremonial. In the item of ceremonial as
well as in the item of dogmas, orthodox Protestants nowadays feel
themselves to be much superior to Catholics; and they have really
rejected a considerable number of naïve beliefs and of useless rites
not infrequently borrowed from paganism. You should hear an excited
Protestant, in a discussion with a Catholic, speak of the Mass, that
degrading superstition in which “the most material and barbarous
interpretation possible” is put upon the words of Christ—_He that
eateth me shall live by me_. But does not this same Protestant admit
with the Catholic the miracle of the redemption, of Christ sacrificing
himself to save mankind? If you admit one miracle, what reason is there
to stop with that or any succeeding miracle? “Once more in this order
of ideas,” says Mr. Matthew Arnold, “and what can be more natural and
beautiful than to imagine this miracle every day repeated, Christ
offered in thousands of places, everywhere the believer enabled to
enact the work of redemption and unite himself with the Body whose
sacrifice saves him.” A beautiful conception, you acknowledge, for a
legend, but you refuse to put faith in it on the ground that it shocks
your reason; very good, but you reject in the same breath all the
rest of the irrationalities that are part and parcel of Christianity.
If Christ sacrificed himself for the human race, why should not he
sacrifice himself for me? if he came to a world that did not call
him, why should he not come to me who call upon him and pray to him?
if God once took on a form of flesh and blood, if He once inhabited a
human body, why find it strange that He should be present in my flesh
and blood? You want miracles, on condition that you are not to see
them; what is the meaning of such false modesty? When one believes a
thing, one must live in the heart of this belief, one must see it and
feel it everywhere; when one possesses a god, it is in order that he
may walk and breathe on earth. He whom we adore must not be relegated
to a corner of the heavens, or forbidden to appear in our midst; and
they must not be made sport of, who see him, and feel him, and touch
him. Free-thinkers may laugh, if they have the courage, at the priest
who believes that God is present in the Host that he holds in his
hands, and present in the temple when he officiates. They may laugh
at the peasant children who believe that Saints or the Virgin present
themselves before them to listen to their wants, but a true believer
cannot do otherwise than take all this seriously. Protestants take
baptism very seriously, and think it absolutely necessary to salvation.
Luther certainly believed in the devil; he saw him everywhere, in
storms, in fires, in the tumult that his passage along the streets
often excited, in the interruptions that occurred in his sermons; he
challenged, and threatened all devils, “were they as numberless as the
tiles of the roofs.” One day he even exorcised the Evil One, who had
been vociferating in the person of the audience, so efficiently that
the sermon, which opened in the midst of the greatest disturbance,
was finished in peace; the devil had been frightened. Why, then, do
orthodox Protestants, especially in our day, so genuinely wish to
stop arbitrarily short in their faith? Why believe that God or the
devil appeared to men two thousand years ago, and at no time since?
Why believe in the Gospel cures and not in the naïve legends that
are related of the Communion, or in the miracles at Lourdes? All
things hold together in a faith, and if you propose outraging human
reason, why not do it thoroughly? As Mr. Matthew Arnold observes, the
orthodox Protestant doctrine, in admitting that the Son of God could
substitute himself as an expiatory victim for man, condemned for the
fault of Adam,—in other words that he could suffer for a crime that
he had not committed for men who had not committed it either,—is only
to accept the following passage literally and rudely: “The son of man
is come to give his life as a ransom unto many.” From the moment that
one holds literally to a single text, why not do the same in regard to
others? In introducing a certain share of liberty into their faith,
the Protestants have also introduced a spirit of inconsequence; this
is its characteristic and its defect. Someone said to me once: “If I
should try to believe everything, I should end by believing nothing.”
This was Luther’s reasoning; he wished to make some allowances for
enlightenment; he hoped to preserve the faith by minimizing it. But
the limits are artificial. Only listen to Pascal, who possesses the
French talent for logic, and is at the same time a mathematician,
making light of Protestantism. “How I detest such nonsense!” he cries:
that is, not to believe in the Eucharist, etc. “If the Gospel is true,
if Jesus Christ is God, what difficulty is there in all that?” Nobody
saw more clearly than Pascal the things that, as he says, are “unjust”
in certain Christian dogmas, that are “shocking,” are “far-fetched,”
the “absurdities”; he saw it all and accepted it all. He accepted
everything or nothing. When one makes a bargain with faith, one does
not pick and choose; one takes all and gives all. It was Pascal who
said that atheism was a sign of strength of mind, but a strength
displayed in one direction only. One might turn that round and say
that Catholicism implies strength of mind, at least on one point.
