An animal is not sufficiently master of its sensations to follow their course throughout their successive modifications; it is not in any proper sense a witness, as man is, of the progress, of the perpetual movement and transformation of all things; nature is, for it, a series of detached pictures of which it does not seize the contrasts. When man, on the contrary, follows attentively the more or less slow evolution of things, he perceives the effacement of every fundamental difference between the animate and the inanimate, he observes a process of blind mechanical labour, which produces life in objects in appearance quite inert. Is there not something rationally profound and justifiable in the very naïveté with which he interprets nature? Poetry is often philosophy in its most penetrating form. Who has not asked himself sometimes if a puissant and hidden spring of life does not circulate unknown to us in the high mountains, in the still trees, and in the restless ocean, and if mute nature does not live in one long course of meditation upon themes unknown to us? And since even nowadays we ourselves are full of such vague doubts as that, do we imagine that it would be easy to convince one of these primitive men of his error, when he fancies that he feels the beating of what the Germans call the “heart of nature”? After all is the primitive man wrong? Everything about us does live, nothing is inanimate except in appearance, inertia is a word simply; all nature is one universal aspiration, modern science alone can measure with some approach to accuracy the activity with which all things are saturated, and show it to us, here existent in a state of diffusion, there in a state of concentration, and self-conscious, and make us acquainted with the difference between the higher organisms and the lower organisms, and between the latter and mechanisms and rudimentary groupings of bits of matter. For primitive man, to whom all these distinctions, all the gradations are impossible, there is but one thing evident, and that is that the whole of nature lives; and he naturally conceives this life on the model of his own, as accompanied by self-consciousness, by an intelligence the more astonishing in that it is mysterious. Moreover he is a man, and humanizes nature; he lives in society with other men, and conceives all things in terms of social relations of friendship or of enmity.
And divinizes it.
From the humanization to the divinization there is but one step; let us endeavour to make it. Whoever says god, means a living and powerful being worthy, in some especial degree, of fear, of respect, or of gratitude. Primitive man possesses already, let us suppose, some notion of life; he needs now to be supplied with some notion of power, which alone is capable of inspiring him with reverence, and this notion it does not seem difficult for a being to obtain, who sees in all nature an expression of a manifold conscious life, and who must recognize in certain great phenomena the manifestation of a will much more powerful than that of any man, and consequently more redoubtable and worthy of respect. Here also, however, we encounter serious objections from Mr. Spencer and from anthropologists like M. Le Bon; the question becomes more complex.
Natural phenomena quite striking enough to be adored on their own account.
According to Mr. Spencer, as we have seen, the most important phenomena of nature, and among others the rising and the setting of the sun, are precisely those which must be least striking to primitive man; they cannot appear to him to be extraordinary because they happen every day; so that he experiences before them neither surprise nor admiration. This argument is very ingenious, but is it not also a little sophistical? If it were pushed to the end it would amount simply to the fact that there is nothing surprising or unusual in nature, nothing which breaks with the preconceived association of ideas, nothing which seems to manifest the sudden intervention of strong or violent powers. The fact, however, is quite the contrary; nature is full of surprises and of terrors. The day may be fine; suddenly the clouds gather and the thunder rolls—the fear of thunder felt by animals has already been spoken of; in the mountains especially the rumbling, re-echoing, fills them with unspeakable terror. Droves of cattle lose all control of themselves and throw themselves headlong down precipices. It is with great difficulty that the herdsman by his presence and exhortations keeps his herd in order; probably the beasts see in the herdsman a powerful friend, capable of protecting them against this terrible being whom the Hindus call the “howler.” If animals tremble thus before the thunder, it is unlikely that primitive man should see nothing in it abnormal and extraordinary. Similarly with the hurricane, which seems like an enormous respiration, as of a universe out of breath. Similarly with the tempest: one knows the Basque proverb: “If you want to learn to pray, go to sea.” Everyone who finds himself in the hands of a victorious enemy is naturally inclined to beg for mercy. Let there supervene a sudden calm; at the moment when the tempest was about to break, let the sun reappear like a great smiling face, chasing away the cloud with his arrow of gold, and will it not seem a benevolent auxiliary; will it not be received with cries of joy and enthusiasm? Nature is incessantly showing us thus some unexpected change of scene, producing some theatrical effect which inevitably suggests some anthropomorphic drama, in which the elements and the stars are the actors. How many strange things happen in the sky when once the attention is directed thither! Eclipses of the moon and of the sun, and the very phases of the moon, are abundantly calculated to astonish the very savages whom Messrs. Spencer and Müller declare to be incapable of astonishment. Note, too, that the simple view of the stars at night provokes a lively admiration in anyone who is accustomed to sleep under a roof. I remember still my surprise, when, as a child, I was awake for the first time in the night and lifted my eyes by chance on high and perceived the heaven glittering with stars; it was one of the most striking impressions of my life.[31]
In effect, earth and sky incessantly furnish mankind with new impressions capable of stimulating the most torpid imagination, and of appealing to the whole round of human and social sensibilities: fear, respect, gratitude. With these three elements it is easy to account for the genesis of the religious sentiment.[32] If, then, our ancestors adored the dawn, we do not believe, with Max Müller, that it was because it seemed to open the gates of heaven and reveal to them a vision of the infinite; we do not admit, with Mr. Spencer, that a cult for the stars is reducible in the last resort to a simple confusion of names, and was originally but an off-shoot from ancestor worship due originally to the soul of some ancestor, who was metaphorically called in his lifetime by the name of the sun or of some star. It seems to us that one might quite well worship the sun and the stars on their own account, or rather on account of the relation they bear to us.
