[ p. 88 ]
That the outer form of religion is more or less shaped by outer factors is easily shown and has already been illustrated. Thus, to give a few obvious examples, the reason why there is no cult of agricultural spirits in Kamchatka is that there is no agriculture, there j the reason why East-Wind was a god in South America[^xxxx] and is today a devil in India is that this wind regularly brought longdesired rain to the American coast and as regularly in Central India brings a parching dust, which shows demoniac maliciousness. In the same way the outer form of the cult, in monkey-w’orship, mountain-worship, lake-worship, is adventitious, varying according to circumstances of food, temple material, accessibility, etc. Now, in line with this, anthropologists have been prone to say that natural environment conditions man himself as vyoU as his gods and worship, so that his religious mentality represents the result of home and heritage, that is, his environment individually and racially; man, it is said, is the product of “nature and nurture.” This is true, but only to a limited extent.
f’or were it altogether true, men from a religious point of view would be much more diverse than they are now. As it is, no matter what the environment and heritage, men are different rather by grade than by capacity. At about the same cultural stage the religious expression is rather uniform than diverse, with the same primitive reactions in the low grades and almost identical results in the highest grades, ethical and philosophical. The great [ p. 89 ] diversity in great religions does not come from nature and nurture, but from sporadic and extraordinary personalities wMch do not seem to be the result of environment except to a small extent, and it is these great personalities which have made all great rehgions. A personality of this sort not only sums up the best that nature and nurture have bestowed, but springs beyond and stands out apart from the mass, as a sport blossoms out without logical connection with its nature or nurture. Every great thinker adds to home and heritage something not to be. interpreted in terms of either; what he hands on to posterity is the old religion plus himself, which may be the most important factor of all. But these different great thinkers in their turn think so much alike that the same phenomenon repeats- itself in the highest as in the lowest grade, and just as the lowest religious activities are similar, whether occurring in India or America or Africa, so the higher reaches of religion, as of philosophy, are the same; the supreme believers worship the samo Supreme God everywhere.
But if this be so, the cause must lie in human nature itself. This is so much alike all the world over that it more than counterbalances accidents of home and heritage, which do not really make man what he is in any^one place, but only modify him. It is then in the nature of man as man that the most primitive stimuli to religious birth and growth are to be sought. And as man is a complex, so there is no one stimulus to which religion can be referred; but the combined factors of his being work together to a religious outcome. Nor is it correct to say that of these factors, which can be grouped roughly as emotional and intellectual, the emotional have complete precedence. For prior to anything which can be called religion there are only fear and hope without consciousness of a spiritual power to which fear or hope is directed : but [ p. 90 ] from the very beginning of religious experience there is present with these a modicum of intellectual activity. Let us take, for example, the attitude of the junglemen already cited. There is an indefinite something which they fear and try to propitiate, not a person but a power or group of powers which they imagine in the rushing river, the spreading tree, the advance of fever, and propitiate as some sort of power, they know not what, in which they believe because of its efiect and generally malign activity. Now this is almost the lowest form of religion. There is no recognized spirit which these savages propitiate, only a vague power which they logically imagine from the effect produced. This logical imagination is really at the base of the attempt to propitiate, and it is the same logical imagination which “bodies foi’th the forms of things unknown.” Those “who in the night imagining some fear suppose the bush a bear,” or the disease a demon, connect effect and cause, as at a later stage the cobweb on the grass argues a fairy maker of the web, or in the ease of a child, the chair that hurts is regarded as malevolent. This it is which makes the Ainu believe that the river which drowns his brother has done so on purpose. All effects are so judged. Especially is it easy to imagine life in motion, difficult to imagine that activity does not imply life, and that active life does not imply will. Thus to the savage the rivei’, in that it moves and acts, is a power possessed of will, as, to the senii-eivilized, the sun is still a similar volitive power. Moreover, even far down in the scale of savagery, the world as understood by the savage is either a creation arguing a creator, as among the lowest savages of Australia, or an evolution from primordial matter, as apiong the Polynesians and Californians, It is as much logic with the savage as with the philosopher when the former argues a “cutter-out of the world” or other creator-gods. Prom imagination [ p. 91 ] logically working comes also the idea of the self persisting after death. The sleeper sees his dead alive and active again and argues that his own personality will live after death as he imagines others so living.
