Thus the cult which, according to this hypothesis, ought to be the predominating one in inferior societies, is really nonexistent there. In reality, the Australian is not concerned with his dead, except at the moment of their decease and during the time which immediately follows. Yet these same peoples, as we shall see, have a very complex cult for sacred beings of a wholly different nature, which is made up of numerous ceremonies and frequently occupying weeks or even entire months. It cannot be admitted that the few rites which the Australian performs when he happens to lose one of his relatives were the origin of these permanent cults which return regularly every year and which take up a considerable part of his existence. The contrast between the two is so great that we may even ask whether the first were not rather derived from the second, and if the souls of men, far from having been the model upon which the gods were originally imagined, have not rather been conceived from the very first as emanations from the divinity.
IV IV From the moment that the cult of the dead is shown not to be primitive, animism lacks a basis. It would then seem useless to discuss the third thesis of the system, which concerns the transformation of the cult of the dead into the cult of nature. But since the postulate upon which it rests is also found in certain historians of religion who do not admit the animism properly so-called, such as Brinton,[122] Lang,[123] Réville,[124] and even Robertson Smith himself,[125] it is necessary to make an examination of it.
This extension of the cult of the dead to all nature is said to come from the fact that we instinctively tend to represent all things in our own image, that is to say, as living and thinking beings. We have seen that Spencer has already contested the reality of this so-called instinct. Since animals clearly distinguish living bodies from dead ones, it seemed to him impossible that man, the heir of the animals, should not have had this same faculty of discernment from the very first. But howsoever certain the facts cited by Spencer may be, they have not the demonstrative value which he attributes to them. His reasoning supposes that all the faculties, instincts and aptitudes of the animal have passed integrally into man; now many errors have their origin in this principle which is wrongfully taken as a proven truth. For example, since sexual jealousy is generally very strong among the higher animals, it has been concluded that it ought to be found among men with the same intensity from the very beginnings of history.[126] But it is well known to-day that men can practise a sexual communism which would be impossible if this jealousy were not capable of attenuating itself and even of disappearing when necessary.[127] The fact is that man is not merely an animal with certain additional qualities: he is something else. Human nature is the result of a sort of recasting of the animal nature, and in the course of the various complex operations which have brought about this recasting, there have been losses as well as gains. How many instincts have we not lost? The reason for this is that men are not only in relations with the physical environment, but also with a social environment infinitely more extended, more stable and more active than the one whose influence animals undergo. To live, they must adapt themselves to this. Now in order to maintain itself, society frequently finds it necessary that we should see things from a certain angle and feel them in a certain way; consequently it modifies the ideas which we would ordinarily make of them for ourselves and the sentiments to which we would be inclined if we listened only to our animal nature; it alters them, even going so far as to put the contrary sentiments in their place. Does it not even go so far as to make us regard our own individual lives as something of little value, while for the animal this is the greatest of things?[128] Then it is a vain enterprise to seek to infer the mental constitution of the primitive man from that of the higher animals.
