It is significant, further, that in the foregoing cases of unbelief at the lower levels of civilization it is only the high rank of the doubter that secures publication for the fact of the doubt. In Hawaii, or Tonga, only a king’s unbelief could make itself historically heard. So in the familiar story of the doubting Inca of Peru, who in public religious assembly is said to have avowed his conclusion that the deified Sun was not really a living thing, it is the status of the speaker that gives his words a record. The doubt had in all likelihood been long current among the wise men of Peru; it is indeed ascribed to two or three different Incas;[58] but, save for the Incas’ promulgation of it, history would bear no trace of Peruvian skepticism. So again in the Acolhuan State of Tezcuco, the most civilized in the New World before the Spanish conquest, the great King Netzahualcoyotl is found opposing the cults of human sacrifice and worshipping an “unknown God,” without an image and with only incense for offering.[59] Only the king in such an environment could put on record such a conception. There is, in fact, reason to believe that all ancient ameliorations of bloody rites were the work of humane kings or chiefs,[60] as they are known to have been among semi-savages in our own day.[61] In bare justice we are bound to surmise that similar developments of rationalism have been fairly frequent in unwritten history, and that there must have been much of it among the common folk; though, on the other hand, the very position of a savage king, and the special energy of character which usually goes to secure it, may count for much in giving him the courage to think in defiance of custom. In modern as in early Christian times, it is always to the chief or king of a savage or barbarous tribe that the missionary looks for permission to proceed against the force of popular conservatism.[62] Apart from kings and chiefs, the priesthood itself would be the likeliest soil for skepticism, though, of course, not for the open avowal of it.
There are to be noted, finally, the facts collected as to marked skeptical variation among children;[63] and the express evidence that “it has not been found in a single instance that an uneducated deaf-mute has had any conception of the existence of a Supreme Being as the Creator and Ruler of the Universe.”[64] These latter phenomena do not, of course, entitle us to accept Professor Gruppe’s sweeping theorem that it is the religious variation that is abnormal, and that religion can have spread only by way of the hereditary imposition of the original insanity of one or two on the imagination of the many.[65] Deaf-mutes are not normal organisms. But all the facts together entitle us to decide that religion, broadly speaking, is but the variation that has chiefly flourished, by reason of its adaptation to the prevailing environment thus far; and to reject as unscientific the formulas which, even in the face of the rapidly-spreading rationalism of the more civilized nations, still affirm supernaturalist beliefs to be a universal necessity of the human mind.
On the same grounds, we must reject the claim—arbitrarily set up by one historian in the very act of showing how religion historically oppugns science—that all sacred books as such “are true because they have been developed in accordance with the laws governing the evolution of truth in human history; and because in poem, chronicle, code, legend, myth, apologue, or parable, they reflect this development of what is best in the onward march of humanity.”[66] In this proposition the opening words, “are true because” are strictly meaningless. All literature whatever has been developed under the same general laws. But if it be meant that sacred books were specially likely to garner truth as such, the claim must be negated. In terms of the whole demonstration of the bias of theology against new truth in modern times, the irresistible presumption is that in earlier times also the theological and theocratic spirit was in general hostile to every process by which truth is normally attained. And if the thesis be limited to moral truth, it is still less credible. It is, in fact, inconceivable that literature so near the popular level as to suit whole priesthoods should be morally the best of which even the age producing it is capable; and nothing is more certain than that enlightened ethic has always had to impeach or explain away the barbarisms of some sacred books. The true summary is that in all cases the accepted sacred books have of necessity fallen short not only of scientific truth and of pure ethic, but even of the best speculation and the best ethic of the time of their acceptance, inasmuch as they excluded the criticism of the freethinking few on the sacred books themselves. There is sociological as well as physical science, and the former is flouted when the whole freethinking of the human race in the period of Bible-making is either ignored or treated as worthless.
It is probable, for instance, that in all stages of primitive religion there have been disbelievers in the value of sacrifice, who might or might not dare to denounce the practice. The demurrers to it in the Hebrew prophetic literature are probably late; but they were in all likelihood anticipated in early times. Among the Fijians, for whom cannibalism was an essentially religious act, and the privilege of the males of the aristocracy, there were a number of the latter who, before and apart from the entrance of Christianity, abominated and denounced the practice, reasoning against it also on utilitarian grounds, while the orthodox made it out to be a social duty. There were even whole towns which revolted against it and made it tabu; and it was by force mainly of this rationalistic reaction that the missionaries succeeded so readily in putting down the usage.[67] It is impossible to estimate how often in the past such a revolt of reason against religious insanity has been overborne by the forces of pious habit.
[1] E. B. Tylor, Anthropology, 1881, p. 439. Cp. Lang, Custom and Myth, ed. 1893, p. 72; J. G. Frazer, Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, 1905, pp. 85–87. [↑]
[2] Theal, The Beginning of South African History, 1902, p. 57. See also the Rev. J. Macdonald, Light in Africa, 1890, p. 192. [↑]
[3] Account of the Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, 5th ed. 1871, i, 280, note. [↑]
[4] Life of Mr. Yukichi Fukuzawa, Tokyo, 1902, pp. 48–53, 56–69. [↑]
[5] See Tylor, Primitive Culture, 3rd ed. i, 71, as to savage conservatism in handicraft; but compare his Researches into the Early History of Mankind, 1865, p. 160, as to countervailing forces. [↑]