Chapter 8

If then we had merely to account for cases in which prayer does not happen to have been recorded as a constituent part of the rite of worship, we should not be warranted in inferring that prayer was really absent. The presumption would rather be that either the records are faulty, or that prayer, even though not uttered in word, yet played its part. The ground for the presumption is found in the nature of the occasions on which the gods are approached in the lower stages of religion. Those occasions are either exceptional or regularly recurring. The exceptional occasions are those on which the community is threatened, or afflicted, with calamity; and on such occasions, whether spoken words of prayer happen to have been recorded by our informants, or not, it is beyond doubt that the purpose of the community is to escape the calamity, and that the attitude of mind in which the god is approached is one of supplication or prayer. The regularly recurring occasions are those of seed-time and harvest, or first-fruits. The ceremonies at seed-time obviously admit of the presumption, even if there be no spoken prayers to prove it, that they too have a petitionary purpose; while the recorded instances of the prayers put up at harvest time, and on the occasion of the offering of first-fruits, suffice to show that thanksgiving is made along with prayers for continued prosperity.

It is however not merely on the ground of the absence of recorded prayers that it is maintained that there was a stage in the evolution of religion when prayer was unpractised and unknown. It is the presence and the use of spells which is supposed to show that there may have been a time when prayer was as yet unknown, and that the process of development was a progress from spell to prayer. On this theory, spells, in the course of time, and in accordance with their own law of growth, become prayers. The nature and operation of this law, it may be difficult or impossible now for us to observe. The process took place in the night of time and is therefore not open to our observation. But that the process, by which the one becomes the other, is a possible process, is perhaps shown by the fact that we can witness for ourselves prayer reverting or casting back to spell. Wherever prayers become 'vain repetitions,' it is obvious that they are conceived to act in the same way as the savage believes spells to act: the mere utterance of the formula has the same magical power, as making the sign of the cross, to avert supernatural danger. If prayers thus cast back to spells, it may reasonably be presumed that it is because prayer is in its origin but spell. It is because oxygen and hydrogen, combined, produce water, that water can be resolved into oxygen and hydrogen.

This theory, when examined, seems to imply that spell and prayer, so far from being different and incompatible things, are one and the same thing: seen from one point of view, and in one set of surroundings, it is spell; seen from another point of view, and in other surroundings, it is prayer. The point of view and the circumstances may change, but the thing itself remains the same always. What then is the thing itself, which, whether it presents itself as prayer or as spell, still always remains the same? It is, and can only be, desire. In spell and prayer alike the common, operative element present is desire. Desire may issue in spell or prayer; but were there no desires, there would be neither prayer nor spell. That we may admit. But, then, we may, or rather must go further: if there were no desire, neither would there be any action, whatever, performed by man. Men's actions, however, differ endlessly from one another. They differ partly because men's desires, themselves, differ; and partly because the means they adopt to satisfy them differ also. It would be vain to say that different means cannot be adopted for attaining one and the same end. Equally vain would it be to say that the various means may not differ from one another, to the point of incompatibility. If then we regard prayer and spell as alike means which have been employed by man for the purpose of realising his desires, we are yet at liberty to maintain that prayer and spell are different and incompatible.

That there is a difference between prayer and spell--a difference at any rate great enough to allow the two words to be used in contradistinction to one another--is clear enough. The cardinal distinction between the two is also clear: a spell takes effect in virtue of the power resident in the formula itself or in the person who utters it; while a prayer is an appeal to a personal power, or to a power personal enough to be able to listen to the appeal, and to understand it, and to grant it, if so it seems good. That this difference obtains between prayer and spell will not be denied by any student of the science of religion. But if this difference is admitted, as admitted it must be, it is plain that prayer and spell are terms which apply to two different moods or states of mind. Desire is implied by each alike: were there no desire, there would be neither prayer nor spell. But, whereas prayer is an appeal to some one who has the power to grant one's desire, spell is the exercise of power which one possesses oneself, or has at one's command.

