History of Religion Part 2

We must now make some attempt to set forth the princ.i.p.al features of the religion of savages. It is an attempt of some difficulty; for savage religion is an immense and bewildering jungle of all manner of extraordinary growths. It is described in detail in large books and if we try to sum it up in a short statement, we may be told that essential features have been omitted. No one set of savages has anything that can be called a system, and different sets of savages are not alike. For the present purpose we are obliged to include under the name, tribes who occupy various positions in the scale of human advancement, and tribes in all sorts of geographical positions, in hot climates and in cold, both rude savages and those who are n.o.bler; and these will, of course, have a variety of ideas and needs, and in so far, different religions. After reading such a book as Mr.

Frazer's _Golden Bough_, or turning over the pages of Waitz and Gerland's _Anthropologie der Naturvolker_, one is inclined to regard it as a hopeless task to reduce savage religion to any compact statement.

Mr. Tylor's orderly collections, in his great book _Primitive Culture_, of materials bearing on different features of early religion are a help for which the student cannot be sufficiently thankful. After all, it is not the whole of savage religion that we are responsible for here, but only those parts of it that grew and survived in higher faiths. Remembering what has been said as to the uniformity of savage thought amid its great variety of forms, and looking for those parts of it which have proved to have life in them, rather than for what is merely curious and grotesque, we may venture on our task not without hope. In the present chapter we shall inquire what beings savages wors.h.i.+p as G.o.ds. Of these we shall find that there are several cla.s.ses; and it will be necessary to notice the great discussions which have arisen on the question which of these cla.s.ses of deities was first wors.h.i.+pped by man. The objects wors.h.i.+pped by men in low stages of civilisation may be arranged in four cla.s.ses, viz.--

1. Parts of nature (_a_) great, (_b_) small.

2. Spirits of ancestors and other spirits.

3. Objects supposed to be haunted by spirits (fetish-wors.h.i.+p).

4. A Supreme Being.

1. Nature-wors.h.i.+p.--It is not difficult to realise why early man turned to the great elements of nature as beings who could help him, and whom he ought, therefore, to cultivate. The farther we go back in civilisation, the less protection has man against the weather, the more do his subsistence and his comfort depend on the action of the sun, the winds, the rain. If, according to the habits of early thought, he conceived these beings as living like himself and as guided by feelings and motives similar to his own, he could not fail to wish to open up communication with them. That simple view, that they were living beings with feelings like his own, was enough to go upon. In his anxieties for food or warmth he could not fail to think of the beings who, he had observed, had power to supply him with these comforts, of the rain which he had noticed was able to make food grow, of the sun whose warmth he knew. The thunderstorm was a being who had power to put an end to a long drought; the winds could break the trees, could dry up the wet earth, or could bring rain.

Heaven was over all, and the Earth was the supporter and fertile producer of all; from her all life came. The moon as well as the sun was a friendly power, nay, in some climates, more friendly. Fire was a living being certainly, on whom much depended; and so was the great lake or the ocean. This is what M. Reville calls the great Nature-wors.h.i.+p, in comparison with the minor Nature-wors.h.i.+p to be noticed presently.

We do not now enter on the subject of mythology; that is to say, of the names men very early began to give to the great natural objects of wors.h.i.+p, the characters they ascribed to them, the stories they told about them. That process of myth-making began very early, and is to be found at work in every part of the world. But at first it was simply the natural being itself, conceived as living, that was wors.h.i.+pped, not a spirit or a person thought to dwell in it. Of this, abundant evidence has survived in the great religions. Jupiter is just the sky, the Greek G.o.d Helios is just the sun, and the G.o.ddess Selene the moon. In China heaven itself is wors.h.i.+pped to this day.

