The plurality of the human race

by G. Pouchet

Pure monotheism seems always to have been the religion of the Semitic race. Most European nations, on the contrary, have professed from antiquity, a polytheism or a pantheism, more or less disguised, more or less acknowledged. In fact, by the side of those nations of Asia and Europe, where civilisation and religious ideas appear to have simultaneously been developed, although in different directions, we find other people who have neither religious ideas, nor gods, nor any kind of worship.[177]

Three vast regions of the earth, inhabited by people still in a savage state, appear to have remained, up to the present day, free from religious beliefs; these are Central Africa, Australia, and the country around the North Pole,—that is to say, the three parts of the world which are most difficult to explore,—the only parts which have even not yet been thoroughly examined. And this is one consequence of this want of exploration; it supposes a sort of sequestration from the rest of the world, which has not even succumbed to civilisation by this contact and imitation of which we have already spoken. Let us admit that relations were established by these people with their neighbours; they would soon have imported from the foreigner conceptions which would even then have never taken a form, on account of the small portion of intellect which nature had given to them.

Referring to the inhabitants of Australia, Latham acknowledges that the general opinion is, in fact, that they have not yet commenced to shape the rudest elements of a religion,[178] “an opinion,” he says, “which causes the idea that their intellects are too sluggish even for the maintenance of superstition.” It is certainly true that, in the American expedition under Captain Gray, it was thought that some religious ideas could be perceived among them; but it appears from the same account that the song which constituted all this apparent religion, had been brought from far by strangers, and adopted by the natives,—doubtless, by other Australians, who had already been influenced by the Christian ideas of the white men, or the Buddhist principles of the Malays.

To relate the history of the introduction of an idea among a people is, in reality, to declare and prove that this idea did not exist there before, which is sufficient for us if we can be assured of the fact. The testimony of missionaries[179] is, besides, consonant with that which we have just said; and we may remark on the importance of assertions coming from men whose whole study is to discover, in the people whom they desire to convert, ideas analogous to those which they endeavour to propagate. “They have no idea of a Divine Being,” says one of these men; “they appear to have no comprehension of the things they commit to memory,—I mean especially as regards religious subjects.” “What can we do,” says another, “with a nation whose language possesses no terms corresponding to justice or sin, and to whose mind the ideas expressed by these words are completely strange and inexplicable?”

As to Central Africa, we confine ourselves to relating a few facts relative to this want of religious belief, gathered from different points in the periphery of the vast triangle, almost unexplored and unknown, which is described by lines joining together Senegal, Zanzibar, and the Cape.

An American missionary,[180] who lived four years amongst the Mpongwes, one of the most important nations of Central Africa, the Mandingos, and the Grebos, and who knew their language perfectly, declares that they had neither religion, nor priests, nor idolatry, nor any religious assemblies whatsoever. Dr. Livingstone says the same thing concerning the Bechuanas.[181] The Austrian missionaries, established upon the distant banks of the White Nile, have met with the same want of religion, the same void[182] in the mind. In fact, among the Caffres, the name which they give to the Divine Being, as among the Hottentots, is undeniable evidence that they formerly had no idea of anything similar. This name is Tixo, and its history is too curious not to be related; it is composed of two words which, together, signify the “wounded knee.” It was, they say, the name of a doctor or sorcerer, well known among the Hottentots and Namaquas, on account of some wound which he had received on his knee. Having been held in great estimation for his extraordinary power during his life, the Wounded Knee continued to be invoked even after his death, as being able to comfort and protect; and consequently his name became the term which best represented, to the minds of his countrymen, their confused idea of the missionaries’ God!

As to the Esquimaux, since 1612, Whitebourne wrote that they had no knowledge of God, and lived without any form of civil government. And we can add to this distant testimony the following lines from the journal of Sir John Ross, who lived for a long time in the midst of them. “Did they comprehend anything of all that I attempted to explain, explaining the simplest things in the simplest manner that I could devise? I could not conjecture. Should I have gained more had I better understood their language? I have much reason to doubt. That they have a moral law of some extent ‘written in the heart,’ I could not doubt, as numerous traits of their conduct show, but beyond this, I could satisfy myself of nothing; nor did these efforts, and many more, enable me to conjecture aught worth recording. Respecting their opinions on the essential points from which I might have presumed on a religion, I was obliged at present to abandon the attempt, and I was inclined to despair.”[183]

This extract is so much the more important for our thesis, since we perceive in every word the chagrin of a man who did not find in the hearts of others a fraternal echo to his dearest sentiments. It is, in truth, a difficulty peculiar to the study of questions of this nature. We must, therefore, be very careful in discussing the value of any testimony which may be brought forward, and to distrust those minds which begin by declaring à priori the universality of beliefs, hopes, and fears among mankind, as a natural consequence of the primitive unity of the human species. We must always examine most minutely the accounts of travellers to which we are obliged to refer. Thus, for example, it is evident that the older the evidence, the better it is; but at the same time, the farther it goes back, the less chance there is that it emanates from an independent and impartial mind, free from all prejudice.