As a race advances, imagination invents more advanced gods, corresponding to the cultural advance of the community in other regards and among these will be found many abstract divinities. But it is an error to think that divine abstractions are necessarily of civilized origin. Masses of them are invented by communities scarcely to be called civilized and the same process produces virtually the same divinity in different localities. Thus abstractions of physical objects are found among the Eomans and Slavs, and the tendency to invest attributes with personality leads to such paraUei forms as Thor’s daughter Thunder and Mars’ wife Bravery (Nerio) and Indra’s wife Power (Sachi). Or the abstraction stands alone and the same thought produces the same result, as in the three sister Norms and three sister Moirai. The more advanced the people the more advanced will be the abstraction. In India, the god Pharma (Justice, Eight) is a late divinity and still later comes the Scribe of Pharma, who, like Gabriel, keeps the account of man’s sins in Ms ledger. On the other hand, Kindness, Piety, and other abstractions are deities at a pre-Vedic period. “Come to us with Abundance,” prays a Vedic poet to the god of increase, and even the oldest commentator is not sure whether Abundance is a female deity or a common noun. But probably in all such cases, though there was no cult, the abstraction was vaguely felt as connoting some sort of personality, a usage still reflected in our poetic speech, but a personality having volition, the will to come or not. It was thus the doorpost, threshing-floor, threshold, harvest, etc., were regarded by the Slavs, Teutons, and Eomans, whose Numina were [ p. 92 ] animate volitive powers, as were the plough, furrow, grindstone, and drum of the Vedio Aryans, although we can scarcely avoid speaking of them as spirits of the plough, etc.
But abstractions as such are not much cared for or invoked. Often they have no cult or receive a cult only because they cease to be pure abstractions and are identified with something more real, the sun, the dead chief, etc. Thus in Greece and India, Piety and Justice are seldom invoked as divinities and the creator Vishnu is much more real than the abstract Maker. Nor can imagination conceive of gods as too unhuman. Especially must the head-god be like the head of the state. Euled by a king a people will not recognize a “matriarchal” divinity, which is one of the reasons why Hera becomes subordinate to Zeus, though, if the state changes, the goddess of a matriarchal state is apt to become androgynous or male, as in Babylon. The gods too will be placed in septs and clans, corresponding to social orders, and as the moral order changes so the gods change, or, as with many lesser gods, disappear, as Zeus in Homer becomes quite another Zeus in Aeschylus and Plato. We ourselves no longer ascribe to the Divinity “sinful acts,” and it was the sinful acts of the Lord of Beings in India that led to this Pather-god being superseded by gods to whom no such acts could be attributed. It is only when imagination and logic have worked for ages in conjunction with an ever developing moral sense that man arrives at the supreme imagination of a moral creator and governor of the universe usurping the functions of previous deities. Imagination also operates in the making of myths, associating natural processes with a group of ideas, and in the making of symbols, where a thought is associated with a sign. Examples of both are the seasonal myth, the death of the year, and [ p. 93 ] water as a symbol of purity or of wisdom, as in Babylonia, Germany, and India.
But as all horses are more or less alike yet some breeds are more nervous than others, so though all men are much alike some are more imaginative than others, as some are more passionate, and this predisposition affects religion as it does art and literature. Hence the religious experience of different races has not been identical. No one ladder has led to the higher stages of religion.