The Babylonians wors.h.i.+pped the stars. The Vedic G.o.ds are primarily the elements. From savage life examples of this earliest state of matters can also be quoted, though mythology has nearly everywhere greatly confused it. The Mincopies adore the sun as a beneficent deity, the moon as an inferior G.o.d. To the Natchez the sun is the supreme G.o.d; with some tribes of North America the chief G.o.d is heaven blowing, the sky with a wind in it, what Longfellow calls the "Great Spirit" or blowing. The Incas invoked together the Creator and the Sun and Thunder. Thunder was one of the great G.o.ds of the Germans. The Samoyede bows to the Sun every morning and every evening and says. "When thou arisest I also arise; when thou settest I also betake myself to rest." To the Ojibways Fire is a divine being, to be well entertained, with whom no liberties must be taken. In every land men are to be found who wors.h.i.+p the Earth as a great deity, calling her by her own name and serving her with suitable rites. In the _Prometheus_ of aeschylus the hero addresses his appeal as follows to the beings he regards as G.o.ds of old race who will sympathise with him against the upstart Zeus:--

Ether of Heaven and Winds untired of wing, Rivers whose fountains fail not, and thou Sea, Laughing in waves innumerable! O Earth, All-mother!--Yea and on the Sun I call, Whose orb scans all things; look on me and see How I, a G.o.d, am wronged by G.o.ds.

_Lewis Campbell_, line 85 _sq_.

The minor Nature-wors.h.i.+p has to do with rivers and springs, with trees and groves, with crops and fruits, with rocks and stones, and with the lower animals. Here also we must bear in mind the habit of mind of early man, who regarded all things as animated and as like himself. It was not necessary for one who thought in this way to suppose that the spring was haunted by a nymph or the oak inhabited by a dryad, before he felt that the spring or the oak had a claim on him, and brought offerings to secure their friends.h.i.+p. The Nile and the Ganges did not become sacred by having a mythical being added to them as their spirit; they were themselves sacred beings. Every country is studded with names which reveal to the scholar the primeval sanct.i.ty of the spots they belong to; the mountain, the grove, and the individual tree, the rocky gorge, the rock, the gra.s.sy knoll, each was once an object of reverence. Britain is full of sacred wells, which once received prayers and offerings. There is no animal that has not once been wors.h.i.+pped. A marked feature of primitive life also is the wors.h.i.+p of nature not in its particular objects but in its living processes. In a mult.i.tude of curious rites, some of which still survive in local usages, and have only recently been explained, primitive man brought himself into relations with nature in its growth, decay, and resurrection. He sympathised with it and imitated it, and he thus sought to make himself sure of the benefits which he saw bestowed by some power which he apprehended in its processes and believed able to further him.

2. Ancestor-wors.h.i.+p.--A set of beings of a very different kind comes next. If man found in the world which he beheld outside him a number of objects he could make G.o.ds, his domestic experience forced him to consider certain beings of a different kind, of whom the outward world could tell him nothing. The wors.h.i.+p of the dead, of ancestors, is diffused throughout nearly the whole of antiquity, it is practised by most savages. Man at an early stage does not fully realise the meaning of death. He interprets death after the a.n.a.logy of dreams, in which he judges that the spirit leaves the body and traverses distant regions, coming back to the body again when the journey is ended. A vision is to him an instance of the same thing. He sees a friend, who, he afterwards learns, was far from him at the time, and he judges that it was the spirit of his friend which visited him. Thus there arises in his mind the conception of a human spirit which is able to leave the body and dwell at a distance from it. It is called by various names,--the shade, the image, the heart, as perhaps when Elisha says his heart went with Gehazi when he went to meet Naaman the Syrian (2 Kings v. 26), the breath, the soul. When the breath or spirit goes away and stays away (in spite of efforts made to bring it back) the man dies. But the spirit is not dead. It has gone away and is staying somewhere else. The spirit resembles the body in shape, but it is of a thin and light consistence, and is able to move about and to pa.s.s through the smallest openings, to make unpleasant noises, and to cause its presence to be felt in a variety of ways. In the very earliest times, the savage regards the spirit which has left the house as an enemy, and uses a variety of precautions to keep it from coming back to trouble him (vampires, ghosts, _lemures_). Whether from such fear or from more liberal motives, much is done to please the spirits of the departed and to increase their comfort in the abodes to which they have gone. At their burial or cremation all they may be supposed to want where they are going, _i.e._ the things they used on earth, are made to accompany them; food and weapons are placed beside them; servants are killed whose spirits are to wait on them, even a wife, voluntarily or without being asked, gives up her earthly life to accompany her husband. Offerings of food and drink are made to them afterwards, prayers are addressed to them, memorials of them, of various kinds, are preserved in the houses they occupied.