That the two moods are different, and are incompatible with one another, is clear upon the face of it: to beg for a thing as a mercy or a gift is quite different from commanding that the thing be done. The whole attitude of mind assumed in the one case is different from that assumed in the other. It is possible, indeed, to pass from the one attitude to the other. But it is impossible to say that the one attitude is the other. It is correct to say that the one attitude may follow the other. But it is to be misled by language to say that the one attitude becomes the other. It is possible for one and the same man to fluctuate between the two attitudes, to alternate between them--possible, though inconsistent. The child, or even that larger child, the man, may beg and scold, almost in the same breath. The savage, as is well known, will treat his fetish in the same inconsequential way. That it is inconsequential is a fact; but it is a fact which, if learned, is but very slowly learned. The process by which it is learned is part of the evolution of religion; and it is a process in the course of which the idea of God tends to disengage itself from the confusion of thought and the confusion of feeling, in which it is at first enshrouded.

We, indeed, at the present day, may see, or at any rate feel, the difference between magic and religion, between spell and prayer. And we may imagine that the difference, because real, has always been seen or felt, as we see and feel it. But, if we so imagine, we are mistaken. The difference was not felt so strongly, or seen so definitely, as to make it impossible to ascribe magic to Moses, or rain-making to Elijah. In still earlier ages, the difference was still more blurred. The two things were not discriminated as we now discriminate them: they were not felt then, as they are felt now to be inconsistent and incompatible. It was the likeness between the two that filled the field of mental vision, originally. Whether a man makes a petition or a command, the fact is that he wants something; and, with his attention centred on that fact, he may be but little aware, as the child is little, if at all, aware, that he passes, or is guilty of unreasonable inconsistency in passing, from the one mood to the other, and back again. It is in the course of time and as a consequence of mental growth that he becomes aware of the difference between the two moods.

If we insist on maintaining that, because spell and prayer are essentially different, men have at all times been fully conscious of the difference, we make it fundamentally impossible to explain the growth of religion, or to admit that it can have any growth. Just as, on the argument advanced in our first chapter, gods and fetishes have gradually been differentiated from some conception, prior to them, and indeterminate; just as magician and priest, eventually distinguished, were originally undistinguished, for a man of power was potentially both and might become either; so spell and prayer have come to be differentiated, to be recognised as different and fundamentally antagonistic, though originally the two categories were confused.

The theory that spell preceded prayer and became prayer, or that magic developed into religion, finds as little support in the facts afforded by the science of religion, as the converse theory of a primitive revelation and a paradisaical state in which religion alone was known. For what is found in one stage of evolution the capacity must have existed in earlier stages; and if both prayer and spell, both magic and religion, are found, the capacity for both must have pre-existed. And instead of seeking to deny either, in the interests of a pre-conceived theory, we must recognise both potentialities, in the interest of truth.

Just as man spoke, for countless thousands of years, before he had any idea of the principles on which he spoke, of the laws of speech or of the grammar of his language; just as he reasoned, long before he made the reasoning process matter of reflection, and reduced it to the laws of logic; so from the beginning he was religious though he had no more idea that there were principles of religion, than that there were principles of grammar or laws of correct thought. 'First principles of every kind have their influence, and indeed operate largely and powerfully, long before they come to the surface of human thought and are articulately expounded' (Ferrier: _Institute of Metaphysics_, p. 13).

But this is not to say that primitive man argued, or thought, with never an error, or spoke with never a mistake, until by some catastrophe he was expelled from some paradise of grammarians and logicians. Though correct reasoning was logical before the time of Aristotle, and correct speech grammatical before the time of Dionysius Thrax; there was before, as there has been since, plenty both of bad logic and bad grammar. But that is very different from saying that, in the beginning, all reasoning was unsound, or all speech ungrammatical. To say so, would be as unmeaning and as absurd as to say that primitive man's every action was immoral, and his habitual state one of pure, unmitigated wickedness. If the assumption of a primitive paradise is unworkable, neither will the assumption of a primitive inferno act, whether it is for the evolution of the grammar of language or morality, or of logic or religion, that we wish to account. It is to ask too much, to ask us to believe that in the beginning there was only wrong-doing and no right, only error and no correctness of thought or speech, only spell and no prayer. And if both have been always, as they are now, present, there must also always have been a tendency in that which has prevailed to conquer. We may say that, in the process of evolution, man becomes aware of differences to which at first he gave but little attention; and, so far as he becomes conscious of them, he sets aside what is illogical, immoral, or irreligious, because he is satisfied it is illogical, immoral, or irreligious, and for no other reason.

