III.
At the point we have reached, the religious feeling has attained the height of its development, and can henceforth only decline, so that the third period need not detain us long. It may be summed up in the following formula: an ever-growing predominance of the intellectual (rational) element, a gradual effacement of the emotional element as it tends to approximate to the intellectual feelings and to come under that category.
When the march of thought towards unity has reached its limit in pure monotheism, the work of theologians and especially of metaphysicians tends to refine the conception of divinity, assumed as First Cause, or moral ideal, or both at once, but always as an inaccessible ideal, visible only in occasional glimpses. The logical, necessary, inevitable consequence is the weakening of the emotional state. In fact, we may lay down the following principle:—
From the perception to the image, and from the image to the concept, the concomitant emotional element keeps on diminishing, other things being equal; for we must take into account differences of temperament and individual variations. This is only a summary way of stating what I have so often said in Part I.: emotional states, beyond all others, depend on physiological (visceral, motor, and vaso-motor) conditions. Now it is clear that perception is the operation which most rigorously demands complex organic conditions. Among images or representations there are two categories: the vivid and intense imagination approximates, by its hallucinatory tendency, to the percept; while the cold and dull imagination, which is a bare outline of things, approaches the nature of a concept. Finally, the pure concept, reduced almost entirely to a sign, a substitute for reality, is as much detached from organic conditions as it is possible for a psychic state to be; it requires a minimum of physiology. In consequence, emotion, attacked at its source, flows very scantily; and of the religious feeling properly so called there remains only a vague respect for the unknowable—for the x—the last survival of fear and a certain attraction towards the ideal which is the last remnant of the love dominant during the second period.
We might say in clearer and simpler terms that religion tends to become a religious philosophy, which is an entirely different thing, for each corresponds to a distinct psychological condition, one being a theoretic construction of argumentative reason, the other the living work of a group of persons or an inspired great man, involving the whole man, his thoughts and feelings. This distinction is extremely important and throws light on our subject.
It would be easy to show that the great religions, at the height of their development, become transmuted into a subtle metaphysic, accessible to philosophers only. For the sake of impartiality, and not to shock any one, let us place ourselves in a remote period. In India, the religion which begins with the naturalism of the Vedas is organised, becomes social and moral with Brahmanism, and attains a transcendental ideality in the Bhâgavad-Gitâ. Take the following passage, chosen at random among a hundred similar ones:—"I am [Krishna is speaking] incomprehensible in form, subtler than the subtlest of atoms. I am the light of the sun and moon; beyond the darkness I am the brightness of flame, the rays of everything that shines, sound in the ether, perfume on the earth, the eternal seed of all that exists, the life of everything. As wisdom, I live in the hearts of all. I am the goodness of the good, I am the beginning, the middle and the end, eternity of time, the death and birth of all."
Is this religion, or metaphysics, or rather a beautiful philosophical poem, which moves us by the splendour of its images? For such a doctrine to become a real religion it must be concreted and condensed. That we may not, however, seem to cavil and dispute about words, or come to an arbitrary decision that the one thing is a religion and the other a religious philosophy, we may state the question in an objective form. As soon as religious thought ceases to have a worship or a ritual, and indeed finds itself incompatible with such, it is a philosophical doctrine. Stripped of all external and collective character, of all social form, it ceases to be a religion, and becomes an individual and speculative belief. Such is the deism of the eighteenth century, with all analogous conceptions, where feeling is only present in a very slight, almost imperceptible, degree.
Let us note, however, that in these periods of intellectual refinement, feeling does not lose its rights: it has its revenge in mysticism. In all great religions which have reached their highest point, the antagonism between the two elements of belief, the rational and the emotional, shows itself in the opposition between dogmatists and mystics. History is full of their mutual antipathy: in Christianity we find it, from the Gnostics, through the schools of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, to the “pure love” of the seventeenth century and later. The same may be said of other religions: Islam, in spite of its dry monotheism and the poverty of its ritual, has not escaped the universal law; it has had, and still has, its mystical sects. When we study them we find that, for all the differences of time, place, race and belief, the mystics, caring little for rigorous dogmatism, all show a singularly strong family likeness to each other. In this case it is argument which divides and feeling which unites.
