PREFACE
This, the third edition, represents a considerable expansion of the second (1906), which in its turn was a considerable expansion of the first (1899). The book now somewhat approximates, in point of fullness, to the modest ideal aimed at. Anything much fuller would cease to be a “Short History.”
The process of revision, carried on since the last issue, has, I hope, meant some further advance towards correctness, and some improvement in arrangement—a particularly difficult matter in such a book. As before, the many critical excursus have been so printed that they may be recognized and skipped by those readers who care to follow only the narrative. The chapter on the nineteenth century, though much expanded, like those on the eighteenth, remains, I fear, open to objection on the score of scantiness. I can only plead that the ample and excellent work of Mr. A. W. Benn has now substantially met the need for a fuller survey of that period.
It is fitting that I should acknowledge the generous critical reception given by most reviewers to the previous editions of a book which, breaking as it did new ground, lacked the gain from previous example that accrues to most historical writing. My many debts to historians of culture are, I trust, indicated in the notes; but I have to repeat my former acknowledgments as to the Biographical Dictionary of Freethinkers of my dead friend, J. M. Wheeler, inasmuch as the aid I have had from his manifold research does not thus appear on the surface.
It remains to add my thanks to a number of friendly correspondents who have assisted me by pointing out shortcomings and errors. Further assistance of the same kind will be gratefully welcomed. It is still my hope that the book may help some more leisured student in the construction of a more massive record of the development of rational thought on the side of human life with which it deals.
An apology is perhaps due to the purchasers of the second edition, which is now superseded by a fuller record. I can but plead that I have been unable otherwise to serve their need; and express a hope that the low price of the present edition will be a compensation.
J. M. R.
A SHORT HISTORY OF FREETHOUGHT
Chapter I
INTRODUCTORY
§ 1. Origin and Meaning of the Word
The words “freethinking” and “freethinker” first appear in English literature about the end of the seventeenth century, and seem to have originated there and then, as we do not find them earlier in French or in Italian,[1] the only other modern literatures wherein the phenomena for which the words stand had previously arisen.
The title of “atheist” had been from time immemorial applied to every shade of serious heresy by the orthodox, as when the early Christians were so described by the image-adoring polytheists around them; and in Latin Christendom the term infidelis, translating the ἀπίστος of the New Testament, which primarily applied to Jews and pagans,[2] was easily extensible, as in the writings of Augustine, to all who challenged or doubted articles of ordinary Christian belief, all alike being regarded as consigned to perdition.[3] It is by this line of descent that the term “infidelity,” applied to doubt on such doctrines as that of the future state, comes up in England in the fifteenth century.[4] It implied no systematic or critical thinking. The label of “deist,” presumably self-applied by the bearers, begins to come into use in French about the middle of the sixteenth century;[5] and that of “naturalist,” also presumably chosen by those who bore it, came into currency about the same time. Lechler traces the latter term in the Latin form as far back as the MS. of the Heptaplomeres of Bodin, dated 1588; but it was common before that date, as De Mornay in the preface to his De la Vérité de la religion chrétienne (1581) declaims “against the false naturalists (that is to say, professors of the knowledge of nature and natural things)”; and Montaigne in one of his later essays (1588) has the phrase “nous autres naturalistes.”[6] Apart from these terms, those commonly used in French in the seventeenth century were bel esprit (sometimes, though not necessarily, connoting unbelief), esprit fort and libertin, the latter being used in the sense of a religious doubter by Corneille, Molière, and Bayle.[7]
It seems to have first come into use as one of the hostile names for the “Brethren of the Free Spirit,” a pantheistic and generally heretical sect which became prominent in the thirteenth century, and flourished widely, despite destructive persecution, till the fifteenth. Their doctrine being antinomian, and their practice often extravagant, they were accused by Churchmen of licentiousness, so that in their case the name Libertini had its full latitude of application. In the sixteenth century the name of Libertines is found borne, voluntarily or otherwise, by a similar sect, probably springing from some remnant of the first, but calling themselves Spirituales, who came into notice in Flanders, were favoured in France by Marguerite of Navarre, sister of Francis I, and became to some extent associated with sections of the Reformed Church. They were attacked by Calvin in the treatise Contre la sects fanatique et furieuse des Libertins (1544 and 1545).[8] The name of Libertini was not in the sixteenth century applied by any Genevese writer to any political party;[9] but by later historians it was in time either fastened on or adopted by the main body of Calvin’s opponents in Geneva, who probably included some members of the sect or movement in question. They were accused by him of general depravity, a judgment not at all to be acquiesced in, in view of the controversial habits of the age; though they probably included antinomian Christians and libertines in the modern sense, as well as orthodox lovers of freedom and orderly non-Christians. As the first Brethren of the Free Spirit, so-called, seem to have appeared in Italy (where they are supposed to have derived, like the Waldenses, from the immigrant Paulicians of the Eastern Church), the name Libertini presumably originated there. But in Renaissance Italy an unbeliever seems usually to have been called simply ateo, or infedele, or pagano. “The standing phrase was non aver fede.”[10]
In England, before and at the Reformation, both “infidel” and “faithless” usually had the theological force of “non-Christian.” Thus Tyndale says of the Turks that though they “knowledge one God,” yet they “have erred and been faithless these eight hundred years”; adding the same of the Jews.[11] Throughout Elizabeth’s reign, “infidel” seems thus to have commonly signified only a “heathen” or Jew or Mohammedan. Bishop Jewel, for instance, writes that the Anglo-Saxon invaders of Britain “then were infidels”;[12] and the word appears to be normally used in that sense, or with a playful force derived from that, by the divines, poets, and dramatists, including Shakespeare, as by Milton in his verse.[13] Ben Jonson has the phrase:
I did not expect
To meet an infidel, much less an atheist,
Here in Love’s list.[14]
One or two earlier writers,[15] indeed, use “infidel” in the modern sense; and it was at times so used by early Elizabethans.[16] But Foxe brackets together “Jews, Turks, or infidels”;[17] and Hooper, writing in 1547, speaks, like Jewel, of the heathen as “the infidels.”[18] Hooker (1553–1600), in his Fifth Sermon, § 9,[19] uses the word somewhat indefinitely, but in his margin makes “Pagans and Infidels” equivalent to “Pagans and Turks.” So also, in the Ecclesiastical Polity,[20] “infidels” means men of another religion. On the title-page of Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1574), on the other hand, we have “the infidelitie of atheists”; but so late as 1600 we find “J. H.” [John Healy], the translator of Augustine’s City of God, rendering infideles and homines infideles by “unbelievers.”[21] “Infidelity,” in the modern sense, occurs in Sir T. Browne.[22]
In England, as in the rest of Europe, however, the phenomenon of freethought had existed, in specific form, long before it could express itself in propagandist writings, or find any generic name save those of atheism and infidelity; and the process of naming was as fortuitous as it generally is in matters of intellectual evolution. Phrases approximating to “free thought” occur soon after the Restoration. Thus Glanvill repeatedly writes sympathetically of “free philosophers”[23] and “free philosophy.”[24] In 1667 we find Sprat, the historian of the Royal Society, describing the activity of that body as having arisen or taken its special direction through the conviction that in science, as in warfare, better results had been obtained by a “free way” than by methods not so describable.[25] As Sprat is careful to insist, the members of the Royal Society, though looked at askance by most of the clergy[26] and other pietists, were not as such to be classed as unbelievers, the leading members being strictly orthodox; but a certain number seem to have shown scant concern for religion;[27] and while it was one of the Society’s first rules not to debate any theological question whatever,[28] the intellectual atmosphere of the time was such that some among those who followed the “free way” in matters of natural science would be extremely likely to apply it to more familiar problems.[29] At the same period we find Spinoza devoting his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) to the advocacy of libertas philosophandi; and such a work was bound to have a general European influence. It was probably, then, a result of such express assertion of the need and value of freedom in the mental life that the name “freethinker” came into English use in the last quarter of the century.
Before “deism” came into English vogue, the names for unbelief, even deistic, were simply “infidelity” and “atheism”—e.g., Bishop Fotherby’s Atheomastix (1622), Baxter’s Unreasonableness of Infidelity (1655) and Reasons of the Christian Religion (1667), passim. Bishop Stillingfleet’s Letter to a Deist (1677) appears to be the first published attack on deism by name. His Origines Sacræ (1662) deals chiefly with deistic views, but calls unbelievers in general “atheists.” Cudworth, in his True Intellectual System of the Universe (written 1671, published 1678), does not speak of deism, attacking only atheism, and was himself suspected of Socinianism. W. Sherlock, in his Practical Discourse of Religious Assemblies (2nd ed., 1682), attacks “atheists and infidels,” but says nothing of “deists.” That term, first coined, as we have seen, in French, seems first to have found common currency in France—e.g., on the title-pages of the apologetic works of Marin Mersenne, 1623 and 1624. The term “atheist” was often applied at random at this period; but atheism did exist.
When the orthodox Boyle pushed criticism in physical science under such a title as The Sceptical Chemist, the principle could not well be withheld from application to religion; and it lay in the nature of the case that the name “freethinker,” like that of “skeptic,” should come to attach itself specially to those who doubted where doubt was most resented and most resisted. At length the former term became specific.
In the meantime the word “rationalist,” which in English has latterly tended to become the prevailing name for freethinkers, had made its appearance, without securing much currency. In a London news-letter dated October 14, 1646, it is stated, concerning the Presbyterians and Independents, that “there is a new sect sprung up among them, and these are the rationalists; and what their reason dictates to them in Church or State stands for good until they be convinced with better.”[30] On the Continent, the equivalent Latin term (rationalista) had been applied about the beginning of the century to the Aristotelian humanists of the Helmstadt school by their opponents,[31] apparently in the same sense as that in which Bacon used the term rationales in his Redargutio Philosophiarum—“Rationales autem, aranearum more, telas ex se conficiunt.” Under this title he contrasts (as spiders spinning webs out of themselves) the mere Aristotelean speculators, who framed à priori schemes of Nature, with empiricists, who, “like ants, collect something and use it,” preferring to both the “bees” who should follow the ideal method prescribed by himself.[32] There is here no allusion to heterodox opinion on religion. [Bishop Hurst, who (perhaps following the Apophthegms) puts a translation of Bacon’s words, with “rationalists” for rationales, as one of the mottoes of his History of Rationalism, is thus misleading his readers as to Bacon’s meaning.] In 1661 John Amos Comenius, in his Theologia Naturalis, applies the name rationalista to the Socinians and deists; without, however, leading to its general use in that sense. Later we shall meet with the term in English discussions between 1680 and 1715, applied usually to rationalizing Christians; but as a name for opponents of orthodox religion it was for the time superseded, in English, by “freethinker.”
In the course of the eighteenth century the term was adopted in other languages. The first French translation (1714) of Collins’s Discourse of Freethinking is entitled Discours sur la liberté de penser; and the term “freethinkers” is translated on the title-page by esprit fort, and in the text by a periphrasis of liberté de penser. Later in the century, however, we find Voltaire in his correspondence frequently using the substantive franc-pensant, a translation of the English term which subsequently gave way to libre penseur. The modern German term Freigeist, found as early as 1702 in the allusion to “Alten Quäcker und neuen Frey-Geister” on the title-page of the folio Anabaptisticum et Enthusiasticum Pantheon, probably derives from the old “Brethren of the Free Spirit”; while Schöngeist arose as a translation of bel esprit. In the middle of the eighteenth century Freidenker came into German use as a translation of the English term.
In a general sense “free thoughts” was a natural expression, and we have it in Ben Jonson: “Being free master of mine own free thoughts.”[33] But not till about the year 1700 did the phrase begin to have a special application to religious matters. The first certain instance thus far noted of the use of the term “freethinker” is in a letter of Molyneux to Locke, dated April 6, 1697,[34] where Toland is spoken of as a “candid freethinker.” In an earlier letter, dated December 24, 1695, Molyneux speaks of a certain book on religion as somewhat lacking in “freedom of thought”;[35] and in Burnet’s Letters[36] occurs still earlier the expression “men ... of freer thoughts.” In the New English Dictionary a citation is given from the title-page of S. Smith’s brochure, The Religious Impostor ... dedicated to Doctor S-l-m-n and the rest of the new Religious Fraternity of Freethinkers, near Leather-Sellers’ Hall. Printed ... in the first year of Grace and Freethinking, conjecturally dated 1692. It is thought to refer to the sect of “Freeseekers” mentioned in Luttrell’s Brief Historical Relation (iii, 56) under date 1693. In that case it is not unbelievers that are in question. So in Shaftesbury’s Inquiry Concerning Virtue (first ed. 1699) the expression “freethought” has a general and not a particular sense;[37] and in Baker’s Reflections upon Learning, also published in 1699, in the remark: “After the way of freethinking had been lai’d open by my Lord Bacon, it was soon after greedily followed”;[38] the reference is, of course, to scientific and not to religious thought.
But in Shaftesbury’s Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (1709) the phrases “free-writers” and “a freethought”[39] have reference to “advanced” opinions, though in his letters to Ainsworth (May 10, 1707) he had written, “I am glad to find your love of reason and freethought. Your piety and virtue I know you will always keep.”[40] Compare the Miscellaneous Reflections (v, 3) in the Characteristics[41] (1711), where the tendency to force the sense from the general to the special is incidentally illustrated. Shaftesbury, however, includes the term “free liver” among the “naturally honest appellations” that have become opprobrious.
In Swift’s Sentiments of a Church of England Man (1708) the specialized word is found definitely and abusively connoting religious unbelief: “The atheists, libertines, despisers of religion—that is to say, all those who usually pass under the name of freethinkers”; Steele and Addison so use it in the Tatler in 1709;[42] and Leslie so uses the term in his Truth of Christianity Demonstrated (1711). The anonymous essay, Réflexions sur les grands hommes qui sont morts en plaisantant, by Deslandes (Amsterdam, 1712), is translated in English (1713) as Reflections on the Death of Free-thinkers, and the translator uses the term in his prefatory Letter to the Author, beside putting it in the text (pp. 50, 85, 97, 102, 106, etc.), where the original had esprit fort.
It was not till 1713, however, that Anthony Collins’s Discourse of Freethinking, occasioned by the Rise and Growth of a Sect called Freethinkers, gave the word a universal notoriety, and brought it into established currency in controversy, with the normal significance of “deist,” Collins having entirely repudiated atheism. Even after this date, and indeed in full conformity with the definition in Collins’s opening sentence, Ambrose Philips took The Freethinker as the title of a weekly journal (begun in 1718) on the lines of the Spectator, with no heterodox leaning,[43] the contributors including Boulter, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin, and the son of Bishop Burnet. But despite this attempt to keep the word “freethinking” as a name for simple freedom from prejudice in secular affairs, the tendency to specialize it as aforesaid was irresistible. As names go, it was on the whole a good one; and the bitterness with which it was generally handled on the orthodox side showed that its implicit claim was felt to be disturbing, though some antagonists of course claimed from the first that they were as “free” under the law of right reason as any skeptic.[44] At this time of day the word may be allowed prescriptive standing, as having no more drawbacks than most other names for schools of thought or attitudes of mind, and as having been admitted into most European languages. The question-begging element is not greater in this than in many other terms of similar intention, such as “rationalism”; and it incurs no such charge of absurdity as lies against the invidious religious term, “infidelity.” The term “infidel” invites “fidel.”
A plausible objection may, indeed, arise on the score that such a term as “freethought” should not be set up by thinkers who almost invariably reject the term “freewill”—the rationalistic succession having for two hundred and fifty years been carried on mainly by determinists. But the issues raised by the two terms are on wholly different planes; and while in both cases the imperfection of the instrument of language is apparent, it is not in the present case a cause of psychological confusion, as it is in the discussion of the nature of will. The freewill fallacy consists in applying universally to the process of judgment and preference (which is a process of natural causation like another) a conception relevant only to human or animal action, as interfered with or unaffected by extraneous compulsion. To the processes of nature, organic or inorganic, the concepts “free” and “bond” are equally irrelevant: a tiger is no more “free” to crave for grass and recoil from flesh than is water to flow uphill; while, on the other hand, such “appetites” are not rationally to be described as forms of bondage. Only as a mode distinguishable from its contrary can “freedom” be predicated of any procedure, and it is so predicated of actions; whereas the whole category of volitions is alleged and denied by the verbal disputants to be “free.” Some attempt to save the case by distinguishing between free and alleged “unfree” volitions; but the latter are found to be simply cases of choices dictated by intense need, as in the case of deadly thirst. The difference, therefore, is only one of degree of impulse, not in the fact of choice.
The term “freewill,” therefore, is irrational, as being wholly irrelevant to the conception of volition. But “freethought,” on the other hand, points to an actual difference in degree of employment of the faculty of criticism. The proposition is that some men think more “freely” than others in that they are (a) not terrorized by any veto on criticism, and (b) not hampered, or less hampered, by ignorant pre-suppositions. In both cases there is a real discrimination. There is no allegation that, absolutely speaking, “thought is free” in the sense of the orthodox formula; on the contrary, it is asserted that the rationalist’s critical course is specifically determined by his intellectual structure and his preparation, and that it is sometimes different structure, but more often different preparation, that determines the anti-critical or counter-critical attitude of the believer. Change in the preparation, it is contended, will put the latter in fuller use of his potential resources; his inculcated fear of doubt and docility of assent being simply acquiescences in vetoes on his attention to certain matters for reflection—that is to say, in arbitrary limitations of his action. It is further implied that the instructed man, other things being equal, is “freer” to think than the uninstructed, as being less obstructed; but for the purpose of our history it is sufficient to posit the discriminations above noted.
The essential thing to be realized is the fact that from its earliest stages humanity has suffered from conventional or traditionary hindrances to the use of judgment. This holds good even as to the early play of the simple inventive faculty, all innovations in implements being met by the inertia of habit; and when men reached the stages of ritual practice, social construction, and religious doctrine, the forces of repression became powerful in proportion to the seriousness of the problem. It is only in modern times that freedom in these relations has come to be generally regarded as permissible; and it has always been over questions of religion that the strife has been keenest.
For practical purposes, then, freethought may be defined as a conscious reaction against some phase or phases of conventional or traditional doctrine in religion—on the one hand, a claim to think freely, in the sense not of disregard for logic, but of special loyalty to it, on problems to which the past course of things has given a great intellectual and practical importance; on the other hand, the actual practice of such thinking. This sense, which is substantially agreed on, will on one or other side sufficiently cover those phenomena of early or rudimentary freethinking which wear the guise of simple concrete opposition to given doctrines or systems, whether by way of special demur or of the obtrusion of a new cult or doctrine. In either case, the claim to think in a measure freely is implicit in the criticism or the new affirmation; and such primary movements of the mind cannot well be separated, in psychology or in history, from the fully conscious practice of criticism in the spirit of pure truth-seeking, or from the claim that such free examination is profoundly important to moral and intellectual health. Modern freethought, specially so-called, is only one of the developments of the slight primary capacity of man to doubt, to reason, to improve on past thinking, to assert his personality as against sacrosanct and menacing authority. Concretely considered, it has proceeded by the support and stimulus of successive accretions of actual knowledge; and the modern consciousness of its own abstract importance emerged by way of an impression or inference from certain social phenomena, as well as in terms of self-asserting instinct. There is no break in its evolution from primitive mental states, any more than in the evolution of the natural sciences from primitive observation. What particularly accrues to the state of conscious and systematic discrimination, in the one case as in the other, is just the immense gain in security of possession.
§ 2. Previous Histories
It is somewhat remarkable that in England this phenomenon has thus far[45] had no general historic treatment save at the hands of ecclesiastical writers, who, in most cases, have regarded it solely as a form of more or less perverse hostility to their own creed. The modern scientific study of religions, which has yielded so many instructive surveys, almost of necessity excludes from view the specific play of freethought, which in the religion-making periods is to be traced rather by its religious results than by any record of its expression. All histories of philosophy, indeed, in some degree necessarily recognize it; and such a work as Lange’s History of Materialism may be regarded as part—whether or not sound in its historical treatment—of a complete history of freethought, dealing specially with general philosophic problems. But of freethought as a reasoned revision or rejection of current religious doctrines by more or less practical people, we have no regular history by a professed freethinker, though there are many monographs and surveys of periods.
The latest and freshest sketch of the kind is Professor J. B. Bury’s brief History of Freedom of Thought (1913), notable for the force of its championship of the law of liberty. The useful compilation of the late Mr. Charles Watts, entitled Freethought: Its Rise, Progress, and Triumph (n. d.), deals with freethought in relation only to Christianity. Apart from treatises which broadly sketch the development of knowledge and of opinion, the nearest approaches to a general historic treatment are the Dictionnaire des Athées of Sylvain Maréchal (1800: 3e édit., par J. B. L. Germond, 1853) and the Biographical Dictionary of Freethinkers by the late Joseph Mazzini Wheeler. The quaint work of Maréchal, expanded by his friend Lalande, exhibits much learning, but is made partly fantastic by its sardonic plan of including a number of typical religionists (including Job, John, and Jesus Christ!), some of whose utterances are held to lead logically to atheism. Mr. Wheeler’s book is in every respect the more trustworthy.
In excuse of Maréchal’s method, it may be noted that the prevailing practice of Christian apologists had been to impute atheism to heterodox theistic thinkers of all ages. The Historia universalis Atheismi et Atheorum falso et merito suspectorum of J. F. Reimmann (Hildesiæ, 1725) exhibits this habit both in its criticism and in its practice, as do the Theses de Atheismo et Superstitione of Buddeus (Trajecti ad Rhenum, 1716). These were the standard treatises of their kind for the eighteenth century, and seem to be the earliest systematic treatises in the nature of a history of freethought, excepting a Historia Naturalismi by A. Tribbechov (Jenæ, 1700) and a Historia Atheismi breviter delineata by Jenkinus Thomasius (Altdorf, 1692; Basileæ, 1709; London, 1716). In the same year with Reimmann’s Historia appeared J. A. Fabricius’s Delectus Argumentorum et Syllabus scriptorum qui veritatem religionis Christianæ adversus Atheos, Epicureos, Deistas, seu Naturalistas ... asseruerunt (Hamburghi), in which it is contended (cap. viii) that many philosophers have been falsely described as atheists; but in the Freydenker Lexicon of J. A. Trinius (Leipzig, 1759), planned as a supplement to the work of Fabricius, are included such writers as Sir Thomas Browne and Dryden.
The works of the late Rev. John Owen, Evenings with the Skeptics, Skeptics of the Italian Renaissance, and Skeptics of the French Renaissance, which, though not constituting a literary whole, collectively cover a great deal of historical ground, must be expressly excepted from the above characterization of clerical histories of freethought, in respect of their liberality of view. They deal largely, however, with general or philosophical skepticism, which is a special development of freethought, often by way of reasonings in which many freethinkers do not acquiesce. (All strict skeptics, that is to say—as distinguished from religionists who profess skepticism up to a certain point by way of making a surrender to orthodox dogmatism[46]—are freethinkers; but most freethinkers are not strictly skeptics.) The history of philosophic skepticism, again, is properly and methodically treated in the old work of Carl Friedrich Stäudlin, Geschichte und Geist des Skepticismus (2 Bde., Leipzig, 1794), the historic survey being divided into six periods: 1, Before Pyrrho; 2, from Pyrrho to Sextus; 3, from Sextus to Montaigne; 4, from Montaigne to La Mothe le Vayer; 5, from La Mothe le Vayer to Hume; 6, from Hume to Kant and Platner. The posthumous work of Émile Saisset, Le Scepticisme: Ænésidème—Pascal—Kant (1865), is a fragment of a projected complete history of philosophic skepticism.
Stäudlin’s later work, the Geschichte des Rationalismus und Supernaturalismus (1826), is a shorter but more general history of the strife between general freethought and supernaturalism in the Christian world and era. It deals cursorily with the intellectual attitude of the early Fathers, the early heretics, and the Scholastics; proceeding to a fuller survey of the developments since the Reformation, and covering Unitarianism, Latitudinarianism, English and French Deism, and German Rationalism of different shades down to the date of writing. Stäudlin may be described as a rationalizing supernaturalist.
Like most works on religious and intellectual history written from a religious standpoint, those of Stäudlin treat the phenomena as it were in vacuo, with little regard to the conditioning circumstances, economic and political; critical thought being regarded purely as a force proceeding through its own proclivities. Saisset is at very much the same point of view. Needless to say, valuable work may be done up to a certain point on this method, which is seen in full play in Hegel; and high praise is due to the learned and thoughtful treatise of R. W. Mackay, The Progress of the Intellect as Exemplified in the Religious Development of the Greeks and Hebrews (2 vols. 1850), where it is partially but ably supplemented by the method of inductive science. That method, again, is freshly and forcibly applied to a restricted problem in W. A. Schmidt’s Geschichte der Denk- und Glaubensfreiheit im ersten Jahrhundert der Kaiserherrschaft und des Christenthums (1847).
Later come the Vorgeschichte des Rationalismus (1853–62) and Geschichte des Rationalismus (1865) of the theologian Tholuck. Of these the latter is unfinished, coming down only to the middle of the eighteenth century; while the former does not exactly fulfil its title, being composed of a volume (2 Abth. 1853, 1854) on Das akademische Leben des 17ten Jahrhunderts, and of one on Das kirchliche Leben des 17ten Jahrhunderts (2 Abth. 1861, 1862), both being restricted to German developments. They thus give much matter extraneous to the subject, and are not exhaustive as to rationalism even in Germany. Hagenbach’s Die Kirchengeschichte des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts (2 Th. 1848, 1849), a series of lectures, translated in English, abridged, under the title German Rationalism in its Rise, Progress, and Decline (1865), conforms fairly to the latter title, save as regards the last clause.
Of much greater scholarly merit is the Geschichte der religiösen Aufklärung im Mittelalter, vom Ende des achten Jahrhunderts bis zum Anfange des vierzehnten, by Hermann Reuter (1875, 1877). This is at once learned, judicious, and impartial. Its definition of “Aufklärung” is substantially in agreement with the working definition of Freethought given above.
Among other surveys of periods of innovating thought, as distinguished from histories of ecclesiastical heresy, or histories of “religious” or theological thought which only incidentally deal with heterodox opinion, should be noted the careful Geschichte des englischen Deismus of G. F. Lechler (1841); the slighter sketch of E. Sayous, Les déistes anglais et le Christianisme (1882); the somewhat diffuse work of Cesare Cantù, Gli eretici d’Italia (3 tom. 1865–67); the very intelligent study of Felice Tocco, L’Eresia nel medio evo (1884); Schmidt’s Histoire des Cathares (2 tom. 1849); Chr. U. Hahn’s learned Geschichte der Ketzer im Mittelalter (3 Bde. 1845–50); and the valuable research of F. T. Perrens, Les Libertins en France au xviie siècle (1896). A similar scholarly research for the eighteenth century in France is still lacking, and the many monographs on the more famous freethinkers leave a good deal of literary history in obscurity. Such a research has been very painstakingly made for England in the late Sir Leslie Stephen’s History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (2 vols., 2nd ed., 1881), which, however, ignores scientific thought. One of the best monographs of the kind is La Critique des traditions religieuses chez les Grecs, des origines au temps de Plutarque, by Professor Paul Decharme (1904), a survey at once scholarly and attractive. The brilliant treatise of Mr. F. M. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy (1912), sketches on more speculative lines the beginnings of Greek rationalism in Ionia. The Geschichte des Monismus im Altertum of Prof. Dr. A. Drews (1913) is a wide survey, of great synthetic value.
Contributions to the general history of freethought, further, have been made in the works of J. W. Draper (A History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, 2 vols, 1861, many reprints; and History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, 1873, many reprints), both full of suggestion and stimulus, but requiring thorough revision as to detail; in the famous Introduction to the History of Civilization in England of H. T. Buckle (2 vols. 1857–61; new ed. in 1 vol. with annotations by the present writer, 1904); in the History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe of W. E. H. Lecky (2 vols. 1865; R. P. A. rep. 1910), who was of Buckle’s school, but fell below him in point of coherence; in the comprehensive History of the Warfare of Science with Theology of Professor Andrew D. White (2 vols. 1896—a great expansion of his earlier essay, The Warfare of Science, 2nd ed. 1877); and in the essay of Mr. E. S. P. Haynes, Religious Persecution: A Study in Political Psychology (1904; R. P. A. rep. 1906), as well as in many histories of philosophy and of sciences.
The so-called History of Rationalism of the American Bishop J. F. Hurst, first published in 1865, and “revised” in 1901, is in the main a work of odium theologicum, dealing chiefly with the evolution of theology and criticism in Germany since the Reformation. Even to that purpose it is very inadequate. Its preface alleges that “happily the vital body of evangelical truth has received only comparatively weak and timorous attacks from the more modern representatives of the rank and rabid rationalism which reached its climax near the close of the eighteenth, and has had a continuous decline through the nineteenth, century.” It urges, however, as a reason for defensive activity, the consideration that “the work of Satan is never planless”; and further pronounces that the work of rationalism “must determine its character. This work has been most injurious to the faith and life of the Church, and its deeds must therefore be its condemnation” (Introd. p. 3). Thus the latest approximation to a history of theological rationalism by a clerical writer is the most negligible.
In English, apart from studies of given periods and of the progress of science and culture, the only other approaches to a history of freethought are those of Bishop Van Mildert, the Rev. J. E. Riddle, and the Rev. Adam Storey Farrar. Van Mildert’s Historical View of the Rise and Progress of Infidelity[47] constituted the Boyle Lectures for 1802–05; Mr. Riddle’s Natural History of Infidelity and Superstition in Contrast with Christian Faith formed part of his Bampton Lectures for 1852; and Mr. Farrar produced his Critical History of Freethought in reference to the Christian Religion as the Bampton Lectures for 1862. All three were men of considerable reading, and their works give useful bibliographical clues; but the virulence of Van Mildert deprives his treatise of rational weight; Mr. Riddle, who in any case professes to give merely a “Natural History” or abstract argument, and not a history proper, is only somewhat more constrainedly hostile to “infidelity”; and even Mr. Farrar, the most judicial as well as the most comprehensive of the three, proceeds on the old assumption that “unbelief” (from which he charitably distinguishes “doubt”) generally arises from “antagonism of feeling, which wishes revelation untrue”—a thesis maintained with vehemence by the others.[48]
Writers so placed, indeed, could not well be expected to contemplate freethought scientifically as an aspect of mental evolution common to all civilizations, any more than to look with sympathy on the freethought which is specifically anti-Christian. The annotations to all three works, certainly, show some consciousness of the need for another temper and method than that of their text,[49] which is too obviously, perhaps inevitably, composed for the satisfaction of the ordinary orthodox animus of their respective periods; but even the best remains not so much a history as an indictment. In the present sketch, framed though it be from the rationalistic standpoint, it is proposed to draw up not a counter indictment, but a more or less dispassionate account of the main historical phases of freethought, viewed on the one hand as expressions of the rational or critical spirit, playing on the subject-matter of religion, and on the other hand as sociological phenomena conditioned by social forces, in particular the economic and political. The lack of any previous general survey of a scientific character will, it is hoped, be taken into account in passing judgment on its schematic defects as well as its inevitable flaws of detail.