But if the objection of Spencer does not have the decisive value which its author gives it, it is equally true that the animist theory can draw no authority from the confusions which children seem to make. When we hear a child angrily apostrophize an object which he has hit against, we conclude that he thinks of it as a conscious being like himself; but that is interpreting his words and acts very badly. In reality, he is quite a stranger to the very complicated reasoning attributed to him. If he lays the blame on the table which has hurt him, it is not because he supposes it animated and intelligent, but because it has hurt him. His anger, once aroused by the pain, must overflow; so it looks for something upon which to discharge itself, and naturally turns toward the thing which has provoked it, even though this has no effect. The action of an adult in similar circumstances is often as slightly reasonable. When we are violently irritated, we feel the need of inveighing, of destroying, though we attribute no conscious ill-will to the objects upon which we vent our anger. There is even so little confusion that when the emotion of a child is calmed, he can very well distinguish a chair from a person: he does not act in at all the same way towards the two. It is a similar reason which explains his tendency to treat his playthings as if they were living beings. It is his extremely intense need of playing which thus finds a means of expressing itself, just as in the other case the violent sentiments caused by pain created an object out of nothing. In order that he may consciously play with his jumping-jack, he imagines it a living person. This illusion is the easier for him because imagination is his sovereign mistress; he thinks almost entirely with images, and we know how pliant images are, bending themselves with docility before every exigency of the will. But he is so little deceived by his own fiction that he would be the first to be surprised if it suddenly became a reality, and his toy bit him![129] Let us therefore leave these doubtful analogies to one side. To find out if men were primitively inclined to the confusions imputed to them, we should not study animals or children of to-day, but the primitive beliefs themselves. If the spirits and gods of nature were really formed in the image of the human soul, they should bear traces of their origin and bring to mind the essential traits of their model. The most important characteristic of the soul is that it is conceived as the internal principle which animates the organism: it is that which moves it and makes it live, to such an extent that when it withdraws itself, life ceases or is suspended. It has its natural residence in the body, at least while this exists. But it is not thus with the spirits assigned to the different things in nature. The god of the sun is not necessarily in the sun, nor is the spirit of a certain rock in the rock which is its principal place of habitation. A spirit undoubtedly has close relations with the body to which it is attached, but one employs a very inexact expression when he says that it is its soul. As Codrington says,[130] "there does not appear to be anywhere in Melanesia a belief in a spirit which animates any natural object, a tree, waterfall, storm or rock, so as to be to it what the soul is believed to be to the body of man. Europeans, it is true, speak of the spirits of the sea or of the storm or of the forest; but the native idea which they represent is that ghosts haunt the sea and the forest, having power to raise storms and strike a traveller with disease." While the soul is essentially within the body, the spirit passes the major portion of its time outside the object which serves as its base. This is one difference which does not seem to show that the second idea was derived from the first.
From another point of view, it must be added that if men were really forced to project their own image into things, then the first sacred beings ought to have been conceived in their likeness. Now anthropomorphism, far from being primitive, is rather the mark of a relatively advanced civilization. In the beginning, sacred beings are conceived in the form of an animal or vegetable, from which the human form is only slowly disengaged. It will be seen below that in Australia, it is animals and plants which are the first sacred beings. Even among the Indians of North America, the great cosmic divinities, which commence to be the object of a cult there, are very frequently represented in animal forms.[131] "The difference between the animal, man and the divine being," says Réville, not without surprise, "is not felt in this state of mind, and generally it might be said that _it is the animal form which is the fundamental one_."[132] To find a god made up entirely of human elements, it is necessary to advance nearly to Christianity. Here, God is a man, not only in the physical aspect in which he is temporarily made manifest, but also in the ideas and sentiments which he expresses. But even in Greece and Rome, though the gods were generally represented with human traits, many mythical personages still had traces of an animal origin: thus there is Dionysus, who is often met with in the form of a bull, or at least with the horns of a bull; there is Demeter, who is often represented with a horse's mane, there are Pan and Silenus, there are the Fauns, etc.[133] It is not at all true that man has had such an inclination to impose his own form upon things. More than that, he even commenced by conceiving of himself as participating closely in the animal nature. In fact, it is a belief almost universal in Australia, and very widespread among the Indians of North America, that the ancestors of men were beasts or plants, or at least that the first men had, either in whole or in part, the distinctive characters of certain animal or vegetable species. Thus, far from seeing beings like themselves everywhere, men commenced by believing themselves to be in the image of some beings from which they differed radically.
V Finally, the animistic theory implies a consequence which is perhaps its best refutation.
If it were true, it would be necessary to admit that religious beliefs are so many hallucinatory representations, without any objective foundation whatsoever. It is supposed that they are all derived from the idea of the soul because one sees only a magnified soul in the spirits and gods. But according to Tylor and his disciples, the idea of the soul is itself constructed entirely out of the vague and inconsistent images which occupy our attention during sleep: for the soul is the double, and the double is merely a man as he appears to himself while he sleeps. From this point of view, then, sacred beings are only the imaginary conceptions which men have produced during a sort of delirium which regularly overtakes them every day, though it is quite impossible to see to what useful ends these conceptions serve, nor what they answer to in reality. If a man prays, if he makes sacrifices and offerings, if he submits to the multiple privations which the ritual prescribes, it is because a sort of constitutional eccentricity has made him take his dreams for perceptions, death for a prolonged sleep, and dead bodies for living and thinking beings. Thus not only is it true, as many have held, that the forms under which religious powers have been represented to the mind do not express them exactly, and that the symbols with the aid of which they have been thought of partially hide their real nature, but more than that, behind these images and figures there exists nothing but the nightmares of primitive minds. In fine, religion is nothing but a dream, systematized and lived, but without any foundation in reality.[134] Thence it comes about that the theorists of animism, when looking for the origins of religious thought, content themselves with a small outlay of energy. When they think that they have explained how men have been induced to imagine beings of a strange, vaporous form, such as those they see in their dreams, they think the problem is resolved.