We have still to examine one question relating to the emotional element alone: is religious emotion a complete emotion? It is worth while lingering over this, since many writers (not to mention those who omit it altogether) set it down as a variety of the intellectual feelings—i.e., of the coldest form of emotional life.
A complete emotion, as we know, includes, besides the purely psychic state, a somatic resonance, a vibration of the organism, consisting (a) of changes in the circulation, the respiration, and the functions in general; (b) of movements, gestures and actions which constitute its proper mode of expression. Without these, there is merely an intellectual state. Does religious emotion fulfil these two conditions?
(a.) It has its physiological accompaniment; it penetrates as far into the organism as any other. Since by its very nature it contains, though in varying proportion, two elements, depression and exaltation, let us very briefly survey their physiological relations.
Depression is related to fear and under its acute forms has been confounded with it. Does not the worshipper entering a venerated sanctuary show all the symptoms of pallor, trembling, cold sweat, inability to speak—all that the ancients so justly called sacer horror? Physical and mental weakness makes us religious through consciousness of human frailty. Austerities, macerations—in short, the asceticism which is an institution in the so-called pessimistic religions—though springing from a multitude of causes which need not here be inquired into, prove at least that the physiological factor is not regarded as indifferent. The Hindoo ascetics of the early ages were able, by their insensate mortification, to dethrone the gods and take their places—gods in their turn. The widespread belief that austerities contribute to salvation is a very much modified form of this.
Exaltation is related to love and tends to union, to possession. The history of all ages abounds in physiological procedures made use of for the artificial production of enthusiasm in the etymological sense of the word, which implies having the deity within one’s self.
There are inferior forms: the mechanical exaltation produced by dancing, or by the rhythmical music of primitive tribes, which excites them and places them in a favourable mental attitude for inspiration. Toxic exaltation: soma, wine, the Dionysiacs, the Mænads. The sanguinary means so widespread in the cults of Asia Minor: the Bona Dea and Atys, the Corybantes, the Galli, who mutilated and gashed themselves with sword strokes; in the Middle Ages, the Flagellants; and in our own day, Fakirs, dervishes, etc.
There are higher, less materialistic forms: the collective excitement of pilgrimages and revivals, where the emotion of each individual is increased by that of the rest; the artificial means, known from antiquity, of attaining ecstasy, i.e., full possession; the frequent confusion, which has so often excited the wrath of theologians, between the language of carnal and that of mystical love.[[198]]
All these facts are well known, and thousands of others are recorded in history. It is convenient to recall them in order to show that they have their psychological reasons; they are not aberrations, as might seem to be the case at first sight, but the necessary conditions of intense emotion. If it is objected that some of them border on madness, we may reply that every violent passion does the same, and sometimes crosses the border-line.
(b.) The religious sentiment, again, is attached to material conditions by its mode of expression, which is ritual. Ritual practices are not, as many think, purely exterior and artificial, accessory and adventitious; they are a spontaneous creation, originating in the nature of things. Every religion, great or insignificant, is an organism constituted by a fundamental belief attached to percepts, images, or concepts, plus certain secondary notions which are sometimes mutually contradictory, plus an emotional state. All this forms a living whole, which evolves, vegetates, or retrogrades. This organic character distinguishes the positive religions from the purely theoretical and metaphysical conceptions, which are not alive, never have lived, and are nothing but pure speculation. Now, as every animal organism, from the infusoria to man, has its relational life,—i.e., relations with external agents,—so religion, as an organism, has its life of relations with the supernatural and mysterious powers on which man believes himself to be dependent. This life is expressed by rites, which are means of action, methods of establishing a relation.
The history of ritual is a chapter of the expression of the emotions. The only difference is this: emotional expression, in the sense given to the words by Duchenne, Darwin, their successors, and the world in general, has an individualist character, showing fear, anger, love, etc.; while ritual expression has a social character; being the spontaneous product of a collectivity, of a group, which has become fixed and permanent, erected into an institution by the influence of society, and safeguarded by tradition. On this subject I cannot enter into detail; it is sufficient to remind the reader that ritual is psychic in its origin. There have been two principal phases in its development.