§ 3. The Psychology of Freethinking
Though it is no part of our business here to elaborate the psychology of doubt and belief, it may be well to anticipate a possible criticism on the lines of recent psychological speculation, and to indicate at the outset the practical conception on which the present survey broadly proceeds. To begin with, the conception of freethinking implies that of hindrance, resistance, coercion, difficulty; and as regards objective obstacles the type of all hindrance is restraint upon freedom of speech or publication. In other words, all such restraint is a check upon thinking. On reflection it soon becomes clear that where men dare not say or write what they think, the very power of thinking is at length impaired in the ablest, while the natural stimulus to new thought is withdrawn from the rest. No man can properly develop his mind without contact with other minds, suggestion and criticism being alike factors in every fruitful mental evolution; and though for some the atmosphere of personal intercourse is but slightly necessary to the process of mental construction, even for these the prospect of promulgation is probably essential to the undertaking of the task; and the study of other writers is a condition of useful ratiocination. In any case, it is certain that the exercise of argument is a condition of intellectual growth. Not one man in a million will or can argue closely with himself on issues on which he knows he can say nothing and can never overtly act; and for the average man all reasoning on great problems is a matter of prompting from without. The simple fact that the conversation of uneducated people runs so largely to citation of what “he says” makes clear this dependence. Each brings something to the common store, and progress is set up by “pooling” the mass of small intellectual variations or originalities. Thus in the long run freedom of speech is the measure of a generation’s intellectual capacity;[50] and the promoters of such freedom are typically the truest servants of progress.
On the other hand, there is still a common disposition to ascribe to a species of intellectual malice the disturbance that criticism causes to the holders of established beliefs. Recent writers have pressed far the theorem that “will” enters as an element into every mental act, thus giving a momentary appearance of support to the old formula that unbelief is the result of an arbitrary or sinister perversity of individual choice. Needless to say, however, the new theorem—which inverts without refuting Spinoza’s denial of the entity of volition—applies equally to acts of belief; and it is a matter of the simplest concrete observation that, in so far as will or wilfulness in the ordinary sense operates in the sphere of religion, it is at least as obvious and as active on the side of belief[51] as on the other. A moment’s reflection on the historic phenomena of orthodox resistance to criticism will satisfy any student that, whatever may have been the stimulus on the side of heresy, the antagonism it arouses is largely the index of primary passion—the spontaneous resentment of the believer whose habits are disturbed. His will normally decides his action, without any process of judicial deliberation.
It is another way of stating the same fact to point out the fallacy of the familiar assumption that freethinking represents a bias to “negation.” In the nature of the case, the believer has to do at least as much negation as his opponents; and if again we scan history in this connection, we shall see cause to conclude that the temperamental tendency to negation—which is a form of variation like another—is abundantly common on the side of religious conservatism. Nowhere is there more habitual opposition to new ideas as such. At best the believer, so-called, rejects a given proposition or suggestion because it clashes with something he already believes. The new proposition, however, has often been reached by way not of preliminary negation of the belief in question, but of constructive explanation, undertaken to bring observed facts into theoretic harmony. Thus the innovator has only contingently put aside the old belief because it clashes with something he believes in a more vital way; and he has done this with circumspection, whereas his opponent too often repels him without a second thought. The phenomena of the rise of the Copernican astronomy, modern geology, and modern biology, all bear out this generalization.
Nor is the charge of negativeness any more generally valid against such freethinking as directly assails current doctrines. There may be, of course, negative-minded people on that side as on the other; and such may fortuitously do something to promote freethought, or may damage it in their neighbourhood by their atmosphere. But everything goes to show that freethinking normally proceeds by way of intellectual construction—that is, by way of effort to harmonize one position with another; to modify a special dogma to the general run of one’s thinking. Rationalism stands not for “skepticism” in the strict philosophic sense, but for a critical effort to reach certainties. The attitude of pure skepticism on a wide scale is really very rare—much rarer even than the philosophic effort. So far from freethinkers being given to “destroying without building up,” they are, as a rule, unable to destroy a dogma either for themselves or for others without setting a constructive belief in its place—a form of explanation, that is; such being much more truly a process of construction than would be the imposition of a new scheme of dogma. In point of fact, they are often accused, and by the same critics, of an undue tendency to speculative construction; and the early atheists of Greece and of the modern period did so err. But that is only a proof the more that their freethinking was not a matter of arbitrary volition or an undue negativeness.
The only explanation which ostensibly countervails this is the old one above glanced at—that the unbeliever finds the given doctrine troublesome as a restraint, and so determines to reject it. It is to be feared that this view has survived Mr. A. S. Farrar. Yet it is very clear that no man need throw aside any faith, and least of all Christianity, on the ground of its hampering his conduct. To say nothing of the fact that in every age, under every religion, at every stage of culture from that of the savage to that of the supersubtle decadent or mystic, men have practised every kind of misconduct without abandoning their supernatural credences—there is the special fact that the whole Christian system rests on the doctrine of forgiveness of sins to the believer. The theory of “wilful” disbelief on the part of the reprobate is thus entirely unplausible. Such disbelief in the terms of the case would be uneasy, as involving an element of incertitude; and his fear of retribution could never be laid. On the other hand, he has but inwardly to avow himself a sinner and a believer, and he has the assurance that repentance at the last moment will outweigh all his sins.
It is not, of course, suggested that such is the normal or frequent course of believing Christians; but it has been so often enough to make the “libertine” theory of unbelief untenable. Indeed, the singular diversity between profession and practice among Christians has in all periods called out declarations by the more fervid believers that their average fellow-Christians are “practical atheists.” More judicial minds may be set asking instead how far men really “believe” who do not act on their opinions. As one high authority has put it, in the Middle Ages the normal opposition of theory and practice “was peculiarly abrupt. Men’s impulses were more violent, and their conduct more reckless, than is often witnessed in modern society; while the absence of a criticizing and measuring spirit made them surrender their minds more unreservedly than they would do now to a complete and imposing theory.... Resistance to God’s Vicar might be, and indeed was admitted to be, a deadly sin, but it was one which nobody hesitated to commit.”[52] And so with other sins, the sinner having somewhere in the rear of his consciousness the reflection that his sins could be absolved.
And, apart from such half-purposive forms of licence among Christians, there have been countless cases of purposive licence. In all ages there have been antinomian Christians,[53] whether of the sort that simply rest on the “seventy times seven” of the Gospel, or of the more articulately logical kind who dwell on the doctrine of faith versus works. For the rest, as the considerate theologian will readily see, insistence on the possibility of a sinister motive for the unbeliever brings up the equal possibility of a sinister motive on the part of the convert to Christianity, ancient or modern. At every turn, then, the charge of perversity of the will recoils on the advocate of belief; so that it would be the course of common prudence to abandon it, even were it not in itself, as a rule, so plainly an expression of irritated bias.
On the other hand, it need not be disputed that unbelief has been often enough associated with some species of libertinism to give a passing colour for the pretence of causal connection. The fact, however, leads us to a less superficial explanation, worth keeping in view here. Freethinking being taken to be normally a “variation” of intellectual type in the direction of a critical demand for consistency and credibility in beliefs, its social assertion will be a matter on the one side of force of character or degree of recklessness, and on the other hand of force of circumstances. The intellectual potentiality and the propagandist purpose will be variously developed in different men and in different surroundings. If we ask ourselves how, in general, the critical tendency is to arise or to come into play, we are almost compelled to suppose a special stimulus as well as a special faculty. Critical doubt is made possible, broadly speaking, by the accumulation of ideas or habits of certain kinds which insensibly undo a previous state of homogeneity of thought. For instance, a community subsiding into peace and order from a state of warfare and plunder will at length find the ethic of its daily life at variance with the conserved ethic of its early religion of human sacrifice and special family or tribal sanctions; or a community which has accumulated a certain amount of accurate knowledge of astronomy will gradually find such knowledge irreconcilable with its primitive cosmology. A specially gifted person will anticipate the general movement of thought; but even for him some standing-ground must be supposed; and for the majority the advance in moral practice or scientific knowledge is the condition of any effective freethinking.
Between top and bottom, however, there are all grades of vivacity, earnestness, and courage; and on the side of the normal resistance there are all varieties of political and economic circumstance. It follows, then, that the avowed freethinker may be so in virtue either of special courage or of antecedent circumstances which make the attitude on his part less courageous. And it may even be granted to the quietist that the courage is at times that of ill-balanced judgment or heady temperament; just as it may be conceded to the conservative that it is at times that which goes with or follows on disregard of wise ways of life. It is well that the full force of this position be realized at the outset. When we find, as we shall, some historic freethinkers displaying either extreme imprudence or personal indiscipline, we shall be prepared, in terms of this preliminary questioning, to realize anew that humanity has owed a great deal to some of its “unbalanced” types; and that, though discipline is nearly the last word of wisdom, indiscipline may at times be the morbid accompaniment or excess of a certain openness of view and spontaneity of action which are more favourable to moral and intellectual advance than a cold prudence or a safe insusceptibility.
But cold or calm prudence in turn is not a vice; and it is hardly possible to doubt that there have been in all ages varying numbers of unbelievers who shrugged their shoulders over the follies of faith, and declined to tilt against the windmills of fanaticism. There is much reason for surmising that Shakespeare was a case in point. It is not to be supposed, then, because some freethinkers who came out into the open were unbalanced types, that their psychology is the psychology of freethought, any more than that of General Gordon or Francis of Assisi is to be reckoned typical on the side of belief. There must have been myriads of quiet unbelievers, rational all round, whose unbelief was a strictly intellectual process, undisturbed by temperament. In our own day such types abound, and it is rather in them than in the abnormal types of past freethought—the Brunos and the Voltaires—that the average psychology of freethought is to be looked for and understood.
As for the case of the man who, already at odds with his fellows in the matter of his conduct, may in some phases of society feel it the easier to brave them in the matter of his avowed creed, we have already seen that even this does not convict him of intellectual dishonesty. And were such cases relatively as numerous as they are scarce—were the debauched deists even commoner than the vinous Steeles and Fieldings—the use of the fact as an argument would still be an oblique course on the side of a religion which claims to have found its first and readiest hearing among publicans and sinners. For the rest, the harm done in the world’s history by unbalanced freethinkers is as dust in the balance against the immeasurable evil deliberately wrought on serious religious motives, to say nothing of the constant deviation of the mass of believers from their own professed code.
It may, finally, help a religious reader to a judicial view of the phenomenon of freethought if he is reminded that every step forward in the alleged historic evolution of his own creed would depend, in the case put, on the existence of persons capable of rejecting a current and prevailing code in favour of one either denounced as impious or marked off by circumstances as dangerous. The Israelites in Egypt, the prophets and their supporters, the Gospel Jesus and his adherents, all ostensibly stand in some degree for positions of “negation,” of hardy innovation, of disregard to things and persons popularly venerated; wherefore Collins, in the Discourse above mentioned, smilingly claimed at least the prophets as great freethinkers. On that head it may suffice to say that some of the temperamental qualifications would probably be very much the same for those who of old brought about religious innovation in terms of supernatural beliefs, and for those who in later times innovate by way of minimizing or repudiating such beliefs, though the intellectual qualifications might be different. Bruno and Dolet and Vanini and Voltaire, faulty men all four, could at least be more readily conceived as prophets in early Jewry, or reformers under Herod, than as Pharisees, or even Sadducees, under either regimen.
Be that as it may, however, the issues between freethought and creed are ultimately to be settled only in respect of their argumentative bases, as appreciable by men in society at any given time. It is with the notion of making the process of judicial appreciation a little easier, by historically exhibiting the varying conditions under which it has been undertaken in the past, that these pages are written.
[1] Cp. Lechler, Geschichte des englischen Deismus, 1841, p. 458; A. S. Farrar, Critical History of Freethought, 1862, p. 588; Larousse’s Dictionnaire, art. Libre Pensée; Sayous, Les déistes anglais et le Christianisme, 1882, p. 203. [↑]
[2] Jesus is made to apply it either to his disciples or to willing followers in [Matt. xvii, 17], where the implication seems to be that lack of faith alone prevents miraculous cures. So with ἀπιστία in [Matt. xiii, 58]. In the Epistles, a pagan as such is ἀπίστος—e.g., [1 Cor. vi, 6]. Here the Vulgate has infideles: in [Matt. xiii, 58], the word is incredulitatem. [↑]
[3] Cp. [Luke xii, 46]; [Tit. i, 15]; [Rev. xxi, 8]. [↑]
[4] In the prologue to the first print of the old (1196) Revelation of the Monk of Evesham, 1482. [↑]
[5] Bayle, Dictionnaire, art. Viret, Note D. [↑]
[6] Essais, liv. iii. ch. 12. Édit. Firmin-Didot, 1882, ii, 518. [↑]
[7] See F. T. Perrens, Les Libertins en France au xviie Siècle, 1896, Introd. § 11, for a good general view of the bearings of the word. It stood at times for simple independence of spirit, apart from religious freethinking. Thus Madame de Sevigné (Lettre à Mme. de Grignan, 28 juin, 1671) writes: “Je suis libertine, plus que vous.” [↑]
[8] Stähelin, Johannes Calvin, 1863, i, 383 sq.; Perrens as cited, pp. 5–6; Mosheim, Eccles. Hist., 13 Cent., part ii, ch. v, §§ 9–12, and notes; 14 Cent., part ii, ch. v, §§ 3–5; 16 Cent., § 3, part ii, ch. ii. §§ 38–42. [↑]
[9] A. Bossert, Calvin, 1906. p. 151. [↑]
[10] Burckhardt, Renaissance in Italy, Eng. tr. ed. 1892, p. 542, note. [↑]
[11] Answer to Sir T. More, Parker Soc. rep. 1850, pp. 53–54. [↑]
[12] Controversy with Harding, Parker Soc. rep. of Works, 1845, i, 305. [↑]
[13] Paradise Lost, i, 582; Samson Agonistes, 221. [↑]
[14] The New Inn, 1628–9, Act iii. Sc. 2. [↑]
[15] The New English Dictionary gives instances in 1526 and 1552. [↑]
[16] If Mr. Froude’s transcript of a manuscript can here be relied on. History, ed. 1870, x, 545. (Ed. 1872, xi, 199.) [↑]
[17] Four Questions Propounded (pref. to Acts and Monuments). [↑]
[18] Answer to the Bishop of Winchester, Parker Soc. rep., p. 129. [↑]
[19] Works, ed. 1850, ii, 752. [↑]
[20] B. V, ch. i, § 3. Works, i, 429. [↑]
[21] De civitate Dei, xx, 30, end; xxi, 5, beginn., etc. [↑]
[22] Religio Medici, 1642, pt. i. §§ 19, 20. [↑]
[23] Essay II, Of Scepticism and Certainty (rep. of reply to Thomas White, app. to Scepsis Scientifica in 1665) in Glanvill’s collected Essays on Several Important Subjects in Philosophy and Religion, 1676, pp. 38, 44. [↑]
[24] Plus Ultra: or, The Progress and Advancement of Knowledge since the Days of Aristotle, 1668, p. 146. [↑]
[25] History of the Royal Society, 1667, p. 73. Describing the beginnings of the Society, Sprat remarks that Oxford had at that time many members “who had begun a free way of reasoning” (p. 53). [↑]
[26] Buckle, Introd. to Hist. of Civ. in Eng., 1-vol. ed. p. 211. [↑]
[27] Sprat, p. 375 (printed as 367). [↑]
[28] Id., p. 83. The French Academy had the same rule. [↑]
[29] Some of Sprat’s uses of the term have a very general sense, as when he writes (p. 87) that “Amsterdam is a place of Trade without the mixture of men of freer thoughts.” The latter is an old application, as in “the free sciences” or “the liberal arts.” [↑]
[30] Cited by Archbishop Trench, The Study of Words, 19th ed., p. 230, from the Clarendon State Papers, App. Vol. III, p. 40. [↑]
[31] Art. Rationalismus and Supernaturalismus in Herzog and Plitt’s Real-Encyk. für prot. Theol. und Kirche, 1883. xii, 509. [↑]
[32] Philosophical Works of Bacon, ed. Ellis and Spedding, iii, 583. See the same saying quoted among the Apophthegms given in Tenison’s Baconiana (Routledge’s ed. of Works, p. 895). [↑]
[33] Every Man in his Humour (1598), Act iii, sc. 3. [↑]
[34] Some Familiar Letters between Mr. Locke and Several of his Friends, 1708, p. 190. [↑]
[36] Ed. Rotterdam, 1686. p. 195. [↑]
[38] Ch. on Logic, cited by Professor Fowler in his ed. of the Novum Organum, 1878, introd. p. 118. [↑]
[41] Orig. ed. iii, 305, 306, 311; ed. J. M. R., 1900, ii, 349, 353. [↑]
[43] Cp. Johnson on A. Philips in Lives of the Poets. Swift, too, issued his Free Thoughts upon the Present State of Affairs in 1714. [↑]
[44] Thus Bentley, writing as Phileleutherus Lipsiensis against Collins, claims to have been “train’d up and exercis’d in Free Thought from my youth.” Dr. Samuel Clarke somewhere makes a similar statement; and the point is raised by Berkeley in his Minute Philosopher, Dial. i, § 10. One of the first replies to Collins, A Letter to the Free-thinkers, By a Layman, dated February 24, 1712–13, likewise insists on the right of believers to the title, declaring that “a free-thinker may be the best or worst of men.” Shaftesbury on the other side protests that the passion of orthodoxy “holds up the intended chains and fetters and declares its resolution to enslave” (Characteristics, iii. 305; ed. 1900, ii, 345). Later, the claim of Bentley and Clarke became common; and one tract on Christian evidences, A Layman’s Faith, 1732, whose author shows not a grain of the critical spirit, professes to be written “by a Freethinker and a Christian.” [↑]
[46] Cp. Hauréau, Histoire de la philosophie scolastique, ed. 1870–1872, i, 543–46. [↑]
[47] Second ed. with enlarged Appendix (of authorities and references), 1808, 2 vols. [↑]
[48] Farrar, pref., p. x; Riddle, p. 99; Van Mildert, i, 105, etc. [↑]
[49] Van Mildert even recast his first manuscript. See the Memoir of Joshua Watson, 1863, p. 35. [↑]
[50] Cp. W. A. Schmidt, Geschichte der Denk- und Glaubensfreiheit im ersten Jahrhundert der Kaiserherrschaft und des Christenthums, 1847, pp. 12–13. [↑]
[51] Its legitimacy on that side is expressly contended for by Professor William James in his volume The Will to Believe (1897), the positions of which were criticized by the present writer in the University Magazine, April and June, 1897. [↑]
[52] Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire, 8th ed., p. 135. [↑]
[53] A religious basis for sexual licence is of course a common feature in non-Christian religions also. Classic instances are well known. As to sexual promiscuity in an “intensely religious” savage community, see Turner, Samoa a Hundred Years Ago, 1884, p. 290. [↑]
Chapter II
PRIMITIVE FREETHINKING
To consider the normal aspects of primitive life, as we see them in savage communities and trace them in early literature, is to realize the enormous hindrance offered to critical thinking in the primary stages of culture by the mere force of habit. “The savage,” says our leading anthropologist, “by no means goes through life with the intention of gathering more knowledge and framing better laws than his fathers. On the contrary, his tendency is to consider his ancestors as having handed down to him the perfection of wisdom, which it would be impiety to make the least alteration in. Hence among the lower races there is obstinate resistance to the most desirable reforms, and progress can only force its way with a slowness and difficulty which we of this century can hardly imagine.”[1] Among the Bantu of South Africa, before the spread of European rule, “any person in advance of his fellows was specially liable to suspicion [of sorcery], so that progress of any kind towards what we should term higher civilization was made exceedingly difficult by this belief.”[2] The real or would-be sorcerer could thus secure the elimination of the honest inventor; fear of sorcery being most potent as against the supposed irregular practitioner. The relative obstinacy of conservatism in periods and places of narrow knowledge is again illustrated in Lane’s account of the modern Egyptians in the first half of the nineteenth century: “Some Egyptians who had studied for a few years in France declared to me that they could not instil any of the notions which they had there acquired even into the minds of their most intimate friends.”[3] So in modern Japan there were many assassinations of reformers, and some civil war, before Western ideas could gain a footing.[4] The less the knowledge, in short, the harder to add to it.
It is hardly possible to estimate with any confidence the relative rates of progress; but, though all are extremely slow, it would seem that reason could sooner play correctively on errors of secular practice[5] than on any species of proposition in religion—taking that word to connote at once mythology, early cosmology, and ritual ethic. Mere disbelief in a particular medicine-man or rain-maker who failed would not lead to any reflective disbelief in all; any more than the beating or renunciation of his fetish by a savage or barbarian means rejection of his fetishism, or than the renunciation of a particular saint by a modern Catholic[6] means abandonment of prayer to saints for intercession.
The question as to whether savages do beat their idols is a matter in some dispute. Sir A. B. Ellis, a high authority, offers a notable denial to the current belief that negroes “beat their Gods if their prayers are unanswered.” “After an experience of the Gold Coast extending over thirteen years,” he writes, “I have never heard of, much less witnessed, anything of the kind, although I have made inquiries in every direction” (The Tshi-speaking Peoples, 1887, p. 194). Other anthropologists have collected many instances in other races—e.g., Fr. Schultze, Der Fetischismus, 1871, p. 130. In one case, a priest beats a fetish in advance, to secure his careful attention. (Id. pp. 90–91, citing the personal narrative of Bastian.) It seems to be a matter of psychic stage. The more primitive negro is as it were too religious, too much afraid of his Gods, who are not for him “idols,” but spirits residing in images or objects. Where the state of fear is only chronic another temper may arise. Among the Bataks of Sumatra disappointed worshippers often scold a God; and their legends tell of men who declared war on a deity and shot at him from a mountain. (Warneck, Die Religion des Batak, 1909, p. 7. Cp. [Gen. ii, 4–9].) A temper of defiance towards deity has been noted in an Aryan Kafir of the Hindu-Kush. (Sir G. S. Robertson, The Káfirs of the Hindu-Kush, 1899, p. 182.) Some peoples go much further. Among the Polynesians, when a God failed to cure a sick chief or notable, he “was regarded as inexorable, and was usually banished from the temple and his image destroyed” (W. Ellis, Polynesian Researches, 2nd ed. 1831, i, 350). So among the Chinese, “if the God does not give rain they will threaten and beat him; sometimes they publicly depose him from the rank of deity” (Frazer, Lectures on the Early History of Kingship, 1905, pp. 98–101. Cp. Ross, Pansebeia, 4th ed., 1672, p. 80).
There are many analogous phenomena. In old Samoa, in the ritual of mourning for the dead, the family God was first implored to restore the deceased, and then fiercely abused and menaced.[7] See, too, the story of the people of Niuē or Savage Island in the South Pacific, who in the time of a great pestilence, thinking the sickness was caused by a certain idol, broke it in pieces and threw it away (Turner, Samoa a Hundred Years Ago, 1884, p. 306). See further the cases cited by Constant, De la religion, 1824, vol. i, ptie. ii, pp. 32–34; and by Peschel, The Races of Man, Eng. tr. 1876, pp. 247–8, in particular that of Rastus, the last pagan Lapp in Europe, who quarrelled with his fetish stone for killing his reindeer in revenge for the withholding of its customary offering of brandy, and “immediately embraced Christianity.” (Compare E. Rae, The White Sea Peninsula, 1881, p. 276.) See again the testimony of Herman Melville in his Typee, ch. xxiv; and that of T. Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, ed. 1858, i, 236: “Sometimes the natives get angry with their deities, and abuse and even challenge them to fight.” Herodotos has similar stories of barbarians who defy their own and other deities (iv, 172, 183, 184). Compare the case of King Rum Bahadur of Nepaul, who cannonaded his Gods. Spencer, Study of Sociology, pp. 301–2. Also the anecdote cited by Spencer (Id. p. 160) from Sir R. Burton’s Goa, p. 167. Here there is no disbelief, no reflection, but simple resentment. Compare, too, the amusing story of a blasphemy by Rossini, told by Louis Viardot, Libre Examen, 6e éd. pp. 166–67, note. That threats against the Gods are possible at a semi-civilized stage is proved by various passages in medieval literature. Thus in Caxton’s Charles the Grete, a translation from an older French original, Charles is made to say: “O lord God, if ye suffre that Olyver be overcome and that my ryght at thys tyme be loste and defyled, I make a vowe that al Crystyante shal be destroyed. I shal not leve in Fraunce chirche ne monasterye, ymage ne aulter,” etc. (Early Eng. Text Soc. rep. 1881, pp. 70–71.) Such language was probably used by not a few medieval kings in moments of fury; and there is even record that at the battle of Dunbar certain of the Scots Presbyterian clergy intimated to their deity that he would not be their God if he failed them on that day.
If such flights be reckoned possible for Christian kings and clerics in the Christian era, there would seem to be no unlikelihood about the many stories of God-beating and God-defying among contemporary savages, though so good an observer as Sir A. B. Ellis may not have witnessed them in the part of Africa best known to him. The conclusion reached by Sir A. B. Ellis is that the negroes of the Gold Coast are not properly to be described as fetishists. Fetishism, on his view, is a worship of objects as in themselves endowed with magical power; whereas the Gold Coast negro ascribes no virtue to the object commonly called his fetish, regarding it simply as inhabited by a supernatural power. This writer sees “true fetishism” in the attitude of Italian peasants and fishermen who beat and ill-treat their images when prayers are not answered, and in that of Spaniards who cover the faces of their images or turn them to the wall when about to do anything which they think the saint or deity would disapprove of. On this view, fetishism is a later yet lower stage of religious evolution than that of the negro. On the other hand, Miss Kingsley takes fetishism to be the proper name of the attitude of the negro towards particular objects as divinely inhabited, and represents it as a kind of pantheism (West African Studies, 2nd ed. 1901, ch. v). And since, by her definition, “Gods of fetish” do not necessarily “require a material object to manifest themselves in” (p. 96), the term “fetish” is thus detached from all of its former meanings. It seems expedient, as a matter of terminology, to let fetishism mean both object- or image-worship and the belief in the special inhabiting of objects by deities, with a recognition that the beliefs may be different stages in an evolution, though, on the other hand, they are obviously likely to coalesce or concur. In the “Obeah” system of the negroes of the West Indies the former belief in the indwelling spirit has become, or has coalesced with, belief in the magical powers of the object (Keane, Man, Past and Present, 1900, p. 57).
As to defiance or contumely towards the Gods, finally, we have the testimony of the Swiss missionary Junod that the South African Thonga, whom he studied very closely, have in their ritual “a regular insulting of the Gods.” (Life of a South African Tribe, ii, 1912, p. 384.) Why not? “Prayers to the ancestors ... are ... absolutely devoid of awe” (p. 385), though “the ancestor-Gods are certainly the most powerful spiritual agency acting on man’s life” (p. 361); and “the spirits of the ancestors are the main objects of religious worship” (p. 344). The Thonga, again, use “neither idolatry nor fetishism,” having no “idols” (p. 388), though they recognize “hidden virtues” in plants, animals, and stones (p. 345). They simply regard their ancestor-Gods very much as they do their aged people, whom they generally treat with little consideration. But the dead can do harm, and must therefore be propitiated—as savages propitiate, with fear or malice or derision in their hearts, as the case may be. (Cp. p. 379.) On the other hand, despite the denial of their “fetishism,” they believe that ancestor-Gods may come in the shape of animals; and they so venerate a kind of palladium (made up like a medicine-man’s amulet) as to raise the question whether this kind of belief is not just that which Miss Kingsley called “fetish.” (Junod, pp. 358, 373–74.)
Whatever may be the essence, or the varieties, of fetishism, it is clear that the beating of idols or threatening of Gods does not amount to rational doubt concerning the supernatural. Some general approach to that attitude may perhaps be inferred in the case of an economic revolt against the burdens of a highly specialized religious system, which may often have occurred in unwritten history. We shall note a recorded instance of the kind in connection with the question whether there are any savage tribes without religion. But it occurs in the somewhat highly evolved barbarism of pre-Christian Hawaii; and it can set up no inference as to any development of critical unbelief at lower levels. In the long stage of lower savagery, then, the only approach to freethinking that would seriously affect general belief would presumably be that very credulity which gave foothold to religious beliefs to begin with. That is to say, without anything in the nature of general criticism of any story or doctrine, one such might to some extent supersede another, in virtue of the relative gift of persuasion or personal weight of the propounders. Up to a certain point persons with a turn for myth or ritual-making would compete, and might even call in question each other’s honesty, as well as each other’s inspiration.
Since the rise of scientific hierology there has been a disposition among students to take for granted the good faith of all early religion-makers, and to dismiss entirely that assumption of fraud which was so long made by Christian writers concerning the greater part of every non-Christian system. The assumption had been passed on from the freethinkers of antiquity who formulated the view that all religious doctrine had been invented by politicians in order to control the people.[8] Christian polemists, of course, applied it to all systems but their own. When, however, all systems are seen to be alike natural in origin, such charges are felt to recoil on the system which makes them; and latterly[9] Christian writers, seeing as much, have been fain to abandon the conception of “priestcraft,” adroitly representing it as an extravagance of rationalism. It certainly served rationalistic purposes, and the title of the supposititious medieval work on “The Three Impostors” points to its currency among unbelievers long ago; but when we first find it popularly current in the seventeenth century, it is in a Christian atmosphere.[10] Some of the early deists and others have probably in turn exaggerated the amount of deliberate deceit involved in the formation of religious systems; but nevertheless “priestcraft” is a demonstrable factor in the process. What is called the psychology of religion has been much obscured in response to the demand of religious persons to have it so presented as to flatter them in that capacity.[11] Such a claim cannot be permitted to overrule the fair inductions of comparative science.