Summary.
To sum up, the simplest, the most primitive conception that man can form of nature is to regard it, not as a manifold of interdependent phenomena, but as a multitude of conscious and voluntary beings, more or less independent and endowed with extreme power, capable of acting upon each other and upon mankind. Scientific determinism cannot but be a much later conception, incapable of suggesting itself in the early stages of human thought. The world once conceived thus as a collection of physically powerful, voluntary beings, man comes, in the course of time, to endow these beings, morally and socially, with qualities according to the manner in which they conduct themselves toward him. “The moon is naughty this evening,” a child said to me; “it will not show itself.” Primitive man said also that the hurricane was naughty, the thunder was naughty, and so forth, whereas the sun, the moon, the fire, when they gave him pleasure, were good and beneficent. Well, given a world of voluntary beings sometimes good, sometimes evil, armed with irresistible power, easy to irritate, prompt to take vengeance as man is himself, are they not gods? And if primitive man thus possesses gods, does he not also possess a religion as the ceremonial which regulates his social relations with the gods? To create a religion we need, in effect, to add but one idea to those already dealt with—the idea that it is possible by such and such conduct, by offerings, by supplications, to influence the superior beings with which nature is peopled; but this idea, which seems to us quite simple, did not, however, appear before a relatively advanced stage of intellectual evolution. A savage animal is scarcely acquainted with any other means of influencing other beings than biting, growling, and menacing; if these means fail, he counts on flight. A mouse has no hope of influencing a cat in any manner whatsoever; once between the cat’s paws, it knows there is but one resource, to run away; still the animal ultimately, and in especial at the period of courtship, learns to recognize the power of caresses and attentions; it does not, however, occur to him to employ these means toward any but individuals of the same species. Moreover, the animals must be social before the language of manners can attain even a very humble degree of development; the animal confines itself generally to caresses with the tongue, with the head, with the tail. Evidently, also, such means would be inappropriate in regard to beings which did not possess a hide and coat of hair; an animal would not lick a tree or a stone, even if it attributed to them an unwonted degree of power. So that even if the brute, as Auguste Comte supposed, really possessed fetichistic conceptions more or less vague, it would experience a complete inability to manifest its goodwill in any manner whatsoever toward its rudimentary fetiches.
Superstitious fear is one of the elements of religion which, after all, is well within the capacity of an animal, but this fear cannot in an animal produce even the first steps of an embryo cult. An animal is ignorant of the means of touching, of captivating, of the infinitely complex language of affection and reverence. Comparatively inaccessible to pity himself, he has no notion how to act to excite pity in another; the conception of a gift, of an offering, so essential to the relations of men to each other and to their gods is, save in rare instances, to it unknown. The most primitive cult is always essentially a counterfeit of an advanced social state; an imitation, in an imaginary commerce with the gods, of a commerce already existing among men united by complex ties. Religion implies a nascent art of sociability, an elementary acquaintance with the springs which regulate the conduct of beings in society; there is a certain rhetoric in prayer, in genuflections and prostrations. Everything of that kind is far beyond the range of the lower animals. One may discover among them, however, some traces of the process of evolution which man must have followed. It is, in especial, under domestication that an animal’s manners reach their highest development. Their association with a superior being resembles, more closely than anything else in nature, the state in which primitive man believed himself to live with his gods. The dog seems at times to put up a veritable prayer to the master who is beating it, when it crawls at his feet and whimpers. This attitude, however, provoked by the fear of a blow, is perhaps in a large measure instinctive and not reflectively designed to excite pity. The true prayer of the dog consists in licking the hand which wounds him; the story is well known of the dog that licked the fingers of his master while the latter was pitilessly practising upon him an experiment in vivisection. I myself observed an analogous fact in an enormous dog from the Pyrenees whose eye I had to cauterize; he might have crushed my hand, and he simply licked it feverishly. It is almost an example of religious submission; the sentiment which is observable in embryo in the dog is the same as that which in its complete development appears in the Psalms and the book of Job. The lower animals display such a sentiment toward no other being but man. As to man himself, he displays it only toward his gods, toward an absolute chief or a father. Profound, however, as this sentiment is in some animals, their expression of it is quite imperfect; though I remember a case in which the action of licking, so habitual with dogs, was almost like a human kiss. I was embracing my mother, at the door of the house, before leaving for a journey, when my Pyrenees dog ran up to us, and, placing his paws upon our shoulders literally kissed both of us. From that time on (we have tried the experiment) he never sees us embrace each other without coming to demand his kiss.