Suffering and death are facts; they are part of the world, and men must know them. They are needed to strengthen and deepen the greatest emotions of men.
And therefore there is in man this instinct, this attraction to the sight of suffering and death, an instinct that, rightly followed, has in it nothing but good.
So I read the ceremony I had witnessed. Such is, I am sure, the meaning of all such ceremonies. They never arise from mental theories, always from inner emotion. The scientific theologian of the tribe has explained them in his way, and when enquirers have tried to understand these ceremonies they have gone to the priest instead of the people. Hence the absolute futility of all that has been written on the origins of faiths.
Men have begun at the wrong end: they have argued down instead of up; they have begun their pyramid at the top. Yet surely if there is any fact that ought to be impressed on us since Darwin, it is to begin at the bottom. Reason never produces facts or emotion. It can but theorise on them.
And meditating on what I had seen, I came to see at last all my mistakes.
Instead of beginning with ideas of God, to find man I ought to have gone first to man, to see how arise the ideas of the First Cause. Instead of examining codes of conduct as supernaturally given and impossible, I ought to have gone to man and tried to discover how he came to frame and to uphold these codes. And so also with heaven and hell, man has but imagined them to suit his needs: and if so, what needs? I have tried all the creeds to find an explanation of man, and there is none. I begin now with man to find an explanation of the creeds. Man and his necessities are the eternal truth, and all his religions are but framed by himself to minister to his needs. This is the theory on which to work and try for results.
We have an authority for such a method in science, for she proceeds not from the unknown to the known, but from the observed to the imagined. Thus has she imagined the unimaginable ether to explain certain phenomena and to act as a working theory to proceed on. Scientific men did not invent ether and the laws of ether first, and so descend to light and electricity. They felt the light and heat, and gradually worked inwards and upwards.
So perhaps has man felt certain needs, certain emotions and certain impulses, and has imagined his First Cause, his Law, his codes, his religious theories, one and all, to explain his needs and help himself.
The whole series of questions becomes altered.
It is no longer which is true, the Christian Triune God, the Hindu million of Gods, the Mahommedan one God, the Buddhist Law? but from what facts did these arise, and why do they persist to-day?