Anthropological evidence suggests that, while religion clearly begins in primordial fear and fancy, wilful fraud must to some extent have entered into all religious systems alike, even in the period of primeval credulity, were it only because the credulity was so great. One of the most judicial and sympathetic of the Christian scholars who have written the history of Greece treats as unquestionable the view that alike in pagan and Christian cults “priestcraft” has been “fertile in profitable devices, in the invention of legends, the fabrication of relics, and other modes of imposture”;[12] and the leading hierologist of the last generation pronounces decisively as to an element of intentional deceit in the Koran-making of Mohammed[13]—a judgment which, if upheld, can hardly fail to be extended to some portions of all other sacred books. However that may be, we have positive evidence that wilful and systematic fraud enters into the doctrine of contemporary savages, and that among some “primitives” known myths are deliberately propounded to the boys and women by the male adults.[14] Indeed, the majority of modern travellers among primitives seem to have regarded their priests and sorcerers in the mass as conscious deceivers.[15] If, then, we can point to deliberate imposture alike in the charm-mongering and myth-mongering of contemporary savages and in the sacred-book-making of the higher historical systems, it seems reasonable to hold that conscious deceit, as distinguished from childlike fabrication, would chronically enter into the tale-making of primitive men, as into their simpler relations with each other. It is indeed impossible to conceive how a copious mythology could ever arise without the play of a kind of imaginativeness that is hardly compatible with veracity; and it is probably only the exigencies of ecclesiastical life that cause modern critics still to treat the most deliberate fabrications and forgeries in the Hebrew sacred books as somehow produced in a spirit of the deepest concern for truth. An all-round concern for truth is, in fact, a late intellectual development, the product of much criticism and much doubt; hence, perhaps, the lenity of the verdicts under notice. Certain wild tribes here and there, living in a state of great simplicity, are in our own day described as remarkably truthful;[16] but they are not remarkable for range of supernatural belief; and their truthfulness is to be regarded as a product of their special stability and simplicity of life. The trickery of a primitive medicine-man, of course, is a much more childlike thing than the frauds of educated priesthoods; and it is compatible with so much of spontaneous pietism as is implied in the common passing of the operator into the state of convulsion and trance—a transition which comes easily to many savages.[17] But even at that stage of psychosis, and in a community where simple secular lying is very rare, the professional wizard-priest becomes an adept in playing upon credulity.[18]
It belongs, in short, to the very nature of the priestly function, in its earlier forms, to develop in a special degree the normal bias of the undisciplined mind to intellectual fraud. Granting that there are all degrees of self-consciousness in the process, we are bound to recognize that in all of us there is “the sophist within,” who stands between us and candour in every problem either of self-criticism or of self-defence. And, if the instructed man recognizes this clearly and the uninstructed does not, none the less is the latter an exemplification of the fact. His mental obliquities are not any less real because of his indifference to them than are the acts of the hereditary thief because he does them without shame. And if we consider how the fetish-priest is at every turn tempted to invent and prevaricate, simply because his pretensions are fundamentally preposterous; and how in turn the priest of a higher grade, even when he sincerely “believes” in his deity, is bound to put forward as matters of knowledge or revelation the hypotheses he frames to account for either the acts or the abstentions of the God, we shall see that the priestly office is really as incompatible with a high sincerity in the primitive stages as in those in which it is held by men who consciously propound falsities, whether for their mere gain or in the hope of doing good. It may be true that the priestly claim of supernatural sanction for an ethical command is at times motived by an intense conviction of the rightness of the course of conduct prescribed; but none the less is such a habit of mind fatal to intellectual sincerity. Either there is sheer hallucination or there is pious fraud.
Given, however, the tendency to deceit among primitive folk, distrust and detection in a certain number of cases would presumably follow, constituting a measure of simple skepticism. By force partly of this and partly of sheer instability of thought, early belief would be apt to subsist for ages like that of contemporary African tribes,[19] in a state of flux.[20] Comparative fixity would presumably arise with the approach to stability of life, of industry, and of political institutions, whether with or without a special priesthood. The usages of early family worship would seem to have been no less rigid than those of the tribal and public cults. For primitive man as for the moderns definite organization and ritual custom must have been a great establishing force as regards every phase of religious belief;[21] and it may well have been that there was thus less intellectual liberty of a kind in the long ages of what we regard as primitive civilization than in those of savagery and barbarism which preceded them. On that view, systems which are supposed to represent in the fullest degree the primeval spontaneity of religion may have been in part priestly reactions against habits of freedom accompanied by a certain amount of skepticism. A modern inquirer[22] has in some such sense advanced the theory that in ancient India, in even the earlier period of collection of the Rig-Veda, which itself undermined the monarchic character of the pre-Vedic religion, there was a decay of belief, which the final redaction served to accelerate. Such a theory can hardly pass beyond the stage of hypothesis in view of the entire absence of history proper in early Indian literature; but we seem at least to have the evidence of the Veda itself that while it was being collected there were deniers of the existence of its Gods.[23]
The latter testimony alone may serve as ground for raising afresh an old question which recent anthropology has somewhat inexactly decided—that, namely, as to whether there are any savages without religious beliefs.
[For old discussions on the subject see Cicero, De natura deorum, i, 23; Cumberland, Disquisitio de legibus naturæ, 1672, introd. (rejecting negative view as resting on inadequate testimony); Locke, Essay on the Human Understanding, Bk. I, ch. iii, § 9; ch. iv, § 8 (accepting negative view); protests against it by Vico (Scienza Nuova, 1725, as cited above, p. 26); by Shaftesbury (Letters to a Student, 1716, rep. in Letters, 1746, pp. 32–33); by Rev. John Milne, An Account of Mr. Lock’s Religion (anon.), 1700, pp. 5–8; and by Sir W. Anstruther, Essays Moral and Divine, Edinburgh, 1701, p. 24; further protests by Lafitau (Mœurs des sauvages ameriquains comparées aux mœurs des premiers temps, 1724, i, 5), following Boyle, to the effect that the very travellers and missionaries who denied all religion to savages avow facts which confute them; and general view by Fabricius, Delectus argumentorum et Syllabus scriptorum, Hamburghi, 1725, ch. viii. Cp. also Swift, Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, § 2.
Büchner (Force and Matter, ch. on “The Idea of God”); Lord Avebury = Sir John Lubbock (Prehistoric Times, 5th ed., pp. 574–80; Origin of Civilization, 5th ed., pp. 213–17); and Mr. Spencer (Principles of Sociology, iii, § 583) have collected modern travellers’ testimonies as to the absence of religious ideas in certain tribes. Cp. also J. A. St. John’s (Bohn) ed. of Locke, notes on passages above cited, and on Bk. IV, ch. x, § 6. As Lord Avebury points out, the word “religion” is by some loosely or narrowly used to signify only a higher theology as distinct from lower supernaturalist beliefs. He himself, however, excludes from the field of “religion” a belief in evil spirits and in magic—here coinciding with the later anthropologists who represented magic and religion as fundamentally “opposed”—a view rejected even by some religionists. Cp. Avebury, Marriage, Totemism, and Religion, (1911), p. 116 sq.; Rev. E. Crawley, The Mystic Rose, 1902, p. 3; Prof. T. Witten Davies, Magic, Divination, and Demonology, 1898, pp. 18–24. The proved erroneousness of many of the negative testimonies has been insisted on by Benjamin Constant (De la Religion, 1824, i, 3–4); Theodore Parker (Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion, 1842 and 1855, ed. 1877, p. 16); G. Roskoff (Das Religionswesen der rohesten Naturvölker, 1880, Abschn. I and II); Dr. Tylor (Primitive Culture, 3rd ed., i, pp. 417–25); and Dr. Max Müller (Introd. to the Science of Religion, ed. 1882, p. 42 sq.; Hibbert Lectures, p. 91 sq.; Natural Religion, 1889, pp. 81–89; Anthropological Religion, 1892, pp. 428–35.)
The Rev. H. A. Junod (Life of a South African Tribe, vol. ii, 1913, p. 346) shows how easily misconception on the subject may arise. Galton (Narrative of an Explorer, ch. viii, ed. 1891, p. 138) writes: “I have no conception to this day whether or no the Ovampo have any religion, for Click was frightened and angry if the subject of death was alluded to.” The context shows that the native regarded all questions on religious matters with suspicion. Schweinfurth, again, contradicts himself twice within three pages as to the beliefs of the Bongo in a “Supreme Being” and in a future state; and thus leaves us doubting his statement that the neighbouring race, the Dyoor, “put no faith at all in any witchcraft” (The Heart of Africa, 3rd ed. i, 143–45). Much of the confusion turns on the fact that savages who practise no worship have religious beliefs (cp. Max Müller, Hibbert Lectures, ed. 1878, p. 17, citing Monsignor Salvado; and Carl Lumholtz, Among Cannibals, 1889, p. 284). The dispute, as it now stands, mainly turns on the definition of religion (cp. Chantepie de la Saussaye, Manual of the Science of Religion, Eng. tr. 1891, pp. 16–18, where Lubbock’s position is partly misunderstood). Dr. Tylor, while deciding that no tribes known to us are religionless, leaves open the question of their existence in the past.
A notable example of the prolongation of error on this subject through orthodox assumptions is seen in Dr. A. W. Howitt’s otherwise valuable work on The Native Tribes of South Australia (1904). Dr. Howitt produces (pp. 488–508) abundant evidence to show that a number of tribes believe in a “supernatural anthropomorphic being,” variously named Nurrundere, Nurelli, Bunjil, Mungan-ngaua, Daramalun, and Baiame (“the same being under different names,” writes Dr. Howitt, p. 499). This being he describes as “the tribal All-Father,” “a venerable kindly Headman of a tribe, full of knowledge and tribal wisdom, and all-powerful in magic, of which he is the source, with virtues, failings, and passions such as the aborigines regard them” (pp. 500–1). But he insists (p. 506) that “in this being, though supernatural, there is no trace of a divine nature,” and, again, that “the Australian aborigines do not recognize any divinity, good or evil” (p. 756), though (p. 501) “it is most difficult for one of us to divest himself of the tendency to endow such a supernatural being [as the All-Father] with a nature quasi-divine, if not altogether so.” Dr. Howitt does not name any European deity who satisfies him on the point of divinity! Obviously the Australian deities have evolved in exactly the same way as those of other peoples, Yahweh included. Dr. Howitt, indeed, admits (p. 507) that the Australian notions “may have been at the root of monotheistic beliefs.” They certainly were; and when he adds that, “although it cannot be alleged that these aborigines have consciously any form of religion, it may be said that their beliefs are such that, under favourable conditions, they might have developed into an actual religion,” he indicates afresh the confusion possible from unscientific definitions. The sole content of his thesis is, finally, that a “supernatural” being is not “divine” till the priests have somewhat trimmed him, and that a religion is not “actual” till it has been sacerdotally formulated. Dr. Howitt’s negations are as untenable as Mr. Andrew Lang’s magnification of the Australian All-Father into a perfect Supreme Being.
The really important part of Dr. Howitt’s survey of the problem is his conclusion that the kind of belief he has described exists only in a specified area of Australia, and that this area is “the habitat of tribes ... where there has been the advance from group marriage to individual marriage, from descent in the female line to that in the male line” (p. 500). Messrs. Spencer and Gillen’s denial of the existence of any belief in a personal deity among the tribes of Central Australia (Northern Tribes, 1904, p. 491) appears to stand for actual fact.
As to the “divinity” of the ancestor-gods of the primitives, see Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. p. 41 sq.]
The problem has been unduly narrowed to the question whether there are any whole tribes so developed. It is obviously pertinent to ask whether there may not be diversity of opinion within a given tribe. Such testimonies as those collected by Sir John Lubbock [Lord Avebury] and others, as to the existence of religionless savages, are held to be disposed of by further proof that tribes of savages who had been set down as religionless on the evidence of some of themselves had in reality a number of religious beliefs. Travellers’ questions had been falsely answered, either on the principle that non-initiates must not be told the mysteries, or from that sudden perception of the oddity of their beliefs which comes even to some civilized people when they try to state them to an unbelieving outsider. Questions, again, could easily be misunderstood, and answers likewise. We find, for instance, that savages who scout the idea that the dead can “rise again” do believe in the continued disembodied existence of all their dead, and even at times conceive of them as marrying and procreating! On the whole, they conceive of a continuity of spirit-life on earth in human shape. To speak of such people as having no idea of “a life beyond the grave” would obviously be misleading, though they have no notion of a judgment day or of future rewards or punishments.[24]
Undoubtedly, then, the negative view of savage religion had in a number of cases been hastily taken; but there remains the question, as a rule surprisingly ignored, whether some of the savages who disavowed all belief in things supernatural may not have been telling the simple truth about themselves, or even about their families and their comrades. As one sympathetic traveller notes of the Samoyedes: “There can be no such thing as strict accuracy of grammar or expression among an illiterate people; nor can there be among these simple creatures any consistent or fixed appreciation even of their own forms of ... belief.... Having no object in arriving at a common view of such matters, each Samoyede, if questioned separately, will give more or less his own disconnected impression of his faith.”[25] And this holds of unfaith. A savage asked by a traveller, “Do you believe” so-and-so, might very well give a true negative answer for himself;[26] and the traveller’s resulting misconception would be due to his own arbitrary assumption that all members of any tribe must think alike.
A good witness expressly testifies: “In the tribe [of Australians] with which I was best acquainted, while the blacks had a term for ghost and believed that there were departed spirits who were sometimes to be seen among the foliage, individual men would tell you upon inquiry that they believed that death was the last of them” (Eaglehawk and Crow: A Study of the Australian Aborigines, by John Mathew, M.A., B.D., 1899, p. 146). As to the risk of wrong negative inferences, on the other hand, see pp. 145, 147.
One of the best of our missionary witnesses, H. A. Junod, in his valuable study of the South African Thonga, testifies both to the commonness of individual variation in the way of religious fancy and the occurrence of sporadic unbelief, usually ended by fear. Individuals freely indulge in concrete speculations—e.g., as to the existence of animal souls—which do not win vogue (Life of a South African Tribe, vol. ii, 1913, p. 342 sq.), though the reporter seems to overlook the possibility that such ideas may be adopted by a tribe. Freethinking ideas have, of course, by far the least chance of currency. “The young folks of Libombo used to blaspheme in their hearts, saying, ‘There are no Gods.’ But,” added the witness, “we very soon saw that there were some, when they killed one of us,” who trod on a snake (work cited, pp. 354–55). That testimony illustrates well the difficulties of rational progress in a primitive community. But at times the process may be encouraged by the environment. The early missionary Ellis gives an instance of a community in Hawaii that had abandoned all religious practices: “We asked them who was their God. They said they had no God; formerly they had many: but now they had cast them all away. We asked them if they had done well in abolishing them. They said ‘Yes,’ for tabu had occasioned much labour and inconvenience, and drained off the best of their property. We asked them if it was a good thing to have no God.... They said perhaps it was; for they had nothing to provide for the great sacrifices, and were under no fear of punishment for breaking tabu; that now one fire cooked their food, and men and women ate together the same kind of provisions.” (W. Ellis, Tour Through Hawaii or Owhyhee, 1827, p. 100.) The community in question had in their own way reached the Lucretian verdict, Tantum relligio potuit suadere malorum.
Unless, again, such witnesses as Moffat be unfaithful reporters as well as mistaken in their inferences, some of the natives with whom they dealt were all but devoid of the ordinary religious notions[27] which in the case of other natives have enabled the missionaries to plant their doctrines. Nor is there anything hard of belief in the idea that, just as special religious movements spread credence in certain periods, a lack of active teachers in certain tribes may for a time have let previously common beliefs pass almost out of knowledge. If it be true that the Black Death wrought a great decline in the ecclesiastical life of England in the fourteenth century,[28] a long period of life-destroying conditions might eliminate from the life of a savage tribe all lore save that of primary self-preservation. Moffat incidentally notes the significant fact that rain-makers in his time were usually foreigners to the tribes in which they operated.[29]
The explanation is partly that given by him later, that “a rain-maker seldom dies a natural death,”[30] most being executed as impostors for their failures. To this effect there are many testimonies.[31] Among the Bushmen, says Lichtenstein, when a magician “happens to have predicted falsely several times in succession, he is thrust out of the kraal, and very likely burned or put to death in some other way.”[32] “A celebrated magician,” says Burton again, “rarely if ever dies a natural death.”[33] And it is told of the people of Niuē, or Savage Island, in the South Pacific, that “of old they had kings; but as they were the high priests as well, and were supposed to cause the food to grow, the people got angry with them in times of scarcity, and killed them; and as one after the other was killed, the end of it was that no one wished to be king.”[34] So, in Uganda, if a chief and his medicine-men cannot make rain, “his whole existence is at stake in times of distress.” One chief was actually driven out; and the rain-doctors always live on sufferance.[35] In such a state of things religion might well lose vogue.
Among some peoples of the Slave Coast, it appears, the regular priests, despite their power and prestige, are always under suspicion by reason of their frequent miscarriages; and they are—or were—not unfrequently put to death.[36] Here there is disbelief in the priest without disbelief in the God. But a disbelief in the priest which tended to exterminate him might well diminish religion.
On the other hand, a relative indifference to religion in a given tribe might result from the influence of one or more leading men who spontaneously doubted the religious doctrine offered to them, as many in Israel, on the face of the priestly records, disbelieved in the whole theocratic polity. In modern times preachers are constantly found charging “unbelief” on their own flocks, in respect not of any criticism of religious narrative or dogma, but of simple lack of ostensible faith in doctrines of prayer and Providence nominally accepted.[37] Among peasants who have never seen a freethinking book or heard a professed freethinker’s arguments may be heard expressions of spontaneous unfaith in current doctrines of Providence.
This is but a type of variations possible in primitive societies. Despite the social potency of primitive custom, variation may be surmised to occur in the mental as in the physical life at all stages; and what normally happens in savagery and low civilization appears to be a cancelment of the skeptical variation by the total circumstances—the strength of the general lead to supernaturalism, the plausibility of such beliefs to the average intelligence, and the impossibility of setting up skeptical institutions to oppose the others. In civilized ages skeptical movements are repeatedly seen to dwindle for simple lack of institutions; which, however, are spontaneously set up by and serve as sustainers of religious systems. On the simpler level of savagery, skeptical personalities would in the long run fail to affirm themselves as against the institutions of ordinary savage religion—the seasonal feasts, the ceremonies attending birth and death, the use of rituals, images, charms, sorcery, all tending to stimulate and conserve supernatural beliefs in general. Only the abnormally courageous would dare outspokenly to doubt or deny at all; and their daring would put them in special jeopardy.[38] The ancient maxim, Primus in orbe deos fecit timor, is verified by all modern study of primitive life.[39] It is a recent traveller who gives the definition: “Fetishism is the result of the efforts of the savage intelligence seeking after a theory which will account for the apparent hostility of nature to man.”[40] And this incalculable force of fear is constantly exploited by the religious bias from the earliest stages of sorcery.[41]
The check to intellectual evolution would here be on all fours with some of the checks inferribly at work in early moral evolution, where the types with the higher ideals would seem often to be positively endangered by their peculiarity, and would thus be the less likely to multiply. And what happened as between man and man would further tend to happen at times as between communities. Given the possible case of a tribe so well placed as to be unusually little affected by fear of enemies and the natural forces, the influence of rationalistic chiefs or of respected tribesmen might set up for a time a considerable anti-religious variation, involving at least a minimizing of religious doctrine and practices. Such a case is actually seen among the prosperous peoples of the Upper Congo, some of whom, like the poorer tribes known to Moffat, have no “medicine-men” of their own, and very vague notions of deity.[42] But when such a tribe did chance to come into conflict with others more religious, it would be peculiarly obnoxious to them; and, being in the terms of the case unwarlike, its chance of survival on the old lines would be small.
Such a possibility is suggested with some vividness by the familiar contrast between the modern communities of Fiji and Samoa—the former cruel, cannibalistic, and religious, the latter much less austerely religious and much more humane. The ferocious Fijians “looked upon the Samoans with horror, because they had no religion, no belief in any such deities [as the Fijians’], nor any of the sanguinary rites which prevailed in other islands” (Spencer, Study of Sociology, pp. 293–94, following J. Williams, Narrative of Missionary Enterprise in the South Sea Islands, ed. 1837, pp. 540–41; cp. the Rev. A. W. Murray, Forty Years’ Mission Work, 1876, p. 171). The “no religion” is, of course, only relatively true. Mr. Lang has noticed the error of the phrase “the godless Samoans” (cp. Turner, Samoa a Hundred Years Ago, 1884, pp. 16–17); but, while suggesting that the facts are the other way, he admits that in their creed “the religious sentiment has already become more or less self-conscious, and has begun to reason on its own practices” (Myth, Ritual, and Religion, ii, 34; 2nd ed., ii, 58).
Taking the phenomena all along the line of evolution, we are led to the generalization that the rationalistic tendency, early or late, like the religious tendency, is a variation which prospers at different times in different degrees relatively to the favourableness of the environment. This view will be set forth in some detail in the course of our history.
It is not, finally, a mere surmise that individual savages and semi-savages in our own time vary towards disbelief in the supernaturalism of their fellows. To say nothing of the rational skepticism exhibited by the Zulu converts of Bishop Colenso, which was the means of opening his eyes to the incredibility of the Pentateuch,[43] or of the rationalism of the African chief who debated with Sir Samuel Baker the possibility of a future state,[44] we have the express missionary record that the forcible suppression of idolatry and tabu and the priesthood by King Rihoriho in the island of Hawaii, in 1819, was accomplished not only “before the arrival of any missionary,” but on purely common-sense grounds, and with no thought of furthering Christianity, though he had heard of the substitution of Christianity for the native religion by Pomare in Tahiti. Rihoriho simply desired to save his wives and other women from the cruel pressure of the tabu system, and to divert the priests’ revenues to secular purposes; and he actually had some strong priestly support.[45] Had not the missionary system soon followed, however, the old worship, which had been desperately defended in battle at the instigation of the conservative priests, would in all probability have grown up afresh, though perhaps with modifications. The savage and semi-savage social conditions, taken as a whole, are fatally unpropitious to rationalism.
A parallel case to that of Rihoriho is that of King Finow of the Tonga Islands, described by Mariner, who was his intimate. Finow was noted for his want of religion. “He used to say that the Gods would always favour that party in war in which there were the greatest chiefs and warriors”—the European mot strictly adapted to Fiji conditions. “He did not believe that the Gods paid much attention in other respects to the affairs of mankind; nor did he think that they could have any reason for doing so—no more than men could have any reason or interest in attending to the affairs of the Gods.” For the rest, “it is certain that he disbelieved most of the oracles delivered by the priests,” though he carefully used them for political and military purposes; and he acquiesced in the usage of human sacrifices—particularly on his own account—while professing to deplore the taste of the Gods in these matters. His own death seems to have been the result of poisoning by a priest, whom the king had planned to strangle. The king’s daughter was sick, and the priest, instead of bringing about her recovery by his prayers, hardily explained that the illness was the act of the Gods in punishment of the king’s frequent disrespect to them. Daughter and father were alternately ill, till the former died; and then it was that the king, by disclosing his resolve to strangle the priest, brought on his own death (1810). A few warriors were disposed to take revenge on the priest; but the majority, on learning the facts, shuddered at the impious design of the late king, and regarded his death as the natural vengeance of the Gods. But, though such “impiety” as his was very rare, his son after him decided to abolish the priestly office of “divine chieftain,” on the score that it was seen to avail for nothing, while it cost a good deal; and the chiefs and common people were soon brought to acquiesce in the policy.[46]
Such cases appear to occur in many barbarous communities. It is recorded of the Kaffir chief Go that he was perfectly aware of the hollowness of the pretensions of the magicians and rain-makers of his tribe, though he held it impolitic to break with them, and called them in and followed their prescriptions, as did his subjects.[47] Of the Galeka chief Segidi it is similarly told that, while his medicine-men went into trances for occult knowledge preparatory to a military expedition, he carefully obtained real information through spies, and, while liberally rewarding his wizards, sent his sons to school at Blythswood.[48] Yet again, in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, we have the story of King Edwin’s priest, Coifi, naïvely avowing that he saw no virtue in his religion,[49] inasmuch as many men received more royal favours than he, who had been most diligent in serving the Gods.[50] Such a declaration might very well have been arranged for by the Christian Bishop Paulinus, who was converting the king, and would naturally provide for Coifi; but on any view a process of skepticism had taken place in the barbarian’s mind.[51]
Other illustrations come from the history of ancient Scandinavia. Grimm notes in several Norse sagas and songs expressions of contempt for various Gods, which appear to be independent of Christian influence;[52] and many warriors continued alike the Christian and the Pagan deities. In the saga of King Olaf Tryggvason, who enforced Christianity on Norway, it is declared by one chief that he relied much more on his own arm than on Thor and Odin; while another announced that he was neither Christian nor Pagan, adding: “My companions and I have no other religion than the confidence of our own strength and in the good success which always attends us in war.” Similar sentiments are recorded to have been uttered by Rolf Krake, a legendary king of Denmark (circa 500);[53] and we have in the Æneid the classic type—doubtless drawn from barbaric life—of Mezentius, divum contemptor, who calls his right arm his God, and in dying declares that he appeals to no deity.[54] Such utterances, indeed, do not amount to rational freethinking; but, where some could be thus capable of anti-theism, it is reasonable to surmise that among the more reflective there were some capable of simple atheism or non-belief, and of the prudence of keeping the fact to themselves. Partial skepticism, of course, would be much more common, as among the Aryan Kafirs of the Hindu-Kush, with whom, before their conquest by the Ameer of Afghanistan, a British agent found among the younger men an inclination to be skeptical about some sacred ceremonies, while very sincere in their worship of their favourite deity, the God of war.[55]
It is thus seen to be inaccurate to say, as has been said by an accomplished antagonist of apriorism, that “under the yoke of tribal custom skepticism can hardly arise: there is no place for the half-hearted: as all men feel alike, so all think alike: skepticism arises when beliefs are put into formal propositions.”[56] It is broadly true that “there is no place for” the doubter as such in the tribal society; but doubters do exist. Skepticism—in the sense in which the term is here used, that of rational disbelief—may even be commoner in some stages of the life of tribal customs than in some stages of backward civilization loaded with formulated creeds. What is true is that in the primitive life the rationalism necessarily fails, for lack of culture and institutions, to diffuse and establish itself, whereas superstition succeeds, being naturally institution-making. Under such conditions skepticism is but a recurrent variation.[57]
It is significant, further, that in the foregoing cases of unbelief at the lower levels of civilization it is only the high rank of the doubter that secures publication for the fact of the doubt. In Hawaii, or Tonga, only a king’s unbelief could make itself historically heard. So in the familiar story of the doubting Inca of Peru, who in public religious assembly is said to have avowed his conclusion that the deified Sun was not really a living thing, it is the status of the speaker that gives his words a record. The doubt had in all likelihood been long current among the wise men of Peru; it is indeed ascribed to two or three different Incas;[58] but, save for the Incas’ promulgation of it, history would bear no trace of Peruvian skepticism. So again in the Acolhuan State of Tezcuco, the most civilized in the New World before the Spanish conquest, the great King Netzahualcoyotl is found opposing the cults of human sacrifice and worshipping an “unknown God,” without an image and with only incense for offering.[59] Only the king in such an environment could put on record such a conception. There is, in fact, reason to believe that all ancient ameliorations of bloody rites were the work of humane kings or chiefs,[60] as they are known to have been among semi-savages in our own day.[61] In bare justice we are bound to surmise that similar developments of rationalism have been fairly frequent in unwritten history, and that there must have been much of it among the common folk; though, on the other hand, the very position of a savage king, and the special energy of character which usually goes to secure it, may count for much in giving him the courage to think in defiance of custom. In modern as in early Christian times, it is always to the chief or king of a savage or barbarous tribe that the missionary looks for permission to proceed against the force of popular conservatism.[62] Apart from kings and chiefs, the priesthood itself would be the likeliest soil for skepticism, though, of course, not for the open avowal of it.
There are to be noted, finally, the facts collected as to marked skeptical variation among children;[63] and the express evidence that “it has not been found in a single instance that an uneducated deaf-mute has had any conception of the existence of a Supreme Being as the Creator and Ruler of the Universe.”[64] These latter phenomena do not, of course, entitle us to accept Professor Gruppe’s sweeping theorem that it is the religious variation that is abnormal, and that religion can have spread only by way of the hereditary imposition of the original insanity of one or two on the imagination of the many.[65] Deaf-mutes are not normal organisms. But all the facts together entitle us to decide that religion, broadly speaking, is but the variation that has chiefly flourished, by reason of its adaptation to the prevailing environment thus far; and to reject as unscientific the formulas which, even in the face of the rapidly-spreading rationalism of the more civilized nations, still affirm supernaturalist beliefs to be a universal necessity of the human mind.
On the same grounds, we must reject the claim—arbitrarily set up by one historian in the very act of showing how religion historically oppugns science—that all sacred books as such “are true because they have been developed in accordance with the laws governing the evolution of truth in human history; and because in poem, chronicle, code, legend, myth, apologue, or parable, they reflect this development of what is best in the onward march of humanity.”[66] In this proposition the opening words, “are true because” are strictly meaningless. All literature whatever has been developed under the same general laws. But if it be meant that sacred books were specially likely to garner truth as such, the claim must be negated. In terms of the whole demonstration of the bias of theology against new truth in modern times, the irresistible presumption is that in earlier times also the theological and theocratic spirit was in general hostile to every process by which truth is normally attained. And if the thesis be limited to moral truth, it is still less credible. It is, in fact, inconceivable that literature so near the popular level as to suit whole priesthoods should be morally the best of which even the age producing it is capable; and nothing is more certain than that enlightened ethic has always had to impeach or explain away the barbarisms of some sacred books. The true summary is that in all cases the accepted sacred books have of necessity fallen short not only of scientific truth and of pure ethic, but even of the best speculation and the best ethic of the time of their acceptance, inasmuch as they excluded the criticism of the freethinking few on the sacred books themselves. There is sociological as well as physical science, and the former is flouted when the whole freethinking of the human race in the period of Bible-making is either ignored or treated as worthless.