Happily, the exaggeration of these ideas must often suffice to put us on our guard against them, like the candid Jesuit, whose zealous but hazy faith thought it had discovered traces of St. Thomas’s preaching in Brazil.[184] In an otherwise good notice of the Esquimaux,[185] Dr. King says, “that these people have preserved, like many other uncivilised races, a vague remembrance of the creation and of the deluge, and that they believe in future rewards and punishments.” In his religious zeal, Dr. King forgets that if the Esquimaux had been able to bring a confused tradition of even the deluge and the creation from the valley of the Euphrates, it was impossible it could have been the same with a belief in future rewards and punishments, seeing that the Jews themselves never possessed this belief before their contact with Assyrian civilisation. We may read in Dr. Brecher’s excellent work[186] the whole history of the development of this belief in the immortality of the soul. If the German doctor wishes piously to prove that the Jews ought, morally, to have always believed in this immortality, at all events, his zeal has been able to invent real proofs, which in fact, are wanting. The famous scheol, which is mentioned so often in old Hebrew books, appears to be merely the kingdom of the dead, and not that of souls, like hell, Tartarus, the Elysian fields, and Paradise; the scheol is but an ideal representation of the tomb. Even at the time when the Jews had generally adopted the ideas of their neighbours, during the Talmudic period, the belief in the immortality of the soul, if it existed, was neither completely clear nor well reasoned, since they refused all participation in a future life to those who denied the resurrection and the last judgment, “which was equivalent to entire annihilation.”[187] To believe this, is certainly not to believe in the immortality of the soul, since they regarded eternal life not as a necessary consequence, but as a recompense for good principles, and having faith in them. Such an inconsistency is the clearest possible proof that, even at this period, these ideas had not undergone the change which brought them to the actual point of clearness. They were also not yet completely freed from the ancient belief which the Sadducees, besides, had not abandoned; they were the faithful preservers of the ancient faith, and the pure tradition of the sons of Israel. “They have the theory that the soul dies with the body,” wrote Josephus,[188] “and consider that they ought to keep nothing but the law.”

We must be pardoned for insisting so much upon this point; but it is of importance as regards our thesis to show that the belief in the immortality of the soul, and in a divinity, is not universal on the globe, that one general characteristic of humanity could not be formed from it, and that we ought even less to rely upon the existence of such ideas in order to establish a human kingdom. We have only spoken of people who are either entirely savage, or of Jewish opinions, which have long been lost in the past. Even in our own time, there are two hundred million Buddhists on the earth, who have reached a marvellous point of civilisation, who ignore, in the most absolute manner, the notion of another life and that of a divinity. Eugène Burnouf, whose ability no one will deny, has already said it; M. Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, after much hesitation, which will remain as the seal of a firmly established conviction, has decided in the same way, in the last edition of Bouddha et sa Religion.[189] We quote his own words:—“There is not the slightest trace of a belief in God in all Buddhism; and to suppose that it admits the absorption of the human soul into a divine or infinite soul, is a gratuitous supposition which cannot even enter into the ideas of the Buddhist. In order to believe that man can lose himself in the God to which he is reunited, this God must first be believed in as a necessary commencement. But we can scarcely say that the Buddhist does not believe in Him. He ignores God in such a complete manner, that he does not even care about denying His existence; he does not care about trying to abolish Him; he neither mentions such a being in order to explain the origin or the anterior existence of man, his present life, nor for the purpose of conjecturing his future state, and his eventual freedom. The Buddhist has no acquaintance whatsoever with a God, and, quite given up to his own heroic sorrows and sympathies, he has never cast his eyes so far or so high.” And the author adds the following lines, which have a direct bearing on anthropology, and which are like the sum of all we have just brought forward:—“The human mind has scarcely been observed but in the races to which we ourselves belong. These races deserve, certainly, a high place in our studies; but if they are the most important, they do not stand alone. Ought not the others to be noticed, although they are said to be so inferior? If they do not enter into the hastily drawn outline, must they be disfigured by submitting them to over-strict theories? Is it not a better plan to acknowledge that old systems are faulty, and that they are not comprehensive enough in everything which they undertake to explain?”[190]