To turn now to the emotional factors of religioo, a very crude dictum of ignorant antiquity asserted that Fear first fashions gods. Tribes whose gods are the dear spirits of the family, who guide and protect them, have more love than fear for divine powers and in a dog’s religion probably love and fear are inextricably united, but just as we are commanded first to fear God and then to love him, and are instructed that perfect love castetb out fear, so we may assume that fear of divinity generally precedes love, as malicious demons precede beneficent gods. But what sort of fear? Obviously ah automatic expression of fear, such as dodging a blow or closing eyes before dust or shrinking from a suddenly revealed precipice, has no religious meaning. But- when one fears the eventual effect of an approaching thunderstorm, reason and imagination come into play before one deprecates the power that may slay. Again, the religious expression differs as danger is actual or potential. When the danger is merely possible and remote, as in danger of drought which may lead to hunger, the expression is not merely deprecatory but hopeful, and the prayer for good sounds with the cry not to harm. Fear from a religious point of view is thus first of all intelligent and then hopeful. So in the earliest Aryan expression of refigious feeling the god is besought not to kill with lightning-stroke but to bring good, and the same union here expressed poetically in our oldest [ p. 94 ] literature is really present in the most primitive expression of savage religious feeling, as when the Australian savage begs the favor of the powers he is trying to coerce; he fears, yet at the same moment he hopes; he seeks to compel, yet at the same moment unconsciously voices the feeling of subjection and dependence. In no case is religious fear automatic or instinctive. In every case it is a reasoned fear. It is a common error to assert that fear of the dark shows innate or instinctive fear of the supernatural. Both observation and induction here ar§ faulty. Savages are not afraid of the darkness but of demons and other foes in the darkness, and children properly brought up are not afraid of the darkness; they fear only to be alone and if they woke in daylight and thought themselves deserted they ’would be fearful too. Even animals as nervous as horses do not fear the dark if it hides no harm, as in a New England pasture. When, as in India, cattle fear the darkness, it is because they know what danger darkness hides. Pear of solitude or of falling and of other such dangers is instinctive as a racial inheritance, not a sign of instinctive belief in the supernatural. As for animals, when a dog bristles in the dark, it is because he becomes aware of something material not yet explained; he fears the unknown as the first stage of defence.[1]
The dictum of Petronius cited above has been accepted in a modified sense by Tiele, who makes fearsome dependence the root of all religion. Yet what truth might lie in this is vitiated by the connotation of dependence in the scheme of Tiele’s philosophy, according to which it is the beginning of loving trust and confidence. Even the lowest [ p. 95 ] savage, according to Tiele, feels a religious fear which interprets itself to the savage’s own consciousness as a need of communion with, the divine power and the need of a redeemer. But this interpretation of savage thought is almost grotesque. To a savage, as to a beast, whatever is unkaown is uncanny, and whatever is uncanny is feared. There is no beginning of a feeling of need of communion with a divine power in the savage’s fear of a disease-devil.[2]
It is to be noticed further that though fear is prominent in savage religions, it is not always xmdiluted fear. Even among the most primitive peoples may be found the same mixture of fear and attachment toward ghosts that conditions human intercourse, while in the higher religions hope, admiration, and sympathy unite with fear to make a complex far removed from abjection. The Yedic seer who fears and hopes also a’dmires and is in full sympathy with the terrible power of the god of storms, whose glorious exhibition fills him_ width exultation as well as dread. Yet the Vedie reli^on is of an advanced type, and the usual primitive attitude toward dangerous powers is one rather of antagonism than sympathy. Late among religious emotions is that of thankfulness. When the fear is stilled and the hope gratified the savage rejoices, but to offer thanks to the spiritual powers for their favor is as rare as to thank a man for service. Some savages seem utterly without any sense of gratitude toward their human neighbors and it is not strange that toward the spirits their attitude is the same. Even literary religions [ p. 96 ] are often devoid of the expression of thankfulness, and most of the so-called thanksgiving festivals of savages are merely joyous feasts, though occasional observers, interpreting advanced savagery, speak, for example, of some Amerinds as “eating thanksgiving to the Great Spirit” for meat, snow, etc.[3]