Protestantism, though of a higher order in the evolution of belief,
remains to-day a mark of a certain weakness of mind in those who,
having made the first step toward freedom of thought, rest there; it
is a halt midway. At bottom, however, the two rival orthodoxies, over
which nowadays civilized nations dispute, are equally astonishing to
those who have passed beyond them.
_III. The dissolution of dogmatic faith in modern society._
[Sidenote: Dogmatic faith distanced by science.]
Can a dogmatic faith, whether narrow or broad, indefinitely coexist
with modern science? We think not. Science consists of two portions:
the constructive and the destructive. The constructive portion is
already far enough advanced, in modern society, to provide for certain
desiderata which dogma undertook formerly to supply. We have to-day,
for example, more extended and detailed information about the genesis
of the world than is found in the Bible. We are attaining by degrees a
certain number of facts relating to the affiliation of species. And all
the celestial or terrestrial phenomena which strike the eye are already
completely explained. The definitive _why_ has not been given, no
doubt; we even ask ourselves if there is one. But the _how_ has already
been in a great part dealt with. Let us not forget that religions
in the beginning took the place of physics; that physical theories
constituted for a long time an essential and preponderant part of them.
Nowadays physics and religion have been distinguished, and religion has
lost by the separation a large part of its power, which has passed over
to science.
[Sidenote: And undermined.]
The dissolvent and destructive aspect of science is not less important.
The first to present it in high relief were the physical sciences and
astronomy. All the ancient superstitions about the trembling of the
earth, eclipses, etc., which were a constant occasion of religious
exaltation, are destroyed, or nearly so, even among the populace.
Geology has overturned with a single stroke the traditions of most
religions. Physics has done away with miracles. The same almost may
be said of meteorology, which is so recent and has such a brilliant
future. God is still to a man of the people too often the sender of
rain and good weather, the Indra of the Hindus. A priest told me the
other day, in the best faith in the world, that the prayers of his
parishioners had brought the country three days of sunshine. In a
religious town if rain falls the day of a religious procession, and
stops shortly before the time of setting out, the people unhesitatingly
believe that a miracle has been performed. Sailors, who depend
so entirely on atmospheric perturbations, are more inclined to
superstition. The minute the weather can be more or less accurately
foretold and guarded against, all these superstitions are doomed. It
is thus that fear of thunder is rapidly subsiding at the present day;
this fear formed an important factor in the formation of the ancient
religions. By inventing the lightning-rod, Franklin did more to destroy
superstition than the most active propaganda could have done.
[Sidenote: Experiment in miracles.]
As M. Renan has remarked, we might even in our day demonstrate
scientifically the non-existence of miraculous interference in the
affairs of this world and the inefficiency of requests to God to
modify the natural course of things; one might, for example, minister
to patients according to the same methods, in two adjoining rooms of
a hospital; for the one set of patients a priest might pray, and one
might see whether the prayer would appreciably modify the means of
recovery. The result of this sort of experiment on the existence of a
special providence is moreover easy to foretell, and it is doubtful
whether any educated priest would lend himself to it.
[Sidenote: Religion and physiology and psychology.]
The sciences of physiology and psychology have explained to us in
a natural way a multitude of phenomena of the nervous system which
we were forced until recently to attribute to the marvelous, or to
trickery, or to divine influence, or to the devil.
[Sidenote: Religion and history.]
Finally, history is attacking not only the object of religion,
but religions themselves, by displaying all the sinuosities and
uncertainties of the thought that constructed them; the primitive
contradictions, corrected for better or for worse at some later period,
the genesis of the precisest dogmas by the gradual juxtaposition of
vague and heterogeneous ideas. Religious criticism, the elements of
which will sooner or later find their way into elementary instruction,
is the most terrible weapon that could be used against religious
dogmatism; it has produced and will produce its effect in Protestant
countries, where theology passionately engages the multitude. Religious
faith tends to give place to curiosity about religion; we understand
more readily the things we do not so absolutely believe, and we can be
more disinterestedly interested in the things that no longer fill us
with a sacred horror. But the explanation of positive religion seemed
destined to be absolutely the opposite of its justification: to write
the history of religions is to write a damaging criticism of them.
