CHAPTER II.

RELIGIOUS METAPHYSICS.

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

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

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

_I. Animism._

[Sidenote: Legitimate and illegitimate metaphysics.]

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

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

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[Sidenote: Primitive metaphysics a fetichistic monism.]

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

[Sidenote: Becomes a dualistic animism. Separate existence of the soul.]

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

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

[Sidenote: Ghosts.]

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

[36] See the author’s _Morale d’Épicure_ (_Des idées antiques sur la mort_) 3d edition, p. 105.

[Sidenote: Analogies between ghosts and living people.]

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

[37] See Le Bon, _L’Homme et les Sociétés_, t. ii.

[Sidenote: Care of vengeance committed to ghosts.]

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

[Sidenote: Summary.]

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

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

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

_II. Providence and Miracles._

[Sidenote: From ghosts to divinity a single step.]

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

[Sidenote: Development of notion of special providence.]

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

[38] A belief in relics, pushed so far by the earlier Christians and by so many Catholics to-day, is, too, a sort of faith in fetiches or amulets. From the earliest period of Christianity the faithful were accustomed to go to the Holy Land to obtain water from the Jordan, and gather dust from the soil that the feet of Christ had trod, and to break pieces from the true cross, which St. Paulin of Nole says, “possesses in all its parts a vital force in so much that although its wood be every day clipped off by innumerable pilgrims, it remains intact.” Relics are supposed not only to cure the body, but the soul of those who touch them: Gregory sent to a barbarous king the chains that had served to manacle the apostle Paul; assuring him that the same chains which had manacled the body of the saint could deliver the heart from sin.

This superstition for relics, common in the Middle Ages, was held in all its naïveté by Bishop Gregory of Tours. He relates that one day when he was suffering from a pain in the temples, a touch from the hangings about the tomb of St. Martin cured him. He repeated the experiment three times with equal success. Once, he tells, he was attacked by a mortal dysentery; he drank a glass of water in which he had dissolved a pinch of dust scraped up on the tomb of the saint, and his health was restored. One day a bone stuck in his throat, he began praying and groaning, and kneeled before the tomb; he stretched out his hand and touched the hangings and the bone disappeared. “I do not know,” he says, “what became of it, for I neither threw it up nor felt it pass downward into my stomach.” At another time his tongue became swollen and tumefied; he licked the railing of the tomb of St. Martin and his tongue became of its natural size. St. Martin’s relics go the length even of curing toothache. “Oh, ineffable theriac!” cries Gregory of Tours, “ineffable pigment! admirable antidote! celestial purge! superior to all the drugs of the faculty! sweeter than aromatics, stronger than all unguents together! Thou cleanest the stomach like scammony, the lungs like hyssop; thou purgest the head like pyrethrig.”

[Sidenote: Systematic subordination among the gods.]

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

[Sidenote: Development of belief in miracle.]

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

[39] Etymologically, miracle signifies simply surprising. The Hindus do not even possess a special word for a supernatural event; miracle and spectacle in their language are one. The supernatural, that is to say, is for them simply an object of contemplation and admiration, an event which stands out prominently from the general monotony which attracts the eye.

[Sidenote: Marks a degree of intellectual progress.]

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

[Sidenote: Conception of God as Providence more essential than that of Him as First Cause.]

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

[Sidenote: Increasing opposition between notion of Providence and science.]

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

[Sidenote: Practical evil of belief in Providence.]

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

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[Sidenote: Miracles not frauds.]

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

[Sidenote: But illusions.]

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

[40] _Actes de la Société helvét. des sc. nat._, August, 1877.

[Sidenote: Usually explicable by the science of nervous phenomena.]

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

[Sidenote: Often by less recondite knowledge.]

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

[41] _Through Siberia_, by Henry Lansdell, with illustrations and maps; London, 1882.

[Sidenote: Miracles essential to religion.]

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

[Sidenote: Prevalence of belief in special providence.]

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

[Sidenote: Belief in Providence tames people for absolute monarchy.]

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

[Sidenote: Personal initiative a defiance of the gods.]

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

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

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

_III. Creation._

[Sidenote: Conception of creation dualistic.]

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

[Sidenote: Conception of creation natural.]

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

[Sidenote: God conceived as orderer rather than as creator.]

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

[Sidenote: Notion of creation ex nihilo of empirical origin.]

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

[Sidenote: Summary.]

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

[Sidenote: Dangers of effort to classify systems of religious metaphysics.]

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

[42] “Henotheism,” says Von Hartmann, “rests upon a contradiction. Man goes forth in search of divinity, and finds gods. He addresses each of these divinities in succession in the hope that he may be the divinity sought for, and confers upon him a multitude of predicates which call in question the divinity of the other gods. Obliged, however, as he is to look to different gods for the fulfilment of his respective demands he is unable to remain faithful to any one of them; he changes his object of adoration repeatedly and each time acts toward the god he is addressing as if he were god _par excellence_, without indeed himself observing at the time that he is denying the supreme divinity of any god by attributing it in turn to each of them. What renders the origin of religion possible is that this contradiction is not at first remarked; a persistent failure to recognize such a contradiction would not be possible in the midst of the progress of civilization, except in the case of an extreme intensity of religious sentiment, which shields all religious subjects from rational criticism. Such intensity of religious sentiment neither exists in all places nor at all times, and a spirit of intellectual criticism, operating intermittently, suffices in the long run to render the point of view of henotheism untenable. Two ways of avoiding the contradiction in question offer themselves. One may maintain the unity of God at the expense of the plurality, or, on the contrary, plurality of God at the expense of the unity. The first way leads to abstract monism, the second to polytheism; and out of polytheism, by a process of degeneration, arise polydemonism or animism and then fetichism.”

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

[Sidenote: Logically posterior often historically prior.]

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

[Sidenote: Comte’s classification logical, not psychological.]

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

[Sidenote: The real classification.]

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

[Sidenote: Progressive encroachment of deterministic conception.]

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

[Sidenote: Unification of creeds incidental to that encroachment.]

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

[Sidenote: Development of sociological and moral sides of religion.]

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