The Faith of the Millions Part 9

[Footnote 81: P.F. 17.]

[Footnote 82: P.F. 17, 18. "The conclusion is therefore certain that the land at this particular spot must have sunk twenty feet, and again risen as much so as to bring the floor of the temple to its present position, &c. Similar proofs may be multiplied to any extent.... In fact the more we study geology the more we are impressed with the fact that the normal states of the earth is and always has been one of incessant changes."

(M.S. 35--9.)]

[Footnote 83: i.e., Lyell says: Present causes could give these effects, given the time. Laing says: Therefore, since they have given these effects, we must suppose the time.]

[Footnote 84: P.F. 18]

[Footnote 85: P.F. 74.]

[Footnote 86: Ibid.]

[Footnote 87: P.F. 20.]

[Footnote 88: M.S. 34, 41.]

[Footnote 89: P.F. 6.]

[Footnote 90: P.F. 23.]

[Footnote 91: M.S. 46.]

[Footnote 92: P.F. 24.]

[Footnote 93: P.F. 32.]

[Footnote 94: P.F. 66.]

[Footnote 95: "Thus giving to palaeolithic man no greater antiquity than perhaps about 20,000 to 30,000 years, while, should he be restricted to the so-called post-glacial period, the antiquity need not go back further than from 10,000 to 15,000 years before the time of neolithic man." (57.)]

[Footnote 96: P.F. 67.]

[Footnote 97: M.S. 109.]

[Footnote 98: Prestwich evinces the same recalcitrance according to the _Nineteenth Century_, December 4, 1894, p. 961, being one of the geologists of high standing "who have lately come to believe in some sudden and extensive submergence of continental dimensions in very recent times."]

[Footnote 99: 74.]

[Footnote 100: P.F. 84.]

[Footnote 101: P.F. 69, 70.]

[Footnote 102: P.F. 70.]

[Footnote 103: H.O. 364.]

[Footnote 104: H.O. 388.]

XXI.

"THE MAKING OF RELIGION."

Some twelve years since we read Mr. Tylor's well-known and able work on _Primitive Culture_, and were much impressed with the evident fair-mindedness and courageous impartiality which distinguished the author so notably from the Clodds, the Allens, the Laings, and other popularizers of the uncertain results of evolution-philosophy. For this very reason we made a careful a.n.a.lysis of the whole work, and more particularly of his "animistic" hypothesis, and laid it aside, waiting, according to our wont, for further light bearing upon a difficulty wherewith we felt ourselves then incompetent to deal. This further light has been to some extent supplied to us by Mr. Andrew Lang's _Making of Religion_, which deals mainly with that theory of animism which is propounded by Mr. Tylor, and unhesitatingly accepted, dogmatically preached, and universally a.s.sumed, by the crowd of sciolists who follow like jackals in the lion's wake. Without denying the value of our conceptions of G.o.d and of the human soul, Mr. Tylor believes that these conceptions, however true in themselves, originated on the part of primitive man in fallacious reasoning from the data of dreams and of like states of illusory vision. He a.s.sumes, perhaps with some truth, that the distinction between dream and reality is more faintly marked in the less developed mind; in the child than in the adult, in the savage than in the civilized man. Hence a belief arises in a filmy phantasmal self that wanders abroad in sleep and leaves the body untenanted, and meets and converses with other phantasmal selves. Nor is it hard to see how death, being viewed as a permanent sleep, should be ascribed to the final abandonment of the body by its "dream-stuff" occupant. Whether as dreaded or loved or both, this ever-gathering crowd of disembodied spirits wins for itself a certain _cultus_ of praise and propitiation, and reverence, and is humoured with food-offerings and similar sacrifices. Nor is it long before the form of an earthly polity is transferred to that unearthly city of the dead, till for one reason or another some jealous ghost gains a monarchic supremacy over his brethren, and thus polytheism gives place to monotheism. It need not be that this supreme deity is always conceived as a defunct ancestor, once embodied, but no longer in the body. Rather it would seem that the primitive savage, having once arrived at the conception of a ghost, pa.s.ses by generalization to that of incorporeal beings unborn and undying, of spirits whose presence and power is revealed in stocks and stones, or in idols shaped humanwise--spirits who preside over trees, rivers, and elements, over species and cla.s.ses and departments of Nature, over tribes and peoples and nations; until, as before, the struggle for existence or some other cause gives supremacy to some one G.o.d fittest to survive either through being more conceivable, or more powerful, or in some other way more popular than the rest of the pantheon.