It was the universal belief of the early world that the person continued to exist after the death of the body; and this furnished the materials for a religion which was more widely prevalent in antiquity than the wors.h.i.+p of any G.o.d. In some forms of it, indeed, the spirit appears to have been treated as an enemy, and this wors.h.i.+p might be judged to fall short of religion, which is the cultivation, not the avoidance, of intercourse with higher powers. The savage has no hope from the spirit, and does not seek his intercourse. But in most forms of the belief in the continued life of the departed, other sentiments than fear prevail; natural affection is felt for the lost relative; the ancestor represents the family, to which the individual is called to subordinate and to some extent even to sacrifice himself; the spirit of the dead is the upholder of a family tradition which the living must hold sacred. Even in those cases in which nothing but fear is apparent, these latter sentiments may also be to some extent operative.

3. Fetish-wors.h.i.+p.--The early world has still another kind of deity.

In the case of all those we have considered, the G.o.d stands in some respect above the wors.h.i.+pper; man reverences the sun, spirit, or animal, for some quality in them that is admirable or that gives them a hold over him; they are in some ways beyond him. Among certain sets of savages, however, notably in South Africa, this feature of religion partially disappears, and objects are reverenced not for any intrinsic quality in them that makes them worthy of regard, but because of a spirit which is supposed to be connected with them.

Stones, trees, twigs, pieces of bark, roots, corn, claws of birds, teeth, skin, feathers, articles of human manufacture, any conceivable object, will be held in reverence by the savage and regarded as embodying a spirit. Anything that strikes his fancy as being out of the common he will take up and add to his museum of objects, each of which has in it a hidden power. That power, be it repeated, is not connected with the natural quality of the object, but is due to a spirit which has come to reside in it, and which may very possibly leave it again. Having chosen this deity and set it up for wors.h.i.+p, the man can use it as he thinks fit. He addresses prayers to it and extols its virtues; but should his enterprise not prosper, he will cast his deity aside as useless, and cease to wors.h.i.+p it; he will address it with torrents of abuse, and will even beat it, to make it serve him better. It is a deity at his disposal, to serve in the accomplishment of his desires; the individual keeps G.o.ds of his own to help him in his undertakings.

The name "fetis.h.i.+sm," by which this kind of wors.h.i.+p is known, is of Portuguese origin; it is derived from _feitico_, "made," "artificial"

(compare the old English _fetys_, used by Chaucer); and this term, used of the charms and amulets worn in the Roman Catholic religion of the period, was applied by the Portuguese sailors of the eighteenth century to the deities they saw wors.h.i.+pped by the negroes of the West Coast of Africa. De Brosses, a French savant of last century, brought the word fetis.h.i.+sm into use as a term for the type of religion of the lowest races. The word has given rise to some confusion, having been applied by Comte and other writers to the wors.h.i.+p of the heavenly bodies and of the great features of nature. It is best to limit it, as has been done above, to the wors.h.i.+p of such natural objects as are reverenced not for their own power or excellence but because they are supposed to be occupied each by a spirit.

Can this be called religion? In the full sense of the term it cannot.

We should remember that it is not the casual object, but the spirit connected with it that the savage wors.h.i.+ps; but even then we shall be obliged to hold that the fetish wors.h.i.+pper is rather seeking after religion than actually in possession of it.

