The Religious Sentiment / Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and / Philosophy of Religion

by Daniel G. Brinton

This similarity is in a measure owing to the similar impressions which the same phenomenon, the sunrise or the thunder-storm for instance, makes on the mind—and to this extent the science of mythology is adequate to its explanation. But that it falls short is so generally acknowledged, that various other explanations have been offered.

These may be classed as the skeptical explanation, which claims that the likeness of the myths is vastly exaggerated and much more the work of the scholar at his desk than of the honest worshipper; the historical explanation, which suggests unrecorded proselytisms, forgotten communications and the possible original unity of widely separated nations; the theological explanations, often discrepant, one suggesting caricatures of the sacred narrative inspired by the Devil, another reminiscences of a primeval inspiration, and a third the unconscious testimony of heathendom to orthodoxy;[161-1] and lastly the metaphysical explanation, which seems at present to be the fashionable one, expressed nearly alike by Steinthal and Max Müller, which cuts the knot by crediting man with “an innate consciousness of the Absolute,” or as Renan puts it, “a profound instinct of deity.”

The philosophy of mythology, differing from all these, finding beyond question similarities which history cannot unriddle, interprets them by no incomprehensible assumption, but by the identity of the laws of thought acting on similar impressions under the guidance of known categories of thought. Nor does it stop here, but proceeds to appraise these results by the general scheme of truth and error. It asks for what psychological purpose man has so universally imagined for himself gods—pure creations of his fancy;—whether that purpose can now or will ultimately be better attained by an exercise of his intellect more in accordance with the laws of right reasoning; and thus seeking to define the genuine food of the religious desire, estimates the quality and value of each mythological system by the nearness of its approach to this standard.

The philosophy of mythology, starting with the wish or prayer as the unit of religious thought, regards all myths as theories about the unknown power which is supposed to grant or withhold the accomplishment of the wish. These theories are all based upon the postulate of the religious sentiment, that there is order in things; but they differ from scientific theories in recognizing volition as an efficient cause of order.

The very earliest efforts at religious thought do not rise to the formation of myths, that is, connected narratives about supernatural beings. All unknown power is embraced under a word which does not convey the notion of personality; single exhibitions of power which threaten man’s life are supposed to be the doings of an unseen person, often of a deceased man, whose memory survives; but any general theory of a hierarchy, or of the world or man, is not yet visible. Even such immature notions are, however, so far as they go, framed within the category of causality; only, the will of the god takes the place of all other force. This stage of religious thought has been called Animism, a name which does not express its peculiarity, which is, that all force is not only supposed to proceed from mind, but through what metaphysicians call “immanent volition,” that is, through will independent of relation. Mind as “emanant volition,” in unison with matter and law, the “seat of law,” to use an expression of Professor Boole’s, may prove the highest conception of force.

As the slowly growing reason reached more general notions, the law which prescribes unity as a condition of thought led man early in his history to look upon nature as one, and to seek for some one law of its changes; the experience of social order impressed him with the belief that the unseen agencies around him also bore relations to each other, and acknowledged subjection to a leader; and the pangs of sickness, hunger and terror to which he was daily exposed, and more than all the “last and greatest of all terribles, death,” which he so often witnessed, turned his early meditations toward his own origin and destiny.

Around these three subjects of thought his fancy busied itself, striving to fabricate some theory which would solve the enigmas which his reason everywhere met, some belief which would relieve him from the haunting horror of the unknown. Hence arose three great cycles of myths, which recur with strangely similar physiognomies in all continents and among all races. They are the myths of the Epochs of Nature, the Hierarchy of the Gods, and of the Paradise lost but to be regained. Wherever we turn, whether to the Assyrian tablets or to the verses of the Voluspa, to the crude fancies of the red man of the new world or the black man of the African plateau, to the sacred books of the modern Christian or of the ancient Brahman, we find these same questions occupying his mind, and in meaning and in form the same solutions proffered. Through what intellectual operations he reached these solutions, and their validity, as tested by the known criteria of truth, it is the province of the philosophy of mythology to determine.

Let us study the psychological growth of the myth of the Epochs of Nature. This tells of the World, its beginning, its convulsions and its ending, and thus embraces the three minor cycles of the cosmogonical, the cataclysmal and the eschatological myths.

Nature is known to man only as force, which manifests itself in change. He is so constituted that “the idea of an event, a change, without the idea of a cause, is impossible” to him. But in passing from the occurrence to its cause the idea of Time is unavoidable; it presents itself as the one inevitable condition of change; itself unwearing, it wears out all else; it includes all existence, as the greater does the less; and as “causation is necessarily within existence,”[165-1] time is beyond existence and includes the nonexistent as well. Whatever it creates, it also destroys; and as even the gods are but existences, it will swallow them. It renders vain all pleasures, and carries the balm of a certain oblivion for all woes.

This oppressive sense of time, regarded not in its real meaning as one of the conditions of perception, but as an active force destroying thought as well as motion, recurs continually in mythology. To the Greek, indefinite time as Cronos, was the oldest of the gods, begetting numberless children, but with unnatural act consuming them again; while definite time, as the Horæ, were the blithe goddesses of the order in nature and the recurrent seasons. Osiris, supreme god of the Egyptians, was born of a yet older god, Sev, Time. Adonis and Aeon acknowledge the same parentage.[165-2] The ancient Arab spoke of time (dahr, zaman) as the final, defining principle; as uniting and separating all things; and as swallowing one thing after another as the camel drains the water from a trough.[166-1] In the Koran it is written: “Time alone destroys us.” Here and there, through the sacred songs of the Parsees, composed long before Aristotle wrote, beyond all the dust and noise of the everlasting conflict of good and evil, of Ahura Mazda and Anya-Mainyus, there are glimpses of a deeper power, Zeruana Akerana, Eternal Duration, unmoved by act or thought, in the face of which these bitter opponents are seen to be children, brethren, “twin sons of Time.”[166-2] The Alexandrian Gnostics, in their explanations of Christian dogmas, identify Aeon, infinite time, with God the Father, as the source and fount of existence; not merely as a predicate of the highest, but the Highest himself.