It is probable, for instance, that in all stages of primitive religion there have been disbelievers in the value of sacrifice, who might or might not dare to denounce the practice. The demurrers to it in the Hebrew prophetic literature are probably late; but they were in all likelihood anticipated in early times. Among the Fijians, for whom cannibalism was an essentially religious act, and the privilege of the males of the aristocracy, there were a number of the latter who, before and apart from the entrance of Christianity, abominated and denounced the practice, reasoning against it also on utilitarian grounds, while the orthodox made it out to be a social duty. There were even whole towns which revolted against it and made it tabu; and it was by force mainly of this rationalistic reaction that the missionaries succeeded so readily in putting down the usage.[67] It is impossible to estimate how often in the past such a revolt of reason against religious insanity has been overborne by the forces of pious habit.
[1] E. B. Tylor, Anthropology, 1881, p. 439. Cp. Lang, Custom and Myth, ed. 1893, p. 72; J. G. Frazer, Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, 1905, pp. 85–87. [↑]
[2] Theal, The Beginning of South African History, 1902, p. 57. See also the Rev. J. Macdonald, Light in Africa, 1890, p. 192. [↑]
[3] Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, 5th ed. 1871, i, 280, note. [↑]
[4] Life of Mr. Yukichi Fukuzawa, Tokyo, 1902, pp. 48–53, 56–69. [↑]
[5] See Tylor, Primitive Culture, 3rd ed. i, 71, as to savage conservatism in handicraft; but compare his Researches into the Early History of Mankind, 1865, p. 160, as to countervailing forces. [↑]
[6] E.g., in the first chapter of Saint-Simon’s Mémoires, the account of the French soldiers who at the siege of Namur burned and broke the images of Saint Médard for sending so much rain. Cp. Irvine, Letters on Sicily, 1813, p. 72; and Ramage, Wanderings through Italy, ed. 1868, p. 113. Constant, De la religion, 1824, vol. i, ptie. ii, p. 34, gives a number of Christian instances. [↑]
[7] Rev. J. B. Stair, Old Samoa, 1897, pp. 181–82. [↑]
[8] Sextus Empiricus, Adv. Mathematicos, ix, 14, 29; Pseudo-Plutarch, De placitis philosophorum, i, 7; Lactantius, De ira Dei, x, 47; Cicero, De natura Deorum, i, 42; Augustine, De civitate Dei, iv, 32. It is noteworthy that the skeptic Sextus rejects the opinion as absurd, even as does the high-priest Cotta in Cicero. [↑]
[9] Vico was one of the first, after Sextus Empiricus and his modern commentator Fabricius, to insist (following the saying of Petronius, Primus in orbe deos fecit timor) that “False religions were founded not by the imposture of some, but by the credulity of all” (Scienza Nuova [1725], lib. i, prop. 40). Yet when denying (id., De’ Principii, ed. 1852, p. 114) the assertions of travellers as to tribes without religion, he insisted that they were mere fictions planned to sell the authors’ books—here imputing fraud as lightly as others had done in the case of the supposed founders of religions. [↑]
[10] E.g., the Elizabethan play Selimus (Huth Lib. ed. of Greene, vol. xiv, ed. Grosart), dated 1594, vv. 258–262. (In “Temple Dramatists” ed., vv. 330–334.) See also below, vol. ii, ch. xiii. [↑]
[11] On the principle of self-expression in religion, cp. Feuerbach, Das Wesen der Religion, in Werke, ed. 1846–1849, i, 413, 445, 498, etc. [↑]
[12] Bishop Thirlwall, History of Greece, ed. 1839, i, 186, 204. Cp. Curtius, Griechische Geschichte, 1858, i, 389. [↑]
[13] Tiele, Outlines of the Hist. of Religions, Eng. tr., p. 96. Cp. Robertson Smith, The Old Testament in the Jewish Church, 2nd ed., p. 141, note. [↑]
[14] Spencer and Gillen, The Northern Tribes of Central Australia, 1904, pp. 258, 347, 366, 373, 492. [↑]
[15] See the article by E. J. Glave, of Stanley’s force, on “Fetishism in Congoland,” in the Century Magazine, April, 1891, p. 836. Compare F. Schultze, Der Fetischismus, 1871, pp. 137, 141, 142, 144, etc.; Theal, The Beginning of South African History, 1902, pp. 49, 52; Kranz, Natur- und Kulturleben der Zulus, 1880, pp. 110, 113–14; Moffat, Missionary Labours, 35th thous., pp. 69, 81–84; A. B. Ellis, The Tshi-Speaking Peoples, 1887, pp. 125–29, 137–39, 142; Sir G. S. Robertson, The Káfirs of the Hindu-Kush, ed. 1899, pp. 405, 417; E. Rae, The White Sea Peninsula, 1881, p. 149; Turner, Samoa, 1884, p. 272. It is certain that the wizards of contemporary savage races are frequently killed as impostors by their own people. See below, p. 35. [↑]
[16] Tylor, Anthropology, p. 406; Primitive Culture, 3rd ed., i, 38. [↑]
[17] The fact that this phenomenon occurs everywhere among primitives, from the South Seas to Lapland, should be noted in connection with the latterly revived claims of so-called “Mysticism.” [↑]
[18] Cp. E. Rae, The White Sea Peninsula, 1881, pp. 149, 263. [↑]
[19] Glave, article cited, pp. 835–36. [↑]
[20] Cp. Max Müller, Natural Religion, 1889, p. 133; Anthropological Religion, 1892, p. 150; Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, 2nd ed. ii, 358 sq. [↑]
[21] Compare Bishop Butler’s Charge to the Clergy of Durham, and Bishop Wordsworth On Religious Restoration in England, 1854, p. 75, etc. [↑]
[22] P. von Bradke, Dyâus Asura, Ahura Mazda, und die Asuras, Halle. 1885, p. 115. [↑]
[23] Rig-Veda, x, 121 (as translated by Muir, Müller, Dutt, and von Bradke); and x, 82 (Dutt’s rendering). It is to be noted that the refrain “Who is the God whom we should worship?” is entirely different in Ludwig’s rendering of x, 121. [Bertholet’s Religionsgeschichtliches Lesebuch (1908) compiled on the principle that “the best translations are good enough for us,” follows the rendering of Muir, Müller, Dutt, and von Bradke (p. 165).] Cp. Max Müller, Hibbert Lectures, p. 302, and Natural Religion, pp. 227–229, citing R. V., viii, 100, 3, etc., for an apparently undisputed case of skepticism. See again Langlois’s version of vi, 7, iii, 3 (p. 459). He cannot diverge much more from the German and English translators than they do from each other. [↑]
[24] Junod, as above cited, pp. 341, 343, 350, 388. Cp. Dalton, as cited, p. 115. [↑]
[25] E. Rae, The White Sea Peninsula, 1881, pp. 146–7. [↑]
[26] On the other hand, there might be genuine defect of knowledge of the religion of others of the tribe. This is said to occur in thousands of cases in Christian countries: why not also among savages? See the express testimony of Sir G. S. Robertson, The Káfirs of the Hindu-Kush, ed. 1899, pp. 377, 409. [↑]
[27] E.g., Moffat, Missionary Labours, end of ch. xvi and beginning of ch. xix. [↑]
[28] See Dr. Gasquet, The Great Pestilence, 1893. [↑]
[29] Missionary Labours, ch. xix: stereo. ed. pp. 81, 82. It is noteworthy that the women were the first to avow unbelief in an unsuccessful rainmaker (Id. p. 84). [↑]
[30] Missionary Labours, as cited, p. 85. [↑]
[31] Cp. Schultze, Der Fetischismus, 1871, pp. 155–56; A. H. Keane, Man, Past and Present, 1900, p. 49; Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India, 1909, i, 86. [↑]
[32] Travels in Southern Africa in the Years 1803–1806, 1815, ii, 61. Cp. Rev. J. Macdonald, Light in Africa, 1890, p. 192, as to the compulsion on men of superior intelligence to play the wizard, by reason of the common connection of wizardry with any display of mental power. There is no more tragical aspect in the life-conditions of primitive peoples. [↑]
[33] The Lake Regions of Central Africa, 1860, ii, 351. [↑]
[34] Turner, Samoa a Hundred Years Ago, 1884, pp. 304–305. Cp. Herodotos, iv, 68, as to the slaying of “false prophets” among the Scythians; and i, 128, as to the impaling of the Magi by Astyages. [↑]
[35] Paul Kollmann, The Victoria Nyanza, 1899, p. 168. [↑]
[36] Sir A. B. Ellis, The Tshi-Speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast, 1887, p. 127. [↑]
[37] E.g., an aged female relative of the writer, quite orthodox in all her habits, and devout to the extent of calling the Book of Esther “Godless” because the word “God” does not occur in it, yet at a pinch declared that she had “never heard of Providence putting a boll of meal inside anybody’s door.” Her daughter-in-law, also of quite religious habits, quoted the saying with a certain sense of its audacity, but endorsed it, as she had cause to do. Yet both regularly practised prayer and asserted divine beneficence. [↑]
[38] See B. Seeman, “Fiji and the Fijians,” in Galton’s Vacation Tourists, 1862, pp. 275–76, as to the terrorism resorted to by Fijian priests against unbelievers. “Punishment was sure to overtake the skeptic, let his station in life be what it might”—i.e., supernatural punishment was threatened, and the priests were not likely to let it fail. Cp. Basil Thomson, The Fijians: A Study of the Decay of Custom, 1909, introd., p. xi: “The reformers of primitive races never lived long: if they were low-born they were clubbed, and that was the end of them and their reforms; if they were chiefs, and something happened to them, either by disease or accident, men saw therein the figure of an offended deity; and obedience to the existing order of things became stronger than before.” Cp. Pagan Christs, 2nd ed., pp. 60–62, as to kings who wished to put down human sacrifices. [↑]
[39] See Pagan Christs, 2nd ed., pp. 1–2. [↑]
[40] E. J. Glave, art. cited, p. 825. Cp. Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, pp. 582, 594. [↑]
[41] Cp. the Rev. J. Macdonald, Light in Africa, 1890, pp. 222–23, as to the “universal suspicion” which falls upon tribesmen of rationalistic and anti-superstitious tendencies, making them “almost doubt their own sanity.” [↑]
[42] Sir H. H. Johnston, The River Congo, ed. 1805, p. 289. Cp. Moffat, as cited above. [↑]
[43] Colenso, The Pentateuch, vol. i, pref. p. vii; introd. p. 9. [↑]
[44] Spencer, Principles of Sociology, iii, § 583. [↑]
[45] W. Ellis, Polynesian Researches, 1831, iv, 30–31, 126–28. [↑]
[46] Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands, compiled from the communications of W. Mariner, by John Martin, M.D., 3rd ed. 1827, i, 289–300, 306–307, 338–39; ii, 27–28, 83–86, 134. Mariner, who saw much of the priests, found no reason to suspect them of any systematic deception. See ii, 129. But his narrative leaves small room for doubt as to the procedure of the priest of Toobo Totai. [↑]
[47] Dr. A. Kropf, Das Volk der Xosa-Kaffern in östlichen Südafrika, Berlin, 1899, pp. 203–204. Dr. Kropf, a missionary of forty years’ experience, states that many of the Kaffirs latterly disbelieve in their sorcerers; but this may be partly a result of missionary teaching—not so much the religious as the scientific. See the testimony of the Rev. J. Macdonald, Life in Africa, 1890, pp. 47–48. [↑]
[48] Rev. J. Macdonald, Life in Africa, pp. 225–26. [↑]
[49] It is clear that in the Christianization of Europe much use was made of the argument that the best lands had fallen to the Christian peoples. See the epistle of Bishop Daniel of Winchester to St. Boniface (Ep. lxvii) cited in Schlegel’s note to Mosheim, Reid’s ed. of Murdock’s translation, p. 262. [↑]
[50] Bede, Eccles. Hist., ii, 13. [↑]
[51] Cp. A. H. Mann in Social England, illustr. ed., i, 217. [↑]
[52] Teutonic Mythology, Eng. trans. 1882, i, 7. [↑]
[53] Crichton and Wheaton, Scandinavia, 1837, i, 198, note. Compare Dr. Ph. Schweitzer, Geschichte der Skandinavischen Litteratur, i, 25: “In the higher circles [in the pagan period] from an early date (schon lange) unbelief and even contempt of religion flourished ... probably never reaching the lower grades of the people.” See also C. F. Allen, Histoire de Danemark, French trans., Copenhagen, 1878, i, 55. [↑]
[54] Æneid, vii, 648; x, 773, 880. Mezentius does not deny that Gods exist: see x, 743. [↑]
[55] Sir G. S. Robertson, The Káfirs of the Hindu-Kush, ed. 1899, p. 379. [↑]
[56] Professor T. Clifford Allbutt, Harveian Oration on Science and Medieval Thought, 1901, p. 82. [↑]
[57] Mr. Basil Thomson, in the able introduction to his excellent work on The Fijians, speaks of primitive reformers (p. xi) as “rare souls born before their time.” But there is no special “time” for reformers, who, as such, must be in advance of their average contemporaries. [↑]
[58] Garcilasso, 1. viii, c. 8; 1. ix, c. 10; Herrera, Dec. v, 1. iv, c. 4. See the passages in Réville’s Hibbert Lectures, pp. 162–65. [↑]
[59] Prescott, Conquest of Mexico, Kirk’s ed., pp. 81 sq., 91–93, 97; H. H. Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific States, v, 427–29; Clavigero, History of Mexico, Eng. tr. ed. 1807, B. iv, §§ 4, 15; vii. § 42. [↑]
[60] See the author’s Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. pp. 60–62, 361. Cp. Lafcadio Hearn, Japan, 1904, pp. 313–14. [↑]
[61] Cp. T. Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, ed. 1870, i, 231; Turner, Samoa a Hundred Years Ago, 1884, p. 202. [↑]
[62] “A long time elapses between each step that their [missionaries’] stations advance: and when they do it invariably is under the influence of some chief that they are even then led on.” Dalton, Narrative of an Explorer in Tropical South Africa, ed. 1891, p. 102. [↑]
[63] See Professor Sully’s Studies of Childhood, 1895. [↑]
[64] Rev. S. Smith, Church Work among the Deaf and Dumb, 1875, cited by Spencer, Principles of Sociology, iii, § 583. Cp. the testimony cited there from Dr. Kitto, Lost Senses, p. 200. [↑]
[65] Die griechischen Culte und Mythen, 1887, pp. 263, 276, 277, etc. What is true as regards the thesis is that some of the central insanities of religion, such as the cult of human sacrifice, seem to have been propagated in all directions from an Asiatic centre. See the author’s Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. pp. 273, 292, 343, 354, 362, etc. Cp. the Rev. D. Macdonald’s Asiatic Origin of the Oceanic Languages, Luzac & Co., 1894; the Nubische Grammatik of Lepsius, 1880; and Terrien de Lacouperie, Western Origin of the Early Chinese Civilization, 1894, pp. 134, 362–63. [↑]
[66] Dr. Andrew White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, 1896, i, 23. [↑]
[67] Dr. B. Seeman, Viti, 1862, pp. 179–82. [↑]
Chapter III
PROGRESS UNDER ANCIENT RELIGIONS
§ 1. Early Association and Competition of Cults
When religion has entered on the stage of quasi-civilized organization, with fixed legends or documents, temples, and the rudiments of hierarchies, the increased forces of terrorism and conservatism are in nearly all cases seen to be in part countervailed by the simple interaction of the systems of different communities. There is no more ubiquitous force in the whole history of the subject, operating as it does in ancient Assyria, in the life of Vedic India and Confucian China, and in the diverse histories of progressive Greece and relatively stationary Egypt, down through the Christian Middle Ages to our own period of comparative studies.
In ages when any dispassionate comparative study was impossible, religious systems appear to have been considerably modified by the influence of those of conquered peoples on those of their conquerors, and vice versâ. Peoples who while at arm’s length would insult and affect to despise each other’s Gods, and would deride each other’s myths,[1] appear frequently to have altered their attitude when one had conquered the other; and this not because of any special growth of sympathy, but by force of the old motive of fear. In the stage of natural polytheism no nation really doubted the existence of the Gods of another; at most, like the Hebrews of the early historic period, it would set its own God above the others, calling him “Lord of Lords.” But, every community having its own God, he remained a local power even when his own worshippers were conquered, and his cult and lore were respected accordingly. This procedure, which has been sometimes attributed to the Romans in particular as a stroke of political sagacity, was the normal and natural course of polytheism. Thus in the Hebrew books the Assyrian conqueror is represented as admitting that it is necessary to leave a priest who knows “the manner of the God of the land” among the new inhabitants he has planted there.
See [2 Kings xvii, 26]. Cp. [Ruth i, 16], and [Judges xvii, 13]. The account by Herodotos (ii, 171) of the preservation of the Pelasgic rites of Dêmêtêr by the women of Arcadia points to the same principle. See also hereinafter, ch. vi, § 1; K. O. Müller, Introd. to a Sci. Study of Mythol., Eng. trans., p. 193; Adolf Bastian, Der Mensch in der Geschichte, 1860, i, 189; Rhys, Celtic Britain, 2nd ed., p. 69; Max Müller, Anthropological Religion, p. 164; Gibbon, ch. xxxiv—Bohn ed., iii, 554, note; Tylor, Primitive Culture, i, 113–15; and Dr. F. B. Jevons’s Introd. to the Hist. of Relig., 1896, pp. 36–40, where the fear felt by conquering races for the occult powers of the conquered is limited to the sphere of “magic.” But when Dr. Jevons so defines magic as to admit of his proposition (p. 38) that “the hostility from the beginning between religion and magic is universally admitted,” he throws into confusion the whole phenomena of the early official-religious practice of magic, of which sacrifice and prayer are the type-forms that have best survived. And in the end he upsets his definition by noting (p. 40) how magic, “even where its relation to religion is one of avowed hostility,” will imitate religion. Obviously magic is a function or aspect or element of primitive religion (cp. Roskoff, Das Religionswesen der rohesten Naturvölker, 1880, p. 144; Sayce, pp. 315, 319, 327, and passim; and Tiele, Egyptian Rel., pp. 22, 32); and any “hostility,” far from being universal, is either a social or a philosophical differentiation. On the whole question compare the author’s Pagan Christs, 2nd ed., pp. 11–38. In the opinion of Weber (Hist. of Ind. Lit., p. 264) the magic arts “found a more and more fruitful soil as the religious development of the Hindus progressed”; “so that they now, in fact, reign almost supreme.” See again Dr. Jevons’s own later admission, p. 395, where the exception of Christianity is somewhat arbitrary. On this compare Kant, Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, B. iv, Th. ii, § 3.
Similar cases have been noted in primitive cults still surviving. Fear of the magic powers of “lower” or conquered races is in fact normal wherever belief in wizardry survives; and to the general tendency may be conjecturally ascribed such phenomena as that of the Saturnalia, in which masters and slaves changed places, and the institution of the Levites among the Hebrews, otherwise only mythically explained. But if conquerors and conquered thus tended to amalgamate or associate their cults, equally would allied tribes tend to do so; and, when particular Gods of different groups were seen to correspond in respect of special attributes, a further analysis would be encouraged. Hence, with every extension of every State, every advance in intercourse made in peace or through war, there would be a further comparison of credences, a further challenge to the reasoning powers of thoughtful men.
On the normal tendency to defer to local deities, compare Tylor, Primitive Culture, as last cited; B. Thomson, The Fijians, 1908, p. 112; A. B. Ellis, The Tshi-Speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast, 1887, p. 147, and The Ewe-Speaking Peoples, 1890, p. 55; P. Wurm, Handbuch der Religionsgeschichte, 2te Aufl., p. 43 (as to Madagascar); Sir H. Johnston, The Uganda Protectorate, 1902, ii, 589; Waitz, Anthropologie der Naturvölker, iii, 186; P. Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, ed. 1908, p. 191; W. W. Skeat, Malay Magic, 1900, pp. 56, 84; Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India, 1909, i, 86–87, 94, 100; iii, 188; iv, 170; v, 467–68; W. H. R. Rivers, The Todas, 1906, p. 263; Rae, The White Sea Peninsula, 1881, p. 262; Élie Reclus, Primitive Folk, pp. 254–56; Grant Allen, Evolution of the Idea of God, 1897, pp. 289, 301–302; Castrén, Vorlesungen über die Finnische Mythologie, 1853, p. 281; Gummere, Germanic Origins, 1892, p. 140, citing Weinhold, Deutsche Frauen, i, 105; Gobineau, Les religions et les philosophies dans l’Asie centrale, 2e éd. p. 67; E. Higgins, Hebrew Idolatry and Superstition, 1893, pp. 20, 24; Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 1889, p. 77; Wellhausen, Heidenthum, pp. 129, 183, cited by Smith, p. 79; Lang, Making of Religion, p. 65; Frazer, Golden Bough, 2nd ed. ii, 72. Above all, see the record in Old New Zealand, “by a Pakeha Maori” (2nd ed. Auckland, 1863, p. 154), of the believing resort of some white men to native wizards in New Zealand.
Stevenson, again, is evidently proceeding upon observation when he makes his trader in The Beach of Falesà say: “We laugh at the natives and their superstitions; but see how many traders take them up, splendidly educated white men that have been bookkeepers (some of them) and clerks in the old country” (Island Nights’ Entertainments, 1893, pp. 104–105). In Abyssinia, “Galla sorceresses are frequently called in by the Christians of Shoa to transfer sickness or to rid the house of evil spirits” (Major W. Cornwallis Harris, The Highlands of Aethiopia, 1844, iii, 50). On the other hand, some Sudanese tribes “believe in the virtue both of Christian and Moslem amulets, but have hitherto lent a deaf ear to the preachers of both these religions” (A. H. Keane, Man, Past and Present, 1900, p. 50).
This tendency did not exclude, but would in certain cases conflict with, the strong primitive tendency to associate every God permanently with his supposed original locality. Tiele writes (Hist. of the Egypt. Relig., Eng. trans. introd. p. xvii) that in no case was a place given to the Gods of one nation in another’s pantheon “if they did not wholly alter their form, character, appearance, and not seldom their very name.” This seems an over-statement, and is inconsistent with Tiele’s own statement (Hist. comparée des anc. relig. égyptiennes et sémitiques, French trans., 1882, pp. 174–80) as to the adoption of Sumerian and Akkadian Gods and creeds by the Semites. What is clear is that local cults resisted the removal of their Gods’ images; and the attempt to deport such images to Babylon, thus affecting the monopoly of the God of Babylon himself, was a main cause of the fall of Nabonidos, who was driven out by Cyrus. (E. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, i (1884), 599.) But the Assyrians invoked Bel Merodach of Babylon, after they had conquered Babylon, in terms of his own ritual; even as Israelites often invoked the Gods of Canaan (cp. Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, Relig. of the Anc. Babylonians, p. 123). And King Mardouk-nadinakhe of Babylon, in the twelfth century B.C., carried off statues of the Assyrian Gods from the town of Hekali to Babylon, where they were kept captive for 418 years (Maspero, Hist. anc. des peuples de l’orient, 4e éd. p. 300). A God could migrate with his worshippers from city to city (Meyer, iii, 169; Sayce, p. 124); and the Assyrian scribe class maintained the worship of their special God Nebo wherever they went, though he was a local God to start with (Sayce, pp. 117, 119, 121). And as to the recognition of the Gods of different Egyptian cities by politic kings, see Tiele’s own statement, p. 36. Cp. his Outlines, pp. 73, 84, 207.
A concrete knowledge of the multiplicity of cults, then, was obtruded on the leisured and travelled men of the early empires and of such a civilization as that of Hellas;[2] and when to such knowledge there was added a scientific astronomy (the earliest to be constituted of the concrete sciences), a revision of beliefs by such men was inevitable.[3] It might take the form either of a guarded skepticism or of a monarchic theology, answering to the organization of the actual earthly empire; and the latter view, in the nature of the case, would much the more easily gain ground. The freethought of early civilization, then, would be practically limited for a long time to movements in the direction of co-ordinating polytheism, to the end of setting up a supreme though not a sole deity; the chief God in any given case being apt to be the God specially affected by the reigning monarch. Allocation of spheres of influence to the principal deities would be the working minimum of plausible adjustment, since only in some such way could the established principle of the regularity of the heavens be formally accommodated to the current worship; and wherever there was monarchy, even if the monarch were polytheistic, there was a lead to gradation among the Gods.[4] A pantheistic conception would be the highest stretch of rationalism that could have any vogue even among the educated class. All the while every advance was liable to the ill-fortune of overthrow or arrest at the hands of an invading barbarism, which even in adopting the system of an established priesthood would be more likely to stiffen than to develop it. Early rationalism, in short, would share in the fluctuations of early civilization; and achievements of thought would repeatedly be swept away, even as were the achievements of the constructive arts.
§ 2. The Process in India
The process thus deducible from the main conditions is found actually happening in more than one of the ancient cultures, as their history is now sketched. In the Rig-Veda, which if not the oldest is the least altered of the Eastern Sacred Books, the main line of change is obvious enough. It remains so far matter of conjecture to what extent the early Vedic cults contain matter adopted from non-Aryan Asiatic peoples; but no other hypothesis seems to account for the special development of the cult of Agni in India as compared with the content and development of the other early Aryan systems, in which, though there are developments of fire worship, the God Agni does not appear.[5] The specially priestly character of the Agni worship, and the precedence it takes in the Vedas over the solar cult of Mitra, which among the kindred Aryans of Iran receives in turn a special development, suggest some such grafting, though the relations between Aryans and the Hindu aborigines, as indicated in the Veda, seem to exclude the possibility of their adopting the fire-cult from the conquered inhabitants,[6] who, besides, are often spoken of in the Vedas as “non-sacrificers,”[7] and at times as “without Gods.”[8] But this is sometimes asserted even of hostile Aryans.[9] In any case the carrying on of the two main cults of Agni and Indra side by side points to an original and marked heterogeneity of racial elements; while the varying combination with them of the worship of other deities, the old Aryan Varuna, the three forms of the Sun-God Aditya, the Goddess Aditi and the eight Adityas, the solar Mitra, Vishnu, Rudra, and the Maruts, imply the adaptation of further varieties of hereditary creed. The outcome is a sufficiently chaotic medley, in which the attributes and status of the various Gods are reducible to no code,[10] the same feats being assigned to several, and the attributes of all claimed for almost any one. Here, then, were the conditions provocative of doubt among the critical; and while it is only in the later books of the Rig-Veda that such doubt finds priestly expression, it must be inferred that it was current in some degree among laymen before the hymn-makers avowed that they shared it. The God Soma, the personification of wine, identified with the Moon-God Chandra,[11] “hurls the irreligious into the abyss.”[12] This may mean that his cult, like that of his congener Dionysos in Greece, was at first forcibly resisted, and forcibly triumphed. At an earlier period doubt is directed against the most popular God, Indra, perhaps on behalf of a rival cult.[13] Later it seems to take the shape of a half-skeptical, half-mystical questioning as to which, if any, God is real.
From the Catholic standpoint, Dr. E. L. Fischer has argued that “Varuna is in the ontological, physical, and ethical relation the highest, indeed the unique, God of ancient India”; and that the Nature-Gods of the Veda can belong only to a later period in the religious consciousness (Heidenthum und Offenbarung, 1878, pp. 36–37). Such a development, had it really occurred, might be said to represent a movement of primitive freethought from an unsatisfying monotheism to a polytheism that seemed better to explain natural facts. A more plausible view of the process, however, is that of von Bradke, to the effect that “the old Indo-Germanic polytheism, with its pronounced monarchic apex, which ... constituted the religion of the pre-Vedic [Aryan] Hindus, lost its monarchic apex shortly before and during the Rig-Veda period, and set up for itself the so-called Henotheism [worship of deities severally as if each were the only one], which thus represented in India a time of religious decline; a decline that, at the end of the period to which the Rig-Veda hymns belong, led to an almost complete dissolution of the old beliefs. The earlier collection of the hymns must have promoted the decline; and the final redaction must have completed it. The collected hymns show only too plainly how the very deity before whom in one song all the remaining Gods bow themselves, in the next sinks almost in the dust before another. Then there sounds from the Rig-Veda (x, 121) the wistful question: Who is the God whom we should worship?” (Dyâus Asura, Ahuramazda, und die Asuras, Halle, 1885, p. 115; cp. note, supra, p. 30). On this view the growth of monotheism went on alongside of a growth of critical unbelief, but, instead of expressing that, provoked it by way of reaction. Dr. Muir more specifically argues (Sanskrit Texts, v, 116) that in the Vedic hymns Varuna is a God in a state of decadence; and, despite the dissent of M. Barth (Religions of India, p. 18), this seems true. But the recession of Varuna is only in the normal way of the eclipse of the old Supreme God by a nearer deity, and does not suffice to prove a growth of agnosticism. M. Fontane (Inde Védique, 1881, p. 305) asserts on other grounds a popular movement of negation in the Vedic period, but offers rather slender evidence. There is better ground for his account of the system as one in which different cults had the upper hand at different times, the devotees of Indra rejecting Agni, and so on (pp. 310–11).
To meet such a doubt, a pantheistic view of things would naturally arise, and in the Vedas it often emerges.[14] Thus “Agni is all the Gods”; and “the Gods are only a single being under different names.”[15] For ancient as for more civilized peoples such a doctrine had the attraction of nominally reconciling the popular cult with the skepticism it had aroused. Rising thus as freethought, the pantheistic doctrine in itself ultimately became in India a dogmatic system, the monopoly of a priestly caste, whose training in mystical dialectic made them able to repel or baffle amateur criticism. Such fortifying of a sophisticated creed by institutions—of which the Brahmanic caste system is perhaps the strongest type—is one of the main conditions of relative permanence for any set of opinions; yet even within the Brahmanic system, by reason, presumably, of the principle that the higher truth was for the adept and need not interfere with the popular cult, there were again successive critical revisions of the pantheistic idea.
