This view of the origin of religion is shared in the main by Otto Pfleiderer,6 and other German writers. It was from the impressions made on man by the powers of nature, these scholars hold, and not from his belief in spirits, that his religion came. But it was not necessarily due to pure egoism, as Von Hartmann represents; the earliest religions need not, they hold, have been a mere attempt at bribery. The motives which first caused man to worship the heavenly powers surely arose from other needs than that for food alone. The intellectual craving, the desire to know the nature of the world he lived in, and to refer himself to the highest principle of it, as far as that could be attained; the æsthetic need, the desire to have to do with objects which filled his imagination; the moral need, the desire not to occupy a purely isolated position, but to place himself under some authority, and to feel some obligation, these also, though in the dimmest way, as matters of presentiment rather than clear consciousness, entered into the earliest worship of the heavenly powers. This view has the great advantage over that of Von Hartmann, that it makes the development of religion continuous from the first, instead of representing it as being originally a purely selfish thing, into which the character of affection and devotion only entered at some subsequent stage. If man's nature is essentially religious, then all that constitutes religion must have been with him from the first, in however unconscious and undeveloped form.
6 Philosophy of Religion, vol. iii. chap. i.
Conclusion.—We have enumerated the different kinds of gods worshipped by early man—fetishes, spirits, the powers of nature. We have found a general agreement that fetishism is not an original form of religion, but a product of the decay of higher forms in unfavourable conditions. As to the other two kinds of deities, it is impossible to deny that gods have been formed from the very first in each of these two ways. The domestic worship of the early world cannot be derived from nature-worship, but grew out of the belief awakened in early man, by the familiar experiences mentioned above. That the greater nature-worship, on the other hand, can be derived from the belief in spirits is an assertion which can never be proved, or even made probable; that it arose from the impressions produced on early man by the great objects and forces of nature, is a thing we can understand and believe. The minor nature-worship is also a very intelligible thing, even without Mr. Tylor's theory of souls to explain it. What more natural than that the savage should worship the great oak or the waterfall, or should think himself surrounded by invisible beings, even if he did not frame the latter on the model of the human soul? We arrive therefore at the conclusion that with the exception of the doctrines about death and the abode of spirits, we must regard the worship of nature as the root of the world's religion.
We must beware, however, of imputing to the thoughts of early men about their gods, any such qualities as consistency or regularity. The power of holding at one and the same time religious beliefs which are inconsistent with each other, is one which even in the most developed religions is by no means wanting; and how much more was this the case among men who lived before there was any exact thought! The savage could have a variety of gods of very different natures, who formed in his mind quite a happy family. When he found a new god, that did not oblige him to part with any old one; it was one god he was seeking, but he could not settle on one god as yet, when there were so many beings with a good claim to the position. He made his gods not out of nothing, but out of a great variety of experiences and impressions, and they acted and reacted on each other in an endless variety of ways. One god came to the front here and another there; an object was deified here from one reason and there from another; new gods in time turned old and were less thought of while forgotten gods of former days came back to memory and were worshipped once more. Endless change, endless recurrences of growth and of decay filled up those great spaces and periods, measureless and trackless almost as the expanses of the ocean, that were covered by the prehistoric life of mankind.
BOOKS RECOMMENDED
Jevons, Introduction to the History of Religion, 1896.
E. S. Hartland, in Proceedings of Oxford Congress of the History of Religion, p. 21, sqq.
Of the large class of books reporting the manners and beliefs of special savage races we may specify—
D. G. Brinton, The Myths of the New World, 1896.