“Du gleichst dem Geist, den du begreifst.”
—Goethe.
“Nowadays, matters of national defence, of politics, of religion, are still too important for Knowledge, and remain subjects for certitude; that is to say, in them we still prefer the comfort of instinctive belief because we have not learnt adequately to value the capacity to foretell.”—W. Trotter.
No one who has read Flaubert’s Tentation de St. Antoine will be likely to forget that amazing procession of Gods, hundreds upon hundreds, in every diversity of form, defiling past the visionary Saint to topple over into the abyss of nothingness and be for ever destroyed—the doomed and outworn divinities of man’s childhood and adolescence, put away as he came to maturity. “Man created God in his own image,” wrote the irrepressible pen of Voltaire; and if it is not always true that Gods have been in his own image, but also in the image of animals and monsters, of embodied fears and hopes, it is indubitable that man has created God after God, only to throw them on the scrapheap as he outgrows them, like a child rejecting his old toys for new.
Indubitable—in a sense; indubitable that he has given each of them their peculiar and characteristic form, endowed this and that God with different qualities. But there is another part which he has not created, which he can only perceive, mould, clothe. The raw material of Divinity and its elemental attributes are given—man can but take it or leave it; and, what is more, it is difficult for him to leave it. It is given as the raw material and elemental attributes of life are given, and the evolutionary process can but take them. Man moulds and forms; but evolution has no more created living matter than he Divinity.
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I propose, then, to lay down as my main point that the idea of God is an inevitable product of biological evolution, arising when the human type of mind first came into being, and taking shape and form as a definite God or Gods. That the Gods who thus arise, although of course they play a rôle in the affairs of the human species only, have a definite biological function. That the term God can still be properly and profitably employed to denote a certain complex of phenomena, with a certain function in human evolution.
What, then, do we mean by saying that the idea of God arises inevitably with the appearance of man upon the evolutionary scene? How can the appearance of man account for such a curious phenomenon?
With man, for the first time in the history of life upon the earth, an organism appeared capable of generalizing, of framing concepts, and of communicating them to his fellows. Through sense-organs and brain, an organism reflects in its mind some of the events of the world outside, creates some sort of a microcosm over against the macroscosm. But the animal with no more than associative memory can at best create a haphazard microcosm, a mere cinema record, and incomplete at that, of the most elementary organization; while all one can say of its power of profiting by experience is that a certain primitive plot is thus provided for the series of adventures which make up the scenario.
With an organism like man, however, in which to the faculty of associative memory there has been superadded the power of framing concepts and of accumulating experience by tradition, the picture is altogether changed. The microcosm becomes more highly organized; from rough-and-tumble cinema it develops into an elaborate drama, whose plot is knotted up in the same general way as that of the great macrocosmic drama unrolling itself outside. Microcosm images macrocosm more nearly, both in its form and in its scope. As result of this, life is for the first time enabled in man’s person to frame some general ideas of the outer world. Not only is it enabled, it cannot help but do so. The outer world is there; it impinges through man’s sense-organs on his mind, and his mind is so constructed that, if it thinks at all, it must think in general terms.