Count Eugene Goblet D'alviella - Lectures On The Origin and Growth of The Conception of God (1892)

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2. BAUR (P. C.) Paul, the Apostle of Jesus Christ, his Life
and Work, his Epistles and Doctrine. A Contribution to a Critical
History of Primitive Christianity. Second Edition. By the Rev. Allan
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3. BLEEK'S Lectures on the Apocalypse. Edited by the Rev
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Testament. Translated by the Rev. J. Frederick Smith. 5 vols. 8vo.
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Second German Edition, by the Revs. C. T. Poynting and P. Quenzer.
2 vols. 8vO. 215.
8. KEIM (Th.) History of Jesus of Nazara. Considered in its
connection with the National Life of Israel, and related in detail. Trans-
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13. REVILLE Prolegomena of the History of
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14. SCHRAEDER (Professor) The Cuneiform Inscriptions and
the Old Testament. By Dr. Eberh. Schrader, Professor of Oriental
Languages, University of Berlin. Translated from the second Enlarged
German Edition, with Additions by the Author, and an Introduction by
the Rev. Owen C. Whitehouse, m.a.. Professor of Hebrew Cheshunt
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is
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WILLIAMS & NORGATE. 14, Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London ;

;
THE HIBBERT LECTURES.

1891.— Count Goblet d'Alviella Lectures on the Origin and
Growth of the Idea of God. 8vo. Cloth. io5 6d
1888.—Rev. Dr. Hatch. Lectures on the Influence of Greek

Idâs and Usages upon the Christian Church, edited by the Rev
Dr. Fairbairn. 8vo. Cloth. los 6d.
1887.— Professor Sayce. Lectures on the Religion of Ancient

Assyria and Babylonia. 8vo. Cloth. los 6d.
1886.— Professor J. Rhys, M.A. Lectures on Celtic Heathendom.

Svo. Cloth. los 6d.
1885.—Professor Pfleiderer. Lectures on the Influence of the

Apostle Paul on the Development of Christianity. Svo. Cloth. io5 6d.
1884.—Professor Albert Reville. Lectures on the Ancient

Religions of Mexico and Peru. Svo. Cloth. io5 6d.
1883 —The Rev. Charles Beard. Lectures on the Reforma-

tion of the Sixteenth Century in its Relation to Modern Thought and
Knowledge. Svo. Cloth. los 6d. (Cheap Edition, 45 6d).
1882.— Professor Kuenen. Lectures on National Religions
and Universal Religions. Svo. Cloth. los 6d,
1881.— T.W. Rhys Davids. Lectures on some Points in the

History of Indian Buddhism. Svo. Cloth. 10s 6d.
1880.— M. Ernest Renan. On the Influence of the Institutions,

Thought and Culture of Rome on Christianity, and the Development of
the Catholic Church. Svo. Cloth. los 6d. (Cheap Edition, 2s 6^).
1879.— P. Le Page Renouf. Lectures on the Religion of Ancient

Egypt. 2nd Edition. Svo. Cloth. los 6d.
1878.—Professor Max Miiller. Lectures on the Religions of

India. Svo. Cloth. los 6d.
WORKS PUBLISHED BY THE HIBBERT TRUSTEES.

Wallis.— The Cosmology of the Rigveda: An Essay. By H. w.
Wallis, M.A., Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Svo. Cloth. 5s.
Poole.— Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought, in

the departments of Theology and Ecclesiastical Politics. By Reginald
Lane Poole, m.a., Balliol College, Oxford, ph.d. Leipzig. Svo. Cloth.
los 6d.
Stokes.— The Objectivity of Truth. By George J. Stokes, b.a.,

Senior Moderator and Gold Medallist, Trinity College, Dublin, late
Hibbert Travelling Scholar. Svo. Cloth. 55.
Evans. —An Essay on Assyriology. By George Evans, m.a., Hibbert
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Schvirman.—Kantian Ethics and the Ethics of Evolution.
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THE HIBBERT LECTURES,
1891.
THE HIBBERT LECTURES, iSgi.
LECTURES
ON THE
ORIGIN AND GROWTH
CONCEPTIOIT OF GOD
AS ILLUSTRATED BY
ANTHROPOLOGY AND HISTORY.
BY
COUNT GOBLET D'ALVIELLA,

PROFESSOR OF THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF BRUSSELS.
WILLIAMS AND NORGATE,

14, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN, LONDON;
And 20, SOUTH FREDERICK STREET, EDINBURGH.
181)2.
\_AU Rights reserved^]

LONDON :
PRINTED BY C. GREEN AND SON,
178, STRAND.
TO
THE UNIVERSITY OF BRUSSELS,

FOUNDED BY PRIVATE INITIATIVE
ON THE PRINCIPLE OF FREE INQUIRY,

PREFACE.
Many attempts have been made to trace the develop-

ment of the conception of God; and, apart from the
work of the theologians, the anthropologists and his-
torians have often been led by their respective methods
to widely different solutions of the problem. It has
appeared to me, however, that these methods do not

exclude each other ; nay, that each finds in the other its
necessary supplement.
I may be reproached for associating such different
methods together, and I have already been told that as
soon as we apply what is known as the comparative
method to the investigation of the origins of Eeligion,
or endeavour to trace its pre-historic development, or

even to elucidate the evolution of Eeligion in general,
by reference to the fortunes of the several creeds, we

have already left the domain of history, and entered
upon that of pure philosophy.
I should myself prefer to give a wider signification to
the word history, and make it include all attempts to
recover the past of mankind ; but if we are to restrict its
application to facts of the "historic age" of civilized
communities, then history must assuredly be supple-
mented by other studies which can throw light upon a

VIU PREFACE.
remoter horizon. It is true that these studies cannot give

us certainty — nor, indeed, can history itself always do
that ;
—but at least they can give us information concern-
ing the origin and early stages of human culture, the
details of which may lend each other mutual support,

and may find confirmation in historical facts. And what,
after all, do the names we give our methods signify,
provided they bring us nearer to the truth ?
While my premises wake the suspicion of those who

shrink from applying the ordinary canons of investiga-
tion to religious phenomena, my conclusions, in their turn,
may prove unacceptable to those who see in the spirit of
free inquiry the standing foe and the destined destroyer of

the religious sentiment itself. Yet I cannot tax myself
with want of logic or with partiality, if my attempt to

deduce the laws of religious evolution from the admitted
facts has brought me to the conclusion that the scientific
treatment of Eeligion does not afi'ect the religious senti-

ment in the revolutionary manner feared by some and
hoped for by others. Eather does the study of comparative
theology seem to reveal a growing tendency towards the
admission of the principle laid down by Herbert Spencer,
as a bond of union between religion and science, — that
"the power manifested throughout the universe distin-

guished as material, is the same power which in ourselves
wells up under the form of consciousness," both modes
of force being regarded as phenomenal manifestations of
one absolute Eeality by which they are immediately
produced.
I trust that in this treatment of my subject I have
remained faithful to the spirit which inspired the founder
PREFACE. IX
of the Hibbert Trust and the promoters of the Hibbert

Lectures.
I have only to add that I regard this work as a con-
tinuation of my previous studies on "The Contemporary

Evolution of Eeligious Thought in England, America,
and India. '^ ^ Having described the most advanced forms
of Eeligion amongst the enlightened minds of our age,
I felt a special interest in investigating the gradual
development of these forms and the relation in which
they stand to the lowest manifestations of religious cul-
ture. Enormous as the distance appears, it does not
prove impossible to trace the road that leads from the
one extreme to the other; and here again we find an
illustration of that adage which is now coming to domi-
nate every branch of knowledge, Natura non facit saltus.
I ought to express my gratitude to the Hibbert
Trustees for having offered me this unique opportunity
of developing my views before an English public whose
hospitable welcome I shall always remember. But what
adequate terms can I find, when M. Ernest Eenan him-
self described a similar invitation as " one of the rewards
of his life"?
I have also to offer my special thanks to Mr. Wick-
steed for the patience and accuracy with which he has
executed the translation of these Lectures.
Goblet d'Alviella.
Court St. Etienne, Dec. 1891.
' English Translation by the Kev. J. Moden. London : Williams

and Norgate, 1885.
Erratum.
P. 5, line 10, for " Boechoven" read " Bachofeii."
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.
The references to Tylor's " Primitive Culture" have, through inadvert-
ence, been made to the first edition (1871), except in a few cases.
The following table will enable possessors of any edition to find the
passages referred to.
On p. 56 the passage referred to is ii. 285 of the editions of 1873 and 1891.
83 ii. 300
112 ii. 178 sq. „ ,
114 ii. 177 sq. „

115 ii. 174
117 ii. 216
140 ii. 349 „ ,
189 ii. 69 of the edition of 1871.

190 ii. 73
5
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
PAGE
Preface ... ... ... ... ... ••• ••• 'vii
Lecture I.
ON METHODS OF RESEAECH INTO THE PRE-HISTORIC

MANIFESTATIONS OF RELIGION.
Religious beliefs and institutions discovered at the dawn of
history. — Inability of the historic method to reconstruct
their origins. — Recourse to the comparative method neces-
sary ... ... ... ... ... ... ••• 1 —

Reasons for believing that the general evolution of humanity
has been progressive; and inferences as to our humble
—Refutation of the theory that man began
origins. at a
high of
level — Point of departure of the
culture. religious
development. — Estimate the value of the ancient

of tradi-
tions and Sacred Books of the several peoples ... ... 5 — 12

Conclusions drawn from philology. — Essence and form of the
conceptions formulated at the dawn of languages. — Ina-
bility of their framers to formulate abstract ideas ... 12 — 14
Data of pre-historic archseology. — Funeral rites in the mam-
moth age; in the reindeer age; in the neolithic period. — '
The megaliths. — Scull- trepanning. — Traces of idolatry ;
the worship of the axe. — The method of pre-historic archaeo-
logy 15—30
Folk-lore.— Religious survivals in popular customs; in social
usages; in ecclesiastical liturgies ... ... 30 — 38
—
XU TABLE OF CONTENTS.
PAGE
Comparative ethnography : its legitimacy and its importance.
How far is the contemporary savage the counterpart of
primitive man ? ... ... ... ... ... 38 — 41
Applicability of the general law of continuity and progress
to the religious sentiment. —Present position of the pro-
blem ... ... ... ... ... ... 41 — 46
Lecture II.
THE GENESIS OF THE IDEA OF GOD.
(i.) The Worship op Nature, and the Worship of the Dead.

Definition of religion. —Did spring from
religion the emotions
or from the reason —Have animals
? religion ] ... 47 — 51
Unwarranted extension of the idea of —Attribu-
personality.
tion of all movement to personal agents. — Metaphorical
language fosters but does not create the illusion. —To what
extent do children and savages confound the personal and
the impersonal ? ... ... ... ... ... 51 — 63
Deity implies superiority and mystery. — Original distinction
between the natural and the abnormal. —Deification of
phenomena which man cannot understand or control.
Nature-worship. —The emotion of fear and the sense of
the Infinite as religious motives. —Worship addressed to
an active power with which it is possible to enter into
relations ... ... ... ... ... ... 63 — 71
Confusion of concomitance and causality ... ... 71 — 73
Assimilation of dreams to reality. — Eifect of dreams in multi-

plying the superhuman beings and extending their attri-
l)utes ... ... ... ... ... ... 73 — 76

The idea of the " double." — Future life. — Sources of the worship
of the dead 77—82
(ii.) Primitive Rites.
I'rayer. — Primitive theory of sacrifice. — Intimidation of the

gods.— Sorcery. — Sources of symbolism. — Did conjuration
precede propitiation ? ... ... ... ... 82 — 96
—
. TABLE OF CONTENTS. XIU
Lecture III.
POLYDEMONISM AND POLYTHEISM.
(i.) Spiritism, Fetishism and Idolatry.

PAGE
When natural objects are adored, it is the personality with which
they are supposed to be endowed to which the worship is
addressed. —
This personality is conceived, by analogy with
that of man, in the form of a " double" that can be sepa-
rated from its envelope. —The distinction between body
and soul extended to all personified objects. What —
becomes of the crowd of souls released by the disappear-
ance of their visible envelopes, — Spiritism. — The belief in
spirits not necessarily the result of necrolatry ... 97 — 106

Eeli"ious phenomena connected with — Obsession,
spiritism.
possession, talismans, fetishes. —Belief that the appropria-

tion of an object secures the of the
services lodged spirit
within it. — Sources of fetishism. — The an elaborated idol
fetish. — Sundry springs of — Criticism of the

idolatry.
theory that idols were at first symbolic representations.

Is idolatry a step in advance ] ... ... ... 106 — 122
(ii.) The Divine Hierarchy.
Arrested development and indications of degeneration in the

beliefs of certain peoples. —
The progressive evolution of
the conception of God starts from the differentiation of the
—
superhuman powers. Preponderance grantedto the regents
of the great phenomena of nature, to the souls of the illus-
trious dead, to the genii of species, of social groups and of
moral abstractions ... ... ... ... 122 — 138
Subordination of spirits to gods. —The divine societies modelled
upon those of earth. —The divine societies of the Indo-
Europeans ; of the Egyptians ; of the Mesopotamians ; of

the Western Semites ; of the aboriginal Americans ; of
the Chinese 138—152
—
XIV TABLE OF CONTENTS.
Lecture IV.
DUALISM.
(i.) The Struggle for Order.
PAGE
Selfishness of the first gods. —Alliance between the gods and
man. —Eolations of mythology and religion. — How the
gods became interested in securing order in the universe 153 — 158
Dualism of the superhuman personalities representing the hostile
and the beneficent forces of nature respectively. Accen- —
tuation of dualism as religion advances. —Confidence in
the final triumph of the beneficent —The idea of
deities.
the cosmic order generated by the spectacle of the regular

recurrence of phenomena ... ... ... 158 — 167
Gradual restriction of the field abandoned to divine caprice.
Personifications of the natural order exalted above the

ancient gods. —The supreme god the author and sustainer
of the cosmic order ... ... ... ... 168 — 174
(ii.) The Struggle for Good.
The absurd and immoral actions attributed to the gods some-
times to be explained as metaphorical descriptions of
natural phenomena, sometimes as survivals from the bar-
barism of earlier generations. — Original independence of
morals and religion. — Influence of the religious sentiment
in consolidating the social relations ... ... 175 — 179

The divine sanction of the oath. — Intervention of the gods in
the ordeal. —
The gods punish attacks on the comnmnity.
Conception of a moral order on tlie model of the cosmic
order 179—186
Unpunished violations of the moral order argue either the feeble-
ness or the injustice of the gods. — Solution offered by a

future life. — Conception of the future similar life as to the
present, as better, or as worse. — Assignment of the souls
to different abodes according to their conduct in this

•world. —
The theory of continuation and the theory of
retribution. —Eecompense after death and recompense on
earth ... 186-200
. —
TABLE OF CONTENTS. XV
PAGE
Purification of the character of the gods by the assimilation
of the moral ord«r to the divine order. —The attributes of
Deity reduced solely to justice and love ... ... 200 — 203
Lecture V.
MONOTHEISM.
Monolatry. — National pantheons. — Gods attached to the land
or the people. — Monolatry founded on tlie belief in the
superiority of the national god.— Conception of a supreme
god, sovereign of gods and men. — Formation of divine
genealogies in the national pantheons. —The supreme god
conceived as the universal father ,. ... ... 204 — 211
The place of metaphysical speculation in the development of
mouotheisn. — Monotheism implies superiority not only in
power, but in nature, on the part of the Supreme Deity as
conceived by his worshippers. — Simplification of the pan-
theons by the assimilation of the gods representing analo-
gous phenomena.— Conception of a god of whom single all
— The
other deities are the several members, forms or names.
triune God of Egypt. — The Semitic monotheism. — God as
from matter. — Indo-European pantheism. — God
distinct
evolving the universe out of own substance. — God
his as
the soul the universe. — The One without
of second 211 — 226 a
The ancient gods before the of the Only God. — Their

face
transformation into hypostases, demiurges and mediators.
The religious syncretism of the declining Greco-Roman
paganism. —The Christian theodicy. — God reduced the to
absolute unity by modern philosophy. — Opposition of
science, not to the belief in God, but to the supposition of
interventions by secondary deities. — The divine interme-
diaries transformed into abstractions or ideal types. —The
eternal and infinite energy whence all things proceed.
The eternal power that makes for righteousness. — Corol-
laries 226 — 244
—
XVI TABLE OF CONTENTS.
Lecture VI.
THE FUTURE OF WORSHIP AS DEDUCED FROM ITS

PAST.
PAGE
Transformation of the motives of worship. —What fear and
admiration tend to become. — Love takes its bearings
afresh. —Disappearance of the lower elements of worship.
Divination and sorcery in our day ... ... 245—250
Transformation of the expressions of worship. — What prayer
tends to become. —Evolution of sacrifice ; its spiritualiza-
tion and attenuation ; offerings pass into acts of homage ;
the moral transformation of sacrifice. —Evolution sym- of

bolism.—Applications imitative of symbolism. — Services
rendered by symbolism to free inquiry and religious pro-
gress.— Evolution of the priesthood. — Growth and dis-
solution of — Place of the ministry in modern

theocracies.
society 250—277
Is worship destined to disappear ? — Societies for ethical cul-
ture. — Satisfaction demanded by our sesthetic and spiritual

—Religious progress the churches and mutual
faculties. in
relationsof the —Religion and the masses.
religions.
Religion and contemporary Socialism. — Need of a stronger

altruisticmotive than supplied by the teachings of
is
science or even the love of humanity. — Causes of pessi-

mism. — Danger of a reaction
religious 277 — 288
... ...
Brighter prospects —Importance the question,

for religion. of
Has a goal — Conclusion
life 1 the conception: God in of
the future 288—295
—
Lecture I.
0]S" THE METHODS OF EESEAECH INTO

THE PRE-HISTORIC MANIFESTATIONS
OF EELIGION.
When the first volume of the Hihhert Lectures

appeared, in 1878, the general history of religions was
but just beginning to take its place in the courses of
advanced study on the Continent ; and I can well
remember the delight and admiration with which
devoted as I had long been to this branch of historical
—
study I devoured the pages on which Prof. Max Miiller
had lavished the wealth of his knowledge and the charm
of his style in drawing out the lessons to be derived from
the study of the Eeligions of India.
I little imagined that in thirteen years I was myself
to have the honour of succeeding that illustrious master
in this Chair. And may be I owe so flattering a distinc-
tion in no small degree to the efforts I have made, from
the very beginnings of my work as a writer, to dissipate
a prejudice concerning England, and the Anglo-Saxon
race in general, that still lurks amongst us west of the
Channel. It is the idea, based on very one-sided obser-
vations, that in matters of religion you are at once the
most formal and the most superficial of all the nations

upon the earth ; or, in other words, that you divide your
B
;
Z I. METHODS OF RESEARCH INTO THE
lives into two sharply- defined sections, in the first of
which (embracing one day out of the seven) you passively

accept all the ceremony, discipline, and even doctrine, to
which tradition has attached the label of respectability,

whereas in the other (including all the rest of the week)
you are completely absorbed by your material interests,
and never give a thought to the great Beyond. This

view can only be held by those who do not know or do
not appreciate the strength, of the movement which has
never been lacking amongst you towards gaining a rational
satisfaction for the religious needs of the mind and heart
of man.
The institution of the Hibbert Lectures in particular
has helped to show how this progressive spirit may find
support in the comparative history of religions ; and

perhaps still more to point out how the impartial study
of the very subject that has so long divided men into
hostile camps may now serve to bring them together.
I would add that these Lectures, after bearing fruit in

England itself, where it would not be difficult to trace
their influence upon the temper and the method of reli-
gious discussion, have re-acted most happily upon Con-
tinental thought itself, in helping to enlarge its horizon
and this even apart from the specific services they have
rendered to purely historical research. Indeed, all this is
so true, that in coming here to expound my views on the

evolution of the religious idea, I am in danger, on more
points than one, of simply returning to you the echo of
your own thoughts, in place of the original, not to say
revolutionary, ideas which, for anything I know, may in
some quarters be expected of me. For this you have only

PRE-HISTORIC MANIFESTATIONS OF RELIGION. 6
to blame your own ethnographers, your own sociologists,
and your own historians, upon whom it is impossible for

any one to help drawing, in whatever part of the world he
may undertake to treat of the history of religions, and
still more of the history of Eeligion.
The scholars who have devoted themselves

Pre-historic , ,
development to tlio study of aucieut religious, and spe-

of Relit];ions. • n
cmcally
^^
my 'ii
illustrious
j. •
precursors m•
ai,'
this
Chair, have laid before you the methods by which

the developments of the religious systems underlying
the worship of the most important civilizations have
been respectively traced. We are in a position to say
that, in spite of some divergences in detail, the main

lines of this work of reconstruction are now definitively
laid down. This result is chiefly due to the applica-
tion of the historical method ; that is to say, the collec-
tion, classification, and interpretation of written evidence,
together with the monumental insoriptions which have

been discovered in such vast numbers during the last
half- century.
Nevertheless, the historical method can give us no

information at all concerning the origins of the most
important ancient worships. A glance at the genealogical
tree of the higher religions will at once convince us that

they all depend upon each other in an unbroken line of
filiation, or are derived from a small number of systems
that rose up independently in the bosoms of sundry

groups of distinct and unrelated peoples. But we cannot
trace thein beyond this point by direct observation.
b2
4 T. METHODS OF RESEARCH INTO THE
In every instance we find that, as we go back through

the ages, written documents become ever scarcer, till they
cease altogether, and the ground seems to fall away
beneath the investigator's feet. And yet at this remotest
point we already find beliefs and institutions fully recog-
nizable, which have maintained themselves right on, across
the whole series of intermediate systems, into the heart

of the religions of the present day.
These elements, common to all organized religions,
may be classed as follows :
1. The belief in the existence of superhuman beings

who intervene in a mysterious manner in the destinies of
man and the course of nature.

2. Attempts to draw near to these beings or to escape
them, to forecast the object of their intervention and

the form it will take, or to modify their action by con-
ciliation or compulsion.
3. Eecourse to the mediation of certain individuals

supposed to have special qualifications for success in
such attempts.
4. The placing of certain customs under the sanction
of the superhuman powers.
Unless we are to suppose that these factors of the early
religions were suddenly formed at a given moment, we
are compelled to admit that they must have had a rudi-
mentary development before their first appearance in
history. To re-discover this development, we must appeal
to psychology, philology, pre-historic archseology, folk-
and ethnography. Every one of these sciences has
lore,
some contribution to make, and nothing short of the com-

bination of them all will suffice to solve the problem. But
PRE-HISTORIC MANIFESTATIONS OF RELIGION. O
amongst these, it is comparative or descriptive ethno-

graphy which supplies us with the richest material to
make good the deficiencies of historical data.

And, after all, this is but an application of the com-
parative method so justly glorified by Freeman as one of
the most precious acquisitions of our century —an appli-
cation already accepted without question in researches

into the origins of language, of art, of the family, of
property, of law, and even of morals, as is obvious
t\0^
from the classical works of such authors as Iêchevea,
Freeman, De Laveleye, Giraud-Teulon, Sumner Maine,
McLennan, Max Miiller, Lubbock and Starcke ; not to
mention the numerous sociological works which, espe-
cially in England and France, have employed the com-
parative method in attempting to retrace the general

course of human evolution. Eeligious phenomena, in
their turn, have been subjected to the same treatment
by enlightened theologians such as Professors Tiele and
E^ville, who can join hands on this field of research with
ethnographers like Mr. E. B. Tylor, sociologists like
Mr. Herbert Spencer, and students of folk-lore like Mr
Andrew Lang. I shall endeavour to tread in the foot-
steps of these eminent writers in my attempts to recon-

struct, so far as possible, the first manifestations of the
belief in the Divine ; with a view to tracing subsequently,
in the facts recorded by history, the sequel of a develop-
ment which, if we may judge of the future by the past,
has not yet reached its goal.
By separately examining the chief factors

Theories of •
-t i- +1 ^ '
f
progress and of of Contemporary civilization, or the cJiici
retrogression.
^^^^^^ ^^,^^ ^^^^ ^^^^,^ ^^^^ dominion of the
b I. METHODS OF RESEARCH INTO THE
globe, we may establish historically that the march of

civilization has been progressive ; that is to say, that
there is a constant and growing tendency to secure the
same results at the expense of smaller efforts, and to utilize
the surplus of forces thus left disposable for the satisfac-

tion of more and more exalted wants. It must, indeed,
be admitted that this movement is not continuous ; it is
sometimes arrested, sometimes even reversed ; but taken

as a whole, its direction cannot be mistaken. From the
other side, palaeontology shows us that before the appear-
ance of man upon the earth, life had always been pro-
gressive; that is to say, that studied in its great successive
periods, it reveals a tendency to produce a succession of
creatures of growing complexity, the crown of all being
found in man, whether we consider the range of his
intellect and moral faculties, or his power of re-acting
upon the forces of external nature. This in itself raises
a strong presumption that humanity in its pre-historic

period was not exempt from the general law of develop-
ment of living beings, and therefore that its origins
must be sought in a state inferior to anything that the
oldest evidence of j)rimitive civilization reveals to us.
Pre-historic archa3ology turns this presumption almost
into a certainty. We now know beyond the possibility
of doubt that wherever the super -position of several
industrial strata has been established, the age of iron
was preceded by an age of bronze or copper, the age
of metals by an age of stone, and the age of polished
stone by one of cut or chipped stone. We discover a
period at which man, though he had not yet arrived at
the relative civilization of which the earliest inscriptions
: :
PEE-HISTORIC MANIFESTATIONS OF RELIGION. 7
preserve the memory, already practised agriculture,
possessed domestic animals, raised rough monuments of
stone, and gathered into little groups on fortified heights
or in lake cities. Another period reveals itself in a yet

remoter antiquity (for it corresponds to the deposits of
the quaternary rocks), in which men lived exclusively
by hunting, clothed themselves in the skins of beasts,
and dwelt in narrow caves or were scattered in nomadic

hordes on steppes desolated by the rigour of the glacial
epoch. Finally, we can trace a period yet further with-
drawn into the twilight, in which, under a gentle and

moist climate, man, the contemporary of the elephas
antiquus^ perhaps still ignorant of the use of fire, clothing,
and earthenware, but already in possession of a cut fiint
mallet or hatchet, realized the state of nature vaguely

conceived by certain poets of antiquity
" Vita ferae siniilis, iiullos agitata per usus :
Artis adhuc expers et rude valgus erant.

Pro domibus frondes norant, pro frugibus lierbas
Nectar erat palmis hausta duabus aqua."^
It is true that because the wielder of flint imple-
ments preceded us on the soil of Europe, it does not
absolutely follow that he was our ancestor. At the time

when the hunters of the reindeer and the mammoth, and
perhaps the erectors of the megaliths, occupied this part
of the world, is it not possible that the ancestors of the
Aryans, the Semites, the Egyptians, the Chinese, not to
mention the Aztecs and the Incas, may already have been
in possession elsewhere of a semi-civilization far more
advanced in type? Yes ; but we are justified in asking for
1 Ovid, Fasti, ii. 291—294.
8 I. METHODS OF RESEARCH INTO THE
the traces of this supposed civilization. It is true that

we have not yet explored and ransacked the whole planet,
but must be admitted that the chances of any such
it
discovery are diminishing day by day. More than twenty

years ago, Mr. E. B. Tylor could already write, " There
is scarcely a known province of the world of which we
cannot say certainly, savages once dwelt here;" and I
would add, there is hardly one of which we cannot say
with equal right, " Man has been progressive here."
Pre-historic archoeology thus unites wîth paleeontology
to assure us that, if the golden age exists in the possible
nature of things at all, it is not in the past that we must
look for it.
It has been asserted that savages have never been able

to rise into civilization except through the instrumentality
of a people already civilized. It is very true that the
transition from savagery to civilization, or even to the
demi- civilization from which we ourselves are admitted
gradually to have risen to our present level, has never
been actually observed ; but there are excellent reasons
why this link should be missing. In the first place, until
they have reached a certain level of culture, nations have
no history, and therefore cannot themselves enlighten us
as to their own past ; and as for external observation, as
soon as savages come into contact with a superior civili-
zation, the latter deflects and absorbs their spontaneous

development, unless indeed it paralyzes it. This much,
of course, is obvious —that there are some peoples worse
equipped than others for the struggle for life and pro-
gress ; nay, perhaps there may be some permanently
incapable of rising above a low level of civilization. But
PRE-HISTORIC MANIFESTATIONS OF KELIGION. 9
because, in running a race, the most agile are the only-

ones that reach the goal, it does not follow that all the
competitors did not start from the same post, or that the
victor has not had to pass the very points at which his
less fortunate competitors have stopped.
In the second place, we may well ask where savagery
ends and civilization begins. We can of course lay down
a more or less complicated criterion depending on evi-
dence collected from industrial processes, ways of living,

religious and social institutions, and all the current mani-
festations of the moral and intellectual life. But we
shall not be able to force all the populations of mankind
into one or the other of the two categories, unless we
are prepared to ignore transitional cases. In truth, the
different groups of mankind may be arranged on a scale
the bottom of which is lost in the extreme savagery of
the Bushmen, the Tierra-del-Fuegians, the Samoyeds, the

Akkas and the Australians, while the most advanced
peoples of the Indo-European race stand at the summit;
and between these extreme limits the gulf seems impos-
sible to cross. And yet the space between the succes-

sive populations which occupy neighbouring positions on
the scale is almost insensible, and the slightest progress
in a given tribe would suffice to raise it to the level of
those immediately above it. There is, therefore, no

reason why Ave should not believe that the same nation
may have gradually scaled all the steps which separated
it from the culminating-pointand perhaps, even so, the
;
steps it has already passed may be as nothing compared

with those which will yet permit the most favoured
nations of the future to continue their ascent ; for civi-
lization too is a Jacob's ladder, the top of wliicli we

cannot see because it reaches to the heavens.
Point of
^^^ often meets with men, free enough
depaiture in from preiudices in other matters, who readily
the develop- , , ...
ment of admit the extreme barbarism of primitive
° '
society, but are nevertheless disposed to make

an exception in the case of religion. They would have
ns believe that the ancestors of the Semites, the Aryans,
the Egyptians, and the Chinese, or at any rate the ances-
tors of some one or other of these races, started with a
very simple and elementary industrial and social life,
but with pure morals and exalted beliefs, and even in

full possession of a monotheistic belief.
In suj)port of this hypothesis, they allege, in the first
place, that these peoples retain reminiscences of far more

elevated beliefs than those they afterwards held. But
to begin with, the assertion in this form is far too sweep-
ing. For the fact is that there are other traditions, quite
as worthy of attention, which relegate the past to a state
of religious ignorance from which the teachings of some

heroic or even superhuman founder of civilization first
drew mankind. And, in the second place, little reliance

can be placed on these legends, either in the one sense
or the other. Peoples have asked themselves in every
age whence their knowledge of the gods came; and since
they were unable to trace it back to any other origin,
they naturally concluded that it had been instilled into
them by the gods themselves at an epoch, as Alfred de

Musset puts it,
" oil le ciel sur la terre

Marcliait et resj)irait dans un peitplc de dieux."
Moreover, parallel questions have in every age presented

themselves with reference to arts, letters, sciences, cus-
toms, and what-not; and the answer has always been

found in similar mythical attempts to explain the secrets
of the past.
The theory of primitive purity has sought to entrench
itself behind a second line of defence constructed from

the pictures of certain primitive peoples, such as the
Germans and the Pelasgians, given by the classical
authors. But now that we are better acquainted with
uncivilized races, we can see that the state of moral
innocence attributed to the infant populations of ancient
Europe, reduces itself to simplicity of manners and such
virtues as commonly prevail amongst the savages of our
own day where they have not been corrupted by pre-

mature contact with civilization. As for the absence of
idols, or even of any more definite deities than the vague

numina of the Italiots, it simply means that the peoples
in question had not yet reached the stage of polytheism
and idolatry, and were still dominated by the savage

conceptions of nature-worship and fetishism.
Finally, our theorists have not forgotten to appeal to
the lofty sentiments and even the theological reasonings
which occur in the sacred books of the Persians, Hindus,
Jews, and Chinese, to say nothing of some of the Egyp-

tian and Chaldsean hymns. But recent researches tend
more and more to dissipate the illusions that were natural
enough in the first enthusiasm awakened by the discovery
of these marvellous literatures. The aureole that sur-
rounded them is gone, and we have come to a more sober
appreciation alike of their significance and of their anti-
—
qiiity, thoiigli they have not lost theii' value or even their
charm in becoming loss anomalous and more human
that is to say, in taking their place in the general history
of human evolution.
However this may be, we are forced to recognize the
fact that not one of these venerable documents carries us
back to the first period of religion iu general, or even of
the special systems into which they respectively enter.
What they represent is, not the naive asjDiration of primi-
tive humanity, but the result of a sacerdotal elaboration
that has already made its selections and rejections
amongst the beliefs of the past. The further we ascend
towards the origins of the various races, the more com-
pletely do we see the beliefs of the Semites assuming
the appearance of a veritable polydemonism ; those of
the Egyptians, of a systematized sorcery; and those of
the Indo-Europeans, of a kind of universal physiolatry
in the course of a polytheistic transformation. All this
amounts to saying that, as we ascend towards the origins
of these peoples, we trace, in every instance, a growing
predominance of the forms of thought and the expressions
of feeling which characterize the religions of savages in
every age and in all parts of the world.
Evidence of Philology enables us to mount a little

Language,
jîgjêr towards the sources of all civilization.
But its conclusions are still less calculated than those

of history to encourage the belief in an early religion
high above the level now observed amongst savages ; for
they tend to show that, in all cases, the abstract signi-
fications of the words employed to render general ideas
have been preceded by concrete and even material senses.
Language is now a marvellous mechanism which not

only enables us to register the mutual relations of things
down to the subtlest shades, but even guides our minds,
from abstraction to abstraction, up to the very threshold
of that inaccessible region, beyond the world of forms
and of ideas, where we verge upon the mysterious Eeality
that is above all definition. Yet modern philological
analysis takes us back to a time at which language reduces
itself —with the exception possibly few onomatopoetic
of a .
^vords — to number
a closely restricted sounds and of
cries, each expressive of a physical action, and that

action performed by man. I need not here explain how
the monosyllabic accompaniments of human actions came
convey the idea of those actions to others, nor
at last to
the part played by the progress of language in leading
thought into conscious possession of itself. It is enough
to note that the phenomena in question fully justify the
conclusions, first, that the primitive creators of our lan-

guages freely ascribed faculties like their own to all the
things they saw around them, if their manifestations
could in any way be likened to human actions; and

secondly, that their equipment of conscious ideas was
confined to a small number of essentially concrete notions
embracing actions and physical events of daily occurrence.

This being so, not only must these men have been
incapable of rising spontaneously to such abstract ideas
as are suggested to our minds by the words, God, soul,
infinite, absolute, self-existence, and the like, but they

could not even have been in a position to comprehend
them had they been suddenly communicated to them from
—
without.^ Such is still the case with modern savages,

whom the preiDonderating evidence of travellers repre-
sents as absolutely inaccessible to abstract ideas.^ Every
missionary knows at the cost of what effort, and, I may
add, of what distortion, he succeeds in introducing some
gleams of the Christian metaphysic into the minds of the
really inferior races. Professor Max Miiller has told
you of the Benedictine who attempted in vain, during
a three- years' stay amongst the natives of Australia,
to discover the deity to whom they rendered homage.
But at last, one day, he discovered that they believed
in a god who used to be omnipotent, and had created
the world by his breath, but was now so old and decrepit
that folk took but little count of liim.^ Iô doubt this
was really an echo of his own teaching coming back to
him in the form of a belief in an omnipotent deity
who had created the earth with his breath. Only the
natives could not help thinking of him as reduced to
complete decrepitude, since he was old enough to have
helped in the formation of the world and been present
at the birth of their ancestors.
^ Pfleiderer points out that if we require whole years to develope

abstract ideas in the minds of our children, though they have the
benefit of all their inheritance from the past " wdiich thought for
them," it must have needed centuries, and even millenniums, for primi-
tive man to arrive at the same results. The Philosophy of Religion,
London, 1888, vol. iii. pp. 4, 5.
>
2 See Sir John Lubbock, Tlie Origin of Civilization, London, 1870:

chap. viii. " On Language."
^ Hibhert Lectures, 1878, p. 17.

