Aristotle quotes these words of Anaxagoras, who lived one hundred and fifty years before him: “The man who recognised in nature an intelligence which is the cause of the arrangement and order of the universe has alone kept his reason in the midst of the follies of his predecessors.”
There has been no break in the continuity of the first impression experienced by man at the sight of lightning, and God whom each nation named after its own way, and Him whom the Athenians worshipped without knowing, whom the Apostle declared to them.
I will here repeat the words of Aristotle, which must never be effaced from our memories: “Man is face to face with the light that lighteth every one that cometh into the world.” It was this that caused the same philosopher to use those other surprising words, so difficult to grasp when reading them for the first time in a book: “All who see see the same things, and all that a man has seen is true.”
Anthropomorphism
Man at the beginning, knowing of two kinds of agents only, both tangible, themselves and the beasts, conceived the idea that the phenomena of nature were set in motion by invisible agents of some kind, their imagination followed its natural bent in picturing these agents under one or the other of the two aspects familiar to them, and sometimes under the two united; since these unknown powers—for instance amongst the Egyptians—often assumed the shape of creatures half man and half fish, or bird, or quadruped. But with the progress of civilisation these representations of divinities were modified. Man having obtained glimpses of the difference between the phenomenal and the non-phenomenal, was led to suspect the existence of an author for the one and the other; and this author or agent was perceived by him anthropomorphically, that is to say, arrayed with a human personality, but endowed with all the qualities of goodness and beauty which distinguish the highest and noblest of men. We know that anthropomorphism in the abstract is wrong, yet without it man could never have found the way of approach to this unknown author of all created things, and the desire to know him nearer was irresistible.
In one sense we are less advanced than our primitive ancestors. Attracted on the one hand by the occult properties of the magnet, and impelled by sensation, they advanced in all simplicity. At a later date they desired to have those things explained to them which they did not understand; men undertook this duty, greater distances grew up between them, and the sacred code was the result.
The Sacred Codes and the Codes of Laws
History teaches us that each sacred Code grew gradually, and in the same way as the Codes of Laws. A religion peculiar to each people existed, though vague and indefinite, before the written Code. If there had not been a growth of the law by means of decrees, pronounced at various times by the heads of the people, accumulating slowly, and accepted in the same degree by the people in general, there would have been no definite Codes of Laws, such as those of Solon and Draco and others. If there had not been a religious growth formulated in oracles and prayers, and in commandments promulgated at different times by the prophets, accumulating slowly, and accepted in the same degree by the people in general, there would have been no sacred writings, such as those of Moses, Confucius, Buddha, and others.
It sometimes happens that Codes of Laws become transformed into petrified fetishes, to which submission is blindly yielded, whilst their origin is forgotten, and the sense of what is just or unjust is lost in the question of what is written and thus legal; and some sacred books are treated as fetishes, to which an implicit submission is exacted, whilst their origin is forgotten and the sense of what is true and divine is absorbed in the sole thought of what is written and therefore orthodox.
The sense of responsibility of the citizen with regard to the law of his country is in danger of becoming paralysed when that law is applied with such mechanical exactitude as to confuse the ideas of law and equity;[127] and the responsibility of the believer with regard to the religion of his country may run risks of becoming paralysed when that religion is framed in accordance with a ceremonial exactitude rather than with a human feeling for what is true or false. The mere possession of the sacred Scriptures may have become a substitute for the love of God; the effective influence of the Infinite became changed into a mere habit which drove away the spontaneous action of the soul. We distinguish with difficulty organised religions from religions as practised by each one, which was our primitive religion. There are rites that we love; rites which at first reflected God have imperceptibly taken the place of God who vivified our religious life. We possess dogmas, but lose perhaps our hold of the personal assurance of the existence of a Being whom Plato named “the Being apart,” or “the self-existent Being.” The results of this are serious, since dogmata, of themselves, do not always furnish sufficing arguments against atheism.