Recent Developments in European Thought

by Unknown

From this point of view, then, Sir James Frazer's account of religion will be considered unacceptable: it makes religion and magic alike but means whereby man has—vainly—sought to satisfy desire. And the implication is that the day of both alike is over. But if Frazer's account of religion is unacceptable, his account of magic also is open to criticism. He wavers between two opinions about magic: at one time he regards it as all falsehood and deception, at another as the source from which science springs, just as at one time he considered magic fundamentally the same as religion and then again as fundamentally different from religion. When Frazer is bent upon identifying magic and science, he attributes to primitive man a theory of causation (that like produces like): magic is based, he says, upon 'the views of natural causation embraced by the savage magician'. On the other hand, according to Wilhelm Wundt in his Völkerpsychologie, primitive man has no notion whatever of natural causation: primitive man, Wundt says, has only one way of accounting for events—if something happens, somebody did it. If any one mysteriously falls ill and dies, the question at once presents itself to the savage mind, who did it? How any one could contrive to make the man fall ill and die is, to the man's relations, thoroughly and disquietingly mysterious. The one thing clear to them is that somebody possesses and has exercised this mysterious and horrible power. The person who, in the opinion not only of the relatives but also of all or most of the community, naturally would do this sort of thing differs in some way—in his appearance or habits—from the average member of the community, and accordingly is credited, or discredited, with this mysterious and dreadful power. Such a person, according to Wundt, is a magician. Such an event is a marvel: so long as it is supposed to be brought about by a man, it is a piece of magic; when it is ascribed (as, according to Wundt, it comes in later, though not in primitive times, to be ascribed) to a god, it is a miracle.

If science then does not work magic, there must be a fundamental distinction between science and magic, an absolute opposition of principles. The principles of thought on which magic is based cannot be, as Frazer maintains, the same as those which give to science its validity. In fine, the belief in magic seems to be based not on any principle of thought, but upon the assumption that, if something happens, somebody must have done it, and therefore must have had the power to do it.

Wundt, whilst differing from Frazer in his description of magic, is at one with him in believing that before religion existed there was an age of magic. But Wundt's view that marvels are magic when supposed to have been done by man, but miracles when supposed to have been done by a god or his priests, suggests the possibility that, as the belief in magic is found usually, if not always, to exist side by side with the belief in miracles, the two beliefs may from the beginning have co-existed, that the age of magic is not prior in the course of evolution to the age of religion. This possibility, it will be admitted, derives some colour at least from the way in which the theory of evolution is employed to account for the origin of species: different though reptiles are from birds, the serpent from the dove, both are descended from a common ancestor, the archaeopteryx. If this instance be taken as typical of the process of evolution in general, then the course of evolution is not, so to speak, linear or rectilinear, but—to use M. Bergson's word—'dispersive'. To suppose that religion is descended from magic would then be as erroneous as to suppose that birds are descended from reptiles or man from the monkey. The true view will be that the course of evolution is not linear, is not a line produced for ever in the same direction, not a succession of stages, but is 'dispersive', that from a common starting point many lines of evolution radiate in different directions. The course of evolution is not unilinear but multilinear; it runs on many lines which diverge, but all the diverging lines start from the same point.

If we apply this conception of evolution in general to the evolution of religion in particular—and Bergson, I should say, does not—then the centre of dispersion, common to all religions, is the heart of man. The forms of religion evolving, emanating and radiating from that common centre are, let us say, fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism. If we wish to avoid, in the theory of religious evolution, an error analogous to that of supposing birds to be descended from reptiles, we must decline to suppose that monotheism is simply polytheism evolved, or that polytheism is descended from fetishism. We must consider that each of these three forms of religion is terminal, in the sense that no one of them leads on to, or passes into, either of the other two. All three forms of religious life may, and indeed do, exist side by side with one another, just as the countless forms of physical life may be found existing side by side. The foraminifera exist now, as they existed millions of years ago; but the fact that they co-exist with higher forms of physical life does not show that the higher forms of life are but foraminifera in a more highly evolved form. Similarly, the fact that fetishism exists side by side with polytheism, or polytheism with monotheism, does not show that one is but a higher form of another: we must consider each to be a terminal form, as incapable of producing another, as it is impossible to conceive that the serpent develops into the dove.

The common centre and starting-point of fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism on this view (the 'dispersive' view) of the evolution of religion lies in the heart of man, in a consciousness, originally vague in the extreme, of the personality and superiority to man of the being or object worshipped. In all these three forms of religion there is worship, and in all three forms the being worshipped is personal. Further, a special tie is felt to exist between the worshipper and the personality worshipped: religion is the bond of union between them, and it is also a bond which unites the worshippers to one another. It is by its very nature a bond of union, a means of communion between persons, human and divine. That is the mystic aspect of religion which finds expression in the rite of sacrifice and in the sacramental meals which are felt somehow to bind together, or rather to reunite and keep together, the worshippers and their god. This communion however is not merely mystic: it has its practical effects inasmuch as it affects the conduct of the worshipper and enables him to do what without it he would not have had strength to do.

If fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism radiate from a common centre, the heart of man, then the heart of man must also be regarded as the starting-point of magic. If they spring straight from the heart, though in different directions, dispersively, then magic must also start from the common centre; and, though its divergence from religion tends to become total, at first, and indeed it may be for long, the discrepancy between them is rather felt uneasily than recognized clearly. Categories, such as those of cause and effect, identity and difference, which are the common property of civilized thought, and which among us, Mr. L.T. Hobhouse says, 'every child soon comes to distinguish in practice, are for primitive thought interwoven in wild confusion.' Two categories, which in primitive thought are thus interwoven in wild confusion, are, it may be suggested, religion and magic; and only in the dispersive process of evolution do they tend to become discriminated. In ancient Egypt, in Babylon, in Brahminism, religion fails to disentangle itself from magic; and not even has Christianity always succeeded in throwing it off. Different as we may conceive magic and religion to be, the fact remains that at first they grow up intertwined together. In the lower forms of religion magic is worked not only by magicians but by priests as well; spells and prayers are hardly to be distinguished from one another. The idea that 'priest' is but 'magician' writ differently, that prayers are but spells under another name, is now obsolete. The truth may be that religion neither follows on, nor is evolved from magic, but that both radiate from a common centre, the heart of man; and that at first both are attempts made by man to secure the fulfilment of his desires, to do his will, though eventually he finds that the way to control nature is to obey her, not to try to command her by working magic; and that it is in endeavouring to do God's will, not his own, that man finds peace at the last.

In the three forms of religion which thus far we have taken into account, fetishism, polytheism, monotheism, religion is felt to be a personal relation—a relation between the human personality and some personality more than human; and the human heart is reaching out and groping after some divine personality, if peradventure it may find Him. But there is yet another form of religion proceeding from the human heart in which this does not seem to be the case—and that is Buddhism. The Buddha definitely renounced the search after God and would not allow his disciples to engage in the pursuit. Practically the pursuit was useless, according to the Buddha: escape from suffering is all that man can want or strive or hope for. Escape from suffering is possible only by cessation from existence; and that cessation from existence, here and hereafter, can be attained by man himself, who can reach Nirvana without the aid of gods, if gods there be. From the point of view of metaphysics the idea that there is any relation between the human personality and the divine falls to the ground, according to the Buddha, because, whether there be gods or not, at any rate there is no human personality. As in a conflagration—and according to the Buddha the whole world, burning with desire, is in a state of conflagration—the flames leap from one house that is burning to the next, so in its transmigrations the self, or rather the character, Karman, like a flame, leaps from one form of existence to another. The flame indeed appears to be there all the time the fire is burning; but the flame has no permanence, it is changing all the time the process of combustion is going on; and 'I' have no more permanence than the flame. 'I' only appear to be there as long as the process of life goes on. And as the flame only continues so long as there is something for it to feed on, so the process of transmigration or re-birth continues only so long as the thirst for being continues: the escape from re-birth is conditional on the extinction of that thirst or desire; and the disciple who has succeeded in putting off lust and desire has attained to deliverance from death and re-birth, has attained to rest, to Nirvana.

Thus, on the 'dispersive' view of the evolution of religion, Buddhism is a radiation from the common centre, from the heart of man, though it radiates in a direction very different from that followed by any other religion. The direction is indeed one which, as the history of religion shows, it has been impossible for man long to follow, for, wherever Buddhism has been established, it has relapsed; and the Buddha, who strove to divert man from prayer and from the worship of gods, has himself become a god to whom prayer and worship are addressed. Whether in the future the direction may be pursued more permanently than it has been by Buddhism up to now lies with the future to show.

Buddhism, however, on the 'dispersive' view of the evolution of religion, is not the only radiation from the common centre, of which we have to take account, in addition to fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism. From the human heart also proceeds 'the religion of humanity', the Positivist Church. Here, as originally in Buddhism, the conception of a divine personality plays no part; but here the human personality, the very existence of which is denied by the Buddha, is raised to a high, indeed to the highest, level. There is no such thing as an individual, if by 'individual' is meant a man existing solely by himself, for a man can neither come into existence nor continue in existence by himself alone. It is an essential part of the conception of personality that it includes fellowship: a person to be a person must stand in some relation to other persons. They are presented to him, the subject, as objects of his awareness; and he, the subject, is also an object of their awareness. Humanity is thus a complex, in which alone persons are found and apart from which they have in fact no existence. Humanity thus plays in Positivism, as a religion, the part of 'the great Being', le grand Être, which in other religions is fulfilled by God, but with this difference, that humanity is human always and never divine.

The ruler of a country steers the ship of state, but he is a pilot only metaphorically. Whether the terms worship and prayer are used more than metaphorically by the Positivist seems hard to decide. On the one hand, if it is felt that worship and prayer are indispensable to religion, it may be argued that in religions other than Positivism they prove not only on analysis, but in the course of history, to be, as by Positivism they are recognized to be, of purely subjective import. On the other hard, it may be that they provide merely a means of transition from the religions of the past to the religion of the future.