Pre-historic
Pre-historic archseology, in its turn, takes
archaeology,
^^g y^^ another step, inasmuch as the material
remains with which it deals indicate the existence of
certain beliefs prior to all civilization. It is true that no
such traces have yet been found amongst the deposits

of the very earliest period in which the existence ofman
has been established ; that is to say, in what is known as
the Drift period, which seems to have preceded the great
glacial age in Europe. But we must be on our guard
against basing any definitive conclusion on this fact.
Eemember what happened, in this respect, with regard
to the rest of the paleolithic age. There, too, scholars

whose names carried authority maintained that man in
the quaternary period had no religious beliefs, and did
not even pay attention to the dead ; but the discoveries
of the last five - and - twenty years, especially in the
caves of France and Belgium, have established con-

clusively that as early as the mammoth age man practised
funeral rites, believed in a future life, and possessed
fetishes and perhaps even idols. A glance at the dis-
coveries that authorize these conclusions will perhaps
not be out of place.
Man in the I^ the cavo of Spy we can trace through
a'^'ramUds
thousands upon thousands of years savage
funeral rites,
inhabitants whose bones exhibit such an ape-
like character that they have supplied a new link in the
descending scale from man to the animals. Armed only
with flints to defend themselves against the terrible beasts

that wandered round their retreat, exposed to the rigours
of such a climate as the present inhabitants of the

Polar regions can scarcely endure, though supported by
resources which in comparison with those of the primitive

inhabitants of Moustiers almost represent civilization,
mammoth and the cave-bear,
these contemporaries of the
whose energies one would have thought would have been
wholly absorbed in the struggle for existence, still found
time to attend to their dead, to prepare them for their
future life, and to offer them objects which they might
have used for themselves, but which they preferred to
bestow on the dead for their use in another life."^ The
custom of placing arms, implements, and ornaments in
the tombs, may be regarded as general amongst the
ancient cave-dwellers, as it still is amongst all savages
who bury their dead. It implies the belief in the sur-
vival of the personality after death, and the idea that the
future life will be a repetition of the present, or at any
rate that the same wants will be experienced, the same
dangers incurred, and the same enjoyments tasted there
as here. All this was well explained by the ancient
Peruvians when, in answer to the question why they
sacrificed animate and inanimate objects, and even human
beings, to the dead, they answered that in dreams they
had seen men who had long been dead walking about with
the creatures and the objects that had been buried in
their tombs. Certain natives of Borneo go so far as to
say, that if they throw objects that have belonged to
the deceased upon the waves, he will at once come and
reclaim them. Amongst the Patagonians, the Comanches,
and the Bagos of Africa, the custom of sacrificing all his
belongings to the deceased is actually pushed so far, that
^ I)e Puydt et Loliest, Lhomme contempoixdn du mammoutli a Spy :
Nainur, 18S7.
travellers have declared it interferes with the maintenance
of the family and the accumulation of even the smallest

capital.^
Traces of funeral feasts have also been found in the

caves of the mammoth age. We must remember that
amongst all uncivilized peoples these feasts redound, not
only to the honour, but to the welfare of the dead, just
as the feasts in honour of the gods are supposed to be of
actual service to them. The natives of the Eed Eiver
expressly declare " that while they partake of the visible
material, the departed spirit partakes at the same time of
the spirit that dwells in the food."^ The observance of
this custom by pre-historic man carries with it, therefore,
the fact that he had already drawn a distinction between
the material object and the spirit to which it served as a
body ; and further, that he believed in the possibility of
that spirit quitting its case and surviving it. But still
more incontestable proof of this belief occurs a little
later, when the objects deposited in the tombs are broken

or burned, with the idea that they must be destroyed or
killed in order to enable their souls to follow the soul of
the deceased.
In certain caves, the earliest of which go back to the
reindeer age (those of Mentone, for example), the bones

of the dead are painted red with oligist or cinnabar; and
^ De Lucy-Fossarieu, Ethnographie de V Amerique antariiqne, Paris,
1884-, p. 151.Capt. Grossman, Report of the Bureau of Ethnography^
1879-80: " Smithsonian Institute," Washington, 1881, p. 99. Rene
Caillie, Voyage a Temhodou, Paris, 1830, vol. i. pp. 245, 246.
2 Dr. S. G. Wright, cited by H. C. Yarrow in Mortuary Cmtoms of
ike NortJi- American Indians, in the Report of the Bureau of Ethnology,
1879-80: " Smithsonian Institute," Washington, 1881, p. 191.
C
18 I. METHODS OF EESEAECH INTO THE
in our own day some of the !N'orth- American tribes, who

expose their dead on trees, collect the naked bones and
paint them red before finally burying them. An analo-
gous custom has been observed amongst the Mincopies

of the Andaman Islands, and the Niams of Central
Africa.! The explanation of this custom has sometimes

been sought in the fact that red is the colour of spirits.
Thus in Polynesia, painting an object red suffices to make
it tahu, that is to say, the property of the superhuman
powers, and as such inviolable and unapproachable. But
it may well be asked whether, in the funeral rites I have
just described, the red paint was not rather intended to
imitate the infusion of blood —that is to say, the restitu-
tion of life — in conformity with the idea so widespread
amongst uncivilized peoples that blood and life are

equivalent essences. To paint the bones of the deceased
red would in this case be to assure, or at least to facilitate,
the renewal of his existence.^

Another custom to be traced in the caves of Central
France from the age of the reindeer downwards, and
1 Cartailhac, La France preMstorique, Paris, 1889, p. 292, Du

Pouget de Nadaillac, Les decouvertes prehistoriques et les croyances
chretiennes, Paris, 1889, p. 13. Letourueau, Sociologie, Paris, 1880, pp.
211, 220 ; Eng. trans, by H. M. Trollope, London, 1881, pp. 224, 233.
Thus the ancient Peruvians smeared the doors and the idols -with
2
tlood while sacrifice was being performed in the temples. A. Eeville,

Hibhert Lectures, 1884, p. 220. The Arabs of pre-historic times used
to sprinkle the walls of the Kaabah with the blood of victims and ;
the Bedouins of the Sinaitic district still throw blood, drawn from
their camels' ears, upon the door of the tomb of one of their most
famous saints. Ignace Goldziher, Le cidte des saiiits cliez les Musidraans
in the Revue de riddoire des religions, 1880, vol. ii. p. 311. Cf. Exodus
xii. 7.
— ^
gradually spreading as the age of polished stone advances,

consists in burying the body, folded up upon itself, so
that the knees touch the chin. It has been maintained

that the idea was to give the corpse the position taken
by the living man as he slept by the fire at night after a

day's hunting or war.^ But no peoples really sleep in
this posture : and I incline to the belief that they meant

to put the deceased in the position of the infant in his
mother's womb. Many peoples believe that life is a
re-birth, from the Algonkins, who by a touching atten-
tion bury little children on the paths most frequented by
the women of the tribe, down to the peoples on both
continents who explain family likenesses or cases of
atavism on this principle. For the rest, this custom

re -discovered by Dr. Schliemann in the tombs of
Mycenge — still exists in the Andaman Islands, in New

Zealand, in Melanesia, in South America, amongst the
African Bongos, and amongst the Hottentots. Almost
all travellers explain the custom as I have done above.
Mr. T. L. Hutchinson, in describing the mummies of
ancient Peru, says that "the bodies were generally

placed in the same position as they are known to exist
The idea that

[in] during the progress of uterine life."^
the earth is the common mother of mankind reappears
in all the mythologies that have made any considerable
1 l.QtoMXi\&iiVi, Sociologie, pp. 207, 208; Eng. trans, pp. 220, 221.
2 On the Hottentots, see Peschel, VdlArrkundf., Leipzig, 1874, p. 494,
Eng. trans. J
The Races of Man, &c., second edition, London, 1876,
p. 460. On the Andamans, E. H. Man, Journal of the Anthropo-
logical Institute, 1883, vol. xii. p. 144. On the Araucans, d' Orbigny,
L'homme americain, Paris, 1839, vol. i. p. 92.
3 Journal of the Anthropological Insfifut', vol. iv. p. 447.
C2
;
progress. The Aryans of the Yeclic epoch, when they

buried their dead without reducing them to ashes, im-
plored the earth to receive the body as a mother her son.^
Did man, in this remote aê, worship the
^ ,
Idolatry
,
m
. '
^ '
\ ,
the palfeo- dead aloue ? I would remark that this is

° '
almost the only form of worship capable of
leaving material traces. We may easily find the articles
deposited in a tomb ; but where are we to look for traces
of sacrifices oJffered to the celestial bodies, or of symbolic
dances performed in their honour ? As for written records,
we might as well expect the phonograph to transmit us
the text of the prayers or the charms which bore to heaven

ihe first manifestations of the religious ideas of man ! "We
do possess a certain number of carved or scratched repre-
sentations, however, which ascend to the reindeer age
and it is difiicult not to admit that this primitive art had a
religious bearing. The objects represented are generally
•animals, such as mammoths, reindeer, horses, serpents,
and fish, often drawn upon fragments of bone or ivory,
with a fidelity of expression, and even a feeling of life,
which are equally surprising and noteworthy. Amongst

the Negroes similar representations are always fetishes,
or at any rate are used as charms, and I confess that I

have not much faith in any purely sesthetic impulses of
savages. With them, everything has a practical purpose,

even art and religion. Moreover, it is a common idea
amongst uncivilized peoples that a likeness provides the
means by which we can act upon the original. Finally,
as Mr. Andrew Lang very appositely remarks, ^ " If one
^ Rig Veda, x. 18, 11.
^ Andrew Lang, Custom and Myth, London, 1884, p. 294.

"
adores a lizard or a bear, one is likely to think that
prayer and acts of worship addressed to an image of the

animal will please the animal himself, and make him
propitious.
The human figure appears to have been less frequently
and less successfully attempted. Several examples of it
are known, however ; and M. Edouard Dupont found a

rude attempt at a human figure cut in reindeer-horn in
the cave of Pont-a-Lesse. This figure was perhaps an

idol. The same discoverer also found the tibia of a
mammoth on a slab of sandstone near a hearth belonging

to the reindeer age, in a cave of Chaleux. It is impos-
sible to deny the character of a fetish to this tibia, for the
mammoth was already extinct in that locality at the period
in question, and M. Dupont points out that the bones of

gigantic extinct species still play an important part in
the popular beliefs everywhere.^ The Dacotalis and other
Eedskins, for instance, carefully collect the bones of the
mastodon and place them in their huts for the sake of
the magic virtues which they attribute to thcm.^ We

should also note the perforated snail-shells, fossils, crys-
tals, quartz-stones, and reindeer-horns, deposited in the

tombs, and somxctimes even in the hand of the deceased.
These objects, none of which are of any practical use,
may sometimes have served as ornaments, but must surely

in some cases have been talismans or amulets.
'No doubt all these remains indicate infantile and
^ E. Dupont, L'Jiomme pendant les ages de la pierre anx enoirons de
Dinant sur Meuse, second edition, Brussels, 1872, pp. 92 and 205 sqq.
2 Ed. B. Tylor, Researches into the Early History of Mankind,
third edition, London, 1878, p. 322.
gross couceptions ; but nevertheless they show that man

was ah'eady aware of something mysterious and mighty
beyond his limited horizon ; that he attempted to con-
tract relations with the superhuman beings by which he
believed himself to be surroiinded, on the basis of an
exchange of services ; and finally, that he was already
capable of the idea of abstinence, that is to say, of relin-
quishing a tangible and immediate advantage in view of
a more considerable but more distant and uncertain one.
Passing to the age of jôlished stone, we see the
religious manifestations which I have just defined taking
a more developed and general form ; nor are there wanting
such new elements as the worship of megaliths, trepanning
the skull, and special veneration of the mallet.
„ ,. , , I shall not enter upon
l
the question,
\L ?
still
Megaliths of .
the neolithic hotly disputed, of the use of the stones,

" '
erected in lines, found almost all over the
two worlds. It has been maintained that they were
simply commemorative monuments, like the twelve stones
from the bed of Jordan which Joshua erected at the
first camp of the Israelites after their passage of the
river, to servê, as the Bible supposes, "as a memorial
for ever." ^ I will not deny that some of these monu-
ments played the part of mementos, or even of inter-
national boundary-marks; but when I see how widespread
the worship of stones still is amongst uncivilized peoples,
^ Josh. iv. — 8. It appears that Avithin recent times it was cus-
tomary amongst the Kabyls for the representatives of confederated
tribes each to set up a great stone when they had arrived at an impor-
tant decision. If one of the tribes subsequently broke the engagement,
its stone was cast down. — târtailhac, France prehistoriqne, i>p. 314,
315.
especially tlie worship of stones set up on one end, I

am far more disposed to conclude that megaliths in
general are the legacy and the evidence of a veritable
litholatry, whether they were worshipped in and for
themselves, as amongst the natives of India, Malaysia,
Polynesia, Iôrth Africa, and the two Americas, ^ or
whether they were regarded as the abode or the image
of some superhuman power, like the Bethels of the
whole Semitic race, or the shapeless masses which, as
Pausanias testifies, the earlier Greeks worshipped instead
of images.^ We shall presently see that worship of
stones set up on end was the first step towards idolatry
everywhere.
Man in the age of polished stone, like his paleolithic
predecessor, disposed of his dead in caves ; but when
natural caves were wanting, he made artificial ones,
either by hollowing an excavation in the rock, or by
arranging four stones, in a sort of rectangle surmounted
by a large slab, and covered with a mound of earth.
This is the origin of the dolmens, which are now
universally admitted to be connected with funeral rites.
The only question is, whether they were tombs of the

first or the second instance ; that is to say, whether the
dead were placed in them at once, or whether decom-
position was first allowed to do its work. On the latter
hypothesis, which is the more probable, the dolmens
^ Myfholor/ie du monde mineral ; legon professee a I'ecole d'anthro-

pologie, par Andre Lefevre in the Revue des traditions populaires ior
:
JSIovember, 1889. Paris.
2 Pausanias, vii. 22, 4; cf. infra.

24 I. ilETHODS OF RESEARCH INTO THE
were only ossuaries, like those still met with in some

cemeteries in EurojDean countries. But the very desire
to secure a kind of perpetual abode to the incorruptible
elements of the body, is itself only another proof of the
importance attached to funeral rites.
There is a certain detail, frequently observed in these

dolmens, which has not failed to exercise the minds of
the archaeologists, especially when the dolmens were
supposed to be the work of one particular people. It is

the presence in one of the walls
— generally the one that
closes the entrance — of a hole not more than large enough
human head. In the Caucasus and
for the passage of a
on the coast of Malabar, these holes have given the
dolmens the popular name of "dwarf-houses."
The hole is too small to serve as a passage for living
men, or for the introduction of the skeleton ; or even for
which moreover would be found
inserting the sacrifices,
piled up against the interior wall. The most probable
explanation seems to be that it was intended for the soul
to pass through. Numbers of savage peoples suppose
that the soul continues to inhabit the body after death,
though from time to time it makes excursions into the
world of the living. Now we shall see presently that
amongst these peoples the soul is generally regarded as
a reduced and semi-material copy of the body. It there-
fore requires a hole if it is to escape from the enclosure.
It is for this reason that, at the death of a relative, the
Hottentots, the Samoyeds, the Siamese, the Fijians, and
the Eedskins, make a hole in the hut to allow the pas-
sage of the deceased, but close it again immediately
afterwards to prevent its coming back.^ The Iroquois

make a small hole in every tomb, and expressly declare
that it is to enable the soul to go out or come in at its
pleasure.^ At Koulfa, in North Africa, the same idea

was combined with a desire to clear a passage for sacri-
fices. They buried the body, in a sitting posture, in a
round, well-like shaft, into which they left an open hole,
and then put cloths and other things close to the mouth,
so that the dead man himself could come and fetch them,
and take them to others who had died before him,^
Trepanned ^^ ^^ the same desire to secure a way

skulls.
jpQj, ^|-^g spirit to pass, which best explains
the curious phenomenon of trepanning the skull, first
observed, in 1872, by Dr. Prunieres, in the neolithic

caves of Central France ; and subsequently in tombs of
the same period, in Denmark, Bohemia, Italy, Portugal,
North Africa, and the two Americas.^ Some of these
skulls have been trepanned after death ; others during

life, as apjDeared from the reparative efforts of nature
which had followed. As for the circles of bone extracted,
^ Compare Frazer, On certain Burial Customs : in the Journal of

the Anthropological Institute, vol. xv. p. 70; see also Herbert Spencer,
Principles of Sociology, vol. i. § 94,
^ A. Eeville, Religions des peuples non-civilises, Paris, 1883, vol. i.
p. 252.
^ Clapperton, Second Expedition into the Interior of Africa, London,

1829, pp. 141, 142. Note that the Greeks, too, pierced the soil near
the tomb to pour libations into it, under the impression that this
would enable them to reach the dead more easily. J. Girard, Le
sentiment religieuse en Grece d^Homere a Eschyle, 1879, p. 182.
* Broca, Sur la trepanation du crane et les amulettes crdnimnes a

V fi.poque neolithique : Paris, 1877.
2G I. METHODS OF RESEARCH INTO THE
tliev had sometimes been pierced and hung npon a

ueckhiee. a custom which survived down to the Chuilish
period.
It wouki appear tliat trepanning is still practised by
the Kabyls. M. de Xadaillac believes that the object is
religious, but 'M. Broca takes it to bo therapeutic. If

"we follow the former, we may suppose it intended to
allow the soul free communication with the superhuman
powers ; or it might be an ofiering to the gods of a sub-
stitute or representative in place of the whole person, ou
the principle which rules religious mutilations, from the
sacrifice of a finger- joint to the offering of the hair or a
nail-paring. If we follow M. Broca, it must have been
intended to facilitate the expulsion of the spirit that
had gained enti'ance into the body, and was causing

disorders in it ; conformably to the theory of uncivilized
peoples that every malady is caused by diabolic or divine
possession. It is evidently with this view that savages
in the Old and the Xew Worlds apply the processes of
massage and suction them purgatives
to their sick, give
and emetics, and even bleed and cauterize them. The

efhcacity of such treatment is often real though always
empirical, and it is invariably attributed to the departiu'e
of the disturbing spirit.
The trepanning of the dead is perhaps more difficult
to explain, especially as we can find no similar practice

amongst known peoples. M. Cartailhac, on the strength
of a species of embalming still practised by the Dyaks,
thinks its object was to allow of the extraction of the
brain. ^ But one would suppose that such a procedure
^ France prchistoriqm, p. '2SQ.
PEE-HISTORIC MANIFESTATIONS OF EELIGION. 27
must have left some further traces ; and, in any case, it
would not explain the value attached to the severed

fragments of the cranium, as amulets. Perhaps the very
object of the operation was no other than to procure
these precious talismans ; or it may have been to provide
the soul with a special passage through which to leave

the body. It deserves notice that the trepanning has
not been applied indiscriminately to all the bodies in

the same tomb ; that on some of the skulls it must have
been performed both during life and after death; and,
some cases the holes thus formed have

finally, that in
been closed by means of disks evidently borrowed from

other skulls. All these facts are in full hannony with
the hypothesis that trepanning was resers'ed — as certain
funeral rites and even certain privileged methods of
burial certainly were — to particular individuals, who, in

virtue of their rank, their knowledge, or their character,
were regarded as superior in nature to their fellows, or
even as holding direct communication with the super-
human world.
Worship of ^® ^^^'^ incontestable proof that idolatry

the niaUet. in the age of the lake dwellings
^^g practised
and artificial crypts. In the caves of Mame, Oise, Eure,
and Du Gard, an attempt at a female figure has been found,

always on the left wall of the ante-cave, which implies a
deliberate arrangement. The eyes, nose, mouth, breasts,
and even the representation of a necklace, are distinctly
recognizable.^ This rough representation, which is always

the same, is generally accompanied by the picture of a
flint hatchet, or double-headed mallet, sometimes with

^
Baron de Baye, Memoires stir lesgrottes de la Mame : Paris, 1872.
the handle. It is not surprising that the man of the

stone age venerated the instrument which characterized
his civilization, the arm which assui-ed him his rule
over nature, and which represented the foundation of
his power. Do not we still find the Eedskins, the
Polynesians, and even the Hindus, offering homage
to their arms and their tools ? This worship of dressed
flints and a fortiori of the stone hatchet, has been
almost universal to the human race. And even after
the discovery of the metals, these primitive implements
have been connected with the lightning and supposed
to be stones fallen from heaven. But the representa-
tionswe are now speaking of force us to ask whether
we ought not to attach the hatchet to the worship of
some feminine divinity, whose arm or symbol it was,
just as in the tombs of a later age it becomes that of
Thor and Taran, the Germanic and Gaulish divinities
of thunder.i This, however, does not at all imply that
it was likewise the thunder which the men of the age
of polished stone worshipped under the features of a
woman; and perhaps the wisest course in the present
state of our knowledge would be to renounce all attempts
to penetrate the mystery further. And yet if, without
transgressing my limits, I might suggest an hypothesis,
I should ask whether we might not recognize in this
naive and fragmentary idol the personification of nature,
or rather of the earth. As a matter of fact, we find
the earth worshipped in feminine form by all peoples
1 It is interesting to note that the axe reappears in the hand of the

thunder-god amongst the Chaldaeans, the Greeks (Zeus Labrandeus),
and the Hindus (îva).
who have attained a sufficient faculty of generaliza-

tion to be able to conceive the idea of such a power.
Going a step further, I would even suggest that the
association of the hatchet with the goddess may well
have been drawn from some myth of the union of heaven
and earth, in which the fructifying powers of the storm
were symbolized by the flint axe. The presence of such

conceptions amongst almost all the peoples who have
attained a certain level of mythological development, is
my only excuse for hazarding this explanation, which is
in perfect agreement with all that we know of the reli-
gious ideas of the occupants of France, at the moment

when they come into contact with more advanced civi-
lizations.
We frequently find on the Gallo-Eoman altars a god

grasping a long mallet, associated with a goddess bearing
a cornucopia. Archteologists agree in taking the former
to be Taran, or Taranis, the Celtic thunder-god (cor-
responding to the Germanic Thor), who is sometimes
Latinized into Dis Pater or Sylvanus. In the latter
they recognize a goddess of the earth or of nature.^

The mallet is the emblem of the storm, with its life-
giving streams, and was also the symbol of fertility,
amongst the Germanic populations. In Scandinavia,

when the bride entered the conjugal abode it was cus-
tomary to throw a mallet into her lap ;
^ and the German
minnesinger Frauenlob naively makes the Virgin Mary
explain the conception of the infant Jesus by saying
'
Le diexi gaulois au maillet, by Ed. Flouest and H. Gaidoz, in the
Reveu archeoloijigue for IMarch — April, 1890.
* Reveu des traditions populalres, Jan. 1889, vol. iv. p. 23.

that "the smith from the upper land threw his hammer
into her lap."^
Most of the rites which I have just explained have
also left their stamp on the age of bronze or copper,
and we can even follow them into the first iron age, in
which we enter almost everywhere upon the field of
history.
It will be thought, perhaps, that this harvest of

information is meagre enough, and that hypotheses form
a great part even of what there is. But the facts we
have been able to establish suffice, if not to re-constitute
the whole religion of pre-historic man, at any rate to

show that he stood on a religious plane hardly superior
to that of the peoples of our own day, who stand midway
between absolute savagery and the beginnings of civiliza-
tion. You will observe that, to recover the beliefs implied
in our data, we have had recourse to the similar usages

we can trace amongst uncivilized peoples in the present
day, and to the recognized explanations they receive.
In like manner, to recover the use of certain pre-historic
implements, we turn to populations amongst whom their

like may still be found; and indeed the scholars who
have attempted to re-construct the industry, the occu-
pations, and the manners of pre-historic savages, have
not hesitated to generalize the conclusions drawn from
such analogies with considerable freedom. All I ask is
to be allowed to do the same with respect to religious

beliefs and institutions.
Folk-lore. There is yet another branch of study

1 Karl Blind, in The Antiquary for 1884, vol. ix. p. 200.
PRE-HISTORIC MANIFESTATIONS OF RELIGION, 31
which leads us to the same results. It is Folk-lore, that
is to say, the study of the traditions which previous

civilizations, as they disappeared, left like so many
sedimentary deposits in the lower classes. It cannot be
denied that these classes, specially in the country dis-
tricts, have been much less sensitive than the rest of
the nation to the modifying influence of progress, and

have therefore preserved much more of the intellec-
tual and social habits once common to all strata of the
population. Hence and customs prevail amongst

beliefs
them which appear absolutely inexplicable if judged

by the scientific or even the religious ideas generally
accepted in our day. To understand the significance and
the genesis of these survivals, we must replace them
among the surroundings from which they respectively
issued. Some of them may be explained by the beliefs
and rites of the historic religions immediately anterior

to Christianity. Others point back to a more rudimentary
and gross religious state. If these last were incorporated
in the ancient religions, they were veritable survivals
even here, and were recognized as such by more than one
writer of the period. Now if we search for their equiva-
lents amongst the materials supplied by modern ethno-
graphy, not only is it nine chances to one that we shall
find them amongst one or another of the uncivilized

groups, perhaps amongst almost but further, when we
all,
study them amid their actual present surroundings, they

will acquire a rational meaning, —
that is to say, a mean-
ing in conformity with the general ways of thought

current amongst savages.
In certain departments of France, when the peasants
enter upon a newly -built house, they cut a chicken's

neck and sprinkle the blood in all the rooms. In Poitou,
the explanation given is, that if the living are to dwell
in the house, the dead must first pass through it.^ Thus
presented, the custom is without meaning ; but it is no
longer so if we bring it into connection with the belief,
almost universal amongst peoples who possess the art
of masonry, that the soul of a victim buried under
the foundations protects the solidity or guards the ap-
proaches of the edifice. And if we combine this belief
with the principle, no less widely spread, that in the
matter of sacrifice (as we shall presently see) the inferior
may be substituted for the superior, an animal for a

man, the whole meaning of the ceremony becomes
clear. In Germany, it is often an empty coffin that is
built into the foundations ; whilst the Bulgarians con-

fine themselves to the pantomime of throwing in the
shadow of some passer-by. To find the explanation of
this last trait, we have only to transport ourselves into
the ideas of the numerous peoples who regard a man's
shadow as the spiritual part of him — that is to say, as his
soul.Our own languages bear witness that our ancestors
were of the same opinion. The belief that the dead
have no shadows is found amongst the Negroes of Central
Africa, as well as in Dante's Purgatory, And the Zulus
imagine that there is a crocodile or some other beast in
the water that can draw in a passer-by if it can get hold
of his shadow.^
^ Cf. Les rites de la construction : in "Melasine" for Jan. 5th, 1888.
2 See Arbousset et Daumas, Voyage d' exploration au nord-est de la
colnnie du Cap, Paris, 1842, p. 12. Compare Journal of the Anthro-
jwlogical Institute, vol, x. p. 313; vol. xvi. p. 344.
PRE-HISTORIC MANIFESTATIONS OF RELIGION. oo
Two years ago, I was present at the Crematorium in

Milan, at the cremation of the remains of a young
teacher. When the cremation was over and they were
about to seal the nrD, the mother and sisters of the
deceased asked leave to put their photographs in, Avith
the still warm ashes of the deceased. Surely we can all
feel a touching appropriateness in placing the likeness of

the beings he most loved dnring life on the tomb or
even at the side of the dead; but is it not strangely
significant to see a family, sufficiently emancipated to
break with the traditional routine of interment, still
subject to the traditions of the most distant past, and

offering a form of homage to the deceased which, in
spite of the intervention of the photographic art, carries
us to the funeral sacrifices of the Negroes and the New

Zealanders ? To this very day, throughout the whole of
pagan Africa, they surround the dead, especially if he is
a distinguished personage, with his wives and attendants
and even his favourite animals. But here the process
of attenuation has not yet set in, and they actually
slaughter the miserable victims whom they send to follow
their husband and master in beyond the tomb. his life
Iq China, in Marco Polo's time, they had already begun

to replace the sacrifice of actual victims by parchment
figures, which they burnt with the body.i The Chinese

of our own day, with a still keener eye to economy, con-
fine themselves to writing out the schedule of their
sacrifices on a piece of paper, which they then burn
upon the tomb.

1 Muiro Polo, bk. i. chap. xL, in Yule's Book of Ser Marco Polo,
London, 1875, vol. i. pp. 207, 208.
D
The populace, however, has not a monopoly of sur-

vivals. Try the experiment, as I myself have done, of
asking the mourners at a military funeral why they
make the deceased officer's horse follow the coffin ; and
especially why they make the poor beast limp during
the funeral procession. Some of them will tell you
they cannot say, and they suppose it has always been so.
Others will tell you that it is a tribute to the deceased,

and perhaps a way of comj^telling the horse to take part
in the mourning. Only one here and there, who has

read a little ethnography, will remember that the sacri-
fice of the horse at the funeral is almost universal
amongst uncivilized peoples who practise riding. And
indeed we know, from the direct evidence of historians,
that it was once practised on a large scale by the Celts,
the Germans, the Slavs, and the Mongols. Amongst the
Caucasian Ossets it appears in a transition stage, analo-
gous to that with which we are acquainted ourselves.
They content themselves with making the horse and the
widow circle the tomb three times only the woman ;
may not marry again, nor may the horse serve another
member of the tribe. In Europe, we confine ourselves
to imitating the effect of hamstringing the horse ; and
at the funeral of Prince Baudouin at Brussels, I noticed
that even this piece of useless cruelty was suppressed.
Thus the old customs disappear ; but now and then the
original feeling which still survives in the popular con-
sciousness rises to the surface again, and throws an
unexpected light upon the past, like a flame leaping up
from the embers of a dying fire. Mr. Andrew Lang
reports the case of a peasant woman some years ago in
PRE-HISTOEIC MANIFESTATIONS OF RELIGION. 35
Xeny, wlio killed her husband's horse when he died,

and when reproached with her folly, exclaimed, "Would
ye have my man go about on foot in the next world ?"^
Liturgical Eeligioiis — at any rate such as are orga-
survivals.
njzed into orthodoxies — generally declare
war on the superstitions of preceding ages ; but they
are themselves compelled to take under their patronage
the survivals which they cannot uproot. This is the
explanation of traditions and practices, imbedded in rela-
tively high religions, entirely foreign to the intellectual
and moral atmosphere of their professors. You know with
what zeal and, I must add, with what success Mr. Andrew
Lang has applied this principle in explaining the shock-
ing and grotesque stories of the Greek mythology. He
has sho^vn how these myths were formed at a period
when the ancestors of the classical Greeks had the

manners and ideas of savages. The same observation
may be applied to more than one rite in the worships of
the present and the past.
The saying has often been repeated, that dogma, inas-
much as it represents the fixation of beliefs dominant at
a given moment, soon comes to represent the religion, or
rather the theology, of f/esterdaf/ rather than to-day; and

in the same sense one might say that the cultus generally
represents the theology of the day before yesterday^ for
nowhere does the conservative spirit maintain itself so
toughly as in religious rites. Here the dominion of

custom is fortified by the fear of displeasing the Deity
by altering the practices which he is himself supposed
to have inspired, or the efiicacity of which has been
^ Custorn and Myfh, pp. 11, 12.
d2
3G I. METHODS OF RESEARCH INTO THE
established by long and repeated experience ; and tbns

there no religion which does not embrace in its cultus
is
ceremonies and symbols borrowed from the whole series

of previous religions.
The lamented Edwin Hatch, in his Hibbert Lectures
of 1888 —one of the most lucid, conscientious, and com-
plete treatises ever published on tlie part played by
Greece in the development of Christian dogmas and
rites —has shown how the pagan mysteries gained admis-
sion, with a new significance, into the bosom of nascent
Christianity. amongst those ceremonies there were

ISTow
certainly some which classical antiquity itself had bor-
rowed from more ancient forms of worship; and it follows
that we may still see certain Christian churches perform-
ing ceremonies that Ave may safely say have traversed at
least three religions, and the equivalent of which — per-
haps even down to the explanation officially given— may

still be found on all hands amongst barbarous peoples.
I must content myself with citing, as one of the most
characteristic examples, the renovation of fire in the
office of Holy Saturday. The priest, after extinguishing

all the lights, re-kindles the Paschal taper by means of a
spark struck by the old method of the flint and steel.
Does not this ceremony carry us straight back to the
solar or fire rites, which were already more or less touched
with metaphysical conceptions in almost the ancient all
polytheisms, but which reveal their purely naturalistic

origin in the customs of certain savage peoples, and, for
the matter of that, in the traditions of our folk-lore also ?
Formerly the renovation of the fire took place in the
church on the dawn of Easter Sunday (the day of the
;
PRE-HISTOEIC MANIFESTATIONS OF RELIGION. 6i
Besurrection), and the fire which tlie clergy had struck

fi-om the flint and steel served to re-kindle the fires of
private individuals which had all been previously extin-

guished. This is the very ceremony which took place
annually at Lemnos in the temple of Hephaistos, at Eome
in that of Vesta, at Cuzco in that of the Sun, in Mexico
in honour of Xiuhtecutli, " the Lord of the year." It is
the same which is still observed in kindling the sacrificisl
fire amongst the Brahmans ; ^ in conducting one of the
principal religious ceremonies of the Chippeways;^ in

^
celebrating the renewal of the year on the Zanzibar coast ;
in securing rain amongst the Kafiirs ;
^ on every solemn
occasion amongst the Australians;^ in putting a stop to
epidemics in certain remote districts of Europe ;

or simply
in celebrating the summer solstice. On the banks of the

Moselle, and in other localities of Western Europe, it was
the custom, on St. Jean d'Et^ (Midsummer-day), to kindle
a wheel and then roll it across the fields or the vineyards

to secure a good harvest.^ was the custom in certain
It
provinces of the Slavonic and Germanic countries to

extinguish all the fires at this same season of the year
then to fix a wheel upon a pivot and whirl it round till
1 J. C. Xesfield, Primitive Philosojjlnj of Fire, in the Calcutta Review

of April, 1884, p. 335.
2 A. Keyille, Rcli(jions des peiqjles non-civilises, vol. i. p. 222.
3 J. Becker, La vie en Afrique, Bruxelles, 1887, vol. i. p. 36.
4 Capt. Condor, On the Bechuanas, in the Journal of the Anthropo-
logical Institate, vol. xvi. p. 84.

s
E. Trcgcgar, The Maoris, in tlie Journal of the Anthropological
Institute of Nov. 1889, vol. xix. p. 107.
6 H. Gaidoz, Le dieu Gaidois du soleil ei le sijmholisme de la roue,
Paris, 1886, pp. 17— 21.

the wood caught fire, whereupon every one present took

a light to re-kindle his own fire.
I have selected this rite as an excellent example of the

parallel development of one and the same usage on the
three-fold track of organized religions, popular traditions,
and savage rites; and, further, because we can trace it
back to its original source without wounding any one's
feelings, or creating too harsh a sense of discord between
the meaning now put into a religious ceremony and the
ideas that first gave it birth. But the same process might
be followed with reference to far other rites, performed
every day before our eyes. And if such loans are found
even in the Christian Church, one may imagine how they
must abound in rituals which can have no reason for
disguising their naturalistic origin. We soon come to

accept M. James Darmesteter's assertion, that one need
not search very long amongst the historical religions to
find, often under forms of striking identity, most of the
essential elements of the non-historical religions.^
. Here, perhaps, I shall be arrested by the

comparative question : " What right have you thus to
etliiiograpliy
to be taken Credit savago populations with the preserva-
tion intact of the heritage of primitive reli-
gion ? Is not the savage, whom we wrongly call primi-
tive, as old as the civilized man ? Has he not as long
an ancestral line behind him? Has he not traversed,
in the course of ages, an endless series of fluctuations,
alternating between progress and decadence, which must

have very greatly modified his original conceptions ?
^ James Darinesteter, Revue critiqtie cVhiatoirc ct de IHterature,

Paris, 1884, P^ trimestre, p. 42.
;
Aud, moreover, the superstitions and the rites of savages

differ to some extent from one people to another. To
which special group, then, shall we address ourselves by
preference in order to re-discover the primitive beliefs ?
Amongst some peoples the dominating system is Shaman-

ism — that is to say, belief in the power of sorcerers.
Amongst others it is Totemism, the worship of animals
or Fetishism, the belief in the supernatural influences
emanating from certain concrete objects. There are
populations which assign a single soul to man ; others
which give him two, three, or even four. Sometimes it
is the sun that occupies the first place in the worship

sometimes it is the moon, the heavens, the mythical
ancestor, or some casually selected spirit."
All very true. But I do not for a moment maintain

that the savages of to-day reproduce, trait by trait, the
beliefs of our pre-historic ancestors. No doubt we may

reasonably suppose that between races so far separated
in time, there must be differences analogous to those
which part the chief sections of savages now existing
one from another in matters of religion. But these latter
divergences are themselves largely counterbalanced by

the far more numerous and significant resemblances which
fill the narratives of travellers and the treatises of eth-
nographers. Moreover, a really attentive examination
soon shows us that if the detail of the beliefs, and even
of the rites, varies from people to people, the mental and
religious state of which these ideas and customs are the

manifestation is identiccd throughout. What does it
matter, for example, whether the fire lighted on the
tomb is intended to warm the dead man in the other

world, as with the Eedskins, or to hinder him from return-

ing to this world, as with the Kaffirs ? The two ideas
bear impartial witness to the belief that the soul is a
semi-material being capable of feeling heat and cold.
Or, again, what does it matter that the magic operations
for healing maladies or securing rain now and then vary
on the two continents, since they all alike imply that. the
malady is attributed to the presence of a spirit in the body,

and that certain individuals are recognized as having
power over the genii of the elements ? Of what conse-
quence is the nature of the superhuman beings placed in
the first rank, or even the infinite diversity of the stories
told about them, if they are everywhere represented after
the guise of chiefs or sorcerers, with faculties more or less
magnified, but subject to all the limitations and weak-
nesses of human nature at its lowest level of culture ?
The real interest for us is found in the underlying
analogy of reasoning and of motive ; and under this
aspect I affirm that the savage of every age represents
primitive man —not because he is his authentic likeness,
that has defied the ravages of time, but because he has
remained in, or has re-entered, the same stage of civili-
zation ; and at that lower level, the same conditions

beget the same ideas, and even the same applications of
those ideas. It is only at a higher stage of development
that man can even begin to free himself from a close
dependence upon external nature. Liberty is not the
point of departure, but the goal of human evolution.
This explains at once the diversity of historical religions
and the uniformity of savage beliefs. The latter repre-
sent the common foundation, hardly yet organic, out of

PRE-HISTOEIC MANIFESTATIONS OF RELIGION. 41
which all the great religious systems have respectively

issued by a process of differentiation and organization.
Thus history, pre-historic archaeology, folk-lore, and
comparative ethnography, combine with philology and
psychology to tell us, that if we would re-construct the
early forms and primitive developments of religion, we

must of necessity address ourselves to the beliefs of the
uncivilized peoples, while collecting for comparison the^

corresponding elements still to be detected in the historic
forms of worship and in the popular survivals. Where
these three sources of information yield identical results,
when gathered from divers regions and races,
especially
we may presume that we have bef (jre us no accidental or

transient facts, special to this or that people or climate,
but general facts of humanity, characterizing all peoples
placed under similar conditions of social development,

and therefore common to our own ancestors at a certain
period of their evolution.

Continuity To Complete the demonstration, however,
that
irtwZious w^ ™^»t êe whether it is really true
evolution,
gygj^ ^^^q jj^Qgt exalted religious ideas and
institutions of our own times can be connected, without
breach of continuity and without recourse to the hypo-
an intervention from without, with the natural
thesis of
development of beliefs still observed amongst populations
at the lowest stage of human culture. This is the question
with which I propose to deal in the present course of

Lectures, at least as far as concerns the idea of Deity
and and function in the universe.
of its nature
I do not disguise from myself the difficult and delicate

nature of the task, in spite of the positions made good
42 I. METHODS OF RESEAECH INTO THE
by those who have preceded me in the attemi^t. I shall
have to contend against the rei3ugnance not only of

orthodox minds, which find the origin of religious ideas
in a supernatural revelation, but also of all who, while
regarding the different religions as the spontaneous pro-
duct of a sentiment inherent in human nature, neverthe-
less shrink from admitting the lowly character of their
origins and antecedents. Yet those independent minds
who love to insist on the perfectible and progressive
character of religion, and who have formed too lofty a
conception of it to be content to confine it within the
limits of a particular revelation, ought to perceive clearly

enough the confirmation and support which their views
must find in the thesis which I am defending. If, so
far, religion has always been exalting and purifying

itself —and this implies its humble origin —then there
is all the more certain prospect that it will continue to
do so in the future. The important thing is, not what

our ancestors believed concerning the Deity, but what
our own ideas on the subject are. And will our concep-
tion of God be less sublime when we have found a

place for its development in the divine plan of creation ?
Do what we may, we can no longer escape the neces-

sity of submitting the religious sentiment to the general
law of evolution, which affirms the concurrent principles

of continuity and progress, whether in the cosmography
of the sidereal world, the geology of the terrestrial sphere,
the palaeontology of living beings, or the archceology and
history of the human race. The only position which
will thereby suff'er will be the old metaphysical argument
which made the reality of God rest upon the impossi-
—
bility of our ever having conceived of Him, had He not
in some fashion written His signature on the conscious-

ness of the first man. But this is simply a more refined
form of the argument which undertakes to found upon
miracles —that is to say, on the reversal of natural laws
the existence of the Author of nature.
How much more satisfying, both to the reason and
the conscience, is the hypothesis of gradual development,
explaining, with Lessing, that the succession of reli-
gions represents the religious education of the human
race. If has long suffered from ignorance or mis-
man
conception of the Deity, it is simply because his educa-
tion has long been incomplete. Who shall dare to say
that it is yet completed ?
I have not the least intention of discussing
position of the dogmas of the positive religions. I shall

the question.
^,^^^^^^ ^^ ^^^ ^^^^^ ^f ^l^^t may be called
Natural Eeligion; though not using the term in the

old sense of a system of doctrine embracing the beliefs
common to every worship, but rather as including all
manifestations due to the spontaneous development of
the religious sentiment. I cannot, however, abstain
from expressing my regret that the belief in the progres-
sive evolution of religions should find its chief opponents

amongst the exponents of a theology founded, like the
Chistian creed, on an application of that very principle.
Special interest attaches, in this connection, to the fol-
lowing declaration by a Catholic writer, who represents,
par excellence, Eoman Catholic orthodoxy on the subject
of the history of religions, to wit, M. I'Abb^ de Broglie,
Professor of Apologetics at the University of Paris:

" The Judaism of the later period shows progress from

the religion of Moses, and the latter from that of the
Patriarchs. Christianity .... is an immense step
in advance ; and in the Church itself, as the great Doctors
maintain, there is progress in the knowledge of truth." ^
Since the learned Professor admits that Christianity
is a progressive outcome of Judaism, Judaism of the
religion of Moses, and the latter in its turn of the reli-
gion of the Patriarchs, he has only to make one step
more, and admit that the religion of the Patriarchs is a
progressive outcome of the beliefs common to a lower
level of humanity, and we shall then be completely at
one with him in method, if not in results.
There are orthodox scholars who seem to have taken
this last step, at any rate as far as the pagan religions
are concerned. One of the most eminent Professors
of the Catholic University of Louvain wrote not long
ago :
" The belief in a primitive monotheism only con-
cerns a period too remote for historical researches ever to
reach This original monotheism does not affect
any of the religious transformations and vicissitudes
which history can trace, and which may become the
subject of our studies. The worship of material objects
and the corresponding state of intelligence may perfectly
well be admitted by us all, as existing in an age which
is lost in the night of time, and from which man succes-
sively raised himself, at several centres, to loftier con-
ceptions." ^
^ Problemes et conclusions de Vldstoire des religions, p. 319.
'^
De la methode dans V etude Idstorique des religions : in i\iQ Museon
of Jan. 1887, p. 58.
And one of the most enliglitened and sympathetic

defenders of Protestant orthodoxy, M. de Pressenst^,
admits, on his side, that in consequence of a moral fall,
humanity must have lapsed from its primitive culture

into a state of absolute savagery, and that from that
point onwards the study of savages is the best means
"of re-constructing, with some degree of precision, the
social and religious condition of the rude infancy of

humanity, of which they are themselves survivals."^
Hierographic science can ask no more.
These declarations are a significant sign of what is
going on even in the minds most attached to orthodox

beliefs. Consider, moreover, what has come to pass
within the last third of a century as to other once
burning questions, in which the future of Christianity
and even of Religion was said to be involved. What
has become of the polemics which lashed the last gene-
ration into fury over the explanation of the days in
Genesis ? What has become of the pleadings and the
anathemas which a few years ago filled the Reviews,
and the Professorial Chairs, apropos of historical re-
searches into the age and authenticity of the sacred

books? These controversies, it seems, have sunk into
de(?p peace because men have come to see that their
solution is not a question of religion, but one of scholar-

ship —which is a way of saying that the scholars were
quite right, but that religion has taken no harm ! It is
true that from time to time some brilliant essay still
appears which gives itself the airs of a challenge to

battle ; but in trutli these efforts may more properly be
^ Pressense, Uancien monde et le christianisme, Paris, 1887, pp. 5, G.
46 PRE-HISTOEIC MANIFESTATIONS OF RELIGION.
compared to the last cartridges fired by a retiring rear-

guard, or to charges of cavahy protecting a retreat.
The actual seat of war seems to be transferred to j)ro-
blems concerning the origin of man and of religion itself.
It is easy to foresee the result. Here, too, Eeligion will
benefit by the victory of Science, not only because that
victory will eliminate a source of conflict between two

necessary factors of human culture, but also because it
will give us a sublimerand more harmonious conception

of theways of God's revelation of Himself to man, or, to
employ Hegel's expression, "of the way in which the
finite spirit has come to a consciousness of its essence as
absolute Being."
Lecture II.
THE GENESIS OF THE IDEA OF GOD.
(i.) The Worship of Nature, and the Worship of

