II.
Except the intellectual feelings themselves, no emotional manifestation depends more on the intellectual development than the religious sentiment, because every religion implies some conception of the universe—a cosmology and a system of metaphysics. With the first period we have scarcely passed beyond the stage of imagination; with the second, reflection and generalisation, whose upward progress we are about to follow, make their appearance. The intellectual evolution and the emotional evolution must each be studied in turn during this second stage.
I. Intellectual Evolution.—We shall find it useful, moreover, to divide the study of the intellectual element into two questions: (1) the conception of a cosmic order, at first physical, afterwards moral; (2) the progressive march of generalisation from an almost unlimited multiplicity up to unity. These two processes have not always coincided or kept pace with one another.
(1) We have seen that, for primitive man, everything is alive, full of arbitrary caprices, desires, intentions, and especially mysteries, because everything is unforeseen: it is the reign of universal contingency. The formula, “everything is alive,” is, however, too absolute; it only suits those things which were seen to move and change—i.e., the majority, not the totality of things. It seems as if the absence of motion, stability, fixity, the want of reaction, had been a sort of revelation to a simple mind. Perhaps it was through the spectacle of the fixity of things that the notion of order or law made its very humble entry into the world. However that may be, it is certain that the depersonification of nature began early to mark the origin of science. In our present state of culture we find a difficulty in representing to ourselves a state of mind in which the idea of fixity in natural phenomena is almost nil; yet such a state of mind has existed, and there is no want of documents to prove it. The expression, “the new moon,” was not at first a metaphor: men wondered if the sun would always continue his course; the Mexicans anxiously awaited his new birth every fifty years; eclipses seemed to happen at random, and caused great terror, etc.[[193]] Gradually the spirit of observation and reflection arrived at constant relations, and introduced into the conception of Nature the ideas of order and regularity, diminishing in so far the domain of chance and contingency. This notion of a cosmic order has influenced religious conceptions; the government of the physical world was attributed to the gods; they are its regulators; each has his department where he is supreme. The co-existence of two opposite principles has been remarked in the religion of several nations in this period of their development: necessity being personified in an abstract, mysterious, inaccessible deity (Rita among the Aryans, Ma with the Egyptians, Tao with the Chinese, Moira or Nomos with the Greeks, etc.[[194]]); while contingency, or rather limited arbitrary power, was personified in more human gods having their legends, acting within their own special sphere, as, for instance, the gods of Greece. The latter are also sometimes divided into two categories, which is the first step towards simplification, one kind bestowing physical well-being—health, prosperity, riches; the other inflicting physical ills—disease, famine, tempest, shipwreck.
The notion of the cosmic order led to that of a moral order; the gods have first the physical government, in a later age the ethical government of the universe. The conception of higher powers, invested with moral attributes, has been, as we shall afterwards see, an important stage in the evolution of the religious sentiment. The very ancient opinion, still prevalent among many believers, that the crimes of men occasion epidemics, unchain the elements, cause floods and earthquakes, shows that the human mind, rightly or wrongly, has supposed an analogy between all the forms of order in the universe. Hence also the change of the physical dualism above mentioned into a moral dualism; the genii of light and darkness become respectively moral or immoral gods, good or bad counsellors, saviours or tempters; and in this period a faith in the superiority and definitive triumph of the good is firmly established. In short, the gods have as attributes first power, then intelligence, and lastly morality.
(2) Let us now see the part played by increasing generalisation in the constitution of religious ideas.
When we wish to study the ascending degrees of generalisation, not in abstracto, but according to facts and documents, we may take as our guide the evolution of languages, or, better still, the progress of the scientific spirit (as, for instance, by following the methods of classification used in zoology, from antiquity up to the present day); we might also have recourse to the development of religion, for this is the same mental process applied to a different matter. It is sufficient to indicate the various steps in a very cursory manner.
It is a well known fact that the various races of mankind differ greatly in their powers of abstraction and generalisation; some can scarcely get beyond the concrete, while others disport themselves, easily and swiftly, in the region of the abstract. This difference of aptitude is expressed in their religions. Many peoples have never passed beyond polydemonism—i.e., the cult of individual genii; in other words, the realm of the concrete. Not to speak of savages, such was the religion of the ancient Chinese empire (Tiele); such the innumerable genii in the primitive religion of the Romans—a people not greatly inclined to abstractions.
Certain tribes have, even at the present day, words to designate every water-course in their country, but no general term for a river. To have found such a one is a step in progress. It is the same in the region of religious thought: by an analogous progress the spirit of each tree is subordinated to the deity of the forest, the various river-spirits to a river-god, etc. For a number of particular divinities is substituted one specific and pre-eminent divinity.
At a higher stage the mind seizes more remote resemblances and constitutes one god for water, one for fire, one for the earth, so that the spirits of the waters, the sky, and the earth are severally grouped under the dominion of one power, known in Greece as Zeus, Poseidon, or Hestia.
