Note: The cover of this book was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain. A more extensive [transcriber’s note] can be found at the end of this book.

THE NON-RELIGION
OF THE FUTURE
A SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH
OF
M. GUYAU

NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1897

THE MERSHON COMPANY PRESS,
RAHWAY, N. J.

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION.
I. Sociality the basis of religion—Its definition.
II. The connection between religion, æsthetics, and morals.
III. The inevitable decomposition of all systems of dogmatic religion; the state of “non-religion” toward which the human mind seems to tend—The exact sense in which one must understand the non-religion as distinguished from the “religion of the future.”
IV. The value and utility, for the time being, of religion; its ultimate insufficiency, [1]
Part First.
THE GENESIS OF RELIGIONS IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETIES.
CHAPTER I.
RELIGIOUS PHYSICS.
Importance of the Problem of the Origin of Religion—Universality of Religious Beliefs or Superstitions—Variability of Religions and Religious Evolution.
I. Idealist theory which attributes the origin of religion to a notion of the infinite—Henotheism of Max Müller and Von Hartmann—M. Renan’s Instinct for Divinity.
II. Theory of a worship of the dead and of spirits—Herbert Spencer—Spencer’s objections to the theory of the attribution of a soul to natural forces.
III. Answer to objections—Religious physics sociological in form, and the substitution of relations between malevolent or beneficent conscious beings for relations between natural forces—Sociomorphism of primitive Peoples, [21]
CHAPTER II.
RELIGIOUS METAPHYSICS.
I. Animism or polydemonism—Formation of the dualist conception of spirit—Social relations with spirits.
II. Providence and miracles—The evolution of the dualist conception of a special providence—The conception of miracles—The supernatural and the natural—Scientific explanation and miracles—Social and moral modifications in the character of man, owing to supposed social relations with a special providence—Increasing sentiment of irresponsibility and passivity and “absolute dependence.”
III. The creation—Genesis of the notion of creation—The dualistic elements in this idea—Monism—Classification of systems of religious metaphysics—Criticism of the classification proposed by Von Hartmann—Criticism of the classification proposed by Auguste Comte, [80]
CHAPTER III.
RELIGIOUS MORALS.
I. The laws which regulate the social relations between gods and men—Morality and immorality in primitive religions—Extension of friendly and hostile relations to the sphere of the gods—Primitive inability in matters of conscience, as in matters of art, to distinguish the great from the monstrous.
II. The moral sanction in the society which includes gods and men—Patronage—That divine intervention tends always to be conceived after the model of human intervention and to sanction it.
III. Worship and religious rites—Principles of reciprocity and proportionality in the exchange of services—Sacrifice—Principle of coercion and incantation—Principle of habit and its relation to rites—Sorcery—Sacerdotalism—Prophecy—The externals of worship—Dramatization and religious æsthetics.
IV. Subjective worship—Adoration and love; their psychological origin, [113]
Part Second.
THE DISSOLUTION OF RELIGIONS IN EXISTING SOCIETIES.
CHAPTER I.
DOGMATIC FAITH.
I. Narrow dogmatic faith—The credulity of primitive man: First, spontaneous faith in the senses and imagination; Second, faith in the testimony of superior men; Third, faith in the divine word, in revelation, and in the sacred texts—The literalness of dogmatic faith—Inevitable intolerance of narrow dogmatic faith—Belief in dogma, revelation, salvation, and damnation all result in intolerance—Modern tolerance.
II. Broad dogmatic faith—Orthodox Protestantism—Dogmas of orthodox Protestantism—Rational consequences of these dogmas—Logical failure of orthodox Protestantism.
III. The dissolution of dogmatic faith in modern society—Reasons that render this dissolution inevitable—Comparative influence of the various sciences; influence of public instruction, of means of communication, of industry even and of commerce, etc.—The disappearance of belief in oracles and prophecies—Gradual disappearance of the belief in miracles, in devils, etc., [136]
CHAPTER II.
SYMBOLIC AND MORAL FAITH.
I. Substitution of metaphysical symbolism for dogma—Liberal Protestantism—Comparison with Brahmanism—Substitution of moral symbolism for metaphysical symbolism—Moral faith—Kant—Mill—Matthew Arnold—A literary explanation of the Bible substituted for a literal explanation.
II. Criticism of symbolic faith—Inconsequence of liberal Protestantism—Is Jesus of a more divine type than other great geniuses?—Does the Bible possess a greater authority in matters of morals than any other masterpiece of poetry?—Criticism of Matthew Arnold’s system—Final absorption of religions by morality, [167]
CHAPTER III.
DISSOLUTION OF RELIGIOUS MORALITY.
I. The first durable element of religious morality: Respect—Alteration of respect by the addition of the notion of the fear of God and divine vengeance.
II. Second durable element of religious morality: Love—Alteration of this element by the addition of ideas of grace, predestination, damnation—Caducous elements of religious morality—Mysticism—Antagonism of divine love and human love—Asceticism—Excesses of asceticism—Especially in the religions of the East—Conception of sin in the modern mind.
III. Subjective worship and prayer—The notion of prayer from the point of view of modern science and philosophy—Ecstasy—The survival of prayer, [195]
CHAPTER IV.
RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION AMONG THE PEOPLE.
I. Is religious sentiment an innate and imperishable possession of humanity—Frequent confusion of a sentiment for religion with a sentiment for philosophy and morals—Renan—Max Müller—Difference between the evolution of belief in the individual and the evolution of belief in the race—Will the disappearance of faith leave a void behind?
II. Will the dissolution of religion result in a dissolution of morality among the people?—Is religion the sole safeguard of social authority and public morality?—Christianity and socialism—Relation between non-religion and immorality, according to statistics.
III. Is Protestantism a necessary transition stage between religion and free-thought?—Projects for Protestantizing France—Michelet, Quinet, De Laveleye, Renouvier, and Pillon—Intellectual, moral, and political superiority of Protestantism—Utopian character of the project—Uselessness, for purposes of morals, of substituting one religion for another—Is the possession of religion a condition sine qua non of superiority in the struggle for existence?—Objections urged against France and the French Revolution by Matthew Arnold; Greece and Judea compared, France and Protestant nations compared—Critical examination of Matthew Arnold’s theory—Cannot free-thought, science, and art evolve their respective ideals from within? [226]
CHAPTER V.
RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION AND THE CHILD.
I. Decline of religious education—Defects of this education, in especial in Catholic countries—Means of lightening these defects—The priest—The possibility of state-action on the priest.
II. Education provided by the state—Primary instruction—The schoolmaster—Secondary and higher instruction—Should the history of religion be introduced into the curriculum?
III. Education at home—Should the father take no part in the religious education of his children—Evils of a preliminary religious education to be followed by disillusionment—The special question of the immortality of the soul: what should be said to children about death, [272]
CHAPTER VI.
RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION AMONG WOMEN.
Are women inherently predisposed toward religion and even toward superstition?—The nature of feminine intelligence—Predominance of the imagination—Credulity—Conservatism—Feminine sensibility—Predominance of sentiment—Tendency to mysticism—Is the moral sentiment among women based upon religion—Influence of religion and of non-religion upon modesty and love—Origin of modesty—Love and perpetual virginity—M. Renan’s paradoxes on the subject of monastic vows—How woman’s natural proclivities may be turned to account by free-thought—Influence exercised by the wife’s faith over the husband—Instance of a conversion to free-thought, [295]
CHAPTER VII.
THE EFFECT OF RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION ON POPULATION AND THE FUTURE OF THE RACE.
I. Importance of the problem of population—Antagonism between numerical strength and wealth—Necessity of numbers for the maintenance and progress of the race—Necessity of giving the advantage of numbers to the superior races—Problem of population in France—Its relation to the religious problem—Are the reasons for the restriction of the number of births physiological, moral, or economic?—Malthusianism in France—The true national peril.
II. Remedies—Is a return to religion possible?—Religious powerlessness and growing tolerance in the matter—The influence that the law might exercise upon the causes of small families—Enumeration of these causes—Reform of the law in regard to filial duty—(Support of parents)—Reform of the law of inheritance—Reform of the military law for the purpose of favouring large families and of permitting emigration to the French colonies.
III. Influence of public education: its necessity as a substitute for religious sentiment, [315]
Part Third.
NON-RELIGION OF THE FUTURE.
CHAPTER I.
RELIGIOUS INDIVIDUALISM.
I. Is a renovation of religion possible? 1. Is a unification of the great religions to-day existing possible? 2. Is the appearance of a new religion to be expected?—Future miracles impossible—Religious poetry not to be expected—Men of genius capable of sincerely and naïvely labouring in the creating of a new religion not to be expected—Impossibility of adding to the original stock of religious ideas—No new cult possible—Last attempts at a new cult in America and in France—The Positivist cult—Ethical culture—Can socialism renew religion?—Advantages and defects of socialistic experiments.
II. Religious anomy and the substitution of doubt for faith—1. Will the absence of religion result in scepticism? Will the number of sceptics increase with the disappearance of religion? 2. Substitution of doubt for faith—Genuinely religious character of doubt.
III. Substitution of metaphysical hypothesis for dogma—Difference between religious sentiment and instinct for metaphysics—Imperishable character of the latter—Sentiment at once of the limits of science and of the infinity of our ideal—Spencer’s attempted reconciliation of science and religion—Confusion of religion with metaphysics, [350]
CHAPTER II.
ASSOCIATION. THE PERMANENT ELEMENT OF RELIGIONS IN SOCIAL LIFE.
Social Aspect of Religions—Religious Communities and Churches—Ideal Type of Voluntary Association—Its Diverse Forms.
I. Associations for intellectual purposes—How such associations might preserve the most precious elements of religions—Societies for the advancement of science, philosophy, religion—Dangers to avoid—Popularization of scientific ideas; propagandism in the interests of science.
II. Associations for moral purposes—Tendency of religion in the best minds to become one with charity—Pity and charity will survive dogma—Rôle of enthusiasm in moral propagandism—Necessity of hope to sustain enthusiasm—Possibility of propagating moral ideas: 1. Apart from myths and religious dogmas; 2. Apart from any notion of a religious sanction—Baudelaire’s conception of a criminal and happy hero—Criticism of that conception—Worship of the memory of the dead.
III. Associations for æsthetic purposes—Worship of art and nature—Art and poetry will sever their connection with religion and will survive it—Necessity of developing the æsthetic sentiment and the worship of art, as the religious sentiment becomes more feeble—Poetry, eloquence, music; their rôle in the future—Final substitution of art for rites—Worship of nature—Feeling for nature originally an essential element of the religious sentiment—Superiority of a worship of nature over worship of human art—Nature is the true temple of the future, [391]
CHAPTER III.
THEISM.
Review of the Principal Metaphysical Hypotheses which will Replace Dogma.
I. Introduction—Progress of metaphysical hypotheses—Metaphysical hypotheses destined to increasing diversity in details, and increasing agreement on essential points—Importance of the moral element in metaphysical hypotheses—The part played by conscience in human morality will not diminish, as Mr. Spencer says—Sympathetic groups under which divers systems of metaphysics will be ranged.
II. Theism—1. Probable fate of the creation hypothesis—The author of the world conceived as a prime mover—Eternity of movement—The author of the world conceived as a creator properly so called—Illusion involved in the conception of nothing—Criticism of the creation hypothesis from the point of view of morals: the problem of evil and of the responsibility of the creator—Attempts to save optimism—Hypothesis of a God creating free agents, “workmen” and not “work”—Reciprocal determinism and the illusion of spontaneity—Immorality of the temptation—Hypothesis of the fall, its impossibility—God the tempter—Lucifer and God—2. Probable fate of the notion of Providence—Hypotheses to explain a special Providence and miracles thus insufficient—Hypothesis of a non-omnipotent God proposed by John Stuart Mill—The God of Comtism—Religion should be not solely human but cosmic—The fate of the philosophical idea of God—Rational religion proposed by the neo-Kantians—Ultimate transformation of the notion of divinity and of Providence—Human Providence and progressive divinity in the world, [424]
CHAPTER IV.
PANTHEISM.
Review of the Principal Metaphysical Hypotheses which will Replace Dogma.—Continued.
I. Optimistic pantheism—Transformation of transcendent Deism into immanent theism and pantheism—Disanthropomorphized God, according to Messrs. Fiske and Spencer—Diverse forms of pantheism—Optimistic and intellectualistic pantheism of Spinoza—Objections, Spinoza’s fatalism—The moral significance that might be lent to pantheism by the introduction of some notion of a final cause—Qualities and defects of pantheism—Conception of unity upon which it is founded—This conception criticised—Its possible subjectivity.
II. Pessimistic pantheism—Pessimistic interpretation of religions in Germany—1. Causes of the progress of pessimism in the present epoch—Progress of pantheistic metaphysics and of positive science—Penalties incident to thought and reflection—Mental depression and sense of powerlessness, etc.—2. Is pessimism curable?—Possible remedies—The labour problem and the future of society—Illusions involved in pessimism—Inexactitude of its estimate of pleasures and pains—Quotation from Leopardi—Criticism of the practical results of pessimism—Nirvâna—An experiment in Nirvâna—Will pessimistic pantheism be the religion of the future? [452]
CHAPTER V.
IDEALISM, MATERIALISM, MONISM.
Review of the Principal Metaphysical Hypotheses which will Replace Dogma.—Concluded.
I. Idealism—Different forms of idealism: subjective idealism, objective idealism: The whole of existence resolved into a mode of mental existence—Value of idealism considered from point of view of the religious sentiment—Most specious of contemporary idealisms: Possibility of universal progress in the hypothesis of radical spontaneity and of “freedom”—Reconciliation between determinism and the conception of freedom—Moral idealism as a possible substitute for religious sentiment: Dependence of the universe on the principle of goodness.
II. Materialism—Difficulty in defining absolute materialism: Matter—The atom—Nebular hypothesis—Hydrogen—Necessity of supplementing materialism by some theory of the origin of life—The latest conception of materialism: Conception of infinite divisibility and infinite extensibility.
III. Monism and the fate of worlds—Current of contemporary systems toward monism—Scientific interpretation of monism—The world conceived monistically as a becoming and as a life—Scientific formulæ for life—Progress consists in the gradual confusion of these two formulæ—That the rise of morality and religion can be accounted for without the presupposition of any final cause—Metaphysical and moral expectations in regard to the destiny of the world and of humanity, it may be, founded on scientific monism—Facts which appear to be inconsistent with these expectations—Pessimistic conception of dissolution that is complementary to the conception of evolution—Is the immanence of dissolution demonstrable?—Natural devices for the perpetuation of the “fittest”—Rôle of intelligence, of numbers, etc.—Calculation of probabilities—Is eternity a parte post a ground of discouragement or of hope—Probable existence of thinking beings in other worlds: the planets, possibility of the existence of beings superior to man—Survival of the conception of gods—Hypothesis of intercosmic consciousness and of a universal society.
IV. Destiny of the human race—The hypothesis of immortality from the point of view of monism—Two possible conceptions of immortality—Eternal or untemporal existence and continuation of life in some superior forms—I. Hypothesis of eternal life—its function in antique religions, in Platonism, and in the systems of Spinoza, Kant, and Schopenhauer—Eternal life and the subsistence of the individual—Distinction made by Schopenhauer and various other philosophers between individuality and personality—Eternal life problematical and transcendent—Aristocratic tendency of the theory of eternal life—Hypothesis of conditional immortality—Criticism of the hypothesis of conditional immortality; incompatibility of this notion with that of divine goodness—II. Hypothesis of a continuation of the present life and its evolution into some superior form—What sort of immortality the theory of evolution permits us to hope for—Immortality of one’s labours and conduct—True conception of such immortality—Its relation to the laws of heredity, atavism, natural selection—Immortality of the individual—Objections drawn from science—Protestations of affection against the annihilation of the person—Resulting antinomy—III. Modern opposition between the conception of function and the conception of simple substance, in which ancient philosophy endeavours to find a proof of immortality—Peripatetic theory of Wundt and modern philosophers on the nature of the soul—Immortality as a continuation of function, proved not by the simplicity, but by the complexity of consciousness—Relation between complexity and instability—Three stages of social evolution—Analogy of conscience with a society, collective character of individual consciousness—Conception of progressive immortality—Last product of evolution and natural selection: (1) No necessary relation between the compositeness and complexity of consciousness and its dissolubility: indissoluble compounds in the physical universe—(2) Relation between consciousnesses, their possible fusion in a superior consciousness—Contemporary psychology and the religious notion of the interpenetration of souls—Possible evolution of memory and identification of it with reality—Palingenesis by force of love—Problematic character of those conceptions and of every conception relative to existence, of consciousness and the relation between existence and consciousness—IV. Conception of death appropriate to those who, in the present state of evolution, do not believe in the immortality of the individual—Antique and modern stoicism—Acceptance of death: element of melancholy and of greatness in it—Expansion of self by means of philosophical thought, and scientific disinterestedness, to the point of to some extent approving one’s own annihilation, [477]

