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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[8] Herr Roskoff, _Das Religionswesen der rohesten Naturvoelker_ (Leipzig, 1880); M. Girard de Rialle, _Mythologie comparée_ (Paris, 1878); M. Réville, _Les religions des peuples non civilisés_ (Paris, 1880).

[9] See M. G. De Mortillet, _Le préhistorique. Antiquité de l’homme_ (Paris, 1883).

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[10] We find it adopted or almost so even by spiritualists, like M. Vacherot, _La religion_, Paris, 1869.

[11] See _Origin and Development of Religion_, by F. Max Müller, M. A.

[Sidenote: 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]

[12] _Origin and Development of Religion_, p. 210.

[13] _Origin of Religion_, p. 25.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[14] This word has met with success in Germany. Hartmann also adopts a theory of henotheism.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.”

[Sidenote: 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.”

[Sidenote: 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.”

* * * * *

[Sidenote: 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.

[15] Max Müller, as is well known, goes the length of believing that the authors of the first myths were perfectly conscious that they were speaking in parables; and that subsequent generations misunderstood them, because they personified the figures and the names by which the Divine was referred to; so that mythology becomes literally the science of a disease of language.

[16] Among the most ingenious and least contestable of Max Müller’s suggestions, we cite the paragraph devoted to the Vedic deity Aditi, one of the names of the dawn: “You will be as surprised as I certainly was surprised when the fact first presented itself to me, that there really is a deity in the Veda who is simply called the boundless or the infinite, in Sanscrit A-_diti_. _Aditi_ is derived from _diti_, and the negative particle _a_. _Diti_, again, is regularly derived from a root DÂ (dyati), to bind, from which _dita_, the participle, meaning bound, and _diti_, a substantive, meaning binding and bound. _Aditi_, therefore, must originally have meant without bounds, not chained nor inclosed, boundless, infinite, infinitude.”

This etymology, on the contrary, seems to us rather to be calculated to show precisely that the conception of infinity is not primitive, and that the first time the Hindus invoked the dawn under the name of Aditi, they were far from possessing any distinction between finite and infinite. The night was for them a prison-house, the return of day was their deliverance. It is well known that they represented day as a luminous cow, which moved slowly out of the stable at night and stepped across the fields of heaven and of earth. Sometimes these cows are represented as stolen and confined in sombre caverns. Aurora herself is retained in the depths of _Rita_; night threatens to reign without end, but the gods set out in search of her, Indra discovers and delivers her, and with her aid, the cows bellowing for liberty are discovered in their cavern. It seems to us that for one who enters into the spirit of these primitive legends, it is easy to determine the primitive sense of Aditi. Aditi is the dawn who, confined one knows not where, succeeds at last in breaking bonds and appears radiantly in the open heaven, delivering and delivered, breaking the jail in which the hours of darkness have confined the world. Aditi is the dawn, freed and giving freedom. And, by an extension of meaning, it comes to signify the immortal and imperishable light which no power can veil or hide for more than a day. Whereas, Diti signifies what is mortal and perishable and prisoned in the bounds of matter. This construction is simple, and what is more, is confirmed by the legends to which we have just alluded; after having advocated it in the _Revue philosophique_ (December, 1879), we find it adopted by M. Réville, _Prolégomènes à l’histoire des religions_, 1881.

[Sidenote: “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?

[Sidenote: 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.

[17] Alfred Fouillée, _La liberté et le déterminisme, 2e partie_.

[Sidenote: 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.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[18] See the authors _Morale anglaise contemporaine, 2e partie_.

[Sidenote: 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.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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]

[19] See our _Morale anglaise contemporaine_, p. 579.

[Sidenote: 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.

[20] Fetichism, M. Réville also says, is logically a later belief. “A fetich is a vulgar object, possessing no value in itself, but which a negro preserves, venerates, adores, because _he believes that it is the dwelling place of a spirit_. And the choice of the said object is not absolutely arbitrary. A fetich possesses this very special distinction, that it is the property of the person who adores it. It is in this element of individual ownership—ownership by the tribe or the family—that the difference clearly appears between the object of a naturist religion, and the fetich, properly so called. However humble it may be—tree, rock, or rivulet—the first is independent, is accessible to all, to strangers as to indigenes, on the sole condition that they conform to the exigencies of the ritual or the cult. The sun shines for everybody, the mountain is accessible to all who scale its sides, the spring refreshes the passer-by, whatever be his tribe; the very tree which rises in the midst of the desert asks of the traveller some mark of deference, and does not trouble itself about his origin. One cannot appropriate a natural object. It is otherwise with a fetich. Once adopted by a family, it is in some sort in the service of that family and has nothing to do with others.” This definition of fetichism is quite special, and in no wise concerns _primitive fetichism_, conceived as an ascription of something analogous to the human will in all inanimate things.