4. A Supreme Being.--Is it necessary to add another cla.s.s of deity to these three, and to say that besides nature-G.o.ds and spirits early man also wors.h.i.+pped a Supreme Being above all these? In most savage religions there is a princ.i.p.al deity to whom the others are subordinate. But if we carefully examine one by one the supreme G.o.ds of these religions, we shall find reason to doubt whether they really have a common character so as to form a cla.s.s by themselves. Many of them are nature G.o.ds who have outgrown the other deities of that cla.s.s and come to occupy an isolated position. The North American Indians, as we saw, wors.h.i.+p the Great Spirit, the heaven with its breath, to whom sun and moon and other ordinances of nature act as ministers. In many cases heaven is the highest G.o.d. In others again the sun is supreme. Ukko the great G.o.d of the Finns is a heaven- and rain-G.o.d. Perkunas the G.o.d of the Lithuanians is connected with thunder. On the other hand there are instances in which the supreme G.o.d appears to be a different being from the nature-G.o.d. The Samoyedes wors.h.i.+p the sun and moon and the spirits of other parts of nature; but they also believe in a good spirit who is above all. The Supreme Being of the islands of the Pacific bears in New Zealand the name of Tangaroa, and is spoken of in quite metaphysical terms as the uncreated and eternal Creator. Here we may suspect Christian influence. With the Zulus Unkulunkulu the Old-old one might be supposed to be a kind of first cause. But on looking nearer we find he is distinctly a man, the first man, the common ancestor; beyond which idea speculation does not seem to go. Among many North American tribes it is usual to find an animal the chief deity, the hare or the musk-rat or the coyote. It is very common to find in savage beliefs a vague far-off G.o.d who is at the back of all the others, takes little part in the management of things, and receives little wors.h.i.+p. But it is impossible to judge what that being was at an earlier time; he may have been a nature-G.o.d or a spirit who has by degrees grown faint and come to occupy this position. We cannot judge from the supreme beings of savages, such as they are, that the belief in a supreme being was generally diffused in the world[1] in the earliest times, and is not to be derived from any of the processes from which the other G.o.ds arose. We shall see afterwards how natural the tendency is which, where there are several G.o.ds, brings one of them to the front while the others lose importance. For a theory of primitive monotheism the supreme G.o.ds of savages certainly do not furnish sufficient evidence; they do not appear to have sprung all from the same source, but to have advanced from very different quarters to the supreme position, in obedience to that native instinct of man's mind which causes him, even when he believes in many G.o.ds, to make one of them supreme.

[Footnote 1: _Cf._ A. Lang, _The Making of Religion_ (1898); Galloway, _Studies in the Philosophy of Religion_ (1904), p. 123, _sqq._]

Which G.o.ds were First Wors.h.i.+pped?--If then early man formed his G.o.ds from parts of nature and from spirits of departed ancestors or heroes, and even, should the more backward races now existing represent a stage of human life belonging to the early world, from spirits residing in outward objects, which of these is the original root of all the religions of the world? The claim has been made for each of these kinds of religion, that it came first.

1. Fetish-G.o.ds came First.--Till recently the view prevailed that all the religion of the world has sprung out of fetis.h.i.+sm. First the savage took for his G.o.d some casual object, as we have described, then he chose higher objects, trees and mountains, rivers and lakes, and even the sun and stars. The heavens at last became his supreme fetish, and at a higher level, when he had learned about spirits, he would make a spirit his fetish, and so at last come to Monotheism.

This view is attractive because it places the beginning of religion in the lowest known form of it and thus makes for the belief that the course of the world's faith has been upward from the first. But it presents the gravest difficulties; for why should the savage make a G.o.d of a stick or a stone, and attribute to it supernatural powers?

Who told him about a G.o.d, that he should call a stick G.o.d, or about supernatural powers, that he should suppose a stick to work wonders?

There is nothing in the stick to suggest such notions; that he should make G.o.ds in this way, that the belief in wonderful powers should originate in this way, is surely quite incredible. Much more likely is it, surely, that he got the notion of G.o.d from some other quarter and applied it in his own grotesque and degraded way; than that the notion of G.o.d was taken first from such poor forms and applied afterwards to objects better suited to it. Religion and civilisation go hand in hand, and if civilisation can decay (and leading anthropologists declare that the debased tribes of Australia and West Africa show signs of a higher civilisation they have lost) then religion also may decay. A lower race may borrow religious ideas from a higher and adapt them to their own position, _i.e._ degrade them.

And the progress of religion may still have been upwards on the whole, although retrograde movements have taken place in certain races. On these and other grounds it is now held with growing certainty that fetis.h.i.+sm cannot be the original form of religion, and that the higher stages of it are not to be derived from that one. The races among whom fetis.h.i.+sm is found exhibit a well-known feature of the decadence of religion, namely that the great G.o.d or G.o.ds have grown weak and faint, and smaller G.o.ds and spirits have crowded in to fill up the blank thus caused. Wors.h.i.+p is transferred from the great beings who are the original G.o.ds of the tribe and whom it still professes in a vague way to believe, to numerous smaller beings, and from the good G.o.ds to the bad.