INTRODUCTION.

I. Sociality the basis of religion—Its definition.

II. The connection between religion, æsthetics, and morals.

III. The inevitable decomposition of all systems of dogmatic religion; the state of “non-religion” toward which the human mind seems to tend—The exact sense in which one must understand the non-religion as distinguished from the “religion of the future.”

IV. The value and utility, for the time being, of religion; its ultimate insufficiency.

I. We shall meet, in the course of this work, many different definitions that have at one time or another been given to religion. Some were assigned from the point of view of physics, others from that of metaphysics, others from that of morals, almost none from that of sociology. And yet, upon closer scrutiny, the notion of a social bond between man and the powers superior to him, but resembling him, is precisely the point in which all religious conceptions are at one. Man becomes truly religious, in our judgment, only when above the human society in which he lives he superimposes in his scheme of the world another society, more powerful and more cultured, a universal and, so to speak, a cosmic society. The sphere of sociality, which is one of the characteristics of humanity, must be enlarged till it reaches to the stars. Sociality is the firm foundation of the religious sentiment, and a religious being might be defined as a being disposed to be sociable, not only with all living creatures with whom experience makes him acquainted, but also with the creatures of thought with whom he peoples the world.

That religion consists essentially in the establishment of a bond—at first mythical, and subsequently mystic, in the first instance between man and the forces of the universe, then between man and the universe itself, and ultimately between man and the elements of the universe—is distinctly the outcome of every study of religion; but what we wish especially here to consider is the precise way in which this bond has been conceived. Well (it may appear more clearly at the close of this inquiry), the religious bond has been conceived ex analogia societatis humanæ: the relations, amicable and inimical, of men to each other were employed first for the explanation of physical phenomena and natural forces, then for the metaphysical explanation of the world, of its creation, conservation, and government; in short, sociological laws were universalized, and the state of war or peace which existed among men, families, tribes, and nations was conceived as existing also among the volitions which were fancied to exist beneath or beyond the forces of nature. A mythic or mystic sociology, conceived as containing the secret of all things, lies at the basis of all religions. Religion is not simply the expression of an anthropomorphism—animals and fantastic beings of various sorts have played no inconsiderable rôle in different cults; it is an imaginative extension, a universalization of all the good or evil relations which exist among conscious beings, of war and peace, friendship and enmity, obedience and rebellion, protection and authority, submission, fear, respect, devotion, love: religion is a universal sociomorphism. Social relations with animals, with the dead, intellectual and social relations with good and evil genii, with the forces of nature, are nothing more nor less than various forms of this universal sociology in which religion has sought to find the reason of things—of physical phenomena such as thunder, storm, sickness, death, as well as of metaphysical relations—the origin and destiny of things, and of moral relations—virtue, vice, law, and sanction.

If, therefore, we were forced to condense the theory of this book into a single definition, we should say that religion is the outcome of an effort to explain all things—physical, metaphysical, and moral—by analogies drawn from human society, imaginatively and symbolically considered. In short it is a universal sociological hypothesis, mythical in form.

To justify this conception we shall review the various definitions that have been put forth of the religious sentiment; we shall see that each of them needs completion by the rest, and that, too, from the sociological point of view.

The definition which has perhaps been most widely adopted of late years, with divers modifications by Strauss, by Pfleiderer, by Lotze, and by M. Réville, is that of Schleiermacher. According to him, the essence of religion consists in the feeling that we all have of our own absolute dependence. The powers in respect to which this dependence is felt we call divinities. On the other hand, according to Feuerbach, the origin, nay the essence even of religion is desire: if man possessed no needs, no desires, he would possess no gods. If grief and evil did not exist, says Hartmann later on, there would be no religion; the gods, even the gods of history, are no more than the powers to whom man looks for what he does not possess, and wants, to whom he looks for relief, for salvation, for happiness. The respective definitions of Schleiermacher and Feuerbach, taken separately, are incomplete; it is at least necessary, as Strauss suggests, to superpose them. The religious sentiment is primarily, no doubt, a feeling of dependence; but this feeling of dependence, really to give birth to religion, must provoke in one a reaction—a desire of deliverance. To feel one’s own weakness; to be conscious of limitations of all sorts which bound one’s life, and then to desire to augment one’s power over one’s self and over the material universe; to enlarge one’s sphere of action; to attain once more to a comparative independence in face of the necessities of every kind which hem one in—such is the course of the human mind in the presence of the universe.

But here an objection occurs: precisely the same course seems to be followed by the mind in the establishment of science. In a scientific period man feels himself as profoundly dependent as in a religious period, and this feeling of dependence is accompanied by a no less vivid reaction in the one case than in the other. The man of science and the believer alike aim at enfranchisement, but by different means. Must one be content, then, with an external and negative definition, and say with M. Darmesteter: “Religion embraces all knowledge and all power not scientific”?[1] A knowledge not scientific possesses all the attributes of a contradiction in terms, and, as for a power not scientific, it is indispensable to distinguish it in some positive way from the power which is afforded us by science. Well, to keep close to the facts, the power of religion is that which we frankly do not possess, while the power of science is that which we do possess and know that we possess. One might indeed fall back on the distinction between belief and certainty; but the man of science also has his beliefs, his preferences for such and such a cosmological hypothesis, which, however, is not a religious belief, properly so called. Religious and moral “faith,” as opposed to scientific “hypothesis,” is an ultimate and very complete manifestation of the religious sentiment, which we shall examine later, though it carries with it no suggestion of its primitive origin.

From the sociological point of view the distinction is plain. The religious sentiment begins at the point where mechanical determinism seems to offer an opportunity in the world for a sort of moral and social reciprocity—a possible exchange of sentiments and even of desires, between man and the powers of the universe, whatever they may be. That point once reached, man no longer conceives it possible to measure the consequences of an act—of using an axe, for example, on a sacred tree—in the exact terms of mere mechanical reaction; for over and above the simple brute fact of what he has done, the sentiment or intention that it indicates must be taken into account and the probable effect of that for good or evil upon the gods. Religious sentiment is a feeling of dependence, on the part of primitive man, in respect to the intelligences, the volitions, with which he has peopled the universe and which he believes capable of being affected agreeably or disagreeably by his conduct. Religious sentiment is not a feeling of mere physical dependence upon the universal frame of things; it is more than all a physical dependence, a moral, and in especial, a social dependence. This relation of dependence consists really of two reciprocal terms: if man is bound by it in some sort to the powers of nature, they in turn are bound by it to man; man has more or less of a hold on them, he can offend them morally, just as he might offend a fellow-man. If man is in the hand of the gods, he can in a measure force the hand to open or shut. The divinities are in a sense dependent also on man; they experience, as the result of his conduct, a measure of pleasure or of pain. It is only later that this idea of reciprocal dependence becomes metaphysical; it reaches its ultimate development in the concept of the “absolute,” and in the sentiment of adoration or simple “respect.”

Besides the consciousness of dependence and the correlative need of a liberation of some sort from it, we find in the religious sentiment the expression of another social need not less important; the need of affection, of tenderness, of love. Our sensibility, developed by hereditary instincts of sociality and by the force even of our imagination stretching out beyond the limits of this world, instinctively seeks for a person, a commanding figure to lean on, to confide in. When we are happy we need to bless some one; when we are wretched, we need some one to complain to, to groan to, even to curse. It is hard to resign ourselves to the belief that no one hears us, that no one a long way off sympathizes with us, that this swarming universe spins in the void. God is the friend with us at the first hour and at the last, with us always and in all places, even where no other friend can follow, even in death. To whom can we speak of those we have loved and lost? Of the people about us, some hardly remember them, others did not even know them; but in this divine and omnipresent Being we find the society, which is constantly broken by death, once more reunited: In eo vivimus, in Him we cannot die. From this point of view, God, the object of the religious sentiment, no longer seems a guardian and master simply. He is better than a friend; He is a father; in the beginning a severe father and all-powerful, as very young children imagine their fathers to be. Children readily believe that their father can do anything, even work miracles: a word from him and the world moves; fiat lux, and the day is born; the distinction between evil and good lies in his will; disobedience to him naturally involves punishment. They judge his power by their weakness; and so the primitive race of man felt toward God. But later a superior conception arose; as man developed he developed his God, endowed him with a more generous list of moral attributes; and this God is ours. We feel the need of a smile from Him after a sacrifice, the thought of Him sustains us. Woman especially, who is more immature in this respect than man, experiences a greater need of a “Father in heaven.” When one wishes to deprive us of a god, to deliver us from celestial tutelage, we suddenly find ourselves orphans. One might recognize a profound truth in the great symbol of Christ, the God, dying for the enfranchisement of human thought. This modern version of the “passion” is enacted, it is true, only in the heart, but it is none the less agonizing; it stirs one’s indignation none the less, it dwells in one like the image of a father who is dead. One cares less for the promised freedom than for the protection and affection that are gone. Carlyle—whimsical, unhappy genius—could eat no bread that his wife’s own hands, nay his wife’s own heart, had not prepared; and we are all like that; we all have need of daily bread kneaded with love and tenderness; and they that have no loving hand from which to look for it, ask it of their god, of their ideal, of their dream; they create for themselves a family in the realm of imagination, they fill out the bosom of infinity by the addition of a heart.

The social need for protection and love was evidently not so dominant in primitive times. The tutelary functions attributed to divinities were at first confined to the more or less vulgar accidents of this life. Later they were more especially directed toward one’s moral emancipation and extended even beyond the tomb. Need of protection and affection leads ultimately to considerations on the destiny of man and the world; and thus it is that religion, nearly physical in origin, issues in systems of metaphysics.

II. This book is intimately related to two others that we have published on æsthetics and on morals. We believe that the æsthetic sentiment is identical with self-conscious life, with life that is conscious of its own subjective intensity and harmony; beauty we have said may be defined as a perception or an act that stimulates life simultaneously on its three sides—sensibility, intelligence, will—and that produces pleasure by the immediate consciousness of this general stimulation. Moral sentiment, on the other hand, is identical, we believe, with a consciousness of the powers and possibilities in the sphere of practice of a life ideal in intensity and breadth of interest. The bulk of these possibilities relates to one’s power, in some form or other, of serving other people. Finally, religious sentiment appears when this consciousness of the social aspect of life is extended to the totality of conscious beings, and not only of real and living, but also of possible and ideal beings. It is, therefore, in the very notion of life, and of its various individual or social manifestations, that the essential unity of æsthetics with morals and religion is to be found.