Prof. Garbe (Philosophy of Anc. India, sect. on Hindu Monism) argues that all monistic, and indeed all progressive, thinking in ancient India arose not among the Brahmans, who were conscienceless oppressors, but among the warrior caste; citing stories in the Upanishads in which Brahmans are represented as receiving such ideas from warriors. The thesis is much weakened by the Professor’s acceptance of Krishna as primarily a historic character, of the warrior class. But there is ground for his general thesis, which recognizes (p. 78) that the Brahmans at length assimilated the higher thought of laymen. Max Müller puts it that “No nation was ever so completely priestridden as the Hindus were under the sway of the Brahmanic law. Yet, on the other side, the same people were allowed to indulge in the most unrestrained freedom of thought, and in the schools of their philosophy the very names of their Gods were never mentioned. Their existence was neither denied nor asserted....” (Selected Essays, 1881, ii, 244). “Sankhya philosophy” [on which Buddhism is supposed to be based], “in its original form, claims the name of an-îsvara, ‘lordless’ or ‘atheistic,’ as its distinctive title” (ibid. p. 283).
Of the nature of a freethinking departure, among the early Brahmanists as in other societies, was the substitution of non-human for human sacrifices—a development of peaceful life-conditions which, though not primitive, must have ante-dated Buddhism. See Tiele, Outlines, pp. 126–27 and refs.; Barth, Religions of India, pp. 57–59; and Müller, Physical Religion, p. 101. Prof. Robertson Smith (Religion of the Semites, p. 346) appears to hold that animal sacrifice was never a substitute for human; but his ingenious argument, on analysis, is found to prove only that in certain cases the idea of such a substitution having taken place may have been unhistorical. If it be granted that human sacrifices ever occurred—and all the evidence goes to show that they were once universal—substitution would be an obvious way of abolishing them. Historical analogy is in favour of the view that the change was forced on the priesthood from the outside, and only after a time accepted by the Brahmans. Thus we find the Khârvâkas, a school of freethinkers, rising in the Alexandrian period, making it part of their business to denounce the Brahmanic doctrine and practice of sacrifice, and to argue against all blood sacrifices; but they had no practical success (Tiele, p. 126) until Buddhism triumphed (Mitchell, Hinduism, 1885, p. 106; Rhys Davids, tr. of Dialogues of the Buddha, 1899, p. 165).
In the earliest Upanishads the World-Being seems to have been figured as the totality of matter,[16] an atheistic view associated in particular with the teaching of Kapila,[17] who himself, however, was at length raised to divine status,[18] though his system continues to pass as substantially atheistic.[19] This view being open to all manner of anti-religious criticism, which it incurred even within the Brahmanic pale,[20] there was evolved an ideal formula in which the source of all things is “the invisible, intangible, unrelated, colourless one, who has neither eyes nor ears, neither hands nor feet, eternal, all-pervading, subtile, and undecaying.”[21] At the same time, the Upanishads exhibit a stringent reaction against the whole content of the Vedas. Their ostensible object is “to show the utter uselessness—nay, the mischievousness—of all ritual performances; to condemn every sacrificial act which has for its motive a desire or hope of reward; to deny, if not the existence, at least the exceptional and exalted character of the Devas; and to teach that there is no hope of salvation and deliverance except by the individual self recognizing the true and universal self and finding rest there, where alone rest can be found.”[22]
And the critical development does not end there. “In the old Upanishads, in which the hymns and sacrifices of the Veda are looked upon as useless, and as superseded by the higher knowledge taught by the forest-sages, they are not yet attacked as mere impositions. That opposition, however, sets in very decidedly in the Sutra period. In the Nirukta (i, 15) Yâska quotes the opinion of Kautsa, that the hymns of the Veda have no meaning at all.”[23] In short, every form of critical revolt against incredible doctrine that has arisen in later Europe had taken place in ancient India long before the Alexandrian conquest.[24] And the same attitude continued to be common within the post-Alexandrian period; for Panini, who must apparently be dated then,[25] “was acquainted with infidels and nihilists”;[26] and the teaching of Brihaspati,[27] on which was founded the system of the Khârvâkas—apparently one of several sections of a freethinking school called the Lokâyatas[28] or Lokâyatikas—is extremely destructive of Vedic pretensions. “The Veda is tainted by the three faults of untruth, self-contradiction, and tautology.... The impostors who call themselves Vedic pandits are mutually destructive.... The three authors of the Vedas were buffoons, knaves, and demons: All the well-known formulas of the pandits, and all the horrid rites for the queen commanded in the Asvamedha—these were invented by buffoons, and so all the various kinds of presents to the priests; while the eating of flesh was similarly commanded by night-prowling demons.”[29]
To what extent such aggressive rationalism ever spread it is now quite impossible to ascertain. It seems probable that the word Lokâyata, defined by Sanskrit scholars as signifying “directed to the world of sense,”[30] originally, or about 500 B.C., signified “Nature-lore,” and that this passed as a branch of Brahman learning.[31] Significantly enough, while the lore was not extensive, it came to be regarded as disposing men to unbelief, though it does not seem to have suggested any thorough training. At length, in the eighth century of our era, it is found applied as a term of abuse, in the sense of “infidel,” by Kumârila in controversy with opponents as orthodox as himself; and about the same period Sankara connects with it a denial of the existence of a separate and immortal soul;[32] though that opinion had been debated, and not called Lokâyata, long before, when the word was current in the broader sense.[33] Latterly, in the fourteenth century, on the strength of some doggerel verses which cannot have belonged to the early Brahmanic Lokâyata, it stands for extreme atheism and a materialism not professed by any known school speaking for itself.[34] The evidence, such as it is, is preserved only in Sarva-darsana-samgraha, a compendium of all philosophical systems, compiled in the fourteenth century by the Vedantic teacher Mâdhavâchâra.[35] One source speaks of an early text-book of materialism, the Sutras of Brihaspati;[36] but this has not been preserved. Thus in Hindu as in later European freethought for a long period we have had to rely for our knowledge of freethinkers’ ideas upon the replies made by their opponents. It is reasonable to conclude that, save insofar as the arguments of Brihaspati were common to the Khârvâkas and the Buddhists,[37] such doctrine as his or that of the later Lokâyatikas cannot conceivably have been more than the revolt of a thoughtful minority against official as well as popular religion; and to speak of a time when “the Aryan settlers in India had arrived at the conviction that all their Devas or Gods were mere names”[38] is to suggest a general evolution of rational thought which can no more have taken place in ancient India than it has done to-day in Europe. The old creeds would always have defenders; and every revolt was sure to incur a reaction. In the Hitopadesa or “Book of Good Counsel” (an undated recension of the earlier Panchatantra, “The Five Books,” which in its first form may be placed about the fifth century of our era) there occur both passages disparaging mere study of the Sacred Books[39] and passages insisting upon it as a virtue in itself[40] and otherwise insisting on ritual observances.[41] They seem to come from different hands.
The phenomenon of the schism represented by the two divisions of the Yazur Veda, the “White” and the “Black,” is plausibly accounted for as the outcome of the tendencies of a new and an old school, who selected from their Brahmanas, or treatises of ritual and theology, the portions which respectively suited them. The implied critical movement would tend to affect official thought in general. This schism is held by Weber to have arisen only in the period of ferment set up by Buddhism; but other disputes seem to have taken place in abundance in the Brahmanical schools before that time. (Cp. Tiele, Outlines, p. 123; Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., pp. 10, 27, 232; Max Müller, Anthropol. Relig., 1892, pp. 36–37; and Rhys Davids, Buddhism, p. 34.) Again, the ascetic and penance-bearing hermits, who were encouraged by the veneration paid them to exalt themselves above all save the highest Gods, would by their utterances of necessity affect the course of doctrine. Compare the same tendency as seen in Buddhism and Jainism (Tiele, pp. 135, 140).
But in the later form of the Vedânta, “the end of the Veda,” a monistic and pantheistic teaching holds its ground in our own day, after all the ups and downs of Brahmanism, alongside of the aboriginal cults which Brahmanism adopted in its battle with Buddhism; alongside, too, of the worship of the Veda itself as an eternal and miraculous document. “The leading tenets [of the Vedânta] are known to some extent in every village.”[42] Yet the Vedântists, again, treat the Upanishads in turn as a miraculous and inspired system,[43] and repeat in their case the process of the Vedas: so sure is the law of fixation in religious thought, while the habit of worship subsists.
The highest activity of rationalistic speculation within the Brahmanic fold is seen to have followed intelligibly on the most powerful reaction against the Brahmans’ authority. This took place when their sphere had been extended from the region of the Punjaub, of which alone the Rig-Veda shows knowledge, to the great kingdoms of Southern India, pointed to in the Sutras,[44] or short digests of ritual and law designed for general official use. In the new environment “there was a well-marked lay-feeling, a widespread antagonism to the priests, a real sense of humour, a strong fund of common sense. Above all there was the most complete and unquestioned freedom of thought and expression in religious matters that the world had yet witnessed.”[45]
The most popular basis for rejection of a given system—belief in another—made ultimately possible there the rise of a practically atheistic system capable, wherever embraced, of annulling the burdensome and exclusive system of the Brahmans, which had been obtruded in its worst form,[46] though not dominantly, in the new environment. Buddhism, though it cannot have arisen on one man’s initiative in the manner claimed in the legends, even as stripped of their supernaturalist element,[47] was in its origin essentially a movement of freethought, such as could have arisen only in the atmosphere of a much mixed society[48] where the extreme Brahmanical claims were on various grounds discredited, perhaps even within their own newly-adjusted body. It was stigmatized as “the science of reason,” a term equivalent to “heresy” in the Christian sphere;[49] and its definite rejection of the Vedas made it anti-sacerdotal even while it retained the modes of speech of polytheism. The tradition which makes the Buddha[50] a prince suggests an upper-class origin for the reaction; and there are traces of a chronic resistance to the Brahmans’ rule among their fellow-Aryans before the Buddhist period.
“The royal families, the warriors, who, it may be supposed, strenuously supported the priesthood so long as it was a question of robbing the people of their rights, now that this was effected turned against their former allies, and sought to throw off the yoke that was likewise laid upon them. These efforts were, however, unavailing: the colossus was too firmly established. Obscure legends and isolated allusions are the only records left to us in the later writings of the sacrilegious hands which ventured to attack the sacred and divinely consecrated majesty of the Brahmans; and these are careful to note at the same time the terrible punishments which befel those impious offenders” (Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., p. 19).
The circumstances, however, that the Buddhist writings were from the first in vernacular dialects, not in Sanskrit,[51] and that the mythical matter which accumulated round the story of the Buddha is in the main aboriginal, and largely common to the myth of Krishna,[52] go to prove that Buddhism spread specially in the non-Aryan sphere.[53] Its practical (not theoretic)[54] atheism seems to have rested fundamentally on the conception of Karma, the transition of the soul, or rather of the personality, through many stages up to that in which, by self-discipline, it attains the impersonal peace of Nirvana; and of this conception there is no trace in the Vedas,[55] though it became a leading tenet of Brahmanism.
To the dissolvent influence of Greek culture may possibly be due some part of the success of Buddhism before our era, and even later. Hindu astronomy in the Vedic period was but slightly developed (Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., pp. 246, 249, 250); and “it was Greek influence that first infused a real life into Indian astronomy” (Id. p. 251; cp. Letronne, Mélanges d’Érudition, 1860 (?), p. 40; Narrien, Histor. Acc. of Orig. and Prog. of Astron., p. 33, and Lib. Use. Kn. Hist. of Astron., c. ii). This implies other interactions. It is presumably to Greek stimulus that we must trace the knowledge by Aryabhata (Colebrooke’s Essays, ed. 1873, ii, 404; cp. Weber, p. 257) of the doctrine of the earth’s diurnal revolution on its axis; and the fact that in India as in the Mediterranean world the truth was later lost from men’s hands may be taken as one of the proofs that the two civilizations alike retrograded owing to evil political conditions. In the progressive period (from about 320 B.C. onwards for perhaps some centuries) Greek ideas might well help to discredit traditionalism; and their acceptance at royal courts would be favourable to toleration of the new teaching. At the same time, Buddhism must have been favoured by the native mental climate in which it arose.
The main differentiation of Buddhism from Brahmanism, again, is its ethical spirit, which sets aside formalism and seeks salvation in an inward reverie and discipline; and this element in turn can hardly be conceived as arising save in an old society, far removed from the warlike stage represented by the Vedas. Whatever may have been its early association with Brahmanism[56] then, it must be regarded as essentially a reaction against Brahmanical doctrine and ideals; a circumstance which would account for its early acceptance in the Punjaub, where Brahmanism had never attained absolute power and was jealously resisted by the free population.[57] And the fact that Jainism, so closely akin to Buddhism, has its sacred books in a dialect belonging to the region in which Buddhism arose, further supports the view that the reaction grew out of the thought of a type of society differing widely from that in which Brahmanism arose. Jainism, like Buddhism, is substantially atheistic,[58] and like it has an ancient monkish organization to which women were early admitted. The original crypto-atheism or agnosticism of the Buddhist movement thus appears as a product of a relatively high, because complex, moral and intellectual evolution. It certainly never impugned the belief in the Gods; on the contrary, the Buddha is often represented as speaking of their existence,[59] and at times as approving of their customary worship;[60] but he is never said to counsel his own order to pray to them; he makes light of sacrifice; and above all he is made quite negative as to a future life, preaching the doctrine of Karma in a sense which excludes individual immortality.[61] “It cannot be denied that if we call the old Gods of the Veda—Indra and Agni and Yama—Gods, Buddha was an atheist. He does not believe in the divinity of these deities. What is noteworthy is that he does not by any means deny their bare existence.... The founder of Buddhism treats the old Gods as superhuman beings.”[62] Thus it is permissible to say both that Buddhism recognizes Gods and that it is practically atheistic.
“The fact cannot be disputed away that the religion of Buddha was from the beginning purely atheistic. The idea of the Godhead ... was for a time at least expelled from the sanctuary of the human mind,[63] and the highest morality that was ever taught before the rise of Christianity was taught by men with whom the Gods had become mere phantoms, without any altars, not even an altar to the unknown God” (Max Müller, Introd. to the Science of Religion, ed. 1882, p. 81. Cp. the same author’s Selected Essays, 1881, ii, 300.)
“He [Buddha] ignores God in so complete a way that he does not even seek to deny him; he does not suppress him, but he does not speak of him either to explain the origin and anterior existence of man or to explain the present life, or to conjecture his future life and definitive deliverance. The Buddha knows God in no fashion whatever” (Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, Le Bouddha et sa Religion, 1866, p. v).
“Buddhism and Christianity are indeed the two opposite poles with regard to the most essential points of religion: Buddhism ignoring all feeling of dependence on a higher power, and therefore denying the very existence of a supreme deity” (Müller, Introd. to Sc. of Rel., p. 171).
“Lastly, the Buddha declared that he had arrived at [his] conclusions, not by study of the Vedas, nor from the teachings of others, but by the light of reason and intuition alone” (Rhys Davids, Buddhism, p. 48). “The most ancient Buddhism despises dreams and visions” (Id., p. 177). “Agnostic atheism ... is the characteristic of his [Buddha’s] system of philosophy” (Id., p. 207).
“Belief in a Supreme Being, the Creator and Ruler of the Universe, is unquestionably a modern graft upon the unqualified atheism of Sákya Muni: it is still of very limited recognition. In none of the standard authorities ... is there the slightest allusion to such a First Cause, the existence of which is incompatible with the fundamental Buddhist dogma of the eternity of all existence” (H. H. Wilson, Buddha and Buddhism, in Essays and Lectures, ed. by Dr. R. Rost, 1862, ii, 361. Cp. p. 363).
On the other hand, the gradual colouring of Buddhism with popular mythology, the reversion (if, indeed, this were not early) to adoration and worship of the Buddha himself, and the final collapse of the system in India before the pressure of Brahmanized Hinduism, all prove the potency of the sociological conditions of success and failure for creeds and criticisms. Buddhism took the monastic form for its institutions, thus incurring ultimate petrifaction alike morally and intellectually; and in any case the normal Indian social conditions of abundant population, cheap food, and general ignorance involved an overwhelming vitality for the popular cults. These the orthodox Brahmans naturally took under their protection as a means of maintaining their hold over the multitude;[64] and though their own highest philosophy has been poetically grafted on that basis, as in the epic of the Mahâbhârata and in the Bhagavat Gita,[65] the ordinary worship of the deities of these poems is perforce utterly unphilosophical, varying between a primitive sensualism and an emotionalism closely akin to that of popular forms of Christianity. Buddhism itself, where it still prevails, exhibits similar tendencies.[66]
It is disputed whether the Brahman influence drove Buddhism out of India by physical force, or whether the latter decayed because of maladaptation to its environment. Its vogue for some seven hundred years, from about 300 B.C. to about 400 A.C., seems to have been largely due to its protection and final acceptance as a State religion by the dynasty of Chandragupta (the Sandracottos of the Greek historians), whose grandson Asoka showed it special favour. His rock-inscribed edicts (for which see Max Müller, Introd. to Science of Rel., pp. 5–6, 23; Anthrop. Relig., pp. 40–43; Rhys Davids, Buddhism, pp. 220–28; Wheeler’s Hist. of India, vol. iii, app. 1; Asiatic Society’s Journals, vols. viii and xii; Indian Antiquary, 1877, vol. vi) show a general concern for natural ethics, and especially for tolerance; but his mention of “The Terrors of the Future” among the religious works he specially honours shows (if genuine) that normal superstition, if ever widely repudiated (which is doubtful), had interpenetrated the system. The king, too, called himself “the delight of the Gods,” as did his contemporary the Buddhist king of Ceylon (Davids, Buddhism, p. 84). Under Asoka, however, Buddhism was powerful enough to react somewhat on the West, then in contact with India as a result of the Alexandrian conquest (cp. Mahaffy, Greek World under Roman Sway, ch. ii; Weber’s lecture on Ancient India, Eng. tr., pp. 25–26; Indische Skizzen, p. 28 [cited in the present writer’s Christianity and Mythology, p. 165]; and Weber’s Hist of Ind. Lit., p. 255 and p. 309, note); and the fact that after his time it entered on a long conflict with Brahmanism proves that it remained practically dangerous to that system. In the fifth and sixth centuries of our era Buddhism in India “rapidly declined”—a circumstance hardly intelligible save as a result of violence. Tiele, after expressly asserting the “rapid decline” (Outlines, p. 139), in the next breath asserts that there are no satisfactory proofs of such violence, and that, “on the contrary, Buddhism appears to have pined away slowly” (p. 140: contrast his Egypt. Rel., p. xxi). Rhys Davids, in his Buddhism, p. 246 (so also Max Müller, Anthrop. Rel., p. 43), argues for a process of violent extinction; but in his later work, Buddhist India, he retracts this view and decides for a gradual decline in the face of a Brahmanic revival. The evidences for violence and persecution are, however, pretty strong. (See H. H. Wilson, Essays, as cited, ii, 365–67.) Internal decay certainly appears to have occurred. Already in Gautama’s own life, according to the legends, there were doctrinal disputes within his party (Müller, Anthrop. Rel., p. 38); and soon heresies and censures abounded (Introd. to Sc. of Rel., p. 23), till schisms arose and no fewer than eighteen sects took shape (Davids, Buddhism, pp. 213–18).
Thus early in our inquiry we may gather, from a fairly complete historical case, the primary laws of causation as regards alike the progress and the decadence of movements of rationalistic thought. The fundamental economic dilemma, seen already in the life of the savage, presses at all stages of civilization. The credent multitude, save in the very lowest stages of savage destitution, always feeds and houses those who furnish it with its appropriate mental food; and so long as there remains the individual struggle for existence, there will always be teachers ready. If the higher minds in any priesthood, awaking to the character of their traditional teaching, withdraw from it, lower minds, howbeit “sincere,” will always take their place. The innovating teacher, in turn, is only at the beginning of his troubles when he contrives, on whatever bases, to set up a new organized movement. The very process of organization, on the one hand, sets up the call for special economic sustenance—a constant motive to compromise with popular ignorance—and, on the other hand, tends to establish merely a new traditionalism, devoid of the critical impulse in which it arose.[67] And without organization the innovating thought cannot communicate itself, cannot hold its own against the huge social pressures of tradition.
In ancient society, in short, there could be no continuous progress in freethinking: at best, there could but be periods or lines of relative progress, the result of special conjunctures of social and political circumstance. So much will appear, further, from the varying instances of still more ancient civilizations, the evolution of which may be the better understood from our survey of that of India.
§ 3. Mesopotamia
The nature of the remains we possess of the ancient Babylonian and Assyrian religions is not such as to yield a direct record of their development; but they suffice to show that there, as elsewhere, a measure of rationalistic evolution occurred. Were there no other ground for the inference, it might not unreasonably be drawn from the post-exilic monotheism of the Hebrews, who, drawing so much of their cosmology and temple ritual from Babylon, may be presumed to have been influenced by the higher Semitic civilizations in other ways also.[68] But there is concrete evidence. What appears to have happened in Babylonia and Assyria, whose religious systems were grafted on that of the more ancient Sumer-Akkadian civilization, is a gradual subordination of the numerous local Gods (at least in the thought of the more philosophic, including some of the priests) to the conception of one all-pervading power. This process would be assisted by that of imperialism; and in the recently-recovered code of Hammurabi we actually find references to Ilu “God” (as in the European legal phrase, “the act of God”) without any further God-name.[69] On the other hand, the unifying tendency would be resisted by the strength of the traditions of the Babylonian cities, all of which had ancient cults before the later empires were built up.[70] Yet, again, peoples who failed in war would be in some measure led to renounce their God as weak; while those who clung to their faith would be led, as in Jewry, to recast its ethic. The result was a set of compromises in which the provincial and foreign deities were either treated genealogically or grouped in family or other relations with the chief God or Gods of the time being.[71] Certain cults, again, were either kept always at a higher ethical level than the popular one, or were treated by the more refined and more critical worshippers in an elevated spirit;[72] and this tendency seems to have led to conceptions of purified deities who underlay or transcended the popular types, the names of the latter being held to point to one who was misconceived under their grosser aspects.[73] Astronomical knowledge, again, gave rise to cosmological theories which pointed to a ruling and creating God,[74] who as such would have a specially ethical character. In some such way was reached a conception of a Creator-God as the unity represented by the fifty names of the Great Gods, who lost their personality when their names were liturgically given to him[75]—a conception which in some statements even had a pantheistic aspect[76] among a “group of priestly thinkers,” and in others took the form of an ideal theocracy.[77] There is record that the Babylonian schools were divided into different sects,[78] and their science was likely to make some of these rationalistic.[79] Professor Sayce even goes so far as to say that in the later cosmogony, “under a thin disguise of theological nomenclature, the Babylonian theory of the universe has become a philosophical materialism.”[80]
It might be taken for granted, further, that disbelief would be set up by such a primitive fraud as the alleged pretence of the priests of Bel Merodach that the God cohabited nightly with the concubine set apart for him (Herodotos, i, 181–82), as was similarly pretended by the priests of Amun at Thebes. Herodotos could not believe the story, which, indeed, is probably a late Greek fable; but there must have been some skeptics within the sphere of the Semitic cult of sacred prostitution.
As regards freethinking in general, much would depend on the development of the Chaldæan astronomy. That science, growing out of primitive astrology (cp. Whewell, Hist. of the Induct. Sciences, 3rd ed. i, 108), would tend to discredit, among its experts, much of the prevailing religious thought; and they seem to have carried it so far as to frame a scientific theory of comets (Seneca, citing Apollonius Myndius, Quaest. Nat., vii, 3; cp. Lib. Use. Kn. Hist. of Astron., c. 3; E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alterthums, i, 186; and Weber, Ind. Lit., p. 248). Such knowledge would greatly favour skepticism, as well as monotheism and pantheism. It was sought to be astrologically applied; but, as the horoscopes varied, this was again a source of unbelief (Meyer, p. 179). Medicine, again, made little progress (Herod., i, 197).
It can hardly be doubted, finally, that in Babylonia and Assyria there were idealists who, like the Hebrew prophets, repudiated alike image-worship and the religion of sacrifices. The latter repudiation occurs frequently in later Greece and Rome. There, as in Jerusalem, it could make itself heard in virtue of the restrictedness of the power of the priests, who in imperial Babylonia and Assyria, on the other hand, might be trusted to suppress or override any such propaganda, as we have seen was done in Brahmanical India.
Concerning image-worship, apart from the proved fact of pantheistic doctrine, and the parallels in Egypt and India, it is to be noted that Isaiah actually puts in the mouth of the Assyrian king a tirade against the “kingdoms of the idols” or “false gods,” including in these Jerusalem and Samaria ([Isa. x, 10, 11]). The passage is dramatic, but it points to the possibility that in Assyria just as in Israel a disbelief in idols could arise from reflection on the spectacle of their multitude.
The chequered political history of Babylon and Assyria, however, made impossible any long-continued development of critical and philosophical thought. Their amalgamations of creeds and races had in a measure favoured such development;[81] and it was probably the setting up of a single rule over large populations formerly at chronic war that reduced to a minimum, if it did not wholly abolish, human sacrifice in the later pre-Persian empires;[82] but the inevitably subject state of the mass of the people, and the chronic military upset of the government, were conditions fatally favourable to ordinary superstition. The new universalist conceptions, instead of dissolving the special cults in pantheism, led only to a fresh competition of cults on cosmopolitan lines, all making the same pretensions, and stressing their most artificial peculiarities as all-important. Thus, when old tribal or local religions went proselytizing in the enlarged imperial field, they made their most worthless stipulations—as Jewish circumcision and abstinence from pork, and the self-mutilation of the followers of Cybelê—the very grounds of salvation.[83] Culture remained wholly in the hands of the priestly and official class,[84] who, like the priesthoods of Egypt, were held to conservatism by their vast wealth.[85] Accordingly we find the early religion of sorcery maintaining itself in the literature of the advanced empires.[86] The attitude of the Semitic priests and scribes towards the old Akkadic as a sacred language was in itself, like the use of sacred books in general, long a check upon new thought;[87] and though the Assyrian life seems to have set this check aside, by reason of the lack of a culture class in Assyria, the later Babylonian kingdom which rose on the fall of Assyria was too short-lived to profit much by the gain, being in turn overthrown in the second generation by Cyrus. It is significant that the conqueror was welcomed by the Babylonian priests as against their last king, the inquiring and innovating Nabonidos[88] (Nabu-nahid), who had aimed at a monarchic polytheism or quasi-monotheism. He is described as having turned away from Mardouk (Merodach), the great Babylonian God, who accordingly accepted Cyrus in his stead. It is thus clear that Cyrus, who restored the old state of things, was no strict monotheist of the later Persian type, but a schemer who relied everywhere on popular religious interests, and conciliated the polytheists and henotheists of Babylon as he did the Yahweh-worshipping Jews.[89] The Persian quasi-monotheism and anti-idolatry, however, already existed, and it is conceivable that they may have been intensified among the more cultured through the peculiar juxtaposition of cults set up by the Persian conquest.
Mr. Sayce’s dictum (Hib. Lect., p. 314), that the later ethical element in the Akkado-Babylonian system is “necessarily” due to Semitic race elements, is seen to be fallacious in the light of his own subsequent admission (p. 353) as to the lateness of the development among the Semites. The difference between early Akkadian and later Babylonian was simply one of culture-stage. See Mr. Sayce’s own remarks on p. 300; and compare E. Meyer (Gesch. des Alt., i, 178, 182, 183), who entirely rejects the claim made for Semitic ethics. See, again, Tiele, Outlines, p. 78, and Mr. Sayce’s own account (Anc. Em. of the East, p. 202) of the Phœnician religion as “impure and cruel.” Other writers take the line of arguing that the Phœnicians were “not Semites,” and that they differed in all things from the true Semites (cp. Dr. Marcus Dods, Israel’s Iron Age, 1874, p. 10, and Farrar, as there cited). The explanation of such arbitrary judgments seems to be that the Semites are assumed to have had a primordial religious gift as compared with “Turanians,” and that the Hebrews in turn are assumed to have been so gifted above other Semites. We shall best guard against à priori injustice to the Semites themselves, in the conjunctures in which they really advanced civilization, by entirely discarding the unscientific method of explaining the history of races in terms of hereditary character (see below, § 6, end).
§ 4. Ancient Persia
The Mazdean system, or worship of Ahura Mazda (Ormazd), of which we find in Herodotos positive historical record as an anti-idolatrous and nominally monotheistic creed[90] in the fifth century B.C., is the first to which these aspects can be ascribed with certainty. As the Jews are found represented in the Book of Jeremiah[91] (assumed to have been written in the sixth century B.C.) worshipping numerous Gods with images: and as polytheistic and idolatrous practices are still described in the Book of Ezekiel[92] (assumed to have been written during or after the Babylonian Captivity), it is inadmissible to accept the unauthenticated writings of ostensibly earlier prophets as proving even a propaganda of monotheism on their part, the so-called Mosaic law being known to be in large part of late invention and of Babylonian derivation.[93] In any case, the mass of the people were clearly image-worshippers. The Persians, on the other hand, can be taken with certainty to have had in the sixth century an imageless worship (though images existed for other purposes), with a supreme God set above all others. The Magian or Mazdean creed, as we have seen, was not very devoutly held by Cyrus; but Dareios a generation later is found holding it with zeal; and it cannot have grown in a generation to the form it then bore. It must therefore be regarded as a development of the religion of some section of the “Iranian” race, centering as it does round some deities common to the Vedic Aryans.