THE Dead.
Definition Before formulating a theory on the origin

of Religion.
^^ Religion, we must seek an adequate defini-
tion of the word.
The definitions of religion are innumerable, and I have
no intention of discussing them here. To do so would
be to pass the whole history of the philosophy of religions
in review. I shall confine myself to explaining the
sense in which I mean to use the word in these Lectures.
By religion, then, I mean the concqMon man forms of his
relations with the superhuman and mysterious powers on
which he helieves himself to depend.
This definition does not touch the question whether

the end pursued by religion is based on a reality or not.
On the other hand, I think it sharply defines the sphere
of religious phenomena, and at the same time indicates
the common and essential character of all religious mani-
festations.
Most writers on religion, as distinct from
Did Religion . ^ ,
•.
spring from its particular forms, recognize tliat it em-

the emotions , . , , • •
i-',^^„
or from the braccs two fiictors pertaining rcspccti\ely
reason?
^^ ^^^ ^^^^^^^ ^^^ ^j^^ feelings, but they
48 II. THE GENESIS OF THE IDEA OE GOD.
differ as which of these two came first; in other

to
words, whether the conception of the divinity engen-
dered the religious sentiment, or whether the presence
of that sentiment brought man to believe in the existence
of the gods and to reason as to their nature.
According to the one view, man instinctively attempted
to put himself into relations with the superhuman influ-
ences by which he felt himself surrounded, and it was
only subsequently that he thought of defining them.
No one in our day has formulated this thesis with more
eloquence than M. Renan, who compares man's religious
impulses to the instinct that makes the hen-bird "sit,"
which instinct spontaneously declares itself as soon as
the aôpropriate stage is reached.^

Others, on the contrary, maintain that before worship-
ping his gods, man must have had some conception of
their nature, and that the sentiments he entertains
towards them must of necessity flow from the ideas he
has formed of their character and workings.
At first sight, this latter theory seems to have logic on
its side. Clearly, one can neither love nor fear a being
before having conceived the idea of its existence. Never-
theless, inevitable as it seems to place a purely intellectual
operation at the source of religion, we must recollect that
tlie sentiments that sprang from it must have long preceded
even the most ancient formulae of primitive theology.
The infant in the cradle, when he stretches his arms

towards his mother or his nurse, is conscious of an agree-
able sensation which he instinctively associates with the
approach of certain persons, and he will manifest this
^ Dlaloijucfi pliilosophiques, Paris, 1876, pp. 38, 39.
II. THE GENESIS OF THE IDEA OF GOD. 49
sentiment, or in the opposite case sentiments of repul-

sion and fear, long before lie has taken to reasoning on
his relations with the beings around him. In like
manner, primitive man must from the first have experi-
enced more or less vague and unreflecting feelings of
sympathy or repulsion, of joy or terror, not only with

regard to his fellow-men, but with respect to the other
beings and even phenomena which he supposed to influ-
ence his destiny favourably or the reverse ; and the day
on which he deified these beings and phenomena —that is
them a personality analogous to his

to say, attributed to
own, but more mysterious and exalted was the day —

on which the sentiments he experienced towards them
became religious.
RelWonin ^^ ^^^ ^*^®^ asked, in this connection,

animals,
whether animals can experience the reli-
gious sentiment. A century ago such a question would

only have provoked a smile; but now that we have
accustomed ourselves to search in the lowest strata of
animal life for the antecedents of physiological and
intellectual characteristics which only receive their full
expression in the best-endowed representatives of human

culture, it is no longer possible to dismiss the ques-
tion of the religion of animals in this summary style.
Animals share the philosophic fate of savages. They

are alternately exalted and humbled, according to the
exigencies of the current theory as to the position of

man in nature. Under the influence of Descartes, they
were regarded simply as machines, and their absolute
automatism served to throw the liberty of the lord of
creation into relief. Under the influence of Darwinism,

E
50 II. THE GENESIS OF THE IDEA OF GOD.
we tend to regard them not only as the precursors

and the elder brothers of man, but even as his equals,
not to say his superiors ; and to represent the ant-hill
or the bee-hive as the ideal of a well-organized society.
!N'ot so long ago the ojDponents of religious ideas used
to reply to those who would make religion a natural
characteristic of the human mind, " Eeligion is nothing
but an accident, a parasitical excrescence. It is so far from
being natural to humanity that most savages are without
it." Now that this position can no longer be maintained,
4hey have reversed their batteries, and it is not uncom-
mon to hear them maintain with equal fervour, "Eeligion,
so far from being a distinctive sign of humanity, is found
in the animals themselves."
We need take no notice of these partizan attacks, for
the positionwe have taken up is entirely unaffected by

them but we must not forget that serious and impartial
;
authors have maintained that religion exists among the

animals. Four years ago, a talented writer, M. Yan
Ende, published a thick volume of 320 pages filled
with ingenious and suggestive observations to show that

animals attribute the grand phenomena of nature to the
action of powers superior to all the beings they know,
and that those powers inspire them with most of the
characteristic sentiments of religion.^ I think the author

has sometimes let his imagination run away with him,
and has taken advantage of the fact that we cannot check
him by getting into the animal's hide and learning
what it thinks and how it thinks it. I am quite
^ Histoire natarelle de la croyance : premik'e partie, L'animal :
Paris, 1887.
willing to admit that animals apiârently experience

more or less spontaneous feelings of joy or terror in the
presence of certain natural phenomena ; but I very much
doubt whether their powers of analysis can take them
the length of reasoning upon the character and disposi-
tions of the beings they imagine they find behind the
manifestations of nature. Still less can I believe that they
endeavour to enter into relations with those mysterious
beings, based on their conception of their nature. Un-
doubtedly, if the word religion be made to imply a simple
feeling of dependence, as Schleiermacher has it, we may
answer with Fichte that the dog must be the most reli-
gious of beings. But (with M. de Pressens(^) we shall
decline to believe that it is so until the dog has combined

with his fellows to found a religion implying the desire
to establish ideal relations with the mysterious higher
powers.! This would require a capacity for abstraction
and generalization and a perception of analogies which
we could hardly expect from an animal, even were it
Haekel's Anthropopithecus.
Unwarranted But a day Came for nascent humanity
^thfideTof when our ancestors were no longer content,
personality.
i[\^q auimals, to look for the sun to warm
them; to greet the return of the dark-dispelling moon
with cries of joy; to howl in terror at the rumbling of
the thunder to demand of the rock a shelter from the
;
wind and rain ; and to spy out the beasts of the forest
so as to capture or escape them. The savage began
to ask what were his own relations to the beings who
1 E. de Pressense, Les Oriyines, Paris, 1883, p. 471 [omit>ted in the

English Translation, p. 458],
e2
52 11. THE GENESIS OF THE IDEA OF GOD.
thus affected his destiny ; and the mental process which

gave him his answer differed in nothing save in com-
plexity from that which contemporary thought accepts
to explain the course ofphenomena in the last analysis.
The philosophy which, resting on the most recent
discoveries, has established the constancy of the same
energy under all the varied manifestations of nature, can
only conceive of that ultimate force by relating it to our
own sense of effort springing from the consciousness of

the resistance of our surroundings to the action of our
will. The savage, on his side, wherever he finds life
and movement, refers them to the only source of activity
of which lie has any direct knowledge, namely the will.
He therefore sees in all phenomena the action of wills

analogous to his own, — wills which he locates sometimes
in the moving beings themselves, the celestial bodies,

clouds, fire, running waters, plants, and animals ; some-
times in invisible beings of which he can only perceive
the manifestations, such as thunder and wind.
Personification ôt Only the beliefs of uncivilized peoples,

of phenomena,
i^^^^ ^j^^ traditions of our own folk-lore, abun-
dantly establish the fact that uncultivated minds ascribe
the attributes of life to stones and waters ; the faculties
of animals to plants; and the feelings and even the align-
ments of man to animals.^ The savage believes that

animals understand his language. If the dog does not
answer, it is because he is proud, says the Karachadal.
^ See especially E. B. Tyler, Primitive Ctdture, 2 vols. : London^

1871. Albert Keville, Les religions dcs 2êi(jrdes non-civilises, 2 vols.:
Paris, 1883. Th. 'Waltz, AnfhrojwJogie der Naturvolkcr: Leipzig, 1876,
Sir John Lubbock, Origin of Civilization : London, 1870.
If the ape remains dumb, it is because lie is lazy, accord-

ing to the N'egroes, and knows that if he spoke they
would make him work. The Redskin talks to his horse
as to one of his and the Arab believes that

companions ;
certain horses can read the Koran. The natives of the

Philippine Islands, when they meet an alligator, beg it
to do them no harm and when the Malagassy catch a
;
whale-calf, they beg its mother to go away.

They also believe that animals have the same relations
with each other that men have. The inhabitants of
Borneo maintain that the tigers have a Sultan and a

court. According to the traveller Crevaux, the Eed-
skins believe that animals have sorcerers of their own.
Perrault's fairy-tales. La Fontaine's fables, and the
popular traditions of our country districts, are no more
than the echo, in this respect, of the actual beliefs of
our ancestors of yore, and of the Polynesians, the Red-
and Negroes of our own day.
skins,
Even trees are put upon the footing of equality with

man amongst comparatively adxanced peoples. There
are numerous legends attributing to certain men the
power of understanding the language of plants, and

vice versa. Ibn-al-Awam's agricultural treatise recom-
mends the intimidation of trees that refuse to produce
fruit. You are to flog them mildly, and threaten to cut
them down if they go on bearing no fruit.^ So, too,
the Bohemian Slavs used to cry to the garden trees at
even, "Bud, ye trees bud or I will strip you

I !
of your
1 E. Cbovreul on J. J. Clement-Mullet's translation of Le h'vro de
VAgnculiure d' Ihn-al-Axmm in Journal des Savants, Paris, 1870, pp.

633, 63t.
bark."^ "Water, again, suggests the idea of movement

and so of life to the primitive imagination, and is there-
fore invested with conscious faculties everywhere. "When
the brothers Lander were descending the Niger by boat
and a thick cloud rose on the horizon, their boatmen
begged them to hide themselves at onee in the bottom
of the boat, because the river had never seen whites
before, and that was why it was raising a cloud. Cameron

tells us of a spring in Unyamuesi which the natives
.
declare stops flowing if, instead of calling it marwa

(palm-wine), they call it maji (the ordinary word for
water), or if they tire guns in its neighbourhood, or,
finally, if they go near it with their boots on.^ At

Whydah they offer presents to the sea to induce it to
allow the merchandize of the whites to be discharged.

Natives of Sumatra from the inland, on first seeing the
ocean, are said to sacrifice cakes and sweetmeats to it in
deprecation of its power of injuring them.^
The savage has no difficulty in ascribing, not only the
powers of movement, but life and personality, even to
stones. Caill^ saw a big stone in an African village
which they said circled the place three times whenever

itwas threatened by danger. This recalls the stones of
the Celtic countries which dance and turn on certain
occasions, and the Breton rock which, according to a
legend cited by M. Cartailhac, goes down every year

on Christmas-eve to drink at the neighbouring river.*
^ Girard de Eialle, Mythologie comparee, Paris, 1878, p. 57.
2 Cameron, Across Africa, London, 1877, vol. i. p. 144.

^ W. Marsden, Sumatra, London, 1783, p. 256.
* La Franco prrhistorique, ])^. 164, 165,
The Lapps, the ancient Peruvians, the Fijians, and the

dwellers on the shores of Tanganyika, believe that
rocks marry and have children. The myth of Deukalion,
which attributes the origin of our race to stones, trans-

formed into men, has its counterpart amongst the ancient
inhabitants of Central America, who say that the ances-
tors of man were stones.
The same delusion recurs with respect to the atmo-

spheric phenomena and the celestial bodies. Not so
long ago the celestial bodies were universally personi-
fied, and almost all the mythologies contain stories
of people who have talked with the sun and moon.
The Karens of Burmah, the Zulus, and the Eedskins of
the Washington district, make the rainbow a monster
which drinks the water out of rivers and ponds. The
same belief is found in the folk-lore of the Slavs, the
Greeks, the Germans, and Central France. The Karens,
according to Mason, cry to their children, " The rainbow
has come down to drink. Play no more, lest some acci-
dent should happen to you.''^ By a strange coincidence,
the rainbow is called "the Sucker" in Yolhynia; and

when the little TJkranian children see him, they run away
and shout, "Eun ! run I or he'll eat you up."^
The Egyptians, according to Herodotus, believed that
fire was a living creature; and Cicero himself calls it
"ignis animal." The Aryans of India personified it
under the name of Agni, the Agile; "the blessed one,"

as a Yedic hymn has it, " who is born white and becomes
1 Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1865 (vol. xxxiv.), part ii.
p. 217.
2 Melusine, deuxicme annee, 1884-5, p. 42.
red as he grows." And to this very day, in Dahomey,

they offer sacrifices to the hearth to prevent the fire
eating up the house. In Europe itself, the Bohemians

keep the crumbs of their repast for the fire if any food ;
falls into the fire-place while they are cooking it, it is
because the fire has demanded the offering; and old

people still exist who attribute the frequency of destruc-
tive fires to the neglect of these usages.^
Our own languages, especially those which have no
neuter gender or which make but little use of it, take
us back to a period which knew no scruple in indefi-
nitely extending the categories of life, of personality,
and even of sex. Sometimes it is the sun, some-
times the moon, which is of the masculine gender; but
in almost every known language these two heavenly
bodies differ in gender, and can therefore be regarded as
husband and wife. The same observation applies to the
ancient cosmogonic couple of heaven and earth. When
the Frenchman says, ''II pleut; il vente; il tonne," is
it not as much as to declare "Some one is sprinkling,

blowing, growling"? This "some one" may mean a
hidden being who only reveals himself through his mani-
festations, or may indicate a visible being, the Sky or
the Cloud, invested with the chief meteorob tgical powers,
and at the same time with faculties modelled on those of
man.
Such examples might be multiplied indefinitely. I
^ Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. ii. p. 259. Compare, for what may
be called the "theology of fire" in the ancient beliefs, Prof. Max
INIuller's beautiful studies in his Gifford Lectures for 1890, delivered
at Glasgow, on Physical Religion : London, 1891.
have been content with drawing upon the standard trea-

tises of ethnography for a few characteristic facts which
establish the tendency of man, at a certain stage of his
mental development, to anthropomorphize everything.

The difficulty is not to say what kind of beings and
phenomena he personifies, but rather to say in what cate-
gory of objects he does not seek arbitrary personifications.
Nomina Scholars, who have carried linguistic pre-
nuiiiina.
conceptions into the study of mythology,
have maintained that it was the forms of language, at
an epoch when every verb implied a concrete act, so that

every subject must necessarily be an animated being,
which led to the attribution of life and personality to
inanimate and material objects, nomina numina. M. Michel

Brâl, one of the greatest linguists of the French school,
declares :
" However vivid and poetical may have been
the first flights of imagination in the infancy of the
human race, they could never have risen to representing
the rain which waters the earth as coming from heavenly
cows, or the cloud which conceals the lightning in its
flanks as a monster vomiting flame, or the sun with his

darting rays as a divine warrior discharging his arrows
upon his foes Whence, then, come these
images ? . . . From language, which spontaneously
created them without man himself being aware of it."^
To refute this thesis, it is enough to recall the nai've
dialogue, apropos of an eclipse, between the Algonkiu

and a missionary of the sixteenth century, Pere Lejeune,
who certainly will not be suspected of being under the
influence of our present theories on the subject of mytho-
1
M. Breal, Melanges de Utterafure cf de Jiiujuisiiquc, Paris, 1878, p. 8.
logy. "I asked them what caused eclipses of the moon

and the sun. They answered that the moon was eclipsed
and aiDpeared dark because she held her son in her arms,
and that concealed her brightness. '
If the moon has a
son,' I replied, 'she is married or was married once.'
'Yes, certainly,' said they. '
The sun is her husband. He
is out all day and she all night ; and if he is eclipsed or
darkened, it is because he, too, sometimes takes the son
that he has had by the moon in his arms.' '
Yes ; but
neither the moon nor the sun has any arms at all,' I
said. '
You've no sense ; they always have their bows
strung in front of them. That's why you can't see their
arms.' 'And what do they want to shoot at?' 'Oh!
how should we know?'"^
Do you say that the Algonkins had already been led
to personify the celestial bodies by the metaphors of lan-
guage ? Well, then, here is a page of mythological auto-
biograjDhy in which we catch these personifications in the
act of birth. De Gubernatis relates in his "Zoological
Mythology" that when he was four years old, as he was
walking one evening with a brother, the latter pointed
to a fantastical cloud on the horizon and cried, " Look

down there; that is a hungry wolf running after the
sheep." "I well recollect," continues the author, "that
he convinced me so entirely of that cloud being really a
hungry wolf running upon the mountains, that fearing
it might, in default of sheep, overtake me, I instantly took
to my heels, and escaped precipitately into the house." ^
^ Relation de ce qui s'est passe dans la nouvelle France en Vannee

1634, Paris, 1635, pp. 96, 97.
2 Zoological Mythology, London, 1872, vol. i. p. xxiv.
;
You will perhaps maintain that this is simply another

proof of the influence of words on the imagination. But
in such a case the words are but the vehicle of a thought
and that thought, though suggested to the mind of our
young mythologist from outside, might just as well liave
sprung up spontaneously in his own imagination as in
that of another. In any case, we see that it is not
necessary, as a certain school of philologists maintains^
that before a conscious personality can be ascribed to
inanimate things, the primitive sense of the concrete
terms applied them must have been lost. The unwar-
to
ranted extension of personality which forms the basis of

mythology is due, not to a " disease of language," but to
a "disease of thought," if, indeed, one may apply such
a term to an illusion which enters into the normal deve-
lopment of man.
The testimony of De Gubernatis in this anecdote is
the less open to suspicion, inasmuch as it seems to con-

tradict his favourite thesis on the formation of meteoro-
logical mythology ; for he maintains that the myths in
which animals appear as personal and conscious agents
were originally histories attributed to clouds to which the
names of animals were given, and were afterwards trans-
ferred to the terrestrial animals which bore the same
name;i whereas in this case we have the story of a
ferocious beast of earth transfeiTed to the cloud.
^. ,. ,. According
^ to another hypothesis very
Distinction .
between the eommonly received, which I myself long

^theTmpei- advocatcd, but which I can hardly defend
^''''^^'
now in the same unqualified fashion, man
^ Ojp. dt. pp. xvi sqq.
;
used to regard everything as living that appealed to

his senses with a sufficiently pronounced character of
individuality to wake a distinct image in his mind ; and
it was only after a long series of accumulated experiences
that he came to conceive the notion of inanimate things
from which moment his progress consisted in restricting

more and more the category of living and personal
beings, and increasing that of lifeless things.
In confirmation of this thesis it is urged, first, that
the savage personifies everything around him ; second,

that children look upon the articles of furniture and their
playthings as living and reasonable beings; third, that
civilized men under the impulse of passion are capable
of treating material objects as if they were sensible and
responsible agents.
In answer to this last argument, it has been urged that
even in our explosions of anger and grief, we never so
far lose sight of the distinction between animate and
inanimate things, as really to suppose that the reproaches
or blows we lavish upon material objects fall upon
beings capable of receiving any moral impression. As
regards children, it has been observed —and personal
observations have inclined me more and more to believe
it —that if they talk to their dolls, or strike the table or

chair that they have knocked against, it is generally
under the influence of ideas first suggested to them by
some one else ; unless, indeed, it is simply a conscious
piece of acting in which their youthful imagination

indulges for its own entertainment.
There remains the argument that savages have no
conception of the inanimate or the impersonal. The
Jesuit missionaries to Canada, in their accounts publislied

in 1685, note that to the Eedskin "not only men and
animals, but everything else is alive." ^ The facts that
we have already dwelt upon seem at first sight to con-
firm this generalization. But does it really follow that
because savages extend the idea of personality in so wild

a fashion, that they have no sense at all of the distinction
between animate and inanimate ? Or does it only follow
that they make the distinction in the wrong place ?
If we look more closely into the travellers' stories, we

shall soon perceive that the savages do not really personify
everything without distinction, but only such objects
as they select in virtue of their form, their origin, their
behaviour, or their association with particular events.
To the savage, as to the animal, it is movement which

is the sign of life. "The zi (supernatural power),"
observes Professor Sayce, in his Lectures on the beliefs

of the ancient Babylonians, "was simply that which
manifested life, and the test of the manifestation of life
was movement." 2 Only we must note, in the first place,
that objects may be credited with movement in virtue
of highly complex and indirect deductions, as we see

from the phenomena of rock and stone worship; and,
in the second place, that if any object is supposed to be
capable of acting at a distance, even though no spon-
taneous movement takes place, this is quite enough to
carry with it all that is essentially implied in the power
1 Vhe Lpjeune, Relation de ce qui s'est passe dans la nouvclle
France en Cannee 1634, p. 58.

andUahjloyiia,
2 8ayco, Hibhert Lectures. Religion of Ancient Assyria
Louduii, 1888, p. 328.
of locomotion.^ Thus man comes to personify not only

everything that he supposes to move, but everything
which seems to exercise an influence upon him implying
the existence of an active will. " The Indian [in British
Guiana]," says Mr. E. F. im Thurn, "is occasionally
hurt either by falling on a rock or by the rock falling on
him ; and in either case he attributes the blame to the
rock." 2 Even so advanced a people as the Athenians
present us with the spectacle of the tribunal of the
Prytanies condemning to death inanimate objects which
had accidentally caused the death of a man.^ An analo-
gous custom is still found amongst certain tribes of Indo-
China, where a tree which has caused any one's death

must be completely hacked to pieces.^
We must not suppose that the savage's investigations
into the nature of the creatures about him is inspired
by simple curiosity. However exuberant his imagi-
nation may be, nothing is less in his line than specu-
lation. With him, everything has a practical end;
and in the present instance the end is to form connec-
tions, advantageous to himself, with the extra-human
beings by which he believes himself to be surrounded.
And since he has assigned to these beings motives and
^ " The king of the Koussa Kaffirs having

broken off a piece of a
stranded anchor, died soon afterwards, upon which all the Kaffirs
looked upon the anchor as alive, and saluted it respectfully whenever
they passed near it." —Lubbock, Origin of Civilization, p. 188.
2 E. F. ini Thurn, Indians of British Guiana, in Journal of the

Anthropological Institute, vol. xi, 1882, p. 370.
3 Pausanias, i. 28, 10.
* Ch. Ploix, La nature des dieux, etude de mythologie compareey

Paris, 1888, p. 4.
reasonings analogous to his own, he naturally thinks

that he can act u^Don them by just such measures (here-
after to be enumerated) as would be effective with him-
self. And, from the other side, he cannot but feel
gratitude for their benefits, terror in the face of their
wrath, even a certain confidence in their protection,
and depression or indignation when deserted by them.
Deity implies
^^^y ^^^ ^11 these elements, even when
superiority united and combined, enough to constitute
and mystery. t •
o m
religion? The idea that certain beings,
whatever their nature, may be of service to us, and that
we can secure their help by the same means as are
current in human society, even when we add the feelings
of hope, fear, gratitude, and anger, provoked by such
relations, is no more than what springs out of the mutual
relations of men themselves, without its constituting a
religion.
Eeligion, at any rate as I have defined it, implies,

in addition to this, something exalted and mysterious in
the character of the being adored. Iôte that the supe-
riority and mystery may be only partial. The being
deified may have the advantage over his worshipper only
in some one important faculty, or may escape his com-
prehension under some one aspect only. It has often
been said that the savage can have no idea of the super-
natural, for the excellent reason that in his eyes every-
thing is natural, even the impossible. The assertion is
justified if it means that, having no idea whatever of a

regular course of things, he cannot distinguish between
what contradicts and what does not contradict such a
course; but although he has no notion of the supernatural.
he cannot be without an idea of the extraordinary and

the unforeseen, or without the power of distinguishing
between the facts he understands, or thinks he under-
stands,and those which he considers incomprehensible.
Experience has taught him that he increases his power
by arming himself with a knotted branch or a chipped
flint; that he increases his chances of success in securing
game by setting certain traps for animals; that he can
cross the river by getting upon the trunk of a tree;
and can provide against thirst by keeping water in a
clay vessel, baked in the sun. But neither the way in
^vhich he gets his implements, nor the result upon
which he can rely, has anything extraordinary or
mysterious about it. He is dealing with foreseen and

which are dependent on his own will,
forseeable effects,
which he can reproduce indefinitely by means of simple
methods of which he knows the secret and feels himself
to be the master.
But side by which may be considered
side with all this,
normal, he comes across phenomena produced by methods

which he cannot explain, and by beings which he can
neither control nor even understand. Jarvis tells us
that when the North American Indian cannot understand

a thing, he says it is a spirit.^ Garcilasso de la Yega
informs us that the ancient Peruvians applied the name

of huacas to "all those things which, from their beauty
and excellence, were superior to other things of a like
kind;" further, '' things that were ugly and monstrous, or
that caused horror and fright;" and lastly, "things which
1 Appendix to J. Bachanan's Hidory, Manners^ and Customs, of the

N-^jrtJt American Indians, London, 1824, p. 228.
were out of tlie usual course of nature."^ Amongst the

Chinese, according to the Yuen-Jcien lui-han^ as cited by
M. Lôn de Eosny, the name of Chin is given generally
to the producers of clouds and the provokers of wind and
rain, and everything that seems extraordinary in the moun-
tains, the forests, the rivers, the lakes, the rocks, and the
hills. ^ The Todas of central India call their deities Der^
and Colonel Marshall tells us that amongst them there is
a tendency for everything mysterious or unseen to ripen

into Der. In the Fiji Islands the word kalu^ which is
used to signify the gods, is also applied to everything

great or marvellous.^ " The Negroes," says a traveller,
"worship everything extraordinary and rare." When
first the Xegroes of the Guinea coast saw a pump on
board a European vessel, they thought it a very marvel-
lous creature, "since it could make water rise up whose
'""'
natural property is to descend."^
For the most part, however, the sphere of the extra-

ordinary extends, for the savage, far beyond what we
should consider its duo limits. It includes, for instance,
all the wild animals which excel man in strength, agility,
or cunning, and whose proceedings always have some-
thing mysterious in them. It includes the plants,
^ Royal Commentaries, lik. ii. cliap. iv. ; C. R. Markham's transla-

tion (Hakluyt Society), London, 1869, 1871, vol. i. p. 116.
2 Leon de Eosny, Les origines du Taoisme, in the Revue de Vhistoire

des reliijums for Sept. Oct. 1890, vol; xxii. pp. 171, 172.
^ T. Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, London: Plodder and Stoughton.

1870, p. 183.
* Sir John Lubbock, History of Civilization, London, 1870, p. 202.
F
66 II. THE GENESIS OP THE IDEA OF GOD.
whose slow growth and periodical blossoming depend

upon forces alien to the intervention of man. It includes
the sun who, defying all interference, pursues his course,
dealing out alternate life and death ; the, moon, that
strange and changing being, which the popular imagina-

tion is still unable to disentangle from the affairs of our
planet ; the atmospheric phenomena, beginning with the

thunder-storm, whose sinister rumblings throw all ani-
mated nature into terror; running waters, that sometimes

fertilize and sometimes lay waste, and whose continuous
and spontaneous movement nothing can arrest.

There is nothing, even down to the rocks, which may
not become an enemy or an ally according to the associa-
tionswhich chance events have thrown round it; nothing

which may not acquire a character all the more active and
mysterious in proportion to the barriers the imagination
has had to pierce in order to draw it into the category of
conscious and animated beings. "The A-shi-wi, or
Zunis," says Mr. Frank Gushing, "suppose the sun, moon,
and stars, the sky, earth, and sea, in all their phenomena
and elements, and all inanimate objects, as well as plants,
animals and men, to belong to one great system of all-
conscious and inter-related life, in which the degrees of
relationship seem to be determined largely, if not wholly,
by the degrees of resemblance. In this system of life the
starting-point is man, the most finished, yet the lowest
organism; at least, the lowest because most dependent

and least mysterious The animals .... are con-
sidered .... more nearly related to the gods than is man,

because more mysterious Again, the elements and
ir. THE GENESIS OF THE IDEA OF GOD. 67
phenomena of nature, because more mysterious, powerful,

and immortal, seem more closely related to the higher
gods than are the animals." ^
It seems clear that the reason why living man is seldom
worshipped is precisely because he is too well known.
The only exception is in the case of certain persons
withdrawn by the prestige of their authority or their
wisdom from the ordinary conditions of humanity —that

is to say of savage or primitive humanity. Sir John
Lubbock points out that the adoration of the king is
only found in cases where he is powerful enough to

withdraw himself from the common life.^ The French
say that no one is a hero to his valet -de-chambre;
and in the same way we may assert that no one is a
god to his familiar companion. The traveller Battel,
speaking of a king of Loango who is worshipped as the

equal of a god, adds that no one is allowed to see him
eat or drink. This is a wise precaution for a royal deity
to take.
On the other hand, certain men may be worshipped,

even when alive, on account of some extraordinary cha-
racteristic wdiich exhibits them in a mysterious light.
Thus whites have often been regarded as superhuman

beings by the red, yellow, or black savages who see
them for the first time. But just the same thing may
happen in the case of a hitherto unknown animal, as in
Mexico with the horse ridden by Cortez, or on the west
coast of Africa with Monteiro's ass. However ondoyant
^ Zuni Fetiches, in the Publications of the Bureau of Ethnologxj,
"Smithsonian Institute," 1883, vol. ii. p. 9.
' Origin of Civilization, p. 234:.
f2
: :
et divers man may be, he is far less mysterious to the
savage than the celestial bodies, trees, or even stones
are.
To say mystery Man, like
is to say fear.
of fear in the animals, fears the unknown, even though

a kind of fascination draw him towards the
object of his terror, that he may learn to give himself
some account of it. This two-fold feeling unquestionably
lies at the root of religion ; and, in this connection, the
Latin poet might well say that fear was the first creator
of the gods
"Primus in orbe deos fecit timor."
But it was not fear alone that created them. It is not

only evil that man expects from his deities, nor does he
confine his adoration to the maleficent powers of nature.
Nature herself has always a two -fold aspect, the one
fruitful and propitious, the other cruel and destructive,

both reflected in one of her most complete and transparent
personifications, the great goddess of the Pha3nicians
" Diva Astarte hominum deorunique vita salus

Eursus eadem quai es pernicies mors interitus."
If man dreads the beings who may injure him, why

should he not be equally capable of hope, trust, love,
and gratitude, towards those from whom he hopes to
receive benefits or has already received them. Whether

we turn to the most rudimentary or the most elaborate
religions, we always find the superhuman powers, taken
collectively, arousing sentiments at once of dread and of
attraction in the wort>hipper. The former may sink to
the most abject terror, the latter may rise to the most
II. THE GENESIS OF THE IDEA OE GOD. 69
exalted love ; but, in whatever proportions, they always

combine to produce what we mean by veneration.
No doubt man may disentangle this mingled character
of his deities. But whenever he conceives of certain
superhuman beings as absolutely evil, you may be cer-
tain that he will counterbalance them with others that
are absolutely good, even if, for obvious reasons, he
devotes his chief attention to the former. One can
conceive Ormuzd without Ahriman, and the Persian
theology looks forward to the time when the latter shall
be destroyed; but no one ever conceived Ahriman without
Ormuzd, even amongst the sects who reserve their homage
for Ahriman on the ground that Ormuzd does not need it.
You perceive that the sense of dependence is not
enough to produce religion ; otherwise man would have

to adore everything that he is dependent on, from
his own limbs down to the force of gravitation which
prevents his forthwith knocking his head against the
stars of heaven. As M. E^ville observes, the sense of
dependence furnishes no issue from opposition and anti-
thesis, whereas the very purpose of religion is so to
harmonize opposition as to solve the antithesis.^ The

religious sentiment is not fully satisfied until man feels
himself one with his deities.

The sense of On the other hand, neither is the sense of
t'a foc"o? mystery, of the great Beyond, the Infinite,

in Religion. Supra-scnsiblc, enough in itself to pro-
^îQ
duce religion, unless man assigns some positive content
to this purely negative conception. The savage standing

1 A. Revillt', Prolerjomenes de VhistoirQ des religwn.'<, Paris, 1881,
pp. 25, 26.

70 II. THE GENESIS OF THE IDEA OF GOB.
on his coral island, to take Professor Max Miiller's
example, might have speculated to his heart's content

on what there lay beyond the horizon, but he could
hardly have worshipped that invisible continuation of
the tossing ocean or the azure firmament, had he not
attributed to it the power of interposing in his own
affairs. I am ready to admit that the perception of the
finite really implies the conception of the infinite ; but it
is only a relatively advanced philosophy which succeeds

in making the implicit idea explicit and if the savage ;
speculates on what lies beyond whether that "Beyond," —

the boundaries of which he cannot apprehend, stretch
behind the sights of nature or retreat within the inner
consciousness of beings — it is only because he suspects

the existence in it of a power with which he is, or can
be, in some actual relation.
I ought to add, however, that the eminent Indian

scholar whose views I am discussing has done much in
his recent Gifford Lectures to meet the objections which
have been urged, in this connection, against the defini-
tion of religion which he gave from the Chair which I

have the honour of occupying at this moment. " The
infinite per se, as a mere negative, would have had no
interest for primitive man ; but as the background, as
the support, as the subject or the cause of the finite in
its many manifestations, it came in from the earliest
period of human thought."^ To put this explanation
above the reach of criticism, it is only necessary to insist
on the part played by the practical element in the

1 F. Max Miiller, Natural Religion : the Gifford Lectures for 1888 :
London, 1889, p. 149.

genesis of religion —that is to say, the influences which

the mysterious agents thus deified were supposed to
exercise upon human affairs, and man's desire to enter
into such relations with them as might turn to his own
ad vantage. 1
^, ^ . ^ Amonsrst the factors which contributed
Contusion of ^
concomitance most actively towards increasing the num-
and causality. , „,, ••,• t-,-
ber 01 the primitive deities we must
-•
give
the first rank to the confusion of concomitance, or rather
succession, with causality, together with the assimilation

of dreams to reality.
Post hoc^ ergo propter hoc, is man's first argument as
he endeavours to get at the reason of things. Do we
not, in our own day, hear causation defined by the most
advanced psychologists as "a constant and uniform rela-
tion of succession"? The savage omits the qualifications
of uniformity and constancy, or at best accepts a few

accidental repetitions as enough. That is all the diff'er-
ence, but it is vital.
Eoemer tells us of a Negro who once showed him a

stone, amongst his domestic fetishes, to which he attached
great value, because he once stumbled against it at the
threshold of his hut as he was setting out on an impor-

tant expedition. Mr. E. F. im Thurn says of the Indian
of British Guiana :
" If his eye falls on a rock in any
way abnormal or curious —and none such escapes his

notice —and if, shortly after, any evil happens to him,
he regards rock and evil as cause and effect : and here
1
The succeeding volume of Giffovd Lectures, viz. Ph>/sical Brlir/ion,
London, 1891, has contributed still further towards dispelling the mis-
conception.
/^ II. THE GENESIS OF THE IDEA OF GOD.
again he perceives a spirit in the rock."^ This explains

how peoples so far distant from each other as the Finns
and the Redskins, can unite in attributing the fertilizing
showers of spring to the cuckoo ; for the former accom-
pany or closely follow the latter. Perhaps this same coin-
cidence explains the origin of the Cretan myth in which
Jupiter transforms himself into a cuckoo to impregnate
Juno.
This tendency to attribute events to some pheno-
menon with which they are associated, but with which
they have really nothing to do, recurs amongst all uncivi-
lized peoples — civilized peoples, too, for that matter, as
is testified by the "fetishes" of gamesters in our own
days, and other similar superstitions. —But this idea of
the good or ill luck attached to some talisman is not in
itself in any way religious, and it is a mistake to place
the origin of religion in fetishism so understood. It is
all very well to declare that the deity grew out of the
amulet, but we have to be shown how men passed from
one idea to the other; and here our teachers, in their
turn, point to a concomitance in lieu of a cause. The
idea that a material object can exercise a certain influ-
ence or produce certain events in virtue of some myste-
rious connection it has with them, can only be called a
religious belief when this connection is ascribed to the
intervention of a superhuman being incorporated in the
object or using it as its tool. The Negroes themselves
distinguish between their fetishes (gris-gris, jou-jou,
mokissos), which they regard as superhuman beings, or
rather as possessed by such, and their amulets, or talismans
^ Journal of the Ant]iroj)olo<jlc(.d Instituie^ vol. xi. p. 370,
y
proper (mondas), which they do not regard as living and

conscious.! But who does not see that this already pre-
supposes a belief that such superhuman beings exist ?
understand how, when once the idea of

It is easy to
mysterious superhuman personalities has been formu-
lated in the imagination, this unwarranted extension of
causality may indefinitely increase the number of the
gods. Any conceivable object may happen to be asso-
ciated with any conceivable event, and so may come to
be regarded as its cause. Then follows, by a process
already familiar to the human mind, the personification
of that cause ; and the primitive pantheon is enriched by
a new god.
The fantastic associations which occur in
The assimila- ,
tiou of dreams drcams Contribute to the result as much as
to rea ity.
^^^^ which casually occur in
^^^^ associatious
the waking life. Animals dream, but do not remember

their dreams the savage not only remembers them, but
;
believes they are actual experiences. Travellers are all
agreed on this point, and it would be wearisome to repeat
the proofs of the fact, since it is not contested. The

places which he has visited, the things which he has seen,
the people he has talked to — in a word, all the details
of his dreams, appear to the savage as real after he has
awaked as they did while he was dreaming. If some of

these people or things have played the part he is accus-
tomed to assign to his gods, why should he hesitate to

rank them henceforth amongst the superhuman powers
which he must conciliate or serve ?
Compare du Chaillu, Transactions of

1 the Ethnological Society
London, 1861, vol. i. p. 307.

;
In brief, under the action of this two-fold influence,

the savage ends by deifying everything in nature. This
is the stage at which, as Bossuet puts it, " everything
was a god excej^t God himself." In truth, whether we
take the savage of our own time or his pre -historic
counterpart, the difficulty is not to say what he worships,
but to find anything that escapes his adoration.
The functio
^^® Same associatious, real or imaginary,
of the first which havo thus indefinitely multir)lied the
deities.
number of the gods, have also served con-
siderably to extend the sphere of action originally
attributed to each of them. Men probably began by
demanding of each being or each object which they
had deified only those services which it was really
suited to render in virtue of its actual nature. Thus
they invoked the sun for warmth or fertilization ; the
moon, to dissipate the darkness ; the spring, to slake or
inflict thirst; the cloud, to drop its waters or to di'ift away;
the wind, not to throw down the hut ; the tree, to bear
abundant fruit; ferocious beasts, to spare the life and
property of the suj^pliant. But one day it was observed
that the clouds before breaking gathered round a certain
peak. It was this mountain then that made the rain.
At the moment of the full moon the savage would fall

ill ; it was the full moon then which had sent his disease,
and which could therefore take it away. As he started
out on a successful hunting expedition he met a serpent
serpents then had the power of securing game; and if
they could bring success in the chase, why not in war

and other enterprizes as well ? Or the savage had
dreamed that the sun made him* promises or presents;
tliis must have happened, and therefore might happen

again. Another night he had seen a neighbouring rock
change itself into a roaring lion, and hurl itself upon the
enemies of the tribe ; henceforth he will know where to
turn in order to secure victory.
Here is an example in which the dream combines with
a purely accidental coincidence as a factor in the result.
M. E. de Backer, in his work on the Indian Archipelago,
tells us of a native who had found a stone covered with
small fishes, and next night saw a genius in his sleep.
This genius told him that he was the stone itself, and that
if he received due homage he would send him abundance
of fish.The author adds that the fetishes or idols of
the Dyaks —
scraps of wood or stone, hollow crocodiles'
teeth, little figures j)ainted on sticks, human statuettes
cut in bark —were almost always made in consequence
of some dream in which the native had seen a gigantic
''Kambi" or a hairy and terrible "Antung" appear.^
In the same way, Mr. Powell tells us that amongst the
Eedskins every Indian " is provided with his charm or
fetish, revealed to him in some awful hour of ecstacy,
produced by fasting, or feasting, or drunkenness." ^
Thus men not only come to deify all manner of dif-
ferent beings, but to invest them with powers so varied
and so extensive that they no longer know what super-

human being they may not require under any given
' Valentyn, cited by De Backer, UArcliipel Indien, Paris, 1874,

p. 222.
'^
Powell, Myths of the North-American Indians, in the PuhJicafions
of the Bureau, of Ethnology , "Smithsonian Institute," 1881, vol. i.
p. 41.
circumstances ; and in doubtful cases nine gods out of
ten are ready to aid the worshipper, as the Californian

savage gave to understand when he was asked what it
was he muttered in order to secure the recovery of a

sick man, and answered : "I talk to the trees, and to
the springs, and birds, and sky, and rocks, to the wind,
and rain, and leaves; I beg them all to help me.''^
" The cold has spoken to me," cries the author of the
song which serves as a prelude to the Finnish Kalevala,
"and the rain has told me her runes; the winds of
heaven, the waves of the sea, have spoken and sung to
me ; the wild birds have taught me, the music of many

waters has been my master."^
Might one not fancy one was listening to the prema-
ture echo of a great contemporary poet who calls every
detail of nature to bear witness to his vanished joy ?
lac, rochers muets, grottes, foret obscure,
Que tout ce qu'on entend, Ton voit ou Ton respire

Tout dise : lis ont aime !^
But what is mere play of imagination or figure of
speech in the modern poet, is to his savage contemporary
of to-day, and was to the primitive savage of ancient

times, the expression of a general belief in the animation
of all nature and the possibility of entering into relations
with its personified manifestations.
^ Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific States, 1875, vol. i. pp. 358,
359.
2 Kalevala, chant i. As quoted in A. Lang's Custom and Myth,

London, 1884, p. 165.
^ Lamartine, Le Lac.
;
IT. THE GENESIS OF THE IDEA OF GOD. 77
The belief in the reality of dreams acts on the develop-

ment of religious ideas in yet another direction, as we
see from the conception of the " double" and the idea of
survival.
The idea of The man who in his dreams has just

the double.'
" encountered the most extraordinary adven-
tures, wakes again in the very spot and in the very
positionwhich he occupied when he fell asleep. He
remembers having traversed immense spaces, accom-
plished difficult enterprizes, perhaps received blows or
wounds, and yet his limbs, far from being fatigued,
have found fresh strength and subtlety. He has just
been conversing with individuals who will deny the
existence of the interview, and in case of need will
support their denial by an incontestable alihi^ and per-
haps he himself will pay them back in their own coin of
denial the next day. Hence the only possible explana-
tion —
an explanation which must present itself spontane-
ously to the mind of the savage as soon as he endeavours
to remember his dreams and to give himself some account
of them —
is that man is composed of two parts, one in
some way enclosed in the other —

one external, formed of
the body which remains stationary during sleej) ; the
other internal, which could cast the body like a garment
and go its way, as the Greenlander expressed it, " to
hunt, dance, and pay calls."