During the primitive period, ritual is the immediate and direct expression of the religious sentiment, and bears the stamp of the national character. Among the Greeks, it was graceful and joyous, as is fitting for divinities who are merely superior and happy human beings. Among the early Romans it has an agricultural and family character, is formalist and methodical; the omission of the minutest detail invalidates the sacrifice. The Mexicans immolated human hecatombs to divinities who were intoxicated with blood. Rationalist religions, being half philosophical, have little ritual and a dry liturgy; they resemble persons of phlegmatic temperament, whose gestures are rare and restrained. The religions of the imagination and the heart, on the other hand, manifest themselves by the splendour and exuberance of their ceremonies.
In the second period, we have the passage from the literal to the figurative; ritual becomes symbolism. Since it is a means of expression, a language, it is quite natural that this should be so, and this phase corresponds to that of metaphor in spoken language. Thus the offering of a lock of hair, or a figure made of dough, becomes a substitute for human sacrifice. Having reached this point, ritual can no longer be understood except through its history; but worshippers still use it, without fully knowing its meaning, just as they use metaphors without knowing their derivation, or being able to trace them back to their primary sense. Lastly, there are some rites which are simply survivals, analogous to a frown when we are perplexed, vestiges of certain ways of feeling and acting which have been, but have long ago disappeared.
The religious feeling is therefore a complete emotion, with its train of physiological manifestations, and those writers who have classed it among the intellectual feelings have only considered it under its higher forms, and when it is on the point of extinction. At the period of its fullest development, but rarely under either its primitive or its intellectualised form, the religious feeling may become a passion, yielding to no other in tenacity and violence, which has its own special name: religious fanaticism. It borders on madness without quite crossing the line. This passion would require a psychological monograph to itself; and there is no lack of documents whence to compose one. We may gather from these facts:
1. New proofs of the fundamental independence of the religious and of the moral sentiments. In religious wars, persecution, the torture inflicted on heretics, the murder of the chiefs of the opposite party, are held to be meritorious acts; all which seems inexplicable to persons of calm and deliberate sense. They would be less astonished if they would consider that religious emotion, when it reaches the point of a paroxysm of passion, becomes as uncontrollable as violent love, and, like it, must have satisfaction; that there is the firm belief in a right, superior to human obligations, because of higher origin (a belief attaining its highest degree in theomania, of which we shall speak presently); and that the religious sentiment and the moral sentiment, though having numerous points of contact and moments of fusion, are yet, in their nature, essentially distinct, because answering to two totally distinct tendencies of human nature.
2. We find a proof of the tendency of the religious feeling to unite, group, socialise. Unity of belief creates the religious community, as community of external and internal interests creates the civil community. Both tend to expel dissidents (internal enemies), and to conquer external enemies—in this case, the heathen.
The distinct or vague consciousness of the conditions of a society’s existence, i.e., its instinct of conservation, determines its morality and its way of acting. National religions, therefore, which are the same thing as civil society, proselytise only slightly, or not at all: the Greeks never tried to convert the Persians, neither did the Romans the Gauls. The universal religions (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism) forming societies other than, and outside nationality, and transcending it, have aimed at spiritual conquest, i.e., at their social extension.
IV.
The question whether there exist any tribes completely devoid of all religious belief has been extensively discussed. That there are any such seems doubtful, when we take into account, on the one hand, the reticence of the savage towards strangers with regard to his own feelings and beliefs; and on the other, the scanty psychological equipment of travellers, who frequently understand by religion only a developed and organised cult. The fact, even were it proved, would be but of slight value, since it could only be the case among the very lowest specimens of humanity.[[199]] A question scarcely ever asked is this: Are there individuals (not social groups) utterly without religious feeling? We must eliminate idiots, imbeciles, and the uneducated deaf and dumb; we are speaking of normal men living in some society or other, all of which have a religion. I am distinctly inclined to answer in the affirmative, though I find no decisive observation on this point. The case would be analogous to those of moral blindness already studied, to the absence, if it exists, of all æsthetic feeling; it would denote a lacuna in the emotional life. It should be noted that it is only in this department that such a lacuna can occur. No normal man, living in a society, can have his mind closed to religious ideas, can ignore their existence, their object, their significance; but they may have no hold on him, may remain within his consciousness as a foreign substance, originating no tendency and exciting no emotion; they may be conceived without being felt.