In the first part of this work we shall trace the origin and evolution of sociological mythology. In the succeeding portions we shall consider whether, if we once set aside the mythical or imaginative element which is essential to religion and which distinguishes it from philosophy, the sociological theory does not offer the most probable, and most comprehensive, metaphysical explanation of the universe.[2]

III. It is important that there should be no misunderstanding in regard to this non-religion of the future, as contradistinguished from the multitude of religions of the future that have been recently expounded. It has seemed to us that these various expositions are based on a number of equivocations. In the first place religion, properly so-called, has sometimes been confused with metaphysics, sometimes with morals, sometimes with both; and it is owing to this confusion that religion has been conceived to be indestructible. Is it not by an abuse of language that Mr. Spencer, for example, gives the name of religion to speculations concerning the unknowable and thence readily deduces the conclusion that religion, by which he means metaphysics, possesses an impregnable stronghold in the human mind? In the same way many other contemporary philosophers, like Herr von Hartmann, the theologian of the unconscious, have not resisted the temptation of describing for us a religion of the future, which resolves itself simply into their own system, whatever it may be, of philosophy. Others again, especially among liberal Protestants, preserve the name of religion for purely rationalistic systems of thought. There is, of course, a sense in which one may admit that metaphysics and morals constitute a religion, or form at least the vanishing point toward which religion tends. But, in many books, the “religion of the future” is no more than a somewhat hypocritical compromise with some form of positive religion. Under cover of the symbolism dear to the Germans, they save in appearance what they in reality destroy. It is in opposition to this species of subterfuge that we have adopted the less misleading term of the “Non-religion of the Future.” Thus we separate ourselves from Von Hartmann and the other prophets who reveal to us, point by point, the religion of the fiftieth century. When one approaches an object of such ardent controversy it is better to employ words with exactness. Everything, first and last, has been included within the limits of philosophy; even the sciences, on the pretext that all scientific researches were in the beginning undertaken by philosophy; and philosophy, in turn, has been included in religion, on the pretext that originally religion embraced within its limits the whole of philosophy and of science. Given a religion of some kind, even that of the Fuegians, there is nothing to prevent one from reading into its myths the last dictum of modern metaphysics; by this means a religion may apparently continue in existence until there is no more left of it than a mere envelope of religious phraseology covering and discovering a wholly metaphysical and purely philosophical system. Better still, on this method, since Christianity is the highest form of religion, all philosophers must ultimately become Christians; and finally, since universality and catholicity are the ideal of Christianity, we shall all be Catholics before we are aware of it.

For the investigator who, without denying such analogies as may ultimately be found to exist, proposes to take as his point of departure the specific differences of religion (which is the true method), every positive and historical religion presents three distinctive and essential elements: (1) An attempt at a mythical and non-scientific explanation of natural phenomena (divine intervention, miracles, efficacious prayers, etc.), or of historical facts (incarnation of Jesus Christ or of Buddha, revelations, and so forth); (2) A system of dogmas, that is to say, of symbolic ideas, of imaginative beliefs, forcibly imposed upon one’s faith as absolute verities, even though they are susceptible of no scientific demonstration or philosophical justification; (3) A cult and a system of rites, that is to say, of more or less immutable practices regarded as possessing a marvellous efficacy upon the course of things, a propitiatory virtue. A religion without myth, without dogma, without cult, without rite is no more than that somewhat bastard product, “natural religion,” which is resolvable into a system of metaphysical hypotheses. By these three different, and really organic elements, religion is clearly marked off from philosophy. Also, instead of being nowadays what it was at a former period, a popular philosophy and popular science, mythical and dogmatic religion tends to become a system of antiscientific and antiphilosophical ideas. If this character is not always apparent, it is owing to the sort of symbolism of which we have spoken, which preserves the name and abandons the ideas or adapts them to the progress of the modern mind.

The elements which distinguish religion from metaphysics or from ethics, and which constitutes a positive religion properly so-called, are, in our judgment, essentially caducous and transitory, and, if so, we reject the religion of the future, as we should reject an alchemy of the future, or astrology of the future. But it does not follow that non-religion or a-religion—which is simply the negation of all dogma, of all traditional and supernatural authority, of all revelation, of all miracle, of all myth, of all rite erected into a duty—is synonymous with impiety, with a contempt for the moral and metaphysical elements of ancient faiths. Not in the least; to be non-religious or a-religious is not to be anti-religious. More than that, as we shall see, the non-religion of the future may well preserve all that is pure in the religious sentiment: an admiration for the cosmos and for the infinite powers which are there displayed; a search for an ideal not only individual, but social, and even cosmic, which shall overpass the limits of actual reality. As it may be maintained that modern chemistry is a veritable alchemy—but an alchemy shorn of the presuppositions which caused its miscarriage—as modern contemporary chemists may pronounce a sincere eulogium upon the ancient alchemists and their marvellous intuitions; just so it may be affirmed that the true religion, if the word must be preserved, consists in no longer maintaining a narrow and superstitious religion. The absence of positive and dogmatic religion is, moreover, the very form toward which all particular religions tend. In effect they strip themselves, little by little (except Catholicism and Turkish Mohammedanism), of their sacred character, of their antiscientific affirmations; they renounce the oppressive control that they have traditionally exercised over the individual conscience. The developments of religion and those of civilization have always proceeded hand in hand; the developments of religion have always proceeded in the line of a greater independence of spirit, of a less literal and less narrow dogmatism, of a freer speculation. Non-religion, as we here understand it, may be considered as a higher degree simply of religion and of civilization.

The absence of religion thus conceived is one with a reasoned but hypothetical metaphysics, treating of men and the universe. One may designate it as religious independence, or anomy, or individualism.[3] It has, moreover, been preached in some degree by all religious reformers from Sakia-Mouni and Jesus to Luther and Calvin, for they have all of them maintained liberty of conscience and respected so much only of tradition as, in the then state of contemporary religious criticism, they could not help admitting. Catholicism, for example, was founded in part by Jesus, but also in part in spite of Jesus; intolerant Anglicanism was founded in part by Luther, but also in part in spite of Luther. The non-religious man, the man simply without a religion, may therefore admire and sympathize with the great founders of religion, not only in that they were thinkers, metaphysicians, moralists, and philanthropists, but in that they were reformers of established belief, more or less avowed enemies of religious authority, of every affirmation which should be that of a sacred body and not of an individual. Every positive religion possesses as one of its essential characters that of transmitting itself from one generation to another, by virtue of the authority which attaches to domestic or national traditions; its mode of transmission is thus totally different from that of science and of art. New religions themselves are obliged more often than not to present themselves in the guise of simple reforms, in the guise of simple returns to the rigour of former teaching and precept, to avoid giving too great a shock to the principle of authority, but in spite of these disguises every new religion has shaken it; the return to an alleged primitive authority has always been a real outleap in the direction of ultimate liberty. There exists, then, in the bosom of every great religion a dissolving force; namely, the very force which served in the beginning to constitute it and to enable it to triumph over its predecessor: the right of private judgment. It is upon this force, this right, that one may count for the ultimate establishment, after the gradual decomposition of every system of dogmatic belief, of a final absence of religion.[4]

Over and above the confusion between the perpetuity of metaphysics and morals and that of positive religion, there is another tendency among our contemporaries against which we have wished to protest. It is the belief, which many profess, in the final unification of existing religions into a religion of the future, either a perfected Judaism, or a perfected Christianity, or a perfected Buddhism. To this predicted religious unity we oppose rather a future plurality of beliefs, a religious individualism. A pretension to universality is, no doubt, characteristic of every great religion; but the dogmatic and mythological element which constitutes a religion positive is precisely irreconcilable, even under the elastic form of symbolism, with the very universality to which they aspire. Such a universality cannot be realized even in metaphysics and morals, for the element of insolubility and unknowability, which cannot be eliminated, will always attract different minds in different directions. The notion of a dogma actually catholic, that is universal, or even a belief actually catholic, seems to us a belief contrary to the indefinite progress for which each of us ought to work according to his strength and his opportunities. A thought is not really personal, does not, properly speaking, even exist or possess the right to exist, unless it be something more than a mere repetition of the thoughts of somebody else. Every eye must have its own point of view, every voice its own accent. The very progress of intelligence and of conscience must, like all progress, proceed from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, nor seek for an ideal unity except in an increasing variety. Would one recognize the absolute power of the savage chief or the Oriental monarch in the federative republican government, which, after a certain number of centuries, will probably be that of all civilized nations? No; and yet humanity will have passed from the one to the other by a series of gradations sometimes scarcely visible. We believe that humanity will progress in the same way generally, from dogmatic religion with pretensions to universality, catholicity, and monarchy—of which the most curious type has precisely been achieved in our days with the dogma of infallibility—toward that state of individualism and religions, which we consider as the human ideal, and which, moreover, does not in the least exclude the possibility of diverse religious associations or federations, nor of free and continuous progress toward ultimate unity of belief on the most general subjects of human inquiry.

The day when positive religions shall have disappeared, the spirit of curiosity in matters of cosmology and metaphysics, which has been more or less paralyzed by an effort to dwell within the unyielding limits of indomitable formula, will be more vivacious than ever before. There will be less of faith, but more of free speculation; less of contemplation, but more of reasoning, of hardy induction, of an active outleap of thought; the religious dogma will be extinct, but the best elements of religious life will be propagated, will be augmented in intensity and extent. For he alone is religious, in the philosophical sense of the word, who searches for, who thinks about, who loves the truth. Christ might have said: I came not to bring peace into human thought, but an incessant battle of ideas; not repose, but movement and progress of spirit; not universal dogma, but liberty of belief, which is the first condition of growth.[5]

IV. To-day, when the very value of religion is increasingly called in doubt, it has been defended by sceptics, who support it, sometimes in the name of the poetry and beauty of religious legend, sometimes in the name of its practical utility. There is sometimes a reaction in the modern mind toward fiction and away from the reality. The human mind becomes weary of regarding itself as a too passively clear mirror in which the world throws its image; and takes pleasure in breathing on the glass and obscuring it; and thence it comes that certain refined philosophers raise the question whether truth and clearness are advantageous in art, in science, in morals, in religion; and they go the length even of preferring religious or philosophical error on æsthetic grounds. For our part, we are far from antagonizing poetry, and believe it to be excessively beneficial for humanity, but on condition that it be not the dupe of its own symbols and do not erect its intentions into dogmas. At this price, we believe that poetry may very often be truer, and better, than certain too narrowly scientific, or too narrowly practical truths. We shall not take ourselves to task for having frequently, in this book, mingled poetry and metaphysics. In so doing we preserve, in so far as it is legitimate, one of the aspects of every religion, its poetic symbolism. Poetry is often more philosophic, not only than history, but than abstract philosophy, but on condition of being sincere and of making no pretensions to being what it is not.

But the partisans of “beneficent error” will object: Why endeavour to dissipate poetic illusion and to call things by their names? Are there not for peoples, for men, for children, certain useful errors and permissible illusions?[6] Surely a great number of errors may be considered as having been necessary in the history of humanity; but has not progress precisely consisted in restricting the number of these useful errors? There have been also organs in the body which have become superfluous, and have disappeared or been fundamentally transformed; such, for example, are the muscles which, no doubt, served our ancestors to move their ears. There exist evidently also, in the human mind, instincts, sentiments, and beliefs which have already atrophied and are destined to disappear or to be transformed. To show the deep roots that religion has sent down into the depths of the human mind is not to demonstrate the perpetuity of religion, for the human mind itself is incessantly changing. “Our fathers,” said Fontenelle, “made the mistake of hoarding up their errors for our benefit”; and in effect, before arriving at the truth, a certain number of false hypotheses must be tried; to discover the true is in some sense to have exhausted the possibilities of the false. Religions have rendered the human mind this immense service, they have exhausted a whole class of side-issues in science, metaphysics, and ethics; one must cross the marvellous to attain the natural, one must cross direct revelation and mystical intention to attain to rational induction and deduction. All the fantastic and apocalyptical ideas with which religion has peopled the human mind once possessed their utility, just as the incomplete and often grotesque sketches with which the studio of the artist is filled once possessed theirs. This straying of the human mind was a sort of reconnoitering, this play of imagination was a veritable labour, a preliminary labour; but the products of it must not be presented as final. The false and even the absurd have always played so great a rôle in human affairs that it would assuredly be dangerous to attempt abruptly to proceed without them; transitions are useful, even in passing from darkness into light, and one needs to become accustomed even to the truth. It is for that reason that society has always rested in a great measure upon error. To-day this portion of its foundation is being withdrawn, and conservatives are sadly frightened lest the whole social equilibrium be destroyed; but we repeat, this diminution of the number of errors is precisely what constitutes progress, and in some sort defines it. Progress in effect is not simply a sensible amelioration of life, it is also the achievement of a better intellectual formulation of life, it is a triumph of logic; to progress is to attain to a more complete consciousness of one’s self and of the world, and by that very fact to a more complete inner consistency of one’s theory of the world. In the beginning, not only moral and religious life, but civil and political life, rested upon the grossest errors, on absolute monarchy, divine right, caste, and slavery; all this barbarity possessed a certain utility, but its utility precisely consisted in its leading to its own extinction; it served as a means of handing us on to something better. What distinguishes the living mechanism from other mechanisms is that the outer springs precisely labour to cause themselves to be superseded; that the movement once produced is perpetual. If we possessed means of projection powerful enough to rival those of nature, we might convert a cannon ball into an eternal satellite of the earth, without its being necessary to impart movement to it a second time. A result accomplished in nature is accomplished once for all. A step forward if it is real and not illusory, and in especial if it is completely conscious, renders impossible a step backward.

In the eighteenth century the attack on religion was directed by philosophical partisans of a priori principles, who were persuaded that the instant a faith was proved to be absurd that was the end of it. In our days the attack is led by historians who possess an absolute respect for fact, which they are inclined to erect into a law, historians who pass a learned existence in the midst of absurdity in all its forms, and for whom the irrational, instead of condemning a belief in which it appears, is often a condition of its duration. Therein lies the difference between the attitude of the eighteenth century and that of the nineteenth toward religion. The eighteenth century hated religion and wished to destroy it. The nineteenth century endeavours to understand religion and cannot reconcile itself to seeing so charming an object of study disappear. The historian’s device is, “What has been, will be”; he is naturally inclined to model his conception of the future on his knowledge of the past. A witness of the futility of revolutions, he sometimes forgets that complete evolution is possible: an evolution which transforms things to their very roots and metamorphoses human beings and their beliefs to an extent that renders them unrecognizable.[7]

One of the masters of religious criticism, M. Renan, wrote to Sainte-Beuve: “No, assuredly I did not wish to detach from the old trunk a soul which was not ripe.” We, also, are not of those who believe in shaking the tree and gathering a green and bruised crop; but if one ought not to make the green fruit fall, one may at least take means to hasten its ripening upon the branch. The human brain is a transmutation of solar heat; one must dissipate this heat, to become once more a ray of the sun. Such an ambition is very gentle, is not at all exorbitant, when one remembers how small a thing a ray of the sun is and how lost in infinite space; a relatively small portion of these wandering rays, however, has sufficed to fashion the earth and all mankind.