Again, it is a.s.sumed that the G.o.ds of primitive man are non-ethical, that they do not "make for righteousness;" that they are at most jealous powers to be feared and propitiated. When the savage speaks of a G.o.d as good, he only means "favourable to me," "on my side;" he does not mean "good to me if I am good." G.o.d is conceived first as power and force; then as non-moral wisdom, or cunning, and only in the very latest developments as holy and just and loving.

Starting with the a.s.sumptions of evolutionists, the theory is plausible enough. Nor is it inconceivable that G.o.d, without using error and evil directly as a means to truth and good, should pa.s.sively permit error for the sake of the truth that He foresees will come out of it. Astrology was not incipient astronomy; nor was alchemy primitive chemistry; the end and aim in each case was wholly different. Yet the pseudo-science gave birth to the true; as false premisses often lead by bad logic to sound conclusions. Totemism, "a perfectly crazy and degrading belief,"

says Mr. Lang, "rendered possible--nay, inevitable--the union of hostile groups into large and relatively peaceful tribal societies.... We should never have educated the world thus; and we do not see why it should have been thus done. But we are very anthropomorphic, and totally ignorant of the conditions of the problem." In like manner it might have been, that G.o.d willed to let men wander through the slums and backways of animism into the open road of theism.

But our concern is not with what might have been, but with what was.

Mr. Lang contends, first, that belief in spirits and in a circ.u.mambient spiritual world, more probably originated in certain real or imaginary experiences of supernormal phenomena, than in a fallacious explanation of dreams; then, that belief in a supreme G.o.d is most probably not derived from or dependent upon belief in ghosts.

Consistently with the whole trend of his thought in his recent work connected with psychical research, in _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_, in _c.o.c.k-Lane and Common-Sense_, Mr. Lang begins by entering a protest against the att.i.tude observed towards the subject by contemporary science, especially by anthropology, which, as having been so lately "in the same condemnation," might be expected to show itself superior to that injustice which it had itself so much reason to complain of. Yet anthropology, abandoning the first principles of modern science, still refuses to listen to the facts alleged by psychical research, and justifies its refusal on Hume's oft-exploded fallacy, namely, on an _a priori_ conviction of their impossibility and therefore of their non-occurrence.

However wide the range of experience upon which physical generalizations are based, it can never be so wide as on this score alone to prove the inherent possibility of exceptions; more especially when we consider the confinement of the human race to what is relatively a momentary existence on a whirling particle of dust in a sandstorm. There may indeed be abundant evidence of a certain impetus or tendency enduring from a comparatively distant and indefinite past and making for an equally indefinite future; but there is not, cannot be evidence against the possibility of interference from other laws whose paths, at points unknown and incalculable, intersect those followed by the (to us) ordinary course of events.

And in this wholesome agnosticism we are confirmed when we see that while some animals are deprived of certain senses which we possess, and all of them of the gift of reason, others are apparently endowed with senses unknown to us, and are taught by seeming instincts which surpa.s.s what reason could effect; whence we may infer that the likelihood of our being _en rapport_ with the greater part of the _possible_ phenomena amidst which we live, or of our possessing all possible senses or the best of those possible, is infinitely small. What a magician a man with eyes would be among a race of sightless men; or a man with ears among a deaf population! How studiously would the scientists explain the effects of sight as produced by subtilty of hearing; and those of hearing as due to abnormal sensitiveness in some other respect!

