Our view of this vast process may be made clearer by comparing it with the opposite condition of Greece. In Greece, we see a country altogether the reverse of India. The works of nature, which in India are of startling magnitude, are in Greece far smaller, feebler, and in every way less threatening to man. In the great centre of Asiatic civilization, the energies of the human race are confined, and as it were intimidated, by the surrounding phenomena. Besides the dangers incidental to tropical climates, there are those noble mountains, which seem to touch the sky, and from whose sides are discharged mighty rivers, which no art can divert from their course, and which no bridge has ever been able to span. There, too, are impassable forests, whole countries lined with interminable jungle, and beyond them, again, dreary and boundless deserts; all teaching Man his own feebleness, and his inability to cope with natural forces. Without, and on either side, there are great seas, ravaged by tempests far more destructive than any known in Europe, and of such sudden violence, that it is impossible to guard against their effects. And, as if in those regions every thing combined to cramp the activity of Man, the whole line of coast, from the mouth of the Ganges to the extreme south of the peninsula, does not contain a single safe and capacious harbour, not one port that affords a refuge, which is perhaps more necessary there than in any other part of the world.[257]
But in Greece, the aspects of nature are so entirely different, that the very conditions of existence are changed. Greece, like India, forms a peninsula; but while in the Asiatic country every thing is great and terrible, in the European country every thing is small and feeble. The whole of Greece occupies a space somewhat less than the kingdom of Portugal,[258] that is about a fortieth part of what is now called Hindustan.[259] Situated in the most accessible part of a narrow sea, it had easy contact on the east with Asia Minor, on the west with Italy, on the south with Egypt. Dangers of all kinds were far less numerous than in the tropical civilizations. The climate was more healthy;[260] earthquakes were less frequent; hurricanes were less disastrous; wild-beasts and noxious animals less abundant. In regard to the other great features, the same law prevails. The highest mountains in Greece are less than one-third of the Himalaya, so that nowhere do they reach the limit of perpetual snow.[261] As to rivers, not only is there nothing approaching those imposing volumes which are poured down from the mountains of Asia, but nature is so singularly sluggish, that neither in Northern nor in Southern Greece do we find any thing beyond a few streams, which are easily forded, and which, indeed, in the summer season, are frequently dried up.[262]
These striking differences in the material phenomena of the two countries gave rise to corresponding differences in their mental associations. For as all ideas must arise partly from what are called spontaneous operations in the mind, and partly from what is suggested to the mind by the external world, it was natural that so great an alteration in one of the causes should produce an alteration in the effects. The tendency of the surrounding phenomena was in India to inspire fear; in Greece to give confidence. In India Man was intimidated; in Greece he was encouraged. In India obstacles of every sort were so numerous, so alarming, and apparently so inexplicable, that the difficulties of life could only be solved by constantly appealing to the direct agency of supernatural causes. Those causes being beyond the province of the understanding, the resources of the imagination were incessantly occupied in studying them; the imagination itself was overworked, its activity became dangerous, it encroached on the understanding, and the equilibrium of the whole was destroyed. In Greece opposite circumstances were followed by opposite results. In Greece Nature was less dangerous, less intrusive, and less mysterious than in India. In Greece, therefore, the human mind was less appalled, and less superstitious; natural causes began to be studied; physical science first became possible; and Man, gradually waking to a sense of his own power, sought to investigate events with a boldness not to be expected in those other countries, where the pressure of Nature troubled his independence, and suggested ideas with which knowledge is incompatible.
The effect of these habits of thought on the national religion must be very obvious to whoever has compared the popular creed of India with that of Greece. The mythology of India, like that of every tropical country, is based upon terror, and upon terror, too, of the most extravagant kind. Evidence of the universality of this feeling abounds in the sacred books of the Hindus, in their traditions, and even in the very form and appearance of their gods. And so deeply is all this impressed on the mind, that the most popular deities are invariably those with whom images of fear are most intimately associated. Thus, for example, the worship of Siva is more general than any other; and as to its antiquity, there is reason to believe that it was borrowed by the Brahmins from the original Indians.[263] At all events, it is very ancient, and very popular; and Siva himself forms, with Brahma and Vishnu, the celebrated Hindu Triad. We need not, therefore, be surprised that with this god are connected images of terror, such as nothing but a tropical imagination could conceive. Siva is represented to the Indian mind as a hideous being, encircled by a girdle of snakes, with a human skull in his hand, and wearing a necklace composed of human bones. He has three eyes; the ferocity of his temper is marked by his being clothed in a tiger's skin; he is represented as wandering about like a madman, and over his left shoulder the deadly cobra di capella rears its head. This monstrous creation of an awe-struck fancy has a wife Doorga, called sometimes Kali, and sometimes by other names.[264] She has a body of dark blue; while the palms of her hands are red, to indicate her insatiate appetite for blood. She has four arms, with one of which she carries the skull of a giant; her tongue protrudes, and hangs lollingly from her mouth; round her waist are the hands of her victims; and her neck is adorned with human heads strung together in a ghastly row.[265]
If we now turn to Greece, we find, even in the infancy of its religion, not the faintest trace of any thing approaching to this. For, in Greece, the causes of fear being less abundant, the expression of terror was less common. The Greeks, therefore, were by no means disposed to incorporate into their religion those feelings of dread natural to the Hindus. The tendency of Asiatic civilization was to widen the distance between men and their deities; the tendency of Greek civilization was to diminish it. Thus it is, that in Hindostan all the gods had something monstrous about them; as Vishnu with four hands, Brahma with five heads, and the like.[266] But the gods of Greece were always represented in forms entirely human.[267] In that country, no artist would have gained attention, if he had presumed to portray them in any other shape. He might make them stronger than men, he might make them more beautiful; but still they must be men. The analogy between God and Man, which excited the religious feelings of the Greeks, would have been fatal to those of the Hindus.