The Australian Kurnai who was asked whether he
am bo could "go out" while he
really believed that his ?/
was asleep, immediately answered : "It must be so, for
when I sleep I go to distant places, I see distant people

/O II. THE GENESIS OF THE IDEA OF GOD.
I even see and speak with those that are dead."^ We

have but to open the first treatise on ethnography that
comes to hand, and we shall see that the same reasoning
prevails amongst the Negroes, Kaffirs, Polynesians, Eed-
skins, Greenlanders, and natives of South America.
At the outside, some of them, such as the Karens of
Bur mall, have observed that in dreams one can only visit
the places and people one has already known. Some
peoples, such as the Tagals of Lucon, refuse to wake a
sleeping man suddenly, because, they say, you must
give his soul time to get into its abode again.
Here we see an opposition beginning to shape itself
between the body and what we have come to call the soul.
The savage is doubtless far from regarding his interior
personality as an immaterial entity, conceived by force
of abstraction, and reduced to a pure psychic force. He
can conceive neither a being nor a force except under a
material, or at any rate a sensible, form ; he will there-
fore endow his ego with the traits under which his own
personality and that of his companions appear in his
dreams. It will thus be a reduction, or rather a re-
flexion of the body, vaguer, paler, half -effaced. This
is what has been called the double^ identified by many
peoples with the shadow produced by the body, with its
reflexion in water, with its image seen in the puj)il of

the eye, and so forth.
The sorcerers Greenland describe the soul as a
of
pale soft thing, without nerves, without bones, with-
' W. Howitt, On some Australian Beliefs : in the Journal of the

Aidliropological Institute, 1884, vol. xiii. p. 189.
II THE GENESIS OF THE IDEA OF GOD. 79
out flesh. "When one would seize it, one feels nothing.
Is not this exactly the animula vagula blandula^ hospes,
comesque corporis^ under the traits of which Hadrian con-

ceived his own spiritual principle 'P^ And in our own
day, too, does not the description precisely correspond
to the physiognomy of the spirits which our mediums
profess to bring before us ?
Worship of This "double" of the personality has no

t le dead,
religious significance in itself; but the deduc-
drawn from it go much beyond its mere existence.
tions
Amongst the beings with whom the savage enters into
communication in his dreams, some have passed from life.
Perhaps he himself has slain, not to say eaten, them !
What conclusion can he arrive at but that man does not

altogether die, and that the disappearance of the body
does not involve that of the "double"? Thus when
Achilles has clasped the shade of Patroclus and has seen
it dissolve under his embrace like smoke, he does not fail
to cry, "Yerily, there is a certain soul and semblance
even in the abode of Hades, though substance there be
none."-^
Animals do not appear to have arrived at the abstract
idea of death. Primitive man, too, must have begun by
confounding death with sleep, fainting and catalepsy.
Hence the efforts to revive the corpse and ensure its
preservation which we find even amongst the animals,
^ ^1^1 ius Spartianus, adrianus, cap. 25. In the Scriptores Historicb

A ugustce.
^ Iliad, xxiii. 103, 104. '/'i-'X*) '^'^'- f'SwAor' arap <^piv(.<; ovK evi
irdjiTTav. The word f/j/êres' must be taken in its pliysical sense, nuih'itf,
vitals, substance or body.
and which survive in the customs of many peoples long

after the idea of death has established itself in their
minds. Even in the times of Marco Polo the Mongols

sometimes kept their corpses as long as six months, and
offered them food every day.^ Obviously it was the
dissolution of the body which finally revealed the differ-
ence between the apparent suspension and the definitive
cessation of the vital functions.
The double^ however, continued in the neighbourhood
of the living, and maintained relations with them during
sleep. According to some, such as the Yorubas of
Western Africa and the Yeddahs of Ceylon — it is the
dead who come to visit the living according ; to others,
like the Maoris of New Zealand, it is the living who

go to visit the dead. Again, the double has myste-
rious powers in dreams which it does not possess, or
possesses in a less degree, when united to the body. It
can assume the most diverse and terrible forms, can

transport itself, or can act at a distance, with the rapidity
of lightning — in a word, can produce results absolutely
disproportioned to its previous powers, and that too by

the most extraordinary means. Polynesians sometimes
kill themselves in order that, when in the spiritual state,
they may be able to take a fuller vengeance on a power-

ful enemy. ^ The same thing has been observed amongst
the Hindus, who have likewise been known to kill some
^ The Book of Ser Marco Polo, by H. Yule, second edition : London,

1875, vol. i. p. 208.
2 Gerland, quoted by Reville, Religions des peufles non-civilises,

vol. ii. p. 92. May we not trace a survival of the same practice in
tlie 2-)oint (Vhonncur of the Japanese who kill themselves when insulted?
chance-met victim in order to get the assistance of his

spirit. The case is reported of a Brahman who slew his
mother so that her spirit could catch and punish a thief.
M. Letourneau says that on the Congo likewise the son

often kills his mother to secure the assistance of her
soul, now a formidable spirit.^ The Alfurus of Molacca
bury children up to their waists, and expose them to all
the tortures of thirst, until they wrench from them the

promise to hurl themselves upon the enemies of the
village. Then they take them out, but only to kill them
on the spot, imagining that the spirits of the victims
will respect their last promise.^ On the other hand,
Philander Prescott says that amongst the Eedskins fear
of the departed spirits often prevents murder more effec-
tually than the fear of hanging does amongst white

peoples.^
^ , . In any
j
case,i the douhle thus conceived
Relations
of nature- unites in itself all the characteristics of those
whom the savage it
worship and ,
the worship Superhuman beings believes

of the dead. ,
to exist
• j.
m
• j. t,x,„i
nature, whom he endeavours to
i.
conciliate by the methods in vogue in his relations with

the great ones of the earth, and whom he surrounds
with testimonies of his affection and dread.
Did the worship of the dead precede or follow the
worship of natural objects and personified phenomena?
It is possible that in certain localities the worship of
the dead manifested itself the first, or that the two
^ Sociologie, pp. 240, 241; Eng. trans, p. 253.
^ Rosenberg, Der Malayisclie ArcJiijyel, Leipzig, 1878, pp. 59, 60.

^ In H. R Schoolcraft, Indian Tribes of the United States, Philadel-
phia, 1861—1860, part ii. pp. 195, 196.
G
conceptions formed themselves pari passu, with a pre-

ponderance of the one or the other. It seems that in China
the worshijD of ancestors grafted itself upon a previous
nature-worshijD. Amongst the Polynesians it has been
successfully established that the worship of the dead,
native to the eastern archipelagos, sporadically overlaid
the ancient mythological nature- worship, while it hardly
penetrated into the most western islands of Micronesia.^
All I maintain is that neither of these two forms of
worship) necessarily presupposes the other; but that man,
having been led by different routes to personify the souls
of the dead on the one hand, and natural objects and

phenomena on the other, subsequently attributed to both
alike the character of mysterious superhuman beings.
Let us add that this must have taken place everywhere,
for there is not a people on earth in which we do not
come upon these two forms of belief side by side and
intermingled.
(ii.) Primitive Eites.
"We have now to sujDplement the picture of primitive

beliefs by that of primitive rites ; that is to say, the acts
which man's primitive conception of the superhuman
beings and his relations with them led him to perform.
Probably the cultus was originally extremely simple.
When the chief objects of nature are looked upon as
quasi-human personalities, the man who desires their sup-
port will evidently approach them as experience has taught
him to approach the mundane powers. Obviously, then,
^ A. R^ville, in the Revue de Vhistoire des Religions, 1882 (vol. iv.),
p. 16.
n. THE GENESIS OF THE IDEA OF GOD. 83
the request must be couched in the terms most calcu-

lated to persuade ; and usually a present, or at any rate
definite promises, must be added. And such are the
motives actually revealed in prayer and sacrifice, or
rather — to escape the misleading associations of the

mystic sense often given to these terms — let us say, of
petition and ofi'ering.
Prayer at first is and can be nothing more

than the demand for wealth and favours,
beginning with the things most indispensable to existence,
such as our " daily bread." I do not suj^pose there is a
single tribe in which prayer of this nature is unknown,
for all have something to gain from the superhuman
powers. "Be greeted !" say the Hottentots to the new
moon. ''Let us get much honey!" "May our cattle
get much to eat, and give much milk!"^ Soon, how-
ever, the circle of requirements expands. Supplications
are offered to the superhuman beings —often in identical
terms by the most widely separated peoples — to make

the rain fall, to put diseases to flight, to appease the
storm, or to secure victory over enemies. " Great Qua-

hootze!" cries the Kootka Indian, "let me live, not be
sick, find the enemy, not fear him, find him asleep, and
kill a great many of him." ^ You perceive that anything
like a moral idea, or even a feeling of chivalry, is absolutely
wanting The sup-
at this stage of religious education.
pliants do not even take the trouble, as they would do

later on, to transform the national enemy into an enemy
^ Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. ii. p. 272.

" Brinton, Myths of the Neio World, second edition, p. 316: New
York, 1876.
g2
of the gods, in order to justify the demand for their

intervention. Their help is secured by the best offer.
The primitive theory of sacrifice answers
to the same ideas. The Karens of Burmah
go so far as to say that it is useless to demand anything
of the gods without at the same time giving a proof of
generosity; and in the interior of Africa, where the
custom of hongo prevails (a toll more or less forcibly
leviedby the petty local chieftains on travellers), the

Negro declares that you must never pass before the abode
of a spirit without leaving a sacrifice, if it is but a little
spittle.^ The Negroes of Sierra Leone offer cattle in

order " to make god glad very much, and do Kroomen
good." 2
Munera, crede mihi, capiunt hominesque, deosque
Placatur donis Jupiter ipse datis.^
How many people, civilized though they be, are still
at this point in their conception of worship ! Worship

indeed is to them but a contract entered into on the prin-
ciple "do ut des," in which man serves the gods in
consideration of a reciprocity formally or tacitly accepted

by them. We read in an Indian hymn addressed to
the sacrificial spoon: "Well filled, Spoon, descend

below; well filled, ascend towards us, as at a price agreed.
Let us exchange strength and vigour : give me, I give
to thee; bring me, I bring to thee."'^ All this is naive
1
J. L. Wilson, Western Africa, p. 218.
2 R. Clarke, Sierra Leone, p. 43 ; cited by Tjlor, Primitive Culture,

vol. ii p. 394.
3 Ovid, Ars Amatoria, iii. 653, 654.

* Taittiriya Samhita, i. 8, 4, 1.
enough ; but as an example of the length to which men

may go on this path, we note the following passage from
the Taittiriya Samhita of the Yajur Yeda :
" If you wish
to injure any one, say to Surya, '
Smite such a one, and I
will give you an offering ;
' and Surya, to get the offer-
ing, will smite him."^ Here the god descends to the
level of a vulgar hravo^ and lets himself out to a man

whom the ideas of our own time would stigmatize as a
contemptible craven. Yet this is the very Surya, ''god
amongst gods," who, according to the Eig Yeda, "departs
not from the right path." For the rest, there is not a
religion in the whole of antiquity in which the deity
allows negligence or parsimony in the matter of offerings
to go unpunished. Did not the Brahmans go the length
of proclaiming that the huge universe was created for
the sake of sacrifice ?
We can trace back, in the same fashion, the motives
which underlie the other forms of sacrifice. When sub-
jects have obtained a favour of their chief, they reward
him by making him a present. This is the thank-ofier-
ing. When they think he is enraged, they offer a gift to
appease him. This is the sacrifice of propitiation. If
they have really injured him, they attempt to disarm his
wrath by paying a fine, or inflicting a penalty on them-
selves. This is the sacrifice of expiation.
Man naturally offers his deities what he believes is
most necessary to them, or what he imagines will please

them most. First comes food. Gods, however, like men,
when once their appetite is satisfied, have more refined
tastes to gratify. The Negro offers strong drinks to his
1 Taittiriija Samhita, vi. 4, 5, 6.

deities ; the Siberian, furs ; the Eedskin and the Ostiak,

tobacco. The idea that in the other world the same
wants are experienced as in this, is evinced by the cha-
racter of the sacrifices offered to their dead by all the
peoples of the earth ; and the gods, whatever the origin
attributed to them, form a community, the conditions of
whose existence are hardly conceived, at a certain stage
of religion, to differ materially from those of the souls of
the defunct.
Human sacrifices appear to us the most absurd and
abominable of all ;
yet there is not a people that has
not practised this custom at some period or other of its
history. Hindus, Egyptians, Chinese, Greeks, Eomans,

even Israelites, differ, in this matter, from the l*êgroes
of our own times in nothing save the object they assign

to this kind of sacrifice.
The aim is sometimes to assure to the distinguished

dead the continuance of the services which had been
rendered them in this world by the slaves and women
slaughtered at their tombs; sometimes — as with the
Polynesians, whose gods are particularly greedy of human
flesh ^ it is to offer the present most worthy of the
divine majesty, if not most agreeable to the celestial
palate.
Intimidation Good-will, howovor, IS not the only senti-

of the gods.
^Qjî Qjj^ which one can rely in seeking to
extort benefits from one's equals or one's superiors. Even
the most powerful of men are sometimes susceptible to
fear. Attempts will therefore be made to intimidate the
superhuman beings by threatening words or gestures,
with the view of extracting a favour from them or avert-
II. THE GENESIS OP THE IDEA OF GOD. 87
ing their wrath. When the storm rages, the peasant of

the Palatinate offers the wind a handful of meal to
appease it; but it is not every race that is so good-
natured. The Payaguas of Brazil rush to meet the

tempest, brandishing lighted torches. The Botocudos of
Brazil and the Namaquas of Kaffirland shoot arrows at
it. The Kegroes Gold Coast and the Papuans of

of the
Malaynesia throw offerings into the sea to calm it but ;
the Guanches lash it with cords^ just as Xerxes beat the

Hellespont with rods for dispersing his To this fleet.
very day, our peasants employ the same two-fold method

with their saints. No doubt at a more advanced stage
of civilization such attempts at intimidation are confined
to the inferior spirits, the souls of the dead, the saints,
and the demons; but at first the distinctions of the
superhuman hierarchy are too fluctuating and undeter-

mined to offer any obstacle to the general application of
such methods. Does not Herodotus tell us that the

Getee shoot arrows at the Heaven itself ?i Yet surely
this deity, if any, must be above all violence.
Side by side with these attempts to influ-

Sorcery.
ence the will of the superhuman beings
indirectly, we observe others intended to act directly
upon them. There is no potentate on earth so great
that he cannot be brought to reason by a stronger
than himself, and forced to surrender his power to his
conqueror, lôw the gods are generally exempt from
physical coercion —
except in the case of fetishism, where
the spirit lodged in the object is henceforth the slave
of him who possesses it ;
—but since the gods have mys-
1 iv. 94.
—
terious means of making their power felt, man asks

whether he, in his turn, cannot act upon them by ana-
logous methods. The only difficulty is to find them
out. Hence the practices of sorcery which, as one
would expect, are as numerous as they are bizarre
from the ' cat's concert,' to which all uncivilized peoples,
without exception, have recourse, to put to flight the
assailant of the sun and moon in an eclipse, down to the
sorceries of vulgar magic and the evocations of fashion-
able spiritualism in our midst.
We need not enter u]3on a course of comparative sor-
cery ; but it is not beside the mark to point out a few
examples of the reappearance in all ages and in every
part of the world of certain rudimentary conceptions as
to the means of forcing certain courses uj)on the super-
human powers. There is not a nation that has not
believed in the efficacy of incantations ; there is none
that has not made use of lustrations, or that has not
kindled fires to put the demons to fiight, or to hinder

the dead from tormenting the living.
It is especially on its pseudo-medical side that sorcery
has had free scope. According as diseases are attributed
by savage peoples to the departure of the soul or to the
entry into the body of a spirit that does not belong to

it, the treatment will aim, now at bringing back the
soul into its envelope, now at expelling the spirit to
which the evil is due. And this is effected by processes
which present a strange resemblance amongst the Negroes,
the Siberians, the Australians, the Japanese, the Chinese,
the natives of India, and those of the two Americas.
Sometimes it is deemed essential to make the spirit
thus expelled pass into tlie body of a living being, a

pebble, a scrap of wood, or some object which can be
thrown away, or perhaps into a rag suspended to a
branch or a nail fixed into the trunk of a tree.
It is a corollary of these beliefs that a malady may

be inflicted on a man by compelling a spirit to enter
into his body. In this connection we note, in the first
place, the practice of wounding or destroying a figure
made in the likeness of the intended victim. This cus-
tom, very common in our Middle Ages, was previously
known to the Chaldseans and Greeks, and is still employed
by the Hindus, the Negroes of the Congo, and the
Chippeways of North America. Next comes the bewitch-
ing of some object which has previously belonged in
an intimate manner to the enemy whose destruction
is sought —a lock of his hair, the parings of his nails,
his footprints, sometimes even his proper name. This

superstition, which we meet with amongst the Negroes,
the Kaffirs, the Patagonians, the Eedskins, the Poly-
nesians, and various branches of the Indo-European race,
implies, besides the belief that death, like disease, is the

result of enchantment, the idea that the part is equivalent
to the whole, and that we may reach the person by means
of his representation or his possessions.
Side by side with the magic processes affecting human
health may be placed, as of equal importance, those
intended to influence atmospheric phenomena, and par-
ticularly the production of rain. Amongst the Redskins
the sorcerer is known as the medicine-man, but amongst
the Kaffirs he is called the rain-doctor. I have already
had occasion to point out the identity of certain pro-
cesses employed to secure rain amongst the most widely

separated peoples. The Bushman strives to obtain rain
by driving the hippopotamus the amphibious animal —
—
âr excellence over the fields and in doing so he acts
;
from the same motives which lead the [Nêgro to throw

pitchers into the river, the Aryan to pour the sacred juice
of the soma upon the altar, the Samoans, the Apaches,
the Keramins of New South Wales, the Britons and the
Welsh to besprinkle certain magic stones, or the peoples
in Southern Europe to plunge their saints into the river.
In Eussia, the sorcerer, or occasionally the priest, has to
undergo this compulsory bath in person if he fails to
secure the rain."^
All these analogies are explained by the fact that the

processes of sorcery are generally the result, not of a
simple caprice, but of some association between two
facts or two objects. Such is the power of logic, that
even at the bottom of unreason itself there is ever found
a spice of reason, — or at any rate of reasoning.
The same remark applies to the methods of divination
by which man seeks to penetrate the secrets of the super-
human beings. The belief that all events of any con-
siderable consequence result from the will of the deities,
carries with it the idea that that will must be deter-
mined and formulated more or less in advance of the
event. Hence the desire to penetrate to it beforehand,
and to take advantage of the knowledge so gained. And
here the confusion between concomitance and causality
has free scope. For the rest, divination at the outset is
no more than a branch of sorcery.

^ An. Leroy Beaulieu, VEmjîre des Tsars: torn iii. La Religion,
Paris, 1889, p. 284.
,, , ,. Finally, we must bear in mind that man, '

Symbolism. . ,
experiencing, as I have shown above, a mixed

feeling of fear and trust towards his deities, ever dreads
them, as one dreads the unknown, but at the same time
seeks to draw near to them and realize a closer union
with them. Hence a series of attempts to seal an
alliance with the gods by some external act, to live
their life or become assimilated to their nature, from
the sacrificial banquets in which the savage is supj)osed
to partake of the food offered to the spirits, up to his
elaborate attempts to imitate their deeds and exploits.
"When these attempts are supposed to have a direct and
forceful action on the suj)erhuman beings, they come
under the category of conjurations ; but when they are
simply intended to simulate the presence of some deity,
to reproduce his movements, or to represent the relations
the worshipper desires to enter into with him, then
they are symbols and come under the category of
homage rendered to the divinity. Symbolism —that is
to say, the representation of an idea by an action or

by an object which recalls it, in virtue of a natural
or conventional association — is found even at the lowest
stages of religious evolution. I would classify symbols
as subjective, when their object is to express any shade
of sentiment; figurative, when they directly represent
a being or an abstract quality itself; and imitative,
when they aim at reproducing the supposed acts of
the real or imaginary being.
Figurative symbols, aiming at representing the deity
or one of his attributes, can hardly be expected before a
people has reached the conception of the deity as distinct
from material beings or things. Subjective symbols, on

the contrary, are found even amongst the most backward
peoples. They may be divided into symbols of submis-
sion, of distress, of repentance, of joy, of love, and so
forth — if, indeed, any enumeration can exhaust material
as diverse as the religious sentiment itself in all its most
delicate shades. Sometimes these symbols consist in a
conscious reproduction of the attitude which man spon-
taneously assumes under the domination of the senti-
ments he wishes to simulate or to express —groaning,
leaping for joy, throwing kisses with the hand, falling
flat upon the belly before the object of adoration, cover-
ing the head with cinders, and so on. And here, as in

hypnotism, it often happens that the very fact of impres-
ing on the members and the featui'es the characteristic
pose of a given emotion tends to produce it in the con-
sciousness. Sometimes men attempt to express their
spiritual state by the use of certain colours or the dis-
play of certain objects. In general, black is a colour of

ill augury; white, the emblem of joy; but there are
exceptions, notably in the case of the l^êgroes, who
paint the images of their dead white because the spirits
appear to them in a palish form. Finally, an elaborated
symbolism, such as the language of plants and flowers,
is sometimes found even amongst quite primitive peoples.
The Tahitians plant leafless shave-grass on the tombs as
the symbol of death ; and other peoples equally backward
symbolize their faith in the continuation of life by ever-
green plants.
Amongst the races who worship personified natural
phenomena, imitative symbolism chiefly consists in repro-
diicing the course of such phenomena as the phases of
the moon, the movements of the planets and constella-

tions, the death and resurrection of the sun, the contests
of the luminous sky with the storm-cloud, the mysteries
of germination and of generation, or the j)roduction of
fire on earth and in heaven. Hence the considerable

place occupied by dancing in savage rites. Elsewhere,
death and resurrection are reproduced in pantomime as
an affirmation of belief in survival after death. Thus
certain Australian tribes celebrate initiatory rites in
which one of the neophytes lies on the ground whilst
the rest cover him with dust, after which he rises again
amidst general rejoicings.^
T..,
Did conjura-
. The question has been much discussed
•*•
tion precede whether worship sprang; from sorcery, or

propitiation ? .
sorcery from worship. You will now under-

stand that this controversy is absolutely otiose. Con-
jurations and propitiations have probably been practised,
though at first with ill- defined and vaguely marked
distinctions, from the day when man first felt the
need of putting himself in communication with the
personified forces of nature. Even amongst the most
backward peoples we find this two-fold category of
actions, intended on the one hand to conciliate and
on the other to compel the superhuman powers. This
explains the complex nature of worship, which some-
times tempts us to despair of the possibility of re-
tracing its psychological origins. This also explains
the difficulty of determining in what category to place
^ J. Bomvick, The Australian Natives, in the Journal of the

Anthropological Institute, vol. xv. 1886, p. 206.
certain acts wliicb. partake, or may partake, at once of

the character of homage, of symbolism, and of conjuration.
For instance, when we see the Abipones of South America
and the IS'egroes of Central Africa performing dances in
imitation of the movements of the celestial bodies, how
are we to know whether the rite rests on the belief that
they can compel the stars to pursue their periodic course,^
or on the desire to drink in their life and so share
their destiny and power, or on the belief that they are
helping them in the accomplishment of their task, or on
the simple wish to pay them homage and give them
satisfaction by the "sincerest flattery" of imitation?
ISTot one of these notions is above or beyond the range
of ideas which permeate the lower levels of civilization,
as we may see by studying the complicated ceremonial

observed by savages towards their gods and their chiefs,
or even in their intercourse one with another. It is well
to note that all these ideas reappear amongst peoples

as advanced as the Aztecs, the ancient Egyptians, the
Hindus, and even the Greeks.
A closely connected question is that of priority as
between the priest and the sorcerer. The probability is
that at first every man was his own priest and his own
sorcerer; that is to say, he alternately invoked or conjured
the superhuman beings, varying his methods according to
the degree of power which he attributed to them or the
nature of the service he expected of them.
^ It is a common idea amongst savages that to prefigure an event

assures its occurrence ; hence the veritable pantomimes in which the
Redskins represent the capture of game or the defeat of the enemy
before starting on the chase or the war-path.
II. THE GENESIS OE THE IDEA OF GOD. 95
Little by little, a first line of demarcation was esta-

blished between the religious operations which can be
performed by any one, and those which require special
preparation or even a special temperament. Every one
continued freely to put himself into relations with the
superhuman beings by whom he supposed himself to be
surrounded, as is still the case with savages ; but the
paterfamilias began to sacrifice on behalf of his family
and in honour of the most formidable or the most respected
powers. Finally, the still undistinguished functions of
the diviner, sorcerer and doctor, were assigned to indivi-
duals singled out for their performance by the command
of more or less real information, or by a predisposition
to hysteria, which is easily taken for inspiration.
In this sense it is quite correct to say that the priest-
hood, properly so called, issued from the domestic cultus,

not from sorcery. But cultus and sorcery alike pro-
ceeded from a religious state in which their respective
practices were indifferently conducted by any one, with-
out need of special qualification. For that matter,
the differentiation was never absolute. There are cases
in which sorcery remains the appanage of the chief,
and others in which the sorcerer takes advantage of
his prestige to make himself the priest par excellence.
"VYe shall see that even in the bosom of the most highly
developed religions the priest never completely renounces
the practices of sorcery ; but it is with the assistance of
the higher divinities, and no longer in virtue of his per-
sonal power, that he now practises his exorcisms; and
they are directed exclusively against evil spirits. Be
that as it may, whatever solution we adopt as to the
priority of these two institutions, it will affect neither

our point of departure nor our conclusion, nor even,
as we shall presently see, our view of the intermediate
development of the religious sentiment.
Lecture III.
POLYDEMONISM AND POLYTHEISM.
(i.) Spiritism, Fetishism, and Idolatry.
We have seen that the worship of natural objects

springs from the arbitrary extension of human personality
to every apparent source of life or even of movement.
If this explanation is correct, it follows that, from the
very first, worship must have been addressed, not to the
material object conceived as such, but to the personality
supposed to be embodied in it ; although this vague and
instinctive appeal to beings psychologically modelled
after man did not necessarily imply a conscious distinc-
tion between the internal personality and its envelope or
body.
Worshi
^^ ^^'^^ îg^^j indeed, it might often seem
addressed that savages
to the
^ ^ the objects themselves,
worsliip
*',
'
. . .
personality without reference to any spiritual attribute.

° Prescott reports that the Dacotah will choose
a round stone at hazard, place it on the turf, then offer
it tobacco or feathers, and pray to it to avert some real or
imaginary danger.^ In the Hawaian islands, Mr. Andrew
Lang informs us, the native enters upon athletic com-
petitions, provided with a stone that he has chosen on
a certain beach of the Archipelago. If he is victorious,
^ Citod by Lubbock, Origin of Civilization, p. 212.
H
98 III. POLYDEMONISM AND POLYTHEISM.
he will treat it as a god ; if not, he will throw it away or
make an axe-head of it.^ The same custom is found in

Africa. "If," said an intelligent Negro to the traveller
Bosnian, "any of us is resolved to undertake anything
of importance, we first of all search out a god to prosper
our designed undertaking; and going out of doors w4th

this design, take the first creature that presents itself to
our eyes, whether dog, cat, or the most contemptible
animal in the world, for our god ; or perhaps, instead
of that, any inanimate object that falls in our way,
whether a stone, or a piece of wood, or anything else of
the same nature. This new-chosen god is immediately

presented with an ofi'ering, Avhich is accompanied with a
solemn vow, that he pleaseth to prosper our under-
if
takings, for the future we will always worship and

esteem him as a god. If our design prove successful,
we have discovered a new and assisting god, which is
daily presented with fresh ofl'eriugs ; but if the contrary

happen, the new god is rejected as a useless tool, and
consequently returns to his primitive state." ^ In India,
to this very day, the workman worships his tools, the
housekeeper her marketing-basket, the fisherman his net,

the scribe his pen, and — a form of worship which re-
appears elsewhere —the banker his account-book.^ These
customs appear to have been in existence as early as in
^ A. Lang, Was Jehovah a fetish-stone? in the Conte^njx/rari/
Review, March, 1890, p. 358.

2 Bosnian, cited by Lubbock, Origin of Civilization, p. 166.
Of this custom, the most sensational example -was to be found

2 "
among tlie Thugs, who used to worship the pick-axe which they carried
for speedy burial of their victims on tlie spot of the murder." — Sir
Alfred Lyall, Asiatic Studies, London, 1882, p. 15.
III. POLYDEMONISM AND POLYTHEISM. 99
the Vedic epoch.^ One is certainly tempted to say,

in such cases, that a spirit can hardly be assigned
to these things; yet whenever we succeed in piercing
below the surface of the savage's thought, it appears
that the object worshipped derives its whole religious
significance from the internal personality attributed to

it. A Negro who was asked how he could offer food to
a tree, explained to Halleur that this food was not offered
to the tree but to the spirit it contained, and that the
latter would only eat the spirit of the sacrifice.^ We
shall have occasion to note the complete conformity of
this interpretation with the religious ideas of savages in
the old and the new worlds.
I do not maintain that man began by erecting this
soul of a thing into a separate or independent entity.
In our own day, as Waitz well says, ''
the Negroes make
a distinction between the spirit and the material object
in which it resides, although they combine the two and
make a single whole of them." Mr. Im Thurn, again,
tells us that the natives of Guiana regard men, animals,
celestial bodies, atmospheric phenomena, and inanimate
objects, as beings of the same nature, alike composed of
a spirit and a body, and differing only in the extent of
their powers.^ This combining of the body and the soul,
or rather this absence of any clear distinction between
^ A.. 'Qd.vih, Hie Religions of India; translated by J. Wood : London,
1882, p. 8. Compare Habakkuk i. 16, for the like practices amongst
tlie Israelites.
2 Halleur, cited by Waitz, Anthropologie der Naturvolker, vol. ii.
p. 188.
^ Im Tliuin, Indians of British Gniana: in the Journal of the

Anthropological Institute, vol. xi. p. 377.
h2
100 ITT. POLYDEMONISM AND POLYTHETSM.
tlicm, was probably the rule amongst pre-historic peoples,

who were far behind even the savages above referred to in
the matter of psychological speculation. But it results
from what I have said in my last Lecture that man
would never have come to invoke or adore any object,
had he not believed that in so doing he was dealing with

personalities modelled after his own.
Extension Little by little, whether from analogy

a sharper with the doublo nature he had discovered in
distinction
]î]j,seif' qj. {j^ consequence
i
of dreams in
between body
and soul, which he saw distant or destroyed objects,
he must have extended to things a more or less sharp

distinction of soul and body ; and, moreover, he must
have accepted for these souls of things the same power of
quitting their envelopes, or even surviving them, which

he allowed in the case of his own soul. Before the Incas
established sun-worship in the valleys of Peru, the natives
adored stones, blocks of rock, or huacas. A Peruvian
legend tells us that, as one of these stones was being
broken, at the order of the Inca Eoca, ^ parrot flew
out of it and disappeared into a neighbouring stone,
which latter inherited the veneration accorded to its
predecessor.^ Now if the new fetish had been treated

in the same way, no doubt the parrot, or some other
living creature, would have been seen to escape from it
too, as representing the veritable object of the popular
worship. Here we come upon the attitude of mind

described by Prof. Tylor as animism, and by Prof. C. P.
Tiele as polydemonism.
It is probable enough that, like human souls, the
^ Girard de Rialle, Mythologie coviparee, Paris, 1878, vol. i. p. 14.
:
Iir. POLYDEMONISM AND POLYTHEISM. 101
spirits of things had the character of doubles in the first
instance. The Tahitians believe that not only plants

and animals, but natural and artificial objects also, have
souls, like man. If they are broken or destroyed, their
spirit survives and goes to the country of the dead. In
one of the Fiji islands the natives even point out a
certain stream running across the bottom of a hole, ''
in
which you may clearly perceive the souls of men, women,
beasts, plants, stocks, stones, canoes, houses, and all the
broken utensils of this frail world, tumbling along one
over the other, into the regions of immortality."^ The
Eedskins, as we are told by the early missionaries, admit
the existence of a personal spirit in the most common-
place objects. That spirit, when once the object itself
is broken, goes, like the soul of man, to the land of the
setting sun.- These peoples would have had no difficulty
in accepting literally the humorous description in Scarron's

burlesque
" J'apergus I'ombre d'un cocher
Qui, tenant I'orabre d'line brosse
Nettoyait Tomb re d'un carrosse."
Perhaps it is the same belief that gives rise to the

custom, still widely spread among savages, and formerly
prevalent, as we have seen, amongst pre-historic peoples,
of breaking or burning the objects deposited near the
deceased. Some writers have maintained that the purpose
of this practice was to protect the offerings against
thieves; but the interpretation of it given by all the
^ Mariner, An Accoimt of the Natives of the Tonga Islands, Edin-

burgli, 1827, vol. ii. p. 123.
^ Pere Lejeune, Relation de ce qni s' est passe en la nouvelle France
en Vannee IGS-l, pp. 58 — 60.
—
peoples who still observe it, shows that the real intention
is to assure the transmission of the object in question
to the spirit of the deceased. The superstitious fear
inspired by the deceased would generally suffice to protect
the offering against thieves, so that its destruction would

be unnecessary on that ground ; but since the animals
destined to follow the deceased into the other world
were unquestionably sacrificed, it would seem only natural
and consistent to treat his arms, garments, and utensils
of every kind in like manner.
Here we come to a distinction which exercises a com-
manding influence on the ultimate direction of the reli-
gious evolution.
Belief in
^^ ^^® objects personified possess a de-
epirits, and terminate individuality and are practically
its origin. , . . .
unlimited in their duration, like the heaven,

the sun, the moon, rivers and mountains, then their soul,
when thought of as capable of quitting its envelope,
will, in its turn, receive a strongly marked and distinc-
tive character. It will long — perhaps indefinitely
retain, in the consciousness, its relations to the particular
object from which it is supposed to have issued, and

which it continues to guide from outside. But the souls
attributed to objects not distinguished by any salient
characteristic, easily confounded with a whole series of
similar objects, and destined ultimately to disappear, such
as men and animals, may indeed survive, in accordance
with the general theory of survival, but the recollection
of their connection with the objects from which they
first issued will soon be lost. Nothing will then be left
them but the vague character of semi- material beings,
III. POLYDEMONISM AND POLYTHEISM:. 103
anonymous and independent, invested with extraordinary-

faculties and capable of arbitrary intervention in the
course of nature and in the destiny of man.
It is the action of these "spirits" which now explains
everything that cannot be attributed to the human will
or to the intervention of some specific deity ; and this
ready explanation dispenses with all efforts to discover the

connection of cause and effect. This spiritism — or, to adopt
M. Albert R^ville's excel lent definition, this belief in spirits
detached from their natural basis and without necessary
connection with specific objects^ — is the dominating factor
in the lower stages of civilization generally, though it
remains undeveloped, indeed, amongst the peoples at the

very bottom of the scale, such as the Bushmen, the
Tierra del Fuegans, and the Samoyeds. In Siberia, Cas-
tren found many individuals who worshipped natural
objects, but who had never heard tell of spirits.^ Such
evidence confirms the presumption that spiritism cannot
be a primitive j^henomenon.
The souls of man and of animals, when not despatched
to a special world of their own, easily pass into the
general mass of spirits, whether because the memory of
the individuals to whom they belonged is lost, or because
they are regarded as themselves forming a specific class of
the spirits. Thus on the Congo the term Zombi signifies
at once the spirits, and the souls of the dead. It is the
same in the Marianne Islands, where both alike bear the

name of Anti. In like manner the spirits appear to be
^ Religions des peuples non-civilises, vol. i. p. 79.
2 Castrt^n, Nordische Reisen 7ind Forschungen, vol. iii. ; Vorlesunqen

nher die Fimmche Mythologie, St. Petersburg, 1853, pp. 196, 197.
recruited from the dead amongst the Polynesians and

the natives of the Indian Archipelago. In the Solomon
Islands, a traveller tells us that the only worship is that
of the dead. They become spirits "who do whatever

^
they like with the living."
Mr. Herbert Spencer relies on these facts,
^^^ others like them, to support his thesis

natirelnd
Bouls of issued from necrolatry, or, in
that spiritism
^
the dead.
other words, that the spirits are m every
case dead men whose individuality has in process of time
been effaced. But in many cases we can still recover
the links which distinctly attach the spirits to an ante-
rior personification of natural objects and phenomena.
There are tribes who have but one word to signify these
objects and the spirits themselves, though they perfectly
understand the distinction between the two. On the
Gold Coast there are the Won(/s who live at liberty in
the fields, forests, rocks, hollow trees, mountains, caverns

and water-courses ; and, on the other hand, the sea, the
rivers, plants, ant-eaters, birds, and serpents, are also called
and are treated accordingly.^ In Western Africa,

Wo7i(/s,
the Wanikas, when asked by the Eev. J. L. Krapf what

they meant by the word 3Iulungu, answered variously
that it meant the thunder, or the celestial vault, or the
author of diseases, or some kind of Supreme Being ; or
that the dead become 3Iulungus.^ It is well to note that
1 Lieut. F. Elton, Notes on Natives of the Solomon Islands: iu

Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 1888, vol. xvii. p. 97.
2 Waitz, Anthropologie, &c., vol. ii. p. 183.
3 J. L. Krapf, Travels, Researches and Missionary Labours in
Eastern Africa, Loudon, 1860, p. 168.

we are now speaking of populations who are sometimes
represented as exclusively worshipping the dead.