When one endeavours to come to close quarters with their foundation in
reality, one finds it retire before one little by little and ultimately
disappear like the place where the rainbow rests upon the earth: one
believes that one has discovered in religion a bond between heaven and
earth, a pledge of alliance and hope; it is an optical illusion which
science at once corrects and explains.
[Sidenote: Religion undermined by primary instruction.]
Primary instruction, which is sometimes made, nowadays, a subject of
ridicule, is also an altogether recent institution of which in former
times there scarcely existed a trace, and which profoundly modifies
all of the terms of every social and religious problem. The modicum
of elementary instruction that the modern schoolboy possesses, in
especial if one adds some few notions of religious history, would
alone suffice to put him on his guard against a great many forms of
superstition. Formerly it was the custom for a Roman soldier to embrace
the religion of any, and of every country, in which he was stationed
for a considerable space of time; on his return home he would set up an
altar to the distant gods that he had made his own: Sabazius, Adonis,
the goddess of Syria, or Asiatic Bellona, the Jupiter of Baalbec, or
the Jupiter of Doliche. To-day our soldiers and mariners bring back
from their travels little more than an incredulous tolerance, a gently
disrespectful smile in relation to gods in general.
[Sidenote: And by the perfection of the means of communication.]
The perfection of means of communication is also one of the great
obstacles to the maintenance of a dogmatic faith; nothing shelters
a belief like the abyss of a deep valley or the meanderings of an
unnavigable river. The last surviving believers in the religions of
antiquity were the peasants—_pagani_; whence the word pagan. But
to-day the country is being thrown open, mountains are being pierced,
the perpetually increasing activity in the movement of things and
of people results in the circulation of ideas, in a lowering of the
pretensions of the faith, and this levelling down must inevitably
continue step by step with the progress of science. In all times it
has been observed that the effect of travelling alters one’s beliefs.
To-day one travels standing still: the intellectual horizon changes
for one, whether one will or not. Men like Papins, Watts, Stephenson,
have done as much for the propagation of free-thought as the boldest of
philosophers. Even in our days the piercing of the Isthmus of Suez will
probably have done more for the enlightenment of the Hindus than the
conscientious efforts of Râm Mohun Roy or of Keshub.
[Sidenote: And by the development of commerce and industry.]
Among the causes which will tend in the future to eliminate the dogma
of a special providence, let us note the development of the arts—even
the art of commerce and of industry, which is still in its very
beginnings. Merchants and workmen, equally, have learned already to
rely upon no one but their own individual selves, to rely each upon
his own initiative, his personal ingenuity; he knows that to work
is to pray, not in the sense that his labour possesses some sort of
mystical value but because its value is real and within his reach;
and he acquires by that very fact a vivid and increasing sense of
responsibility. Compare, for instance, the life of a pointsman (that
of a working-man) with the life of a soldier, and you will see that
the conduct of the first is of necessity reflective, and develops
in him a sense of responsibility, whereas the second—accustomed to
march he knows not where, to obey, he knows not why, to vanquish
or be vanquished he knows not how—lives among circumstances which
naturally inspire in him a conception of irresponsibility, of divine
chance, or of hazard. Moreover, whenever industry does not treat the
workman like a machine but forces him to act consciously and with
reflection, its natural effect is to enfranchise the mind. And the
same thing is true of commerce; although in commerce a more important
rôle is played, by mere lying in wait—mere passivity; the merchant
waits for a purchaser, and his coming or not coming depends upon
something else. The superstitions of commerce, however, will grow
feebler as the functions of personal initiative and activity become
more extensive. Thirty years ago in a very religious town there existed
a number of small merchants who looked upon it as a matter of duty
not to examine their account book till the end of the year: it would
be, they said, a distrust of God to ascertain too often whether they
were losing or gaining; it would bring bad luck; the less attention
you pay to your income the greater it grows. Add that, thanks to this
sort of reasoning, which for the rest was not altogether without a
certain naïve logic, the merchants spoken of did not do an especially
brilliant business. In modern commerce the “positive” spirit—restless
intelligence and calculation outstripping chance—tends to become the
true and sole element of success; as to the risks which, in spite of
every precaution, still remain, they are covered by insurance.