But though there be no _a priori_ impossibility in deviations from the beaten track, yet there is a certain _a priori_ improbability which may seem to justify those who refuse to go into alleged instances of the supernormal. There is a story against Thomas Aquinas, that on being invited by a frisky brother-monk to come and see a cow flying, or some such marvel, he gravely came and saw not, but expressed himself far more astounded at the miracle that a religious man should say "the thing which was not." This is certainly a glorious ant.i.thesis to Hume's position. Whether we take it to ill.u.s.trate the Saint's extreme lack of humour, or a subtler depth of humour veiled under stolidity, or his rigorous veracity, or his guileless confidence in the veracity of others, we certainly cannot approve it as an example of the att.i.tude we ought to observe with regard to every newly recounted marvel. Truly there might be more liberality, more enlightenment, more imagination in such a ready credulity, than in the wall-eyed, ear-stopping scepticism of popular science; but the mere inner possibility of a recounted marvel does not oblige us to search into the matter unless the evidence offered bear some reasonable proportion to the burden it has to support. That this is the case as regards crystal-gazing, telepathy, possession, and kindred manifestation, is what Mr. Lang contends; nor would he have any quarrel with the anthropologists were they not fully impressed with the importance of similar or even weaker c.u.mulative evidence for conclusions which happen to be in harmony with their preconceived hypotheses. Where such evidence exists it must be faced, and at least its existence must be explained.

True criticism should either account for the seeming breach of uniformity, by reducing it to law; or else should show how the a.s.sertion if false ever gained credence; but in no case is it scientific to put aside, on an _a priori_ a.s.sumption, evidence that is offered from all sides in great abundance. Psychic research is daily applying to that tangled ma.s.s of world-wide evidence ancient and modern for the existence of an X-region of experience, those same critical and historical principles which created modern science. Men who, as often as not, have no religion or no superst.i.tion themselves, see that both religion and superst.i.tion are universal phenomena, and cannot be neglected by those who would study humanity historically and scientifically. Even if there be nothing in hallucinations, apparitions, scrying, second-sight, poltergeists, and the rest, there is a great deal in the fact that belief in these things is as wide and as old as the world; it is a fact to be explained. "Each man," says Meister, "commonly defends himself as long as possible from casting out the idols which he wors.h.i.+ps in his soul; from acknowledging a master-error, and admitting any truth that brings him to despair;" and indeed a system as complete and compact as that of Mr. Spencer or Mr. Tylor is apt to become an intellectual idol forbidding under pain of infidelity all inquiries that might cause it to totter on its throne, or which might unravel in an instant what has been woven by years of hard and honest thought. Few of us are in a position to cast stones on this score; still, recognizing the weakness more clearly in others than in ourselves, we are justified in reckoning with it, and in discounting for the unwillingness of men of science to listen to facts inconsistent with long-cherished theories, and for their tendency to acc.u.mulate and magnify evidence on the other side. "If the facts not fitting their theories are little observed by authorities so popular as Mr. Huxley and Mr. Spencer; if _instantiae contradictoriae_ are ignored by them, or left vague; if these things are done in the green tree, we may easily imagine what shall be done in the dry. But we need not war with hasty _vulgarisateurs_ and headlong theorists."

We cannot for a moment question the sincerity of purpose and honesty of intention of many of the leaders of modern scientific enlightenment, whatever we may think of the said crowd of _vulgarisateurs_--those camp-followers who bring disgrace on every respectable cause. But beside wilful bias and unfairness, there is unconscious bias from which none of us are free, but from which we need to be delivered by mutual criticism; for, however much a man can see of himself, he can never get behind his own back. Of such unwitting dishonesty men of thought are abundantly guilty, when deeming themselves to be governed only by reason, they are in fact slaves to some intellectual fas.h.i.+on of the day. Not one of them in a thousand would dare to appear in public with the clothes of last century, or to face the laughter of a crowd of his compeers. Hence a certain indocility and rigidness of mind which they only escape who live out of the fas.h.i.+on or have strength to lead it or to live above it.

Simple, whether from greatness or littleness, they escape the narrowing influence inseparable from being identified, even in their own mind, with a school or coterie; and can afford to say things as they see them.