The theory that spell preceded prayer in the evolution of religion proceeds upon a misconception of the process of evolution. At one time it was assumed and accepted without question that the vegetable and animal kingdoms, and all their various species, were successive stages of one process of evolution; and that the process proceeded on one line and one alone. On the analogy of the evolution of living beings, as thus understood, all that remained, when the theory of evolution came to be applied to the various forms of thought and feeling, was to arrange them also in one line; and that, it was assumed, would be the line which the evolution of religion had followed. On this assumption, either magic must be prior to religion, or religion prior to magic; and, on the principle that priority must be assigned to the less worthy, it followed that magic must have preceded religion.

It will scarcely be disputed that it was on the analogy of what was believed to be the course of evolution, in the case of vegetable and animal life, that the first attempts to frame a theory of the evolution of religion proceeded, with the result that gods were assumed to have been evolved out of fetishes, religion out of magic, and prayer out of spell. To disprove this, it is not necessary to reject the theory of evolution, or to maintain that evolution in religion proceeds on lines wholly different from those it follows elsewhere. All that is necessary is to understand the theory of the evolution of the forms of life, as that theory is held by naturalists now; and to understand the lines which the evolution of life is now held to have followed. The process of evolution is no longer held to have followed one line alone, or to have described but one single trajectory like that of a cannon-ball fired from a cannon. The process of evolution is, and has been from the beginning, dispersive. To borrow M. Bergson's simile, the process of evolution is not like that of a cannon-ball which followed one line, but like that of a shell, which burst into fragments the moment it was fired off; and these fragments being, as it were, themselves shells, in their turn burst into other fragments, themselves in their turn destined to burst, and so on throughout the whole process. The very lines, on which the process of evolution has moved, show the process to be dispersive. If we represent the line by which man has risen from the simplest forms of life or protoplasm by an upright line; and the line by which the lowest forms of life, such as some of the foraminifera, have continued on their low level, by a horizontal line starting from the bottom of the upright line, then we have two lines forming a right angle. One represents the line of man's evolution, the other that of the foraminifera. Between these two lines you may insert as many other lines as necessary. That line which is most nearly upright will represent the evolution of the highest form of vertebrate, except man; the next, the next highest; and so on till you come to the lines representing the invertebrates; and so on till you come to the lines which are getting nearer and nearer to the horizontal. Thus you will have a whole sheaf of lines, all radiating indeed from one common point, but all nevertheless dispersing in different directions.

The rush of life, the _élan de la vie_, is thus dispersive; and if we are to interpret the evolution of mental on the analogy of physical life, we shall find, M. Bergson says, nothing in the latter which compels us to assume either that intelligence is developed instinct, or that instinct is degraded intelligence. If that be so, then, we may say, neither is there anything to warrant us in assuming either that religion is developed magic, or magic degraded religion. Spell is not degraded prayer, nor is prayer a superior form of spell: neither does become or can become the other, though man may oscillate, with great rapidity, between the two, and for long may continue so to oscillate. The two moods were from the beginning different, though man for long did not clearly discriminate between the two. The dispersive force of evolution however tends to separate them more and more widely, until eventually oscillation ceases, if it does not become impossible.

The dispersive force of evolution manifests itself in the power of discrimination whereby man becomes aware of differences to which, in the first confusion of thought, he paid little attention; and ultimately may become conscious of the first principles of reason, morality or religion, as normative principles, in accordance with which he feels that he should act, though he has not always acted, and does not always act in accordance with them. In the beginning there is confusion of feeling and confusion of thought both as to the quarter to which prayer is addressed and as to the nature of the petitions which should be proffered. But we should be mistaken, if from the confusion we were to infer that there was no principle underlying the confusion. We should be mistaken, were we to say that prayer, if addressed to polytheistic gods, is not prayer; or that prayer, if addressed to a fetish, is not prayer. In both cases, the being to whom prayer is offered is misconceived and misrepresented by polytheism and fetishism; and the misconception is due to want of discrimination and spiritual insight. But failure to observe is no proof either that the power of observation is wanting or that there is nothing to be observed. The being to whom prayer is offered may be very different from the conception which the person praying has of him, and may yet be real.

