These primitive forms of religious belief originate in the tendency of the savage, and the child, perhaps also of the higher animal, to look upon everything as alive, to attribute desires, passions, will, to everything that acts, to form his ideas of nature from what he knows of his own nature. This anthropomorphism results from the awakening of reasoning thought under its baldest form: analogy, the first source of myth, language, arts, and even science. But those analogies, which to us are merely images, were realities to primitive man. It is needless to insist on so well known a point. We must remember, however, that this primitive god-creating operation is a projection from our activity rather than from our intelligence; it originates with man as a motor rather than as a thinking being.
So far we have considered nothing but the object of belief, perceived or imagined; but what does the believer feel? of what elements is the religious sentiment composed during this period? We may point out the following:
(1) First of all, the emotion of fear in its different degrees, from profound terror to vague uneasiness, due to the faith in an unknown, mysterious, impalpable Power, able to render great services, and, more especially, to inflict great injuries; for historians have always remarked that, in early times, it is always malevolent and terrible genii who are adored; the good and merciful ones are neglected; in the following periods this state of things will be reversed. During this period Power is the attribute of the gods.
(2) A second and much less marked characteristic consists in a certain attraction or sympathy which, though very slight, binds the worshipper to his deity. The saying “Primus in orbe Deos fecit timor” is not absolutely true; for fear has a tendency to withdrawal, flight, aversion, while in every worship there is at least some hope of moving the most maleficent power and exciting its compassion,—consequently an approach to it. Later on, this rudimentary attraction will become the essential point.
(3) A third characteristic resulting from the preceding is that the religious feeling is strictly practical and utilitarian; it is the direct expression of a narrow egoism. It connects itself with the self-preserving instinct of the individual or the group, and is in nowise, as Sergi has maintained it to be, a pathological symptom. Quite on the contrary, it is a weapon in the struggle for life; since it is not a matter of indifference whether those in power are for or against one. This by no means disinterested character is shown in the worship which rests entirely on the practical rule: Do ut des. Hence the oblations and sacrifices proportioned to the worshippers’ desires and requests, for which the deity owes his faithful ones an ample recompense. Hence incantations, magic, and sorcery, which are methods not only of alluring and appeasing the god, but of getting possession of him by stratagem and holding him in one’s power.
(4) Lastly, from this time forward, the religious feeling has a social character, or rather, the religious and social tendencies amalgamate into a whole. It strengthens the principle of authority, often in favour of the altruistic tendencies, which are still very weak. The chiefs, priests, sorcerers, speak and act in the name of a higher power, and keep up the social tie. The worship of the dead, which Spencer has made the mistake of generalising too much, is an element of stability, establishing a continuity between different generations. The community of worship and ritual is the objective and visible expression of social solidarity. I do not consider as belonging to this period institutions such as the religious oath, trial by ordeal, or others presupposing the addition of a novel element, which is still absent. But there are other customs, local or general—e.g., that of the tabu, existing in nearly the whole of Oceania and elsewhere under different forms, in which religion performs a social office, but a novel one (at least according to our present ideas), and safeguards institutions and conventions by terror, while still remaining outside the region of morality.
II.
Except the intellectual feelings themselves, no emotional manifestation depends more on the intellectual development than the religious sentiment, because every religion implies some conception of the universe—a cosmology and a system of metaphysics. With the first period we have scarcely passed beyond the stage of imagination; with the second, reflection and generalisation, whose upward progress we are about to follow, make their appearance. The intellectual evolution and the emotional evolution must each be studied in turn during this second stage.
I. Intellectual Evolution.—We shall find it useful, moreover, to divide the study of the intellectual element into two questions: (1) the conception of a cosmic order, at first physical, afterwards moral; (2) the progressive march of generalisation from an almost unlimited multiplicity up to unity. These two processes have not always coincided or kept pace with one another.
(1) We have seen that, for primitive man, everything is alive, full of arbitrary caprices, desires, intentions, and especially mysteries, because everything is unforeseen: it is the reign of universal contingency. The formula, “everything is alive,” is, however, too absolute; it only suits those things which were seen to move and change—i.e., the majority, not the totality of things. It seems as if the absence of motion, stability, fixity, the want of reaction, had been a sort of revelation to a simple mind. Perhaps it was through the spectacle of the fixity of things that the notion of order or law made its very humble entry into the world. However that may be, it is certain that the depersonification of nature began early to mark the origin of science. In our present state of culture we find a difficulty in representing to ourselves a state of mind in which the idea of fixity in natural phenomena is almost nil; yet such a state of mind has existed, and there is no want of documents to prove it. The expression, “the new moon,” was not at first a metaphor: men wondered if the sun would always continue his course; the Mexicans anxiously awaited his new birth every fifty years; eclipses seemed to happen at random, and caused great terror, etc.[[193]] Gradually the spirit of observation and reflection arrived at constant relations, and introduced into the conception of Nature the ideas of order and regularity, diminishing in so far the domain of chance and contingency. This notion of a cosmic order has influenced religious conceptions; the government of the physical world was attributed to the gods; they are its regulators; each has his department where he is supreme. The co-existence of two opposite principles has been remarked in the religion of several nations in this period of their development: necessity being personified in an abstract, mysterious, inaccessible deity (Rita among the Aryans, Ma with the Egyptians, Tao with the Chinese, Moira or Nomos with the Greeks, etc.[[194]]); while contingency, or rather limited arbitrary power, was personified in more human gods having their legends, acting within their own special sphere, as, for instance, the gods of Greece. The latter are also sometimes divided into two categories, which is the first step towards simplification, one kind bestowing physical well-being—health, prosperity, riches; the other inflicting physical ills—disease, famine, tempest, shipwreck.