[Sidenote: And by the practice of insurance.]
Insurance, then, is a conception altogether modern, whose operation is
to substitute the direct action of man for the intervention of God in
private affairs, and which looks to the recompense for a misfortune
before it has happened. It is probable that insurance, which dates only
some few years back and is spreading rapidly, will be applied some
day to almost every form of accident to which man is liable, will be
adapted to every circumstance of life, will accompany us everywhere,
will envelop us in a protecting net; and agriculture and navigation,
and those pursuits generally in which human initiative plays the
smallest part, in which one must dance attendance upon the special
benediction of heaven and ultimate success is always contingent, will
become increasingly independent and free. It is possible that the
notion of a special providence will some day be completely eliminated
from the sphere of economics; everything that in any manner whatsoever
is capable of being estimated in terms of money will be covered by an
insurance, shielded from accident, made independent of divine favour.
[Sidenote: And the progress of medical knowledge.]
There remains the purely personal sphere, the physical and moral
accidents which may befall us, the maladies that may come upon
ourselves and those who belong to us. That is the sphere in which
the majority of men feel their will most feeble, their perspicacity
most at fault. Listen to a member of the lower classes on the subject
of physiology or medicine, and you will understand how deep is the
abasement of their intelligence in this matter; and often, indeed, even
men of a more extended education are possessed of no more knowledge
than they on such points. Speaking generally, our ignorance of hygiene
and the most elementary notions of medicine is such that we are
helpless in the presence of physical evil; and it is because of this
helplessness, at the very spot precisely where we most need help, that
we seek for an outlet for an embarrassed volition and a restless hope
and find it in a petition addressed to God. Many people never think of
praying except when ill, or when they see persons dear to them ill. As
always, so here, a sense of an absolute dependence provokes a return
of religious sentiment. Just in proportion as instruction spreads,
just in proportion as the natural sciences become of service, we feel
ourselves armed with a certain power, even in the face of physical
accident. In more than usually pious families, the physician scarcely
assumed formerly any other character than that of an instrument of
special providence; one had confidence in him, less on the score of
his talent than of his sanctity; that confidence was absolute; one
washed one’s hands of all responsibility, as primitive people do in the
presence of the sorcerers and “priest physicians.” Nowadays, however,
the physician is beginning to be looked upon as a man like another, who
must rely upon himself, who receives no inspiration from on high, and
who must, in consequence, be chosen with care, and aided and sustained
in his task. It is understood that the remedies employed by him are
innocent of mystery, that their operation is uniform, that the matter
is altogether one of intelligence in their use; and instead of putting
one’s self, like so much brute matter, into the physician’s hands, one
does one’s best to co-operate with him. When we hear someone calling
for help and are free to run to him, does it ever occur to us nowadays
to fall upon our knees? No; we should even consider a passive prayer
as an indirect form of homicide. The epoch is past when Ambroise Paré
could say modestly: “I poulticed him, God cured him.” The fact is, God
does not cure those whom the physician does not poultice properly. The
progress of natural science will result really in a sort of preventive
insurance, no longer confined wholly to the sphere of economics; and
we shall be able some day to insure ourselves, not simply against the
economical consequences of such and such an accident, but against
the accident itself; we shall foresee it and avoid it, as we not
infrequently nowadays foresee and avoid poverty. And finally, in
respect even to unavoidable evils, it will occur to no one to rely upon
anything but human science and human effort.
[Sidenote: Progress in matters of belief since heathen antiquity and
the Middle Ages.]
Owing to the causes above enumerated, how far we have travelled since
the time of the ancients and the Middle Ages! In the first place we no
longer lend credence to oracles or to predictions. The law at least no
longer goes the length of lending credence to them, and even punishes
those who endeavour to speculate upon a naïveté of their more innocent
neighbours. Soothsayers at the present day are no longer lodged in
Temples. And in no case are philosophers and higher personages among
their clients. We are far from the time when Socrates and his disciples
made a pilgrimage to consult the oracle, when the gods spoke, and
gave advice, and regulated the conduct of men, and took the place of
attorneys, of physicians, of judges, and decided upon peace and war.