Derived from fear, through regret that one has offended against a spirit’s desires, repentance is another emotion which belongs only to higher religions and yet can be traced back to primitive apprehension, though without understanding the sinner’s position it is difficult to distinguish mere regret from repentance. In the early religious hymns of the Veda the consciousness of sin comes first in the recognition of its punishment and repentance is vague because the sinner really does not know why he is punished. He suffers and recognizes that suffering is divine punishment, but, as he is not aware of any faults he has committed, he asks: “How have I offended my god? Was the fault due to drunkenness, gambling, anger! Whatever I have done I have done unwittingly. May I again be friends with my god !” Much the same attitude appears in the early Babylonian hymns. In other words, the first literary expression in this regard reproduces exactly the attitude of the savage who argues from his hurt that he has been attacked by an evil power and is anxious to do Avhat he can to frighten away or satisfy the evil influence. If he can frighten it off, he does so; but he is apt also to try persuasive measures in the form of offering or sacrifice, according as he conceives of the power more i^ersonally. Thus after a defeat in battle, more victims are offered to the presumably offended gods. When the volcano almost destroys a village which has been led aAvay from worship of the fieiry god, it is pacified by offerings placed in the path-of the lava [ p. 97 ] by the savages, whose fear makes them repent of their apostasy.[4]
From this crude beginning, repentance as a religious factor can be traced up to its highest expression as grief at grieving divine love and a return to conformity with the demands made by that love, in which, to the more exalted and sensitive human spirit, fear is entirely submerged in affection. Bepentanee through fear of consequences hereafter is a middle position between the two.
The measure of the emotional side of religion is seen in praise, gifts, performance of what pleases the divinity, music, dance, etc. But it is not always clear why a particular act occurs, since all religious rituals -are a jumble and the same act i$ performed for opposite reasons. Thus dancing is employed both to attract demons and frighten them away, and gifts to spirits are given as often to keep them off as to allure them. So in higher religions, as has been remarked by Durkheim, the service becomes stereotyped, a form applicable to various situations, as when mass is said for a wedding or a funeral.
The existence of fear as a recognized aspect of advanced religions need not be insisted upon. The word “terror” expresses the attitude of the early Teutons toward their gods. The Hindu says, “It is fear alone that makes men virtuous,” and also, “God is a great fear.” Modern life has retained as mere form many usages originally inspired by the fear of spirits, such as placing candles about the dead, spitting for good luck (really to avert evil), together with many other good-luck practices. Our April Fool’s Day has an exact counterpart in India, where the original idea of expelling demons is more obvious. Fear becomes systematized in taboo when, [ p. 98 ] as in Polynesia, tMs becomes so pervasive as to underlie most religious activities. But all religions are necessarilyexpressed more or less in taboo-form, and it must be recognized that ethical advance has been made through taboo, in that it opposes theft and adultery on the part of others; that is, taboo at least defines certain acts as sins. But it is a common exaggeration to insist that theft, adultery, and murder have become ethically wrong through taboo. From the religious point of view, taboo is important as registering a neutral zone between what is evil and what is holy. The object or act to be avoided is simply fearsome, the stage represented being antecedent to a formal distinction between accursed and holy, devilish and divine. The undefined mana or power, not conceived as a spirit, gives its power to personal spirits, who are thought of as beings possessed of great mana. The mana itself, however, may infect in non-personal form objects, places, times, and acts, so that they inspire fear. The priest who possesses mana is a magician but without the magician’s power of controlling spirits, and has therefore been said to exercise “negative magic.” In the establishment of custom taboo has both aided and injured spiritual development, in insisting on the one hand on ethical observances and on the other on ritual. It survives today in many superstitions.