I often meet, near my home, a missionary with a black beard, a hard, sharp eye, lit sometimes by a mystic gleam. He seems to maintain a correspondence with the four corners of the world; assuredly he works and works precisely at building up what I am endeavouring to pull down. And must our opposite strivings therefore be regarded as hostile? Why so? Are we not both brothers and humble collaborators in the work of humanity? To convert primitive peoples to Christian dogma and to deliver those who have arrived at a higher stage of civilization from a positive and dogmatic faith, are two tasks which, far from excluding each other, complete each other. Missionaries and freethinkers cultivate different plants, in different places, but at bottom both are labouring to make the field of humanity more fertile. It is said that John Huss, when tied to the stake at Constance, wore a smile of supreme joy when he perceived a peasant in the crowd, bringing straw from the roof of his hut to light the fire: Sancta simplicitas! The martyr recognized in this man a brother in sincerity; he was glad to find himself in the presence of a disinterested conviction. We are no longer in the times of John Huss, of Bruno, of Servetius, of St. Justin, or of Socrates; it constitutes a reason the more for showing ourselves tolerant, and sympathetic even, toward those whom we regard as being in error, provided that the error be sincere.

There is an anti-religious fanaticism which is almost as dangerous as religious fanaticism. Erasmus compares humanity to a drunken man seated on a horse and lurching first to the right and then to the left. The enemies of religion have often committed the mistake of despising their adversaries; it is the worst of faults. There is a power of elasticity in human beliefs which causes their resistance to increase in proportion to the compression which is exerted upon them. Formerly, when a city was attacked by some scourge, the first care of the notable inhabitants, of the chiefs of the city, was to order public prayers; to-day the practical means of battling with epidemics and other scourges are better known, but nevertheless, in 1885, when there was cholera in Marseilles the municipal council devoted its attention almost singly to removing the religious mottoes from the walls of the public schools; it is a remarkable example of what one may call a counter-superstition. Thus the two species of fanaticism, religious and anti-religious, may equally distract the timid from the employment of scientific means against natural evils; an employment which is after all, par excellence, the business of man; these two kinds of fanaticism are paralyso-motors in the great body of humanity.

Among cultivated people there has now and then taken place a violent reaction against religious prejudice, and this reaction frequently persists till death; but in a certain number of cases this reaction is followed in the course of time by a counter-reaction; it is only, as Spencer has remarked, when this counter-reaction has been sufficient, that one may formulate, with anything like completeness, judgments somewhat less narrow and more comprehensive upon the question of religion. Time makes us generous, enlarges our minds each year, as it does the concentric circles in the trunk of a tree. Life also pacifies us as death does; reconciles us with those who do not think and feel as we do. When you become indignant at some antique, absurd prejudice, remember that it has been a travelling companion of humanity for perhaps ten thousand years, that it has lent men aid when the ways were bad and has been the occasion of many joys, and has lived, so to speak, the life of humanity; one might well find a certain element of fraternity in every human thought.

We do not believe that the readers of this sincere book will be able to accuse us of partiality or of injustice, for we have not sought to disguise either the good or the evil aspects of religion, and have even taken a certain pleasure in setting the former in relief. On the other hand, we shall hardly be taxed with ignorance of the religious problem which we have patiently studied on its every side. We shall perhaps be reproached with belonging something too manifestly to the country of our birth, with introducing into the solutions here offered something of the French excess of logic, of an indisposition to yield to half measures, of the determination to have all or nothing, of the spirit which was unable to stop midway with Protestantism and which for the past two centuries has been the home of the most ardent free thought in the world. We reply that if the French mind has a defect, this defect is not logic but a certain nimble trenchancy, a certain narrowness of view which is the reverse of the spirit of logic and analysis; logic, after all, has always the last word here below. Concessions to absurdity, or at least to relativity, may sometimes be necessary in human affairs—and the French Revolutionists were wrong not to recognize it—but such concessions are always transitory. Error is not the end and aim of the human mind; if one cannot make up one’s account with it, if it is useless to disparage it bitterly, it is also unnecessary to venerate it. Minds at once logical and capacious are always sure to be followed, provided one gives humanity time enough; and the truth can wait; it always remains young and is certain some day to be recognized. Sometimes during long night marches soldiers fall asleep without ceasing on that account to go forward; they march on in their dreams and do not awaken till they have reached their destination on the battlefield. It is thus that ideas advance in the human mind; they are so drowsy that they seem unable to stand upright, one discovers their strength and their vitality only by the distance they traverse, and finally day breaks and they appear on the field and are victorious.

THE NON-RELIGION OF THE FUTURE.

Part First.
THE GENESIS OF RELIGIONS IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETIES.

CHAPTER I.
RELIGIOUS PHYSICS.

Importance of the Problem of the Origin of Religion—Universality of Religious Beliefs or Superstitions—Variability of Religions and Religious Evolution.

I. Idealist Theory which Attributes the Origin of Religion to a Notion of the Infinite—Henotheism of Max Müller and Von Hartmann—M. Renan’s Instinct for Divinity.

II. Theory of a Worship of the Dead and of Spirits—Herbert Spencer—Spencer’s Objections to the Theory of the Attribution of a Soul to Natural Forces.

III. Answer to Objections—Religious Physics Sociological in Form, and the Substitution of Relations between Malevolent or Beneficent Conscious Beings for Relations between Natural Forces—Socio-morphism of Primitive Peoples.

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.

CHAPTER II.
RELIGIOUS METAPHYSICS.

I. Animism or polydemonism—Formation of the dualist conception of spirit—Social relations with spirits.

II. Providence and miracles—The evolution of the dualist conception of a special providence—The conception of miracles—The supernatural and the natural—Scientific explanation and miracles—Social and moral modifications in the character of man owing to supposed social relations with a special providence—Increasing sentiment of irresponsibility and passivity and “absolute dependence.”

III. The creation—Genesis of the notion of creation—The dualistic elements in this idea—Monism—Classification of systems of religious metaphysics—Criticism of the classification proposed by Von Hartmann—Criticism of the classification proposed by Auguste Comte.

I. Animism.

Legitimate and illegitimate metaphysics.

The upshot of the preceding chapter is that every religion in its beginning consisted of a mistaken system of physics; and between a mistaken system of physics and certain forms of metaphysics there is often no difference but one of degree simply. Magnify some scientific error, reduce it to a system, explain heaven and earth by it, and it will be a metaphysics—in the bad sense. Whatever one universalizes—error or truth—acquires metaphysical significance, and possibly it is more easy to universalize in this way the false than the true; truth possesses always a greater concreteness than error, and therefore offers greater resistance to arbitrary fashioning. Let a modern man of science develop his knowledge as he will, and enlarge the circle of known phenomena; so long as he holds vigorously by scientific methods he will never be able to pass at a bound from the sphere of phenomena to the sphere of things in themselves. The conscientious man of science is prisoned within the limits of knowledge, his thought has no outlet. But let him once break the chain of logic which confines him, and behold him free. His false hypothesis grows without obstacle or check from reality; he lands at a bound up to his neck in metaphysics. The fact is, one may arrive at a system of metaphysics in two ways—incontinently, by a logical solecism and an exaggeration of some false premise ad infinitum, or by following the chain of known truth to the point at which it disappears in eternal night, and by endeavouring to peer into the darkness by the light of hypothesis: in the first case metaphysics is simply a logically developed mistake which gains in magnitude what it loses in reality, an illegitimate negation of science; in the second case it is a hypothetical extension of truth, in some sort a legitimate supplement to science.

We are approaching the moment when religious physics became transformed into metaphysics; the period when the gods retreated from phenomenon to phenomenon, and took refuge ultimately in the supersensible; the period when heaven and earth first became distinct and separate; although, to be quite accurate, the distinguishing characteristic of religion even at the present day is an incoherent mixture of physics and metaphysics, of anthropomorphic or sociomorphic theories in regard to nature and to the supernatural. The foundation of every primitive religion is reasoning by analogy, that is to say, the vaguest and least sound of logical methods. At a later date the mass of naïve analogies constituting any one religion is criticised and systematized and completed by tentative induction or regular deduction.

Primitive metaphysics a fetichistic monism.

Man, as we have seen, begins by creating a natural society, including animals, plants, and even minerals, which he endows with a life similar to his own: he believes himself to be in communication with them in matters of volition and intention, just as he is in communication with other men and animals. But in thus projecting something analogous to his own life, to his power of volition and of his social relations and responsibilities, into the existence of external things, he does not, at first, dream of any distinction between the animating principle and the body which it animates; he conceives as yet no such distinction in his own case. The earliest stage of religious metaphysics, therefore, is not a sort of vague monism relative to the divine principle, the indwelling divinity of things, τὸ θεῖον, as Messrs. Müller and Von Hartmann affirm, but a vague monism in regard to the soul and body, which at first are conceived as one. The whole world is a society of living bodies.

Becomes a dualistic animism. Separate existence of the soul.

The conception which is most analogous to the preceding is that of distinct and separate souls animating each its body, of spirits capable of quitting each its dwelling-place. It is this that historians of religion mean by animism. What is remarkable in this conception is its dualistic character. It contains the germ of the opposition between soul and body. The dualistic conception arises slowly from a number of naïve analogies. The first are borrowed from the fact of respiration. Does not one fairly hear the departure of the breath animating a living body, in what one calls the last gasp? Other analogies are borrowed from the physical fact of the shadow cast by the sun; one seems to see the spirit marching side by side with the body, and even changing its place when the body is motionless. Shadow has played a large rôle in the paraphysics of primitive peoples; shadows people the other world. In the third place, during sleep it is incontestable, on the premises that primitive man has at his disposal, that the spirit sometimes makes long journeys, for the sleeper often recollects wandering, hunting, or making war in distant countries, at a time when his companions are perfectly aware that his body has lain motionless. Fainting also seems to be a case in which something dwelling in us suddenly leaves and presently comes back again. Lethargy is a more striking example of the same thing. Visions in delirium, hallucinations in madness, or even in dreams, deal with beings who are invisible to others; fantastic beings who appear to savages as real as any others. Also it is well known that fools and innocents were regarded, until modern times, as inspired and sacred. Other nervous maladies—hysteria, “possession,” somnambulism—add their quota of precision to the conception of a spirit animating the body, dwelling in it, quitting it more or less at will, tormenting it, etc.

Thus, by degrees, there arises the conception of a subtle mode of being eluding touch, and commonly vision even, capable of a life independent of the body it inhabits, and more powerful than the body. Man comes to believe himself to be living in a society with beings other than those who appeal directly and grossly to his senses; he believes himself to be living in a society of spirits.

Ghosts.

That is not all. The problem of death early engaged the attention of primitive people. They considered it altogether as a physical affair; they explained it, as Messrs. Tylor and Spencer (following Lucretius) have shown, by a number of inductions drawn from observations on sleep, lethargy, and dream. A sleeping body awakes, it seems to follow that a dead body will awake; that is the line of reasoning. Moreover, the dead come back in dreams, or in the demi-hallucinations of the night and of fear. The modern conception of pure spirit is an indirect and later consequence of a belief in immortality, it is not itself the principle of it. A cult for the dead, for the manes, as the Romans said, is partly explicable on moral or psychological grounds, as, for example, by a prolongation of filial respect and fear, and partly on grounds altogether material and gross. A cult for the dead rests on a naïve theory based on sentiment; it is semi-physical and semi-psychological. The nature of a departed soul has been conceived in very different ways. Among the Dakota Indians of North America, one’s double goes up into the air, one’s third rejoins the spirits, one’s fourth and last soul stays by the body; an instance of a very complicated theory formed out of elements altogether primitive. In general, the belief is that the souls of the dead go to join ancestral souls in another world, which is commonly a distant land from which the tribe has migrated in former times—affording an example of a social tie which survives death. The Greeks and Romans believed that, if the body was deprived of sepulture, its shadow could not penetrate into its proper place of abode; it remained on earth and haunted the living—a remnant of former beliefs in the necessity of sepulture and the maintenance of friendly relations with the society of the dead.[36]

Analogies between ghosts and living people.

The dead were to be conciliated by the same means as the living, by supplications and gifts. The gifts were the same as those which are acceptable to the living—food, arms, costumes, horses, servants. In Dahomey, when a king dies, a hundred of his soldiers are immolated on his tomb as a body guard. Much the same thing was done among the Incas of Peru. At Bali all the women of the harem are immolated upon the grave of the defunct sultan. In Homer, Achilles slaughtered his Trojan prisoners on the funeral pyre of Patroclus, together with the horses and the dogs of his dead friend. The Fiji islanders used to immolate a man at the foot of each pillar in the home of a chief, as a guard for the edifice. In our days, spirits are still so numerous, in the eyes of certain people, that an Arab, for example, when he throws a stone, breathes an apology to such spirits as he may strike.[37] The universe is populated by anthropomorphic societies.

Care of vengeance committed to ghosts.

It was to spirits that the care of one’s vengeances was confided. According to Tylor, two Brahmans, believing that a man had robbed them of fifty rupees, took their own mother and, with her consent, cut off her head in order that her shadow might torment and pursue the robber till death. Among the Alfourous of Moluccas children are buried alive up to the neck, and left there under the scorching sun with their mouths full of pepper and salt, so that, dying in an agony of thirst, their souls may go in a state of fury in search of the enemy against whom they have been sent. It is always some social exigency, some hatred, some vengeance, some punishment, that leads one to enter into commerce with spirits.

Summary.

In effect, all historical treatises unite to show that animism or polydemonism has at one time or other been universal. It immediately succeeded fetichism or concrete naturism, the primitive belief, in which animating soul and animated body were not distinguished.

A belief in separately existing spirits, or spiritism, as Mr. Spencer calls it, which contains the germ of the belief in revisitants from the other world, constitutes the primitive origin of the more refined metaphysical system called spiritualism. This last system, founded also upon the notion of the fundamental duality of man, and of every living being, leads to the notion of a society of spirits.

Let us now consider the inherent necessity under which animism lies of developing into theism.

II. Providence and Miracles.

From ghosts to divinity a single step.

From the notion of a spirit to that of a divinity is but one step. It suffices to conceive the spirit as sufficiently powerful and redoubtable to reduce us in some considerable measure to a state of dependence. Spirits, manes, gods, subsist in the beginning on an indistinct sentiment of terror. The instant that spirits can separate themselves from the body and perform mysterious actions of which we are incapable, they begin to be divine; it is for this reason that death may change a man into a species of god.

