CHAPTER II.
RELIGIOUS METAPHYSICS.
I. Animism or polydemonism—Formation of the dualist conception of spirit—Social relations with spirits.
II. Providence and miracles—The evolution of the dualist conception of a special providence—The conception of miracles—The supernatural and the natural—Scientific explanation and miracles—Social and moral modifications in the character of man owing to supposed social relations with a special providence—Increasing sentiment of irresponsibility and passivity and “absolute dependence.”
III. The creation—Genesis of the notion of creation—The dualistic elements in this idea—Monism—Classification of systems of religious metaphysics—Criticism of the classification proposed by Von Hartmann—Criticism of the classification proposed by Auguste Comte.
I. Animism.
Legitimate and illegitimate metaphysics.
The upshot of the preceding chapter is that every religion in its beginning consisted of a mistaken system of physics; and between a mistaken system of physics and certain forms of metaphysics there is often no difference but one of degree simply. Magnify some scientific error, reduce it to a system, explain heaven and earth by it, and it will be a metaphysics—in the bad sense. Whatever one universalizes—error or truth—acquires metaphysical significance, and possibly it is more easy to universalize in this way the false than the true; truth possesses always a greater concreteness than error, and therefore offers greater resistance to arbitrary fashioning. Let a modern man of science develop his knowledge as he will, and enlarge the circle of known phenomena; so long as he holds vigorously by scientific methods he will never be able to pass at a bound from the sphere of phenomena to the sphere of things in themselves. The conscientious man of science is prisoned within the limits of knowledge, his thought has no outlet. But let him once break the chain of logic which confines him, and behold him free. His false hypothesis grows without obstacle or check from reality; he lands at a bound up to his neck in metaphysics. The fact is, one may arrive at a system of metaphysics in two ways—incontinently, by a logical solecism and an exaggeration of some false premise ad infinitum, or by following the chain of known truth to the point at which it disappears in eternal night, and by endeavouring to peer into the darkness by the light of hypothesis: in the first case metaphysics is simply a logically developed mistake which gains in magnitude what it loses in reality, an illegitimate negation of science; in the second case it is a hypothetical extension of truth, in some sort a legitimate supplement to science.
We are approaching the moment when religious physics became transformed into metaphysics; the period when the gods retreated from phenomenon to phenomenon, and took refuge ultimately in the supersensible; the period when heaven and earth first became distinct and separate; although, to be quite accurate, the distinguishing characteristic of religion even at the present day is an incoherent mixture of physics and metaphysics, of anthropomorphic or sociomorphic theories in regard to nature and to the supernatural. The foundation of every primitive religion is reasoning by analogy, that is to say, the vaguest and least sound of logical methods. At a later date the mass of naïve analogies constituting any one religion is criticised and systematized and completed by tentative induction or regular deduction.
Primitive metaphysics a fetichistic monism.