In reality, it is not even approached. It is inadmissible that systems of ideas like religions, which have held so considerable a place in history, and to which, in all times, men have come to receive the energy which they must have to live, should be made up of a tissue of illusions. To-day we are beginning to realize that law, morals and even scientific thought itself were born of religion, were for a long time confounded with it, and have remained penetrated with its spirit. How could a vain fantasy have been able to fashion the human consciousness so strongly and so durably? Surely it ought to be a principle of the science of religions that religion expresses nothing which does not exist in nature; for there are sciences only of natural phenomena. The only question is to learn from what part of nature these realities come and what has been able to make men represent them under this singular form which is peculiar to religious thought. But if this question is to be raised, it is necessary to commence by admitting that they are real things which are thus represented. When the philosophers of the eighteenth century made religion a vast error imagined by the priests, they could at least explain its persistence by the interest which the sacerdotal class had in deceiving the people. But if the people themselves have been the artisans of these systems of erroneous ideas at the same time that they were its dupes, how has this extraordinary dupery been able to perpetuate itself all through the course of history?
One might even demand if under these conditions the words of science of religions can be employed without impropriety. A science is a discipline which, in whatever manner it is conceived, is always applied to some real data. Physics and chemistry are sciences because physico-chemical phenomena are real, and of a reality which does not depend upon the truths which these sciences show. There is a psychological science because there are really consciousnesses which do not hold their right of existence from the psychologist. But on the contrary, religion could not survive the animistic theory and the day when its truth was recognized by men, for they could not fail to renounce the errors whose nature and origin would thus be revealed to them. What sort of a science is it whose principal discovery is that the subject of which it treats does not exist?
CHAPTER III LEADING CONCEPTIONS OF THE ELEMENTARY RELIGION--_continued_ II.--_Naturism_ The spirit of the naturistic school is quite different. In the first place, it is recruited in a different environment. The animists are, for the most part, ethnologists or anthropologists. The religions which they have studied are the crudest which humanity has ever known. Hence comes the extraordinary importance which they attribute to the souls of the dead, to spirits and to demons, and, in fact, to all spiritual beings of the second order: it is because these religions know hardly any of a higher order.[135] On the contrary, the theories which we are now going to describe are the work of scholars who have concerned themselves especially with the great civilizations of Europe and Asia.
Ever since the work of the Grimm brothers, who pointed out the interest that there is in comparing the different mythologies of the Indo-European peoples, scholars have been struck by the remarkable similarities which these present. Mythical personages were identified who, though having different names, symbolized the same ideas and fulfilled the same functions; even the names were frequently related, and it has been thought possible to establish the fact that they are not unconnected with one another. Such resemblances seemed to be explicable only by a common origin. Thus they were led to suppose that these conceptions, so varied in appearance, really came from one common source, of which they were only diversified forms, and which it was not impossible to discover. By the comparative method, they believed one should be able to go back, beyond these great religions, to a much more ancient system of ideas, and to the really primitive religion, from which the others were derived.
The discovery of the Vedas aided greatly in stimulating these ambitions. In the Vedas, scholars had a written text, whose antiquity was undoubtedly exaggerated at the moment of its discovery, but which is surely one of the most ancient which we have at our disposition in an Indo-European language. Here they were enabled to study, by the ordinary methods of philology, a literature as old as or older than Homer, and a religion which was believed more primitive than that of the ancient Germans. A document of such value was evidently destined to throw a new light upon the religious beginnings of humanity, and the science of religions could not fail to be revolutionized by it.