Development of notion of special providence.

Spirits are not only powerful, however; they are also clairvoyant, prevoyant—they are acquainted with things that lie beyond our knowledge. More than that, they are benevolent or hostile; they are related to us in various social or antisocial ways. Here we have the elements of the notion of divine providence. The second semi-metaphysical idea, which lies in germ at the bottom of every religion, is, therefore, this of perspicacious spirits, of favouring or unfavouring deities, of providences. “This being is well or ill disposed toward me; he may work me good or harm.” Such is the first naïve formulation of the theory of divine providence. One must not expect to find, in the beginning, the notion of a general, directing intelligence, but simply that of a social tie between particular voluntary, well-disposed or ill-disposed beings. The notion of providence, like all other religious notions, was at first a superstition. A savage, on his way to some undertaking, meets a serpent and succeeds in his enterprise; it was the serpent that brought him luck: behold a providential accident! Gamblers at the present time are quite as superstitious. The fetich theory of providence still subsists, in the belief in medals, scapularies, and so forth.[38] Observation inevitably results in the perception of causal relations among phenomena; the trouble is, simply, that to the primitive mind every coincidence appears to be a cause; post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Any object that is a party to any such coincidence is a lucky object, good to have in one’s power, a portable providence, so to speak. Thus there arises the notion of a destiny, a bias in phenomena toward good or evil, which imposes itself upon the previously existing conception of nature as animated or peopled by spirits. The post hoc, ergo propter hoc—that is to say, the belief in the influence of phenomena immediately preceding or concomitant to the main event, and in the influence of a present action upon some future event—is the germ of superstitions both in regard to providence and to destiny. And out of the idea of destiny, of fortune, of necessity, grows in process of time the scientific notion of determinism and universal reciprocity.

Systematic subordination among the gods.

Little by little, by the growth of experience, man achieves the conception of an orderly subordination among the different voluntary beings with whom he peoples the earth, a sort of unification of special providences, a more or less regular organization of the world. Responsibility for current events retreats from cause to cause into the distance, from powerful being to still more powerful being; primitive man still insists on believing that every event is still the sign, the expression of a volition. Once more his faith is dualistic: he conceives the world as dependent upon the will of some one or more superior beings who direct it, or suspend at need the ordinary course of things.

Development of belief in miracle.

It is at this stage in the evolution of religion that the conception of miracles appears. The notion of miracles is at first very vague in primitive religions; the period at which this notion begins to become definite marks the initiation of a further step in the development of religion. If, in effect, the marvellous has in all times formed a necessary element in the constitution, it did not possess in the beginning the same character as nowadays; it was not so definitely distinguished from the natural order of things. Human intelligence had not yet distinguished scientific determinism and supernaturalism. A natural phenomenon! The bare idea is almost modern; that is to say, the idea of a phenomenon subject to immutable laws, bound up together with the whole body of other phenomena and forming with them a single unit. What a complex conception, and how far above the reach of primitive intelligence! What we call a miracle is a natural phenomenon to a savage, he sees miracles every hour; properly speaking, he sees nothing else but miracles, that is to say, surprising events. Primitive man, in effect, takes no notice of what does not surprise him (surprise, it has been said, is the father of science), and one of the immediate characteristics, in his opinion, of what surprises him, is that it is intentional.[39] That it should be so no more shocks him, than a paradox shocks a philosopher. The savage is not acquainted with the laws of nature, he has no notion of their being universal to prevent his admitting exceptions to them. A miracle is simply to him a sign of a power like his own, acting by methods unknown to him and producing effects above the limits of his own capacity. Are such effects infinitely above his capacity? No such notion enters into the question; it suffices that they be above it at all to make him bow down and adore.

Marks a degree of intellectual progress.

The belief in miracles, so anti-scientific nowadays, marks a considerable progress in the intellectual evolution. It amounts, in effect, to a limitation of divine intervention to a small number of extraordinary phenomena. A conception of universal determinism is, in fact, beginning to make its appearance. The belief in dualism, in the separation between spirit and body, becoming constantly more marked, ends in the belief in distinct and separate powers.

Conception of God as Providence more essential than that of Him as First Cause.

Belief in a power miraculously distributing good and evil, in a Providence, is the most vital element in religion. The most important act in every religion, indeed, is propitiation and entreaty; well, this act is not simply directed toward God as such, but toward God as a presiding divinity, a power capable of favouring or disfavouring us. And the great Oriental religions have reached their present state of perfection without any special effort to make the notion of God precise, without specially insisting upon any of his distinguishing attributes except such as are subsidiary to this notion of a Providence awarding good and evil; and popular fancy hastens to ascribe the accomplishment of this distribution to genii, to good and evil spirits; it need go no further, it need not penetrate to the Great Being, to the infinite, so to speak, to the noumenon, and to the abyss which, in effect, is to it a comparative matter of indifference. Even in religions of Christian origin—in especial, in Catholicism, and the Greek Church—God is not always addressed directly; saints, angels, the Virgin, the Son, the Holy Spirit, are much more frequently invoked as mediators. There is something vague, and obscure, and terrible, in God the Father; He is the creator of heaven and hell, the great and somewhat ambiguous principle of goodness, and, in some dim way, of evil. One may see in Him the germ of an indirect personification of nature, which is so indifferent to man, so hard, so inflexible. Christ, on the contrary, is the personification of the best elements of humanity. The responsibility for ferocious laws, maledictions, eternal punishments, is laid upon the shoulders of the Old Testament Deity hidden behind His cloud, revealed only in the lightning and the thunder, reigning by terror, and demanding the life even of His Son as an expiatory sacrifice. At bottom, the real God adored by the Christians is Jesus, that is to say, a mediating Providence whose function is to soften down the asperities of natural law, a Providence who distributes nothing but good and happiness, whereas nature distributes good and evil with equal indifference. It is Jesus we invoke, and it is to the personification of Providence rather than to that of the first cause of the world that humanity has kneeled these two thousand years.

Increasing opposition between notion of Providence and science.

A belief in miracles and in a Providence comes, in the course of its development, into sharper and sharper conflict with a belief in the order of nature. Man gives himself up to an exclusive preoccupation with what he supposes to be the means of ameliorating his destiny and that of his fellows: providential interference with the course of nature, sacrifice, and prayer are his great means of action on the world. He lives in the supernatural. There exists always, in the early stages of every religion, a certain sentiment of evil, of suffering, of terror; and to correct it the believer takes refuge in miracles. Providence is thus the primitive means of progress, and man’s first hope lay in the superhuman.

Practical evil of belief in Providence.

Fear of evil, and belief that it can be cured by divine intervention, were the origin of prayer. A positive religion, even in our days, can scarcely rest content with the conception of a God who simply sits at a distance and watches the march of a world which he regulated, once for all, at the beginning of time. He must absolutely show himself from time to time in our midst, we must feel the proximity of his hand ready to sustain us, he must be able to suspend the course of nature to our profit. Piety requires the stimulus of a belief in the immediate and present possibility of miracles, in their past existence, in their present existence even, and in one’s power of invoking them by prayer. Thus the believer opposes to the conception of ordinary determinism, as the regulating principle of the external world, a faith in a being capable at any moment of tampering with it; and he counts upon this power being exercised, he counts upon invoking it, he puts his hope in supernatural means not less than in natural means, and sometimes even to the neglect of the latter.

Miracles not frauds.

As Littré remarked, the mind may behave in three ways in regard to miracles: adore them, reject them as a mystification, or explain them by natural means. Primitive times, Antiquity, and the Middle Ages adored miracles; the eighteenth century rejected them as impostures and made game of them. It was then that the theory, that the founders of religion were impostors simply, was generally prevalent. One of the most necessary and most serious incidents in the human drama was simply mistaken for a bit of comedy. It was forgotten that men do not devote a whole lifetime to falsehood; the theory of imposture was a psychological as well as historical error. A man—even an actor or a politician—is always sincere on some side or other; at some period or other a man inevitably says what he thinks, even if only by mistake. Even certain palinodes, provoked by self-interest, are explicable by an unconscious deviation, under the influence of some passion, rather than by an altogether conscious and brazen determination to deceive; and even when one lies with all one’s heart, one inevitably believes, or soon comes to believe, some part of one’s own falsehood. The reproach of hypocrisy, of comedy and falsehood, has been uttered a hundred times in the course of history, and it has usually been a mistake. In the eighteenth century the same men who prepared and achieved the French Revolution were fond of accusing the prophets and Apostles, the revolutionists of an early date, of insincerity and fraud. To-day such an accusation can no longer be sustained against the sacred books, and the men of the eighteenth century are themselves accused of hypocrisy. For M. Taine, for example, almost all the leaders of the French Revolution lie under the reproach of insincerity, and the very people who sustained them were not, in his judgment, moved by the ideas which they proclaimed, but by the grossest self-interest. The fact is, there are always two points of view from which historic events may be regarded: that of personal interests, which come to the surface as seldom as possible, and that of the general and generous ideas which, on the contrary, are complacently given prominence in public speeches and writings. If it is useful for the historian to divine the interested motives which contributed to the production of a historical event, it is irrational to refuse to lend some measure of credence to the higher motives which justified it and which may well have lent their influence to that of self-interest. The human heart is not a one-stringed instrument. The revolutionists had faith in the Revolution, in the rights which they were vindicating, in equality and fraternity; they even believed, sometimes, in their own disinterestedness, as the Protestants believed in the Reformation, as Christ and the prophets believed in their own inspiration; as even in our days, by a belated superstition, the Pope believes in his own infallibility. There is in every faith some element of the naïveté which a child shows in its little semi-conscious hypocrisies, in its caresses which mask a demand and its smiles which are the efflorescence of satisfied desire. But without a certain element of genuineness, a certain element of real naïveté in the faith of the believers, no religion could exist, no revolution would be achieved, no important change would be produced in the life of humanity. Intellectual affirmation and action are always proportionate: to act is to believe and to believe is to act.

But illusions.

In our days, miracles are beginning to be scientifically explained. They are phenomena simply; frequently they were witnessed and described in good faith, but with insufficient knowledge. Everyone is acquainted, for example, with the biblical miracle according to which Isaiah “brought again the shadows of the degrees, which was gone down in the sun dial of Ahaz, ten degrees backward”; indeed the miracle has been reproduced. Mr. Guillemin [40] demonstrates by geometrical reasonings that, by inclining the dial slightly toward the horizon, the shadow may be made gradually to creep a certain distance backward. In the same way, the successive appearances of Jesus after his burial have been paralleled by a recent event in the United States: a criminal, at whose execution all his fellow-prisoners were present, appeared to all of them successively the next day, or the day after. The latter is a remarkable instance of collective hallucination, which shows that a group of individuals living in, so to speak, the same emotional habitat may well be struck at the same time by the same vision, without there being, on their part, either conscious or unconscious fraud or collusion. A third miracle, of an altogether different kind, has also been scientifically explained: I mean the colouring of the fleece of the flocks of Laban and of Jacob; the effect was obtained by a process well-known to the Egyptians, and mentioned by Pliny. Matthew Arnold believes that the miraculous cures also are not pure legend simply, that they bear witness to the great influence of mind over matter. Jesus really did exorcise devils, that is to say, the mad passions which howled about him. And thus may be understood in their true sense the words: “What does it matter whether I say, Thy sins are forgiven thee! or whether I say Arise and walk?” and again: “Thou art made whole; sin no more, lest a worse thing befall thee.” Jesus himself must have known, as Socrates and Empedocles did, though even in a more extraordinary degree, that he possessed a moral and physical power, a virtue, which he himself did not understand and which seemed to him a divine gift. He knew himself to be morally and symbolically the healer of the deaf, the blind, the paralytic, a physician of souls; and the cures that he wrought in cases of hysteria, more or less temporary but real, forced him to attribute to himself a superhuman power over the body also.

Usually explicable by the science of nervous phenomena.

The science of the nervous system, which dates almost entirely from our days, may be taken as a perpetual running commentary on the history of miracles. Perhaps a full quarter of the marvellous facts observed and revered by humanity fall into place within the limits of this new science. A physician, or observer, in the midst of his subjects is like a prophet; those who surround him are incessantly obliged to recognize in him an occult power, which he himself does not understand; physician and patient, observer and observed, live equally in the realm of the extraordinary. The facts of partial insensibility, of catalepsy followed by a reawakening like a rising from the dead, of mental suggestion taking place even at a distance, all these facts, which are well known, and are each day becoming more and more explicable, are even for us at the present moment on the confines of the miraculous; they are detaching themselves, under our very eyes, from the sphere of religion, and falling within the compass of science. The observer who notices for the first time that he can transmit an almost compulsive command by a look, by a pressure of the hand, and even, it appears nowadays, by a simple tension of his will, must experience a species of surprise, even of fright, of almost religious disquietude at finding himself armed with such a power. He must begin to understand that the mythical and mystical interpretation of such facts is an affair of delicate discrimination, that lay beyond the stretch of primitive intelligence.

Often by less recondite knowledge.

Even the miracles which do not belong simply to the less explicable phenomena of the nervous system tend increasingly to appear to the historian as having been possessed of some foundation in fact. All that was subjective in them is the element of the marvellous and the providential. The miracles really were produced, but in the human heart; and instead, in any proper sense, of engendering faith they proceeded from it and are explicable by it. An English missionary [41] who made a journey in Siberia relates that at the moment of his arrival at Irkutsk a fire was consuming three-fourths of the town; a chapel, however, had been spared and the Russian clergy saw in this fact a miracle; the English missionary explained it very simply by the observation that the rest of the town had been built up of wood, and that the chapel was of brick. But the missionary, who denies anything like providential intervention in the above mentioned case, admits providential intervention the same day in regard to another point; for he relates that but for one of his horses having run away he would have arrived too soon at Irkutsk, and would have had his baggage burned in the fire, and offers thanks to God because his horse had been inspired to break the traces. The same natural causes which suffice, according to this excellent gentleman, to explain why the Russian church was spared, suffice no longer when the luggage of an Anglican missionary, the special protégé, is involved. Every believer is inclined thus to interpret miraculously the mercies that have been shown to him. From the height of a stall or the pulpit of a church one sees the events of this world at a particular angle; from the stall or pulpit of another church one sees them at another angle, and for purposes of scientific verity the events must be looked down upon from the stalls and pulpits of every church—unless one rejects churches altogether.