Petitions, then, put up to polytheistic gods, or even to fetishes, may still be prayers. But petitions may be put up, not only to polytheistic gods, or to fetishes, but even to the one god of the monotheist, which never should be put up. 'Of thy goodness, slay mine enemies,' is, in form, prayer: it is a desire, a petition to a god, implying recognition of the superiority of the divine power, implying adoration even. But eventually it comes to be condemned as an impossible prayer: spiritually it is a contradiction in terms. If however we say that it is not, and never was, prayer; and that only by confusion of thought was it ever considered so, we may be told that, as a simple matter of actual fact, it is an actual prayer that was actually put up. That it ought not--from the point of view of a later stage in the development of religion--to have been put up, may be admitted; but that it was a prayer actually put up, cannot be denied. To this the reply seems to be that it is with prayer as it is with argument: a fallacy is a fallacy, just as much before it is detected as afterwards. The fact that it is not detected does not make it a sound argument; still less does it prove either that there are now no principles of correct reasoning or that there were none then; it only shows that there was, on this point, confusion of thought. So too we may admit--we have no choice but to admit--that there are spiritual fallacies, as well as fallacies of logic. Of such are the petitions which are in form prayers, just as logical fallacies are, in form, arguments. They may be addressed to the being worshipped, as fallacies are addressed to the reason; and eventually their fallacious nature may become evident even to the reason of man. But it is only by the evolution of prayer, that is by the disclosure of its true nature, that petitions of the kind in question come to be recognised and condemned as spiritual fallacies. The petitioner who puts up such petitions is indeed unconscious of his error, but he errs, for all that, just as the person who uses a fallacious argument may be himself the victim of his fallacy: but he errs none the less because he is deceived himself. There are normative principles of prayer as well as the normative principles of thought; and both operate 'long before they come to the surface of human thought and are articulately expounded.' It is in thinking that the normative principles of thought emerge. But it is by no means the case that they come to the surface of every man's thought. So too it is in prayer that the normative principles of prayer emerge; yet men require teaching how to pray. Some petitions are permissible, some not.

If then there are normative principles of prayer, just as there are of action, thought and speech; if there are petitions which are not permissible, and which are not and never can be prayers, though by a spiritual fallacy, analogous to logical fallacies, they may be thought to be prayers, what is it that decides the nature of an admissible petition? It seems to be the conception of the being to whom the petition is addressed. Thus it is that prayer throws light on the idea of God. From the prayers offered we can infer the nature of the idea. The confusion of admissible and inadmissible petitions points to confused apprehension of the idea of God. It is not merely imperfect apprehension but confused apprehension. In polytheism the confusion betrays itself, because it leads to collision with the principles of morality: of the gods who make war upon one another, each must be supposed to hold himself in the right; therefore either some gods do not know what is right, or there is no right to be known even by the gods. From this confusion the only mode of escape, which is satisfactory both to religion and to morality, is to recognise that the unity of morality and the unity of the godhead mutually imply one another. But so long as a plurality of gods, with a shifting standard of morality, is believed in, the distinction between admissible and inadmissible petitions cannot be firmly or correctly drawn.

A tribal god is petitioned to slay the tribe's enemies, because he is conceived as the god of the tribe and not the god of its enemies. If the declaration, that 'I am thy servant,' is affirmed with emphasis on the first personal pronoun, so as to imply that others are no servants of thine, the implication is that thy servants' enemies are thy enemies; whereas if there is, for all men, one God only, then all men are his servants, and not one person, or one tribe, alone. The conception of God as the god of one tribe alone is an imperfect and confused apprehension of the idea of God. But it is less so than is the conception of a god as belonging to one individual owner, as a fetish does. To a fetish the distinctive, though not the only, prayer offered, precisely is 'Slay mine enemies'; and therein it is that lies the difference between a fetish and a god of the community. The difference is the same in kind as that between a tribal god and the God of all mankind. The fetish and the tribal god are both inadequate ideas of God; and the inadequacy implies confusion--the confusion of conceiving that the god is there only to subserve the desires and to do the will of the individual worshipper or body of worshippers.

Escape from this confusion is to some extent secured by the fact that prayers to the community's god are offered by the community aloud, in public and as part of the public worship; and, consequently, with the object of securing the fulfilment of the desires of the community as a community. The blessing on the community is, at this stage, the only blessing in which the individual can properly share, and the only one for which he can pray to the god of the community. Thus the nature of the petitions, and the quarter to which permissible petitions can be addressed, are determined by the fact that prayer is an office undertaken by the community as a community. If the desires which an individual entertains are such as would be repudiated by the community, because injurious to the community, they cannot be preferred, in the presence of the community, to the god of the community; and thus permissible petitions begin to be differentiated from those which are impermissible--a normative principle of prayer emerges, and the idea of God begins to take more definite form, or to emerge somewhat from the mist which at first enveloped it.