[Sidenote: 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.

[21] Spencer, _Principles of Sociology_.

[22] See, among others, M. Vacherot, _La religion_.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.”

[23] Spencer, _Principles of Sociology_.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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]

[24] Mr. Spencer’s _Principles of Sociology_.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[25] According to Mr. Spencer, the movement of a train does not appear spontaneous to animals because it is continuous; and therein lies the ground of their exemption from fright. On this reasoning, animals who live in the neighbourhood of stations should display fright at the arrival and departure of trains. Nothing of the kind is observable. They are equally incurious in regard to horses harnessed to wagons on a high-road. Speculative disinterestedness is altogether lacking in animals and savages; they live locked in the arms of sensation and desire; they spontaneously draw a circle about their ego, and whatsoever lies beyond lies beyond their intelligence.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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]

[26] _Principles of Sociology._

[Sidenote: 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.

[27] Add that when an animal or primitive man has recognized that a certain object possesses a particular attribute, he often finds it difficult to recognize that simply analogous objects possess the same attribute. I was one day making a kitten run after a wooden ball as a dog would do; the ball struck it and hurt it; it cried out and I petted it and then wanted to begin playing once more; it would run willingly even after large stones when I threw them, but obstinately refused to run after the ball. So that it evidently conceived that the ball alone possessed the attribute of power to injure it; the kitten looked upon the ball, no doubt, with an evil eye, regarded it perhaps as an evil being who was unwilling to play; by a fault of generalization the kitten created for itself a sort of fetich which it did not adore indeed, but which it feared, and fear is a step toward adoration.

Mr. Spencer himself admits in savages a certain inaptitude for generalization. This opinion, paradoxical as it may seem, is perhaps an important truth. If primitive intelligences, as M. Taine among others remarked, are especially prompt at noticing the superficial resemblances of things, that fact is not always a mark of genuine perspicacity, for the resemblance perceived between two sensations may be explicable less as an intelligent generalization than as a sort of confusion of the sensations themselves; if sensations are analogous or indistinct, they may naturally be mistaken for each other without any exercise whatsoever of intelligence. Thence the comparative insignificance of many examples taken from the case of language. True generalization seems to consist, more than anything else, in the reduction of facts to law; that is to say, in a conscious abstraction of differences, in a conscious recognition of the fundamental determinism which binds things up together and which precisely eludes both savages and animals.

Note finally that the majority of animals and of savages, when they have once been deceived, are slow to recover from their error, are for a long time distrustful toward the object which has deceived them. A dog, coming home one evening, perceived an empty cask in an unusual place. He was extremely frightened and barked for a long time; it was only by day that he dared approach near the object of his alarm, and he examined and moved about it, and finally, like the frog in La Fontaine’s fable, recognized that the thing was inoffensive. If the cask in question had disappeared during the night, the dog would evidently have remembered it as a redoubtable being seen the evening before in the yard. A monkey, which I left in the room with a cardboard sheep one entire day, proved unable to the end entirely to satisfy itself that the sheep was inanimate. I believe, however, that this persuasion was ultimately achieved, for the monkey began finally to pluck the sheep’s wool and to treat it something too familiarly. But nature seldom permits us equally extended _tête-à-tête_ with objects that alarm us.

