Notion of Compensation.
Another well-known fact, and worthy of remark, is the following: when a dog or even a cat has committed some reprehensible act, has eaten the roast or done something clumsy, it comes toward one with a thousand little attentions; in so much that I have found myself able to divine when my dog had committed a peccadillo simply by observing his unwonted demonstrations of friendship. The animal hopes therefore, by force of his social graces and attentions, to prevent his master from holding a grudge against him, to deprecate the wrath that his culpable conduct ought legitimately to arouse, and to awaken in its stead some degree of benevolence by his demonstrations of submission and affection. This notion of compensation becomes later an important element in the religious cult. The Neapolitan brigand who dedicates a wax candle to the altar of the Virgin; the mediæval lord, who, after having killed his next of kin, rears a chapel to some saint, the hermit who lacerates his chest with his hair shirt in order to avoid the more redoubtable pangs of hell, reason precisely after the same fashion as my dog, they are endeavouring, like him, to conciliate their judge, and, to be quite frank, to corrupt him; for superstition rests in a great measure upon the belief that it is possible to corrupt God.
Notion of conscious gift.
The most difficult notion to discover among animals is that of the voluntary and conscious gift; the solidarity observed among certain insects, for example the ant, which causes them to hold all their goods in common, is something too instinctive and irreflective; a veritable gift must address itself to some determinate person, and not to an entire society; it must possess a degree of spontaneity that excludes any hypothesis of pure instinct; and finally, it must be as far as possible a sign of affection, a symbol. And the more symbolic its character, the more religious, properly speaking, it will be; religious offerings are more than anything else a symbolic testimony of respect; piety scarcely plays a part in them, one does not in general believe that they answer to any real need on the part of the gods, one believes that they will be rather accepted by them than seized upon with avidity. The notion of a gift, therefore, presupposes a certain delicacy and refinement. Some germ of this sentiment, however, we discover precisely in a dog observed by Mr. Spencer. This dog, a very intelligent and very valuable spaniel, met one morning, after an absence of some hours, a person of whom he was very fond. He amplified his ordinary greeting by an addition which was not habitual; he drew back his lips in a sort of smile, and, once out of doors, offered other demonstrations of fidelity. As a hunter he had been trained to bring game to his master. He no doubt regretted that there was no game at the moment for him to bring as a means of expressing his affection; however he rummaged about, and seizing presently a dead leaf, carried it to his master with a multitude of caressing gestures.[33] Evidently the leaf possessed for the dog no more than a symbolic value; he knew that it was his duty to retrieve game, and that the action of retrieving gave pleasure to his master, and he wished to accomplish this action under his eyes, as to the object itself it made little difference; it was his goodwill that he wished to show. The dead leaf was a veritable offering, it possessed a sort of moral value.
Elements of which religion is compounded within the reach of the lower animals.
Thus animals may acquire, by contact with man, a certain number of sentiments which enter later into human religion. The monkey in this respect, as in all others, seems much in advance of the other animals. Even in the savage state a number of simiæ display gestures of supplication to deprecate the firing of a gun at them:[34] They possess the sentiment of pity, since they ascribe it to others. Who knows but that there may be in this mute prayer more of real religious sentiment than exists sometimes in the psittacism of certain believers? Animals in general employ in their relations with man the maximum of the means of expression at their disposal, and it is not their fault if the means are limited; they seem to consider man as a really royal being, a thing apart in nature.[35] Must one conclude, as is sometimes done, that man is a god in the eyes of the rest of the animal kingdom? Not altogether; the lower animals see man too close; even in an embryonic religion one must not be able to touch God with one’s finger; in religion as in art, there is an advantage in perspective. My dog and I are companions; sometimes he is jealous, sometimes he pouts. I am unhappily in no respect, in his eyes, on a pedestal. There are, however, evidently exceptions, cases in which the master seems to preserve his prestige. I believe that under certain circumstances man has appeared to some members of the lower animals as endowed with a power so extraordinary that he must have awakened some vague religious sentiments; if man is sometimes a god to his fellow-men, he may well be so to the lower animals. I am aware that in the judgment of certain philosophers, and even of certain men of science, religion is the exclusive appanage of the human race, but up to this point we have found in primitive religion no more than a certain number of simple ideas, not one of which, taken separately, is above the reach of the lower animals. Just as industry, art, language, and reason, so religion also has its roots in the nebulous and confused consciousness of the animal. The animal, however, rises to such ideas only at moments. He is unable to maintain himself at their level, to synthesize them, to reduce them to a system. His attention is too mobile for him to regulate his conduct by them. Even if an animal were quite as capable of conceiving a god as is the lowest of savages, he would remain forever incapable of a religious cult.
Primitive religion a paraphysics.
We have seen that the birth of religion is not a species of theatrical effect in nature, that preparation is being made for it among the higher animals, and that man himself achieves it gradually, and without shock. In this rapid effort to trace the genesis of primitive religions, we have found no need to rely upon the conceptions of the soul, of spirit, of the infinite, of a first cause, nor upon any metaphysical sentiment. These ideas are of later date; they are the product of religion, rather than the roots of it. The basis of religion was in the beginning quite positive and natural; religion is simply a mythical and sociomorphic theory of the physical universe, and it is only at its summit, at an advanced degree of evolution, that it comes into contact with metaphysics. Religion lies beyond and at the side of science. Superstition, in the strict sense of the word, and primitive religion were one, and it is not without reason that Lucretius compares the two: relligio, superstitio. To be present at the birth of religion is to perceive an erroneous scientific conception, gathering other errors or incomplete verities to itself, entering into one body of belief with them, and ultimately, little by little, subordinating them. The earliest religions were systematized and organized superstitions. Be it added that in our judgment superstition consists simply in an ill-conducted scientific induction, in a mistaken effort of human reason; and we do not wish to be understood as intending by that the mere play of the imagination; we do not wish to be understood as holding that religion is founded in the last resort on a species of recreation of the mind. How often the birth of religion has been attributed to an alleged appetite for the marvellous, for the extraordinary, which is supposed to seize upon young peoples as upon infants! A singularly artificial explanation for a very natural and profound tendency. To say the truth, what primitive peoples were in search of when they built up their different religions was an explanation, and the least surprising explanation possible, the explanation most in harmony with their rude intelligence, the most rational explanation. It was infinitely less marvellous for an ancient to suppose that the thunder came from the hand of Indra or of Jupiter, than to believe it to be the product of a certain force called electricity; the myth was for him a much more satisfying explanation; it was the most plausible one that he could hit upon, given his intellectual habitat. So that if science consists in relating things, Jupiter and Jehovah may be regarded as rudimentary scientific conceptions. If they are no longer such, the reason is simply that we have discovered the natural and regular laws which supersede them. When a task, so to speak, begins to perform itself, one dismisses the employee who had previously been charged with it; but one should be careful not to say that he was previously good for nothing, that he had been stationed there by caprice or by favour. If our gods seem nowadays to be purely honorary, the fact was otherwise at a previous period. Religions are not the work of caprice; they correspond to an invincible tendency in man, and sometimes in the lower animals, to try to understand what passes before his eyes. Religion is nascent science, and it was with purely physical problems that it at first essayed to grapple. It was a physics à côté, a paraphysics, before becoming a science au delà, a metaphysics.