2. Spirits, Human or Quasi-human, came First.--Is the wors.h.i.+p of spirits then the original form of religions. This has been powerfully maintained in this country by Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. Tylor.

According to Mr. Spencer "the rudimentary form of all religion is the propitiation of dead ancestors." Men concluded, as soon as they were capable of such reasoning, that the life they witnessed in plants and animals, in sun and moon and other parts of nature, was due to their being inhabited by the spirits of departed men. With all respect for the splendid exposition given by Mr. Spencer[2] of the early beliefs of mankind regarding spirits, it is impossible to think that he has made out his case when he treats the G.o.ds of early India and of Greece as deified ancestors. If the natural incredulity we feel at being told that Jupiter, Indra, the sun, the sacred mountain, and the stars all alike came to be wors.h.i.+pped because each of them represented some departed human hero, is not at once decisive, we have only to wait a little to see whether some other theory cannot account for these G.o.ds in a simpler way.

[Footnote 2: _Sociology_, vol. i. Also _Ecclesiastical Inst.i.tutions_, p. 675; "ghost-propitiation is the origin of all religions."]

Mr. Tylor also derives all religion from the wors.h.i.+p of spirits, but in a different way. His is the most comprehensive system of Animism, using that term in the narrower sense of soul-wors.h.i.+p. Starting from the doctrine of souls, reached by early man in the way described above (p. 33, _sqq._), he argues that when once this notion was reached it would be applied to other beings as well as man. Not having learned to distinguish himself clearly from other beings, man would judge that they had souls like his own; and so every part of nature came to have its soul, and everything that went on in the universe was to be explained as the activity of souls. It was in this way, according to Mr. Tylor, that the view of the universal animation of nature, characteristic of early thought, was reached. "As the human body was held to live and act by virtue of its own inhabiting spirit-soul, so the operations of the world seemed to be carried on by other spirits." At this point the soul is an unsubstantial essence inhabiting a body, it has its life and activity only in connection with the body; but the step was easily taken to the further belief in spirits like the souls, but not attached to any body. The spirits moved about freely, like the genii, demons, fairies, and beings of all kinds, with whom to the mind of antiquity the world was so crowded.

Three cla.s.ses of spirits we have up to this point: those of ancestors, those attached to the various parts of the life of nature, and those existing independently. Can the higher nature-deities be accounted for by this theory as well as the minor spirits of the parts of nature? Mr. Tylor considers that they can; he declares that the "higher deities of polytheism have their place in the general animistic system of mankind." He acknowledges that, with few exceptions, great G.o.ds have a place as well as smaller G.o.ds in every non-civilised system of religion. But in origin and essence he holds they are the same. "The difference is rather of rank than of nature."

As chiefs and kings are among men so are the great G.o.ds among the lesser spirits. The sun, the heavens, the stars, are living beings, because they have spirits as man has a soul, or as a spring has a spirit that haunts it. Thus in the doctrine of souls is found the origin of the whole of early religion. Mr. Tylor confesses, however, that it is impossible to trace the process by which the doctrine of souls gave rise to the belief in the great G.o.ds.

The weakness of this view is that it involves a denial that the great powers of nature could be wors.h.i.+pped before the process of reasoning had been completed which led to the belief that they had souls or spirits. But how did early man regard these great powers before this?

Did they not appear to him adorable by the very impressions they made upon his various senses? Did he really need to argue out the belief that they had souls, before he felt drawn to wonder at them, and to seek to enter into relations with them?