Messrs. Spencer and Müller will call our attention to the fact, it is true, that cardboard sheep, no more than hand-organs or watches, exist _in rerum natura_. We reply that nature supplies primitive man with things much more astonishing: with rocks, and forests which can talk (the echo), with springs of hot water, with intermittent fountains. Mr. Fergusson (_Tree and Serpent Worship_) relates that in India he saw with his own eyes a tree which saluted the rising and setting sun, by lifting or lowering its boughs. Temples had formerly been reared in its neighbourhood. People came from all sides to see the marvellous tree. This tree was an old date-palm, half decayed, which hung above the road; in order to pass below it, it had been held back by a rope; but during this operation the fibres which composed the trunk were twisted like the threads in a rope. These fibres contracted toward midday in the heat of the sun; the tree untwisted and rose. It relaxed under the dew at evening and once more bowed down. (See M. Girard de Rialle, _Mythologie comparée_, t. i.)

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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!

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[28] Mr. H. Russell, the explorer of the Pyrenees, remarks the fantastic effects produced by the moonlight in the mountains. As the moonlight replaced the previous shadow on the faces and the angles of the rocks, he says, in an account of the ascension of the peak of Eriste, they seemed so plainly to move that once he mistook one of them for a bear and cocked the revolver at his side. The same explorer remarks also the surprising transformations which natural objects undergo at nightfall and at daybreak. At dawn, he says, there is a sort of universal shiver which seems to animate everything; the sound of the neighbouring cascade changed frequently; at break of day, after having groaned and thundered alternately, it begins to scold. For in the morning in the mountains, he says, sounds gain magnitude, they swell, and torrents in especial lift their voices as if angry; with the arrival of the day the air becomes sonorous and sound carries farther. He has experienced this, he says, frequently, but does not understand the cause.—_Alpine Club_, 1887.

[Sidenote: 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]

[29] Spencer’s _Sociology_.

[30] Savages imagine that they see the eyes of portraits move. I myself saw a child of two years old, accustomed to play with engravings, one day in a great fright snatch away its grandmother’s finger, which was resting on the picture of a ferocious beast. “Big beast bite grandmamma!” These ideas, which totally ignore the profound and definitive difference between animate and inanimate, are fixed in the human mind. A man of distinguished education once maintained to me quite seriously that certain petrifactive springs in the Pyrenees possessed the power of changing sticks into serpents. For one capable of imagining that a bit of wood might thus become a serpent, what difficulty would there be in believing that the bit of wood is alive (even a bit of dead wood), that the spring is alive (in especial a spring with such marvellous properties), and finally that the mountain itself is alive; everything is animate to eyes like that, and possessed of magic power.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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]

[31] Let us remember in this connection that, according to Wuttke, J. G. Müller, and Schultze, a cult for the moon and nocturnal stars must have preceded that of the sun, contrary to the weight of opinion heretofore. The moon’s phases were calculated to take the attention of primitive people, and must early have done so. One must, however, in this connection be on one’s guard against generalizing too quickly and believing that the evolution of human thought has in all places followed the same route. Habitats differ too widely for there not to have been in the beginning an infinite diversity in the religious conceptions entertained by different peoples. In Africa, for example, it is evident _a priori_ that the sun does not possess all the characteristics of a divinity. It is never desired or regretted, as in a northern country; it is, to all appearance at least, rather maleficent than beneficent; and the Africans adore by preference the moon and stars, the gentle radiance of which affords them light without oppressive heat, refreshes and reposes them from the fatigues of the day. The moon is considered by them as a male and all-powerful being, of which the sun is the female. It is when the new moon arises, after its period of absence from the heavens, and begins once more the round of its visible phases, that it is received and saluted with an especial demonstration of cries and dances. The Congo blacks go the length of seeing in the moon a symbol of immortality (M. Girard de Rialle, _Mythologie comparée_, p. 148). America, on the contrary, has been the centre of the worship of the sun. In general it seems that agriculture must of necessity result in the triumph of sun worship over moon worship, for the labourer is more dependent upon the sun than the hunter or the warrior. According to J. G. Müller, savage and warlike races have displayed a preference for the moon.

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.

[32] As has been remarked, the adoration of natural forces has been observed under two forms. It has been addressed sometimes to regular and calm phenomena (Chaldeans, Egyptians), sometimes to changing and portentous phenomena (Jews, Indo-Europeans). It almost always results in the personification of these forces.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[Sidenote: 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.

[33] H. Spencer, _Appendix to the Principles of Sociology_.

[Sidenote: 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.

[34] Brehm, _Revue scientifique_, p. 974, 1874.

[35] Espinas, _Sociétiés animales_, p. 181.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: 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.