It is needless to dwell on the contrast between this hypothesis and Lang’s. The one traces religion back to the belief in a Supreme God, the other to a reaction against the belief in magic. They are alike in one respect: they both derive it from an exercise of man’s reasoning faculties. It seems a just criticism to say that neither of them takes sufficient account of man’s emotional nature. Yet it must have played an important part in the evolution of religion. It is, if I may say so, the merit of another enquirer, Dr R. R. Marett, that he was the first to point this out. In an article published in Folk-lore in the year 1900, he analyzed, with psychological knowledge and skill, the experiences that underlay Animism, and came to the conclusion that behind the logic was emotion, the recoil from the uncanny and the mysterious, “that basic feeling of awe, which drives a man, ere he can think or theorize upon it, into personal relations with the Supernatural.” Dr Marett’s views have been subsequently developed in a series of papers printed in different periodicals and collections, and republished in 1909 in a volume entitled The Threshold of Religion. This has been supplemented more recently by his inaugural lecture as Reader in Social Anthropology at Oxford, on The Birth of Humility (1910), in which he takes the opportunity of criticizing with vivacity and effect Professor Frazer’s exposition of the relations of magic and religion. His opinions have been reinforced by the independent enquiries of two learned Frenchmen, MM. Hubert and Mauss, who in 1904 published in L’Année Sociologique a remarkable “Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la Magie,” reissued five years later among their collected essays entitled Mélanges d’Histoire des Religions. They approach the subject from the social side, insisting that religion is before everything a social matter, its judgements are social judgements, its rites social rites. They point out its intimate connection with magic, and by skilful analysis exhibit the parallelism between them.
More recently the psychological aspect of the problem has been considered by a group of American writers, notably by Professor James Leuba (A Psychological Study of Religion) and Dr Irving King (The Development of Religion, New York, 1910). The latter work is a most suggestive and judicious survey of the evidence afforded by savage rites and belief. The writer insists on the priority of rites to belief, and finds their origin in social activities, largely in what he calls play-activities, and in spontaneous reactions to the environment. The religious attitude may be coeval with these activities, but organized beliefs were developed gradually. The particular forms they took were the result of different social situations, these in turn depending on the physical and cultural environment. “In and so far as they have elements which are similar functionally, religion and magic,” he holds, “originally formed a part of a primitive, undifferentiated attitude, and separated from each other as experience became more complex and the requirements of action more varied.” Magic became the individualist and antisocial application of the impulses and organized methods of which religion was the social expression and application.
Lastly, Professor Durkheim, taking Totemism as the most primitive religion known to us, has in Les Formes Elémentaires de la vie Religieuse analyzed elementary conceptions, with the result that he derives religious ideas and practices entirely from a social origin. As I have considered his theory more fully on another page, it needs no further reference here.
Thus at the present moment the controversy stands—if it be legitimate to call it a controversy. Criticism, according to a pregnant saying of Andrew Lang’s, is a form of co-operation—of co-operation in the pursuit of truth. The following essays are intended in that spirit as a humble contribution to the discussion. Their primary intention is not controversial. They rather seek to express some of the results of a study of the phenomena, from the point of view of one who has been convinced that the emotions and the imagination—and not merely the individual, but the collective emotions and imagination—have had at least as much to do with the generation of religious practices and beliefs as the reason, and that for the form they may have assumed, physical, social, and cultural influences must be held accountable.
The essay on “The Relations of Religion and Magic” is an expansion of two presidential addresses, one delivered to the Anthropological Section of the British Association at York in 1906, the other to the section on the Religions of the Lower Culture at the International Congress for the History of Religions at Oxford in 1908. The essay on “The Rite at the Temple of Mylitta” was contributed to the volume of Anthropological Essays presented to Sir Edward Tylor, in honour of his seventy-fifth birthday, in 1907. That on “The Voice of the Stone of Destiny” was published in Folk-lore, 1903. Both of these have undergone revision. The remaining essays are new. One of them deals as a preliminary with some of the difficulties that beset the enquirer into the religious ideas of the lower races, with wandering fires that mislead him, with barriers that seem impassable. The others seek to concentrate attention on particular instances of ritual or belief, to elucidate the ideas and emotions that underlie them, or further to illustrate their evolution. I am indebted to the publishers of such as have been already published for their courtesy in facilitating reproduction here.
E. SIDNEY HARTLAND
Highgarth, Gloucester,
January 1914.