Contemporary fas.h.i.+on says at present that there are to be no miracles, nothing supernormal; whatever cannot be reduced in any way to known laws and causes can be flatly denied, for the supposition of unknown causes and laws is rank heresy. Until more recent years, it was not permitted to listen to or show any disposition to investigate the narratives of phenomena which have since been "explained" and reduced to such legalized causes as hysteria or hypnotism, and even (of late) to thought-transference. But since this happy reconciliation has been effected, such stories are allowed to be believed on ordinary evidence, although the accounts of other "uncla.s.sed" supernormal marvels coming from the same lips with the same attestation are still brushed aside as traveller's tales, or as the puerilities of hagiography--not worth a thought. One would think that some kind of apology or reparation were due to ecclesiastical tradition, which was credited with wholesale lying so long as its recorded wonders were cla.s.sed among impossibilities by the intellectual fas.h.i.+on-mongers, but it seems we have only partly escaped the reproach of knavery to incur that of wholesale folly for not having seen that these apparent miracles were but forms of hysteria or hypnotism.

Yet what is hysteria and what does it really explain? [1] Surely the etymology throws no light on the subject! Is it then merely a name for the unknown cause of phenomena every whit as strange as those which were held incredible till their like had been actually witnessed and forced upon the unwilling eyes of science beyond all possibility of denial? Is it that science blindly refused even to weigh the evidence for abnormal facts till the same or similar had become matters of personal observation? Is it that every reported breach of her a.s.sumed uniformities is incredible, because impossible, until the possibility has been proved by some fact which is then named, erected into a cla.s.s, a cause, a law, and used to explain away similar facts formerly denied, and is thus taken into that bundle of generalizations called the "laws of nature"? The ancients a.s.sumed all heavenly motion to be circular of necessity, and where facts gave against them, they patched the matter up with an epicycle or two. Are not hysteria, hypnotism, and thought-transference of the nature of epicycles? It is now confessed that the mind can so affect and dominate the body as to produce blisters and wounds by mere force of suggestion and expectancy; that a like "faith" can cure, not only such ailments as are clearly connected with the nerves, but others where such connection is not yet traceable. And this is supposed to tell in some way against like marvels reported by hagiology, as though they were explained by being observed and named.

Yet what did that supposed marvellousness consist in, except in a seeming revelation of the power and superiority of mind over matter, and of things unseen over things seen and palpable; and in proving that there were more wonders in heaven and earth than were dreamt of by a crude and self-satisfied materialism? They were taken as evidence of a circ.u.mambient X-region where the laws of mechanics were set at defiance and where the fetters of time and place were loosened or cast aside.

Such an X-region being supposed by every supernatural religion and denied by most of those who deny religion, and on the same grounds, its establishment by any kind of experiment is rightly considered in some sort to make for religion. Indeed, it is just on this account that the evidence for it is so opposed by those who are pre-occupied by the anti-religious bias of contemporary science. But unless hysterical effects can be shown to be ultimately due, not to mind, but to matter acting on matter, according to methods approved by materialism, hysteria remains a word-cause and no more, like the meat-cooking quality of the roasting-jack.

Hypnotism is a kindred cause in every way. It means sleep-ism; yet manifestly it deals with characteristics which are utterly unlike those of sleep; and it is precisely these that need to be explained away in conformity with received laws, unless we are to find in these phenomena evidence of such modes of being and operation as every kind of religion postulates. "Possession" is of course a fable; the superabundant world-wide, world-old evidence for the phenomenon was thrust aside without a glance, till hypnotic experiments brought to light what is called "alternating personality." As though this name had explained everything in accordance with materialism, forthwith it was permitted to believe the aforesaid evidence, provided one laughed loudly enough at the theory of "possession." It is allowed that the hypnotic patient may in some sense be said to be "possessed" by the hypnotiser for the time being; nay, even a certain chronic possession of this kind is observable. But an invisible hypnotiser and possession by a disembodied spirit is still out of fas.h.i.+on, notwithstanding all Mrs. Piper's efforts and Dr. Hodgson's audacious declaration of his not very willing belief that those who speak through her "are veritably the personalities they claim to be, and that they have survived the change we call death."