The Mazdean system, as we first trace it in history, was the religion of the Medes, a people joined with the Persians proper under Cyrus; and the Magi or priests were one of the seven tribes of the Medes,[94] as the Levites were one of the tribes of Israel. It may then be conjectured that the Magi were the priests of a people who previously conquered or were conquered by the Medes, who had then adopted their religion, as did the Persians after their conquest by or union with the Medes. Cyrus, a semi-Persian, may well have regarded the Medes with some racial distrust, and, while using them as the national priests, would naturally not be devout in his adherence at a time when the two peoples were still mutually jealous. When, later, after the assassination of his son Smerdis (Bardes or Bardija) by the elder son, King Cambyses, and the death of the latter, the Median and Magian interest set up the “false Smerdis,” Persian conspirators overthrew the pretender and crowned the Persian Dareios Hystaspis, marking their sense of hostility to the Median and Magian element by a general massacre of Magi.[95] Those Magi who survived would naturally cultivate the more their priestly influence, the political being thus for the time destroyed; though they seem to have stirred up a Median insurrection in the next century against Dareios II.[96] However that may be, Dareios I became a zealous devotee of their creed,[97] doubtless finding that a useful means of conciliating the Medes in general, who at the outset of his reign seem to have given him much trouble.[98] The richest part of his dominions[99] was East-Iran, which appears to have been the original home of the worship of Ahura-Mazda.[100]
Such is the view of the case derivable from Herodotos, who remains the main authority; but recent critics have raised some difficulties. That the Magians were originally a non-Median tribe seems clear; Dr. Tiele (Outlines, pp. 163, 165) even decides that they were certainly non-Aryan. Compare Ed. Meyer (Gesch. des Alt., i, 530, note, 531, §§ 439, 440), who holds that the Mazdean system was in its nature not national but abstract, and could therefore take in any race. Several modern writers, however (Canon Rawlinson, ed. of Herodotos, i, 426–31; Five Great Monarchies, 2nd ed. ii, 345–55, iii, 402–404; Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, Eng. tr. pp. 197, 218–39; Sayce, Anc. Emp. of the East, p. 248), represent the Magians as not only anti-Aryan (= anti-Persian), but opposed to the very worship of Ormazd, which is specially associated with their name. It seems difficult to reconcile this view with the facts; at least it involves the assumption of two opposed sets of Magi. The main basis for the theory seems to be the allusion in the Behistun inscription of Dareios to some acts of temple-destruction by the usurping Magian Gomates, brother and controller of the pretender Smerdis. (See the inscription translated in Records of the Past, i, 111–15.) This Meyer sets aside as an unsettled problem, without inferring that the Magians were anti-Mazdean (cp. § 449 and § 511, note). As to the massacre, however, Meyer decides (i, 613) that Herodotos blundered, magnifying the killing of “the Magus” into a slaughter of “the Magi.” But this is one of the few points at which Herodotos is corroborated by Ktesias (cp. Grote, iii, 440, note). A clue to a solution may perhaps be found in the facts that, while the priestly system remained opposed to all image-worship, Dareios made emblematic images of the Supreme God (Meyer, i, 213, 617) and of Mithra; and that Artaxerxes Mnemon later put an image of Mithra in the royal temple of Susa, besides erecting many images to Anaitis. (Rawlinson, Five Great Monarchies, iii, 320–21, 360–61.) There may have been opposing tendencies; the conquest of Babylon being likely to have introduced new elements. The Persian art now arising shows the most marked Assyrian influences.
The religion thus imposed on the Persians seems to have been imageless by reason of the simple defect of art among its cultivators;[101] and to have been monotheistic only in the sense that its chief deity was supreme over all others, including even the great Evil Power, Ahriman (Angra Mainyu). Its God-group included Mithra, once the equal of Ahura-Mazda,[102] and later more prominent than he;[103] as well as a Goddess, Anahita, apparently of Akkadian origin. Before the period of Cyrus, the eastern part of Persia seems to have been but little civilized;[104] and it was probably there that its original lack of images became an essential element in the doctrine of its priests. As we find it in history, and still more in its sacred book, the Zendavesta, which as we have it represents a late liturgical compilation,[105] Mazdeism is a priest-made religion rather than the work of one Zarathustra or any one reformer; and its rejection of images, however originated, is to be counted to the credit of its priests, like the pantheism or nominal monotheism of the Mesopotamian, Brahmanic, and Egyptian religions. The original popular faith had clearly been a normal polytheism.[106] For the rest, the Mazdean ethic has the usual priestly character as regards the virtue it assigns to sacrifice;[107] but otherwise compares favourably with Brahmanism.
As to this cult being priest-made, see Meyer, i, 523, 540, 541. Tiele (Outlines, pp. 167, 178) assumes a special reformation such as is traditionally associated with Zarathustra, holding that either a remarkable man or a sect must have established the monotheistic idea. Meyer (i, 537) holds with M. Darmesteter that Zarathustra is a purely mythical personage, made out of a Storm-God. Dr. Menzies (Hist. of Relig. p. 384) holds strongly by his historic actuality. The problem is analogous to those concerning Moses and Buddha; but though the historic case of Mohammed bars a confident decision in the negative, the balance of presumption is strongly against the traditional view. See the author’s Pagan Christs, pp. 286–88.
There is no reason to believe, however, that among the Persian peoples the higher view of things fared any better than elsewhere.[108] The priesthood, however enlightened it may have been in its inner culture, never slackened the practice of sacrifice and ceremonial; and the worship of subordinate spirits and the propitiation of demons figured as largely in their beliefs as in any other. In time the cult of the Saviour-God Mithra came to the front very much as did that of Jesus later; and in the one case as in the other, despite ethical elements, superstition was furthered. When, still later, the recognition of Ahriman was found to endanger the monotheistic principle, an attempt seems to have been made under the Sassanian dynasty, in our own era, to save it by positing a deity who was father of both Ahura-Mazda and Angra-mainyu;[109] but this last slight effort of freethinking speculation came to nothing. Social and political obstacles determined the fate of Magian as of other ancient rationalism.
According to Rawlinson, Zoroastrianism under the Parthian (Arsacide) empire was gradually converted into a complex system of idolatry, involving a worship of ancestors and dead kings (Sixth Orient. Mon. p. 399; Seventh Mon. pp. 8–9, 56). Gutschmid, however, following Justin (xli, 3, 5–6), pronounces the Parthians zealous followers of Zoroastrianism, dutifully obeying it in the treatment of their dead (Geschichte Irans von Alexander bis zum Untergang der Arsakiden, 1888, pp. 57–58)—a law not fully obeyed even by Dareios and his dynasty (Heeren, Asiatic Nations, Eng. tr. i, 127). Rawlinson, on the contrary, says the Parthians burned their dead—an abomination to Zoroastrians. Certainly the name of the Parthian King Mithradates implies acceptance of Mazdeism. At the same time Rawlinson admits that in Persia itself, under the Parthian dynasty, Zoroastrianism remained pure (Seventh Mon. pp. 9–10), and that, even when ultimately it became mixed up with normal polytheism, the dualistic faith and the supremacy of Ormazd were maintained (Five Monarchies, 2nd ed. iii, 362–63; cp. Darmesteter, Zendavesta, i, lxvi, 2nd ed.).
§ 5. Egypt
The relatively rich store of memorials left by the Egyptian religions yields us hardly any more direct light on the growth of religious rationalism than do those of Mesopotamia, though it supplies much fuller proof that such a growth took place. All that is clear is that the comparison and competition of henotheistic cults there as elsewhere led to a measure of relative skepticism, which took doctrinal shape in a loose monism or pantheism. The language is often monotheistic, but never, in the early period, is polytheism excluded; on the contrary, it is affirmed in the same breath.[110] The alternate ascendancy of different dynasties, with different Gods, forced on the process, which included, as in Babylon, a priestly grouping of deities in families and triads[111]—the latter arrangement, indeed, being only a return to a primitive African conception.[112] It involved further a syncretism or a combining of various Gods into one,[113] and also an esoteric explanation of the God-myths as symbolical of natural processes, or else of mystical ideas.[114] There are even evidences of quasi-atheism in the shape of materialistic hymns on Lucretian lines.[115] At the beginning of the New Kingdom (1500 B.C.) it had been fully established for all the priesthoods that the Sun-God was the one real God, and that it was he who was worshipped in all the others.[116] He in turn was conceived as a pervading spiritual force, of anthropomorphic character and strong moral bias.[117] This seems to have been by way of a purification of one pre-eminent compound deity, Amen-Ra, to begin with, whose model was followed in other cults.[118] “Theocracies of this kind could not have been formed unconsciously. Men knew perfectly well that they were taking a great step in advance of their fathers.”[119] There had occurred, in short, among the educated and priestly class a considerable development, going on through many centuries, alike in philosophical and in ethical thought; the ethics of the Egyptian “Book of the Dead” being quite as altruistic as those of any portion of the much later Christian Gospels.[120] Such a development could arise only in long periods of peace and law-abiding life; though it is found to be accelerated after the Persian conquest, which would force upon the Egyptian priesthood new comparisons and accommodations.[121] And yet all this was done “without ever sacrificing the least particle of the beliefs of the past.”[122] The popular polytheism, resting on absolute ignorance, was indestructible; and the most philosophic priests seem never to have dreamt of unsettling it, though, as we shall see, a masterful king did.
An eminent Egyptologist has written that, “whatever literary treasures may be brought to light in the future as the result of excavations in Egypt, it is most improbable that we shall ever receive from that country any ancient Egyptian work which can properly be classed among the literature of atheism or freethought; the Egyptian might be more or less religious according to his nature and temperament, but, judging from the writings of his priests and teachers which are now in our hands, the man who was without religion and God in some form or other was most rare, if not unknown.”[123] It is not clear what significance the writer attaches to this statement. Unquestionably the mass of the Egyptians were always naïf believers in all that was given them as religion; and among the common people even the minds which, as elsewhere, varied from the norm of credulity would be too much cowed by the universal parade of religion to impugn it; while their ignorance and general crudity of life would preclude coherent critical thought on the subject. But to conclude that among the priesthood and the upper classes there was never any “freethinking” in the sense of disbelief in the popular and official religion, even up to the point of pantheism or atheism, is to ignore the general lesson of culture history elsewhere. Necessarily there was no “literature of atheism or freethought.” Such literature could have no public, and, as a menace to the wealth and status of the priesthood, would have brought death on the writer. But in such a multitudinous priesthood there must have been, at some stages, many who realized the mummery of the routine religion, and some who transcended the commonplaces of theistic thought. From the former, if not from the latter, would come esoteric explanations for the benefit of the more intelligent of the laity of the official class, who could read; and it is idle to decide that deeper unbelief was privately “unknown.”
It is contended, as against the notion of an esoteric and an exoteric doctrine, that the scribes “did not, as is generally supposed, keep their new ideas carefully concealed, so as to leave to the multitude nothing but coarse superstitions. The contrary is evident from a number of inscriptions which can be read by anybody, and from books which anyone can buy.”[124] But the assumption that “anyone” could read or buy books in ancient Egypt is a serious misconception. Even in our own civilization, where “anyone” can presumably buy freethought journals or works on anthropology and the history of religions, the mass of the people are so placed that only by chance does such knowledge reach them; and multitudes are so little cultured that they would pass it by with uncomprehending indifference were it put before them. In ancient Egypt, however, the great mass of the people could not even read; and no man thought of teaching them.
This fact alone goes far to harmonize the ancient Greek testimonies as to the existence of an esoteric teaching in Egypt with Tiele’s contention to the contrary. See the pros and cons set forth and confusedly pronounced upon by Professor Chantepie de la Saussaye, Manual of the Science of Religion, Eng. tr. pp. 400–401. We know from Diodorus (i, 81), what we could deduce from our other knowledge of Egyptian conditions, that, apart from the priests and the official class, no one received any literary culture save in some degree the higher grades of artificers, who needed some little knowledge of letters for their work in connection with monuments, sepulchres, mummy-cases, and so forth. Cp. Maspero, Hist. anc. des peuples de l’orient, p. 285. Even the images of the higher Gods were shown to the people only on festival-days (Meyer Gesch. des Alterthums, i, 82).
The Egyptian civilization was thus, through all its stages, obviously conditioned by its material basis, which in turn ultimately determined its polity, there being no higher contemporary civilization to lead it otherwise. An abundant, cheap, and regular food supply maintained in perpetuity a dense and easily-exploited population, whose lot through thousands of years was toil, ignorance, political subjection, and a primitive mental life.[125] For such a population general ideas had no light and no comfort; for them was the simple human worship of the local natural Gods or the presiding Gods of the kingdom, alike confusedly conceived as great powers, figured often as some animal, which for the primeval mind signified indefinite capacity and unknown possibility of power and knowledge.[126] Myths and not theories, magic and not ethics, were their spiritual food, albeit their peaceful animal lives conformed sufficiently to their code. And the life-conditions of the mass determined the policy of priest and king. The enormous priestly revenue came from the people, and the king’s power rested on both orders.
As to this revenue see Diodorus Siculus, i, 73; and Erman, Handbook of Egyptian Religion, Eng. tr. 1907, p. 71. According to Diodorus, a third of the whole land of the kingdom was allotted to the priesthoods. About a sixth of the whole land seems to have been given to the Gods by Ramessu III alone, besides 113,000 slaves, 490,000 cattle, and immense wealth of other kinds (Flinders Petrie, Hist. of Egypt, iii (1905), 154–55). The bulk of the possessions here enumerated seems to have gone to the temple of Amen at Thebes and that of the Sun-God at Heliopolis (Erman, as cited). It is to be noted, however, that the priestly order included all the physicians, lawyers, clerks, schoolmasters, sculptors, painters, land measurers, drug sellers, conjurers, diviners, and undertakers. Wilkinson, Ancient Egyptians, ed. Birch, 1878, i, 157–58; Sharpe, Egypt. Mythol. p. 26; Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, § 68. “The sacred domains included herds of cattle, birds, fishermen, serfs, and temple servants” (Flinders Petrie, as cited, iii, 42). When the revenues assigned for a temple of Seti I were found to be misappropriated, and the building stopped, his son, Ramessu II, assigned a double revenue for the completion of the work and the worship (id.). Like the later priesthood of Christendom, that of Egypt forged documents to establish claims to revenue (id. p. 69). Captured cattle in great quantities were bestowed on temples of Amen (id. p. 149), whose priests were especially grasping (id. p. 153). Thus in the one reign of Ramessu III they received fifty-six towns of Egypt and nine of Syria and 62,000 serfs (id. p. 155).
This was fully seen when King Akhunaton (otherwise Echnaton, or Icheniton, or Akhunaton, or Akhunaten, or Chuenaten, or Khu-en-aten, or Kku-n-aten, or Khouniatonou, or Khounaton!) = Amen-hetep or Amun-hotep (or Amenophis) IV, moved by monotheistic zeal, departed so far from the customary royal policy as to put under the ban all deities save that he had chosen for himself, repudiating the God-name Amen in his own name, and making one from that of his chosen Sun-God, Aten (“the sun’s disk”) or Aton or Atonou[127] or Iton[128] (latterly held to be = the Syrian Adon, “the Lord,” symbolized by the sun’s disk). There is reason to think that his was not a mere Sun-worship, but the cult of a deity, “Lord of the Disk,” who looked through the sun’s disk as through a window.[129] In any interpretation, however, the doctrine was wholly inacceptable to a priesthood whose multitudinous shrines its success would have emptied. Of all the host of God-names, by one account only that of the old Sun-God Ra-Harmachis was spared,[130] as being held identical with that of Aten; and by one account[131] the disaffection of priests and people rose to the point of open rebellion. At length Akhunaton, “Glory of the Disk,” as he elected to name himself, built for himself and his God a new capital city in Middle Egypt, Akhet-Aten (or Khut-Aten), the modern Tell-el-Amarna, where he assembled around him a society after his own heart, and carried on his Aten-worship, while his foreign empire was crumbling. The “Tell-el-Amarna tablets” were found in the ruins of his city, which was deserted a generation after his death. Though the king enforced his will while he lived, his movement “bore no fruit whatever,” his policy being reversed after his family had died out, and his own monuments and capital city razed to the ground by orthodox successors.[132] In the same way the earlier attempt of the alien Hyksos to suppress the native polytheism and image-worship had come to nothing.[133]
The history of Akhunaton is established by the later Egyptology. Sharpe makes no mention of it, though the point had been discussed from 1839 onwards. Cp. Lepsius, Letters from Egypt, etc., Bohn trans. 1853, p. 27; and Nott and Gliddon’s Types of Mankind, 1854, p. 147, and Indigenous Races of the Earth, 1857, pp. 116–17, in both of which places will be found the king’s portrait. See last reference for the idle theory that he had been emasculated, as to which the confutation by Wiedemann (Aegyptische Geschichte, p. 397, cited by Budge, Hist. of Egypt, 1902, iv, 128) is sufficient. In point of fact, he figures in the monuments as father of three or seven children (Wiedemann, Rel. of Anc. Eg. p. 37; Erman, p. 69; Budge, iv, 123, 127).
Dispute still reigns as to the origin of the cult to which he devoted himself. A theory of its nature and derivation, based on that of Mr. J. H. Breasted (History of Egypt, 1906, p. 396), is set forth in an article by Mr. A. E. P. Weigall on “Religion and Empire in Ancient Egypt” in the Quarterly Review, Jan. 1909. On this view Aten or Aton is simply Adon = “the Lord”—a name ultimately identified with Adonis, the Syrian Sun-God and Vegetation-God. The king’s grandfather was apparently a Syrian, presumably of royal lineage; and Queen Tii or Thiy, the king’s mother, who with her following had wrought a revolution against the priesthood of Amen, brought him up as a devotee of her own faith. On her death he became more and more fanatical, getting out of touch with people and priesthood, so that “his empire fell to pieces rapidly.” Letters still exist (among the Tell-el-Amarna tablets) which were sent by his generals in Asia, vainly imploring help. He died at the age of twenty-eight; and if the body lately found, and supposed to be his, is really so, his malady was water on the brain.
Mr. Breasted, finding that Akhunaton’s God is described by him in inscriptions as “the father and the mother of all that he made,” ranks the cult very high in the scale of theism. Mr. Weigall (art. cited, p. 60; so also Budge, Hist. iv, 125) compares a hymn of the king’s with [Ps. civ, 24] sq., and praises it accordingly. The parallel is certainly close, but the document is not thereby certificated as philosophic. On the strength of the fact that Akhunaton “had dreamed that the Aton religion would bind the nations together,” Mr. Weigall credits him with harbouring “an illusive ideal towards which, thirty-two centuries later, mankind is still struggling in vain” (p. 66). The ideal of subjugating the nations to one God, cherished later by Jews, and still later by Moslems, is hardly to be thus identified with the modern ideal of international peace. Brugsch, in turn, credits the king with having “willingly received the teaching about the one God of Light,” while admitting that Aten simply meant the sun’s disk (Hist. of Egypt, 1-vol. ed. p. 216).
Maspero, again, declares Tii to have been an Egyptian of old stock, and the God “Atonou” to have been the deity of her tribe (Hist. anc., as cited, p. 249); and he pronounces the cult probably the most ancient variant of the religions of Ra (p. 250). Messrs. King and Hall, who also do not accept the theory of a Syrian derivation, coincide with Messrs. Breasted and Weigall in extolling Akhunaton’s creed. In a somewhat summary fashion they pronounce (work cited, p. 383) that, “given an ignorance of the true astronomical character of the sun, we see how eminently rational a religion” was this. The conception of a moving window in the heavens, which appears to be the core of it, seems rather a darkening than a development of the “philosophical speculations of the priests of the Sun at Heliopolis,” from which it is held by Messrs. King and Hall to have been derived. Similarly ill-warranted is the decision (id. p. 384) that in Akhunaton’s heresy “we see ... the highest attitude [? altitude] to which religious ideas had attained before the days of the Hebrew prophets.” Alike in India and in Egypt, pantheistic ideas of a larger scope than his or those of the Hebrew prophets had been attained before Akhunaton’s time.
Dr. E. A. Wallis Budge, on the other hand, points out that the cult of the Aten is really an ancient one in Egypt, and was carried on by Thothmes III, father of Amen-hetep II, a century before Akhunaton (Amen-hetep IV), its “original home” being Heliopolis (History of Egypt, 1902, iv, 48, 119). So also von Bissing, Gesch. Aeg. in Umriss, p. 52 (reading “Iton”). Rejecting the view that “Aten” is only a form of “Adon,” Dr. Budge pronounces that “as far as can be seen now the worship of Aten was something like a glorified materialism”—whatever that may be—“which had to be expounded by priests who performed ceremonies similar to those which belonged to the old Heliopolitan sun-worship, without any connection whatsoever with the worship of Yahweh; and a being of the character of the Semitic God Adôn had no place in it anywhere.” Further, he considers that it “contained no doctrines on the unity or oneness of Aten similar to those which are found in the hymns to Rā, and none of the beautiful ideas on the future life with which we are familiar from the hymns and other compositions in the Book of the Dead” (Ib. pp. 120–21).
By Prof. Flinders Petrie Queen Tii or Thiy is surmised to have been of Armenian origin (see Budge, iv, 96–98, as to her being “Mesopotamian”); and Prof. Petrie, like Mr. Breasted, has inferred that she brought with her the cult of which her son became the devotee. (So also Brugsch, p. 214.) Messrs. King and Hall recognize that the cult had made some headway before Akhunaton took it up; but deny that there is any reason for supposing Queen Tii to have been of foreign origin; adding: “It seems undoubted that the Aten cult was a development of pure Egyptian religious thought.” Certainty on such an issue seems hardly possible; but it may be said, as against the theory of a foreign importation, that there is no evidence whatever of any high theistic cult of Adonis in Syria at the period in question. Adonis was primarily a Vegetation-God; and the older view that Aten simply means “the sun’s disk” is hardly disposed of. It is noteworthy that under Akhunaton’s patronage Egyptian sculpture enjoyed a term of freedom from the paralyzing convention which reigned before and after (King and Hall, as cited, pp. 383–84). This seems to have been the result of the innovating taste of the king (Budge, Hist. iv, 124–26).
As the centuries lapsed the course of popular religion was rather downward than upward, if it can be measured by the multiplication of superstitions.[134] When under the Ramesside dynasty the high-priests of Amen became by marriage with the royal family the virtual rulers, sacerdotalism went from bad to worse.[135] The priests, who held the allegorical key to mythology, seem to have been the main multipliers of magic and fable, mummery, ceremonial, and symbol; and they jealously guarded their specialty against lay competition.[136] Esoteric and exoteric doctrine flourished in their degrees side by side,[137] the instructed few apparently often accepting or acting upon both; and primitive rites all the while flourished on the level of the lowest savagery,[138] though the higher ethical teaching even improves, as in India.
Conflicts, conquests, and changes of dynasties seem to have made little difference in the life of the common people.[139] Religion was the thread by which any ruler could lead them; and after the brief destructive outbreak of Cambyses,[140] himself at first tolerant, the Persian conquerors allowed the old faiths to subsist, caring only, like their predecessors, to prevent strife between the cults which would not tolerate each other.[141] The Ptolemies are found adopting and using the native cults as the native kings had done ages before them;[142] and in the learned Greek-speaking society created by their dynasty at Alexandria there can have been at least as little concrete belief as prevailed in the priesthood of the older civilization. It developed a pantheistic philosophy which ultimately, in the hands of Plotinus, compares very well with that of the Upanishads and of later European systems. But this was a hot-house flower; and in the open world outside, where Roman rule had broken the power of the ancient priesthood and Greek immigration had overlaid the native element, Christianity found an easy entrance, and in a declining society flourished at its lowest level.[143] The ancient ferment, indeed, produced many stirrings of relative freethought in the form of Christian heresies to be noted hereafter; one of the most notable being that of Arius, who, like his antagonist Athanasius, was an Alexandrian. But the cast of mind which elaborated the dogma of the Trinity is as directly an outcome of Egyptian culture-history as that which sought to rationalize the dogma by making the popular deity a created person;[144] and the long and manifold internecine struggles of the sects were the due duplication of the older strifes between the worshippers of the various sacred animals in the several cities.[145] In the end the entire population was but so much clay to take the impress of the Arab conquerors, with their new fanatic monotheism standing for the minimum of rational thought.
For the rest, the higher forms of the ancient religion had been able to hold their own till they were absolutely suppressed, with the philosophic schools, by the Byzantine government, which at the same time marked the end of the ancient civilization by destroying or scattering the vast collection of books in the Serapeion, annihilating at once the last pagan cult and the stored treasure of pagan culture. With that culture too, however, there had been associated to the last the boundless credulity which had so long kept it company. In the second century of our era, under the Antonines, we have Apuleius telling of Isis worshipped as “Nature, parent of things, mistress of all elements, the primordial birth of the ages, highest of divinities, queen of departed spirits, first of the heavenly ones, the single manifestation of all Gods and Goddesses,” who rules all things in earth and heaven, and who stands for the sole deity worshipped throughout the world under many names;[146] the while her worshipper cherishes all manner of the wildest superstitions, which even the subtle philosophy of the Alexandrian Neo-Platonic school did not discard. All alike, with the machinery of exorcism, were passed on to the worship of the Christian Queen of Heaven, leaving out only the pantheism; and when that worship in turn was overthrown, the One God of Islam enrolled in his train the same host of ancient hallucinations.[147] The fatality of circumstance was supreme.
§ 6. Phoenicia
Of the inner workings of thought in the Phoenician religion we know even less, directly, than can be gathered as to any other ancient system of similar notoriety,[148] so completely did the Roman conquest of Carthage, and the Macedonian conquest of Tyre and Sidon, blot out the literary remains of their peoples. Yet there are some indirect clues of a remarkable sort.
It is hardly to be doubted, in the first place, that Punic speculation took the same main lines as the early thought of Egypt and Mesopotamia, whose cultures, mixing in Syria as early as the fifteenth century B.C., had laid the basis of the later Phoenician civilization.[149] The simple fact that among the Syro-Phoenicians was elaborated the alphabet adopted by all the later civilizations of the West almost implies a special measure of intellectual progress. We can indeed trace the normal movement of syncretism in the cults, and the normal tendency to improve their ethics. The theory of an original pure monotheism[150] is no more tenable here than anywhere else; we can see that the general designation of the chief God of any city, usually recognizable as a Sun-God, by a title rather than a name,[151] though it pointed to a general worship of a pre-eminent power, in no sense excluded a belief in minor powers, ranking even as deities. It did not do so in the admittedly polytheistic period; and it cannot therefore be supposed to have done so previously.
The chief Phoenician Gods, it is admitted, were everywhere called by one or several of the titles Baal (Lord), Ram or Rimmon (High), Melech or Molech (King), Melkarth (King of the City), Eliun (Supreme), Adonai (Lord), Bel-Samin (Lord of Heaven), etc. (Cp. Rawlinson, History of Phoenicia, p. 231; Tiele, Hist. comp. des anc. relig., etc., Fr. tr. 1882, ch. iii, pp. 281–87; Outlines, p. 82; Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, 246, and art. “Phoenicia” in Encyc. Biblica, iii, 3742–5; Sayce, Ancient Empires, p. 200.) The just inference is that the Sun-God was generally worshipped, the sun being for the Semitic peoples the pre-eminent Nature-power. “He alone of all the Gods is by Philo explained not as a deified man, but as the sun, who had been invoked from the earliest times” (Meyer, last cit.). (All Gods were not Baals: the division between them and lesser powers corresponded somewhat, as Tiele notes, to that between Theoi and Daimones with the Greeks, and Ases and Vanes with the old Scandinavians. So in Babylonia and India the Bels and Asuras were marked off from lesser deities.) The fact that the Western Semites thus carried with them the worship of their chief deities in all their colonies would seem to make an end of the assumption (Gomme, Ethnology of Folklore, p. 68; Menzies, History of Religion, pp. 284, 250) that there is something specially “Aryan” in the “conception of Gods who could and did accompany the tribes wheresoever they travelled.” Cp. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. iii, 169.
The worship of the Baal, however, being that of a special Nature-power, cannot in early any more than in later times have been monotheistic. What happened was a preponderance of the double cult of the God and Goddess, Baal and Ashtoreth, as in the unquestionably polytheistic period (Rawlinson, p. 323; Tiele, Hist. Comp., as cited, p. 319).
Apart from this normal tendency to identify Gods called by the same title (a state of things which, however, in ancient as in modern Catholic countries, tended at the same time to set up special adoration of a given image), there is seen in the later religion of Phoenicia a spirit of syncretism which operated in a manner the reverse of that seen in later Jewry. In the latter case the national God was ultimately conceived, however fanatically, as universal, all others being negated: in commercial Phoenicia, many foreign Gods were adopted,[152] the tendency being finally to conceive them as all manifestations of one Power.[153] And there is reason to suppose that in the cosmopolitan world of the Phoenician cities the higher intelligence reached a yet more subversive, though still fallacious, theory of religion. The pretended ancient Phoenician cosmogony of Sanchoniathon, preserved by Eusebius,[154] while worthless as a record of the most ancient beliefs,[155] may be taken as representing views current not only in the time and society of Philo of Byblos (100 C.E.), who had pretended to translate it, but in a period considerably earlier. This cosmogony is, as Eusebius complains, deliberately atheistic; and it further systematically explains away all God stories as being originally true of remarkable men.
Where this primitive form of atheistic rationalism originated we cannot now tell. But it was in some form current before the time of the Greek Evêmeros, who systematically developed it about 300 B.C.; for in a monotheistic application it more or less clearly underlies the redaction of much of the Hebrew Bible, where both patriarchal and regal names of the early period are found to be old God-names; and where the Sun-God Samson is made a “judge”[156]—having originally been the Judge-God. In the Byblian writer, however, the purpose is not monotheistic, but atheistic; and the problem is whether this or that was the earlier development of the method. The natural presumption seems to be that the Hebrew adaptors of the old mythology used an already applied method, as the Christian Fathers later used the work of Evêmeros; and the citation from Thallos by Lactantius[157] suggests that the method had been applied in Chaldea, as it was spontaneously applied by the Greek epic poets who made memorable mortals out of the ancient deities Odysseus and Æneas,[158] Helen, Castor and Pollux, Achilles, and many more.[159] It is in any case credible enough that among the much-travelling Phoenicians, with their open pantheon, an atheistic Evêmerism was thought out by the skeptical types before Evêmeros; and that the latter really drew his principles from Phoenicia.[160] At any rate, they were there received, doubtless by a select few, as a means of answering the customary demand for “something in place of” the rejected Gods. Concerning the tradition that an ancient Phoenician, Moschus, had sketched an atomic theory, we may again say that, though there is no valid evidence for the statement, it counts for something as proof that the Phoenicians had an old repute for rationalism.