This difference between the artistic expressions of the two religions was accompanied by an exactly similar difference between their theological traditions. In the Indian books, the imagination is exhausted in relating the feats of the gods; and the more obviously impossible any achievement is, the greater the pleasure with which it was ascribed to them. But the Greek gods had not only human forms, but also human attributes, human pursuits, and human tastes.[268] The men of Asia, to whom every object of nature was a source of awe, acquired such habits of reverence, that they never dared to assimilate their own actions with the actions of their deities. The men of Europe, encouraged by the safety and inertness of the material world, did not fear to strike a parallel, from which they would have shrunk had they lived amid the dangers of a tropical country. It is thus that the Greek divinities are so different from those of the Hindus, that in comparing them we seem to pass from one creation into another. The Greeks generalized their observations upon the human mind, and then applied them to the gods.[269] The coldness of women was figured in Diana; their beauty and sensuality in Venus; their pride in Juno; their accomplishments in Minerva. To the ordinary avocations of the gods the same principle was applied. Neptune was a sailor; Vulcan was a smith; Apollo was sometimes a fiddler, sometimes a poet, sometimes a keeper of oxen. As to Cupid, he was a wanton boy, who played with his bow and arrows; Jupiter was an amorous and good-natured king; while Mercury was indifferently represented either as a trustworthy messenger, or else as a common and notorious thief.
Precisely the same tendency to approximate human forces towards superhuman ones, is displayed in another peculiarity of the Greek religion. I mean, that in Greece we for the first time meet with hero-worship, that is, the deification of mortals. According to the principles already laid down, this could not be expected in a tropical civilization, where the Aspects of Nature filled Man with a constant sense of his own incapacity. It is, therefore, natural that it should form no part of the ancient Indian religion;[270] neither was it known to the Egyptians,[271] nor to the Persians,[272] nor, so far as I am aware, to the Arabians.[273] But in Greece, Man being less humbled, and, as it were, less eclipsed, by the external world, thought more of his own powers, and human nature did not fall into that discredit in which it elsewhere sank. The consequence was, that the deification of mortals was a recognized part of the national religion at a very early period in the history of Greece;[274] and this has been found so natural to Europeans, that the same custom was afterwards renewed with eminent success by the Romish Church. Other circumstances, of a very different character, are gradually eradicating this form of idolatry; but its existence is worth observing, as one of the innumerable illustrations of the way in which European civilization has diverged from all those that preceded it.[275]
It is thus, that in Greece every thing tended to exalt the dignity of man, while in India every thing tended to depress it.[276] To sum up the whole, it may be said that the Greeks had more respect for human powers; the Hindus for superhuman. The first dealt more with the known and available; the other with the unknown and mysterious.[277] And by a parity of reasoning, the imagination, which the Hindus, being oppressed by the pomp and majesty of nature, never sought to control, lost its supremacy in the little peninsula of ancient Greece. In Greece, for the first time in the history of the world, the imagination was, in some degree, tempered and confined by the understanding. Not that its strength was impaired, or its vitality diminished. It was broken-in and tamed; its exuberance was checked, its follies were chastised. But that its energy remained, we have ample proof in those productions of the Greek mind which have survived to our own time. The gain, therefore, was complete; since the inquiring and sceptical faculties of the human understanding were cultivated, without destroying the reverential and poetic instincts of the imagination. Whether or not the balance was accurately adjusted, is another question; but it is certain that the adjustment was more nearly arrived at in Greece than in any previous civilization.[278] There can, I think, be little doubt that, notwithstanding what was effected, too much authority was left to the imaginative faculties, and that the purely reasoning ones did not receive, and never have received, sufficient attention. Still, this does not affect the great fact, that the Greek literature is the first in which this deficiency was somewhat remedied, and in which there was a deliberate and systematic attempt to test all opinions by their consonance with human reason, and thus vindicate the right of Man to judge for himself on matters which are of supreme and incalculable importance.
I have selected India and Greece as the two terms of the preceding comparison, because our information respecting those countries is most extensive, and has been most carefully arranged. But every thing we know of the other tropical civilizations confirms the views I have advocated respecting the effects produced by the Aspects of Nature. In Central America extensive excavations have been made; and what has been brought to light proves that the national religion was, like that of India, a system of complete and unmitigated terror.[279] Neither there nor in Mexico, nor in Peru, nor in Egypt, did the people desire to represent their deities in human forms, or ascribe to them human attributes. Even their temples are huge buildings, often constructed with great skill, but showing an evident wish to impress the mind with fear, and offering a striking contrast to the lighter and smaller structures which the Greeks employed for religious purposes. Thus, even in the style of architecture do we see the same principle at work; the dangers of the tropical civilization being more suggestive of the infinite, while the safety of the European civilization was more suggestive of the finite. To follow out the consequences of this great antagonism, it would be necessary to indicate how the infinite, the imaginative, the synthetic, and the deductive, are all connected; and are opposed, on the other hand, by the finite, the sceptical, the analytic, and the inductive. A complete illustration of this would carry me beyond the plan of this Introduction and would perhaps exceed the resources of my own knowledge; and I must now leave to the candour of the reader what I am conscious is but an imperfect sketch, but what may, nevertheless, suggest to him materials for future thought, and, if I might indulge the hope, may open to historians a new field, by reminding them that every where the hand of Nature is upon us, and that the history of the human mind can only be understood by connecting with it the history and the aspects of the material universe.