Thought-transference, however, promises to be a potent and popular solvent of psychic problems. Thought-transference was a supremely ludicrous supposition till comparatively recently; nor could there be any credible testimony for what was known antecedently to be quite impossible. But some way or other, facts which demanded a name were forced upon the direct observation of science, and so Mr. F. Podmore has written a book in which, a.s.suming thought-transference to be a scientifically recognized possibility, he proceeds to reduce many of the marvels collected by the S.P.R. to that simple and obvious cause, and to reject the residue on the sound old principle that what is known to be impossible cannot be true. Hallucinations, solitary and collective, and other perplexing instances are tortured into cases of thought-transfer with an ingenuity which we should smile at in a mediaeval scholastic explaining the universe by the four elements and the four temperaments.

But is not thought-transference itself lamentably unscientific? No; because we see that unconnected magnets affect one another sympathetically; and the brain being a sort of magnet may well affect distant brains. Thought is a kind of electricity, and electricity, if not exactly a fluid, yet may some day be liquefied and bottled. At all events, science has seen something very remotely a.n.a.logous to thought-transference and every whit as unintelligible and antecedently incredible till observed; and therefore it is permissible to listen to the evidence for it, and forced thereto, to accept the fact.

But have we really disposed of ghosts if we prove the appearance to be caused by a subjective modification of the perceiver's sensorium and not by a modification of the external medium--the air or the ether? Since it is a question of a spiritual substance independent of spatial dimensions and relations, said to be present only so far and where its effects and manifestations are present, what does it matter whether it reports itself by an effect outside or inside the percipient--whether it be a "vision sensible to feeling, as to sight," or but "a false creation proceeding from a heat-oppressed brain"? Is not this very distinction of outside and inside in the matter of perceptions open to no slight ambiguity? The savage, familiar with the electric sparks caused by the friction of deer-skins, ascribes the _aurora borealis_ to the friction of a jostling herd of celestial deer. "Nonsense," says science, after centuries of false hypotheses, "it is nothing more nor less than electricity." This is very much the way she is dealing with the supernormal at present; brus.h.i.+ng aside as wholly nonsensical, beliefs that envelope a core of useful fact in a wrapping of crude explanation, and then receiving the same facts as new discoveries, because she has fitted them into an involucre more to her own liking, though perhaps but little less crude. "Not deer-skin," says science, "but amber; not miracle, but faith-cure; not prophetic insight, but thought-transference; not apparition, but hallucination." And so with the rest.

Considering then the bias of the dominant scientific school, which makes it refuse even to examine the carefully gathered evidence of the S.P.R.; we need not wonder if the reports of travellers concerning the existence of like phenomena among savages and barbarians all over the world are dismissed with a certain _a priori_ superciliousness. Yet surely, on evolutionist principles, the only possible clue to the mode in which belief in spirits and in G.o.d may have originated with "primitive man,"

is the mode in which those beliefs are actually now sustained, and, so to say, "proved" by the most primitive specimens of existing humanity; by, for example, those bushmen of Australia whose facial angle and cerebral capacity is supposed to leave no room for much difference between their mind and that of the higher anthropoids. Doubtless it is hard to get anything like scientific evidence out of people so uncultivated, whose language and modes of conception are so alien to our own. Individual travellers, moreover, have been the victims of their own credulity, stupidity, self-conceit, and prejudice. "But the best testimony of the truth of the reports as to the actual belief in the facts, is the undesigned coincidence of the evidence from all quarters.

When the stories brought by travellers, ancient and modern, learned and unlearned, pious or sceptical, agree in the main, we have all the certainty that anthropology can offer."

From this ever-growing ma.s.s of evidence, it would appear that the universal belief among savages in a spirit-world is mainly strengthened and sustained, not by the phenomena of dreaming but by what Mr. Spencer would call "alleged" supernormal manifestations, such as those of clairvoyance, crystal-gazing, apparitions, miracles, prophecies, possession, and the like. For belief in such marvels exists beyond doubt, and furnishes a very obvious and logical basis for the further belief in the invisible causes of these visible effects; nor should we have recourse to an hypothetical and more indirect explanation of belief in a spirit-world when an actual and direct explanation is at hand. If we see the branch growing out of the tree, we need not inquire what trunk it sprang from, unless we have strong evidence that it is only a graft. All investigation tends to show that savages believe in spirits and in the spirit-world because they witness, or firmly believe they witness, supernormal phenomena.