Animism.--The word Animism, it should here be noticed, is used in the study of religions in a wider sense than that of Mr. Tylor. Many of the great religions are known to have arisen out of a primitive wors.h.i.+p of spirits and to have advanced from that stage to a wors.h.i.+p of G.o.ds. The G.o.d differs from the spirit in having a marked personal character, while the spirits form a vague and somewhat undistinguishable crowd; in having a regular _clientele_ of wors.h.i.+ppers, whereas the spirit is only served by those who need to communicate with him; in having therefore a regular wors.h.i.+p, while the spirit is only wors.h.i.+pped when the occasion arises; and in being served from feelings of attachment and trust, and not like the spirits from fear. When G.o.ds appear, some writers hold, then and not till then does religion begin; before that point is reached magic and exorcism are the forms used for addressing the unseen beings, but when it is reached we have wors.h.i.+p; intercourse is deliberately sought with beings who hold regular relations with man. The word Animism is best employed to denote the wors.h.i.+p of spirits as distinguished from that of G.o.ds. Whether or not early man derived his belief in the mult.i.tude of spirits by which he believed himself to be surrounded, from his belief in the separable human soul, there is no doubt that he did consider himself to be so surrounded. Animism in this sense is undoubtedly the beginning of some at least of the great religions.

3. The Minor Nature-wors.h.i.+p came First.--M. Reville holds[3] that the tree and the river and other such beings were the first G.o.ds, and that the deification of the great powers of nature came afterwards as an extension of the same principle. Mr. Max Muller seems to share this view when he says that man was led from the wors.h.i.+p of semi-tangible objects, which provided him with semi-deities, to that of intangible objects, which gave him deities proper. The Germans, as a rule, hold the view that the great nature-wors.h.i.+p came first, and that the sanct.i.ty of the tree and the river came to them from above, these objects being regarded as lesser living beings deserving to be wors.h.i.+pped as well as the greater ones. The English school let the sanct.i.ty of these objects come to them as it were from below; when man has come to believe in spirits, he concludes that they have spirits too, and wors.h.i.+ps the spirits he supposes to dwell in them.

It does not seem that these theories are entirely exclusive of each other. French writers suppose that the minor nature-wors.h.i.+p first sprang up of itself, half-animal man respecting the animals as rivals, the trees as fruit-bearers for his hunger, and so on, and that spirits were added to these beings when the great animistic movement of thought in which these writers believe took place, of course at a very early period.[4]

[Footnote 3: Reville, _Histoire des religions des peuples non-civilises_, ii. 225.]

[Footnote 4: This view is the basis of M. Andre Lefevre's _La Religion_. Paris, 1892.]

4. The Great Nature-powers came First.--We come in the last place to that cla.s.s of deities which we spoke of first--the powers of nature.

By several great writers it is held that the wors.h.i.+p of these is the original form of all religion. We shall give two of the leading theories on the subject, that of Mr. Max Muller and that of Ed. von Hartmann.

Mr. Max Muller has written very strongly against the view that fetis.h.i.+sm is a primary form of religion, and holds that the wors.h.i.+p of casual objects is not a stage of religion once universally prevalent, but is, on the contrary, a parasitical development and of accidental origin. He does not tell us what the original religion of mankind was. The work in which he deals most directly with this question[5] is concerned chiefly with the Indian faith, the early stages of which he regards as the most typical instance of the growth of religion generally. He does not, however, tell us definitely out of what earlier kind of religion that of the Aryans grew, which India best teaches us to know, or what religion they had before they developed that of the Vedic hymns. We may infer, however, what his view on this point is from the very interesting sketch he draws of the psychological advance man could make, in selecting objects of reverence, from one cla.s.s of things to another (p. 179, _sqq._).

First, there are tangible objects, which, however, Mr. Max Muller denies that mankind as a whole ever did wors.h.i.+p; such things as stones, sh.e.l.ls, and bones. Then second, semi-tangible objects; such as trees, mountains, rivers, the sea, the earth, which supply the material for what may be called _semi-deities_. And third, intangible objects, such as the sky, the stars, the sun, the dawn, the moon; in these are to be seen the germs of _deities_. At each of these stages man is seeking not for something finite but for the infinite; from the first he has a presentiment of something far beyond; he grasps successive objects of wors.h.i.+p not for themselves but for what they seem to tell of, though it is not there, and this sense of the infinite, even in poor and inadequate beliefs, is the germ of religion in him. When he rises after his long journey to fix his regards on the great powers of nature, he apprehends in them something great and transcendent. He applies to them great t.i.tles; he calls them _devas_, s.h.i.+ning ones; _asuras_, living ones; and, at length, _amartas_, immortal ones. At first these were no more than descriptive t.i.tles, applied to the great visible phenomena of nature as a cla.s.s. They expressed the admiration and wonder the young mind of man felt itself compelled to pay to these magnificent beings. But by giving them these names he was led instinctively to regard them as persons; he ascribed to them human attributes and dramatic actions, so that they became definite, transcendent, living personalities. In these, more than in any former objects of his adoration, his craving for the infinite was satisfied. Thus the ancient Aryan advanced, "from the visible to the invisible, from the bright beings that could be touched, like the river that could be seen, like the thunder that could be heard, like the sun, to the devas that could no longer be touched or heard or seen.... The way was traced out by nature herself."