Antithetic to fear is hope, and this too as a religious factor has been systematized in fetishism in contrast to the religion of fear in taboo. The fetish in its most primitive form is a mascot, that is, not an object inhabited by a spi3dt, as is generally asserted but a luck-bringing volitive object in which spirit and will are one with matter, differing from our mascots only in that the mascot involuntarily brings success. A later form of fetish is an object regarded as inhabited by a spirit. Both kinds, however, are treated in the same way, cajoled and punished [ p. 99 ] as luck-bringers that are respectively expected to give success or have failed to do so. No religious attitude is older than this, for in different form the same thought inspired the cave-men of France, who gave themselves luck by the magic of the painted form of the beasts they would slay. These pictures acted as fetishes in that they brought good luck, but they probably differed from the fetish in being magical compelling powers, not objects of prayer and entreaty, for the fetish is besought as a god and is sometimes preserved in a god-house even when discarded. When an object manifests itself as inclining to be beneficial, as when a stone picked up brings hunting-luck, it is treasured as something potentially capable of the wish to confer benefits. When it fails to do so, it is first implored, then threatened and beaten, and then discarded, exactly as a human being might be treated. The fetish is not primarily a clan-object (Mke a totem), but is an individual tutelary power devoted to one man. It may, however, become a clan-object and even develop into a god, but these are secondary forms. The outstanding feature of the fetish is that it objectifies hope and faith in some quasi spiritual power, signifying that man feels himself dependent on some more than human power.[5] But hope and fear work together and it would be absurd to say that any primitive race had a religion based wholly on either, as it is no less absurd to suppose that both or either can exist religiously without intelligent imagination. AU religions, even the most primitive, combiae strands of thought and emotion. If self-preservation is a law of nature, fear and hope, which are exercised in preserving that law, may be called instinctive elemerits of religion, though, as already shown, there is no instinctive belief in spiritual powers.
[ p. 100 ]
Like fear and hope of the mind, hunger and thirst of the body have played a great part in establishing primitive religions, since these appetites have moulded religious systems. The root of totemism is hunger and the root of the cult of divine intoxicants is thirst, but in the latter case, though simple thirst leads to the concoction of pleasant drinks and this further to the cult of the intoxicating beverage, as in India, Persia, and Peru, the actual deification of liquor comes from its supernatural effect. A hjman of the Rig-Veda represents the god Indra as drunken and boastful of .what marvels he can perform under the influence of the divine moon-plant. The feeling that a man has uncanny powers when drunk, that he is spiritually enlarged, has more mana, becomes as it were a god, is common to all savages. With hunger the divinity is the food-giver, as countless instances show, and the totemic clan eventually becomes the worshipper of that which provides it with sustenance, regarding it as a being which is at once father and mother, worthy of the same regard as is given to the ghosts which still care for the clan.[6]
Much more complicated than the simple effect of feai’, hope, and hunger as religious factors is that of love. It is at the same time emotion, appetite, and divinity; further, it inspires not only the worshipper but the god. Pear may be systematized in taboo, hope in fetishism, but they are not themselves personalities of religious importance. As there is no god of gratitude or repentance, [ p. 101 ] so there is no god of fear except as a poetical fignire like I^ame or as one of the little spirits surrounding a great god. In Homer, Fear is son of the war-god and in Greek comedy he is a caricatured ugliest god. Occasional service was given to him and, like Death, he seems at times’to have received sacrifice, but the few cases of sacrifice rest upon association and Homeric influence rather than on any real worship. In India, Fear is personified, like Punishment, but he has no cult and- appears only as an attendant of Shiva. Love, however, is a powerful divinity •even among savages and in certain religious appears as all-powerful. As a religious factor, love, in exciting religious feeling, must be distinguished from love for a deity; the former is primitive, the latter is not.