If it had been affirmed to a pagan that the day would come when man
would find the oracle at Delphi a superfluity, he would have been as
frankly surprised as a Christian is to-day when he hears it affirmed
that cathedrals, priests, and religious ceremonies will some day become
a superfluity.
[Sidenote: Tendency toward simplicity and uniformity.]
The rôle which prophecies played in the religion of the Hebrews is
well known. In the Middle Ages certain prophecies, such as that of the
millennium, were publicly and miserably put to the proof. Since that
time dogmatic religion, in the fear of compromising itself, has stood
aloof from oracles and prophecies, preferring increase of security to
extent of influence. Thus by degrees authoritative religion has come
to renounce its sway over one of the most important portions of human
life, which it pretended formerly to possess a knowledge of, and to
regulate—the future. It contents itself to-day with the present. Its
predictions, ever vaguer and more vague, nowadays bear only on the
period beyond the grave; it contents itself with promising heaven to
the faithful—which the Catholic religion indeed goes the length of in
some measure securing for them by absolution. And one may recognize
in the confessional a certain substitute for the divination of former
times. The hand of the priest opens or shuts the door of heaven for
the believer kneeling in the shadow of the confessional; he wields a
power in some respects greater than that of the Pythoness who might
determine with a word the fate of battles. Confession itself, however,
has disappeared in the stronger and younger offshoots of Christianity.
In orthodox Protestantism one is one’s self the judge of one’s own
future, and possesses no other clew to one’s destiny than the dictum
of one’s own conscience, with all its uncertainty upon its head. Owing
to this transformation dogmatic faith in the word of a priest or a
prophet tends to become a simple reliance on the voice of conscience,
which becomes ever less and less authoritative, ever more and more
feeble in the face of doubt. Faith in oracles and in the visible
finger of Providence in this world has become to-day simply a somewhat
hesitating reliance upon an inner oracle and an together transcendental
Providence. This is one of the items in respect to which religious
evolution may be considered as already something like complete, and
religious individualism as on the point of replacing obedience to the
priest, and the negation of the marvellous as substituted for antique
superstition.
[Sidenote: Belief in God falls with belief in devils.]
The strength of the belief in a personal God has been in all times
proportionate to the strength of the belief in a devil—we have just
seen an illustration of it in the case of Luther. In effect these
two beliefs are correlatives; they are the opposite faces of one and
the same anthropomorphism. Well, in our days, belief in the devil
is incontestably becoming feebler; and this enfeeblement is even
especially characteristic of the present epoch; there has at no other
time been anything to equal it. There is not an educated person to be
found in whom the notion of a devil does not excite a smile. That,
believe me, is a sign of the times, a manifest proof of the decline
of dogmatic religion. Wherever the power of dogmatic religion by an
exception to the general course of things has retained its vitality,
and retained it, as in America, even to the point of giving birth
to new dogmas, the fear of the devil has subsisted in its entirety;
wherever, as in more enlightened regions than America, this fear no
longer exists except as a symbol or a myth, the intensity and the
fecundity of the religious sentiment decline inevitably in the same
degree. The fate of Javeh is bound up with that of Lucifer; angels
and devils go hand in hand, as in some fantastic mediæval dance. The
day when Satan and his followers shall be definitively vanquished and
annihilated in the minds of the people, the celestial powers will not
have long to live.
* * * * *
[Sidenote: Results.]
To sum up, in all these relations, dogmatic faith—and in especial,
such as is narrow, authoritative, intolerant, and at enmity with a
spirit of science—seems on every account destined to disappear, or to
survive, if at all, among a small number of believers. Every doctrine,
no matter how moral or how elevating, seems to us nowadays to lose
these attributes and to become degraded from the moment it proposes
to impose itself upon the human mind as a dogma. Dogma happily—that
crystallization of faith—is an unstable compound; like certain complex
crystals, it is apt to explode, under a concentrated ray of light, into
dust. Modern criticism supplies the ray. If Catholicism, in pursuit of
religious unity, logically results in the doctrine of infallibility,
modern criticism in the course of its establishment of the relativity
of human knowledge and of the essential fallibility of intelligence
in general, tends toward religious individualism and toward the
dissolution of every universal or “Catholic” dogma. And on that score
orthodox Protestantism is itself menaced with ruin, for it also has
preserved in its dogmas an element of Catholicity, and by that very
fact of intolerance, if not practical and civil, at least theoretical
and religious.