THE NON-RELIGION OF THE FUTURE.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.
“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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