[Footnote 5: _Lectures on the Origin of Religion_, 1882.]

This famous theory is, when we come to examine it, rather puzzling.

It does not account for the first beginnings of religion except by inference, and it does so in two contradictory ways; for, on the one hand, Mr. Max Muller enumerates tangible objects first as those from which men rose to higher objects, and on the other he denies that fetis.h.i.+sm is a primitive formation. He suggests that there were earlier G.o.ds than the devas, but he tells us nothing about them, except that they were not fully deities; they were only semi-deities, or not deities at all. The wors.h.i.+p of spirits he leaves entirely out of consideration; religion did not, in his view, begin with Animism.

When he does tell us of the beginnings of religion, what is his view?

The religion of the Aryans began, and it is a type--the other religions presumably began in the same way, _e.g._ those of China and of Egypt--by the impression made on man from without by great natural objects co-operating with his inner presentiment of the infinite, which they met to a greater degree than any objects he had tried before. Religion was due accordingly to aesthetic impressions from without, answering an aesthetic and intellectual inner need. Those needs, then, which led men to make G.o.ds of the great powers of earth and heaven were not of an animal or material nature, but belonged to the intellectual part of his const.i.tution. Those who framed such a religion for themselves must have been raised above the pressing necessities and cares of savage life; they were not absorbed in the task of making their living, but had leisure to stand and admire the heavenly bodies, and to a.n.a.lyse the impressions made on them by the waters and the thunder. Nay, they had sufficient power of abstraction to form a cla.s.s of such great beings, to bestow on them a common t.i.tle, not only one but several progressive common t.i.tles, each expressing a deeper reflection than the last. Thus did they reflect on the nature of the cosmic powers, taken as a cla.s.s. This, evidently, is not the beginning of religion. It is the religion of a comparatively lofty civilisation; lower stages of civilisation, and of religion also, must have preceded this one. Even the heavenly bodies, it appears to many scholars, must have been wors.h.i.+pped by men who regarded them not with aesthetic admiration and intellectual satisfaction only, but in the light of more pressing and practical interests.

We take Edward von Hartmann as the representative of those who, like Mr. Max Muller, trace the origin of religion to the wors.h.i.+p of the heavenly powers, but who carry back that wors.h.i.+p to the earliest stage. Writers who disagree with his philosophy take grave exception to his treatment of religion, for he regards religion, as he considers consciousness itself, not as an original and inseparable element of human nature, but as a thing acquired by man on his way upwards; and he finds the original motive of religion to have lain in egoistic eudaemonism, in the selfish desire of happiness, which at that stage of man's life determined all his actions. The account, however, given by Von Hartmann of the beginning of religion in the adoration of the powers of nature is of singular freshness and power, and we can deduct from it, after stating it, the peculiarities arising out of his philosophical system.

The first religion that existed in the world had for its objects the heavenly powers. The objects wors.h.i.+pped are known, indeed, before religion begins; the illusions of early thought have settled on the heavenly powers before they are wors.h.i.+pped; on the outward object the mind has conferred the character of a living and acting being, which it is henceforth to wear. This transformation, poetic fancy, not mere logic and not merely utilitarian considerations, has brought about.