I have already reminded the reader that the religious feeling may become a violent passion; it may even pass this limit, take a chronic form, and enter the region of pathology. For the alienist, religious madness is not a morbid entity, but a symptom; it sometimes exists by itself, but is more often associated with epilepsy, hysteria, and the forms of melancholia. From a psychological point of view, it has to be studied by itself, as a complement to the normal state. Considered thus, from the purely psychological standpoint, its manifestations, though very diverse, may be reduced to a simple classification: the depressive, or asthenic; and the exalted, or sthenic forms.
I. The depressive forms spring up and grow on the soil of melancholia. Their physiological criteria are the symptoms so often described—lowering of the vital functions, and so on. Their emotional criterion is fear in all its varieties, ranging from the simple scruple to panic terror; and the intellectual criterion, the possession by a fixed idea. Religious madness follows a course depending on character, education, environment, epoch, and form of belief. So those who believe in predestination are tortured by the idea of having committed the unpardonable sin. This obsession, frequent among Protestants, is rare among Catholics, who admit the possibility of absolution.[[200]]
One form, which we might call subjective, consists in religious melancholy pure and simple, in which the patient believes himself continually guilty, rejected, damned. In its anxious form it is characterised by scruples about everything, lamentations over imaginary crimes or faults. This state is connected with two primary emotions, both of which have a depressive character: on one side fear, on the other the self-feeling under its negative form of humility and dejection. An unconscious or conscious course of reasoning leads the subject to a feeling of abjectness and self-contempt; he tries to weaken himself, to make himself worthy of pity. Asceticism, though, rightly or wrongly, invoking moral reasons in its own favour, rests on the fundamental desire of depreciating the individual, at least in this life. This appears, even in its simple and mitigated forms, but still more in its extravagances (the monasticism of the fifth century, Simeon Stylites, etc.), in the cases of castration, mutilation, partial destruction, and finally, in the religious suicide of the Hindoos who threw themselves before the car of Jaganath.
A second form, which for want of a better term may be called objective, is demoniac melancholia—the delusion of obsession or possession,—which, formerly superabundant in all religions, has now become rarer.[[201]] In obsession, or external demonomania, the patient is not in the true sense possessed; he hears, sees, feels, smells the spirits who are obstinately determined on his ruin, but he does not feel them within him. In possession, or internal demonomania, they are inside him. There is doubling of the personality, with sensory, visceral, and psychomotor hallucinations, these last consisting of internal voices which the possessed person hears speaking inside him and in spite of himself.
II. The morbid exaltation of the religious feeling is derived from attraction and love, as depression springs from fear. Related to joy, and sometimes to megalomania, it is accompanied by partial or total augmentation of both the physical and psychical life.
Ecstasy is a transitory and comparatively passive form. Seen from without, it resembles catalepsy in the insensibility to external impressions, and suspension of sensory activity. It differs from it on the motor side. The ecstatic has not the “flexibility of wax” and the complete immobility; he can move, walk, speak, and his face can assume any given expression. Seen from within, ecstasy is an intense state of consciousness, of which the recollection remains after awaking, while catalepsy is attended by unconsciousness, or, at least, complete oblivion. Its psychology is simple enough, if, neglecting details, we confine ourselves to the essential conditions. The confessions of ecstatics, which are tolerably numerous, agree in their principal features: (1) restriction of the area of consciousness, with one intense and overmastering representation serving as the pivot and only centre of association; (2) an emotional state—rapture—a form of love in its highest degree, with desire and the pleasure of possession, which, like profane love, only finds its end in complete fusion and unification (ἐνῶσις of the Alexandrians). The declarations of the great mystics, however involved they may be in metaphor, leave us in no doubt on this point;[[202]] and their critics, even theologians, have reproached them with frequently being mistaken in the nature of their love.