Amongst the beliefs of the Eedskins we may detect
the different stages of the transition by which the per-
sonification of a thing passes to the status of a detached

spirit. The missionary Marquette, when navigating a
river of North America, was warned by his boatmen
that they would have to pass the cave of a terrible
demon. This demon, who devoured travellers, was
simply and solely a rock which divided the current at a
bend of the river. Here the spirit is still inherent in its
material envelope, as with Scylla and Charybdis in the
ancient tradition. The cataract of the Eiver Peihono
passed, in the same region, for the residence of terrible
spirits whose roarings sounded afar. They, too, devoured

passing travellers who ventured on the river, but they
could also surprise any one rash enough to fall asleep in
their neighbourhood. Here the spirits have already

acquired a certain independence, since, like the German
Lorelei, they can quit their retreat for a moment. Accord-
ing to Schoolcraft, the Eedskins tell mocking tales during
winter, because the spii'its up under the groimd
are frozen
and cannot hear.i We can hardly doubt that these must
be spirits of nature, though in this case it is not so easy to
attach them specifically to the various classes of pheno-

mena. Finally, all trace of connection disappears. School-
craft says that the Algonkins believe the whole world to be

animated by good and bad spirits, who rule the aff'airs of
man and his future destinies. This is full-fledged spiritism.
1 H .R. Schoolcraft, Indian Tribes of the United States, Philadelphia,

1853-60, part iii. p. 492.
;
Indeed, it is not difficult to explain the process by

which the doubles of men and of things enter into the
mass of anonymous spirits. Ancestors are generally
regarded as the protectors of their descendants. On the
other hand, the spirits of inanimate things have their
respective spheres of action sharply determined by the
character of the objects to which they are attached. IS'ow
let these attributes mingle, in a sort of cross-chass^, or
rather by reciprocal extension of the powers reserved to
the two categories of superhuman beings, let the manes

of the sorcerer or the chief be invoked for the produc-
tion of rain, the stoppage of an inundation, the averting
of a storm, the fertilization of the harvest, and so forth
(as with the New Zealanders, Siberians, and Iêgroes)

and, further, let the spirits of nature be invoked to assure
bodily health or to protect the house (as amongst the
Finns); and you have only to remove from these two
varieties of spirits the traces of their respective origins,
for them to aj)pear henceforth invested with analogous
attributes, identical in natural functions, and even alike
in aspect.
In losing the record of their connection
Form and
functions of
, ...
with individuals or with
. , .
specific
„ , .
objects,
le spin s.
^^^ spii-its naturally lose the character and
form of doubles^ and yet they are far from being regarded
as immaterial in the sense which we attach to the word.
On the contrary, the most varied features and appearance

are attributed to them, and, in particular, forms borrowed
from all kinds of animals. We must not forget that,
to the savage, animals are not only man's equals, but

his superiors. They possess, in his eyes, a prestige
proportionate to their more mysterious habits and less

intelligible motives. Hence in particular the representa-
tion of spirits under the form of serpents and birds, so
widely spread amongst the peoples of the old and new
worlds. Elsewhere spirits assume fantastic and mon-
strous forms suggested by visions of the night or even
by the caprice of imagination. The essential point is,
that the form chosen must imply life and activity. If

the spirits of plants are never, or but very rarely, con-
ceived under the form of doubles, it is not because those
spirits are ancient human personages who bore the names
of plants, but simply because the vegetable has not a
sufficiently active and spontaneous physiognomy to repre-
sent a personality conceived after the model of our own.
"We must note that the spirits become visible under
certain circumstances and to certain persons; or that they
reveal themselves to other senses than that of sight, by
a whistle, a murmur or friction.
Our folk-lore is full of traditions crediting the spirits
with every sound in the least degree unwonted, from the

cry of the night-bird to the whistling of the wind in
the forest ; but it is chiefly by their direct action on the
human body that the spirits manifest their existence.
They may either act at a distance or incorporate them-
selves in the body. Amongst the Dyaks, diseases are
attributed either to the spirits inflicting internal wounds
with invisible lances, or to their introducing themselves
into the body of their victim and so causing the disease.
The first case we shall call obsession ; the second, posses-
sion. This two-fold process is applicable to things as

well as to beings — that is to say, the spirits can act on
inanimate things from without, using them as imple-

ments (in which case these objects are talismans or
amulets), or they may embody themselves in a concrete
object (which then becomes ?i fetish). This distinction is
already recognized by the greater number of savage races.^

In the second case, the object, having become the body of
the spirit, will dispense the benefits of the latter, and
whoever possesses it (if it be capable of jDrivate appro-
priation) will become the possessor of the power attached
to it. This is the whole meaning of fetishism, which
may be defined as the belief that the appropriation of a
thing may secure the services of the spirit lodged within it.
Moreover, it is easy to imagine that there are means

of attracting spirits into bodies by the aid of special
methods and receipts. In old Calabar they manufacture
fetishes out of straw, rags, or wood. Then they expose
them in the open air to enable the spirits to come into
them. Amongst other tribes of Negroes, fetish-shops
are kept by certain sorcerers. The shopman, after inviting
the customer to take his choice, makes the spirit enter

the selected object by dint of the regulation hocus-pocus.^
In like manner, the Einns manufacture a kind of dolls
or paras out of a child's cap filled with tow and stuck at
the end of a rod. The fetish thus made iscarried nine
times round the church, with the cry, ^' Synny para !"
(Para, be born!) repeated every time, to induce a haltia —
that is to say, a spirit — to enter into it.^
1 See above, pp. 72, 73.
2 J. Becker, Vie en Afrique, vol. ii. p. 306.
^ Castreii, Vorlesungenw.s.w., -p. 166.

;
Amongst ourselves, haunted houses and possessed

objects, the witches known to our rustics, and the table-
turning familiar in our drawing-rooms, clearly show that

these superstitions are not yet extinct, though they have
ceased, so to speak, to rank as religious phenomena.
r. Fetishism, as I have just analyzed it,
fetishism, implies the conception of spirits capable of

existing unattached to material objects. No doubt,
if we choose to apply the terra fetish to every object

capable of being appropriated, which is regarded as
the body of a superhuman power, it becomes inaccurate
to say that fetishism necessarily presupposes spiritism
for whenever man is led by some association to attribute
a propitious or disastrous influence on his fate to any

given object, he will pay his homage to the personality
with which he invests it, whether or not he regards that
personality as capable of separating itself from its mate-
rial envelope. In the latter case, the spirit is bound
up with the fate of its body. Gastrin tells us that
the Ostiaks worshipped a larch-tree, to the branches of
which they hung the skins of animals as off'erings ; but
in consequence of these skins often being stolen by
travellers, they cut a block of wood out of the tree,
deposited it in a safe place, and transferred their homage

to it. In such a case, fetishism is absorbed into natur-
ism or physiolatry, as I have defined it in the course of
the preceding Lecture.^ So, too, there are cases in which
1 I have elsewhere proposed to distinguish between primary

fetishism, in which man, personifying natural objects, chooses one as
an auxiliary or protector ; and secondary, or derived fetishism, which
implies the incorporation of an independent spirit in a material object.
—
fetishism is absorbed in necrolatry; namely, when the

fetish consists in the remains of the deceased, or even in
one of his bones in which his personality is supposed to
have taken refuge.
I think it is better, however, to reserve the name of
fetish for objects which owe their supernatural powers
to the fact that a spirit from outside has taken possession
of them. Thus we may put an end to that veritable
quarrel of words which has risen between Positivists
of the school of Comte, and naturists like M. Albert
E^ville and even Prof. Max MiiUer. We may declare
the naturists right when they say that fetishism (the

worship of material objects, frankly regarded as such)
does not constitute the whole religion of the Negro; and
we may say that Comte's disciples are also right when,
like M. Girard de Eialle, they lay at the basis of all
religions the tendency to consider natural objects, beings,

and phenomena, as possessing feelings and wills simi-
lar to those of man, and differing only in degree or
activity.^
The transition from fetishism to idolatry

The idol an ,
.
elaborated is easily established. The idol may be

regarded as an elaborated fetish. The fetish
is an object supposed to be inhabited by a spirit to
which superhuman power is attributed, and the idol is
the fetish so fashioned or re-tuuched as to reproduce
The first form obviously does not involve an anterior conception of the
spirit as a distinct entity separable from its material envelope. Ori-
gbies de Vidolatrie : in the Revue de I'Histoire des Religions, vol. xii.
pp. 4, 5, note.
^ Girard de Rialle, Mijthologie comjparee, Paris, 1878, vol. i. p. 2.

III. POLYDEMONISM AND POLYTHEISM. Ill
the appearance of the spirit supposed to reside in it.
It is now no longer the spirit that is conceived in

the likeness of the body, but the body to which, by a
sort of reflex action, the supposed traits of the spirit are
given. I must not be understood to class as idols all
images which represent superhuman beings, and are

therefore worshipped ; but only those which are regarded
as conscious and animated. Even so there is no great
religion, ancient or modern, without its idolaters. Doubt-
less enlightened Eoman Catholics, Brahmanists, and Bud-
dhists, are justified in repudiating the charge of idolatry
as far as they themselves or even their ofiicial doctrines
are concerned, in spite of the worship, to some extent
symbolic, which they accord to their representations of
superhuman beings. But the great herd does not always
observe these distinctions, and a Saint or Madonna that
rolls its eyes, drops tears, sheds blood, speaks, inflicts
diseases or wards them off, and sends rain or fine
weather to the fields, is as much an idol —that is to say,
a fetish in human form —as the veriest fetish of fetishes

amongst the Negroes, whether in human form or not, is
a fetish.
In China, when an idol is tardy in rendering the ser-
vices expected of it, it is torn from its temple and flung

into the mud ; but if the desired effect subsequently fol-
lows, it is cleaned up again, replaced, and perhaps pro-
mised a fresh gilding. Though pagan antiquity never
went so far as this in the treatment of the idols, it could
never comj)letely free itself from the idea that its deities
resided in the images. Need I record the case of Ramses

sending to his father-in-law in Syria the statue of the
god Khonsoii to cure his sister-in-law ? Of the Tyrians

throwing chains on the statue of Eaal Melkarth to pre-
vent his going over to the enemy Of the Eomans

?
bringing over the statue of the Magna Mater of Mount

Ida, at great expense, from Pessinus, in order to secure
them the victory over the Carthaginians ? Of Stilpo,

banished from Athens for maintaining that the Minerva
of Pheidias was not the goddess herself ? Even in the
last days of paganism, its most intelligent apologists,
according to Arnobius, made it consist in worshipjîng,
not the gold and silver of the idols, but the deities
which their consecration had brought down into them.^
St. Augustine reports Hermes Trisraegistus as holding
that "attaching invisible spirits to visible and corporeal
things by means of certain processes, in order that the
latter may become, as it were, the animated bodies of
the spirits to which they are consecrated, is making
gods ; a great and marvellous power with which men are
endowed."^ This is a definition which the lêgro sor-
cerer, in his fetish-shop, and his Finn confrere animating
a para^ would readily accept.
In Polynesia, they make figures of carved wood into
which the priests inject the souls of the dead or those of
the gods according to taste ; and when the spirit is in,
it can be ejected again by drawing it out into certain

feathers, which in their turn can pass it on to other
figures. We may add that when these figures are with-
out occupants, they retain a sacred character, but no
^ AdmrstLs Gentes, vi. 17, cited by Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. ii.
p. 163.
2 Augustine, De Civitate Dei, viii. 23; apud Tylor, vol. ii. p. 164.
ni. POLYDEMONISM AND POLYTHEISM. 113
kind of worship is rendered them. This is a typical

example of the difference between an image and an idol,
and also of the assimilation of the idol to the fetish.
This assimilation is often pushed so far that, but for

the form, it would be impossible to distinguish between
idol and fetish. It is true that idols are often the objects
of public worship and would seem to escape individual
appropriation ; but the same may be said of fetishes

also, if they belong to a tribe rather than to a family or an
individual. Such, for example, were the Bethels, those
"living stones," as Sanchoniathon calls them, which
figured as palladiums in more than one ancient cit5^
We may see in Western Africa how the transition from
the private to the public worship of the idol-fetish takes
place, without any modification in its nature in the pro-
cess. It is often the domestic fetish of the chief which
accomplishes on a large scale for the whole community, and
under the direction of the official sorcerer, what private
fetishes do on a small scale for individuals; presiding
over atmospheric changes, healing epidemics, denouncing
criminals, and foretelling the future. What more did
the first idols of Greece, Egypt, India, or Assyria, do ?
Springs The simplest origin of idolatry is as fol-

of idolatry,
j^^g .
Q-iyen the presence of a spirit in a
certain object, the worshipper would feel himself in
closer communication with it if the form of this object
reproduced the likeness of the spirit.
But other origins may also be found. In the first
place, any resemblance between a natural object and the

supposed form of a spirit would raise a presumption that
the latter was present in the former, just as the appearance
I
of a human body is evidence of the presence of the soul

or internal personality. The Zunis of North America
and the natives of the West Indies, when choosing
fetishes, prefer stones and scraps of wood that present
some resemblance to birds or animals.^ Many peoples
worship rocks or trees, the outlines of which recall the
human features. From this to accentuating the resem-
blance by a few strokes of the axe or hammer is but a step.
In the second place, men would imagine that the spirit

would come by preference to dwell in a body made after
its own image. In Chaldea and in Assyria, where

maladies were attributed to spirits that bore the form of
fantastic animals, it was customary to carve these mon-
sters round the palaces in order to offer the spirits an
exact representation of their own bodies, and therefore
an abode preferable to the body of the invalid.^ It is
the same with the Siamese, who represent the demons of

disease in human or quasi-human shape, and make them
pass into clay figures, which they hang on trees or
expose in streams.^
Perhaps it is this superstition which reappears on the
Congo in the custom of making images of the crocodile
or the hippopotamus as a protection against the attacks of

these animals while crossing rivers. So, too, we read in
the book of IS'umbers (xxi. 6 — 9) that Moses had a brass
serpent, the Nehustan (2 Kings xviii. 4), raised on a pole,
^ Im Thurn, On the Races of the West Indies: in the Journal of the

Anthropological Institute, 1887, vol. xvi. p. 195.
2 C. P. Tiele, Religions de VEgypte et des peupJes semitiques, Paris,

1882, p. 175.
3 Tylor, Primitive Ctdtare, vol. ii. p. 162.

for the Israelites to gaze at as a cure for serpent-bites.^
In virtue of the same principle, many peoples believe that

the souls of the deceased pass by preference into statues
or portraits made in their own likeness.^ Long before

Mr. Herbert Spencer, the author of the Wisdom of
Solomon connected idolatry with the worship of the dead.
" For a father afflicted with untimely mourning, when he
hath made an image of his child soon taken away, now
honoured him as a god, which was then a dead man,
and delivered to those that were under him ceremonies
and sacrifices."^
The New Zealanders make images of carved wood in
honour of the deceased, and place them in his house or
by his tomb. They give these little statues clothes, and

talk to them, under the conviction that the spirit of the
departed dwells in them.^ Amongst the Papuans, when
^ It is interesting to re-discover the same belief in the depths of
India. At Cowtha, near Koram, there is a temple dedicated to a

serpent-god Sufi-Nath, whom the worshippers pray to guard them
against the bites of reptiles. The legend declares that if any one is
bitten, he has only to get himself carried to the temple to be cured

{Indian Messenger, Dec. 16, 1888). Amongst the ancients, iEsculapius
was the serpent-god, or at any rate his worship, which was of Phoeni-
cian origin, was connected with that of the serpent, regarded as the
image of Eshnum. This belief in the curative virtues of the serpent
reappears in the centre of Africa. According to Livingstone, " the
serpent is an object of worship, and hideous little images are hung in
the huts of the sick and dying." — David and Charles Livingstone,
Narrative of an Expedition to the Zambesi and its Tributaries, London,
1865, p. 46.
2 Cf. Herbert Spencer, Sociology, §§ 154—158.

' Wisdom of Solomon, xiv. 15.
I 2
any one dies, the survivors go to the neighbouring forest

and cut a Konvar out of a bit of wood,
statuette or
and then they invite the spirit to come and live in it.
The Ostiaks and the Samoyeds make rough statues in
the likeness of their relatives, and offer them food. In
the same way
the ancient Egyptians multiplied statues
in their tombs, as receptacles for the double. " These
M. Maspero, "were more solid than the

statues," says
mummy, and there was no limit to the number of them
that could be made. A singlebody offered the double
one chance of survival ; twenty statues gave him twenty
chances."^
Sometimes this belief is combined with the idea that
the double survives in the bodily remains. The ancient
Mexicans made a paste of the ashes of their dead and
human blood, and then made an image in the likeness
of the deceased out of it. Amongst the inhabitants of

Yucatan, the distinguished dead were burnt, and their
cinders placed in statues, hollowed inside.^ This is not
unlike the proceedings of the Egyptians in covering the
lid of the sarcophagus that contained a mummy, with
the sculptured likeness of the deceased.
But we must not conclude that idolatry always had
its origin in the worship of the dead. We have already
seen that the idol often issued from the fetish. In other
cases we may attach it still more directly to some natural
object previously personified. Pausanias speaks of a
sacred tree that the Corinthians worshipped in honour of
^ Maspero, Histoire des dynes dans VEgypte ancienne : in the Bulletin
de V Association scientifique de France, 1873, vol. xxiii. p. 381,
2 Herbert Spencer, Sociology, vol. i. p. 327.

Bacchus at the command of an oracle. They made two

statues to this deity out of the wood of the tree, and in
the time of the writer these statues were still the object
of special veneration in the agora at Corinth.^ In the
Antilles, where the sorcerers profess to understand the
language of plants, thej make idols out of the wood of

trees supposed to have nominated themselves for the
distinction.^
Moreover, we have already had occasion to point out

that the form of the idols is not always human. Indeed,
it may vary infinitely, provided it always represents
something living, as we may see from the frequent
occurrence of idols of animal or fantastic shape.
In the long run, however, the human form gained the
preponderance in the representation of the most powerful
spirits, whether because man had now come to regard
himself as the most exalted being in nature, and knew

not what better to do than to attribute his own features
to the higher powers ; or whether, by dint of attributing

to the deities human sentiments and motives, he was
instinctively them the human figure like-
drawn to lend
wise. Perhaps the transition between the two forms is
marked by those idols with a human head and an animal
body, or an animal head and a human body, which wo
find in the temples of the Egyptians, Hindus, ancient
Americans, and others.
Some authors have attempted to discover
Relation of
idolatry to marvels of symbolism
•
m•
i
these monstrous
x
symoism,
(jQ^^^^jj^g^îQ^g^ They maintain, for example,
1 Pausanias, ii. 2. 7.
2 Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. ii. p. 197.

that the artist started with the human form in his repre-
sentation of the gods, but introduced wings to indicate
their power of transporting themselves through space,
fins to show that they coukl live in the water, a lion's
body to denote their courage, or a bull's head to repre-
sent their strength, just as he sometimes gave them a
number of arms or heads with the same intent.
Unquestionably, the most enlightened exponents of
the ancient worships thus intei-preted the monstrous
forms of their gods at a period when they began to cause
scandal ; but it is none the less evident that at first
the reality of these representations was believed in.
"Animal forms in which the gods were clothed,"

M. Maspero well remarks, apropos of the Egyptian
deities, " have not an allegorical character. They indi-
cate an animal- worship which reappears in more than one
ancient and modern religion. The ambiguous forms them-
selves, half-man, half -beast, simply prove the ignorance
and credulity of the ancients in the matter of natural
history." 1 Since the presence of such creatures on earth
was su2:)posed to be possible, a fortiori the superhuman
world might be peopled by them; for their very gro-
tesqueness gave an extra assurance of the reality of
their existence. At the outside, if we are to allow
anything at all to the invention of the artist or the
mythologist, we can only admit that the grotesque combi-
nation was due to a naive desire to give a more adequate
representation of superhuman beings, by combining with
the traits derived from man, the forms of beasts conse-
crated by tradition, and, for that matter, necessary to
^ Revue de VHistoire des Rdigions, vol. i. p- 121.
ITI. POLYDEMONISM AND POLYTHEISM. 119
indicate the individuality of the various deities. It
appears that in the hieroglyphics of the first dynasties,
the great deities of Egypt are invariably represented in

the shaj)e of animals.
But many writers have gone far beyond this. Indeed,
the theory is still widespread that idols are symbols, the
original significance of which has been lost by degenera-
tion. According to this theory, which is outlined as
early as in the Wisdom of Solomon, idolatry in general
would represent, not an advance, but a degradation.
Man, after having conceived the deity as pure spirit,
figured it forth symbolically under material traits, and

then came to regard these supposed portraits as divine
individualities, the temporary or permanent abodes of
the gods.
I am far from denying that in certain cases an image
may have become an idol by its primitive meaning and
purpose being forgotten. History shows ns indubitable
examples of religious decline in which idolatry, always
latent in the popular superstitions, re -ascends, as it were,
to the surface of worship.^ In the bosom of the same
system the image, which in the mind of its author or of
its reproducer has a merely symbolic significance, may
become a veritable fetish to others. But these facts,
which are explained by survivals or local infiltrations,
1 The example of Buddhism is familiar. Surely nothing can be

more contrary to the teaching of Buddha than the idolatrous worship
with which the masses now surround his images and in like manner ;
the emperor Si-tzong, in the 16th century, Avas obliged to combat a

similar abuseby forbidding the erection of images of Confucius in the
temples raised to his memory. De Harloz, La religion nationale des
Tartares orientaux, &c., Brussels, 1887.
cannot weigh, against the combined observations of eth-

nography and history, which everywhere show us idols
issuing from fetishes by a series of easily-traced steps.
The widespread worship of stones erected

Idolatry
a step in endwiso
...itself absolutely fetishistic;
is
. . . ,
but no
° "
sooner is a spot of red painted on the stone,
as in Southern India, than we stand on the threshold of

idolatry. The same distinction may be drawn between
the wooden stake to which sacrifices are offered by the
Baguirmis of Africa, and the staff of the Brazilian
sorcerers, surmounted by a gourd, pierced with a hole
to represent the mouth. Sometimes they clothe the
stick or stone, covering it with stuffs and ornaments,
as in the Society Islands, where they worship a frag-
mentary column clothed in native costume. Then sculp-
ture comes in. On the top of the pillar a rude head is
carved ; this brings us to the liermes and the doll, which

already mark striking progress in the development of
religious art. Next, the limbs are traced on the stem
of the column, and then carved out and thrown into
attitudes of life and motion.
All these steps may be traced amongst the Negroes of
tropical Africa, where idolatry is no less clearly developed
than pure and simple fetishism. So, too, amongst the
Samoyeds, where we find, side by side with complete
statues of a rude description, pillars surmounted by a

human head, and mere stones dressed in coloured stuffs.
Perhaps you will ask me how I know that these
parallel forms succeeded each other in this definite order.
Apart from the logical necessity of supposing that in art
and religion alike man advanced from more elementary

to more liigWy developed forms, we have in this case the
evidence of history, especially amongst that people in

which idolatry received its fullest development.
The Greeks began, like the rest, by worshipping blocks
of stone and scraps of wood, regarded as the bodies
of their deities. Pausanias tells us, apropos of thirty
shapeless stones worshipped as gods at Pharse, in Achaia,
that amongst the Greeks unhewn stones had in very
ancient times received divine honours.^ ^'
The natural
advance," says M. Maxime Collignon, "consisted in giving
shapeless stones a regular form, however rudimentary.
.... Zeus and Hera are thus presented on the coins
of the island of Ceos. ... At Sicyone, the most ancient
image of Zeus-Meilikhios was a pyramid, that of Artemis
Patroa a column. Such, too, was the form of the ancient
Hera of Argos ; and perhaps we may discover a reference
to these old representations of the deity in a painting in
Pompeii, which represents a group of Eroses and a Psyche
sacrificing before a column, attached to which are a tiara
and a sceptre. ... As art advances, characteristic fea-
tures are added to these pillars —a head, arms, or phallic

emblems. This is the origin of the Hermes column
surmounted by one or many heads." ^ The same deve-
lopment takes place in wood as in stone : witness the
transition from the square blocks which represent the
first deities of certain Greek cities, to the xoana which
even in the best days of art were the most popular images
amongst the worshippers.
It must not be supposed, for that matter, that even in
1 Pausanias, vii. 22, 4.
' Max Collignon, Mytholugie jiguree dc la Grece, pp. 11—13.

the most advanced religions the credit of an image is
proportionate to its artistic merit. A roughly coloured

virgin, or an old saint who has almost lost the human
shape, will often excite a deeper veneration in simple
souls than a Madonna of Eaphael's or a statue by
Michael Angelo.
(ii.) The Divine Hierarchy.
The great ^^ is amongst the populations of incoherent

nature-gods,
imagination, without stable social organiza-
tion, and with little connection in their ideas, that
fetishism and polydemonism reach their maximum of
intensity, and smother all other forms of worship.
The genii of nature —that is to say, the superhuman
beings associated with the production of certain spe-
cific phenomena, and deriving some degree of fixity
of sjDhere and function from the consciousness of this
connection —
are, amongst such races, relegated more
and more background by the puUulation of the

to the
little anonymous and detached powers, which the N'egro,

the Eedskin, or the Australian feels far nearer to him,
which he understands how to manage, and which he pos-
sesses, or supposes he possesses, more direct and efficacious
means of controlling. Not that the divinities of nature,
as representatives of natural phenomena, entirely dis-
appear. Their survival in the background is attested in
the case of many peoples wholly given over to spiritism,
by the belief in a supreme god —generally the heaven or
the sun —who is sometimes made the creator, but from
whom they withhold the attentions granted to the lowest
of th-e spirits. The Odshis hold the heaven to be the
;
but they think he has delegated

miglitiest of deities,
the government of the world to the inferior spirits. In j^
Dahomey, it is the sun who occupies the supreme place

but there, too, his supremacy is purely theoretical.^ The
natives of Timor in the Indian Archipelago also regard
the sun as their chief deity ; but they expect neither good
nor ill from him, and explain that he is too high to trouble
about them, and too good to injure them.^ Finally, the
Californians concentrate their homage upon the inferior

spirits, adding that the sun and moon used to love them,
but that now these deities no longer concern themselves
with man.
In this vague notion of a superior god who has lost
his power or is inaccessible to emotion, the vanishing
traces of a previous monotheism have sometimes been

found; but I believe what it really implies is simply
the existence of a phase of religion in which the regents

of the heavenly bodies or the chief natural phenomena
retained an importance proportioned to their real place
in nature, while care for the destinies of man was
left to other superhuman beings. It is not monotheism,
then, but nature-worship, that is presupposed.
Amongst other peoples of better mental endowments,
however, or more favoured by circumstances, the parasi-
tical growth of spiritism has failed to stifle the worship
1 Waitz, Anthropologies vol. ii. p. 171.
' A. Reville, Religions des peuples non-civilises, vol. i. p. 56.
3 De Backer, L'ArcMpel Indien, p. 227. According to Du Tertre,
cited by Lubbock (Origin of Civilization, p. 254), a similar notion

prevails among the Caribs.
—
of the great natural deities, whicli directly springs out of
the physiolatry explained in my last Lecture.
Prof. Pfleiderer justly remarks :

" Though this belief
in spirits had great vogue among the Latins, no less than
among the old Iranians, Slavs, Germans, and Pelasgians,
yet there never was a time in any of these peoj^les when
the spirits took the place of gods, and were the highest
or even the sole objects of worship." ^ In my opinion,
not only the Greeks and Hindus, but the Egyptians, the
Chinese, and even the Mesopotamians, might have been
added to the list.
From the Let US take, for example, the words whicli

the ?od of ^^^® served the Hindus and the Greeks
the sky.
respectively to designate the celestial vault
and the ruler of the heavens : in the one case, Ouranos
and Zeus ; in the other, Yaruna and Dyaus. It is
probable that before their separation the Indo-Euroj)eans
already possessed the equivalents of these two terms to
designate the heaven, under some such forms as dyu and
varana ; and whereas the Greeks apply the first of these
names to the celestial lord, Zeus, and the second to the
firmament properly so called, Ouranos, the Hindus dif-
ferentiated the other way, making Yaruna figure as the
^ Philosophy of Religion, London, 1888, vol. iii. p. 111. Professor

Pfleiderer has long contended that the religious sentiment must, in
the first instance, have addressed itself to natural objects and pheno-
mena, or rather to the quasi-human personality with which man

invested them by analogy, though the distinction between this per-
sonality and its envelope or body was not very clearly drawn in the
consciousness. Der Religion, ihr Wesen und ihre Geschichte^ Leipzig,
1869, vol. ii.
:
TIT. POLTDEMONISM AND POLYTHEISM. 125"
god of heaven, and Dyaus as the visible sky itself. This

is enough to raise a strong presumption that the distinc-
tion between the personified heaven and the god of the
sky is subsequent to the separate development of the two
languages ; and this presumption is decisively confirmed
by the fact that Ouranos still continued to be a mytho-
logical personality amongst the Greeks ; whereas amongst
the Hindus, as Prof. Max Miiller has luminously ex-
plained, traces are found in the Vedas of a period when
Dyaus was not only personified but even received the
epithet of Pitar, and was thus the full equivalent of the
Hellenic Zeus pater and the Latin Ju-piter.^
The very epithets assigned to him, the Most High
(yxl/io-TOf), the Thunderer {^Kepavvio's'^^ the Eainer (ueVio?),
the Cloud-gatherer (vecpeXtjyepertj^), and so forth, show

that the Greeks never lost the reminiscence of the time
when Zeus was identical with the sky and its brilliant
or stormy manifestations. The same may be said of the

Latins, amongst whom such expressions as ''sub Jove
vivere " for " to live in the open air," enlighten us as to
the primitive nature of the divine being, to whom an old
poet thus alludes
"Adspice hoc sublime candens quern invocant omnes Jovem."
Here, again, the parallel with Yaruna is complete. In

the Yedas, he is sometimes said to have created the sun,
and sometimes it is called his eye. Some of the hymns
would depict him as a king and a judge, the universal
creator others say that he clothes himself alternately in
;
white and black garments, that the celestial waters fl.ow
^ Max MuUer, Hihhert Lectures for 1878, p. 143.

126 III. POLYDEMONISM AND POLYTHEISM:.
from his mouth as from the hollow of a reed, and that

the celestial fire springs from his belly in the clouds.^
Amongst the Persians, Ahura Mazda, the omniscient
lord, is a deity so completely disentangled from nature
that it has often been doubted to what phenomenon he
could be attached. Yet the hymns describe him as clad
with a luminous, shining body, visible from afar ; they

call him the firmest of the gods because he is clad in
the firm stone of the heaven.^ And, for that matter,
Herodotus calls attention to the fact that the Persians
worship Zeus —that is to say, their supreme god — on the

summits of mountains, " giving the name of Zeus to the
whole sphere of heaven." ^ Amongst the Egyptians, side
by side with the solar disc, Aten, we find the lord of the
Disc, and even "the hidden soul of the lord of the Disc."
Horus, too, according to Maspero, before typifying the
rising sun, was previously the part of the universe situ-
ated on high (hori), the actual substance of the firma-

ment, the heaven-father of the gods, who was insensibly
transformed into a separate god, living in the heaven^
In Mesopotamia, Anu, " the hidden," represents the
god of heaven, side by side with Ana, " the exalted
one," who personifies the heaven itself.^
So, too, amongst the Chinese we find Tien, the per-
1 Rig Veda, viii. 41, 10. v. 85, 3.
^ James Darmesteter, Essais Orieutaux, pp. 120, 121.

3 Herodotus, i. 131.
* La Mythologie J^gijptien7ie, in the Revue de VHistoire des Religions

for Jan.-Feb. 1889, vol. xix. p. 5.
5 Tiele, Histoire des religions de vAgypte et des peuples semifiques,
p. 187.
sonified heaven, and Sliang Ti, tlie celestial emperor.

Amongst the Finns, Ukkho, the grandfather, and Yu-
mala, the god of Thunder, who provided the generic
name for deity when supplanted by Ukkho in his specific
relations with the firmament.

This seemingly contradictory duality of conception,
which applies to many other divine personifications, may
be explained either as a juxtaposition of the beliefs of
several communities who mingled their traditions at some

period or another, or, more probably, as the mingling
of the beliefs of different epochs superposed one upon
another without any mutual exclusiveness. But in either
case it bears witness to a direct connection between the

god of the object and the deified object itself. Admitting,
then, an early period in which nature-worship prevailed,
is it not obvious that the worship rendered to the rulers
of nature springs direct out of the worship offered to the
personified phenomena themselves? What need is there,
then, to postulate an intermediate period in which the
gods of these phenomena, having become simple spirits,
were absorbed into the general rank, only to regain their

primitive importance once more at a later period ?
Not only is evidence of any such interregnum totally
wanting, but it even appears that the very doubling of
heaven, of earth, of the sun, of the moon, of the dawn,
of the storm, &c., into a visible or sensible phenomenon
on the one hand, and the spirit presiding over that phe-
nomenon on the other, has served to increase the religious
preponderance of the deities in question, by leaving the

god thenceforth free from the limitations of his body,
and so enabling him to fulfil more general functions, and
to exercise his activity in a more extended sphere. Thus^

the Zeus, father of men and gods, ruler of all things,
guardian of the family and of the city, inspirer of wisdom,
and avenger of perjury, is a far more august personage
than even the Zeus Avho scatters the rain over the fields
of the Athenians, or makes Olympus tremble with the
nodding of his brow.
On the other hand, '

it is probable
^ that even
Spirits
promoted to amongst the peoples most predisposed to the
worship of nature, when certain spirits (from

whatever cause) had acquired marked pre-eminence, they
frequently took their place at the head of the super-
human world side by side with the great deities of nature.
This must have been the case with the spirits to whom
the production of the abstract phenomena most closely
concerned in the destiny of man had been ascribed. It
is probable that the gods of disease, of war, of death, of

plenty, and of certain moral qualities, were in many
cases not nature gods, but spirits directly created on
the analogy of the superhuman powers whose action was
supposed to be manifested in natural phenomena and the
ordinary events of life. Even the most backward peoples
are not without their abstract deities, or rather their
deities who produce abstract phenomena. The Mintiras
of Malacca attribute every disease to its own liantu. It
was the same with the early Chaldeans. In Polynesia,

as formerly in Mesopotamia, every part of the body has
its special spirit. The Iroquois, the Arancans, the Mu-
seronghis of the Lower Congo, the Khonds, and the Maoris,
all have gods of war. The Iroquois have a spirit of
sleep, and the Ojibways a god of death represented as a
•walking skeleton. In Shintoism, which affirms the exist-

ence of eight million deities recruited from the souls of
heroes, the rivers, the mountains, the waterfalls, and the
great trees, the only gods ^particularly adored throughout
the empire, apart from the great solar deities, are the
genii of Pity, of Wealth, and of Medicine.^ It is no great
step from these abstract personifications to the Pantheon
of the Eomans, where, as M. Preller points out, we find
deities of all the events alike of nature and of humanity,
all the vicissitudes of human life and activity, all the
relations and all the enterprizes of civil life." It was the

same with the Greeks, though there the tendency was
restrained by their anthropomorphism. Plutarch tells us
that Themistocles, having levied a contribution on the
island of Andros in the name of two deities, Persuasion
and Force (YLeiOoo koI B/at/), the inhabitants refused, invok-
ing the commands of two quite equally potent deities,
Poverty and Incapacity (Uevlav Ka\ Airoplav^.^ We must

note, however, that where such personifications mount
to the first rank, as amongst the Parsees and tlie Brah-
mans, it is generally by dint of a very advanced system

of metaphysical speculation.
Under the category of spirits promoted to

A otheoses
of men. a higher grade, may likewise figure the souls
of illustrious personages who have actually lived chiefs, —
sorcerers, warriors, and others. Generally speaking,
savages accord the dead a worship proportionate to the
^ Isabella Bird, Shintuism, in Reivjiom Sydtms of the World,

London, 1890, pp. 98, 99.
2 Preller, Rihnische Mi/thologie, Eerliii, 1858, pp. 45, 596 — 631.
^ Tliemistodes, xxi.
K
130 III. POLYDEMONISM AND POLTTHEIS^J:.
vividness of the recollection tliey have left behind them.

They mostly confine themselves to invoking the rela-
tives whom they have personally known. " Ask the
Negro," says M. du Chaillu, "where is the spirit of his
great-grandfather, he says he does not know, it is done.
Ask him about the spirits of his father or brother who

died yesterday, then he is full of fear and terror."^ But
on the shores of the Tanganyika and the neighbouring
country. Lieutenant Becker tells us that the shades of
certain illustrious dead escape this oblivion. " They
make public sacrifices to them, and the tribe considers
them its permanent protectors."^ Amongst the Ama
Zulu, Bishop Callaway tells us, the worship of ancestors
does not extend beyond the father. They do not so
much as know the names of more distant ancestors.
Nevertheless the whole nation places at the head of its
innumerable spirits a superhuman being named 'Mkulu-

kulu, the great -great -father, who is regarded as the
creator, the legislator, and the first ancestor. No doubt
it would be hard to say whether in this case it is a real
progenitor who has been raised to the dignity of uni-

versal creator, or a nature-spirit that has been promoted
to the rank of ancestor; but the same difficulty exists
with regard to almost all the gods who have been

regarded as founders of the race, or even of the state,
such as the Hindoo Yama or the Peruvian Manco Capac.

Certain natives of Siberia pay honours to the figures
of the dead for three years ; after which they are buried
and heard of no more ; but if the deceased is a celebrated
^ Du Cliaillu, Transactions of the Ethnological Society, vol, i. p. 308.
' J. Becker, La Vie en Afrique, vol. ii. p. 298.

shainan, his statue becomes the object of permanent

worship. 1 We may cite for comparison the history of
-iiEscuhif)ius amongst the Greeks. Homer simply speaks
of ^scuhipius as a faultless physician (o]T>]p a/uufxcov).'^
Subsequently, as Herbert Spencer has pointed out, he

has altars and temples dedicated to him ; his worship
extends from Asia Minor over the whole Greek world,
and at last he is hailed as " The guider and governor
of the Universe, preserver of the World, and guardian
of the Immortal Gods."^ The question always remains
whether we have to do with a historical personage, or
whether we are to see in this god of medicine an ancient
serpent-god, or a representative of some natural pheno-
menon, or even, as M. Maury supposes, an ancient per-
sonification of fire, an analogue of Agni, the succourer.*
In any case, when we think of the important place
occupied by the worship of heroes in Greece, we need
not be surprised to find the dead establishing them-
selves even amongst the great gods of Olympus by
securing the attributes of more or less effaced nature-
gods. We may say that in the classical mythology there
is a continual cross-stream of influence between the gods
and the heroes. When gods are represented as magnified
men, it is no wonder that magnified men should come to
be regarded as gods.
^ x\d. Erman, Travels in Siberia, Cooley's translation, London, 1848,
vol. ii. p. 51.
2 Hiad, iv. 194, and elsewhere.

^ ^lius Arislidos, Oj)era, Oxford, 1722, vol. i. p. .37 : 6 to irav uywi/
Kai ve/xcuv awr^jp riov oAwi', Kal (fjvXa^ rwu aâvarwv.
* A. Maury, Religions de la Grece antique, Paris, 1857, vol. i.

pp.
448 sqq.
k2
At this very day, India shows us the process of

apotheosis in the very act, at least in the case of the
secondary deities, whose ranks are constantly opened to
the manes of distinguished men, and, above all, such as

have made themselves objects of terror during their life-
time. ^ It is true that their deification only rises to the
secondary rank ; but at the time when Hindu mythology

and Hindu society alike were in course of formation, the
secondary divinities in their turn may have had facilities
for reaching the higher places in the Pantheon.
Genii of There is yet another category of divinities

Species.
which has exercised a certain influence on
the development of polytheism, though it does not suffice
to furnish all its elements, and still less, as Auguste
Comte would have it, to explain the conception of spirits
detached from bodies.^ I refer to the genii of species.