Miracles essential to religion.

Religions create miracles by the very need that they themselves feel for them, they create them as evidence in their own support; miracles enter as a necessary element into the process of mental evolution which engenders religion. The distinguishing mark of the word of God is that it alters the order of natural phenomena. Mohammedanism alone made its way in the world without the assistance of visible and gross evidence in its favour, appealing not to the eyes but to the spirit, as Pascal would say; and in this respect it may perhaps claim an intellectual elevation that Judaism and Christianity cannot. But if Mohammed refused the gift of miracles, with a good faith that Moses seems not to have possessed, his disciples hastened to force it upon him, and have supplied his life and death with an appropriate setting of marvellous legend. Ground of belief must be had; the messenger of God must present some visible sign by which he may be recognized.

Prevalence of belief in special providence.

It is evident that divine providence or protection must have been conceived in the beginning as quite special, and not as acting by general laws. The course of the world was one continual series of divine interventions in the natural order of things, and in the affairs of men; divinities lived in the midst of mankind, in the midst of the family, in the midst of the tribe. This result may be explained as due to the very character of primitive humanity. Primitive man, who is the most credulous, is evidently also the least responsible of mankind; incapable of governing himself, he is always willing to abandon himself to the management of somebody else; in every circumstance of life he needs to share some part of his burden. If a misfortune happens to him, he relies on anybody or anything rather than on himself. This characteristic, which has been remarked in a number of races of mankind, is especially visible in infants and in infant peoples. They lack patience to follow without skipping a link in the chain of cause and effect; they do not understand how any human action can produce any great effect, and are, in general, much astonished at the disproportion which exists between effects and their causes—a disproportion which is only explicable in their eyes by the intervention of some foreign cause. Hence the need, so remarkable in feeble minds, to discover some other than the real explanation for a phenomenon; the real explanation is never, in their eyes, truly sufficient. For a vanquished soldier, the defeat is never sufficiently explained by scientific grounds; for example, by his own cowardice, by the ill-management of the men on the field, by the ignorance of the leaders; before the explanation is complete the notion of treason must always be added. Just so, if one of the lower classes has an attack of indigestion, he will not admit that he has eaten too much; he will complain of the quality of the food, and perhaps even suggest that somebody has tried to poison him. In the Middle Ages, when there was pestilence, it was the fault of the Jews; at Naples the people beat the images of the saints when the harvest is not good. All these facts are explicable in the same way; an uncultivated mind cannot bring itself to accept a result which is disagreeable to it, cannot resign itself to having been unexpectedly disconcerted by the mere brute course of things, to say with Turenne, when he was asked how he lost a battle: “By my own fault.” The notion of a special providence allies itself with his natural disposition; it permits man to wash his hands of all responsibility, no matter what happens. A result which it would be too much trouble to foresee, and to obtain by mere natural means, can always be demanded at the hand of Providence; one waits for it instead of working for it; and if one is deceived in one’s expectations one lays the blame on the Deity. In the Bible, kings are never guilty except toward God, their incapacity is simply impiety; but it is always easier to be pious than to be capable.

Belief in Providence tames people for absolute monarchy.

At the same time that the naïve irresponsibility of primitive people thus accommodates itself to the providential government of the world, it accommodates itself no less to the despotic government of a monarch or of an aristocracy. The principle of despotism is at bottom identical with that of a supernatural, external providence; the latter also demands a certain renunciation or abdication in the direction of events. One lets one’s self go, one confides one’s self to someone else, and by this means one winks at the cruellest of frauds, the defraudment of one’s own volition; another wills and determines in one’s stead. One limits one’s self to desiring and hoping, and prayers and supplications take the place of action and of work. One floats with the stream in a state of relaxation; if things turn ill there is always someone for one to blame, to curse, or to wheedle; if, on the contrary, things turn out well, one’s heart overflows with benedictions, not to mention that one secretly attributes some part (man is so made) of the result obtained to one’s self. Instead of saying, “I determined that it should be so,” one says, “I asked, I prayed for it.” It is so easy to believe that one is helping to manage the state, or govern the earth, when one has murmured two words into the ear of a king or a god—when, like the fly in the fable, one has simply buzzed an instant about the great rolling wheel of the world. Propitiatory prayer possesses a power which is great in proportion to its vagueness; it seems to be able to do everything precisely because it cannot ever do anything in especial. It exalts man in his own eyes because it enables him to obtain the maximum of effect with the minimum of effort. What a penchant the people have always felt for destiny and men of destiny! How every appeal to the people, in behalf of men of destiny, has in all times succeeded in taking the suffrage of the masses! A sentiment of submission to the decrees of Providence, who is destiny personified, has been the excuse of every form of indolence, of every cowardly adherence to custom. And if one carries it to its logical conclusion, to what else does the indolent sophism of the Orientals amount? It is true that the precept, “Heaven will aid thee,” is habitually corrected by the precept, “Aid thyself.” But efficiency to aid one’s self demands initiative, and audacity, and a spirit of revolt against an unwelcome course of things; efficiently to aid one’s self one must not say, “God’s will be done,” but “My will be done”; one must be a rebel in the midst of the passive multitude, a sort of Prometheus or Satan. It is difficult to say to one, “Whatever happens, whatever exists, is what it is, by the irresistible and special will of God,” and nevertheless to add, “Do not submit to the accomplished facts.” In the Middle Ages men consoled themselves in the midst of tyranny and poverty by thinking that it was God himself who was oppressing them, and dared not rise against their masters for fear they might be rising really against God. To preserve social injustice it had to be apotheosized. What was really no more than a human right had to be made divine.

Personal initiative a defiance of the gods.

The sentiment of personal initiative, like that of personal responsibility, is quite modern and incapable of being developed in the atmosphere of bigotry and narrowness in which man has long lived with his gods. To say to one’s self, “I can undertake something new; I shall have the audacity to introduce a change into the world; to make an advance; in the combat against brute nature I shall shoot the first arrow, without waiting, like the soldier of antiquity, till the auspices have been consulted”—would have looked like an enormity to men of former times; to men who did not take a step without consulting their gods and carrying their images before them to show the way. Personal initiative was, on the face of it, a direct offence against Providence, an encroachment on His rights; to strike the rock as Moses did, before having received the order to do so from God, would have been to expose one’s self to His wrath. The world was the private property of the Most High. It was not permitted to a man to employ the forces of nature without special leave; man was in the position of a child, who is not allowed to play with the fire; except that the reason for prohibiting the child is not the same—we do not prohibit children from playing with the fire because we are “jealous” of them. The jealousy of the gods is a conception which has survived till the present day, although it is incessantly retreating before the progress made by human initiative. Machinery, the product of modern times, is the most powerful enemy that the notion of a Providence has ever had to wrestle with. One knows how the innocent winnowing machine was cursed by the priests, and looked upon with an eye of hatred by the peasants, because it imprisoned and employed in the service of man an essentially providential force—that of the wind. But malediction was useless, the wind could not refuse to winnow the wheat; the machine vanquished the gods. There, as everywhere, human initiative carried the day. Science found itself in direct opposition to the special intervention of Providence, and appropriated and subdued the forces of nature to an end, in appearance, not divine but natural. A man of science is a disturbing element in nature, and science an anti-providence.

Man practically a domestic animal in the house of the gods: resulting enfeeblement of character.

Before the earliest developments of science, primitive man found himself, as a result of his imagination, in a state of domesticity in the world, analogous to that to which he had himself reduced certain animals; and this state exerted a profound influence upon the character of such animals, deprived them of certain capacities and endowed them, in turn, with others. Some of them—certain birds, for example—become under domestication almost incapable of finding and providing themselves with their necessary food. More intelligent animals like the dog, who might in a case of absolute necessity rely upon himself for indispensables, contract nevertheless a habit of subjection to man which creates a corresponding need: my dog is not at ease except when he knows that I am near; if anything causes me to go away, he is restless and nervous; in the presence of danger he runs between my legs, instead of taking refuge in flight, which would be the primitive instinct. Thus every animal which knows itself to be watched and protected in the details of its life by a superior being, necessarily loses its primitive independence, and if its primitive independence should be once more restored, it would be unhappy, would experience an ill-defined fear, a vague sentiment of enfeeblement. Just so in the case of primitive and uncultivated man: once he is habituated to the protection of the gods, this protection becomes for him a veritable need; if he is deprived of it, he falls into a state of inexpressible discomfiture and inquietude. Add that, in this case, he will soon provide himself with a substitute; to escape from the intolerable solitude which doubt creates within him, he will take refuge in his gods or his fetiches, under the influence of a sentiment identical with that which sends the dog to take refuge between the legs of his master. To attain some idea of the force of such a sentiment among primitive human beings, one must remember that the surveillance of the gods is much more extended and more scrupulous even than that of man over domestic animals, or of a master over his slaves. Primitive man feels his god or his genii at his side at every step, in all the circumstances of life; he is accustomed to being never alone, to the presence of someone by him keeping step with him; he believes that every word that he says and every act that he does is witnessed and judged. No domestic animal is accustomed to so high a degree of subjection; he knows perfectly that our protection is not always efficacious and that we are sometimes mistaken about him, that we caress him when he ought to be punished, etc. Cats, for instance, know that man cannot see in the dark: one evening a white cat made ready to commit an abominable misdemeanour within two steps of me, not suspecting that its colour would betray it to an attentive eye, even in the obscurity. Primitive men sometimes practised an analogous cunning in regard to their gods; they did not yet believe in the complete sovereignty, in the absolute ubiquity, of Providence. But by a process of logical development, Providence is ultimately believed to extend to everything, to envelop one’s whole life; the fear of God becomes to man a perpetual prohibition against his passions, a hope in God’s aid his perpetual recourse. Religion and science possess this much in common, that they result in enveloping us equally in a network of necessities; but what distinguishes science is that it makes us acquainted with the real order and causes of phenomena, and by that fact permits us to modify that order at will; by showing us the fact and nature of our dependence, science supplies us with the means of conquering a comparative independence. In religion, on the contrary, the mythical and miraculous element introduces an unforeseen factor, the divine will, a special providence, into the midst of events, and by that fact deceives one as to the true means of modifying the real course of things. The instant one believes one’s self to be dependent upon Jupiter or Allah, one ascribes a greater efficacy to propitiation than to action; and it follows that the greater one perceives one’s dependence to be the more completely one believes one’s self to be without defence against it; the more complete the submission is to God, the more complete one’s resulting submission becomes to the established fact. The feeling of an imaginary dependence upon supernatural beings thus increases the general dependence of man in relation to nature. Thus understood, the notion of a special providence, of a divine tutelage, has resulted in the protracted maintenance of the human soul in a state of genuine minority; and this state of minority, in its turn, has rendered the existence and surveillance of divine protectors a necessity. When, therefore, the believer refuses an offer of emancipation from the dependence which he has voluntarily accepted, the reason is that he feels a vague sentiment of his own insufficiency, of his irremediably belated coming of age; he is a child, who does not dare stray far from the paternal roof; he does not possess the courage to walk alone. The child who should show a precocious independence, and should early learn to go its own road, would not improbably become simply dissipated; his precocity might well be depravity in disguise. Similarly in history, the irreligious, the sceptics, the atheists, have been frequently spoiled children, precocious in the bad sense; their freedom of spirit was only a high form of mischief. The human race, like the individual, long needed surveillance and tutelage; so long as it experienced this need it leaned inevitably upon a belief in a providence external to itself and to the universe, capable of interfering in the course of things, and of modifying the general laws of nature by particular acts of volition. Subsequently, by the progress of science, Providence has been deprived day by day of some of its special and miraculous powers, of its supernatural prerogatives. By the evolution of human thought piety has been transformed; it tends to-day to regard as an object of filial affection what was formerly an object of terror, of deprecation, of propitiation. Science, enveloping Providence in a network of inflexible laws, is day by day reducing it to a state of immobility and, so to speak, paralyzing it. Providence is becoming like an old man whom age has rendered incapable of movement—who but for our aid could not raise a hand or foot, who lives with our assistance, and who, nevertheless, is only the more beloved, as if his existence became to us more precious in proportion to its uselessness.

III. Creation.

Conception of creation dualistic.

After the notion of Providence one must deal, in running through the metaphysical principles of religion, with the notion of a creator, which has acquired in our days an importance that it did not possess formerly. This conception, like that of the soul and of a special providence, presented itself originally under the form of dualism. Man conceived in the beginning a god as fashioning a world more or less independent of himself, out of some pre-existing material. It was only later that this crude dualism was refined into the notion of creation ex nihilo, which represented the traditional duality as produced by a primitive unity—God, who had at first existed alone, created out of nothing a world distinct and separate from himself.

Conception of creation natural.