A more stable and active form of religious exaltation is theomania—i.e., “a mental state in which the subject believes himself to be God, or at least inspired by Him to reveal His will to men.” To draw a hard and fast line between the founders of religions, the reformers, the promoters of religious orders, and pure theomaniacs, is as difficult as to indicate the precise point at which a violent love becomes madness. We might make use of a practical test, and say that the one has succeeded where the others have failed, but this would be too simple, success and failure depending on a variety of causes. This discussion, moreover, is out of place here. It is sufficient to remark that theomania is, in its psychical characteristics, the complete antithesis to demonomaniac melancholia. Instead of the sorrow of the possessed person with the enemy lodged in his own body, we find an unalterable joy, which can be affected neither by persecution, nor misfortunes, nor tortures. To the feeling of abjectness is opposed the delusion of grandeur. However modest a man may be by nature, or as a result of reflection, he cannot with impunity believe himself chosen by the Deity as His prophet, to speak and act in His name.
The preceding sketch, whence I have purposely eliminated details and observations (of which, as is well known, there is no lack), has but one object—viz., to show that the primary constituents of the religious sentiment may serve as a guide to its pathology, which rests entirely on fear and love. I may add that none among morbid emotions has—and still more, has had—a more marked tendency to rapid propagation in epidemic form: a further proof that, in its nature, it is not so much individual as social.
CHAPTER X.
THE ÆSTHETIC SENTIMENT.
Its origin: the theory of play, and its variants—Æsthetic activity is the play of the creative imagination in its disinterested form. Its instinctive nature—Transition from simple play to æsthetic play: primitive art of pantomimic dancing—Derivation of the arts in motion; of the arts at rest—Why was æsthetic activity evolved?—Art had, in the beginning, a social utility—Evolution of the æsthetic sentiment—Its sociological aspect: progression from the strictly social character towards individualism in the different arts—Its anthropological aspect: progress from strictly human character towards beings and things as a whole—The feeling for nature—The feeling for the sublime only partially belongs to æsthetics—Its evolution: it is not æsthetic in its origin, but becomes so—Why there are not two æsthetic senses—The sense of the comic—Psychology of laughter—It has more than one cause—Theory of superiority. Theory of discord—These correspond to two distinct stages, one of which is foreign to æsthetics—Physiology of laughter. Theory of nervous derivation—Theory of tickling—Pathology. Are there cases of complete æsthetic insensibility? Difficulties and transpositions of the subject—Pathological function of emotion: pessimistic tendencies, megalomania, influence of unconscious activity—Pathological aspects of the creative imagination; its degrees—Reason why the intense image, in artists, does not pass into action; ways in which it is modified—Cause of this deviation; its advantages.
While all the emotions hitherto enumerated have their origin and their raison d’être in the preservation of the individual as an individual, or as a social being, the æsthetic feeling, as we know, differs from the rest by the fact that the activity which produces it, aims, not at the accomplishment of a vital or social function, but at the mere pleasure of exercising itself. The more directly a tendency is connected with life, the more necessary, urgent, and serious it is, and the less it paves the way for the æsthetic feeling, which must always have a surplus to expend. However, its inutility, which is only relative, has been exaggerated; for it tends in some measure to the conservation of the individual and the race, being, and especially having been in the past, a social factor, though an incidental and subordinate one, as we shall see afterwards.
In conformity with the plan adopted, we shall remain strictly within the bounds of psychology, avoiding any excursions into the history or theory of art, except for the purpose of seeking facts and illustrations. We shall thus have to study the origin of æsthetic emotion, the law of its development, and, subsequently, two forms of emotional life, rightly or wrongly, considered as related to it: the sense of the sublime and that of the comic; and we shall conclude by some remarks on its morbid manifestations.