The conception which was thus born was so fully demanded by the state of the science and by the general march of ideas, that it appeared almost simultaneously in two different lands. In 1856, Max Müller exposed its principles in his _Oxford Essays_.[136] Three years later appeared the work of Adalbert Kuhn on _The Origin of Fire and the Drink of the Gods_,[137] which was clearly inspired by the same spirit. When once set forth, the idea spread very rapidly in scientific circles. To the name of Kuhn is closely associated that of his brother-in-law Schwartz, whose work on _The Origin of Mythology_,[138] followed closely upon the preceding one. Steinthal and the whole German school of _Völkerpsychologie_ attached themselves to the same movement. The theory was introduced into France in 1863 by M. Michel Bréal.[139] It met so little resistance that, according to an expression of Gruppe,[140] "a time came when, aside from certain classical philologists, to whom Vedic studies were unknown, all the mythologists had adopted the principles of Max Müller or Kuhn as their point of departure."[141] It is therefore important to see what they really are, and what they are worth.
Since no one has presented them in a more systematic form than Max Müller, it is upon his work that we shall base the description which follows.[142] I We have seen that the postulate at the basis of animism is that religion, at least in its origin, expresses no physical reality. But Max Müller commences with the contrary principle. For him, it is an axiom that religion reposes upon an experience, from which it draws all its authority. "Religion," he says, "if it is to hold its place as a legitimate element of our consciousness, must, like all other knowledge, begin with sensuous experience."[143] Taking up the old empirical adage, "_Nihil est in intellectu quod non ante fuerit in sensu_," he applies it to religion and declares that there can be nothing in beliefs which was not first perceived. So here is a doctrine which seems to escape the grave objection which we raised against animism. From this point of view, it seems that religion ought to appear, not as a sort of vague and confused dreaming, but as a system of ideas and practices well founded in reality.
But which are these sensations which give birth to religious thought? That is the question which the study of the Vedas is supposed to aid in resolving.
The names of the gods are generally either common words, still employed, or else words formerly common, whose original sense it is possible to discover. Now both designate the principal phenomena of nature. Thus _Agni_, the name of one of the principal divinities of India, originally signified only the material fact of fire, such as it is ordinarily perceived by the senses and without any mythological addition. Even in the Vedas, it is still employed with this meaning; in any case, it is well shown that this signification was primitive by the fact that it is conserved in other Indo-European languages: the Latin _ignis_, the Lithuanian _ugnis_, the old Slav _ogny_ are evidently closely related to Agni. Similarly, the relationship of the Sanskrit _Dyaus_, the Greek _Zeus_, the Latin _Jovis_ and the _Zio_ of High German is to-day uncontested. This proves that these different words designate one single and the same divinity, whom the different Indo-European peoples recognized as such before their separation. Now Dyaus signifies the bright sky. These and other similar facts tend to show that among these peoples the forms and forces of nature were the first objects to which the religious sentiment attached itself: they were the first things to be deified. Going one step farther in his generalization, Max Müller thought that he was prepared to conclude that the religious evolution of humanity in general had the same point of departure.
