The Idea of God in Early Religions

by F. B. Jevons

We, indeed, at the present day, may see, or at any rate feel, the difference between magic and religion, between spell and prayer. And we may imagine that the difference, because real, has always been seen or felt, as we see and feel it. But, if we so imagine, we are mistaken. The difference was not felt so strongly, or seen so definitely, as to make it impossible to ascribe magic to Moses, or rain-making to Elijah. In still earlier ages, the difference was still more blurred. The two things were not discriminated as we now discriminate them: they were not felt then, as they are felt now to be inconsistent and incompatible. It was the likeness between the two that filled the field of mental vision, originally. Whether a man makes a petition or a command, the fact is that he wants something; and, with his attention centred on that fact, he may be but little aware, as the child is little, if at all, aware, that he passes, or is guilty of unreasonable inconsistency in passing, from the one mood to the other, and back again. It is in the course of time and as a consequence of mental growth that he becomes aware of the difference between the two moods.

If we insist on maintaining that, because spell and prayer are essentially different, men have at all times been fully conscious of the difference, we make it fundamentally impossible to explain the growth of religion, or to admit that it can have any growth. Just as, on the argument advanced in our first chapter, gods and fetishes have gradually been differentiated from some conception, prior to them, and indeterminate; just as magician and priest, eventually distinguished, were originally undistinguished, for a man of power was potentially both and might become either; so spell and prayer have come to be differentiated, to be recognised as different and fundamentally antagonistic, though originally the two categories were confused.

The theory that spell preceded prayer and became prayer, or that magic developed into religion, finds as little support in the facts afforded by the science of religion, as the converse theory of a primitive revelation and a paradisaical state in which religion alone was known. For what is found in one stage of evolution the capacity must have existed in earlier stages; and if both prayer and spell, both magic and religion, are found, the capacity for both must have pre-existed. And instead of seeking to deny either, in the interests of a pre-conceived theory, we must recognise both potentialities, in the interest of truth.

Just as man spoke, for countless thousands of years, before he had any idea of the principles on which he spoke, of the laws of speech or of the grammar of his language; just as he reasoned, long before he made the reasoning process matter of reflection, and reduced it to the laws of logic; so from the beginning he was religious though he had no more idea that there were principles of religion, than that there were principles of grammar or laws of correct thought. 'First principles of every kind have their influence, and indeed operate largely and powerfully, long before they come to the surface of human thought and are articulately expounded' (Ferrier: Institute of Metaphysics, p. 13).

But this is not to say that primitive man argued, or thought, with never an error, or spoke with never a mistake, until by some catastrophe he was expelled from some paradise of grammarians and logicians. Though correct reasoning was logical before the time of Aristotle, and correct speech grammatical before the time of Dionysius Thrax; there was before, as there has been since, plenty both of bad logic and bad grammar. But that is very different from saying that, in the beginning, all reasoning was unsound, or all speech ungrammatical. To say so, would be as unmeaning and as absurd as to say that primitive man's every action was immoral, and his habitual state one of pure, unmitigated wickedness. If the assumption of a primitive paradise is unworkable, neither will the assumption of a primitive inferno act, whether it is for the evolution of the grammar of language or morality, or of logic or religion, that we wish to account. It is to ask too much, to ask us to believe that in the beginning there was only wrong-doing and no right, only error and no correctness of thought or speech, only spell and no prayer. And if both have been always, as they are now, present, there must also always have been a tendency in that which has prevailed to conquer. We may say that, in the process of evolution, man becomes aware of differences to which at first he gave but little attention; and, so far as he becomes conscious of them, he sets aside what is illogical, immoral, or irreligious, because he is satisfied it is illogical, immoral, or irreligious, and for no other reason.

The theory that spell preceded prayer in the evolution of religion proceeds upon a misconception of the process of evolution. At one time it was assumed and accepted without question that the vegetable and animal kingdoms, and all their various species, were successive stages of one process of evolution; and that the process proceeded on one line and one alone. On the analogy of the evolution of living beings, as thus understood, all that remained, when the theory of evolution came to be applied to the various forms of thought and feeling, was to arrange them also in one line; and that, it was assumed, would be the line which the evolution of religion had followed. On this assumption, either magic must be prior to religion, or religion prior to magic; and, on the principle that priority must be assigned to the less worthy, it followed that magic must have preceded religion.