But religion only begins when man sets himself to wors.h.i.+p these beings, and to this he is driven by his material needs. Religion begins in a being as yet without religion and without morality. The need for food is the motive that brings about the change, for that pure egoist early man has seen that the powers of nature are able to help or hinder him in his search for a living; the sun can set his plants growing or can burn them up, and the thunderstorm can revive them. His happiness depends on these powers, and he seeks to set up relations with them. He seeks to gain as an ally the heavenly power who is so able to further or to thwart his aims; he makes known to it his wishes by calling upon it, and he offers presents to it. He wors.h.i.+ps the heavenly powers, and religion has begun. Wors.h.i.+p lends to these powers, though they were known before, a fixity and reality they did not formerly possess. Von Hartmann is inclined to trace all the various wors.h.i.+ps of these powers, which have prevailed in the most different parts of the earth, to the same original centre, while at the same time he maintains that even if all the instances of this wors.h.i.+p cannot be referred to any common origin, it must have arisen in this way, wherever men of the same nature dwelt; the psychological necessity of this development accounts for the appearance of this same religion in different lands and among dissimilar races.

The wors.h.i.+p of the heavenly powers, accordingly, is with this writer the original religion. While admitting that the wors.h.i.+p of domestic spirits grew up in the way described by the English anthropologists, he denies that Animism is ever a religion by itself without being combined with higher beliefs. He denies also that fetis.h.i.+sm could ever be an original religious product, or that men could ever pa.s.s from having no religion to the religion of fetis.h.i.+sm. Wherever it appears, it is a religion of decay. All the religion in the world has come from the wors.h.i.+p of nature, which, whether arising at one centre or at several, spread over the world, and is to be recognised, clearly or dimly, in the religions of all lands.

This view of the origin of religion is shared in the main by Otto Pfleiderer,[6] and other German writers. It was from the impressions made on man by the powers of nature, these scholars hold, and not from his belief in spirits, that his religion came. But it was not necessarily due to pure egoism, as Von Hartmann represents; the earliest religions need not, they hold, have been a mere attempt at bribery. The motives which first caused man to wors.h.i.+p the heavenly powers surely arose from other needs than that for food alone. The intellectual craving, the desire to know the nature of the world he lived in, and to refer himself to the highest principle of it, as far as that could be attained; the aesthetic need, the desire to have to do with objects which filled his imagination; the moral need, the desire not to occupy a purely isolated position, but to place himself under some authority, and to feel some obligation, these also, though in the dimmest way, as matters of presentiment rather than clear consciousness, entered into the earliest wors.h.i.+p of the heavenly powers. This view has the great advantage over that of Von Hartmann, that it makes the development of religion continuous from the first, instead of representing it as being originally a purely selfish thing, into which the character of affection and devotion only entered at some subsequent stage. If man's nature is essentially religious, then all that const.i.tutes religion must have been with him from the first, in however unconscious and undeveloped form.

[Footnote 6: _Philosophy of Religion_, vol. iii. chap. i.]

Conclusion.--We have enumerated the different kinds of G.o.ds wors.h.i.+pped by early man--fetishes, spirits, the powers of nature. We have found a general agreement that fetis.h.i.+sm is not an original form of religion, but a product of the decay of higher forms in unfavourable conditions. As to the other two kinds of deities, it is impossible to deny that G.o.ds have been formed from the very first in each of these two ways. The domestic wors.h.i.+p of the early world cannot be derived from nature-wors.h.i.+p, but grew out of the belief awakened in early man, by the familiar experiences mentioned above.

That the greater nature-wors.h.i.+p, on the other hand, can be derived from the belief in spirits is an a.s.sertion which can never be proved, or even made probable; that it arose from the impressions produced on early man by the great objects and forces of nature, is a thing we can understand and believe. The minor nature-wors.h.i.+p is also a very intelligible thing, even without Mr. Tylor's theory of souls to explain it. What more natural than that the savage should wors.h.i.+p the great oak or the waterfall, or should think himself surrounded by invisible beings, even if he did not frame the latter on the model of the human soul? We arrive therefore at the conclusion that with the exception of the doctrines about death and the abode of spirits, we must regard the wors.h.i.+p of nature as the root of the world's religion.

We must beware, however, of imputing to the thoughts of early men about their G.o.ds, any such qualities as consistency or regularity.

The power of holding at one and the same time religious beliefs which are inconsistent with each other, is one which even in the most developed religions is by no means wanting; and how much more was this the case among men who lived before there was any exact thought!