It is almost entirely by considerations of a psychological sort that he justifies these inferences. The varied spectacles which nature offers man seemed to him to fulfil all the conditions necessary for arousing religious ideas in the mind directly. In fact, he says, "at first sight, nothing seemed less natural than nature. Nature was the greatest surprise, a terror, a marvel, a standing miracle, and it was only on account of their permanence, constancy, and regular recurrence that certain features of that standing miracle were called natural, in the sense of foreseen, common, intelligible...It was that vast domain of surprise, of terror, of marvel, of miracle, the unknown, as distinguished from the known, or, as I like to express it, the infinite, as distinct from the finite, which supplied from the earliest times the impulse to religious thought and language."[144] In order to illustrate his idea, he applies it to a natural force which holds a rather large place in the Vedic religion, fire. He says, "if you can for a moment transfer yourselves to that early stage of life to which we must refer not only the origin, but likewise the early phases of Physical Religion, you can easily understand what an impression the first appearance of fire must have made on the human mind. Fire was not given as something permanent or eternal, like the sky, or the earth, or the water. In whatever way it first appeared, whether through lightning or through the friction of the branches of trees, or through the sparks of flints, it came and went, it had to be guarded, it brought destruction, but at the same time, it made life possible in winter, it served as a protection during the night, it became a weapon of defence and offence, and last, not least, it changed man from a devourer of raw flesh into an eater of cooked meat. At a later time it became the means of working metal, of making tools and weapons, it became an indispensable factor in all mechanical and artistic progress, and has remained so ever since. What should we be without fire even now?"[145] The same author says in another work that a man could not enter into relations with nature without taking account of its immensity, of its infiniteness. It surpasses him in every way. Beyond the distances which he perceives, there are others which extend without limits; each moment of time is preceded and followed by a time to which no limit can be assigned; the flowing river manifests an infinite force, since nothing can exhaust it.[146] There is no aspect of nature which is not fitted to awaken within us this overwhelming sensation of an infinity which surrounds us and dominates us.[147] It is from this sensation that religions are derived.[148] However, they are there only in germ.[149] Religion really commences only at the moment when these natural forces are no longer represented in the mind in an abstract form. They must be transformed into personal agents, living and thinking beings, spiritual powers or gods; for it is to beings of this sort that the cult is generally addressed. We have seen that animism itself has been obliged to raise this question, and also how it has answered it: man seems to have a sort of native incapacity for distinguishing the animate from the inanimate and an irresistible tendency to conceive the second under the form of the first. Max Müller rejects any such solution.[150] According to him it is language which has brought about this metamorphosis, by the action which it exercises upon thought.
It is easily explained how men, being perplexed by the marvellous forces upon which they feel that they depend, have been led to reflect upon them, and how they have asked themselves what these forces are and have made an effort to substitute for the obscure sensation which they primitively had of them, a clearer idea and a better defined concept. But as our author very justly says,[151] this idea and concept are impossible without the word. Language is not merely the external covering of a thought; it also is its internal framework. It does not confine itself to expressing this thought after it has once been formed; it also aids in making it. However, its nature is of a different sort, so its laws are not those of thought. Then since it contributes to the elaboration of this latter, it cannot fail to do it violence to some extent, and to deform it. It is a deformation of this sort which is said to have created the special characteristic of religious thought.
Thinking consists in arranging our ideas, and consequently in classifying them. To think of fire, for example, is to put it into a certain category of things, in such a way as to be able to say that it is this or that, or this and not that. But classifying is also naming, for a general idea has no existence and reality except in and by the word which expresses it and which alone makes its individuality. Thus the language of a people always has an influence upon the manner in which new things, recently learned, are classified in the mind and are subsequently thought of; these new things are thus forced to adapt themselves to pre-existing forms. For this reason, the language which men spoke when they undertook to construct an elaborated representation of the universe marked the system of ideas which was then born with an indelible trace.
Nor are we without some knowledge of this language, at least in so far as the Indo-European peoples are concerned. Howsoever distant it may be from us, souvenirs of it remain in our actual languages which permit us to imagine what it was: these are the roots. These stems, from which are derived all the words which we employ and which are found at the basis of all the Indo-European languages, are regarded by Max Müller as so many echoes of the language which the corresponding peoples spoke before their separation, that is to say, at the very moment when this religion of nature, which is to be explained, was being formed. Now these roots present two remarkable characteristics, which, it is true, have as yet been observed only in this particular group of languages, but which our author believes to be present equally in the other linguistic families.[152] In the first place, the roots are general; that is to say that they do not express particular things and individuals, but types, and even types of an extreme generality. They represent the most general themes of thought; one finds there, as though fixed and crystallized, those fundamental categories of the intellect which at every moment in history dominate the entire mental life, the arrangement of which philosophers have many times attempted to reconstruct.[153] Secondly, the types to which they correspond are types of action, and not of objects. They translate the most general manners of acting which are to be observed among living beings and especially among men; they are such actions as striking, pushing, rubbing, lying down, getting up, pressing, mounting, descending, walking, etc. In other words, men generalized and named their principal ways of acting before generalizing and naming the phenomena of nature.[154]