It is here that a fundamental error vitiates that theory of Max Muller and Tiele already referred to, according to which the “love of God” is a primitive religious stimulus of all races and peoples. Since God himself is a late discovery of the human intellect, how can primitive man be stimulated by love of him? The anachronism resembles that in the “love of a god of light” ascribed by Brintoii to the Andamanese savages. Of course, savages enjoy warmth and light, but one might as well talk of a lizard loving the sun-god as to use such an expression of the savages of the Andaman Islands. Love of deity is comparatively a late product. In early Babylonian literature, the god Shamash is called “god, king and shepherd,” but one is not to read into this the connotation given by Christian thought and imagine that the Babylonian felt a personal affection such as that of the Christian for his divinity. Babylonian scholars have long since pointed out that no especial endearment is conveyed by this expression. But in the later Vedic hymns, when a god is called “dear,” though the word does not express so much as does our translation, as may be seen from [ p. 102 ] the fact that it is used of clothes, food, and atmosphere, there is a real affection for the gods, especially for Indra and Agni. The Vedic god is a dear friend and member of the family, though of the yearning love for a god such as is felt for the popular divinities in the Hindu period the Rig-Veda shows as yet no trace. It is in the next following literary stratum that one finds the worshipper speaking of gaining the love of the Father-god and coming to his very heart.[7]
In part the matter is geographical. The more Southern and Oriental peoples first attain to the idea of loving’ their gods. Th$ Teuton and Roman fear rather than love, even to the end of their religious development, and Aristotle says that to love God is indecent. He means probably the passionate love which appears first in the East and inay be traced back there to passion itself. What is true, however, is that there is often among primitive savages an affectionate regard for the familiar spirits of the family and not always fear and desire to drive away the good ghosts; also that there is sometimes so great joy in the presence of divine beings as to suggest love of the object. Stars regarded as divine beings which announce by their rising a season of joy are, as we have seen, greeted with joyful worship and the power of spring is celebrated with joyful (erotic) ritual. Yet the love of man for divinity cannot reach a personal stage till the deity is sufSciently anthronomorphized to be in sympathy with humanity.
What is found prior to this is the deification of human desire, love in its crudest form, and of the creative or [ p. 103 ] recreative principle which gives life. In Dahomey there is a love-god called Legba, to whom animals are sacrificed, and eircnmcision is a rite in his honor, while his ritual is an obscene mystery. On the other hand, among the Bushmen there is a creator-god whose ritual is also a licentious blood-dance. There is not much difference between the two. In both, religious expression is based on the recognition of “love” as a creative power. Likewise in India, lust is recognized as ancillary to the reproductive power of spring, and Ihe ritual of this religious phase becomes a sensual debauch. Honor paid to a love-god is originally inseparable from that paid to the creative deity of nature. It is only in later developments that deities of productivity are consciously separated from those of passion and lust. At this stage appear the rites of a bloody nature to further increase, such as the sacrifice to Moloch and to the May-pole, in order that vitality drawn from the victim may help the deity of growth. Imitative magic, such as is seen in pouring out water or blood to induce rain to fall, is exercised in sexual excesses as well, and the principle of lust is itself regarded as one with that of the annual renewal of crops. Passion then becomes the object of a special cult and Aphrodite as Love and Demeter as Mother are formally separated until merged again in “mysteries.” Mexicans, EedsMns, Greeks, Hindus, and Egyptians all had mysteries in which the power of life, interpreted also as one of death, was erotically celebrated, passion being here a power of fear rather than of affection, as is shown by the taboo-dread of sex-power. Even Aphrodite and her Eastern prototype are more feared than loved.
But the god who is really loved is he who as most human is most in sympathy with man. Buddha, Krishna, Christ, are loved because they first loved man, and man [ p. 104 ] feels himself dear to them. The nearer the dearer, in life, in sympathy, in aspirations. The love for a creator- god can never be so intense as for a god whose experience has been one with man’s. Krishna, believed to be the human incarnate form of Vishnu the Preserver, excites a love much warmer and more human than does Vishnu himself.