It will scarcely be disputed that it was on the analogy of what was believed to be the course of evolution, in the case of vegetable and animal life, that the first attempts to frame a theory of the evolution of religion proceeded, with the result that gods were assumed to have been evolved out of fetishes, religion out of magic, and prayer out of spell. To disprove this, it is not necessary to reject the theory of evolution, or to maintain that evolution in religion proceeds on lines wholly different from those it follows elsewhere. All that is necessary is to understand the theory of the evolution of the forms of life, as that theory is held by naturalists now; and to understand the lines which the evolution of life is now held to have followed. The process of evolution is no longer held to have followed one line alone, or to have described but one single trajectory like that of a cannon-ball fired from a cannon. The process of evolution is, and has been from the beginning, dispersive. To borrow M. Bergson's simile, the process of evolution is not like that of a cannon-ball which followed one line, but like that of a shell, which burst into fragments the moment it was fired off; and these fragments being, as it were, themselves shells, in their turn burst into other fragments, themselves in their turn destined to burst, and so on throughout the whole process. The very lines, on which the process of evolution has moved, show the process to be dispersive. If we represent the line by which man has risen from the simplest forms of life or protoplasm by an upright line; and the line by which the lowest forms of life, such as some of the foraminifera, have continued on their low level, by a horizontal line starting from the bottom of the upright line, then we have two lines forming a right angle. One represents the line of man's evolution, the other that of the foraminifera. Between these two lines you may insert as many other lines as necessary. That line which is most nearly upright will represent the evolution of the highest form of vertebrate, except man; the next, the next highest; and so on till you come to the lines representing the invertebrates; and so on till you come to the lines which are getting nearer and nearer to the horizontal. Thus you will have a whole sheaf of lines, all radiating indeed from one common point, but all nevertheless dispersing in different directions.

The rush of life, the élan de la vie, is thus dispersive; and if we are to interpret the evolution of mental on the analogy of physical life, we shall find, M. Bergson says, nothing in the latter which compels us to assume either that intelligence is developed instinct, or that instinct is degraded intelligence. If that be so, then, we may say, neither is there anything to warrant us in assuming either that religion is developed magic, or magic degraded religion. Spell is not degraded prayer, nor is prayer a superior form of spell: neither does become or can become the other, though man may oscillate, with great rapidity, between the two, and for long may continue so to oscillate. The two moods were from the beginning different, though man for long did not clearly discriminate between the two. The dispersive force of evolution however tends to separate them more and more widely, until eventually oscillation ceases, if it does not become impossible.

The dispersive force of evolution manifests itself in the power of discrimination whereby man becomes aware of differences to which, in the first confusion of thought, he paid little attention; and ultimately may become conscious of the first principles of reason, morality or religion, as normative principles, in accordance with which he feels that he should act, though he has not always acted, and does not always act in accordance with them. In the beginning there is confusion of feeling and confusion of thought both as to the quarter to which prayer is addressed and as to the nature of the petitions which should be proffered. But we should be mistaken, if from the confusion we were to infer that there was no principle underlying the confusion. We should be mistaken, were we to say that prayer, if addressed to polytheistic gods, is not prayer; or that prayer, if addressed to a fetish, is not prayer. In both cases, the being to whom prayer is offered is misconceived and misrepresented by polytheism and fetishism; and the misconception is due to want of discrimination and spiritual insight. But failure to observe is no proof either that the power of observation is wanting or that there is nothing to be observed. The being to whom prayer is offered may be very different from the conception which the person praying has of him, and may yet be real.

Petitions, then, put up to polytheistic gods, or even to fetishes, may still be prayers. But petitions may be put up, not only to polytheistic gods, or to fetishes, but even to the one god of the monotheist, which never should be put up. 'Of thy goodness, slay mine enemies,' is, in form, prayer: it is a desire, a petition to a god, implying recognition of the superiority of the divine power, implying adoration even. But eventually it comes to be condemned as an impossible prayer: spiritually it is a contradiction in terms. If however we say that it is not, and never was, prayer; and that only by confusion of thought was it ever considered so, we may be told that, as a simple matter of actual fact, it is an actual prayer that was actually put up. That it ought not—from the point of view of a later stage in the development of religion—to have been put up, may be admitted; but that it was a prayer actually put up, cannot be denied. To this the reply seems to be that it is with prayer as it is with argument: a fallacy is a fallacy, just as much before it is detected as afterwards. The fact that it is not detected does not make it a sound argument; still less does it prove either that there are now no principles of correct reasoning or that there were none then; it only shows that there was, on this point, confusion of thought. So too we may admit—we have no choice but to admit—that there are spiritual fallacies, as well as fallacies of logic. Of such are the petitions which are in form prayers, just as logical fallacies are, in form, arguments. They may be addressed to the being worshipped, as fallacies are addressed to the reason; and eventually their fallacious nature may become evident even to the reason of man. But it is only by the evolution of prayer, that is by the disclosure of its true nature, that petitions of the kind in question come to be recognised and condemned as spiritual fallacies. The petitioner who puts up such petitions is indeed unconscious of his error, but he errs, for all that, just as the person who uses a fallacious argument may be himself the victim of his fallacy: but he errs none the less because he is deceived himself. There are normative principles of prayer as well as the normative principles of thought; and both operate 'long before they come to the surface of human thought and are articulately expounded.' It is in thinking that the normative principles of thought emerge. But it is by no means the case that they come to the surface of every man's thought. So too it is in prayer that the normative principles of prayer emerge; yet men require teaching how to pray. Some petitions are permissible, some not.