The following conversation, of which I can guarantee the authenticity, affords an example of naïve metaphysic. The two interlocutors were a little peasant girl, four years old, who had always lived in the country, and a young girl from town, the daughter of the owner of the farm. They had gone out into the garden where a number of flowers had opened that morning; the little peasant girl admired them enthusiastically, and addressing her companion, for whom she had long entertained a species of cult: “It is you, mistress, is it not,” she cried, “who makes these flowers?” This interrogation did not embody an incipient speculation in a sphere of physics; the child simply attributed an unknown power to a visible and palpable being. Her mistress replied laughingly, “No, not I. I haven’t the power.” “Who does it then?” the child asked. One perceives the persistence, in primitive intelligences, of the impulse to explain things by the direct action of somebody’s volition, the impulse to place somebody behind every event. “It is God,” replied the elder girl. “And where is God? Have you ever seen Him?” No doubt the little peasant, who regarded the city as a very surprising place, supposed one might meet God there, face to face, and God did not, as yet, represent to her anything supra-physical. But how admirably disposed she was for the reception of a more or less illegitimate metaphysic! “I have never seen God,” replied her mistress, “and nobody has ever seen Him. He lives in heaven, and at the same time lives among us; He sees us and hears us; it is He who made the flowers, who made you and me, and everything that exists.” I shall not report the child’s replies, for I believe that she was too much astonished really to say anything. She was in a situation such as a savage finds himself in when a missionary comes and talks with him about God, the supreme being, creator of all things, a spirit existing without a body. Savages sometimes refuse to understand, and point to their heads and declare that they suffer; sometimes they believe that one is making fun of them, and even among our children there is a good deal of persistent and mute astonishment, which wears off slowly with the lapse of time. What is striking in the little conversation reported above, is the way in which the metaphysical myth necessarily rises out of the scientific error. An inexact induction first gives rise to the notion of a human being acting by means to us unknown and mysterious; this notion, once obtained, fastens upon the body of such and such an individual, the object antecedently of especial veneration; from this individual it retreats in course of time to another more distant, from country to town, from earth to heaven, from visible heaven to the invisible essence of things, the omnipresent substratum of the world. Simultaneously with this retrograde movement, the being endowed with marvellous powers becomes increasingly vague and abstract. The human intelligence, in developing its conception of the supernatural being, employs what theologians call the negative method, which consists in abstracting one known attribute after another. If men and races of men have always followed this procedure, it is less because of any refinement of thought on their part than in obedience to the pressure of an external necessity. Directly as man becomes acquainted with nature, he sees all traces of his god fly before him; he is like a miner who, thinking that he recognizes the presence of gold in the soil beneath his feet, begins to dig, and finding nothing, cannot make up his mind to believe that the earth contains no treasure; he sinks his shafts deeper and deeper in an eternal hopefulness. Just so, instead of breaking with his gods, man exiles them to a greater and greater distance as he advances in knowledge. What nature excludes tends to take on a metaphysical character; every error which persists in spite of the progress of experience takes refuge in heaven, in some sphere more and more completely inaccessible. Thus the somewhat gross origins of religions are not irreconcilable with the refined speculations incident to their period of development. Human intelligence, once launched into infinite space, inevitably describes a wider and wider orbit about reality. A mythical religion is not a completely rational and a priori construction; it always rests upon alleged experience, upon observations and analogies, which are tainted with error; it is, therefore, false a posteriori, and therein lies the explanation of the invincible and increasing divergence between myth and verity.

God conceived as orderer rather than as creator.

In the beginning men conceived God rather as an orderer of the universe, as a workman fashioning a pre-existing matter, than as a creator; we find this notion still predominant among the Greeks. Its genesis was probably something as follows: Whoever supposes the existence of God regards the world as an instrument in His hands; God employs the thunder, the wind, the stars for purposes of his own, as man employs his arrows and his hatchet. Does it not naturally result from that conception that God fashions these marvellous instruments just as man fashions his arrows and hatchet? If the little peasant girl, of whom we spoke above, had not seen her father repair or make his tools, make a fire, make bread, till the soil, she would never have asked who made the flowers in the garden. The child’s first why involves the following reasoning: Somebody has acted on this thing as I myself have acted on such and such another thing; who, then, in the present case is it? The abstract notion of causality is a consequence of the practical development of our own causality; the greater the number of things that one can make one’s self, the greater one’s astonishment at seeing things done by other people with greater rapidity or on a larger scale. The more bound down one is one’s self, to the employment of tedious artifice, the more one admires what is produced suddenly by a power which is apparently extraordinary. So that the notion of a miracle thus more naturally arose from one’s experience of the practical arts, than, so to speak, from brute experience, and for the rest contained no element which was contradictory to the naïve science of the earliest observers. Every question presupposes a certain kind and amount of action on the part of the questioner; one does not demand the cause of an event until one has one’s self been the conscious cause of such and such another event. If man possessed no influence in the world, he would not ask himself who made the world. The mason’s trowel and carpenter’s saw have played a considerable part in the development of religious metaphysics.

Notion of creation ex nihilo of empirical origin.

Remark, also, how easy it is, even at the present day, to confound the word make with the word create, which indeed did not exist in primitive times. How should one distinguish precisely what one fashions from what one creates? There is a certain element of creation in fashioning; and this element sometimes positively assumes a magical character, seems to rise ex nihilo. What a marvel, for example, is a spark of fire obtained from stone or wood! The Hindus see in it the symbol of generation. In fire the earliest races of men laid their fingers on the miraculous. In appearance the pebble one strikes or the dried wood one rubs to produce a spark is not itself consumed; it gives without loss, it creates. The first man who discovered the secret of producing fire seemed to have introduced something genuinely new into the world, to have ravished the power of creation from the gods. In general, what distinguishes the artist, properly so called, from the simple workman is the feeling that he possesses a power which he does not understand, that he produces in some sense more than he aims at, that he is lifted above himself; genius is not fully conscious, as simple talent is, of its resources; it contains an element of the unforeseen, a force which is not calculable in advance, a creative power; and therein lies the secret of the true artist’s personal pride. Even in a matter of purely physical power a superexcitation of the nervous system may place at one’s disposal an amount of muscular energy one did not suppose one possessed: the athlete, no more than the thinker, at such times knows the limits of his own strength and the marvels of which he is capable. Each of us possesses thus, during certain hours of his existence, the consciousness of a more or less creative power, of the direct production of something out of nothing. One feels that one has produced by force of will a result that one’s intelligence cannot wholly account for, that one cannot rationally explain. Therein lies the foundation and in a measure the justification of a belief in miracles, in the extraordinary power of certain men, and, in the last analysis, in a power of creating. This indefinite power that man sometimes feels well up within him, he naturally ascribes to his gods. Since he conceives them as acting upon the world in a manner analogous to himself, he conceives them as capable of giving rise to new elements in the world; and this notion of creative power once introduced continuously develops till the day when it leads one, from induction to induction, to the belief that the entire world is the work of a divinity, that the earth and the stars have been fashioned and created by a supernatural volition. If man can strike fire out of a stone, why might not God strike a sun out of the firmament? The conception of a creator, which seems at first a remote consequence from a chain of abstract reasoning, is thus one of the innumerable manifestations of anthropomorphism; one of the ideas which, at least originally, seems to have been rather paraphysical than metaphysical. It rests at bottom upon an ignorance of the possible transformation and actual equivalents of forces, owing to which every apparent creation is resolvable into a substantial equivalence and every apparent miracle into an exemplification of immutable order.

Summary.

To sum up, the creative power once ascribed to God is in our opinion an extension of the notion of special Providence, which itself is of empirical origin. When theologians nowadays begin by establishing the creation, in order therefrom to deduce a special Providence, they are precisely inverting the order of things as they appeared in the beginning. It is only through the continually increasing preoccupation of abstract thought and metaphysical speculation with the question of the first cause, that the idea of a creative deity has acquired thus a sort of preponderance, and constitutes in our day an essential element in religion. Dualism, as we have seen, is of the essence of this notion; dualism is the principal form under which the union of souls and bodies, the relation of a special providence to natural laws, the relation of creator to created has been conceived. The notion, however, of a supreme unity running through all things has been caught more or less vague glimpses of, from remote times down to the present day. And it is on this notion that pantheistic and monistic religions, principally those of India, are based. Brahmanism and Buddhism tend to what has been called “absolute illusionism” for the benefit of a unity in which the supreme being takes for us the form of non-existence.

Dangers of effort to classify systems of religious metaphysics.

The temptation is natural systematically to class diverse systems of religious metaphysics and to represent them as evolving, one after the other in a regular order, conformable to a more or less determinate scheme; but one must be on one’s guard here against two things: first, the seduction of a system, with the metaphysical abstractions to which it leads; second, the pretense of finding everywhere a regular progress constantly headed toward religious unity. Religious philosophers have erred in both these respects; Hegel, for example, yielded to the temptation of imposing upon the history of religion his monotonous trilogy, of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. In Von Hartmann the Hegelian spirit, influenced by Schopenhauer, still survives. We have seen Von Hartmann borrowing from Max Müller the abstract conception of a divinity at once unified and multiple, a species of primitive synthesis out of which historical religions were to arise by a process of differentiation: out of henotheism, as out of matter still void and without form, was to arise polytheism, and then by a process of degenerescence was to arise polydemonism or animism, and finally fetichism.[42] This order of development, as we have seen, is contrary to matter of fact.

Fetichism, understood simply as the ascription of life to natural objects, is primitive. Animism, or the conception of indwelling spirit, arises subsequently. Polytheism, or the worship of a certain number of analogous objects, such as the trees of a forest, implies some distinction between the deity and the forest, whereas fetichism limits itself strictly to the animation of each particular tree, and finally henotheism, or the vague conception of an indwelling divinity in all things, is ulterior and derivative. Monistic pantheism or monism lies but one step beyond.

Logically posterior often historically prior.

Remark also that Von Hartmann, who endeavours to prove that a vague monism is the primitive form of religion, regards the Vedas as a fair example of the earliest form of natural religion, traces of which remain more or less distinctly manifest in all mythologies. But this is positively to forget that for an anthropologist the Vedas are quite modern compositions, and that Hindu literature belongs to a period of high refinement and civilization. Monistic metaphysics may be the ultimate goal toward which all religions tend, but it is at least not the point of departure. Finally, Von Hartmann endeavours to establish the fact of a certain logical order in religious development, a progress. This progress does not exist in history nor anywhere outside of the abstract system constructed by Von Hartmann; it is dialectic, not historic. The divers religious points of view have often coincided in history; and sometimes a logically superior point of view has even preceded an inferior.

Comte’s classification logical, not psychological.

Another classification, not less open to suspicion than that of Von Hartmann, is the celebrated Comtist progression from fetichism to polytheism and from polytheism to monism. In this classification the framework no longer consists of metaphysical abstractions, but of numbers. But numbers also possess their artificial and superficial side; they do not express the most fundamental aspects of religion. In the first place, it is a matter of extreme difficulty to perceive any radical difference between naturistic fetichism and polytheism. Multiplicity of divinities is a characteristic common to both. The sole difference that Comte was able to establish is that in polytheism a whole class of objects, for example all the trees of a forest, or a whole class of phenomena, as lightning and storm, is represented by one divinity. But this species of abstraction and generalization is much less important, much more exterior and purely logical, than the psychological and metaphysical progression from a grossly unitarian and concrete naturism to a dualistic animism. This latter line of development is in the direction of naturalistic and spiritualistic metaphysics, which possess a deeper significance than a system of mathematical enumeration and logical generalization. The passage from polytheism to monotheism is also conceived by Comte somewhat too mathematically. Polytheism early resulted in a certain hierarchy and subordination of the whole body of individual deities to some one powerful god: Jupiter, Fate, etc. On the other hand, monotheism has always provided some place for secondary divinities—angels, devils, spirits of every kind, to say nothing of the trinitarian conception of the Godhead itself. Mathematical terms, in this connection, obscure profound problems which belong really to metaphysics and to morals.

The real classification.

From the point of view of metaphysics the great question is that of the relation which exists between the divinity and the world and mankind; a relation of immanence or of transcendence, of duality or of unity. We have seen that, from this point of view, religions have passed from an extremely vague primitive immanence to a relation of transcendence and of separation, ultimately to return, sometimes with comparative rapidity (as in India), sometimes very slowly (as among Christian nations), to the notion of an immanent God in whom we live and move and have our being.

Progressive encroachment of deterministic conception.

Along with this difference of conception there necessarily goes a corresponding difference in the parts ascribed respectively to determinism and natural law, and to the arbitrary will of the deity or deities. That is to say, the conflict between religion and science, or what will one day become such, exists implicitly in the earliest conceptions of the world. In the beginning, to be sure, there being no such thing as science properly so called, no conflict is apparent; one explains whatever one chooses as the product of an arbitrary will, then little by little the regularity, the determinism, the orderliness of certain phenomena are remarked. Divinities cease to be absolute princes, and become more or less constitutional sovereigns. Therein lies the law of religious evolution, which is much more significant than the law promulgated by Comte; humanity tends progressively to restrict the number of the phenomena with the natural course of which the gods are supposed to interfere; the sphere of natural law tends progressively to become more and more nearly all-comprehensive. The Catholic nowadays no longer believes that a goddess brings his crops to maturity or that a particular god launches a thunder-bolt, though he is still profoundly inclined to imagine that God blesses his fields or punishes him by destroying his house by a flash of lightning; arbitrary power tends to be concentrated in a single being placed on a height above nature. At a still further stage in the course of evolution, the will of this being is conceived as expressed in the laws of nature themselves without allowing for the existence of miraculous exceptions; Providence, the Divinity, becomes immanent in the scientific ordering and determinism of the world. In this respect the Hindus and the Stoics are far in advance of the Catholics.

Unification of creeds incidental to that encroachment.

The absorption of the respective worships of a number of deities into the worship of one deity has been an incidental consequence of the progress of science. Humanity began by offering up a multitude of special services to a multitude of special gods. If one were to believe certain linguists, it is true, natural objects—the sun, fire, the moon—were at first adored as impersonal entities; their subsequent personification being due to a too literal interpretation of figurative impressions habitually employed to designate them, such as Ζεύς, the brilliant. Certain myths, no doubt, did spring from this source: nomina, numina; but humanity does not usually progress from the general to the particular. Primitive religion, on the contrary, was at first subdivided or rather simply divided into cults of all sorts; it was only later that simplifications and generalizations arose. The passage from fetichism to polytheism and to monotheism was simply the consequence of a progressively scientific conception of the world; of the progressive absorption of the several transcendent powers into a single power immanent in the laws of the universe.

Development of sociological and moral sides of religion.

More important still than this metaphysical and scientific evolution of religion is the sociological and moral evolution. What is really important in a religious theory is less the conceived relation of the primary substance to its manifestations in the universe, than the attributes ascribed to this substance and to the inhabitants of the universe. In other words, what sort of a society does the universe constitute? What sort of social relation more or less moral between the various members are derivable from the fundamental tie which binds them to the principle which is immanent in all of them? That is the great problem for which the others simply constitute a preparation. The problem is to interpret the true foundation of beings and of being, independently of numerical, logical, and even metaphysical relations. Well, such an interpretation cannot be other than psychological and moral. Psychologically, power was the first and essential attribute of divinity, and this power was conceived as redoubtable. Intelligence, knowledge, foreknowledge, were only at a later period ascribed to the gods. And finally, divine morality, under the twofold aspects of justice and goodness, is a very late conception indeed. We shall see it develop side by side with the development of the systems of practical morals that are incident to religion.

