This is equally the case with most savage tribes. Mr. J. Walter Fewkes informed me that it was a severe moral shock to the Pueblo Indians to see the white settlers plant corn without any religious ceremony; and a much greater one to perceive that the corn grew, flourished, and bore abundant crops! The result did more to shatter their simple faith than a dozen missionary crusades.
To the simple mind of the primitive man, as to the Mohammedan to-day, there is no such thing as an intermediate law, directing phenomena, and capable of expression in set terms. To him, every event of nature and of life is an immediate manifestation of the power of God, eine Kraftprobe Gottes.[31]
Religion, however, does not begin from any external pressure, no matter how strong this may be. If it has any vitality, if it is anything more than the barrenest ceremonial, it must start within, from the soul itself. Thus it did in primordial ages in all tribes of men.
Therefore in studying its origin and pursuing its development we must commence with its fonts and springs in the mind of man, its psychic sources. These understood, we can proceed to its three chief expressions, in Words, in Objects, and in Rites.
LECTURE II.
The Origin and Contents of Primitive Religions.
Contents:—Former Theories of the Origin of Religions—Inadequacy of these—Universal Postulate of Religions that Conscious Volition is the Source of Force—How Mind was Assigned to Nature—Communion between the Human and the Divine Mind—Universality of “Inspiration”—Inspiration the Product of the Sub-Conscious Mind—Known to Science as “Suggestion”—This Explained—Examples—Illustrations from Language—No Primitive Monotheism—The Special Stimuli of the Religious Emotions: 1. Dreaming and Allied Conditions—Life as a Dream—2. The Apprehension of Life and Death and the Notion of the Soul—3. The Perception of Light and Darkness; Day and Night—The Sky God as the High God—4. The Observation of Extraordinary Exhibitions of Force—The Thunder God—5. The Impression of Vastness—Dignity of the Sub-Conscious Intelligence.
In the last lecture we have seen that all tribes of men, so far as is known, have had religions. How this happened, what general cause brought about so universal a fact, has puzzled the brains of philosophers and theologians. Their explanations have been as various and as conflicting on this as on most other subjects.
A goodly number of philosophers, ancient and modern, have looked upon religion of any kind as a symptom of a diseased brain. Thus Empedocles, in the fifth century B.C., declared it to be a sickness of the mind, and Feuerbach, in the present century, has characterised it as the most pernicious malady of humanity. Regarding all forms of religions as delusions, detrimental therefore to sound reason and the pursuit of truth, they believed the human intellect could freely employ its powers only when liberated from such shackles.