In the unrestrained exercise of this love for divinity as a sympathetic loving power lies the danger that emotional excess may "revert to more primitive expression and become more human than divine. This tendency has made itself felt less in Buddhism than in Krishnaism and Christianity. It dissolves in Buddhism into a chaste mysticism, such as that found also in Christianity, for though Buddha sacrificed himself for man and lived as a man on earth, he lived rather as a sage than as a lover of man. With other worshippers of divine yet human beings there is the danger lest religious exaltation revert to animality. This has been the case both in India and in the Occident. It is not due to conscious antinomianism but to the release, caused by sur-exeitation, from ordinary inhibition. Naturally the lower and coarser the nature the more pronounced is the danger. In the great Hindu Song of Love’ of the twelfth century, written in praise of Krishna, one finds divine love expressed in realistic human terms so skilfully that it is hard to say whether the author was a saint or a debauehe. The same emotionalism produces dire effects in the practical worship of Krishna and of Christ. Mystic eroticism becomes offensive brutality. What the saint feels as rapt emotion the vulgar worshipper practices under the guise of religion. Both saint and shouter are emotionally rather than intellectually strong; in both, judgment is subordinated to feeling. The sensuality of the saint is mental, but he has [ p. 105 ] opened the door to the religions orgy of the love-feast, the “holy kiss,” and other indecencies.[8]
The effect thus becomes the same whether the object be a beloved deity or a deity of love and reproduction. In India, even the sober Sikhs profane their temples with debauchery practiced as a religious exercise, and the Hindu spring-festival consists in equal parts of devotion and voluptuousness. Such facts lead to the question whether religion is based altogether on erotic excitement. This enquiry, however, is directed toward present conditions rather than toward primitive reaction to such a stimulus. It is not asserted by any competent observer that all religious impulse is primarily erotic, only that religion as expressed by conversion is a result of physiological excitement at the age of adolescence. Strictly speaking one should say that conversion is generally coincident with adolescence rather than that it is induced by it. Sexual life, says Starbuck in The Psychology of Religion, has not “furnished the raw material out of which religion was constituted”; but it gave the psychic impulse which called out the latent possibilities of development. The matter might be left here were it not that Dr. Coe has drawn the inference that adolescence is a state divinely appointed for the express purpose of inducing restlessness, in order that the young person may be led to seek rest and peace in religion. But human beings [ p. 106 ] are not the only animals affected and all that results from this investigation is the obvious fact that youth is more impressionable than age; it responds more readily to any emotional appeal, literary, oratorical, theatrical, or religious. Revolutions are largely the’ result of boyish impatience, yet one does not ascribe the origin of patriotism to adolescence. So religious emotion is more apt to occur in youth than in old age, yet it does not follow that religion is caused by youthful excitement. Sex has played an important role in religion, as it has in philosophy, but it does not originate philosophy or religion.[9]
It is indisputable that no one factor can account for religion. To derive religion from any sole stimulus is as unscientific as to refer it to priestly craft, a divine mandate, or to illumination. Religion is the expression of the shifting attitude of man as he reacts to various stimuli, which cause him to incline toward or shrink from certain things and courses. Physically, man shrinks from darkness and prefers light. Morally, he shelters his mind, as he does his body, from discomfort and storm. Shrinking and inclining are instinctive. There is no “religious instinct,” but all a man’s instincts combine to make him religious, as they combine to make him physically happy. His mind abets instincts and seeks the same goal. It is not fear or hope or love or any effect induced by drinking or by hearing a command that makes man believ^ material things to be alive and capable of doing good or evil, nor is it any one of these things that gives him the notion of a self persisting after death. But in believing as he [ p. 107 ] does he is inevitably affected by the imagined powers in which he believes, exactly as he is affected by the real power of animals and men. The emotion religiously excited is identical with the emotion excited without religious implication. Man does not at first make a separation between religious and non-religious, supernatural an d natural. He welcomes his dead father as he welcomes him alive or hates him in the same wayj he fears the malignant river as he fears a malignant animal or man. As, in his most. savage state, he knows toward men no gratitude, so he knows none toward spirits or the animated matter which precedes his conception of spirit. With some exceptions, the order of religious development thus corresponds to man’s general mental and moral development. Fear usually precedes love; sympathy with a god results from higher conceptions, drawing man to divinity instead of making him shrink from demoniac powers; and not until such sympathetic understanding of divinity exists can there be any real religious remorse. The religious progression of the race is thus one with its intellectual progression.[10]
The biological series supports the same view as to the normal development of emotional factors. The only emotions of low organisms appear to be fear and dislike. Social instincts, love and sympathy, appear first in the higher animals (sympathy is exhibited first in birds) and not till the highest mammals are reached is there apparent any consciousness of wrong or of remorse, such remorse at least as that felt by the savage who recognizes sin only through’ sorrow. In short, religious development follows the general laws of evolution and it is especially clear that no theory of religious origins based on love, [ p. 108 ] sympathy, or other later traits can be maintained, despite the high authority of Max Muller, Tiele, and other scholars who have postulated sympathetic love as the foundation of all religion.