The Byblian cosmogony may be conceived as an atheistic refinement on those of Babylon, adopted by the Jews. It connects with the theogony ascribed to Hesiod (which has Asiatic aspects), in that both begin with Chaos, and the Gods of Hesiod are born later. But whereas in Hesiod Chaos brings forth Erebos and Night (Eros being causal force), and Night bears Æther and Day to Erebos, while Earth virginally brings forth Heaven (Uranos) and the Sea, and then bears the first Gods in union with Heaven, the Phoenician fragment proceeds from black chaos and wind, after long ages, through Eros or Desire, to a kind of primeval slime, from which arise first animals without intelligence, who in turn produce some with intelligence. The effort to expel Deity must have been considerable, for sun and moon and stars seem to arise uncreated, and the sun’s action spontaneously produces further developments. The first man and his wife are created by male and female principles of wind, and their offspring proceed to worship the Sun, calling him Beel Samin. The other Gods are explained as eminent mortals deified after their death. See the details in Cory’s Ancient Fragments, Hodges’ ed. pp. 1–22. As to Moschus, cp. Renouvier, Manuel de philos. ancienne, 1844, i, 238; and Mosheim’s ed. of Cudworth’s Intellectual System, Harrison’s tr. i, 20; also Cudworth’s Eternal and Immutable Morality, same ed. iii, 548. On the general question of Phoenician rationalism, compare Pausanias’s account (vii, 23) of his discussion with a Sidonian, who explained that Apollo was simply the sun, and his son Æsculapius simply the healing art.
At the same time there are signs even in Phoenician worship of an effort after an ethical as well as an intellectual purification of the common religion. To call “the” Phoenician religion “impure and cruel”[161] is to obscure the fact that in all civilizations certain types and cults vary from the norm. In Phoenicia as in Israel there were humane anti-sensualists who either avoided or impugned the sensual and the cruel cults around them; as well as ascetics who stood by human sacrifice while resisting sexual licence. That the better types remained the minority is to be understood in terms of the balance of the social and cultural forces of their civilization, not of any racial bias or defect, intellectual or moral.
The remark of E. Meyer (Gesch. des Alt. i, 211, § 175), that an ethical or mystical conception of the God was “entirely alien” to “the Semite,” reproduces the old fallacy of definite race-characters; and Mr. Sayce, in remarking that “the immorality performed in the name of religion was the invention of the Semitic race itself” (Anc. Emp. p. 203; contrast Tiele, Outlines, p. 83), after crediting the Semitic race with an ethical faculty alien to the Akkadian (above, p. 66), suggests another phase of the same error. There is nothing special to the Semites in the case save degree of development, similar phenomena being found in many savage religions, in Mexico, and in India. (Meyer in later passages and in his article on Ba’al in Boscher’s Lexikon modifies his position as to Semitic versus other religions.) On the other hand, there was a chaste as well as an unchaste worship of the Phoenician Ashtoreth. Ashtoreth Karnaim, or Tanit, the Virgin, as opposed to Atergates and Annit, the Mother-Goddesses, had the characteristics of Artemis. Cp. Tiele, Religion comparée, as cited, pp. 318–19; Menzies, History of Religion, pp. 159, 168–71; Kuenen, Religion of Israel, i, 91; Smith, Religion of the Semites, pp. 292, 458. [In Rome, Venus Cloacina, sometimes ignorantly described as a Goddess of Vice, was anciently “the Goddess of chaste and holy matrimony” (Ettore Pais, Ancient Legends of Roman History, Eng. tr. 1906, p. 199)]. For the rest, the cruelty of the Phoenician cults, in the matter of human sacrifice, was fully paralleled among the early Teutons. See Tiele, Outlines, p. 199; and the author’s Pagan Christs, Pt. ii, ch. i, § 4.
§ 7. Ancient China
Of all the ancient Asiatic systems that of China yields us the first clear biographical trace of a practical rationalist, albeit a rationalist stamped somewhat by Chinese conservatism. Confucius (Kung-fu-tse = Kung the Master) is a tangible person, despite some mythic accretions, whereas Zarathustra and Buddha are at best but doubtful possibilities, and even Lao-Tsze (said to have been born 604 B.C.) is somewhat elusive.
Before Confucius (551–478 B.C.), it is evident, there had been a slackening in religious belief among the governing classes. It is claimed for the Chinese, as for so many other races, that they had anciently a “pure” monotheism;[162] but the ascription, as usual, is misleading. They saw in the expanse of heaven the “Supreme” Power, not as a result of reflection on the claims of other deities among other races, but simply as expressing their primordial tribal recognition of that special God, before contact with the God-ideas of other peoples. Monotheistic in the modern sense they could not be. Concerning them as concerning the Semites we may say that the claim of a primary monotheism for them “is also true of all primitive totemistic or clannish communities. A man is born into a community with such a divine head, and the worship of that God is the only one possible to him.”[163] Beside the belief in the Heaven-God, there stood beliefs in heavenly and earthly spirits, and in ancestors, who were worshipped with altars.[164]
The remark of Professor Legge (Religions of China, p. 11), that the relation of the names Shang-Ti = Supreme Ruler, and T’ien = the sky, “has kept the monotheistic element prominent in the religion proper of China down to the present time,” may serve to avert disputation. It may be agreed that the Chinese were anciently “monotheists” in the way in which they are at present, when they worship spirits innumerable. When, however, Professor Legge further says (p. 16) that the ancient monotheism five thousand years ago was “in danger of being corrupted” by nature worship and divination, he puts in doubt the meaning of the other expression above cited. He states several times (pp. 46, 51, 52) that the old monotheism remains; but speaks (p. 84) of the mass of the people as “cut off from the worship of God for themselves.” And see p. 91 as to ancestor-worship by the Emperor. Tiele (Outlines, p. 27) in comparison somewhat overstresses the polytheistic aspect of the Chinese religion in his opening definition; but he adds the essential facts. Dr. Legge’s remark that “the idea of revelation did not shock” the ancient Chinese (p. 13) is obscure. He is dealing with the ordinary Akkado-Babylonian astrology. Pauthier, on the contrary (Chine Moderne, 1853, p. 250), asserts that in China “no doctrine has ever been put forth as revealed.”
As regards ancestral worship, we have record of a display of disregard for it by the lords of Lû in Confucius’s time;[165] and the general attitude of Confucius himself, religious only in his adherence to old ceremonies, is incompatible with a devout environment. It has been disputed whether he makes a “skeptic denial of any relation between man and a living God”;[166] but an authority who disputes this complains that his “avoiding the personal name of Tî, or God, and only using the more indefinite term Heaven,” suggests “a coldness of temperament and intellect in the matter of religion.”[167] He was, indeed, above all things a moralist; and concerning the spirits in general he taught that “To give one’s self to the duties due to men, and, while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom.”[168] He would never express an opinion concerning the fate of souls,[169] or encourage prayer;[170] and in his redaction of the old records he seems deliberately to have eliminated mythological expressions.[171] “I would say,” writes Dr. Legge (who never forgets to be a missionary), “that he was unreligious rather than irreligious; yet, by the coldness of his temperament and intellect in this matter, his influence is unfavourable to the development of true religious feeling among the Chinese people generally, and he prepared the way for the speculations of the literati of medieval and modern times, which have exposed them to the charge of atheism.”[172]
The view that there was a very early “arrest of growth” in the Chinese religion (Menzies, History of Religion, p. 108), “before the ordinary developments of mythology and doctrine, priesthood,” etc., had “time to take place,” is untenable as to the mythology. The same writer had previously spoken (p. 107) of the Chinese system before Confucius as having “already parted with all savage and irrational elements.” That Confucius would seek to eliminate these seems likely enough, though the documentary fact is disputed.
In the elder contemporary of Confucius, Lao-Tsze (“Old Philosopher”), the founder of Taouism, may be recognized another and more remarkable early freethinker of a different stamp, in some essential respects much less conservative, and in intellectual cast markedly more original. Where Confucius was an admirer and student of antiquity, Lao-Tsze expressly put such concern aside,[173] seeking a law of life within himself, in a manner suggestive of much Indian and other Oriental thought. So far as our records go, he is the first known philosopher who denied that men could form an idea of deity, that being the infinite; and he avowedly evolved, by way of makeshift, the idea of a primordial and governing Reason (Tau), closely analogous to the Logos of later Platonism. Since the same idea is traceable in more primitive forms alike in the Babylonian and Brahmanic systems,[174] it is arguable that he may have derived it from one of these sources; but the problem is very obscure. In any case, his system is one of rationalistic pantheism.[175]
His personal relation to Confucius was that of a self-poised sage, impatient of the other’s formalism and regard to prescription and precedent. Where they compare is in their avoidance of supernaturalism, and in the sometimes singular rationality of their views of social science; in which latter respect, however, they were the recipients and transmitters of an already classic tradition.[176] Thus both had a strong bias to conservatism; and in Lao-Tsze it went the length of prescribing that the people should not be instructed.[177] Despite this, it is not going too far to say that no ancient people appears to have produced sane thinkers and scientific moralists earlier than the Chinese. The Golden Rule, repeatedly formulated by Confucius, seems to be but a condensation on his part of doctrine he found in the older classics;[178] and as against Lao-Tsze he is seen maintaining the practical form of the principle of reciprocity. The older man, like some later teachers, preached the rule of returning kindness for evil,[179] without leaving any biographical trace of such practice on his own part. Confucius, dealing with human nature as it actually is, argued that evil should be met by justice, and kindness with kindness, else the evil were as much fostered as the good.[180]
It is to be regretted that Christian writers should keep up the form of condemning Confucius (so Legge, Religions of China, p. 144; Life and Teachings of Confucius, 4th ed. p. 111 sq.; Douglas, p. 144) for a teaching the practice of which is normally possible, and is never transcended in their own Church, where the profession of returning good for evil merely constitutes one of the great hypocrisies of civilization. Dr. Legge does not scruple to resort to a bad sophism in this connection. “If,” he says, “we only do good to them that do good to us, what reward have we?” He thus insinuates that Confucius vetoed any spontaneous act of benevolence. The question is not of such acts, but of kind acts to those who seek to injure us. On the other hand, Mr. Chalmers, who dedicates his translation of Lao-Tsze to Dr. Legge, actually taunts Lao-Tsze (p. 38) with absurdity in respect of his doctrine. Such is the sincerity of orthodox polemic. How little effect the self-abnegating teaching of Lao-Tsze, in turn, has had on his followers may be gathered from their very legends concerning him (Douglas, p. 182). There is a fallacy, further, in the Christian claim that Confucius (Analects, v, 11; xv, 23) put the Golden Rule in a lower form than that of the Gospels, in that he gave it the negative form, “Do not that which ye would not have done unto you.” This is really the rational and valid form of the Rule. The positive form, unless construed in the restrictive sense, would merely prescribe a non-moral doing of favours in the hope of receiving favours in return. It appears, further, from the passage in the Analects, v, 11, that the doctrine in this form was familiar before Confucius.
Lao-Tsze, on his part, had reduced religion to a minimum. “There is not a word in the Tâo Têh King [by Lao-Tsze] of the sixth century B.C. that savours either of superstition or religion.”[181] But the quietist and mystical philosophy of Lao-Tsze and the practicality of Confucius alike failed to check the growth of superstition among the ever-increasing ignorant Chinese population. Says our Christian authority: “In the works of Lieh-Tsze and Chwang-Tsze, followers of Lao-Tsze, two or three centuries later, we find abundance of grotesque superstition, though we are never sure how far those writers really believed the things they relate.” In point of fact, Lieh-Tsze is now commonly held by scholars to be an imaginary personage, whose name is given to a miscellaneous collection of teachings and moral tales, much interpolated and added to long after the date assigned to him—circa 400 B.C.[182] It contains a purely pantheistic statement of the cosmic problem,[183] and among the apologues is one in which a boy of twelve years is made tersely and cogently to rebut the teleological view of things.[184] The writers of such sections are not likely to have held the superstitions set forth in others. But that superstition should supervene upon light where the means of light were dwindling was a matter of course. It was but the old fatality, seen in Brahmanism, in Buddhism, in Egypt, in Islam, and in Christianity.
Confucius himself was soon worshipped.[185] A reaction against him set in after a century or two, doctrines of pessimism on the one hand, and of universal love on the other, finding a hearing;[186] but the influence of the great Confucian teacher Mencius (Meng-Tse) carried his school through the struggle. “In his teaching, the religious element retires still further into the background”[187] than in that of Confucius; and he is memorable for his insistence on the remarkable principle of Confucius, that “the people are born good”; that they are the main part of the State; and that it is the ruler’s fault if they go astray.[188] Some rulers seem to have fully risen to this view of things, for we have an account of a rationalistic duke, who lived earlier than 250 B.C., refusing to permit the sacrifice of a man as a scapegoat on his behalf; and in the year 166 B.C. such sacrifices were permanently abolished by the Han Emperor Wen.[189] But Mencius, who, as a sociologist, excels not only Lao-Tsze but Confucius, put his finger on the central force in Chinese history when he taught that “it is only men of education who, without a certain livelihood, are able to maintain a fixed heart. As to the people, if they have not a certain livelihood, it follows that they will not have a fixed heart.”[190] So clearly was the truth seen in China over two thousand years ago. But whether under feudalism or under imperialism, under anarchy or under peace—and the teachings of Lao-Tsze and Mencius combined to discredit militarism[191]—the Chinese mass always pullulated on cheap food, at a low standard of comfort, and in a state of utter ignorance. Hence the cult of Confucius was maintained among them only by recognizing their normal superstition; but on that basis it has remained secure, despite competition, and even a term of early persecution. One iconoclastic emperor, the founder of the Ch’in or Ts’in dynasty (221 or 212 B.C.), sought to extirpate Confucianism as a means to a revolution in the government; but the effort came to nothing.[192]
In the same way Lao-Tsze came to be worshipped as a God[193] under the religion called Taouism, a title sometimes mistranslated as rationalism, “a name admirably calculated to lead the mind astray as to what the religion is.”[194] It would seem as if the older notion of the Tau, philosophically purified by Lao-Tsze, remained a popular basis for his school, and so wrought its degradation. The Taoists or Tao-sse “do their utmost to be as unreasonable as possible.”[195] They soon reverted from the philosophic mysticism of Lao-Tsze, after a stage of indifferentism,[196] to a popular supernaturalism,[197] which “the cultivated Chinese now regard with unmixed contempt”;[198] the crystallized common-sense of Confucius, on the other hand, allied as it is with official ceremonialism, retaining its hold as an esoteric code for the learned. The evolution has thus closely resembled that which took place in India.
Nowhere, perhaps, is our sociological lesson more clearly to be read than in China. Centuries before our era it had a rationalistic literature, an ethic no less earnest and far more sane that that of the Hebrews, and a line of known teachers as remarkable in their way as those of ancient Greece who flourished about the same period. But where even Greece, wrought upon by all the other cultures of antiquity, ultimately retrograded, till under Christianity it stayed at a Chinese level of unprogressiveness for a thousand years, isolated China, helped by no neighbouring culture adequate to the need, has stagnated as regards the main mass of its life, despite some political and other fluctuations, till our own day. Its social problem, like that of India, is now more or less dependent, unfortunately, on the solutions that may be reached in Europe, where the problem is only relatively more mature, not fundamentally different.
§ 8. Mexico and Peru
In the religions of pre-Christian Mexico and Peru we have peculiarly interesting examples of “early” religious systems, flourishing at some such culture-level as the ancient Akkadian, in full play at the time of the European Renaissance. In Mexico a partly “high” ethical code, as the phrase goes, went concurrently with the most frightful indulgence in human sacrifice, sustained by the continuous practice of indecisive war for the securing of captives, and by the interest of a vast priesthood. In this system had been developed all the leading features of those of the Old World—the identification of all the Gods with the Sun; the worship of fire, and the annual renewal of it by special means; the conception of God-sacrifice and of communion with the God by the act of eating his slain representative; the belief in a Virgin-Mother-Goddess; the connection of humanitarian ethic with the divine command; the opinion that celibacy, as a state of superior virtue, is incumbent on most priests and on all would-be saints; the substitution of a sacramental bread for the “body and blood” of the God-Man; the idea of an interceding Mother-Goddess; the hope of a coming Saviour; the regular practice of prayer; exorcism, special indulgences, confession, absolution, fasting, and so on.[199] In Peru, also, many of those conceptions were in force; but the limitation of the power and numbers of the priesthood by the imperial system of the Incas, and the state of peace normal in their dominions, prevented the Mexican development of human sacrifice.
It seems probable that the Toltecs, who either fled before or were for the most part subdued or destroyed by the barbarian Chichimecs (in turn subdued by the Aztecs) a few centuries before Cortes, were on the whole a less warlike and more civilized people, with a less bloody worship.[200] Their God, Quetzalcoatl, retained through fear by the Aztecs,[201] was a comparatively benign deity opposed to human sacrifice, apparently rather a late purification or partial rationalization of an earlier God-type than a primitively harmless conception.[202] Insofar as they were sundered by quarrels between the sectaries of the God Quetzalcoatl and the God Votan, though their religious wars seem to have been as cruel as those of the early Christians of North Africa, there appears to have been at work among them a movement towards unbloody religion. In any case their overthrow seems to stand for the military inferiority of the higher and more rational civilization[203] to the lower and more religious, which in turn, however, was latterly being destroyed by its enormously burdensome military and priestly system, and may even be held to have been ruined by its own superstitious fears.[204]
Among the recognizable signs of normal progress in the ordinary Aztec religion were (1) the general recognition of the Sun as the God really worshipped in all the temples of the deities with special names;[205] (2) the substitution in some cults of baked bread-images for a crucified human victim. The question arises whether the Aztecs, but for their overwhelming priesthood, might conceivably have risen above their system of human sacrifices, as the Aryan Hindus had done in an earlier age. Their material civilization, which carried on that of the kindred Toltecs, was at several points superior to that which the Spaniards put in its place; and their priesthood, being a leisured and wealthy class, might have developed intellectually as did the Brahmans,[206] if its economic basis had been changed. But only a conquest or other great political convulsion could conceivably have overturned the vast cultus of human sacrifice, which overran all life, and cherished war as a means of procuring victims.
In the kindred State of Tezcuco, civilization seems to have gone further than in Aztec Anahuac; and about the middle of the fifteenth century one Tezcucan king, the conqueror Netzahualcoyotl, who has left writings in both prose and verse, is seen attaining to something like a philosophic creed, of a monotheistic stamp.[207] He is said to have rejected all idol-worship, and erected, as aforesaid, an altar “to the Unknown God,”[208] forbidding all sacrifices of blood in that worship. But among the Tezcucans these never ceased; three hundred slaves were sacrificed at the obsequies of the conqueror’s son, Netzahualpilli; and the Aztec influence over the superior civilization was finally complete.
In Peru, again, we find civilization advancing in respect of the innovation of substituting statuettes for wives and slaves in the tombs of the rich; and we have already noted[209] the remarkable records of the avowed unbelief of several Incas in the divinity of the nationally worshipped Sun. For the rest, there was the dubious quasi-monotheistic cult of the Creator-God, Pachacamac, concerning whom every fresh discussion raises fresh doubt.[210]
Mr. Lang, as usual, leans to the view that Pachacamac stands for a primordial and “elevated” monotheism (Making of Religion, pp. 263–70), while admitting the slightness of the evidence. Garcilasso, the most eminent authority, who, however, is contradicted by others, represents that the conception of Pachacamac as Creator, needing no temple or sacrifice, was “philosophically” reached by the Incas and their wise men (Lang, p. 262). The historical fact seems to be that a race subdued by the Incas, the Yuncas, had one temple to this deity; and that the Incas adopted the cult. Garcilasso says the Yuncas had human sacrifices and idols, which the Incas abolished, setting up their monotheistic cult in that one temple. This is sufficiently unlikely; and it may very well have been the fact that the Yuncas had offered no sacrifices. But if they did not, it was because their material conditions, like those of the Australians and Fuegians, had not facilitated the practice; and in that case their “monotheism” likewise would merely represent the ignorant simplicity of a clan-cult. (Compare Tylor, Primitive Culture, ii, 335 sq.; Brinton, Myths of the New World, p. 52.) On the other hand, if the Incas had set up a cult without sacrifices to a so-called One God, their idea would be philosophical, as taking into account the multitude of clan-cults as well as their own national worships, and transcending these.
But the outstanding sociological fact in Incarial Peru was the absolute subjection of the mass of the people; and though its material development and political organization were comparable to those of ancient Persia under the Akhamenidæ, so that the Spanish Conquest stood here for mere destruction, there is no reason to think that at the best its intellectual life could have risen higher than that of pre-Alexandrian Egypt, to which it offers so many resemblances. The Incas’ schools were for the nobility only.[211] Rationalistic Incas and high priests might have ruled over a docile, unlettered multitude, gradually softening their moral code, in connection with their rather highly-developed doctrine (resembling the Egyptian) of a future state. But these seem the natural limits, in the absence of contact with another civilization not too disparate for a fruitful union.
In Mexico, on the other hand, an interaction of native cultures had already occurred to some purpose; and the strange humanitarianism of the man-slaying priests, who made free public hospitals of part of their blood-stained temples,[212] suggests a possibility of esoteric mental culture among them. They had certainly gone relatively far in their moral code, as apart from their atrocious creed of sacrifice, even if we discount the testimony of the benevolent priest Sahagun;[213] and they had the beginnings of a system of education for the middle classes.[214] But unless one of the States which habitually warred for captives should have conquered the others—in which case a strong ruler might have put an end to the wholesale religious slaughter of his own subjects, as appears to have been done anciently in Mesopotamia—the priests in all likelihood would never have transcended their hideous hallucination of sacrifice. Their murdered civilization is thus the “great perhaps” of sociology; organized religion being the most sinister factor in the problem.
§ 9. The Common Forces of Degeneration
It is implied more or less in all the foregoing summaries that there is an inherent tendency in all systematized and instituted religion to degenerate intellectually and morally, save for the constant corrective activity of freethought. It may be well, however, to note specifically the forms or phases of the tendency.
1. Dogmatic and ritual religion being, to begin with, a more or less general veto on fresh thinking, it lies in its nature that the religious person is as such less intelligently alive to all problems of thought and conduct than he otherwise might be—a fact which at least outweighs, in a whole society, the gain from imposing a terrorized conformity on the less well-biassed types. Wherever conduct is a matter of sheer obedience to a superhuman code, it is ipso facto uncritical and unprogressive. Thus the history of most religions is a record of declines and reformations, each new affirmation of moral freethought ad hoc being in turn erected into a set of sheer commands. To set up the necessary ferment of corrective thought even for a time, there seems to be needed (a) a provocation to the intelligence, as in the spectacle of conflict of cults; and (b) a provocation to the moral sense and to self-interest through a burdensome pressure of rites or priestly exactions. An exceptional personality, of course, may count for much in the making of a movement; though the accident of the possession of kingly power by a reformer seems to count for much more than does genius.
2. The fortunes of such reactions are determined by socio-economic or political conditions. They are seen to be at a minimum, as to energy and social effect, in the conditions of greatest social invariability, as in ancient Egypt, where progress in thought, slow at best, was confined to the priestly and official class, and never affected popular culture.
3. In the absence of social conditions fitted to raise popular levels of life and thought, every religious system tends to worsen intellectually in the sense of adding to its range of superstition—that is, of ignorant and unreasoning belief. Credulity has its own momentum. Even the possession of limitary sacred books cannot check this tendency—e.g., Hinduism, Judaism, Mohammedanism, Mazdeism, Christianity up till the age of doubt and science, and the systems of ancient Egypt, Babylon, and post-Confucian China. This worsening can take place alongside of a theoretic purification of belief within the sphere of the educated theological class.
Christian writers have undertaken to show that such deterioration went on continuously in India from the beginning of the Vedic period, popular religion sinking from Varuna to Indra, from Indra to the deities of the Atharva Veda, and from these to the Puranas (cp. Dr. J. Murray Mitchell, Hinduism Past and Present, 1885, pp. 22, 25, 26, 54). The argument, being hostile in bias from the beginning, ignores or denies the element of intellectual advance in the Upanishads and other later literature; but it holds good of the general phenomena. It holds good equally, however, of the history of Christianity in the period of the supremacy of ignorant faith and absence of doubt and science; and is relatively applicable to the religion of the uneducated mass at any time and place.
On the other hand, it is not at all true that religious history is from the beginning, in any case, a process of mere degeneration from a pure ideal. Simple statements as to primitive ideas are found to be misleading because of their simplicity. They can connote only the ethic of the life conditions of the worshipper. Now, we have seen (p. 28) that small primitive peoples living at peace and in communism, or in some respects well placed, may be on that account in certain moral respects superior to the average or mass of more civilized and more intelligent peoples. [As to the kindliness and unselfishness of some savages, living an almost communal life, and as to the scrupulous honesty of others, there is plenty of evidence—e.g., as to Andaman islanders, Max Müller, Anthrop. Relig., citing Colonel Cadell, p. 177; as to Malays and Papuans, Dr. Russel Wallace, Malay Archipelago, p. 595 (but cp. pp. 585, 587, 589); as to Esquimaux, Keane, Man, p. 374; Reclus, Primitive Folk, pp. 15, 37, 115 (but cp. pp. 41–42). In these and other cases unselfishness within the tribe is the concomitant of the communal life, and represents no conscious ethical volition, being concurrent with phases of the grossest tribal egoism, in some cases with cannibalism, and with the perpetual oppression of women. In the case of the preaching of unselfishness to the young by the old among the Australians, where Lubbock and his authorities see “the tyranny of the old” (Origin of Civilization, 5th ed. pp. 451–52) Mr. Lang sees a pure primeval ethic. Obviously the other is the true explanation. The closest and best qualified observers testify, as regards a number of tribes: “So far as anything like moral precepts are concerned in these tribes ... it appears to us to be most probable that they have originated in the first instance in association with the purely selfish ideas of the older men to keep all the best things for themselves, and in no case whatever are they supposed to have the sanction of a superior being” (Spencer and Gillen, North. Tribes of Cent. Australia, 1904, p. 504).]
The transition from that state to one of war and individualism would be in a sense degeneration; but on the other hand the entirely communistic societies are unprogressive. Broadly speaking, it is by the path of social individuation that progress in civilization has been made, the early city States and the later large military States ultimately securing within themselves some of the conditions for special development of thought, arts, and knowledge. The residual truth is that the simple religion of the harmless tribe is pro tanto superior to the instituted religion of the more civilized nation with greater heights and lower depths of life, the popular religion in the latter case standing for the worse conditions. But the simple religion did not spring from any higher stage of knowledge. The old theorem revived by Mr. Lang (Making of Religion), as to religion having originally been a pure and highly ethical monotheism, from which it degenerated into animism and non-moral polytheism, is at best a misreading of the facts just stated. Mr. Lang never asks what “Supreme Being” and “monotheism” mean for savages who know nothing of other men’s religions: he virtually takes all the connotations for granted. And as regards the most closely studied of contemporary savages our authorities come to an emphatic conclusion that they have no notion whatever of anything like a Supreme Being (Spencer and Gillen, North. Tribes of Cent. Austr. pp. 491–92. Cp. A. H. Keane, Man, p. 395, as to the “Great Spirit” of the Redskins). For the rest, Mr. Lang’s theory is demonstrably wrong in its ethical interpretation of many anthropological facts, and as it stands is quite irreconcilable with the law of evolution, since it assumes an abstract monotheism as primordial. In general it approximates scientifically to the eighteenth-century doctrine of the superiority of savagery to civilization. (See it criticized in the author’s Studies in Religious Fallacy, and Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. pp. 37–43, 46 sq.)
4. Even primary conditions of material well-being, if not reacted upon by social science or a movement of freethought, may in a comparatively advanced civilization promote religious degeneration. Thus abundance of food is favourable to multiplication of sacrifice, and so to priestly predominance.[215] The possession of domesticated animals, so important to civilization, lends itself to sacrifice in a specially demoralizing degree. But abundant cereal food-supply, making abundant population, may greatly promote human sacrifice—e.g., Mexico.
The error of Mr. Lang’s method is seen in the use he makes (work cited, pp. 286–289, 292) of the fact that certain “low” races—as the Australians, Andamanese, Bushmen, and Fuegians—offer no animal sacrifice. He misses the obvious significance of the facts that these unwarlike races have as a rule no domesticated animals and no agriculture, and that their food supply is thus in general precarious. The Andamanese, sometimes described (Malthus, Essay on Population, ch. iii, and refs.; G. W. Earl, Papuans, 1853, pp. 150–51) as very ill-fed, are sometimes said to be well supplied with fish and game (Peschel, Races of Man, Eng. tr. 1876, p. 147; Max Müller, Anthrop. Rel. citing Cadell, p. 177); but in any case they have had no agriculture, and seem to have only occasional animal food in the shape of a wild hog (Colebrooke in Asiatic Researches, iv, 390). The Australians and Fuegians, again, have often great difficulty in feeding themselves (Peschel, pp. 148, 159, 334; Darwin, Voyage, ch. 10). It is argued concerning the Australian aborigines that “as a rule they have an abundance” (A. F. Calvert, The Aborigines of Western Australia, 1894, p. 24); but this abundance is made out by cataloguing the whole edible fauna and flora of the coasts and the interior, and ignores the fact that for all hunting peoples food supply is precarious. For the Australian, “the difficulty of capturing game with his primitive methods compels him to give his whole time to the quest of food” (Keane, Man, p. 148). In the contrary case of the primitive Vedic Aryans, well supplied with animals, sacrifices were abundant, and tended to become more so (Müller, Nat. Relig. pp. 136, 185; Physical Relig. p. 105; but cp. pp. 98, 101; Mitchell, Hinduism, p. 43; Lefmann, Geschichte des alten Indiens, in Oncken’s series, 1890, pp. 49, 430–31). Of these sacrifices that of the horse seems to have been in Aryan use in a most remote period (cp. M. Müller, Nat. Rel. pp. 524–25; H. Böttger, Sonnencult der Indogermanen, Breslau, 1891, pp. 41–44; Preller, Römische Mythologie, ed. Köhler, pp. 102, 299, 323; Griechische Mythologie, 2te Aufg. i, 462; Frazer, Golden Bough, ii, 315). Max Müller’s remark (Physical Religion, p. 106), that “the idea of sacrifice did not exist at a very early period,” because there is no common Aryan term for it, counts for nothing, as he admits (p. 107) that the Sanskrit word cannot be traced back to any more general root; and he concedes the antiquity of the practice. On this cp. Mitchell, Hinduism, pp. 37–38; and the author’s Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. p. 122. The reform in Hindu sacrifice, consummated by Buddhism, has been noted above.
