The human species

by A. de Quatrefages

This population is only a portion of the Bechuana Kaffir race. Now, thanks to Livingstone, M. Cazalis, and others, we have, upon the subject of the religious beliefs of these tribes in general, details which are very minute and of incontestable authenticity. The Basutos have their legends, their cosmogony, and their rudimentary mythology. They admit the existence of a being who destroys by thunder, they give to him the name of Morena, literally, Intelligent Being who is above, they have, moreover, Molimos, a kind of household gods, to whom they offer prayers and sacrifices, and in whose honour they purify themselves; they believe in another life, in another world situated in the centre of the earth, which they call the abyss which is never filled. The Bechuanas believe so strongly in ghosts that the fierce Dingan dare not go out in the evening, for fear of meeting the spectre of Chaka, whom he had assassinated.

IV. The result of my investigations is exactly the opposite of that to which Sir John Lubbock and M. Saint-Hilaire have arrived. Obliged, in my course of instruction, to review all human races, I have sought atheism in the lowest as well as in the highest. I have nowhere met with it, except in individuals, or in more or less limited schools, such as those which existed in Europe in the last century, or which may still be seen at the present day.

Can it be that analogous facts have occurred elsewhere, and that some American tribes, some Polynesian or Melanesian populations, some hordes of Bedouins may have entirely lost the conception of the divinity and another life? It is certainly possible that it may be so. But side by side with these tribes dwell other tribes, other populations, of precisely the same race, which still possess a religious faith. Such is indeed the result of the examples quoted by Lubbock.

This is the great point. We nowhere meet, with atheism except in an erratic condition. In every place, and at all times, the mass of populations have escaped it; we nowhere find either a great human race, or even a division however unimportant of that race, professing atheism.

Such is the result of an inquiry which I am justified in calling conscientious, and which commenced before I assumed the anthropological professorship. It is true that in these researches I have proceeded and have formed my conclusions, not as a thinker, a believer, or as a philosopher, who are all more or less under the influence of an ideal which they accept or oppose, but exclusively as a naturalist, whose chief aim is to seek for and state facts.

In the scientific study of religions we must avoid acting in the manner of the physiologist, who, having experimented upon the vertebrata alone, refused to recognise the characteristic functions of animal life in the lower animals, because they were in those cases simpler and more obscure. Here, more perhaps than elsewhere, we should imitate modern naturalists, who have traced the fundamental functions even in the lowest molluscs and zoophytes, where all special organization is often wanting.

The physiologist does not deny the existence of a phenomenon because it occurs in a place, and by methods, different to those to which he is accustomed. In almost all animals, even to the lowest, chymification takes place in the interior of the body. In the Physalia the same physiological act is performed externally, by the numerous appendages which serve for both arms and mouth to these singular zoophytes. In spite of the strangeness of the process, the function has neither disappeared, nor changed its nature in the eyes of the scientific man.

The naturalist who studies the history of man, that is to say, the anthropologist, should neither act nor judge otherwise. However simple or incomplete, however naïve and childish, however absurd it may be, a belief should not lose its character in his eyes, if it has any connection with that element which is common and essential to all religions.

Now, whatever the dogmas and doctrines of the latter may be, we may accept as a general formula, which embraces them all, the two following points: a belief in beings superior to man and capable of exercising a good or evil influence upon his destiny; and the conviction that the existence of man is not limited to the present life, but that there remains for him a future beyond the grave.