It is asserted by Saussaye that the history of Teutonic religion exhibits successive stages, namely, fear, hope, gratitude, and repentance, through which it has passed consecutively, each in turn becoming more prominent, gratitude appearing first in the Middle Ages, with hope still extant and gratitude more pronounced than repentance. Such a series, however, in so late a religious expression merely means that repentance, for example, is most common in the most advanced writings. It cannot imply that hope was less real or active than fear when the Teutons first make their appearance. In fact, the first half of the series is based largely on the fact that Tacitus describes terror as the mark of Teutonic religion, which may mean nothing as to hope and gratitude. Saussaye’s series is one which must at least be accepted with reservations.
Mr. Josiah Morsein in his Pathological Aspects of Religion makes the common mistake of grouping instinctive fears with mental reasoned fears. Dr. Brinton, too, taught that man has a subconscious apperception of spirituality shown by fear of darkness. ↩︎
Not less extravagant is Tiele’s argument that man has an innate hope of immortality because he invented tales of immortal gods. The statemeants on which Tiele’s theory is built are also, to say the least, of doubtful validity. Thus he asserts that the idea of redemption is “absolutely general” (universal) and that a belief in immortality is found among all peoples. See Tiele, Science of Religion, Ontology, pp, 74, 113, 124. ↩︎
Catlin, North American Indians, I, pp. 145, 213, and II, p. 159. ↩︎
This happened in one of the Pacific islands. When the Christianized savages found that prayer to the new God was in vain, they reverted to the old worship of the volcano, whereupon the lava stopped flowing! ↩︎
See on this point and especially on the wrong assumption that a fetish is originally a spirit, the writer’s History of Religions, pp. 35 f. ↩︎
See the writer article, The Background of Totemism, reprinted from the Journal of the American Oriental Society in the Report of the Smithsonian Institute, 1918, p. 573, in which it is shown that totemism is at bottom an economic institution. The idea that whatever provides a livelihood is worshipful and of a quasi divine nature lingers in civilized lands today. It is for this reason that in India the bookkeeper worships his pen, the ploughman his plow, and the fisherman his nets, a graceful reminder ot a beautiful decadent faith, implying hope and gratitude. ↩︎
Literally, “reaching his armpits,” i.e., coming into the god’s arms, as to his heart. Those who think that India knew no love for a god till Christian influence introduced the idea of loving faith would do well to notice that the word for love used in the Brahmanic period is the same preman which later expresses the worshipper’s passionate love for Krishna. ↩︎
“Emotionalism” says a writer in The Negro Church p. 58, “is the predominating element.” Another writer, describing the “roper dance,” a religions rite, says that it consists in an excited embrace of the sexes at the conclusion of a religious meeting which “results in gross immorality.” Primitive Traits in Religious Revivals, by F. M. Davenport, N. Y., 1905. See also The Negro in Africa and America (1902), by J. A. Tillinghast. The whites are not much better, according to The History of the Presbyterian Church in Kentucky (K. T., 1847), by Robert Davidson, who delicately describe the “most indelicate attitudes” (of white women during a revival), the object of their attentions being “especially the preachers.” ↩︎
See Starbuck, The Psycologhy of Religion (London, 1899); G. A. Coe, The Spiritual Life, and William James, Varieties of Religious Experience. Parkman, in his Jesuit Relations, long ago remarked on “the tendency of the erotic principle to ally itself with high religious excitement,” as illustrated by the life of Marie de l’Incarnation, the “holy widow.” ↩︎
The general history of mankind, epitomized in the individual, shows that men have first been influenced by fear, then by love, then by sympathy, and lastly by remorse. See Drummond, The Ascent of Man, p. 129. ↩︎