5. Even scientific knowledge, while enabling the thoughtful to correct their religious conceptions, in some forms lends itself easily to the promotion of popular superstition. Thus the astronomy of the Babylonians, while developing some skepticism, served in general to encourage divination and fortune-telling; and seems to have had the same effect when communicated to the Chinese, the Hindus, and the Hebrews, all of whom, however, practised divination previously on other bases.
6. Finally, the development of the arts of sculpture and painting, unaccompanied by due intellectual culture, tends to keep religion at a low anthropomorphic level, and worsens its psychology by inviting image-worship.[216] It is not that the earlier and non-artistic religions are not anthropomorphic, but that they give more play for intellectual imagination than does a cult of images. But where the arts have been developed, idolatry has always arisen save when resisted by a special activity or revival of freethought to that end; and even in Protestant Christendom, where image-worship is tabooed, religious pictures now promote popular credulity and ritualism as they did in the Italian Renaissance.[217] So manifold are the forces of intellectual degeneration—degeneration, that is, from an attained ideal or stage of development, not from any primordial knowledge.
[1] Cp. Lang (Myth, Ritual, and Religion, i, 91) as to the contemptuous disbelief of savages in Christian myths. Mr. Lang observes that this shows savages and civilized men to have “different standards of credulity.” That, however, does not seem to be the true inference. Each order of believer accepts the myths of his own creed, and derides others. [↑]
[2] Cp. Decharme, La Critique des trad. relig. chez les Grecs, 1904, p. 121. [↑]
[3] The same process will be recorded later in the case of the intercourse of Crusaders and Saracens; and in the seventeenth century it is noted by La Bruyère (Caractères, ch. xvi, Des esprits forts, par. 3) as occurring in his day. The anonymous English author of an essay on The Agreement of the Customs of the East Indians with those of the Jews (1705, pp. 152–53) naïvely endorses La Bruyère. Macaulay’s remark to the Edinburgh electors, on the view taken of sectarian strifes by a man who in India had seen the worship of the cow, is well known. [↑]
[4] Cp. Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 96, 121–22; Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 74; Tiele, Egyptian Religion, p. 36; and Outlines, p. 52. [↑]
[5] Cp. Tiele, Outlines, pp. 109–110, and Fischer, Heidenthum und Offenbarung, p. 59. Professor Max Müller’s insistence that the lines of Vedic religion could not have been “crossed by trains of thought which started from China, from Babylon, or from Egypt” (Physical Religion, p. 251), does not affect the hypothesis put above. The Professor admits (p. 250) the exact likeness of the Babylonian fire-cult to that of Agni. [↑]
[6] But cp. Müller, Anthropolog. Relig., p. 164, as to possible later developments; and see above, pp. 45–47, as to the many cases in which conquering races have actually adopted the Gods of the conquered. [↑]
[7] Muir, Original Sanskrit Texts, ii (2nd ed.), 372, 379, 384. [↑]
[9] Max Müller, Selected Essays, 1881, ii, 207–208. [↑]
[10] Cp. Oldenberg, Die Religion des Veda, 1894, pp. 94, 98–99; Ghosha, Hist. of Hindu Civ. as illust. in the Vedas, Calcutta, 1889, pp. 190–91; Max Müller, Phys. Relig., 1891, pp. 197–98. [↑]
[11] Max Müller, Selected Essays, ii, 237. [↑]
[12] Muir, Original Sanskrit Texts, v, 268. [↑]
[13] Max Müller, Hibbert Lectures, p. 302, citing R. V., viii, 100, 3; and ii, 12, 5. The first passage runs: “If you wish for strength, offer to Indra a hymn of praise: a true hymn, if Indra truly exist; for some one says, Indra does not exist! Who has seen him? Whom shall we praise?” The hymn of course asseverates his existence. [↑]
[14] Cp. Rig-Veda, i, 164, 46; x, 90 (cited by Ghosa, pp. 191, 198); viii, 10 (cited by Müller, Natural Religion, pp. 227–29); and x, 82, 121, 129 (cited by Romesh Chunder Dutt, Hist. of Civ. in Anc. India, ed. 1893, i, 95–97); Muir, Sanskrit Texts, v, 353 sq.; Tiele, Outlines, p. 125; Weber, Hist. of Ind. Lit., Eng. trans., p. 5; Max Müller, Hibbert Lectures, ed. 1880, pp. 298–304, 310, 315; Phys. Relig., p. 187; Barth, Religions of India, Eng. trans., p. 8; Tylor, Primitive Culture, ii, 354. [↑]
[15] Barth, Religions of India, pp. 26, 31, citing Rig-Veda, v, 3, 1; i, 164, 46; viii, 68, 2. The phrase as to Agni is common in the Brâhmanas, but is not yet so in the Vedas. The second text cited is rendered by Müller: “That which is one the sages speak of in many ways—they call it Agni, Yama, Mâtarisvan” (Selected Essays, 1881, ii, 240). [↑]
[16] Colebrooke’s Miscellaneous Essays, ed. 1873, i, 375–76. Weber (Ind. Lit., pp. 27, 137, 236, 284–85) has advanced the view that the adherents of this doctrine, who gradually became stigmatized as heretics, were the founders or beginners of Buddhism. But the view that the universe is a self-existent totality appears to enter into the Brahmans’ Sankhya teaching, which is midway between the popular Nyaya system and the esoteric Vedânta (Ballantyne, Christianity Contrasted with Hindu Philosophy, 1859, pp. xviii, 59, 61). As to the connection between the Sankhya system and Buddhism, see Oldenberg, Der Buddha, sein Leben, seine Lehre, seine Gemeinde, 3te Aufl., Excurs, pp. 443. [↑]
[17] H. H. Wilson, Works, 1862–71, ii, 346. [↑]
[18] Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., p. 236. [↑]
[19] Ballantyne, pp. 58, 61; Major Jacob, Manual of Hindu Pantheism, 1881, p. 13. [↑]
[20] Cp. Max Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, ed. 1880, i, 228–232, and Banerjea’s Dialogues on the Hindu Philosophy, p. 73, cited by Major Jacob, Hindu Pantheism, p. 13. [↑]
[21] Jacob, as cited, p. 3. [↑]
[22] Max Müller, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 340–41. Cp. Barth, Religions of India, p. 81. [↑]
[23] Müller, Hibbert Lectures, p. 139. [↑]
[24] Cp. Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., p. 28. [↑]
[26] Max Müller, Hibbert Lectures, p. 139, note, citing Panini, iv, 4, 60. [↑]
[27] Apparently belonging to the later or middle Buddhist period. Müller, Hibbert Lectures, p. 141. [↑]
[28] On these cp. Müller, p. 139, note; Garbe, Philos. of Anc. India, Eng. tr. 2nd ed. Chicago, 1899, p. 25; and Weber, Ind. Lit. p. 246, note, with the very full research of Professor Rhys Davids, Dialogues of the Buddha, 1899, pp. 166–72. [↑]
[29] Müller, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 140–41. Cp. Garbe. p. 28. [↑]
[31] Rhys Davids, Dialogues of the Buddha, p. 171. [↑]
[35] Trans. in English by Cowell and Gough, 1882. [↑]
[36] Garbe, as cited, p. 25. [↑]
[37] See Müller, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 141–42, citing Burnouf. [↑]
[38] Müller, Hibbert Lectures, p. 310. [↑]
[39] Bk. I, Stories ii, 7, 8, 16; vii. 180. [↑]
[40] Bk. I, 11, 40; St. ii, 32. [↑]
[42] Major Jacob, as cited, preface. [↑]
[43] Müller, Psychol. Relig., pp. 95, 97, 126; Lect. on the Vedânta Philos., 1894, p. 32. [↑]
[44] Chunder Dutt, Hist. of Civ. in Anc. India, as cited, i, 112–13. [↑]
[45] Rhys Davids, trans. of Dialogues of the Buddha, p. 166. Cp. his Buddhism, p. 143, as to Buddhist censures of an extravagant skepticism which denied every religious theory. In one of the Dialogues (ii, 25, p. 74) a contemporary sophist is cited as flatly denying a future state. Mr. Lillie, however (Buddhism in Christendom, 1887, p. 187), contends as against Professor Rhys Davids that the Upanishads were only “whispered to pupils who had gone through a severe probation.” [↑]
[46] Prof. Weber (Hist. Ind. Lit., p. 4) says the peoples of the Punjaub never at all submitted to the Brahmanical rule and caste system. But the subject natives there must at the outset have been treated as an inferior order. Cp. Tiele, Outlines, p. 120 and refs.; and Rhys Davids, Buddhism, p. 23. [↑]
[47] Cp. Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., pp. 236, 284–85; Max Müller, Chips, i, 228–32; Kuenen, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 258–64; and the general discussion of the problem in the author’s Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. pp. 239–63. [↑]
[48] Brahmanism had itself been by this time influenced by aboriginal elements, even to the extent of affecting its language. Weber, as cited, p. 177. Cp. Müller, Anthrop. Relig., p. 164. [↑]
[49] Major Jacob, as cited, p. 12. [↑]
[50] I.e., “the enlightened,” a title given to sages in general. Weber, p. 284. [↑]
[51] Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., pp. 179, 299; Müller, Natural Religion, p. 299. [↑]
[52] See Senart, Essai sur la légende de Buddha, 2e édit., p. 297 ff. [↑]
[53] Cp. Weber, pp. 286–87, 303. [↑]
[54] See Weber, pp. 301, 307; also Rhys Davids, Buddhism, pp. 43, 83, etc. [↑]
[55] Tiele, Outlines, p. 117. [↑]
[56] Cp. Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., pp. 27, 284–87; Max Müller, Natural Religion, p. 555; Jacobi, as there cited; Tiele, Outlines, pp. 135–36; Rhys Davids, American Lectures on Buddhism, pp. 115–16; Buddhism, p. 84; and the author’s Pagan Christs, pt. ii, ch. ii, §§ 8–13. [↑]
[57] Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., pp. 4, 39. [↑]
[58] Barth, Religions of India, p. 146. [↑]
[59] Rhys Davids, Buddhism, pp. 35, 79, 99. [↑]
[60] Cp. Pagan Christs, pp. 248–50. [↑]
[61] Rhys Davids, trans. of Dialogues, pp. 188–89; Amer. Lec. on Buddhism, 1896, pp. 127–34; Hibbert Lectures, 1881, p. 109; Buddhism, pp. 95, 98–99. [↑]
[62] Max Müller, Selected Essays, 1881, ii, 295. [↑]
[63] As the context in Professor Müller’s work shows, these phrases are inaccurate. [↑]
[64] Cp. Weber, Ind. Lit., p. 289, note; and Banerjea, Dialogues on the Hindu Philosophy, p. 520, cited by Major Jacob, pp. 29–30. [↑]
[65] See Muir, Sanskrit Texts, iv, 50 (cited by Jacob, pp. 30–31), as to the Brahman view of the licence ascribed to Krishna. And see iii, 32 (cited by Jacob, p. 14), as to a remarkable disparagement of Vedism in the Bhagavat Gita. [↑]
[66] Müller, Selected Essays, ii, 363: H. H. Wilson, as last cited, ii, 368 sq. [↑]
[67] See this brought out in a strikingly dramatic way in Mr. Dennis Hird’s novel, The Believing Bishop. [↑]
[68] Cp. Dr. A. Jeremias, Monotheistische Strömungen innerhalb der Babylonischen Religion, 1904, p. 44—a very candid research. [↑]
[69] The Hammurabi Code, by Chilperic Edwards, 1904, pp. 67, 68, 70 (§§ 240, 249, 266). The invocations of named Gods by Hammurabi at the close of the code, however, suggest that the force of the word was “a God.” Cp. p. 76 with what follows; and see note on p. 93. On this question compare Jeremias, as cited, pp. 39, 43. [↑]
[70] Maspero, Hist. anc. des peup. de l’orient, 4e éd. p. 139; Sayce, Hib. Lect., pp. 121, 213, 215; E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt., i (1884), 161 (§ 133); iii (1901), 167 sq. (§ 103). [↑]
[71] Sayce, pp. 219, 344; Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, Eng. ed. p. 127. [↑]
[72] Jastrow, Religions of Babylonia and Assyria, 1898, p. 318. [↑]
[73] Jastrow, p. 187; Sayce, pp. 128, 267–68. Cp. Kuenen, Religion of Israel, Eng. tr., i, 91; Menzies, History of Religion, 1895, p. 171; Gunkel, Israel und Babylonien, 1903, p. 30; Jeremias, as cited, pp. 5–6. [↑]
[74] Meyer, iii, 168; Jastrow, p. 79; Sayce, p. 331 sq., 367 sq.; Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, p. 112; Jeremias, pp. 7–23. [↑]
[75] Sayce, p. 305. Cp. Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 452. [↑]
[76] Jastrow, p. 190, note, p. 319; Sayce, pp. 191–92, 367; Lenormant, pp. 112, 113, 119, 133; Jeremias, p. 26. [↑]
[77] Tiele, Outlines, p. 78; Sayce, Ancient Empires of the East, pp. 152–53; Rawlinson, Five Great Monarchies, 2nd ed. iii, 13; Maspero, p. 139. [↑]
[78] Strabo, xvi, c. 1, § 6. [↑]
[79] Cp. Rawlinson, Five Great Monarchies, i, 110; iii, 12–13. [↑]
[80] Hibbert Lectures, p. 385. [↑]
[81] Meyer, iii, § 103; Sayce, pp. 192, 345. [↑]
[82] Cp. Jastrow, p. 662; Sayce, p. 78; and Tiele, Hist. Comparée, p. 209. It seems probable that human sacrifice was latterly restricted to the case of criminals. [↑]
[84] Meyer, i, 187, and note. [↑]
[85] Cp. T. G. Pinches, The Old Testament in the Light of the Hist. Records of Assyria and Babylonia, 1902, pp. 161–63. [↑]
[86] Jastrow, pp. 187, 256; Sayce, pp. 316, 320, 322, 327; Meyer, i, 183; Lenormant, p. 110; Jeremias, p. 5. [↑]
[87] Sayce, pp. 326, 341; cp. Jastrow, p. 317. [↑]
[88] Meyer, i, 599; Sayce, Hib. Lect., pp. 85–91; Anc. Emp. of the East, p. 245. [↑]
[91] [Jer. xi, 13], etc. [↑]
[93] Cp. the recent literature on the recovered Code of Hammurabi. [↑]
[96] Cp. Grote, History of Greece, pt. ii, ch. 33 (ed. 1888, iii, 442), note. [↑]
[97] Meyer, Gesch. des Alt., i, 505 (§ 417), 542 (§ 451), 617 (§ 515); Tiele, Outlines, p. 164. [↑]
[99] Cp. Herod. iii, 94, 98; Grote, vol. iii, p. 448. [↑]
[100] Meyer, as cited, i, 505, 530 (§ 439); Tiele, Outlines, pp. 163, 165. [↑]
[101] Meyer, i, 528 (§ 438). [↑]
[102] Darmesteter, The Zendavesta (S. B. E. ser.), vol. i, introd., p. lx (1st ed.). [↑]
[103] Rawlinson, Religions of the Anc. World, p. 105; Meyer, §§ 417, 450–51. [↑]
[104] Meyer, i, 507 (§ 418). [↑]
[105] Cp. Meyer, i, 506–508; Renan, as cited by him, p. 508; Darmesteter, as cited, cc. iv-ix, 2nd ed.; Tiele, Outlines, p. 165. [↑]
[106] Meyer, i, 520 (§ 428). [↑]
[107] Meyer, i, 524 (§ 433); Tiele, Outlines, p. 178; Darmesteter, Ormazd et Ahriman, 1877, pp. 7–18. [↑]
[108] Meyer, i, § 450 (p. 541). [↑]
[109] Tiele, Outlines, p. 167. Cp. Lenormant (Chaldean Magic, p. 229), who attributes the heresy to immoral Median Magi; and Spiegel (Avesta, 1852, i, 271), who considers it a derivation from Babylon. [↑]
[110] Le Page Renouf, Hibbert Lectures on Relig. of Anc. Egypt, 2nd ed. p. 92; Wiedemann, Religion of the Ancient Egyptians, Eng. tr. 1897, p. 109. Cp. p. 260. Renouf (pp. 93–103) supplies an interesting analysis. [↑]
[111] Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, 83; Wiedemann, as cited, p. 103 sq. [↑]
[112] Cp. Major Glyn Leonard, The Lower Niger and its Tribes, 1906, pp. 354, 417, 433. [↑]
[113] Wiedemann, as cited, p. 136. [↑]
[114] Meyer, p. 81 (§ 66); Tiele, Hist. of the Egypt. Relig. Eng. tr., pp. 119, 154. [↑]
[115] Le Page Renouf, Hibbert Lectures, 2nd ed. p. 240. [↑]
[116] Meyer, Geschichte des Alten Egyptens, in Oncken’s series, 1877, B. iii, Kap. 3, p. 249; Gesch. des Alt. i. 109; Tiele, Egypt. Relig. pp. 149, 151, 157; Maspero, Hist. anc. des peuples de l’orient, 4é ed., pp. 278–80; Le Page Renouf, as cited, pp. 215–30; Wiedemann, pp. 12, 13, 301; Erman, Handbook of Egyptian Religion, Eng. tr. 1907, p. 57. [↑]
[118] Tiele, Egypt. Rel. pp. 153, 155, 156. [↑]
[120] Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der alten Aegypter, 1884; 1 Hälfte, pp. 90–91; Kuenen, Religion of Israel, Eng. trans. i, 395–97; Tiele, pp. 226–30; Erman, pp. 71, 103–105. [↑]
[121] Cp. Wiedemann, p. 302. [↑]
[122] Tiele, pp. 114, 118, 154. Cp. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, i, 101–102 (§ 85). Wiedemann, p. 260. [↑]
[123] Dr. Wallis Budge, Egyptian Magic, 1899, end. [↑]
[124] Tiele, p. 157. Cp. p. 217. [↑]
[125] Cp. Maspero, as cited, pp. 274–76. [↑]
[128] Von Bissing’s spelling. [↑]
[129] De Garis Davies, The Tombs of Amarna. [↑]
[130] Maspero (Hist. anc. des peuples de l’orient, ed. 1905, p. 251) says he respected also Osiris and Horus. [↑]
[131] Brugsch, Egypt under the Pharaohs, ed. 1891, p. 216. Maspero (as cited, p. 250) recognizes no such revolt. [↑]
[132] Maspero, Hist. anc. de l’orient, 7e éd. pp. 248–54; Brugsch, Hist. of Egypt under the Pharaohs, Eng. trans. ed. 1891, ch. x; Meyer, Geschichte des alten Aegyptens, B. iii, Kap. 4, 5; Gesch. des Alterthums, i, 271–74; Tiele, pp. 161–65; Flinders Petrie, History of Egypt, iii (1905), 10; Wiedemann, pp. 35–39; Erman, pp. 61–70; L. W. King and H. H. Hall, Egypt and Western Asia in the Light of Recent Discoveries, 1907, pp. 383–87; F. W. von Bissing, Geschichte Aegyptens in Umriss, 1904, pp. 52–53. [↑]
[133] Tiele, p. 144; Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, 135. [↑]
[134] “We do not find magic predominant [in the tales] until the Ptolemaic age. At that time the physical magic of the early times reappears in full force” (Petrie, Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt, 1898, p. 29. Cp. Maspero, p. 286; Budge, Egyptian Magic, pp. 64, 233). [↑]
[135] Petrie, Hist. iii, 174–75, 180. [↑]
[136] Tiele, pp. 180–82; Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, 140–43. [↑]
[137] Tiele, pp. 184–85, 196, 217. [↑]
[138] Herodotos, ii, 48, 60–64, etc. Cp. Maspero, p. 286. [↑]
[139] “The Osiride and Cosmic Gods rose in importance as time went on, while the Abstract Gods continually sank on the whole. This agrees with the general idea that the imported Gods have to yield their position gradually to the older and more deeply-rooted faiths” (Petrie, as last cited, p. 95). [↑]
[140] The familiar narrative of Herodotos is put in doubt by the monuments. Sayce, Ancient Empires, p. 246. But cp. Meyer, i, 611 (§ 508). [↑]
[142] See figures 209, 212, 221, 235, 242, 249, 250, in Sharpe’s Hist. of Egypt, 7th ed. [↑]
[143] Cp. Sharpe, ii, 287–95; Budge, Egyptian Magic, p. 64. [↑]
[144] Compare the orthodox view of Bishop Westcott, Essays in the History of Religious Thought in the West, 1891, pp. 197–200. [↑]
[145] These fights had not ceased even in the time of Julian (Sharpe, ii, 280). Cp. Juvenal, Sat. xv, 33 sq. [↑]
[146] Metamorphoses, B., xi. [↑]
[147] Cp. Lane, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, passim. [↑]
[148] Cp. Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, 232–33. [↑]
[150] Put by Canon Rawlinson, History of Phoenicia, 1889, p. 321. [↑]
[151] As to the universality of this tendency, see Meyer, ii, 97. [↑]
[152] Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, i, 251, § 209; Tiele, Outlines, p. 84; Histoire comparée des anciennes religions, Fr. tr. pp. 320–21. [↑]
[153] Rawlinson, Phoenicia, p. 340; Sayce, Anc. Emp. p. 204; Menzies, Hist. of Relig. p. 168. [↑]
[154] Præparatio Evangelica, B. i, c. 9–10. [↑]
[156] Cp. Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, p. 159, as to Persian methods of the same kind. [↑]
[158] E. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, ii, 104, 105. [↑]
[159] As to Greek instances, cp. Bury, Hist. of Greece, ed. 1906, pp. 53, 55, 65, 92, 104; and as to Roman, see Ettore Pais, Ancient Legends of Roman History, Eng. trans. 1906, ch. x, where it is shown that Virginia and Lucretia are primarily ancient Latin divinities; and (ch. vii) that both Numa and Servius Tullius are probably in the same case, Servius Rex being in all likelihood the servus rex Nemorensis of the Arician grove, round whom turns the research of Dr. J. G. Frazer’s Golden Bough; while tullius is an old Latin word for a spring. See also ch. iv as to Acca Larentia, another Goddess reduced by the historians to the status of a hetaira, as was Flora. Horatius Cocles (id. p. 157) is also a God reduced to a hero. [↑]
[160] So Sayce, Ancient Empires, p. 204. [↑]
[161] Sayce, Ancient Empires, p. 202. [↑]
[162] Legge, Religions of China, 1880, pp. 11, 16; Douglas, Confucianism and Taouism, 1879, pp. 12, 82. [↑]
[163] Menzies, History of Religion, p. 158. [↑]
[164] Legge, pp. 12, 19, 23, 25, 26; Tiele, Outlines, p. 27; Douglas, p. 79. [↑]
[165] Legge, Religions of China, p. 142. [↑]
[166] See the citations made by Legge, p. 5. [↑]
[167] Id. p. 139; cp. Menzies, p. 109. [↑]
[168] Legge, p. 140; cp. p. 117; Douglas, p. 81. [↑]
[169] Legge, Religions, p. 117; Life and Teachings of Confucius, 4th ed. p. 101; Douglas, p. 68; Tiele, Outlines, p. 29. [↑]
[170] Tiele, p. 31; Legge, Religions, p. 143. [↑]
[171] Tiele, pp. 31–32; Douglas, pp. 68, 84. But cp. Legge, Religions, pp. 123, 127. [↑]
[172] Legge, Life and Teachings, pp. 100–101. [↑]
[173] Douglas, pp. 179, 184. [↑]
[174] See the author’s Pagan Christs, pp. 214–22. [↑]
[175] Pauthier, Chine Moderne, p. 351. There is a tradition that Lao-Tsze took his doctrine from an ancient sage who flourished before 1120 B.C.; and he himself (Tau Tĕh King, trans. by Chalmers, The Speculations of Lao-Tsze, 1868, ch. 41) cites doctrine as to Tau from “those who have spoken (before me).” Cp. cc. 22, 41, 62, 65, 70. [↑]
[176] Cp. E. J. Simcox, Primitive Civilizations, 1894, ii, 18. [↑]
[177] Pauthier, p. 358; Chalmers, pp. 14, 37. [↑]
[178] Legge, Religions, p. 137. [↑]
[179] Tau Tĕh King, as cited, pp. 38. 49, ch. 49, 63; Pauthier, p. 358; Legge, p. 223. [↑]
[180] Analects, xxv, 36; Legge, Religions, p. 143; Life and Teachings, p. 113; Douglas, p. 144. [↑]
[181] Legge, Religions, p. 164. We do find, however, an occasional allusion to deity, as in the phrase “the Great Architect” (Chalmers’ trans. 1868. ch. lxxiv, p. 57), and “Heaven” is spoken of in a somewhat personalized sense. Still, Mr. Chalmers complains (p. xv) that Lao-Tsze did not recognize a personal God, but put “an indefinite, impersonal, and unconscious Tau” above all things (ch. iv). [↑]
[182] F. H. Balfour, Art. “A Philosopher who Never Lived,” in Leaves from my Chinese Scrap-book, 1887, p. 83 sq. [↑]
[185] Legge, Religions of China, p. 147; Tiele, Outlines, p. 33. [↑]
[186] Legge, Life and Works of Mencius, 1875, pp. 29, 50, 77, etc. [↑]
[188] Legge, Life and Works of Mencius, pp. 44, 47, 56, 57, etc. [↑]
[189] Miss Simcox, Primitive Civilizations, ii, 36–37, following Chavannes. [↑]
[190] Legge’s Mencius, p. 49; cp. p. 48. [↑]
[191] Cp. Legge’s Mencius, pp. 47, 131; Chalmers’ Lao-Tsze, pp. 23, 28, 53, 58 (chs. xxx, xxxi, xxxvi, lxvii, lxxiv); Douglas, Taouism, chs. ii, iii. [↑]
[192] Legge, Religions of China, p. 147. The ruler in question seems to have been of non-Chinese descent. E. H. Parker, China, 1901, p. 18. [↑]
[193] Legge, Religions of China, p. 159. [↑]
[198] Tiele, p. 35; Douglas, p. 287. Taouism, however, has a rather noteworthy ethical code. See Douglas, ch. vi. It has to be noted that the translations of the Tâo Têh King have varied to a disquieting degree. Cp. Drews, Gesch. des Monismus, p. 121. [↑]
[199] Details are given in the author’s Pagan Christs, pt. iv. [↑]
[200] Nadaillac (L’Amérique préhistorique, 1883, pp. 273–84) gives them little of this credit, pronouncing them at once cruel and degenerate. He credits them, however, with being the first makers of roads and aqueducts in Central America, and cites the record of their free public hospitals, maintained by the sacerdotal kings. Prescott, on the other hand, overstated the bloodlessness of their religion (Conquest of Mexico, Kirk’s ed. 1890, p. 41 and ed. note). [↑]
[201] Réville, Hibbert Lectures, On the Native Religions of Mexico and Peru, 1884, pp. 62–67. [↑]
[202] J. G. Müller, Geschichte der Amerikanischen Urreligionen, ed. 1867, pp. 577–90; H. H. Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific States, iii, 279. (Passage cited in author’s Pagan Christs, pp. 402–403; where is also noted Dr. Tylor’s early view, discarded later, that Quetzalcoatl was a real personage.) [↑]
[203] Cp. Prescott, as cited. [↑]
[205] J. G. Müller, as cited, pp. 473–74; Réville, p. 46. Dr. Réville speaks of the worship of the unifying deity as pretty much “effaced” by that of the lower Gods. It seems rather to have been a priestly effort to syncretize these. Still, such an effacement did take place, as we have seen, in Central Asia in ancient times, after a syncretic idea had been reached (above, p. 45). As to the alleged monotheism of King Netzahuatl (or Netzahualcoyotl), of Tezcuco, mentioned above, p. 39, see Lang, Making of Religion, p. 270, note, and p. 282; Prescott, Conquest of Mexico, as cited, p. 92; and J. G. Müller, as cited, pp. 473–74, 480. [↑]
[206] As to the capabilities of the Aztec language, see Bancroft, Native Races, ii, 727–28 (quoted in Pagan Christs, p. 416, note). [↑]
[207] Refs. above, p. 41. Cp. Lang, Making of Religion, p. 270, note, and p. 282; J. G. Müller, as cited, pp. 473–74; and Nadaillac, as cited, p. 289. [↑]
[208] The Christianized descendant of the Tezcucan kings, Ixtilxochitl, who wrote their history, adds the words, “Cause of Causes”—a very unlikely formula in the place and circumstances. [↑]
[209] Above, p. 41. Cp. Lang, as last cited, pp. 263, 282. [↑]
[210] Cp. Kirk’s ed. of Prescott’s Conquest of Peru, 1889, p. 44; Réville, p. 189–90; Lang, as cited below. [↑]
[211] Réville, p. 152, citing Garcilasso. See same page for a story of resistance to the invention of an alphabet. [↑]
[212] Réville, p. 50. citing Torquemada, 1. viii, c. 20. end. [↑]
[213] History of the Affairs of New Spain, French trans. 1880, 1. vi, ch. 7, pp. 342–43. Cp. Prescott, Conquest of Mexico, Kirk’s ed. pp. 31, 33. [↑]
[215] “The priest says, ‘the spirit is hungry.’ the fact being that he himself is hungry. He advises the killing of an animal” (Max Müller, Anthropological Religion, p. 307). [↑]
[216] On the general tendency cp. Chantepie de la Saussaye, Manual of the Science of Religion, pp. 77–84. [↑]
[217] In the windows of the shop of the S. P. C. K., in London, may be often seen large displays of reproduced Madonna-pictures, by Catholic artists, at popular prices. [↑]
Chapter IV
RELATIVE FREETHOUGHT IN ISRAEL
The modern critical analysis of the Hebrew Sacred Books has made it sufficiently clear that in Jewish as in all other ancient history progress in religion was by way of evolving an ethical and sole deity out of normal primitive polytheism.[1] What was special to the Hebrews was the set of social conditions under which the evolution took place. Through these conditions it was that the relative freethought which rejected normal polytheism was so far favoured as to lead to a pronounced monotheistic cultus, though not to a philosophic monotheism.