The conception of a species implies an effort of gene-
ralization too great for many of the peoples who have
reached the phase of spiritism. The Kamtskadals seem
to have no general name for "fish" or "bird," and they
distinguish between the different kinds of living things
by the name of the month in which they most abound.^
The Damara of South Africa "has no one name for a river,
but a different name for nearly every reach of it."^

The Austi'alians have a name for every species of vege-
table and animal, but no general term for "tree," " bird,"
^ Sir Ch. Lyall, The Religion of cm Indian Province, in the Furt-

nighthj Revieto for 1872, p. 133.
2 Pliilosophie Positive, second edition, vol. v. pp. 74 sqq.
3 S. S. Hill, Travels in Siberia, London, 1854-, vol. ii. p. 402.
* F. Galton, Tropical South Africa, London, 1853, p. 176.

or ''iisli."i It is probable that primitive humanity was

equally incapable of forming such conceptions. In time,
however, by dint of noting the identical characteristics
of certain objects, man came to classify them under ideal
categories respectively determined by the traits common
to all theirmembers, and thereupon the observation of
certain properties shared by a whole group of species
led to the formation of collective ideas still wider in
their scope.
Thus from the existence of traits common to all the
trees massed on certain spaces, the existence of the col-

lective individuality we designate by the name of wood
or forest was inferred, and hence the existence of a
genius of the forests to govern the whole mass of trees.
In the same way the similarity of the ears of corn gave
birth to the idea of wheat, just as their common destina-
tion produced the conception of harvest ; hence the belief

in a genius of wheat or harvest. The universal attributes
of water inspii-ed the conception of a liquid element, and

thence of a god of water; the general attributes of flames,
the conception of an igneous element, and thence of a
god of fire. The ''Earth" herself only seems to have
been conceived, and therefore only deified, by peoples

who had already reached a certain stage of mental
development. On the lower levels of evolution, islands,

mountains, and special portions of land are deified but ;
the spirit of generalization could not reach beyond some

clearly determined portion of the soil.
Each member of these collective totals may pi^serve
its individuality, and therefore its special spirit ; but the

1 Encyclopedia Britanka, vol. lii. p. 112. Sub. "Australia,"
genius of the species, from the very fact of its governing

the whole, acquires a sujoerior authority. Sometimes,
indeed, even though the idea of species or element has
been distinctly realized, the individual spirits nevertheless
retain their independence, and are not subordinated, but

are merely divided into certain great categories corre-
sponding to the objects or to the phenomena, the direc-
tive principle of which they represent. Thus among the
Botocudos of Brazil, the Esquimaux, the Chinese, the
Proto-Chaldeans, and others, the spirits are divided into
spirits of the woods, waters, earth, air, &c., as in the
Indo-European traditions. The Finns recognize these
divisions, but also believe in the existence of general
spirits, the haltias, who preside over the destinies of
species. There are haltias of rye, oats, grass, &e., and
they occupy an intermediate position between the ordi-
nary spirits and the great deities of nature.
An analogous conception has been pointed out amongst
the ancient Peruvians. They believed that every kind
of animal had a representative in heaven, charged with
watching over the species and providing for its repro-
duction. This belief reappears in North America. The
Iroquois hold that every species of animal and every
variety of vegetable, has its special genius; and they
declare that the Manito adored under the form of an ox
is not the ox itself, but the Manito ox which is under
the ground and animates all oxen.^
Professor Sayce, in his profound and subtle analysis
of the Mesopotamian shown that Merodach,
religion, has
E:i, Mul-lil, and other great gods of the Chaldean Pan-

^ De Brosses, Bu culte des dieiix fetiches, Paiis, 1760, p. 58.
III. POLYDEMONISil AND POLYTHEISM. 135
theon, may well have been in tlieir origin the ox or

bull, the fish, the antelope, and so forth, venerated for
the services they rendered to the local populations, sub-
sequently regarded as the tutelary deities of the indivi-
dual and the city, and finally confounded with the spirits
of the planets and the great natural phenomena.^ In
that case we are evidently dealing, not with an ox or a
serpent, but with the representatives of the respective

species.
What the Yedic Eishis adored on their hearths was

not the flame itself, but fire personified under the name
of Agni, who, " scattered in all places, remains one sole
and only king," as the hymn expresses it.^ Amongst

the Greeks, Hestia was present in every flame; and
amongst the Eomans, Ovid hints that when the ancients
gathered round the hearth for their repasts, they believed
themselves to be in the presence of the deity itself.^
The gods of human groups, from the family up to the

state, came into existence in virtue of the same principle
that gave birth to the genii of species. Every group,

however arbitrary, as soon as it had a distinct indivi-
duality, had a claim to a personality which could repre-

sent and direct it. Here, however, it seems to have been
the exception for that personality to be created de 7iovo,
like the Dea Eoma. Sometimes the part was taken by

the patron spirit of the principal member or family, as
we have seen in the case of the tribal fetishes of the
1 Hihhert Lectures for 1887, pp. 280—300.
^ Iti(j Veda, iii. 55, 4.
3 Fasti, vi. 305, 306.

Negroes. Or it was the soul of some illustrious chief,

the tribal hero or the founder of the city, that was
raised to this position. We are justified in asking
whether amongst all those Baalim which divided amongst
them the cities and petty states of the Semitic world,

there might not have been some who had actually
lived upon the earth, had afterwards assumed the
posthumous government of their cities, and had finally
acquired the ordinary attributes of the nature-gods. Or,
again, the function of national or tribal patron may have
been deliberately assigned to one or another of the gods
representing the heaven, the sun, or the moon, in for-
getfulness of the fact that these divine beings shine over
all the world alike ; or to some other superhuman power
connected with natural phenomena of a character more
susceptible of national appropriation, such as the genius
of some species, or an archetypal animal. This is what
we actually find to be the case amongst the peoples
addicted to totemism.
I must uot expatiate on the strange cus-
Toteniism.
tom of totemism, the study of which has been popularized

by several eminent writers in England. From the reli-
gious point of view, it may be defined as the worship
rendered to the genius of some species of animal by a
tribe which regards it as its progenitor and its patron.
We should note that even amongst the Eedskins the
totem or dodaim is not just an animal amongst the rest,
but an ideal individual which rules all the representa-

tives of its species, " a Manito ox under the earth which
animates all the oxen."
The inspiring motive of totemism, I take it, is found
in the desire to give the tribe a representative of its
collective personality to serve as its protector. This

representative at the same time (by the usual vcrrepov
irpoTepov') explains the separate existence of the tribe
itself. It is obvious that in the choice of a totem, as in
the choice of fetishes, chance and even caprice take a

large share. We may, however, form an approximate
judgment of the probable genesis of tribal totemism by
observing what takes place in the case of individuals.
Sometimes at the moment of birth the women of the
family repeat the names of a number of animals one
after another, and the child's totem for all his life will
be the animal whose name is being uttered as he gives

his first cry. Sometimes the child himseK, when he has
reached the age of puberty, goes to a solitary place, and
after offering a sacrifice chooses as his totem the first
animal he sees, dreaming or waking ; and he then seals
his contract by drawing a few drops of blood from his

person.^
On the other hand, it may well be that families or
tribes designated by the name of some animal may
have finally reached the conclusion that this animal
must have been their progenitor and is still their pro-
tector. There is nothing foreign to the mental and
religious habits of the inferior peoples in such reasoning.
Totemism, then, is met with amongst almost all the

races of the two worlds that live in isolated tribes ; but
that is no reason for making it the primitive and neces-
^ Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific States of America, vol. i.
pp. 740, 741. Cf. De Brosses, Du culte ties dieux fetiches, pp. 46, 47.
sary phase of all religious development, as some writers

have clone.
In a word, four categories of superhuman beings must

have taken precedence of the common herd of spirits at
an early stage, especially amongst the peoples predisposed

to a polytheistic conception of the universe ; to wit, the
great deities of nature, the spirits that jDreside over the

most important factors of human destiny, the genii of
species and of the chief groups, and the souls of the
illustrious dead.
^ , ,. . In order, however, that

'
this first difPeren-
Suborchnation ^
_ _
of spirits to tiation should result in polytheism, we need

another factor, the necessity of which has
often been overlooked, namely, the subordination of the
spirits to the gods; in a word, the establishment of a
hierarchy amongst the superhuman beings.
Practically, no doubt, the gods of polytheism are often
distinguished from the spirits simply by their greater
power, but that power is exercised on the mass of super-
human beings as well as upon the mass of men. The
ordinary spirits become their servants, their vassals —nay,
even a kind of serfs attached to the soil or invested with
subordinate functions; unless, indeed, having failed to find
a place in the ranks of the divine army, they are treated
as enemies and rebels and laid under the imperial ban.
At the same time that this subordination is being
developed, the gods themselves undergo a parallel
movement of co-ordination. A certain number, some-
times determined by special circumstances, is singled
out for distinction : three (the family triad), seven (the
seven planets known to the ancients), nine (the enneads

of the Egyptians), twelve or thirteea (the months of
the year), thirty-three (perhaps, amongst the Hindus,
the year, the four seasons, and the twenty-eight days of
the month). These special deities, whatever may be the
beings or the phenomena which they properly represent,
are not only put at the head of the Pantheon, but have
a certain authority over the lower ranks of the divine
hierarchy, and may consequently come to be regarded as
ruling over the whole superhuman society.
This organization is demanded by the human mind,
which cannot be content to leave the government of
the universe a prey to anarchy ; but it is not so much
the result of philosophical speculation as a deduction
from the examples furnished by the organization of ter-
restrial communities. We may note, in fact, that the
different peoples conceived and developed this divine
hierarchy pari passu with their own approximation to
political unity.
^, ,. .
The idea of shapinor the society of the srods
The divine . .
societies ou the model of their own little communities

modelled ., ^ , , ^
upon those OU earth, appears to have occurred at an

^ ®^^^^*
early stage to peoples still in quite a back-
ward state of civilization. The Jesuit Molina tells us
that amongst the Arancans the god Pillan is the grand
Togui (regent) of the invisible world. As such, he is
surrounded by his Apo-Ulmenes and his Ulmenes, to
whom he confides the less important affairs. " These
ideas," adds the sagacious observer, "are certainly very

rude ; but it must be acknowledged that the Arancanians
are not the only people who have regulated the things of
heaven by those The Yorubas of West-

of the earth." ^
ern Africa, says the missionary Bowen, have only one

god of heaven, just as they have only one king of the
nation; and as petitioners have to approach the king

through the intervention of his servants, so men in
approaching the supreme deity have recourse to the
mediation of the oresas or spirits.^ The Kimbundas of
the Congo say that Suku-Yanange, probably a personi-

fication of the celestial vault, hands men over to the
Kilulu; and as there are more bad than good amongst
these spirits, life would be intolerable to the poor Negro,
were it not that from time to time Suku-Yanange, driven
to desperation, issues from his constitutional neutrality
and strikes the worst of the Kilulu with lightning."^
Whether these first attempts to construct a super-
human hierarchy are really due to the influence of
Christian doctrines concerning the role of the deity and
his agents, or whether they are to be attributed to the
spontaneous development of local spiritism, in any case
they retain traces of a certain casual and precarious
character, like the Negro empires which, in every dis-
trict of Africa, rise and fall with equal facility, without
resulting in the smallest progress towards a permanent
national unity or political centralization even within a
limited area. These divine hierarchies are seldom found
amongst peoples in the pastoral or nomadic stage of civi-
lization, or even amongst those agricultural poj)ulations
^ Ignatius Molina, History of Chili, English translation, vol. ii.
p. 84: London, 1809.

2 E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. ii. p. 316.
- 2 R Hartmann, Les jpeuples de VAfrique, Paris, 1880, p. 184.

in which the village group is the nucleus of social orga-

nization. Even in such cases, however, a kind of Platonic
belief in a supreme deity is not rarely professed. But

polytheism of a really organized character is only found
amongst races who have attained a sentiment of national
unity superior to the village and clan divisions, possessing
a sufficient degree of culture to co-ordinate their religious
traditions, and above all enjoying a centralized adminis-
tration, without which no permanent sovereign power
can be secured.
The Polynesians, when first discovered, were at a
relatively advanced stage of civilization, and had an

exceptionally rich Pantheon, in which the gods of the
elements were the heroes of adventures comparable to
those of the Greek mythology of pre-Homeric times.
They even distinguished the tikis^ or spirits, from the
atuas^ or gods. The former comprise certain animals, the
souls of the dead, the guardian-spirits of fimiilies and

individuals, the genii of diseases, and finally innumerable
fetishes. The latter include the gods of the celestial
bodies and natural phenomena, to whom the forms of
animals were sometimes attributed, at any rate when
they visited the earth.^ In New Zealand, the first place
was occupied by the cosmogonic couple Eangi (Heaven)
and Pepe (Earth), with their children, the gods of the
winds, of the plants, of the fishes, of the forests, of men,
and so on ; together with Tangaroa, the god of the
1 This is the explanation of zoolatry given by the ^Nfangiiians. On

animal gods, cf. W. W. Gill, Myths and Songs from the South Pacific,
London, 1876, p. 35.
;
sea, Maui, the god of the sun, a kind of Polynesian

Heracles, and his grandmother, perhaps a personification
of the night. In the Hervey Islands, other cosmic deities
appear : Vatea, half man and half shark, god of the sea
and of vegetation, or of heaven. In the Sandwich Islands
there is a goddess of the moon, Hina, ^'
the woman of the
white locks " in Hawai, Pole, the goddess of the great
;
local volcano. And, finally, there are gods of war, of the

harvest, of fish, and what not. The relative power of these
deities, however, varies in the different archipelagos, and
in no case do we find that the tikis have been subordi-
nated to the atuas, or even that any attempt has been
made to co-ordinate these latter, any more than the host
of little insular states into which the Polynesian archi-
pelagos are divided.^
The mythology of the Polynesians has sometimes been
compared with that of the Finns, in regard to its stage
of religious development. Amongst the latter, however,
the subordination of the spirits begins to appear, inas-
much as the inferior spirits of forests, waters, and the
soil, are respectively grouped, as children or servants,
round the presiding couples of the element to which
they belong. The water spirits depend on Ahti and
Wellamo, god and goddess of the waters; the forest
spirits on Tapio and Mielliki, who preside over plants
and the spirits of the soil on Tuoni and Tuona Akka,

1 On the religion of the Polynesians, consult Albert Reville, Religions
des peuples non-cicilises, vol.
ii. chaps, ii. vi. —
Sir George Grey, Poly-
nesicm Mijthology London, 1855.
: W. W. Gill, Mijths and Songs
from the South Pacific: London, 1876. "Williams and Calvert, Fiji
and the Fijians: London, 1870.
•
who rule over the subterranean world.^ But inasmuch

as the Finns were still in the pastoral age at the intro-
duction of Christianity, this organization of the divine
society never passed the patriarchal type. Their Olympus
was formed after the model of the house, their Pantheon
after that of the family ; Ukko himself, the supreme
god, was no more than a majestic shepherd who led the
clouds, his sheep, to their pasture.
The divine Evcn the Indo-Europeaus do not seem to

^° •^'^^
have possessed a regularly organized poly-
L^r Vi^
peans. theism before their dispersion. Indeed,
amongst the who were perhaps the most back-
Slavs,
ward of all the branches of the race, we see that even
the great gods drawTi from the common fatherland Perun —
(perhaps the Yedic Parjanya, god of thunder), Svarog
and Ogon (the respective equivalents of Svar the heaven,
and Agni the fire), and even Bogu, the god of heaven —
hardly rose above the crowd of spirits in the popular
worship. And, on the other side, the very history of the
terms (already recounted) that respectively served the
Aryans of India and those of Persia to designate their
great gods, Devas and Ahwas, shows us that amongst
the Eastern Aryans the same terms were originally
applied more or less indifferently to every category
of superhuman beings.
Amongst the Aryans of India, in the Vedic period,
social organization does not appear to have advanced much
beyond the patriarchal rule of elans ; at any rate we can
discover nothing like the rigorous divisions of caste or
^ A. Keville, Religions des peuplcs tion-civilises, vol. ii. chaps, ii.
and iii.
;
the organization of great unified monarchies which pre-

vailed subsequently. The society of superhuman beings,
still closely attached to the phenomena of nature, mani-
fests a correspondingly unstable character, almost amount-
ing to anarchy, corrected and perhaps to a certain point
maintained by what Prof. Max Miiller has called heno-
theism — that is to say, the religious disposition to ascribe
to each god at the moment of invocation all the attri-
butes of supreme power. This division, or rather this

alternation, of sovereignity only extends to six or seven
great natural deities. The hymn of the legendary Manu
Yaivasvata says that amongst the gods " there are
neither great nor small, neither old nor young, all
are equally great;" but practically, Varuna and Indra,

gods of the heaven ; Surya, the sun ; Ushas, the dawn
Agni, the fire ; Soma, fermented drink ; and Aditi,
space, — are, turn by turn, raised above all other gods,
and are still more clearly distinguished from the innu-

merable spirits to be found in the popular cultus.
Amongst the Germans we find the mythological sys-
tematization carried out much further. At the bottom
of the scale are the giants and elfs, then the Yanir, and
finally the Ases or ^sir, ranked on a system which cor-
responds well enough with that of German society. Odin,
who presides in the council of the iEsir, like the German
chief in the assembly of free men, is no more than the
president of a republic. His power is almost equalled
by that of Thor, and even of Loki, until the latter
becomes a rebel spirit.
Amongst the Greeks of the Homeric epoch, the celes-
tial state is still more directly modelled on that of

— ;
earth. The great gods correspond to the local kings,

whose assembly is presided over by the King of men, just
as the Olympians gather under the presidency of Zeus
and the power of the latter over his divine colleagues
though clearly enough established in the sense of his

boast that he is the mightiest of the gods^ — is no more
absolute than that of Agamemnon over his allies. On
the other side, the popular assembly of the Agora
has its counterpart in the gathering of all the divine
beings to learn the will of Zeus. We may even add
that just as Greece was never able to attain a national
unity, so all the efforts of the philosophers failed to give
currency in the popular theology to a more advanced
conception of the divine unity.
It is extremely difficult to reconstruct the worship of
the Latins before the historical development of Eome,
but it is probable that their numina were hardly superior
to the mass of spirits, in spite of the presence amongst
them of certain great deities of nature, drawn in some
cases from the common fund of Indo-European traditions.
The organizing faculty which characterizes the Roman
genius found scope in the cultus earlier than in theology,
and, with the exception of Jupiter, Mars, lêptune, the
old Janus, Juno and Yesta, the greater part of the deities
who took the first place in the worship of the Romans
were foreign importations, in some instances relatively
late. It is especially as the president of this divine
oligarchy that old Jupiter Optimus Maximus of the
tlie
Capitolbecame the special patron of Rome and assumed

the supreme government of the universe.
^ Iliad, viii. 17.
L
Amongst the Persians, monarchy was firmly established

at an early date, perhaps under the pressure of a terrible
struggle with the Turanian populations. Ahura Mazda,
"the omniscient lord," naturally assumed the absolute
sovereignty over the propitious powers since his imme-
diate function was that of generalissimo of the armies
of light in their contest with the powers of darkness.
Here the hierarchy is complete. The old deities of
nature, and certain great abstractions, personified by

stress of circumstances, are the generals and captains
of the celestial army. They include, firstly, the six
Amesha Qpentas, the "Beneficent Immortals;" then,
the Yazatas or "Worshipped ones," and amongst them

Mithra, god of light ; Nairyo Sanha, god of fire ; Apam
Napat, god of fire concealed in the waters ; Haoma, god
of the drink of immortality ; Yayu, god of the wind, he
who throws the storm against the wind ; Tistrya, genius
of the dog-star; and Anahita, goddess of fertility. Lastly

come the mass of Fravashis, including the divine proto-
plasms of the just, and the genii of pure things.^

^ the
Quittinoj Indo-European
i
peoples
r i to
The divine ,
society in study the polytheism of other races, we

^^^^
' find the same correspondence between the
forms of and the organization of the
political institutions
divine society. Egypt before Menes appears to have

been divided into independent nomes, in each of which
a certain number of gods, properly so called, appear
beside and above the spirits. It seems that before the
^ Tiele, Outlines of the History of Religion, &c., translated by Car-

penter, London, 1877, §§ 102—104, pp. 168—172. J. Darmesteter,
Ormazd et Ahriman, Paris, 1877, chap. vi. Eug. Burnouf, Commentaire
sur le Yagna.
beginnings of history these little local Pantheons had

undergone a certain concentration by the establishment
of triads and enneads, the principal member of which
often received the title of supreme god. But, as M. Mas-
pero well observes, " the supremacy of these highest and
even unique gods was confined to the limits of their
respective nomes. Divine feudalism," continues this
acute historian, "is the primordial fact of the religion
of Egypt, as human feudalism is the primordial fact of
its history." 1
„, ,. . In Mesopotamia, the first inhabitants of
societies of Chaldea appear to have placed a certain
the Semites.
number of superhuman powers (an or diugir)
above the spirits, before the epoch at which their history
begins. These beings were the rulers of the principal
natural phenomena, but were supposed to have made
the world and to be man's protectors against the attacks
of evil spirits. Above all stood Ana, the personification
of heaven ; Ea, the spirit of the earth ; Mul-lil, ruler of
the subterranean world ; the Sun ; the Moon ; Istar, the
evening star ;
perhaps the gods of the other planets then
known ; and finally, the gods of fire and the storm. The
mere uttering of their names was enough to put the
demons and the power of the name rose with
to flight ;
the rank of the deity. ''

The most irresistible of all the
powers resides in the mysterious name which Ea alone
knows. Before that name, everything in heaven, on
earth, and below, must yield. The gods themselves are
chained by that name and obey it."^
^ Revile de Vhistoire des Religions, vol. xix. p. 11.
' Fr. Lenonnant, La Magie chez les Chaldeens, Paris, 1874, p. 40.
l2
;
This, however, is only a magical exaggeration, and at

the outside amounts to nothing more than henotheism.
*'Thou alone art exalted," says the hymn to the Sun;
''amongst the gods thou hast no equal." ^ The Prefect
of, Kalakh, in an inscription bearing the date of King
Eaman-ninari III., does not hesitate to say: "Put your
trust in Nabu [the god of the scribes], and trust in no
other god." 2 Elsewhere Bel is called the lord and
the creator of the gods. Gradually some kind of order
is introduced amongst the host of deities (there are pas-
sages which speak of sixty-five thousand^) by grouping
them into triads, the members of which vary according
to the city, the province, or the state. Sometimes it
is Anu (the ancient Ana, god of heaven), Bel, and

Ea transformed into a god of the ocean. Sometimes
Sin, god of the moon, the god of gods ; Shamas, god
of the sun ; and Rimmon, god of the wind. But even
these triads appear to be rather a juxtaposition of deities
than a combination tending to unity. It was otherwise
with the Assyrians, whose bent was to form a military
monarchy, the type of which is reflected in the organiza-
tion of their divine world. At the bottom of the scale
is the innumerable host of spirits ; then come the gods,

who may be likened to oflicers and imperial functionaries
above them are the chief deities, varying in number on
the different inscriptions, sometimes thirty -six, some-
times thirteen or twelve, sometimes seven. These are
^ Schrader, cited by De Pressens^, Uancien monde et le christian-
isme, p. 63.
2 Tiele, Outlines, &c., § 47, Eng. tr. p. 78.
§ Sayce, Hihhert Lectures for 1887, p. 216.

;
what we might call the ministers and generals of Assur,

who himself is the celestial prototype of the all-powerful
despot who presides over the destinies of Assyria.
The religion of the Assyrians, however, had been
modified by contact with Proto-chaldean beliefs, and for
a pure type of Semitic religion we must turn to the popu-
lations of Syria. Here we find, not, indeed, the mono-
theism so long supposed to be proper to the genius of
the Semitic race, but something very like monolatry,
inasmuch as it often reveals the adoration of a local
god regarded as supreme, and so far exalted above all
other gods as to sink the latter even lower than the

spirits. But here we haAê occasion to distinguish between
the populations of the shore, where the easy conditions
of life early developed a rich mythology, and those of the
inlands, amongst whom the rugged aspects of nature pro-
duced a severer conception of the divine order. Amongst
these latter, the imagination was more impressed by the
imposing unity of the forces of nature than by the inces-
sant variety of their manifestation. The idea of force
dominates that of matter, and thus the superhuman beings
are much less varied if not less numerous. Nothing is
more like one Eloh, says M. Eenan, than another Eloh

whence all that is required is to give these elohira a chief
to direct them, and we have a god whose pre-eminence
no rival will dispute.
For the rest, amongst all the western Semites the very
names of the gods express a general and abstract idea of
force and power rather than a determinate individuality.
It was long supposed that the names of Baal, Adou,
Moloch or Melek, El, êdeq, Eabba, Asherah, &c.,
denoted so many divine personalities, worshipped by

the whole race. Now we know that they were simply
generic names, titles in a word —master, lord, king,
the mighty, the just, the lady, &c. —under which each
group of populations designated its chief deity.^ It
is probable that in every state the divine king adopted
as supreme patron was surrounded by a court of secon-
dary deities or subordinate spirits fulfilling all the
offices of the government and the household. Yahveh
himseK, the Yahveh Qebaoth, god of the celestial armies,
was surrounded by a veritable divan, in which the first

place was held by a kind of " seraskier" or generalissimo,
as M. Eenan has it, the archangel Michael, and a grand
vizier, the Mal'ak, the angel charged with communica-
tions to man. Then came the other angels, the cherubim
and seraphim and the bene-elohim.
The conception of the superhuman world probably
differed very little from this type amongst the Philis-
tines, the Moabites, and the other more or less indepen-
dent peoples that covered the Syrian region bordering on
the desert, and even some of the cities of Phoenicia. At
Beyrout, they specially worshipped the seven Kabires,
probably planetary deities ; but there came a time at
which they placed the eighth (Eshmun) above them,
and he became the chief deity, whether his name con-
ceals a god of nature, or whether we should see in him a
pure creation of theological speculation.^
1 Tiele, Religions de VEgypte et des êujyles semitiques, Paris, 1882,
pp. 281 sqq.
2 IMd. p. 307.
The divine The new world, at the period of the first
the Azte°^
European invasion, presented every degree
and incas. and type alike of religious and social organi-
zation. Side by side with rudimentary forms which
have survived to our own day in the customs and beliefs
of the aboriginal peoples, the Spaniards found civilized
communities at various levels of polytheism. This poly-
theism was still in an early stage, though the peoples
of Central America and Mexico had a highly developed
mythology. They worshipped the teotl —that is to say,
the chief personifications of the elements, conceived under

names and in forms which varied from centre to centre
of civilization ; but while raising some of these deities
to the rank of official protectors and mythical legislators,
they never seem to have enrolled them in any regularly
classified hierarchy. This is because, as M. Albert
E^ville has shown, these peoples never had a unified
and centralized empire, but only great federations, and
states exerting a temporary preponderance^^
Further south, on the other hand, the Peru of the
Incas presents the type of the most centralized state
which our planet has ever known; and this centraliza-
tion has its counterpart in the organization of the divine
world. The Inca was supposed, not only to be descended
from the sun, but to be commissioned to apply the
government of the solar deity on earth; and just as
everything in the empire was subordinated to the Inca,
everything in the heavens was subordinated to the Sun.
The latter had a court in which the moon, the great
^ Reville, Les Religions du Mexique, &c., p. 23 : Paris, 1885. Cf.
the same author's Hibbert Lectures for 1884, pp. 28, 29.
planets and principal constellations appeared. Others,

gods who must once have been almost as important as
himself — Yiracocha, Pachacamac, and Catequil — had
become his children or his ministers.
In the official religion of China, the paral-
^
The divine . , .
, ^ ,
"^ .
society in lelism of which I havo given somany exam-

ples, is carried still further. From an early-
date we find a divine state closely modelled upon that
of earth, and the different stages of the respective orga-
nizations are closely connected one with the other. At
the head stands Shang-ti, the celestial emperor who
watches over the general interests of the world the ;
terrestrial emperor, the "son of heaven," is his deputy
for the government of men, and, moreover, has exclusive

charge of the worship demanded by his superior. In
like manner the chief functionaries preside over the
worship of the great siîrits of nature ; the governors of

provinces and cities, over that of chief local deities of
their respective areas ; and finally, the father of the
family over the worship of the manes of his ancestors
and the rank and file of spirits. Confucius declares
that the functionaries of the State are the servants of
heaven, just as the Li-ki says that the spirits are the
functionaries of Shang-ti.
It is interesting to note that men have, in every case,
been conscious of this parallelism spontaneously esta-
blished between the celestial kingdom and the states on
earth; but, by a common illusion of perspective, it is
always the human society which has been supposed to
be modelled on that of the gods,

Lecture IY.
DUALISM.
(i.) The Struggle for Order.

So now we have the gods arranged in a society like
that of man. What will be the object of the organiza-
tion ? What will be the goal it proposes to itself ? I was
going to say, what will be its platform ?
Contracts of ^^ the first place, it will be the interest of

alliance with
^^^ ^^j^ members. The gods pursue their own
human beings, good, and have uo scruplc in naively avowing
an egoism copied from that of their worshippers. The
important point to notice, however, is, that the interest
of the gods may in various ways coincide with that of
their worshippers.
On the one hand, the latter might enter into a treaty
with their gods founded on reciprocity of service ; whence
the two-fold consequence, that the gods would be inte-
rested in the prosperity and aggrandizement of the nation
that had adopted them, and that they would be opposed
to the gods of the neighbouring nations whenever their
respective subjects fell into conflict. Even savages show
a tendency to put themselves under the protection of
their own ancestors and fetishes, as a defence against
those of neighbouring peoples. And if they rank the
spirits in general amongst these hostile powers, it is
154 IV. DUALISM.
because, being more or less detached and anonymous,

they represent the stranger, and to that extent the enemy.
In polytheism we have no longer to deal with isolated
powers, but with pantheons organized by nations or
groups of nations ; and the relations between these super-
human communities are again modelled on those of earth.
^. , Mythology favours yet another order of

regulating conceptious which directly tends to turn the
efforts of the gods towards the good of man,
or at least towards one of the most necessary conditions
of his existence, namely, an established order in nature.
I mean by mythology the transformation of natural
phenomena or abstract events into personal adventures
ascribed to superhuman beings. It does not enter into
the scope of my plan to expound the rules by which we
must interpret mythology ; and still less to fathom the
principles of the rival schools which trace the mytho-
logical stories respectively to oblivion of the primitive
meaning of words, to distortion of history, or to the
purely fantastic action of the savage imagination. But,
whatever its origin, we discover at the base of all the
myths a tendency to personify the details as well as
the forces of nature, and to attribute to these imaginary
personalities conduct like that of human beings, but
powers far transcending those of man.
In nature-worship —that is to say, as long as personified
objects are looked on as the bodies of spirits which
act through them —we perhaps get no further than
dramatizing the most characteristic of the actual rela-
tions between the objects concerned. The storm will be
regarded as a fight between heaven, or the sun, and the
IV. DUALISM. 155
Storm-cloud. The occultation of the heavenly bodies will

be represented as their consumption by a monster. The
creation will be attributed to a union, or perhaps to an
original separation, of the heaven and the earth.
May be the formation of these first myths was pre-
ceded by a period in which man simply depicted the
phenomena of nature by isolated analogies drawn from
his own experience. Thus, before representing the
storm as the marriage of the heaven and the earth, •
or as the battle of the sun with the storm-cloud, with

the wealth of detail that constitutes the charm of
Indo-European mythology, he must have conceived of
the rain as seed, the production of crops as birth, the
clouds as an army of monsters or giants, the sun as a
dart-hurler, the lightning as a celestial weapon, and the
thunder as the voice of an invisible warrior or the shock
of arms in the sky. Mythical elements remain at this
undeveloped stage amongst peoples whose imagination

is too poor (like that of the Chinese), or too random (like
that of the Negroes), to group these rudimentary con-

ceptions into a general whole ; but elsewhere they early
combine into complete dramas of nature, like those which
we trace in the earliest religious texts of the Chaldeans,
the Egyptians, and the Indo-European peoples.
"When, as human thought advances, men reach a juster
conception of the impersonality of things, they find a
growing difficulty in making celestial or earthly objects
take the part of quasi-human persons. But we must not

forget that the personality of these objects has not
disappeared ; it has simply escaped from its envelope to
rule from outside. Thus it preserves its former attri-
156 IV. DUALISM.
butes and its old relations on the one hand, and on the
other hand, as its new personality approximates to the
human form, it lends itself more readily to combinations
modelled on the life of man. Was it not in Greece
that the deities of nature approached the human type
most closely both physically and morally ? And was it
not there too that mythology acquired its widest exten-

sion and exercised its deepest influence ?
In the long run, however, when the bonds connecting

the spirits of things with the things themselves were
once broken, these superhuman beings would inevitably
be credited more and more with actions that had nothing
in common with the mutual relations of the phenomena.
The gods would tend to transform themselves into histo-
rical personages, and to annex the exploits of real heroes

and even of the creatures of the popular fancy. The
myth would be lost in the tale or legend, or might even
tend to attach itself to any casually determined person-
ality, till it became impossible to distinguish between
a god transformed into a hero, and a hero transformed
into a god.
These adulterations have given rise to a
Relations of . . , . . .
mythology and distinction between mythology and religion ;

re igion.
^^^ latter including the sentiments that man
cherishes with respect to his gods ; the former, the stories
which he accepts concerning them, or rather the deeds
and exploits which he attributes to them. But do not
the sentiments we experience towards any one largely
depend on the idea we have formed of his nature, dispo-
sition, and doings ? —that is to say, precisely on what

mythology has to tell concerning the gods ?
IV. DUALISM. 157
—
we make a distinction at all and, seeing how small
If
an influence many myths exercise on the religious feel-
ings and on the worship, I am inclined to think we
should — it should be based on the fact that a whole class
of myths simply minister to human curiosity, without
affecting man's relations to the gods. Such notably are
the myths professing to explain the first origin of pheno-
mena, without concerning themselves with their main-
tenance or their reproduction. For in truth it is the
future, and not the awakes the hopes and fears
past, that
on which the religious sentiment feeds; so that, from

this point of view, the traditions connected with the
present and future course of phenomena have vastly
greater importance than those that refer to the forma-
tion of the universe, though the latter no less than the
former present themselves in mythological guise, as
recording the definite events of a given moment in the
past. Again, to feel this importance, men must believe

the traditions to be something more than stories in-
vented for their pleasure —more even than a faithful
record of historical facts which are now past and done
with. Then, but then only, will mythology become

religion, when it represents the most important deities
as strengthening the action of the beneficent phenomena,
over which they preside, against the efforts of the beings
who regulate or produce the maleficent phenomena
opposed to them.
Hence grows a dualism which finds its first applica-
tion on the field of the conflicting forces that affect
the two great primary necessaries of life, light and food.

But, with the aid of mythology, it soon comes to embrace
158 IV. DUALISM.
the whole mass of superhuman beings. These latter

are divided into two camps, according to their nature
or affinities. Man himself soon falls into line, and not
only offers his divine defenders sympathy, but actively
co-operates with them, encouraging them by his prayers
and praises, strengthening them by his sacrifices and
incantations, and abstaining from all that might hamper
or enfeeble their action. Hence another bond of union
is contracted between man and the gods, whom he now
feels to be fighting in the same army and espousing the
same cause with himself.

Progress and This dualism based on natural phenomena
^"^ôfnauirar^ appears but little developed amongst peoples

dualism,
^t the first stage of polytheism, such as the
ancient Mexicans, Polynesians, or Finns. Amongst the
Proto-chaldeans dualism manifests itself not so much in
the sphere of natural phenomena as on the field of man's
daily struggle against evil spirits, especially the spirits
of disease; but the death of Tammuz, the descent of
Istar into hell in search of her lost lover, the incidents of
her quarrel with her sister Allat, queen of the subter-
ranean world, and, on the other side, the legend of the
Deluge, of the fight of the moon-god with the seven
evil spirits, to say nothing of the story of the creation
itself, prove clearly enough that natural dualism was not
entirely absent from the Assyrio-chaldean mythology.
We may remark that the seven evil spirits at the head
of the infernal armies represent the seven principal winds,
and that the great gods, invoked to keep them in check,
are unquestionably planetary deities, or at any rate
personifications of natural phenomena of some kind.
IV. DUALISM. 159
According to Prof. Sayce, the texts show traces of a

period when all the superhuman beings were at once
good and evil. It must have been by gradual steps
that the Chaldeans came to separate the two phases of
this mixed character, and to make the superior gods
the dispensers of all benefits, while the lower spirits
assumed the exclusive role of the agents of evil.^
Amongst the Egyptians there were originally three

kinds of deities —the gods of the elements, the gods of
the dead, and the solar gods. The first, such as Sib and
Nut, appear half-effaced in the worship ; the second, with
Osiris at their head, were gradually assimilated to the
sun below the earth, that is to say, the sun after sunset;
and thus the whole religion Egypt became, as M.
of
Pierrot expresses it, a " solar drama "^ that is to say, it

;
was entirely concentrated in the struggle of light against
darkness, and, by extension, of life against death. The

luminous gods embark in full strength in the solar boat,
''
the good boat of thousands of years." They are joined
thereby the souls of the just, thus assimilated to Osiris.
One Horus places himself at the helm, another at the
prow, with couched spear ; the oars are grasped by the

Akhimu Urdu, " who cease not to exist," and the
Akhimu Soku, "who are never destroyed." The crew,
however, quit the luminous fields of heaven to pene-
trate the darksome region of the world below. At
the sixth hour of the night begins the daily fight in
which the serpent Apap, with all his army of monsters,
strives to arrest the course of the boat. But the gods

1 Sayce, Hihhert Lectures for 1887, p. 205.
'^
Paul Pierret, Le Pantheon Agijptien, Paris, 1881, p. xv.
160 IV. DUALISM.
of liglit overcome all obstacles. Ea triumphs. '"'Apap is

slain." And therefore the sun rises again, with renewed
lustre, on the horizon of grateful Egypt.^ The same
dualism re-appears, in a quasi-historical form, in the
myth of Osiris as told by Herodotus, and as read, with
its anthropomorphic traits still further emphasized, on
the inscriptions of the temple of Edfu.^
You are aware of the importance assumed in the wor-
ship of the Syro-phoenicians, by the scenic representa-
tions which reproduced the passion of a deity alternately
slain and resuscitated. In Phrygia, it was Attis, muti-
lated by the jealousy of Cybele, and then transformed

into the pine with evergreen foliage, who wakes from
his winter slumber at the beginning of the spring. At
Byblos, it was Adonis, slain by a wild boar and recalled
to life by the enamoured Astarte. If we may judge
by the dates at which the feast of his death and resur-
rection were respectively celebrated, Adonis (amongst
those Syrian populations who suffer most from the
parching sun) represents the spring sky, slain by the
sun when the heaven grows scorching, and born again
at the approach of autumn, when pregnant nature re -finds
her lost lover.^
^ G. Maspero, Hisloire Aiicienne des peuples de V Orient, Paris,

1886, pp. 280 sqq.
2 H. Brugsch, Die Sage von der gefliigelten Sonnenscheihe, in tho
Ahhandlungen der Koniglichen Gesellschaft der Wissenscliaften zu

Gottingen (vol. xiv.). Historisch Philologische Classe, Gottingeii,
1869, pp. 173—236.
^ C. P. Tiele, Histoire comparee des anciennes religiotis de VEgypte et
des peuples Semitiques, book iii. chap. iv. La religion de Gebal oti Byblos,
pp. 291—298.
IV. DUALISM. IGl
Amongst the Greeks, the '' mysteries" clearly betray

the influence of Oriental religions ; but umler the smiling
climate of Hellas the Aryan genius had conceived a
view of the universe too serene and harmonious to fall in
with the tragic emotions of nature-worship. It chose
rather to relegate the fight with the chaotic forces of

nature to the origin of things. The Titans were enchained
once for all in their dark dungeons, and, but for the
menacing predictions of a Prometheus, there would be
nothing left to trouble the Olympian quiet of Zeus. But
when the Greek religion had overstepped its frontiers, it
finally took a more sombre tone, and under the influence

of theories of emanation the Sdifxcov^ which had once simply
meant spirit —sometimes even the good genius of man, as
in the case of Socrates —gradually became a synonym for
an evil power, the demon, whose name Christianity took,

in this new. signification, and applied it to the whole body
of pagan divinities.
Amongst the Germans, also, it is easy to see how
dualism became accentuated as religion developed. The
giants of the frost, the wolf Fenris, the serpent Nidhugr
gnawing the roots of the cosmic tree, were always evil
spirits ; but the organization of the army of darkness and

the frimas is not complete until Eel and Loki have placed
themselves at its head to leîd it to the attack of the
^sir. Iôw Hel and Loki were originally conceived

with less antipathetic traits. Prof. Tiele points out that
as we ascend towards a remoter antiquity, Hel, the
personification of twiliglit, occupies an ever loftier posi-
tion, though she sank at last into the goddess that

enchains the dead and terrifies the living. As to Loki,
M
162 IV. DUALISM.
the god of fire, he was at first the brother and com-

panion of Odin ; nay, he rendered signal services to the
gods in their fight with the giants; bnt subsequently
he was looked upon as the father of the evil powers,
and it is he who strips the goddess of earth of her

adornments, who robs Thor of his fertilizing hammer,
and causes the death of Balder, the beneficent sun.^
With the Hindus, dualism takes a yet more important
place both in worship and in mythology. They are never
weary of telling how the Maruts, Indra, Agni, and Vishnu,
waged war with the serpent Ahi —alternately named
Yritra (the enveloper), Cushna (the parcher), and Dasa
(the slayer) — to deliver the celestial cows or spouses,
that is to say, the waters held captive in the caverns
of the clouds. Elsewhere it is the fire, the dawn, or the
sun, whose fate is the stake of the battle. The history
of the asuras, or rather of the word which serves to
designate these personified evil influences, bears striking
evidence to the progress, or, if you will, the systcmatiza-
tion of Hindu dualism, as mythology developed. At first
the term asitra (being or spirit) is applied indifferently

to good and evil beings. In fact, Yaruna himself is the
Asura par excellence in the Yedas. On the other hand,
the devas of the Yedic songs sometimes play the part of
demons in retaining the light or the water for them-
selves.^ It is in the brahmanas and the puranas, com-
positions of a later date, that the dualism attains its
1 C. P. Tielo, OuUines of the History of Religions, § 118, pp. 194, 195.
2 Atel Bergaigne, Religion Vedique d'aprh les hymnes du Rig-

Veda, three vols,, Paris, 1878—1883, vol. iii. pp. 78, 79. Vol. xxxvi.
of the Bihliotheque de I'Scole des hautes etudes, Paris.
—
IV. DUALISM, 163
height, and the devas are represented on the one side,

and the asuras on the other, as fighting for the possession
of the amrita^ the heavenly water which assures fertility

i
to the earth and immortality to living beings,
Whether Zoroastrianism be attributed to a natural

evolution of the old Indo-Iranian religion, or to a violent
reaction against the nature- worship of which we find the
earliest traces in the Vedas, it is certain in any case that

there too we find a dualism which must have strengthened
greatly after the separation of the two peoples. Indeed,
we may safely say that it has not been carried out more
completely in any known religion. Opposed to Ormuzd,
and the superhuman beings grouped around him to main-
tain all that is good in the world, we
Ahriman and find
his daevas, whose object is absolutely to thwart the work

of the Omniscient Lord, whether by destroying what he
makes, or by producing, in their turn, counter creations.
Here the opposition is complete. Not only have we two
hierarchies, exactly corresponding to each other, but the
correspondence extends to all their respective acts ; and
all the details of nature are divided between the two
powers. Nothing has a mixed, neutral, or equivocal
character. Everything that does not come from Ormuzd
proceeds from Ahriman. If a being or a phenomenon has
no actual counterpart in the antagonistic forces of nature,
the blank is filled up by a process of abstraction. This

^ ]\Ioor, in his Hindu Pantheon, reproduces a picture of an episode
introduced into the Mahahliarata, representing the churning of the
ocean, for the recovery of the beverage of immortaHty, by means of the
mountain Mandara. The serpent Vasuki girds the mountain as a cord,

and one end is pulled by the devas and the other by the asuras.
Edward Moor, The Hindu Pantheon, London, 1810, p. 182 and plate 49.
M 2
^
1G4 IV. DUALISM.
exj^lains tlie singular conglomeration of abstract genii

and deities of nature which characterizes the religious
system of the Persians.
Even the Jewish religion attests, in the course of its
develoi^ment, the growing accentuation of dualism. In
early times, no superhuman being was recognized in
opposition to Yahveh. Beyond the national deity and
the gods of foreign peojDles, we find little more than
spirits subordinate to the supreme God, such as angels,
seraj)liim, cherubim, and those bene-elohim, or sons of
God, whom the book of Job represents as coming from
time to time to pay their court to the Eternal. Even
Satan was but a kind of public minister, an inspector, or
rather agent iirovocateur^ who had no power to torment or
tempt save by permission of his master. It is only quite
at a late period that we find the revolted angels organizing
themselves into an army of darkness under the guidance
of Satan, to struggle against the soldiery of heaven under
the direction of Yahveh ; and we may even ask whether
tliis phenomenon, when it does appear, is not due to the
influence of Iranian demonology. "We see Yahveh sur-
rounded by six archangels, like Aliura Mazda with his
Amesha ^pentas ; and, as in Iranian mythology, the intro-
duction of evil and death into the world becomes the work
of the rebel spirits.
You will observe that though dualism becomes more

pronounced as its organization is perfected, yet it never
goes the length of setting the powers of good and the
1 Compare James Darmesteter, Onnazd et Ahriman, Paris, 1877,

part ii. chap. vi. pp. 242 — 314. Vol. xxix. of the Blhlwthhque de
rccnle des haufes etudes, Paris.
IV. DUALISM. 165
powers of evil on a footing of absolute equality, still
less of admitting the possibility of the final triumph

of evil. Even in the religion of the Persians, Ahura
Mazda is anterior to Ahriman and will survive him.
Three thousand years after Zoroaster, the evil spirits
will be destroyed, while the just will behold the defini-
tive kingdom of the Omniscient Lord, in which disease
and evil will be banished for ever from nature.
Conception of This Confidence in the permanence, the
the cosmic
j-g^^rn,' or the triumph
^
of the forces that
order, and
idea of laiv.
have assured the actual development of the
world, finally took the shape of the conception of law,
that is to say, of a natural order sustained by the super-

human powers.
Conceive, if you can, the mental state of infantine
peoples beginning to reflect on the great phenomena of
nature. For them, everything is chance, caprice, or, at
the outside, mere habit. They are never sure that the
day once gone will re-appear on the morrow, or that

the summer will return after the winter. If the sun
returns in the spring from his retreat, if the moon re-
assumes her lost form, month by month, if the rain
puts an end to the drought, if the wind is appeased,

it is these phenomena themselves who will it so ; but
who shall say whether they will always be of the same
mind ?
The Abipones, who believe that their race sprang
from the constellation of the Pleiades, suppose that when
it descends below the horizon, at the approach of summer,
their grandfather is sick ; and they celebrate his re-ap-
;
166 IV. DUALISM.
pearance in autumn with great demonstrations of joy."^

Here we find the explanation of the festivals cele-
brated by all the ancient peoples in connection with
the re -birth of the sun at the winter solstice, still
perpetuated in the popular traditions of Christmas in

Euroj)e.
But are we sure that the being who re-appears at
intervals is always the same ? The Bechuanas of Southern
Africa do not say that the sun sets, but that he dies.^
The French term of Noel takes us back to the diesnatalis
soils invicti of Pagan antiquity to an epoch, that is, in —
which men must have believed that the sun was re-born
each year. And to this day we speak of ''
new moons "
in witness of the times when it was supposed that moons
grcAV old and died.^ Certain tribes of Australia declare
that the sun kills the moon every month. The Bassutos
have got beyond this stage, for they say that the sun
chases the moon every month and eats her, little by little
but she is clever enough to escape him when she is
reduced to a mere thread, and so gradually recovers her
former shape. ^ Certain favoured peoples however, by
comparing repeated observations, gradually discovered
1 Martinus Dobrizlioffer, Historia de AhipuniMs, Vienna, 1784,

vol. ii. p. 77.
2 Max Muller, Chips from a German Workshop, vol. ii. p. 83.