CHAPTER III.
RELIGIOUS MORALS.

I. The laws which regulate the social relations between gods and men—Morality and immorality in primitive religions—Extension of friendly and hostile relations to the sphere of the gods—Primitive inability in matters of conscience, as in matters of art, to distinguish the great from the monstrous.

II. The moral sanction in the society which includes gods and men—Patronage—That divine intervention tends always to be conceived after the model of human intervention and to sanction it.

III. Worship and religious rites—Principles of reciprocity and proportionality in the exchange of services—Sacrifice—Principle of coercion and incantation—Principle of habit and its relation to rites—Sorcery—Sacerdotalism—Prophecy—The externals of worship—Dramatization and religious æsthetics.

IV. Subjective worship—Adoration and love; their psychological origin.

I. The laws which regulate the social relations between gods and men.

Religion and morals not originally related.

We are to-day inclined to see everywhere a very intimate relation between religion and morals, since Kant recognized in ethics the aim and sole foundation of the conception of God. In the beginning nothing of the sort existed. It is plain from the preceding chapters that religion was at first a physical explanation of events, and above all of events in their relation to the interests of mankind, by a theory of causes acting for ends of their own after the manner of the human will; an explanation, that is to say, by causes at once efficient and final; and theology is the development of a primitive teleology. Man imagined himself to be living in society with beneficent or maleficent beings, at first visible and tangible, then progressively invisible and separate from the objects they inhabited. Therein, as we have said, lay the first step of religion. Religion was in the beginning nothing more than an imaginative extension of human society; the explanation of things by a theory of volitions analogous to the volitions by means of which man himself acts on the world, but of another order, of a higher degree of power. Well, these volitions are sometimes good, sometimes evil, sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile: friendship and hatred are the two categories under which man inevitably classified the superior powers with whom he believed himself to be in relations. Morality was in no sense one of the distinguishing characteristics of these powers; man was quite as naturally inclined to attribute to them wickedness as goodness, or rather he felt vaguely that the rules of conduct by which he was himself bound were not necessarily those by which these beings, at once analogous to men and so different from them, were themselves bound. Also in his relations with the gods, with the powers of nature, man in nowise believed that the rules of mere human society, of the family, of the tribe, of the nation, were always and in every respect applicable. Thence it came that to render the gods propitious, man had recourse to practices which he would have blamed in mere human morals: human sacrifices, anthropophagy, sacrifices of virginity, etc.[43]

Religion much less moral than society.

If one stops to recollect that moral laws are in a great measure the expression of the very necessities of human life, and that the generality of certain rules is due to the uniformity of the conditions of life on the surface of the globe, one will understand why it was that one’s relations to the gods, that is to say to creatures of the imagination, were not dominated so directly as one’s relations to one’s fellow-men by the exigencies of practical life, but were regulated by much more variable and fantastic laws containing often a visible germ of immorality. The divine society was an imaginary extension of human society, not an imaginative perfection of it. It was physical fear, timor, and not moral reverence, which gave being to the first gods. The human imagination, labouring thus under the empire of fear, naturally gave birth to a prodigy more often than to an ideal. For the primitive conscience, as for primitive art, the distinction between the great and the monstrous was by no means sufficiently marked. The germ of immorality, therefore, not less than of morality lies at the root of every religion. Once more, it would be an error to believe that religions are immoral in that they are anthropomorphic, or sociomorphic; rather the contrary is true, they are not moral except in so far as they are sociomorphic. Mutilation, for example, cruelty, obscenity are foreign to the conceptions which dominate human conduct. One may verify in every religion what is observed in Christianity, that the truly moral God is precisely the man-God, Jesus, whereas God the Father, who pitilessly sacrifices his own son, is anti-human and immoral, precisely in that he is superhuman.

Summary.

In effect we find our fundamental proposition confirmed afresh: religion is a sociology conceived as a physical, metaphysical, and moral explanation of all things; it is the reduction of all natural, and even supernatural forces to a human type, and the reduction of their relations to social relations. Also the progress of religion has been exactly parallel to the progress in social evolution, which has itself been dominated by the progress of subjective morals and conscience. The gods were at first divided into two classes: the beneficent and the maleficent, who ultimately came to be recognized as respectively virtuous and wicked. Then these two classes were absorbed into their respective chiefs, into Ormuzd and Ahriman, into God and Satan, into a principle of good and a principle of evil. Thus by a fresh dualism spirits themselves were separated and ranged into classes, as the spirit itself had previously been separated from the body. Finally the principle of goodness subsisted victoriously under the name of God. He became the personification of the moral law and the moral sanction, the sovereign legislator and judge, in a word, the living law of universal society, as a king is the living law in a human society. To-day God tends to be identified with the human conscience purified ad infinitum, and adequate with the universe. For these last and most subtle representations of the religious sentiment, God is no more than a symbol of the moral and the ideal. One may see in this evolution of religious ideas the gradual triumph of sociomorphism, since it is characterized by an extension to the universe at large of social relations which are incessantly progressing toward perfection among men.

II. The moral sanction in the society which includes gods and men.

The gods inevitably become protectors of social justice.

To the personification of the law, religious morals inevitably joined that of the sanction which plays so capital a rôle in every human society. The celestial government has always been a projection of the human government, with a penalty at first terrible and subsequently softened. To say the truth, the theory of a sanction is the systematization of that of a providence. The distinguishing characteristic of a providence is that it awards or recompenses, insomuch that one may bring down upon one’s self or avoid its anger, by such and such conduct. Well, the instant a man admits that a divine power is governing him, this power will inevitably appear to him to be exercising a control over his conduct, and, as it were, sanctioning it. This control will at first be exercised only in regard to the personal relations of the individual, with his god and his gods. But the individual will soon recognize that if the gods take an interest in him they may well take an interest also in the other members of the tribe, provided that these last know how to render them propitious; and to injure the other worshippers of a god would be indirectly to injure the god himself, and provoke his anger. All the members of a tribe therefore find themselves protected against each other by their association with the gods, religion lends support to social justice, and whoever violates social justice expects the gods to punish him. This expectation also must have been confirmed by the facts, for if antisocial and unjust conduct had habitually prevailed among men, social life would have been impossible. Injustice must then always on an average have carried its sanction with it, and this sanction must have appeared to be the direct work of the gods, passing judgment from on high on the social conduct of their clients, as Roman patrons did, seated beneath the columns of the atrium.

And of human justice.

As religions intermingled and grew in extent, the clientage of a god, at first extended to the members of a single tribe, passed beyond its bounds. Men, of no matter what origin, might become citizens of the celestial city, of the superhuman association which took charge of each of its members, so that the divine sanction tended increasingly to become confounded with the moral sanction, and one understood that God protected justice not only within the bosom of a tribe, but everywhere within the limits of humanity.

Natural desire to have the scales loaded on the side of rectitude.

While in the matter of the sanction the sociomorphic conception of the world tended thus to become a moral conception, morality itself must have tended, in order to eke out its own insufficiency, to ally itself with religion. Human society, powerless to make itself always respected by every one of its members, inevitably invoked the aid of the society of superior beings which enveloped it on all sides. Man being essentially a social animal, ζῶον πολιτικόν, could not be resigned in the presence of the success of antisocial conduct, and whenever it seemed that such conduct had succeeded humanly, the very nature of mankind tended to make it turn toward the superhuman to demand a reparation and a compensation. If the bees should suddenly see their hives destroyed before their eyes without there being any hope of ever reconstructing them, their whole being would be shaken, and they would instinctively await for an intervention of some kind, which should re-establish an order as immutable and sacred for them as that of the stars is for us. Man, by virtue of the moral nature with which heredity has furnished him, is thus inclined to believe that wickedness ought not to have the last word in the universe; the triumph of evil and of injustice always stirs his indignation. This species of indignation is observable in infants almost before they can talk, and numerous traces of it may be found even among animals. The logical result of this instinctive protest against evil is a refusal to believe in its definitive triumph.[44]

Results in victory being given in heaven to principle of light.

Man, in whose eyes the society in which the gods live corresponds so closely to human society, must almost inevitably imagine the existence among them of antisocial beings, of Ahrimans and Satans, protectors of evil in heaven and on earth, but it is natural that he should give the victory in the end to the “principle of good” over the “principle of evil.” Of all things it is the most repugnant to him to believe that the universe is fundamentally indifferent to the distinction between good and evil; a divinity may be irascible, capricious, and even intermittently wicked, but man cannot understand an impassible and cold nature.

Gods legitimated by alliance with the moral forces of society.

The most powerful of the gods had thus served to reconcile force and justice, a barbarous justice appropriate to the spirit of primitive man.

Through the idea of sanction grafted thus upon that of providence, religion assumes a really systematic character, and becomes attached to the very fibres of the human heart. As instruments of goodness in the universe, the gods, or at least the sovereign gods, serve to confirm human morality; they become in some sort the life of morality. Their existence is no longer simply a physical fact; it is a physical fact, morally justified by a social instinct which relies upon it as its main safeguard. Henceforth the power of the gods is legitimate. A divine king, like a human king, requires a certain mystic consecration; it is religion which consecrates human kings, it is morality which consecrates the king of the gods.

Importance of conception of immortality in the moral evolution of religion.

The notion of a divine intervention to trim the balance of the social order, to punish and to recompense, was at first altogether foreign to the belief in a continuation of life after death; it became allied to this belief much later. Even among a people so advanced as the Hebrews in matters of religious evolution, reward and punishment beyond this life played no rôle, and yet there has scarcely ever been a people who believed more heartily in the will of God as directing the life of mankind; but in their eyes God achieved his victory in this life; they possessed no need for an immortality as a means of redressing the moral balance of the world.[45] It was only later, when the critical sense had attained a higher development, that it was recognized that the sanction did not always come in this life; the chastisement of the culpable, the hoped-for recompense of the virtuous, gradually retreated from the present world into a distant future. Hell and heaven were thrown open to correct the manifest imperfections of this life. The notion of immortality thus assumed an extraordinary importance, insomuch that it seemed as if modern life would be destroyed if it were deprived of this belief, which former times had, however, succeeded in doing without. At bottom a clear and reflective conception of a life after death, in which one is rewarded or punished for one’s life here, is a very complex and remote deduction from the notion of sanction.

Religious sanction at first conceived as a vengeance.

The religious sanction, being fundamentally an extension of human social relations to the life of the gods, successively assumed the three forms of human penalty. At first it was only vengeance, as in the case of the lower animals and of savage man. It is evil rendered in return for evil. The sentiment of vengeance has subsisted, and still subsists, in the bosom of every religion which admits a divine sanction; vengeance is confided to God, and becomes only the more terrible. “Do not avenge yourselves,” St. Paul says, “but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Therefore, if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him to drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.” “Our patience,” St. Cyprian wrote, “comes from our certainty that we shall be avenged; it heaps coals of fire upon the heads of our enemies. The day on which the Most High shall number the faithful shall see the culpable in Gehenna, and our persecutors shall be consumed in eternal fire! What a spectacle for my transports, my admiration, and my laughter!” And by way of a refinement, one of the martyrs at Carthage told the pagans to look him well in the face so that they might recognize him on the day of judgment at the right hand of the Father, while they were being precipitated into eternal flame.[46]

Then as an expiation.

The notion of vengeance, as it becomes more subtle and passes, so to speak, from the domain of passion into that of intelligence is transformed into the notion of expiation, which is exclusively religious, although spiritualistic philosophers believe that it contains moral and rational elements. Expiation is a sort of naïve compensation by which one fancies one may counterbalance moral evil by accepting physical evil along with it. Expiation is a penalty which possesses no utility in the way of benefiting the culprit or those who might follow his example; it is neither corrective nor preventive; it is an alleged satisfaction of the law, the re-establishment of an apparent symmetry for the delight of pure intelligence, a public prosecution pure and simple. In a singular passage in the Pensées chrétiennes, Father Bouhours has clearly and innocently set in relief the inutility of religious expiation: “Penitence of the damned, thou art rigorous, and how useless; could the anger of God go further than to punish pleasure so brief by torments which shall never end? When a damned soul shall have shed tears enough to fill all the rivers of the world, even if he should only have shed one a century, he will be no farther ahead after so many millions of years; he will only have begun to suffer, and even when he shall have recommenced as often as there are grains of sand upon the shores of the sea, he shall even then have done nothing.” The highest degree of the notion of expiation is in effect this of eternal damnation. In this theory of the penalty of damnation, and the pains of fire without end, one recognizes the barbarism of former time and the torments inflicted on the vanquished by the vanquisher, on the rebel by the chief of the tribe. A sort of atavism attaches even to the religion of love in this perpetual inheritance of hatred, of the customs of a savage period erected into an eternal and divine institution.

The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

THE NON-RELIGION
OF THE FUTURE
A SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION.

Part First.
THE GENESIS OF RELIGIONS IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETIES.

CHAPTER I.
RELIGIOUS PHYSICS.

CHAPTER II.
RELIGIOUS METAPHYSICS.

I. Animism.

II. Providence and Miracles.

III. Creation.

CHAPTER III.
RELIGIOUS MORALS.

I. The laws which regulate the social relations between gods and men.

II. The moral sanction in the society which includes gods and men.

III. Worship and religious rites.

The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study

THE NON-RELIGIONOF THE FUTUREA SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY

TABLE OF CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION.

Part First.THE GENESIS OF RELIGIONS IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETIES.

CHAPTER I.RELIGIOUS PHYSICS.

CHAPTER II.RELIGIOUS METAPHYSICS.

I. Animism.

II. Providence and Miracles.

III. Creation.

CHAPTER III.RELIGIOUS MORALS.

I. The laws which regulate the social relations between gods and men.

II. The moral sanction in the society which includes gods and men.

III. Worship and religious rites.

THE NON-RELIGION
OF THE FUTURE
A SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY

Part First.
THE GENESIS OF RELIGIONS IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETIES.

CHAPTER I.
RELIGIOUS PHYSICS.

CHAPTER II.
RELIGIOUS METAPHYSICS.

CHAPTER III.
RELIGIOUS MORALS.