I.
As usual, authorities are not agreed on the question of origin. Under what form did the religious sentiment first make its appearance? We must first put aside two extremely systematic answers, which, although differing in spirit, have this in common, that they are both purely intellectualist.
The first, a very ancient one, has found its latest and clearest interpreter in Max Müller, who thinks that the notion of the Divine, more especially under the form of the Infinite, preceded that of the gods. Our senses give us the finite, but “beyond, behind, beneath, and within the finite, the infinite is always present to our senses. It presses upon us, it grows upon us from every side. What we call finite in space and time, in form and word, is nothing but a veil or net which we ourselves have thrown over the infinite.”[[189]] What, then, is the infinite, he asks, but the object of all religions? The religion of the infinite precedes and comprehends all others, and as the infinite is implied by the senses (i.e., the limits to our sensory perceptions imply an unlimited region beyond), it follows that religion can, with as much right as reason, be called a development of our sensory perceptions. The earliest religion consisted in the adoration of various objects, taken, each in turn, and isolatedly, as incarnations of the notion of the Infinite. This is what Max Müller calls “Henotheism.” For him, polytheism and even fetichism are later developments, resulting from the breaking up of the primitive unity, and due to a disease of language: each name becomes a distinct deity; words are raised to the dignity of things, having their life, their attributes, and their legends: Nomina numina.
This last view, though it has had a certain vogue among linguists, is worth nothing as a psychological explanation, for it is quite clear that the word is only a starting-point or a vehicle for the process of thought, which is the sole agent of the metamorphosis. If the nomina become numina, it is by a disease of imagination or thought, rather than of language.[[190]]
As for the principal thesis, the alleged primitive notion of the Infinite, which is the source of henotheism, it is a metaphysical hypothesis of extreme improbability. Primitive man, enclosed within hard conditions of life, is practical and positive rather than a dreamer; he does not naturally tend towards the Beyond. But a better reason than this, and an entirely psychological one, is that he is incapable of attaining to even a medium degree of abstraction and generalisation. How could a savage, who cannot count up to four, form any idea whatever of the Infinite? Evidently, this notion of the Illimitable is far beyond him.
There is only one way of imparting a certain psychological verisimilitude to Max Müller’s view, viz., to strip it of its intellectualist character, and admit as its origin a feeling rather than a notion, a craving, a tendency, rather than a cognition. Of these two factors, which make up all religious belief, one intellectual, the other emotional, which has the priority? Did the notion produce the feeling, or the feeling excite the notion? Such is the problem which lies at the heart of all debates on the origin of religious manifestations. Some place it in the region of instinct: so Renan when he compares religion in humanity to the nest-building instinct of the bird. Others maintain that every feeling presupposes an object. “At first sight this latter theory seems to have logic on its side. It is clear that, in order to love or fear any being, one must have conceived the notion of his existence. Yet, however indispensable it may be to assume an intellectual operation at the beginning of religion, we must recognise that the feelings set in motion by this operation must have long preceded the most ancient formulas of primitive theology.”[[191]] For my own part, I am inclined to accept the priority of feeling, though unable to supply any arguments based on fact; the period of origins being also that of conjecture.
The second theory, that of Herbert Spencer, brings us down from the notion of the Infinite to the extremely terrestrial mental life of savages. It is well known that he reduces all primitive religions to the cult of ancestors—to necrolatry. The primordial fact is the conception of a spirit, or rather, of a double. The savage believes that he has a Sosia, or, in other words, a principal ego and a secondary ego. He infers the existence of this double from a great number of facts, to him inexplicable: his shadow, his reflection in the water, echoes, apparitions in dreams, fainting, trances, epilepsy, etc. The world is thus, for him, full of wandering spirits which he tries to propitiate. According to Spencer, fetichism and polytheism are only aberrant forms of ancestor-worship, and he tries to prove this by a series of arguments, through which we need not now follow him. Imperturbable in his systematic deduction, he even asserts that he can derive from the same root, by far-fetched and easily-controverted arguments, the adoration of animals, plants, and inanimate objects.[[192]] It is indisputable that a great number of beliefs have sprung from this root, but this conception, which is anthropomorphism carried to its extreme, is found to be too narrow to include all the facts. Tylor and others have criticised it with some vivacity, and I do not think that it now claims many adherents.
These two systematic hypotheses being put on one side, we may remind the reader how religious development seems to have taken place during this primitive period; for the march of evolution has not been everywhere and always the same—a difficulty already pointed out with regard to the social instinct. According to the best authorities, the most frequent form has been the following.
The first stage is that of fetichism, polydemonism, naturism—terms which in the history of religions are not quite synonymous, but which answer to the same psychical condition, the adoration of some object, living or not, which is perceived—i.e., apprehended as a concrete form, at the same time body and soul—or rather animated by a soul, judged to be benevolent or malevolent, useful or injurious; for there is scant justification for the opinion that the worshipper of a piece of wood or stone sees in it only a purely material object.
The second stage is that of animism or spiritism, “a belief in spirits having no substantial bond or necessary connection with determinate natural objects.” The spirit is conceived as independent, separable; it goes and comes, enters and departs; it is attributed not only to men, but also to animals: the savage tries to deprecate the wrath of the beast he has killed in hunting, the chief has his horses and dogs buried with him. Psychologically, this stage corresponds to a preponderance of the imagination over simple perception.