3 In the Walloon provinces of Belgium they still tell the children
that the stars are made out of bits of the old moow^.—QuesUonnaire
de Folklore xoallon, Liege, 1890, p. 87.
^ Albert Keville, Religions des p)eup)les 7ion-civilises, vol. i. p. 143,

and vol ii. p. 151.
IV. DUALISM. 167
that the days and the seasons succeed each other at regu-
lar intervals; that the sun, moon, and stars re-appear
periodically at the same points of the horizon, and inva-
riably traverse the same course ; that the storm always
comes to put an end to the drought, and the blue sky
replaces the clouds. This constancy at last re-assured
mankind. They said that the phenomena which acted

thus must have their own superior reasons for doing so,
drawn either from an unalterable affection for earthly
creatures, or from the necessities of their own existence.

Thus men were led by an act of faith, in which religion
anticipated science, to regard the course of celestial
phenomena as- a path traced out once for all. Then
was born in the human spirit the first idea of a natural
order, in which the past is a guarantee of the future. It
is this " immutable way " which the Aryans of Indip
called Eita ;
^ the Persians, Asha ; ^ the Chinese, Tao or
Tien ; ^ the Egyptians, the Ma or Maat.*
1 Max Miiller, Hihhert Lectures for 1878, p. 237.
James Darmesteter, Onnazd et AJmman, parti, chap. i. §§ 11 17,

2
—
pp. 13 —
18. M. Darmesteter points out that the Persian Asha, like
the Hindu Rita, bears the two-fold signification of the cosmic order
and the liturgical order, whence he concludes that the idea is anterior
to the separation of the Indo-lranians. Prof. Max Miiller, mounting
still higher, attempts to prove that it had its origin before the forma-
tion of the Indo-European languages.
2 Albert Reville, La Religion cJnnoise, Paris, 1889, pp. 102, 120,

137, 138. Ch. de Harlez, Les Religions de la Chine, Leipzig, 1891,
p. 47.
* Le Page Renouf, Hihhert Lectures for 1879, pp. 119 sqq. P. Pierret,
Pantheon egxjiMen, p. 20. Eugene Grebaut, Hijmne a Ammon-Ra,
Paris, 1873, p. xix., in the Bibliotheque de I'ecole dcs hautes etudes.
168 IV. DUALISM. .
-n n. i-.i
Results of the
We may *'
easily imas;ine
'' ^ what new light
^
belief in a this idea — concrete and ^
quasi-material as
_ _
it
natural order.
was —must at once have thrown upon the
,
spectacle of the universe. Certainly it alone made the

development of science possible. The explanation of
phenomena by the capricious intervention of superhuman
beings gives so easy a solution, that it discourages all
attempts to inquire into the natural causes of events,

as we see clearly enough from the uncivilized peoples
of our own time. But when, instead of having to deal
-with fantastic and arbitrary beings, man believes in
superhuman agencies who govern the world according
to laws,- he will no longer hesitate to search for these
laws by a rational study of the facts, and he will even

be stimulated in such a course by the thought that
he will thus gain a new means of bringing the divine
wisdom and power into relief. The pursuit of science
will become a conscious act of religion.
Doubtless the natural order, as conceived at that epoch,
only applies to the most regular phenomena, and, on the
other hand, includes a number of supposed facts which
we regard as absurd and impossible. Moreover, it is
still admitted that this order may be violated, within

certain limits, by the. caprice or passion from which the
gods are not yet entirely free. But this arbitrary ele-
ment is more and more regarded as exceptional and "
anomalous and the very fact of its being set in opposi-

;
tion to the normal course of affairs shows the existence

of a well-established belief in that order itself, and at
the same time marks the beginning of a struggle in the
human mind, which will not end until the supernatural,
IV. DUALISM. 169
or rather the anti-natural (which must not he confounded

with the supra-sensible), has been banished from the
reason and the conscience.
,,,.,
Widening
. ^
oi
Nevertheless we must not conclude that
the religious the elasticity of the religious sentiment has
horizon. _ _ , ^ . , ,
been weakened by this gradual suppression

of the arbitrary element. It is, indeed, evident at a
glance that the conception of a natural order must result
in restraining within ever narrower limits the indepen-
dence of the personified phenomena, and even of the
gods which rule them. ''
Surya," says a Yedic hymn,
" does not transgress the places indicated;"^ and Hera-
clitus formulates the same thought with respect to Helios.
But we must is regarded
note that this very order itself
as the work of personal agents, to whom a veneration
intensified by the increased grandeur of their functions
is straightway directed. In a word, the problem of the
Author of things does but shift its ground.
Wlio has esta- ^^ ^^^6 s®^^ '^^^^ the Incas worshipped

bhshed the
order of
^j^ ^^^ '
whom thovj
resjarded
o as their father
nature ? and first legislator ; yet we are told that the
Inca Yupanqui, who lived shortly before the Spanish

conquest, once said : "If [the sun] was a living thing,
he would become tired as we do; and if he was free, he
would visit other parts of the heaven which he never
reaches. He is like a tethered beast that always makes
the same round, or like the dart which goes where it is
sent, and not where it wishes." And a little later, the

Inca Huyana Capac is said to have remarked to the
high-priest at a great festival of the sun at Cuzco: "Our
1 Rig-Veda, ill. 30. 12.
170 IV. DUALISM.
father the Sun must have another Lord more powerful

than himself, who orders him to make this journey day
by day, without resting." ^
One may well doubt whether these words have not

been put into the mouths of the Incas in order to make
them precursors of Christianity, but the naive reasoning
them re-appears amongst many other peoples.
attributed to
" Who," asks the Zend-Avesta, " was from the beginning
the father of the pure world? Who has made a path
for the sun and for the stars ? Who makes the moon to
increase and to decrease ?"2
This question has been answered in divers ways. The
simplest is to say that each celestial body is directed by
its own deity. The Polynesians declare that the sun
used to follow a capricious course, but the sun-god Maui
caught him in a kind of lassoo which compelled him
thenceforth, in spite of his struggles and cries, to remain
above the horizon long enough to allow man to pursue
his occujâtions. ^ Not so many centuries ago, in Europe
itself, a genius was jDlaced within each planet to direct it
through space as a kind of pilot. As soon, however, as

the regular phenomena which in their entirety constitute
the cosmic order have been brought into relations one
with another, that cosmic order itself will come to be
regarded either as the movement proper to the personi-
^ Garcilasso do la Vega, Commentarios Reales (first part), Lisbon,
1609, book viii. and book ix. cliap. x. Translated by

chap, viii.,
Clements R. Markliam, London, 1869 " Hakluyt Society," pp. 354,

:
446.
2 See Max Miiller, Science of Religion, London, 1873, p. 240.
3 Melusine, vol. i. (1878), p. 13.

^
IV. DUALISM. 171
fied firmament, wliicli serves as their theatre, or as the
result of an impulse due to the god who governs the sum

of the celestial phenomena. The first of these two notions
prevailed in the ancient religion of the Chinese, in which
the majestic succession of the cosmic phenomena is re-
garded as the immediate manifestation of the celestial
activity. The second prevailed in the Semitic religions,

particularly in that of the Israelites, in which the book
of Genesis makes the Eternal say, " Let there be lights
in the expanse of heaven to part the day from the night,
and to serve as signs of days, seasons and years.'
Amongst the Chaldeans, it is Bel who fixes the stars,
and establishes the places of the planets and the sun,

"that they might know their bonds, that they might
not err, that they might not go astray in any way.''^
Among the Egyptians, it is Ptah-Ptanen who prescribes
to heaven and earth the path which they transgress not.^
With the Persians, it is of course Ahura Mazda who
takes this part.
The two conceptions are in a certain way nnited in
the Yedas, where we are sometimes told that the un-
shaken laws rest on Yaruna as upon a rock ; and some-
times this same god is represented as the author, the
guardian, and the guide of the Eita :
"
Yaruna has laid
down the conrse of the sun, he has thrown out the im-
petuous torrents of the rivers, and he has hollowed the
^ Fifth tablet of the creation story. Apud Sayce, Hibhert Lectures

for 1887, p. 389.
2 Le Pago Renouf, Hibhert Lectures for 1879, p. 223.

172 IV. DUALISM.
great courses in which flow in seemly order the loosened

flood of the days."i
Finally, the natural order may be personified under the

features of an abstract deity —the Gathu, the " Broad
Way," which amongst the Hindus as one of the
figures
deities of the morning; the Eita itself; the Asha Yahista,
the genius of purity, or rather of regularity, amongst the
Persians ; the goddess Ma, the Egyptian personification
of truth, that is to say, conformity to the reality ;
per-
haps the Moira of the Greeks, to say nothing of Nomos,
their personification of law, and the Erynnyes, those
daughters of Zeus and of justice, who not only forbid
the sun to exceed his orbit, but likewise refuse to allow
the horse of Achilles to speak the language of men.^
These abstract personalities may maintain themselves
against the gods in cases where the latter retain, from
their mythological past, a capricious or arbitrary cha-
racter. In such cases, the ancient deities will either be
gradually relegated to the background by this new con-
ception of the superb aman power, or else their wills will
be gradually assimilated to the irrevocable decrees of the
new power, which is summoned to rule the destinies of
the universe. In China, Taoism, degraded as it now is
by vulgar superstitions, originally defined the Tao as

having existed even before the deity,^ whereas the official
religion of the empire sees in the order of nature the will

of heaven itself. In Egypt, we learn from the texts that
1 Rig-Veda, vii. 87. 1. 2 m^^^^ îx. 418.

2 Ch. Jg Harlez, Les Religions de la CIrine, Leipzig, pp. 174 sq.
—
IV. DUALISM. 173
Ma is sometimes called Lady of the Heaven and Euler of

the World, who ''knows no lord or master;""^ whilst
other passages, perhaps more faithful to the prevailing
conception, declare of Osiris : "He maintains order in

the universe and makes the son succeed the father."
Whilst the Brahmans, as we have just seen, attribute
the creation of the Eita to Yaruna, Buddhism recognizes

nothing in the universe but the action of the Karma^ the
residue of acts, that is to say, the action of effects and
causes. In the Buddhist writings, Qakra, the chief of
the thirty-three gods who inhabited the Yedic Olympus,
declares his inability to act in opposition to the conse-
quences of the Karma.2 So, too, with the Greeks, Moira
is superior even to Zeus; but the opposition pales in
proportion as the will of the lord of Olympus comes into
more constant harmony with the requirements of uni-
versal order, until the time is reached when Cleanthes

can exclaim :
" Oh Zeus ! in conformity to law dost thou
conduct all things."^
1 Le Page Eenouf, mUnvt Lectures for 1879, p. 122. M. Eugene

Grebaut notes, rightly enough, that this conception of the Truth as a
supreme law of the universe is anterior and superior to monotheism in
Egypt. Indeed, when once it becomes the fountlation of the wliole
tlieodicy and of religion itself, it phices the relations of the faithful to
the su[)erhuman world on bases independent of the questions of pan-
tlieism, dualism, and creation properly so called. Hymne a Amnion
Ea, Paris, 1875, p. xix,
- S. Beal, in lieligious Si/ste7ns of the World, 1890, p. 84.
^ Stoboeus, Physica, bk. i. c. ii. § 12. From Homeric times down-

wards, M. Jules Girard points out a tendency to make the gods, in
virtue of their very being, the representatives of stability, endurance,
fixed principles, obvious or hidd6n laws of the universe. — Jules
Girard, Le sentiment religieux en Greco cVHomere a Eschyle, second
174 IV. DUALISM.
We are now in a position to judge whether this assimi-

lation of the cosmic to the divine order —the reign of law
in the whole series of observable facts — implies, as certain
superficial thinkers declare, the first step towards atheism.
On the contrary, it surely leads to the recognition of the

rational principle in the universe. The Vedic poet well
understood this when he cried: " The sun and the moon
move in regular succession in order that we may believe,
Indra !"i Is it not in the same sense that we must
take the words of the Psalmist, "The heavens declare the
glory of God"? " It is because of law that we believe
in the gods," says Euripides ;2 and the Egyptians went
further still in declaring that "the gods live by Maat."^
What lessons have we here for those who still continue
to require some violation of the natural laws as a proof
of the omnipotence and even the existence of God ! How
much more truly was Kant on the line of religious pro-
gress—nay, the stream our ancient Indo-European

in of
tradition — when he urged us seek that proof in the to
spectacle of the heavens and in the voice of conscience,
rather than in the miracles of Joshua stopping the sun,
or Jesus raising the dead !
The conception of universal order thus formulated,

however, implies yet another step of progress, viz. the
assimilation of the divine order not only to the cosmic
but also to the moral order.
edition, Paris, 1879, p. 52. Pindar had already sung, No/xos 6 ttuVtwv
/3acrtAeus Oi/ariov re Kal ddavdrojv, cited by Plato, Gorgias, § 87.
1 Rijj-Veda,i. 102, 2.
vojxw yap rovs Oeov'i riyovjieOa, — Henilxi, 800.

^ Le Page Eenouf, Ojy. cit. p. 120.
—
IV. DUALISM. 175
(ii.) The Struggle for Good.
Immorality of ôw Can peoples professing relatively ad-

the myths, yanced views as to the nature and functions
of the deity —the Hindoos and Greeks, for example
accept accounts of their gods as absurd and gross as
the stories of their respective mythologies are? And,
moreover, how could peoples whose morals were so rela-
tively pure as those of the Germans attribute vices and
even crimes to their gods at which they would have
blushed themselves? The views developed in the pre-
ceding Lectures have already put us in a position to
give a partial answer to the question. Such facts as the
destruction of the twilight by the sun^ the removal of

the clouds by the wind, the apparent union of the heaven
with the atmosphere, the earth, the clouds, or the dawn
have no immoral character in themselves, even when
respectively called parricide, theft, or adultery ; but
they quite change their character when the beings to
whom they are attributed are no longer looked upon as
heavenly bodies and as natural objects (whether per-
sonified or not), but are regarded as heroes, of a human
or a quasi-human physiognomy, living in a society similar
to that of man.
This explanation presented itself to the minds of the
ancients. Thus in the sixth century before our era,
Theagenes of E-hegium taught that the wars of the gods
signified the conflict of the elements. Socrates explained
that if Orithyia was carried away by Boreas, it simply
meant that she had been hurled from the rocks by the
north wind. And, in like manner, a Hindu common-
176 IV. DUALISM.
tator, Kumarila, explains the scandalous chronicle of the

Yedic gods as follows: " It is fabled that Prajapati, the
Lord of Creation, did violence to his daughter. But what

does it riiean ? Prajapati, the Lord of Creation, is a name
of the sun His daughter Ushas is the dawn. And

when it is said that he was in love with her, this only
means that, at sunrise, the sun runs after the dawn, the
dawn being at the same time called the daughter of the
sun, because she rises when he approaches. In the same

manner, if it is said that Indra was the seducer of Ahalya,
this does not imply that the god Indra committed such a
crime ; but Indra means the sun, and Ahalya .... the
night ; and, as the night is seduced and ruined by the
sun of the morning, therefore is Indra called the para-
mour of Ahalya."^
Numbers of myths, however, and especially mythic
episodes, do not lend themselves so easily to this treat-
ment as simple metaphors. When interpretations from
nature have done what they can towards explaining

mythology, we still have a residuum which represents
the free play of popular fancy. Why has imagination-
here, too, allowed itself so free a course in directions
which reason and morals, as we imderstand them, would
have prohibited? The anthropological school explains
this anomaly by throwing back the formation of the myths

to an epoch at which their authors were still at the
intellectual and moral level of the savages of to-day.
Mr, Andrew Lang has contributed much to the illustra-
tion of this theory by comparing the classical mythologies
1 See Max ]MUller, Ilistonj of Ancient SansJa- it Literature, LoikIoii,

1859, pp. 529 s(j[.
IV. DUALISM. 177
with the traditions of uncivilized peoples in both hemi-

spheres.i We cannot insist too often on the point that
the god of the savage is simply an idealized chief or
sorcerer. Why should he not comport himself as the
worshij)per supposes a chief or sorcerer endowed with
increased faculties would do ? But if this theory
accounts for the absurdity and the crudity which make
the more cultivated nations blush for their mythology,
it does not explain why the authors of the myths have
ascribed acts to their deities which they themselves would
regard as blameworthy or degrading. The only possible
explanation is, that at first morals had no influence
whatever on the conception formed of the gods. Ethics
and religion were absolutely independent of each other.
Original inde- I ^m not uow to discuss ethical origins.
morriâiKf Whatever theory we profess in this matter,

religion,
q^q f^ct is certain, namely, that even amongst
the most primitive peoples the right of the strongest is
limited by certain obligations that custom has conse-

crated, and the violation of which at any rate involves
public disfavour, and arouses in the mind of the victim
a sense of injustice. Indeed, were this not so, no society
at all could exist beyond the limits of the family, in
which possibly parental authority might suffice to main-
tain the social ties. No doubt peoples differ much in
their definitions of good and evil, but they all admit the
distinction itself, and declare that we must do good and
shun evil.
You will observe that this has nothing to do with the

belief in superhuman beings, whose support, if not the
^ See, especially, his Myth, Ritual and Relirjion, London, 1887, 2 vols,
N
178 IV. DUALISM.
result of pure caprice, is proportioned to the generosity

with which they are treated or the skill with which tbey
are served.
Even groups which have already reached the first stage
of polytheism, such as the ancient Mexicans, the Poly-
nesians, or the Shintoists of Japan, show no trace as yet
of a connection between religion and morals. We must
not be misled by the prayers in which the worshipper im-
plores pardon for his sins, and prays, often in very exalted
terms, that the stain may be taken from him. '' From a
distance," says a Japanese prayer, ''
I reverently worship
with awe before Ameno Mi-hashira and Kunino Mi-
hashira (the god and goddess of wind), .... I say with
awe, Deign to bless me by correcting the unwilling
faults which, heard and seen by you, I have committed."^
Yet the very author who translates this prayer adds that
Shintoism does not bear so much as a trace of an ethical
code.
In the ancient Chaldean civilization it hardly seems
that men's moral conduct influenced their relations with
the gods in any way, and yet their religious literature
contains hymns which M. Lenormant rightly describes as
penitential psalms. ''
Oh Lord," cries the worshipper of
Bel or Istar, " my sins are many, my transgressions are
great! . . . The sin that I sinned I knew not. The
transgression I committed I knew not. . . . The
Lord in the wrath of his heart has regarded me ; God in
the fierceness of his heart has revealed himself to me.
. . . Lord, destroy not thy servant ! When cast
^ Isabella Bird, Shiniowm, in Religious Systems of the World,

London, 1890/ pp. 93, 98.
IV. DUALISM. 179
into the water of the ocean, take his hand. The sins I
have sinned, turn to a blessing. The transgressions I
have committed, may the wind carry away. Strip off my
manifold wickednesses as a garment."^ But as soon as
we look below the surface, we see that these despairing
cries of a conscience a prey to the agonies of remorse,
refer to faults committed, not against men, but against
the gods, by ritual omissions or legal impurities some-
times contracted by the worshipper even without his
knowledge.
First entry of Nevertheless, religion must have exercised
^sôcial re"a-°
^ favourable influence on the consolidation
tions.
of social relations from the first. To becrin
with, it developed the spirit of subordination, prevented
the scattering of the tribe, and formed a link between
successive generations ; and in the next place, it favoured
the sacrifice of a direct and immediate satisfaction to a
greater but more distant and indirect good.
The oath. The transition from the purely interested
intervention of the superhuman beings in the affairs of
men to the exercise of their moral or judicial functions,
may perhaps be found in their anxiety to make the oath
respected. In general, the spirits are indifferent enough
to the lies which their worshippers tell one another ; but
the latter, in order to inspire confidence in their pro-
mises, often have occasion to close the possibility of
breaking their word with impunity against themselves.
This object may be secured by giving a pledge, or more
simply by calling upon the gods, and especially the most
powerful or the most dreaded of them, as witnesses to
^ Sayce, Ilibhcrt Lectures for 1887, pp. 3o0, 351.
n2
—
180 IV. DUALISM.
the promise ; so that if either of the parties breaks his

engagement, the divinity in question may feel himself
personally aiJected, and may therefore take vengeance.^
Amongst the Greeks, the importance of the oath varied
with that of the deities invoked.^ The most solemn

were those made in the name of the Eiimenides or of
Zeus Horkios. Every oath implies a promise made to the
deity, and we know with what rigour Yahveh himself

exacted the accomplishment of vows, however imprudent,
as, for instance, that of Jephtha. Now, when the gods
have thus been made the champions of truth on solemn
occasions, an easy transition leads to their being supposed
to love the truth for its own sake, and to desire its pre-
valence on all occasions.
The ordeal. Another institution in which the deity

began to assume the character of a justiciary power is
found in the "Judgments of God" in which the super-

human beings sometimes punished the culprit and some-
times simply helped in his detection.
Every one knows of the ordeals of the Middle Ages in
which the accused had to submit to the test of fire or
. water. Some of these customs apparently go back to the
common era of the Indo-European races, since traces
of them are found in the code of Manu, whereas it

is amongst the Germans that we probably find the
^ The bare fact of lieing in the presence of a deity in itself shows
want of respect. Mrs. Murray Ainsley tells us that in certain parts of

India the merchants refuse to take up their positions under a pipal
tree, because, if they did, they could not ask more than the right price
for their wares, Revue des traditions populaires, Jan. 1889, p. 19.
2 A. INIaury, Religion de la Grece antique, 3 vols, Paris, 1857,

vol. ii. p. 167.
;
IV. DUALISM. ISl
earliest explanation of them. For in ancient Germany

their efficacy is attributed, not to the intervention of
a god from outside, but to the inherent sentiments of
the personified element. Thus, if the culprit could not
sink in the water, it was because it rejected him ; and the
fire, of its own accord, spared the innocent victim who
trusted it, and threw himself into the flames or walked
upon burning torches. It is very significant that analo-
gous customs are found wherever some kind of social
justice is beginning to germinate — for instance, amongst

the Xegroes, the Malagassy, the Polynesians, the Eed-
skius, and others. Under the kinglets of pagan Africa, the
ordeal generally consists in drinking a poisonous draught
and here, with the complicity of the sorcerer charged
with the preparation of the drink, it often constitutes the
whole machinery of government.
M. Albert Reville represents the ordeal as a proof
that the savage thinks the spirits of justice and truth
superior to those of evil and error ;
^ but I cannot help
asking whether this is not forcing moral dualism pre-
maturely to the front ere the corresponding stage of
religious development has been reached, and I am
tempted to regard it as simply a tribute to the keener
sight and intellect of the superhuman beings, who are
supposed to be more capable than man of discovering
the authors of certain crimes. To whom, indeed, can the
savage turn for help in such investigations better than
to the powers supposed to be acquainted with the past
and the future ? Lieutenant Becker once saw an idol at
Boma, in East Africa, with several heads. When he
^ Religions dps jicv pics non-niilisi's, vol, i. p. 103.
182 IV. DUALISM.
asked the meaning of this polycephaly, he was told

that it enabled the god the better to discover criminals.^
At any rate, it is certain that the gods thus employed
as informers or detectives naturally become the terror
of criminals, and finally get the reputation of hating

crime itself.
Crimes against Again, when a man believes in the gods

the gods of
q£ ^|-^g community, he cannot but allow that
the commu- -^ '
nity- their protection extends to all the members

of the tribe, and consequently that they will insist on
the rights of his neighbour being respected as much as
his own. Yet more : there are certain crimes which
directly affect the interests, if not the very existence, of
the tribe itself, such as treason, breach of customs, and
so on. The repression of such attempts naturally con-
cerns the gods of the community, and all the more so
because they are regarded as the authors of the violated
custom, and the organizers of the threatened society;
and this is actually the case even amongst populations
as backward as the Araucans, the Andamans, and the
Australians.
Conception of
Finally, the time comes when the idea of
a moral order Iq^w alreadv applied to those phenomena
on the model / _ / ^
•
. , .
of the cosmic which in virtuo of their periodicity or per-

manence ou(]!ht to recur, is extended to all
acts imposed by the voice of conscience which otc^ht to
be accomplished by men. Hence the assimilation of the

course which man is bound to follow in his conduct, to
the course which the celestial bodies ought to follow in
their movements. "Malefactors," says the Eig-Yeda,
^ La vie en A/rique, vol. ii. p. 304.

IV. DUALISM. 183
''do not follow the path of the Eita."i Even in our
own language, such terms as "regularity," "rectitude,"

"right," and "righteousness," imply that the moral
idea which they express was at first accepted in a phy-
sical sense. Amongst ourselves, as in ancient Egypt, to
respect the prescriptions of custom or of morals is still
translated into conforming with the rule. To abide by the

principles of justice is for us, as for the poets of the Kig-
Yeda, to follow the right path.

Nowhere was this assimilation of the moral and the
cosmic order pushed so far as in the ancient religion of
China. Theand even the whole system of
entire ritual,
ethics, rests upon the idea that, since the heaven moves
by fixed rules, man must do the same and on the other ;
side it is admitted that the crimes of man re-act almost
fatally upon the course of nature, by releasing irregular
phenomena or evil spirits, who in their turn intervene
to punish man. In the Kia-iii, Confucius lays it fiow^n
that if the people cease to follow Tao, the heaven in its
turn will disturb the cosmic order ;2 and twenty-seven

centuries afterwards, in 1731, we find the same theory
embodied in a proclamation addressed by the emperor
Yong-Tcheng to his people after a long drought. " Jus-
tice," it says, "originally aroused by heaven and man,

answers more swiftly than the echo. The floods and
droughts or disasters which trouble all the earth come
from the acts of man." ^
^ Rig-Veda, ix. 73, 6.
2 J, Ilappel, La Religion de Vancien empire chinois, in the Revue
de riiistoire des religions, vol. iv. 1881, p. 264.
3 De Harlez, Les croyances des premiers Chinois, Bruxelles, 1888,
p. 55 ; vol. xli. of the octavo series of Memoires of the " Koyal
Academy" of Belgium,
184 IV. DUALISM.
Naturally, it is the gods charged with

Superhuman
champions maintaining physical order who are likewise
<^ i.
and opjônents .j
of the moral entrusted with the maintenance of moral

order ; and their importance increases in pro-
portion to their task. They are, however, often aided by
special deities, particularly amongst the peoples who deify
abstract qualities and moral virtues. These virtues some-
times act as inspirers of man, and sometimes as avengers
of the offences that particularly concern them respec-
tively.
"Justice," says Hesiod, "is the virgin daughter of

Zeus, honoured and revered by the gods who hold
Olympus. Should any outrage her, slighting her by
crooked doings, straightway she takes her seat by Zeus,
the son of Kronos, and chants of the evil mind of men,
that the people may be punished." ^ Such, too, was the
part taken by Ma amongst the Egyptians ; for it is she
Avhom we see introducing the departed to the tribunal of
Osiris and acting as assessor at their judgment. Her

image is even represented as a weight in one scale of the
balance, the other being occupied by the heart of the
deceased. 2 The Persians were impelled to deify the moral
qualities of man, and to jDlace them in the ranks of Ahura-
Mazda's army. We need only mention the Good Mind,
the Best Purity, the Desired Kingdom, and the like.^
Amongst the Eomans, the virtues constituted a special
class of deities, but they were merely hypostases of more
ancient deities ; that is to say, divine attributes detached
1 WorJiS and Days, 256—261 (254—259).

2 P. Pierret, Pantheon egyptien, Paris, 1881, p. 64.
2 Tiele, Outlinoi of the History of Ancient Religions, p. 168.
IV. DUALISM. 185
for separate personification. Thus, according to Preller,

Fides was attached to Jupiter, Concordia to Yenus,
Pudicitia to Juno, &c.^
By an analogous evolution, it is the spirits in revolt
against the cosmic order which come to be represented
as striving to overturn the moral order. Amongst the
Persians, with whom the conflicts of the Indo-Iranian
nature -worship were transformed into an ethical strug-
gle, we may still recognize in the two conflicting armies
the ancient champions of light and of darkness, or of
the storm, which the Yedas have preserved as personifi-
cations of natural forces.^ Amongst the Jews, in like
manner, the angels of darkness became essentially the
angels of evil. In Egypt, the struggle of Osiris and
Set was originally the myth of death combined with
a solar myth. "Set," says M. Maspero, "represented
material evil; .... but material dualism everywhere
brings moral dualism in its train. Just as Osiris
becomes the Good Being (Unnofir), Set becomes the
Evil Being." ^ Finally, amongst the Teutons, dualism,
at first purely physical, likewise tends to take a moral
turn when Loki, rejected from the ranks of the gods,
has become the head of the armies of evil.^ Thus a kind
of assimilation is established everywhere between the
forces representing light, life, order, truth, justice, on
the one hand, and darkness, death, disorder, falsehood,
1 FveileVjRdmischeMi/tJioIogie, second edition, Berlin, 1865, pp. 622,

623.
~ J. Darmesteter, Onnuzd et Ahrlman, passim.
^ Revue de Vlnsiolre des religions, vol. xix. (1889), p. 24.
4 Tiele, OidUnes, &c., §§ 118, 119, pp. 194—198.

186 •
IV. DUALISM.
and iniquity, on the other. The drama which has hitherto

been confined to nature now embraces the conscience,
and man feels more than ever bound to bring his aid to
the godswho are fighting for the good of the workl.
He who fails in this duty takes sides with the evil
powers, and condemns himself henceforth to share their
fate. The gods withdraw from him the protection
which alone assures the enjoyment of the universal
order, or they even inflict direct punishment on him,
proportioned to his fault. Sometimes they themselves
hurl the thunderbolt at conspicuous criminals, as amongst
the Jews, Greeks, and Hindus; more often they act
through the medium of special agents who personify
punishment. " For the (king's) sake," we read in the
code of Manu, " the Lord formerly created his own son,
Punishment, the protector of all creatures, (an incarnation
of) the law, formed of Brahman's glory." ^ The Greeks
had a whole series of beings representing the celestial
punishments; Nemesis sprung from the union of Zeus
with Themis ; the Poinai, represented by the poets as the
attendants of justice; Ate, dark remorse; the Erinnyes,
who pursued the culprit, and executed the decrees of
Minos. Amongst the Persians and Jews, it was the
spirits of evil who were charged with tormenting the
criminal until the day of the final chastisement.

Meanwhile it was impossible not to note
The robiem
of unpunished that vice sometimes escaped unpunished and
crime.
went unrewarded. The poignant ques-
vu'tue
tion addressed by Job to the Eternal, " Wherefore do
^ Manu, vii. 14, p. 218, in Eiililer's translation, Oxford, 1886.

Vol. XXV. of The Sacred Boolis of the East, edited by Max Miiller.
IV. DUALISM. 187
the wicked live, become old, yea, are miglity in power?"

(Job xxi. 7), appears again on the lips of Theognis
addressed to Zeus :
" How canst thou, son of Saturn,
put the sinner and the just man on the same footing?"^
It is the ever -recurring and terrible problem which
reduces the thinker to the alternative of denying the
omnipotence or the absolute justice of the divinity, and
which has always been the citadel of atheism. " May
neither I nor my son now be just amongst men," cried
Hesiod, " since it is an evil for a man to be just, inas-
much as the unjust shall secure the larger rights. Yet

I do not hold that Zeus, who exults in the thunderbolt,
is closing the account as yet."^
Attempts have been made to explain this anomaly by
saying, with the Chorus in ^schylus, that suffering is a
lesson ; or with Solon, that the children pay the debts of
their father ; or with Confucius and the Prophets, that
the good pay for the evil ; or, finally, with Job, that the
decrees of Providence are inscrutable; but these answers
have never fully satisfied either the reason which seeks
the wherefore of things, or the conscience which revolts
against the idea of throwing upon the innocent the con-
sequences of the sins of others. Thus most peoples have
sought in doctrines of a future life the means of repairing
the evils and the injustices of the present.
The theory At the threshold of our investigations we
""^Sfafter^ foimd man admitting, on the strength of his
death. dream s, not only the continuance of the
human personality after death, but even its posthumous
intervention in the affairs of the survivors. This per-
1 Vv. 377 sq. 2 ]j7,rfo and Days, 270—273 (2G8— 271).
188 IV. DUALISM.
sonality, henceforth conceived as a douUe, sometimes

pictured under traits of an animal, wanders around its
last home and walks among its descendants, joining in

their life and even sharing their repasts. Or perhaps it
re-encases itself in another body. And, on this point,

while allowing due influence to dreams, as suggesting
such transformations, I am not disinclined to believe that
the theory of human re-incarnation often has its origin in
anthropophagy, and that the belief in metempsychosis
may be due to the custom of leaving human bodies to be
consumed by animals.^
Or sometimes the soul was relegated to the tomb in
company with the body, which it still frequented till
it was reduced to dust ; and, by a natural extension,
the peoples who bury their dead conceive them as wan-
dering with their fellows in the deej) caverns of the
subterranean world. In like manner, those who commit
their dead to the waves suppose them to have gone, like
the sun, to a distant land beyond the sea. Finally,
those who practise cremation suppose that the dead
ascend to the heights of heaven with the smoke of the
funeral pyre. Hence insensibly arises the conception of
another world situated under the earth, on a distant
island, on the summit of a mountain, beyond the firma-
ment, or even in the stars, the mysterious abodes to which
almost all peoples despatch their dead to continue the life
of this world.
The word "continue" is strictly in its place, for the
future life is at first represented as a continuation, or
^ On all these points Mr. Herbert Spencer's exposition in chaps, xii.
to XV. of his Socio! ngy, vol, i., is as lucid as it is exhaustive.

IV. DUALISM. 189
rather a copy, of the present existence. Eating and

drinking, hunting and fishing, harvesting and other
work, go on just as in this world, and so do war and
love; although, says the Araucan, "they have no more
children, for they are but souls." ^ In the other world,
every one retains his ancient rank. The Polynesians
believe that the departed are divided into the social
which they respectively belonged in their own
classes to
country. The same belief prevails amongst the Kaffirs,

in Dahomey, and amongst the Indian aborigines. When
he has descended into Hades, Achilles still, apparently,
plays the part of a powerful prince amongst the dead.^
When Eabani goes down to hell, he discovers the great
kings of old still wearing their crowns,^ just as Isaiah
(xiv. 9) represents the kings of the earth sitting on their
thrones in Sheol above the crowd of shades. You are
aware that the Egyptians reproduced all the scenes of
public and private life in the interior paintings of the
tombs, supposing that this would secure their recurrence
for the defunct in the other world.
rp, .
riie luture
,
It often happens that, '
while still modelled
life conceived on the terrestrial life, the future life is con-
as better oi' . „
worse than ccivcd of as uotably worse or better. Some-
the present. ,•
times,
11^11 •
doubtless by an mrerence drawn irom

o ^ o
dreams, it bears the character of a vague, pale, haK-

effaced and miserable copy. Nothing can be more dismal
than the fate of souls in the Hebrew Sheol, the Assyrian
Arali, or the Greek Hades. "A corner in this world
is better than a corner in the world of spirits," say the

- Odyssey, xi. 490. ^ Sayce, O/j. cit. p. 62.
190 IV. DUALISM.
Yorubas of Western
Africa.^ This was also the opinion
of Achilles,who would have preferred to be a slave on
earth rather than king amongst the dead. The Finns

believed in the subterranean region of Tuonela, where
there was a sun, fish, and bears, as on the earth ; but
the luminary was paler, the soil more ungrateful, and
the water colder.^
Elsewhere, on the other hand, the future life is sup-
posed to satisfy the aspirations which have never been
realized here below. Man —and this is an indication of
his superiority over all other known beings —frames for
himself an ideal of happiness duly related to his mode
of life and his stage of education. Whether that ideal
is purely material or prevailingly moral, in either case
every one admits his inability to realize it on earth ; or if
by chance the modesty of his aspirations or the unlooked-
for kindness of fortune should enable a man to do so, he
immediately feels the boundaries of his desires expand,
and is more keenly conscious than ever of the inadequacy
of things as they are. Hence the restless feeling, which
must early have impelled man to look beyond this life,
for a little more happiness, while the day was coming in
which he should look there for a little more justice. lie
represented the future life, then, as destined to provide
him with enjoyments and compensations for which he
longed in vain below. ''
For the men who i^ronounce
these prayers," says a poet of the court of Assurbauipal,
"may the land of the silver sky, oil unceasing, and the
wine of blessedness, be their food, and a good moon-
^ Ty.lor, Primitive Culture, vol. ii. p. 80.
^ Ruville, Religions des jyeujplcs noii-civilises, vol. ii. p. 204.