This generalising process which has taken place with regard to natural phenomena also goes on in the social order. There have been, successively, gods of clans, tribes, nations. We know how long religions—even complex and highly organised ones—have remained merely national: the god of a nation is its protector and guardian—watches over it and over nothing else; but his existence does not exclude that of other gods who are lords of other nations. The transition to the universal, extra-national religions was brought about by means of conquest and annexation, but also, and more particularly, by philosophical speculation.
At the point we have reached there are divine hierarchies, analogous, on one hand, to the ideal hierarchy of individuals, species, genera, on the other to the hierarchies of human society: they are conceived and constituted according to the human type. The anarchy of Vedic India is reflected in the mythology of the Vedas, the feudality of Egypt in its religion, Zeus resembles Agamemnon, the Peruvian Inca is descended from the sun, and applies to his empire the government of the solar deity; and “by an optical illusion, human society seems to be a copy of the Divine State.”[[195]]
In its movement towards absolute unity, the human mind has still some stages to pass through before reaching the term. It conceives of a divinity far superior to the rest, who, however, act under him (Jupiter optimus maximus), and whom he does not suppress. This is “monolatry” but not monotheism. We still find accommodations and compromises in the conceptions of triads (trinities) and dyads (associations of masculine and feminine divinities). In fact, pure monotheism is a conquest of the metaphysical spirit, which traces back the series of secondary causes to discover the first cause, rather than an intuition of popular consciousness.
This survey of ascending generalisation is somewhat schematic, and has been presented as an ideal restoration, though all its elements have been taken from reality. Some nations have attained the first stages only; others have, with much difficulty, passed beyond them; others have passed through several at a bound. Perhaps the evolution of religious ideas has not been in any two cases identical.
II. Emotional Evolution.—It has been justly said that religious feeling consists of two scales. One, in the key of fear, is composed of painful and depressive states: terror, fright, fear, veneration, respect, are its principal notes. The other, in the key of tender emotion, is composed of pleasurable and expansive states: admiration, confidence, love, ecstasy. One expresses a feeling of dependence; the other of attraction, going even as far as reciprocal union.
One of the first changes produced during this period of evolution is the predominance of the second scale; in the combination of two elementary emotions the proportional relation has changed, whence a change in the nature of the resultant emotion. We have seen this in the progressive effacement of the worship of the evil gods, in the suppression of sanguinary sacrifices, first in the case of men, then in that of animals; in the tendency to substitute for them simple acts of homage.
A second change, and one of especial importance, consists in the coalescence of the religious and the moral sentiment, which contract a union so close that to many people it seems necessary and indissoluble. We have seen that this is not the case, and that there are religions without morality. Primarily, the religious feeling is a special emotional form, the moral feeling is another form. There are, first of all, the purely naturalistic religions, afterwards the moral religions. A mass of facts demonstrate that, in the beginning, the religious feeling is not only quite a stranger to morality, but even in conflict with it. We know the bitter criticisms directed by the Greek philosophers against the reigning religion, bearing, as it did, the impress of myths springing from a primitive naturalism and understood neither by orthodox believers nor by the philosophers themselves. Contemporary criminologists have shown that prostitutes and even ferocious criminals are most assiduous in their devotional practices. This is because the religious feeling, in its origin and taken by itself, is fundamentally selfish[[196]], being nothing else but anxiety for one’s individual salvation. This superposition of the moral sentiment has taken place in all the great religions—i.e., all those which have had a complete evolution: in Brahmanism and especially in Buddhism when compared with the Vedic period, in the prophets of Israel, even among the Greeks, in the mysteries, etc. People end by believing that a right state of mind is the best of offerings.
For most religions, the supreme question is that of human destiny. Its history, having traversed two periods, the one naturalistic, the other moral, shows once more that the religious and the moral sentiment are, in their origin, two totally distinct feelings.
During the first period, we find no idea of retribution according to men’s works. The life after death is a continuation or copy of the earthly life, sometimes resembling it exactly, sometimes better,—most often worse. We know the complaint of Achilles, in the Odyssey (xi), where Homer has left us a vivid picture of this primitive belief; men remain slaves, masters, chiefs, or kings, as they were during life. Nay, certain tribes, projecting their aristocratic prejudices into the other world, believed that the souls of chiefs alone were immortal.
During the second period there arises a belief in a preliminary judgment on men’s actions, decisive of their future destiny. The conceptions of this future life are various: temporary or eternal penalties and rewards, transmigration upwards or downwards, total liberation (Nirvana), etc., but all resting on a moral idea. This notion appears at an early age among the Egyptians, in the judgment of Osiris and the weighing of the souls. In the “Book of the Dead,” of which a copy was placed in the tomb with every mummy, the defunct addresses to the god a long enumeration of the good deeds he has done and the faults he has not committed; it is remarkable that he speaks, not of his oblations, but of his virtues.[[197]]