! —
IV. DUALISM. 191
tide their light." ^ " Place me, O Soma," said the

Vedic poet, "where celestial light reigns eternal, where
the mighty waters abound, where life is free, where the
worlds are radiant, where the desires of my desires are
accomplished."^ The Greenlanders imagine that in the
other world there will be no night, good drinking water
everywhere, and plenty of fish. The Eedskins conceive
of the better world as a vast hunting-ground, where the
game comes of its own accord to meet the blow of the
hunter. In the Tonga islands, they suppose the dead to
dwell in a spacious and shady abode, where they amuse
themselves with dancing when they are not sucking
sugar-cane.^ The Patagonian sorcerers say that they
sometimes see, in the very depths of the earth, the cave
where the souls are glutted with cattle and strong drink.
In the depths of Amenti, the Egyptians describe the
kingdom of Osiris, the fields of Talu, where wheat grows
seven feet high. You know by reputation Mahomet's
Paradise, and the Elysian Fields of the Greeks. How
many Christians of the present day have conceived an
idea in no way more elevated of the Paradise where
they believe they will pass their time in doing nothing
unless it be taking pleasant walks and joining in reli-
gious music
The superiority and the inferiority of the fate which
awaits the dead in the future life, though apparently con-
tradictory conceptions, are nevertheless simultaneously
held by many peoples ; for the popular imagination is not
1 Sayce, Hihhert Lectures, 1887, p. 357.
"^
In Belgium, the Walloon populace still sing that in Paradise
"they eat sugar with a ladle". (on magne d6 souc al losse),
^ Condensed from Rig-Veda, ix. 113, 7 — 11.
—
192 IV. DUALISM.
daunted by trifles. Sometimes the souls are divided be-

tween the two posthumous realms, according to the rank,
profession, or mode of life of the deceased. And where a
better world alone is believed in, as in the Tonga islands
and Samoa, the future life sometimes exists for the chiefs
and the priests alone. It was observed, however, that
in the present life success is not always the privilege of
birth and of rank, but often falls to the most insinuating
or the most courageous. Thus the better world would be
assigned to the heroes who fell on the field of battle, as is
notably the case with the Tupinambas of Brazil, the
Comanches, the ancient Mexicans, perhaps the Assyrians,
and the Germans, whose Walhalla was open to warriors
who fell with their weapons in their hands. The
natives of Nicaragua despatched all who died in their
beds to the under- world ; violent death alone gave access
to the country of the sun. It is curious enough to find
the same superstition actually appearing in the Eussia
of to-day, where the sect of the '' Smotherers" take the
words of St. Matthew (xi. 12) literally, " The kingdom
of heaven is taken by violence," and save their members
from a natural death by anticipating their end when
they are seriously ill.^
The Esquimaux, for theii- part, being a pacific and

industrious people, promise heaven to those who have
caught the greatest number of seals and whales ; to those
who have been drowned in the sea ; to those, generally,
who have worked hard and finally, like the Mexicans,
;
to women who have died in childbirth.
You will observe that the deceased thus privileged

1 Leroy Beaulieu, UEmpire des Tsars et les Russes, 3 vols., Paris,
1881—1889, vol. iii. La Rdigivn, p. 367.
IV. DUALISiT. 193
especially those whom the superhuman powers have

snatched away in the flower of their age —have suc-
cumbed while rendering services to their community.
It is but natural therefore that the gods of the com-
munity should reward or rather compensate them. How-
ever this may be, we can already note the germs of what
is presently to become the theory of retribution thrusting
themselves up through the mere theory of continuation.
^, , ^ theAt " of belief which I have called

staê
I he theory of ,
_ ^
posthuiuous spiritism, or polydemonism, the dead form a

class of spirits not subject to any higher
authority; but when the existence of the gods is once
admitted, they cannot be excluded from intervening in
the fate of souls. Being generally installed in a kind of
Paradise themselves, the gods admit thereto, by pre-
ference, such as have gained their good graces by praise
and sacrifices, while those who have failed to render them
their dues must go to the tortures of hell. A fortiori,
when the gods have become the protectors of the moral
order, they will reserve Paradise to those who have
fought the good fight, done right, observed the truth,
and followed justice. The idea of a judgment of the
dead, to which the theory of rewards and punish-
ments naturally leads as its culmination, appears to
have found its way into the minds even of very back-
ward peoples. Bosman
declares that certain Negroes
of Guinea imagine that when they cross the river of
death they are questioned by a superhuman being, who
asks them if they have observed the sacred days and
if they have abstained from prohibited kinds of food.
Doubtless the Egyptians, like all known peoples, had
:
194 IV. DUALISM.
their own ritual prescriptions, the violation of which

would involve chastisement in this world and in the
next. But what a moral chasm between the Guinea
Negro's catechism and the following apology which,
thousands of years before our era, the believer must
render to Osiris before the tribunal of the gods
" Yerily, I know you, ye lords of truth and of justice.
I have brought you the truth. I have destroyed lieing
for you. I have not committed any fraud against
man. I have not persecuted the widow. I have not
lied before the tribunal. I have not broken faith. I
have done no forbidden thing. I have not made the
foreman carry out day by day more work than was
due. ... I have not been anywise neglectful. I have
not been idle. ... I have not done that which was
abominable to the gods. I have not injured the slave
with his master. I have not starved. I have not made
to weep. I have not slain. I have not planned treache-
rous murder. I have not committed fraud against any-
one. ... I am pure, I am pure, I am pure !"^
The theories of continuation and of retribution are
sometimes found side by side in the beliefs of the same
people. This co-existence is, for that matter, rendered
all the easier by the belief in several abodes of the dead
and several factors of the personality. If a little order
must be brought into this parallelism, or rather super-
position, of ideas which seem mutually to exclude each
other, there is nothing to prevent the double being
told oif to continue the life of this world in one of the
^ G. IMaspero, Histoire ancienne des peujples de V Orient, fourth

edition, Paris, 1886, pp. 38, 39.
;
IV. DUALISM. 195
abodes assigned by popular tradition to tbe dead, and the

soul or the spirit being allowed to go to Paradise or Hell
according to the balance of its merits or demerits. This
is notoriously what took place with the Egyptians, who
appear to have believed at the same time that the double
went on with the old existence in the tomb, and that the
soul descended to Amenti, there to be judged. The
Greek Hades, which originally received all the shades
indiscriminately, afterwards had a special department,
Tartarus, reserved for the punishment of great sinners
whereas the heroes and even virtuous men went, after
death, to the Elysian Fields in the islands of the blest.
^ ,. ^. "With the Hindus, the distribution of the

Beliet in _ _
remuneration souls between the various sojourns of the

dead seems to have been rendered needless
by the belief in metempsychosis. It was specifically
upon earth that the theory of retribution sought to
realize itself, in a graduated scale of animal re-incarna-
tions ; whereas the absorbtion of the personality into the
bosom of the great whole became more and more the
supreme recompence of the Brahman theology.
The Buddhists went still further in this direction.
They suppressed the whole conception of a posthumous
tribunal and judgment, or even judge, since they dis-
pensed with gods in their moral system ; but they retained
from Brahmanism the theory of re-births, while holding
that each re-incarnation was determined, in some sort
mechanically, by the anterior conduct of the deceased.

Indeed, strictly speaking, it is not the same soul which
is re-incarnated, but the karma — that is to say, the
resultant of all the acts of the individual, good and bad.
o2
;
196 IV. DUALISM.'
It is perhaps to their conception of the future life that
the northern Buddhists owe the astonishing success of

their propaganda amongst the Chinese populations, at the
expense of the old official religion, or rather of Confu-
cianism. The latter, indeed, admits the survival of

souls, passed into the state of spirits, and so justifies the
domestic worship ; but it has nothing to say as to the

conditions of their future state, or any posthumous retri-
bution. " You do not yet understand life," said Confu-
cius to one of his discii^les, more than 2000 years before
modern Positivism ; " how then can you profess to under-
stand death ?"i The only punishment of the wicked
which the great Chinese reformer appears to admit is,
that their descendants, corrupted by their bad example,
will shirk the duties of filial piety.^ But the masses
could not rest content with this philosophical solution
and as soon as they found themselves in contact with
a religion as rich in revelations of future states as
Buddhism, especially the Indo-Tibetan Buddhism already
corrupted by the reaction of local superstitions, a great
part of the nation superposed the amplified and degene-
rated doctrine of Buddha upon the traditional worship of
ancestors, as well as on the official ceremonies of Confu-
cian rationalism.
Jewish The religion of ancient Israel appears to

eschatology. ideas of
-j^^ye been equally inaccessible to
remuneration in another world. The conception of a
future life docs not advance beyond that Sheol in which

"there are neither arts, nor work, nor knowledge, nor
^
J. H;ippel, Bcvue de Vhistoire des religions, vol. iv. p. 275, note.
2 A. Eeville, Religion des Chinois, p. 345.

IV. DUALISM. 197
wisdom;" and where the criminal and the righteous,

the infidel and the saint, Assur and his assembly, Elam
and his people, no less than Israel and his descendants,
all lie confused.^ To complete the analogy with the
beliefs already traced amongst the Assyrio-Babylonians,
there are certain chosen ones, such as Enoch and Elijah,
who have been carried to heaven by the special favour
of Yahveh, just as Eabani and Xisuthros, the Chaldean
JS'oah, were snatched from the gloom of Arali and placed
in the region of the silver skyby the grace of the gods.^
But in Judea, where the moral sentiments finally became
an essential factor of religion, these exceptions were
not enough to satisfy the demands of justice, as it sought
compensation for the persecuted righteousness and trium-
phant iniquity of this world.
The Aryan and Egyptian religions

solutions of the
were, however, closed against the Jews. The over-
shadowing greatness of Yahveh already precluded the
existence of immortal beings at his side. While the
Greek philosophy developed the idea of the soul as a
spiritual entity, constituting the veritable man and

using the body as an instrument, Jewish speculation
refused to regard the body otherwise than as living flesh.
The niakh, the equivalent of our vital breath, was an
emanation, or rather a free gift, of Yahveh, or even
a fragment of his own divine ruakh^ which alone existed
in and for itself. " All living things," says the Psalm
(civ. 29, 30), ''wait upon thee; thou withdrawest thy
1 Ezekiel xxxii. 22—32.
^ F. Lenormant, La divination et la science des presages chez les
Chaldeen-s, Paris, 1875, p. 153,
!
198 IV. DUALISM.
breath, and they die ; thou sendest out thy breath, and
they are created, and thou renewest the face of the earth."
Since, then, they could not put their hopes in the
futiu-e life, the Prophets were compelled to seek their
realization in this world, and accordingly it was on earth
that they expected the coming of the kingdom of Yahveh,
at first for the exclusive benefit of their own nation, but
afterwards for the salvation of humanity at large. This,

as M. Eenan says, was the only way of vindicating the
honour of Yahveh.^ Hence rose the Messianic ideas,

which from the Captivity onwards seem to have taken
a two-fold direction. In some minds it was simply a
question of a national restoration which would culminate
in the assumj)tion by Israel of the hegemony over all the
peoples of the earth. This restoration would be the
work of the Messiah, regarded sometimes as the descend-
ant of the lawful dynasty, sometimes as a kind of angel
sent by the Lord. Others conceived a complete social
renovation, in which peace and justice should reign over
the nations converted to the worship of the true God,
the part of Messiah falling to the chosen people itself.
" In that day Israel shall be a third with the Egyptian

and the Assyrian. There shall be a blessing upon the
earth. Yahveh êbaoth shall bless it, and shall say,
'
Blessed be Egypt my people, and Assyria the work of
my hands, and Israel mine inheritance'" (Isaiah xix.

24, 25).
who should see the dawn of that great day
Blessed they
But the others ? They who had died in the past or who
should succumb during the waiting-tide ? Is it right that
^ Histoire du iieuple cV Israel, vol. ii. pp. 437, 438.
IV. DUALISM. 199
just men persecuted in Yaliveli's cause during their lives

should be deprived of all share in the final triumph ? Is
it right that the wicked who died in wealth and impu-

nity should escape all future punishment ? The belief in
the solidarity of the generations, and even the idea of

expiation, whereby the sufferings of the just weigh against
the offences of the sinner, could but imperfectly satisfy
the demands of the Israelite's conscience. Then was
conceived, or at least brought into prominence, a doctrine
which we likewise meet in Mazdeism, viz. the resurrec-
tion of the body. The Persians believed that at the end
of time the actual world would be destroyed, that Ormuzd
would proceed to a new creation from which evil would

be excluded, and all the just who had died from the
beginning would receive a new body, whereas the souls
of the wicked would be finally destroyed, together with
Ahriman. The Jews could not accept this theory in its
completeness, since they did not believe in the survival

of the soul, but they adapted it to their own aspirations
by picturing a resurrection of the dead on the day of

the final judgment, or rather a reconstruction of the dis-
sipated bodies and their re-animation by the breath of
Yahveh.^
You are aware how this dogma found its way into
Christianity, in the moral conceptions of which it main-
tains itself side by side with the idea of a judgment
immediately after death ; but the religious spirit, as you
have already seen from innumerable instances, does
not shrink from placing the most divergent or even
contradictory theories side by side. Indeed, it derives
1 Ezekiel xxxvii. 7 — 10; Isaiali xxvi. 19; Daniel xii. 2.
200 IV. DUALISM.
certain advantages from this inexhaustible wealth of

explanations ; inasmuch as it is thereby enabled, without
breaking the continuity of the religious development,
quietly to drop theories which are superseded by the
discoveries of science or the advance of the moral con-
sciousness, and bring to the front such others as better
answer to the needs of the age.
,, ,. .
The union of morals and religion, or rather
Morahzation ^ ,
of the divine the belief that the moral order enters into
the divine order, influences not only the con-
ception of the future life, but also the idea of the deity
itself. If we look how the diverse attributes were
successively ascribed to the gods at the most advanced
stage of polytheism, we shall see that man first recog-
nized his deities as possessing the attributes of power,
and then assigned to them, one after another, the
qualities characteristic of intelligence, of love, and finally
of morality. Many of the gods who are described as
punishing the sins of men are still represented in the
mythologies as debauchees and brigands; yet as soon
as they are regarded as protectors of the moral order
amongst men, they are like so many judges who abandon
themselves in private life to the very abominations which
they punish from their exalted tribunal. Hence a gradual
tendency to moralize their character and their mutual
relations, as well as their intervention in the afi'airs of
man.
How can a scoundrel inculcate straightforwardness, or
a perjurer veracity? How can an adulterer or thief
enforce respect for the marriage-tie or property ? How
can a creature as grasping as a miser cultivate the spirit
;
IV. DUALISM. 201
of self-devotion and self-sacrifice ? First of all, tlie tradi-
tions which attribute criminal or simply gross actions to

the gods are thrown into the shade, or allegorically
explained, and only those passions which are regarded as
noble are left to them. These, however, include not only
courage, but resentment of injuries, jealousy, passion, love
of praise, and partiality towards friends. Yahveh reserves
his fiivours for the children of Israel, and their unfaith-
fulness throws him into paroxysms of rage. He deter-
mines to destroy all the human race, and then repents

he hardens Pharaoh's heart that he may have the oppor-
tunity of inflicting the plagues upon Egypt. Moreover,
he deceives the Israelites themselves. When he seeks
to punish them for their profanations, he gives them
"statutes that are not good and ordinances by which
they cannot live" (Ezek. xx. 25).
In tliis process of moralizing the deities, one or another
of the traditional qualities which figure in the character
of each god is selected and thrown into relief. Indra,
Thor, Ares-Mars, in virtue of their mythological prowess,

will come to be regarded especially as types of valour.
Yaruna and Osiris, as the heaven which sees all the
acts of men, and the sun which throws light upon them,
willbecome judges par excellence. Pallas Athene, who
sprang aU armed from the head of Zeus, whether origin-
ally the personification of lightning or of the dawn, will
become the goddess of wisdom. Hestia, the pure flame
of the hearth, will represent chastity and the domestic

virtues. was long before Zeus could venture to take
It
upon himself personally the judgment of the souls of the

dead. He wisely left this function to the incorruptible
;
202 IV. DUALISM.
judges of Hades. But in the end he became the avenger

of outraged right, and at the same time the moral regu-
lator of the universe. " If the gods do aught that is base,
they are not gods,"i says Euri^Dides; and his vigorous
utterance finds a practical illustration in the German
mythology, for when the trespasses and treasons of Loki
began wound the moral sense of his worshippers, they
to
debased him from the ranks of the ^sir.

Finally, as the human ideal becomes more exalted, the
passions still assigned to the gods are further purified by
the exclusion of all movements of the soul that seem
inconsistent with the majesty, the holiness and the kind-
ness, the justice and the love, from which they can no
longer be conceived as departing. " I will not -exe-
cute the decree of my wrath ; I will not turn to destroy
Ephraim, for I am God and not man ; I am Holy One
the
in the midst of thee, and I will not come in wrath"
(Hosea xi. 9). In a word, man comes at last to ascribe
to his deity only the two loftiest sentiments of the human
soul, justice and love. "God," says Plutarch, "being
perfectly good, lacks not any virtue ; and least of all in
what concerns justice and love."^ Going still further,

we notice that the former of these sentiments is subordi-
nated to the latter, inasmuch as the divine punishments
are conceived as having for their object the improve-
ment of the sinner, as when a father chastens his son
until at last chosen religious spirits learn to proclaim
that " God is love," not excluding from this term the
idea of justice, but realizing it therein under its sublimest
aspect.
^ Belleroplion Frag. xix. v. 4. ^ jj^ defedu uraculorum, xxiv.

IV. DUALISM. 203
,, . ^ Henceforth the bond between men and

Identity of
human and gods no longer depends on the analogy of
their enjoyments or their passions, but on
identity of aspiration and reciprocity of sympathies,
which make the gods feel for what is endured by men.
It is no longer through the duration of a single human
life only that Osiris, Yishnu, Krishna, Buddha, or the
Messiah, personally submits to the miseries of a life upon
earth, in order to bring man happiness, justice and sal-
vation ; but everywhere and always, from the bosom of
celestial glory, he feels the reaction of every injustice,
of every fall, of every undisturbed misfortune. "Since
I received the great wound," says Osiris, " I am wounded
by every wound." ^ It is almost the very expression
employed by Isaiah to describe the sympathy of Yahveh
with the Israelites. " In all their affliction he was
afflicted" (Is. Ixiii. 9). The idea that all injustice,
all cruelty to the poor, is inflicted on Yahveh himself,

penetrates the whole Hebrew literature ; and amongst
the Hindus, the Yishnu Purana, extending the limits of
the divine sympathy yet further, proclaims that whoso-
ever injures a living creature injures God.
And reciprocally the qualities and virtues thus ascribed
to the superhuman beings do not fail to exert a truly
moral attraction upon the faithful. "Is it possible,"
asks Plato, " admiringly to investigate an object without
striving to resemble it ?" ^ Thus Eeligion and Morals re-
act one upon the other, the idea of duty purifying the con-
ception of deity; and the latter, in its turn, fortifying
the feeling of obligation, while fructifying it with love.
^ De Presseuse, Vancien monde et le Cliridlanisme,-^. 124.
^ Republic, bk. vi. § 13.

Lecture V.
MONOTHEISM.
Gods attached ^^ have seen that every nation begins

*°
or tilr'^ ^J admitting the real existence of the gods
people. adored by its neighbours. The Israelites in
the period of the Judges believed in the sovereignty of
Cheraosh over the people of Moab, just as much as in that
of Yahveh over the people of Israel ; ^ and when the
armies of Eome besieged a city, they began by offering
sacrifices to the local deities, perhaps hoping to gain them
over to their side, or perhaps on the principle that leads
savages to appease the spirit of the tree which they are
about to fell, by offering it a sacrifice.
It naturally follows that the sphere of action of the
gods is always limited either to the territory regarded
as their patrimony or to the people which has accepted
their suzerainty. If the country of Israel belonged to the
twelve tribes, it was because the god of Bethel had pro-
mised Abraham and Jacob (Gen. xiii. xxviii. xxxv).
it to
In another passage of the Bible we find the Syrians

believing themselves safe against the Israelite invasion
1 Jephthah's envoys said to the king of Amnion, " Wilt not thou
possess that which Chemosh thy god giveth thee to possess 1 So
•whomsoever Yahveh our God hath dispossessed from before us, them
will we possess" (Judges xi. 24).
V. MONOTHEISM. 205
because, as they said, Yahveli is a mountain god and

his power does not extend to the plain (1 Kings xx. 23).
Yet more, a change of country implies a change of gods.
When David is reproaching Saul with his exile, he com-
plains that his enemies have compelled him to quit " the
heritage of Yahveh," and have said to him, ''
Go, serve
other gods" (1 Sam. xxvi. 19); and reciprocally when
Ruth, the Moabitess, follows her mother-in-law to Beth-
lehem, she cries, "Where thou goest, I will go, and
where thou dwellest, I will dwell ; thy people shall be
my people, and thy God my God" (Ruth i. 16). The
God of Israel is so closely connected with the soil, that
when the Syrian general Naaman, healed of his leprosy
in the waters of Jordan, gratefully desires to raise an
altar to Yahveh in his own country, he must carry away
a certain portion of the Israelitish soil, " as much as the
load of two mules" (2 Kings v. 17).
On the other hand, in his own domain, Yahveh is the
lord of strangers as well as the lord of the Israelite.
When the Assyrians have captured Samaria, carried off
the Israelites into captivity, and replaced them by
populations from beyond the Euphrates, the latter com-
plain that they are exposed to the wrath of Yahveh
because they know not how to render him the homage he
desires, and they beg the king of Assyria to send them
some of the former sacrificers to teach them ''the way
to serve the god of the land" (2 Kings xvii. 27). Rut
the Bible tells us that these same peoples also retained
the worship of the gods they had venerated in the land
whence they had come. In fact, however closely the
gods of the peoples may be bound to their own territories,
206 V. monotheism:.
in the end they must come to identify themselves so

closely with the nations as to accompany them wherever
they take up their abode. Yahveh himself was the God
of the Jews in Babylonia, even when the Captivity had
come to an end, and the exile of the colonists had become
a voluntary residence. In the same way, Assur was at
first simply the god of the city that bore his name. But
when the Assyrians transferred the seat of their empire
to Nineveh, the god of their ancient capital still remained
the supreme god of the nation.
^ .^. , Another consequence
^ of this close con-
Deities share ^
the lot of nection between each people and its special

their peoples. -i
•
.i , ,-, i ,,
gods is, that the latter share the fates of the
people and even of the tribe or the province which
originally fell to their lot. In pre -Assyrian times,
Mesopotamia was divided into little states, each of which
had its principal god drawn either from amongst the
members of the local pantheon or from the common
divinities of Chaldea, and the fortune of the god invari-
ably followed that of the state or dynasty which had
adopted him as Thus we see a temporary
its protector.
hegemony successively achieved by the lunar god Sin
with the city of Ur, by the sea-god Ea with Eridu, the
solar god Samash with Larsa, Ann with Urukh, Mul-lil
with Agade, Merodach with Babylon, and (as we have
just called to mind) Assur with Assyria. It was the
same in Egypt, where, as soon as the nomes were
united into a state, attempts were made to identify the
respective gods of the little local pantheons one with
another, while choosing for the supreme deity the chief
god of the dynasty in power or of the city which served as
V. MONOTHEISM. 207
its capital —Abydos, Ea at Heliopolis, Ptah

Osiris at
at Memphis, Amnion at Thebes, Neith at Sais, and so

forth.
When a nation lost its independence, its gods did not

cease to exist, but passed into the service of the con-
querors and became subordinate to their deities. Thus
the deities of the countries annexed by the Eoman
armies successively swelled the ranks of the imperial
pantheon, more or less disguised in Eoman livery. The
same thing took place in Peru, where the Incas collected
in their great temple of the sun at Cuzco the images of
the gods worshipped by all the various nations that they
had absorbed into their empire.
Under such a system, if a nation rose
The supreme
god of the towards supremacy over the known world,
univeibe.
.^^ ^^.^^ deities, and especially its supreme
god, must necessarily approach to universal monarchy.
Thus Jupiter came to extend his empire from the Irish
Sea to the basin of the Ganges in the train of the
Greek and Eoman armies. Or, again, it might equally
well come to pass that, simply through the develop-
ment of their own theology, peoples were led to regard
their supreme god as the master of all the gods. In
fact, by dint of constantly repeating that their own
deity was the mightiest of the gods, they would come
at last to believe that the latter were not only inferior
to him power and rank, but were his mere vassals
in
or subjects. This was the point of view at which
the Judcan people had arrived at the end of the period
of the Monarchy. Finally, there is a third path which
may lead to the political unity of the superhuman world.
208 V. MONOTHEISM.
It is that of the reciprocal assimilation of the deities

who form the several national pantheons. Indeed,
we may wonder that this assimilation did not more
easily and more often occur amongst peoples who adored
the same manifestations of nature ; but we must remem-
ber that the nature-gods, when once conceived as ruling
from outside the phenomena from which they originally
sprang, always acquired sufficiently distinctive features
to give them separate individualities as well as different
names. Thus it is only in syncretistic periods that any
attempt is made to establish their identity, and even
then it is its own gods that each nation takes as the
standards to which to refer the gods of the stranger.
It is the Phoenician deities that Philo of Byblos
re-discovers in the gods of Greece ; and reciprocally, it
is now to Apollo and now to Kronos that the Greeks
liken Melkarth, the divine king of Tyre. You are
acquainted with the process of assimilation by which
Herodotus attempted to draw the gods of Egypt into
the classical pantheon. Megasthenes applied the same
method to the gods of India, and Csesar and Tacitus to
those of Gaul and Germany. Zeus absorbed not only a
certain number of Thracian and Thessalian deities, but
the rulers of more imjDortant pantheons, such as
far
the Lybian Ammon, the Egyptian Serapis, and the

Babylonian Bel Merodach ; while Herodotus even gives
hisname to the great god of the Persians, that same
Ahura Mazda who was destined to survive the Lord of
Olympus by so many centuries.
Divine Imagination did not confine itself to the
famiUes.
conception of divine monarchies correspond-
V. MONOTHEISM. 209
ing to all the independent states or diverse races on the

earth. Within the limits of each of these smaller super-
human societies, it erected groups on the type of the

family. We have already seen how man was brought
by the necessities of language to attribute sex to every
manifestation of nature. And therefore when these
manifestations were personified, they naturally became
male and female. what could be more
After that,
simple or more consistent, when two phenomena united
to produce a third, whether by fusion or by reaction,
than to consider the personification of this last as the

offspring of its two factors, themselves regarded as
husband and wife ? By a similar deduction, phenomena
which sprang from the same source, or were supposed
to do so, or even had certain traits or properties in
common, were regarded as brothers and sisters; as, for
example, the sun and the moon, the two twilights, sleep
and death, and so on.
The divine Presently these family relations of the

fatherhood,
g^^g wore extended till they embraced the
whole creation, and especially mankind. The confusion
between the terms for creating and begetting, which
still maintained itself in half-developed languages, must
have led to a spontaneous fusion of the ideas of creator
and father. Sometimes, as in Egypt and with the Incas,

it was the reigning dynasty alone that laid claim to this
exalted affiliation. " I call upon thee, my father

Amon !
" exclaimed Eameses II. at the battle of Kadshu.
''My many soldiers have abandoned me; none of my
horsemen hath looked towards me ; and when I called
them, none hath listened to my voice. But I believe
p
210 V. MONOTHEISM.
that Amon is worth more to me than a million of soldiers,

than a hundred thousand horsemen."^
The analysis of the identical name which the Hindus,
Greeks, and Latins gave to their heavenly deity, Dyaush
pita = Zei'9 TTttT?/^ = Jupiter, implies not only that the
ancestors of the Indo-Europeans spoke the same language
and worshipped the same god, but further that they
addressed that" god as a celestial father. "Be unto us
easy of access," said the Vedic poet to Agni, "as a
father to his son."^ Side by side with Dyaush, "our
father," another hymn invokes, Prithivi, " the good
mother," and Agni, "our brother."^ It is the same
thought that the Greek poet expresses when he main-
tains that " gods and men are sons of the same mother."*
In the West, this idea, no longer held in check by the
regime of caste, could not fail to stimulate more generous
feelings and to provoke democratic inferences. The
divine paternity must culminate in the brotherhood
of man. "Wilt thou not remember over whom thou
rulest?" says Epictetus, addressing a master on behalf
of his slaves, "that they are thy relations, thy brethren
by nature, the offspring of Zeus?"^
Amongst the Semites, the idea of the divine paternity
was at first kept in the background, hampered in its
^ Le Page Renouf, Hihhert Lectures, 1879, p. 228.

2 Rig-Veda, i. 1, 9.
2 Rig-Veda, vi. 51, 5. Prof. Max Miiller has shown that this idea
presents itself at every step in the Rig- Veda. See Hihhert Lectures, 1878,
pp. 222, 223.
* Pindar, Nemea, vi. 1, 2.
^ Arrian, Ex)icteti Diatribce, i. 13.

V. MONOTHEISM. 211
development by the very majesty of the deity, which

could not brook the establishment of any such relation
with the gods. But it is not altogether absent, as we
may see from the invocation of a Mesopotamian hymn
to Istar: "May thy heart be appeased as the heart of
a mother who has borne children ;"^ and you are aware
how it appeared amongst the Jews at the beginning
and end of the Captivity, in the prophecies of Jeremiah
and of the second Isaiah, to become, with its corollary
of the brotherhood of man, the cardinal doctrine of the

religion taught by Jesus.
The place of The highest point of development that
"^pSlatiou^ polytheism could reach is found in the con-
intliedeve-
caption
•
of a monarcliv or divine family, '
lopnient oi -^
_
*'
monotheism, embracing all terrestrial beings, and even

the whole universe. The divine monarch or father, how-
ever, might still be no more than the first amongst
his peers. For the supreme god to become the Only
God, he must rise above all beings, superhuman as well
as human, not only in his power, but in his very nature.
The conception of this new and higher nature is the
fruit of metaphysical speculation. Monotheism is hardly
complete until man, having conceived the idea of a first
cause, of eternity, of infinity, and of the absolute, makes

them the attributes of one only being, the Being ]par
excellence. And these conceptions are not formed all

at once in the human mind ; they are the products of a
slow mental evolution which acts upon materials ah-eady
in existence, furnished by previous conceptions of the
deity.
1 Sayce, mhhevt Lectures, 18S7, p. 352.
p2
212 V. MONOTHEISM.
Thus we see how the monotheistic evolution may-

have advanced along very different lines to the same
end, and may have proceeded, in the majority of cases,
without any rupture with religious tradition.
Metaphysical speculation
^ early concerned
Simplification . / -^ ...
of tiie national itself with the
thoology of the civilized peoples.
The way to the recognition of the divine unity
had been paved almost everywhere by the identifica-
tion of the chief gods representing the same phenomenon,

or its diverse aspects. Thus the Eg5'ptians found means
of gradually drawing all their deities into the circle of the
divine families already established in triads on the model
of the human family represented by father, mother, and
son. We have seen how they gradually assimilated the
gods of the dead and those of the elements to the type
of the solar divinities ; and the latter were in their turn
identified with the sun, or rather with the soul of the
sun, which remains one in all its manifestations, and
which thus becomes the universal soul of all the gods. In
the Turin papyrus, this mysterious deity is made to say,
"I am the maker of heaven and of the earth. ... It is I
who have given to all the gods the soul which is within
them. ... I am Chepera in the morning, Ea at noon,
Tmu in the evening." ^
In fact, this is really a new being appearing behind

the ancient gods; but since this "hidden soul of the
1 Le Page Eenouf, Hihhert Lectures, 1879, pp. 221, 222. Compare

the Atltarva Veda, xiii. 3, 13 :
" lu the evening Agm becomes Varuna,
who becomes Mitra when he rises in the morning Avhen he has ;
become Savitar, he traverses the firmament ; when he has become

Indra, he burns the heavens at the zenith."
V. MONOTHEISM. 213
Lord of the Disc" equally manifests himself in all the

chief deities, the name of any one of them may be given
to him indifferently. Hence comes the Egyptian heno-
theism, which alternately assimilates Ea, Osiris, Ptah,
Ammon, and the rest, to the supreme God. To accen-
tuate this equivalence still more, the chief deity of the
place receives the names of all the other gods. On the
royal tombs of Biban-el-moluk, Ea is invoked under

seventy-five different names, and the Book of the Dead
has a whole chapter made up of nothing but the names
of Osiris.i Or, again, the supreme soul receives a name
formed by the union of all the appellations given respec-
tively to the supreme gods of the different cycles : Sokar-
Osiris,Ptah -Sokar- Osiris, are complex names which

appear as early as in the ancient empire and later on ;
we meet with Horus-Chem, Chnum-Ea, Sebak-Ea, Amun-

Ea, Amun-Ea-Tum-Harmachis.2 And this was no mere
juxtaposition of words or verbal syncretism. The Egyp-
tians were really conscious that the gods thus drawn
together were in truth identical one with another. It
is, so to speak, the mythic furmula of this fusion which
is given us in the following words: "Osiris came to

Mendes; there he met the soul of Ea; they embraced
and became as one soul in two souls." ^
We must note that in these identifications we are
directly coacerned with solar gods alone —that is to say,
with the first persons of the triads; but just as the
1 Le Page Eeiiouf, Hihhert Lectures, 1879, p. 87.

2 Of. C. P. Tiele, Andennes religions de VAgypte, &c., Paris, 1882,
. p. 137 {History of the Egyptian Religion, London, 1882, p. 223).
' Book of the Dead, chap. xvii. lines 42, 43.

214 V. MONOTHEISM.
unity thus obtained especially represented the active

principle of nature, symbolized by the solar rays, so, in
like manner, the goddesses, reduced in their turn by an

analogous process to a single type, easily passed into per-
sonifications of space, or of the matter upon which the
divine activity worked to produce the world.^ At Den-
dera, Hathor is assimilated not only to Isis, but to Neith
of Sais, to Saosis of Heliopolis, to Bast of Bubastis, to
Sothis of ElejDhantine, and others.^ As to the gods
whose nature or attributes or special local circumstances
prevented them from melting into the great solar deity,
they readily united with the third person of the triad,
the son of the divine couple, the personification and the

synthesis of the phenomenal world begotten in con-
tinuous generation.
The triune ^^ that was now needed was one more
god of Egypt. g^Qj.|-
q£ abstraction, to put above and behind
this triad the being in which it was resumed and into
which, so to speak, it melted. That higher unity was
sometimes found in the first person of the triad, regarded
as reproducing itself by eternal generation; sometimes
in a "spirit more spiritual than the gods; the holy
soul which clothes itself with forms, but itself remains
unknown."^
It is this triune god, who, to employ an expression
of the Egyptian theologians, perpetually "creates his
own members, which are the gods."^ The latter are
1 Paul Pierret, Pantheon Egxjptlen, p. 27.
2 Le Page Eenouf, HiUert Lectures, 1879, pp. 87, 88.

2 Cf. Book of the Dead, xv. 46.
* Maspero, Histoire despeitples de VOrient, i^^ ed., Paris, 1886, p. 279.
V. MONOTHEISM. 215
the universal aliment, "an immense loaf in the middle

of which dwells the Only One," or "a divine society
comj^leting itself in a single heart." ^ Yet further, each
one of these apparently secondary gods may become
in its turn a centre of emanation, giving birth to other
gods by the genesis of triads. But when all is said
and done, they are never more than the names and
aspects of the one only being. "Amon is an image,"
says a hymn copied by Brugsch from the walls of El
Khargeh, " Atmu is an image, Chepera is an image, Ea
is an image; he alone maketh himself in millions of
2
ways."
Semitic An analogous movement of theological
monot leism.
concentration took place amongst the western
Semites. It was immensely facilitated by the habit,
already formed, of designating the most important deities
solely by their titles ; for whatever difficulty might be
found in welding together divine representatives or gover-
nors of the heaven, the sun, the thunderbolt, the wind,
and such like phenomena, or even the illustrious dead, or
mere abstractions of one kind or another, there could be
little objection to identifying all the superhuman beings,
known as the Mighty, the Strong, the King, the Creator,
the Eternal, — to say nothing of those Eedoubtables, or
Eloliim^ who, as M. Eenan observes, act in harmony
as a single being and even take a singular verb. The
Phoenician states, or rather the principal Phoenician cities,
formed their triads, not by uniting three of the most
powerful deities of the local pantheon, as in Mesopotamia,
^ Paul Pierret, Pantheon Egyptian, p. x.
2 Le Page Eenouf, Rihlert Lectures, 1879, p. 233.
216 V. MONOTHEISM.
but by combiuing with the worship of the divine king,

that of his consort and of their child. As in Egypt,
the first person of this triad was probably borrowed
from the luminous personifications of the air or the
sun and represented the creative power, the ruler far
excellence; the second, perhaps originally a personifica-
tion of the earth or moon, represented nature properly
so called, under her two-fold fruitful and murderous
aspect ; the third seems to have been very much effaced,
except where mythology interposed to give it distinctive
features. For the rest, the great goddess herself, the
''Mistress" (Baalith) or " Queen "(Milkath), was regarded
less as the spouse than as the visible manifestation, " the
face," and therefore the reflection of the supreme god.
Sometimes, indeed, like Tauith of Carthage or Astarte
of Cyprus, she succeeded in throwing her spouse into
the background, but it was more often she herself who
fell into the second rank, or even disappeared in the rays
of her lord and master.
One cannot dispute the anthropomorphic character of
the deity as represented in the oldest traditions of the
Bible. Yahveh moulds man like a potter ; he plants the
garden of Eden and walks through it in the cool of the
evening like a rich Mesopotamian. Adam hears his
footsteps. He comes down from heaven to see the build-
ing of the Tower of Babel. He eats and drinks with
Abraham, and the latter washes his feet. He struggles
with Jacob and allows himself to be overcome. At the
time of the Prophets he is no longer seen in person.
Whoso looks on him must die. But he reveals himself in
the manifestations of light and of the storm. Finally, he
N
V. MONOTHEISM. 217
rises above these natural phenomena, and becomes a

voice speaking to the conscience of the righteous.
Nowhere have I found this development of the Hebrew
idea of divinity, or, to speak more accurately, this spiri-
tualization of Yahveh, better followed out and expounded
than in a memoir by M. A. Sabatier, Professor of the
Faculty of Protestant Theology of Paris, on the " Hebrew
Conception of the Spirit." ^ Here we see how the breath,
the "ruakh" of the Eternal, at first simply identified
with the wind which "makes the heaven serene" (Job
xxvi. 13) and "parches the grass" (Is. xl. 7), becomes
the synonym of force in the moral as well as in the
metaphysical sense, and finally comes to represent the
abstract idea of absolute force, " He who is."
„ , Here we have a first form of monotheism,

God as _
_ ^
'
distinct from in which the god is regarded as external

matter. . ,. . „
to the universe, or at least as distinct from
matter. We observe that this system, generally spoken
of as Deism, has especially prevailed amongst peoples
who, like the Semites, regard force as the essential attri-
bute of the superhuman beings, and have risen to the

conception of unity by developing their ideas of causality.
On the contrary, peoples who, like the Indo-Europeans,
seem to have been more struck by the identity of nature
running through their divine personifications, have found
the corner-stone of their monotheism in the idea of self-
existence ; and then, by a further extension, have trans-
formed it into a pantheism in which the Creator and the
creation melt into a higher unity. It is interesting to
^ In the volume entitled La faculte de tlieologie protestante de Paris

ci M. Edouard Reuss, Paris, 1879, pp. 5 sqt^^.
—
218 y. MONOTHEISM.
follow this development wherever it has passed through

all its successive phases, if only to establish the uni-
formity of the process in every case.
God creating The
conception of a unique being resolving
the universe i.
himseli
in-jo
mto j j-\ ,
iragments to create the universe

,
out of his own

substance,
^g found in rudimentary form amongst peoples
still in a state of barbarism. The Chinese traditions

speak of a certain Panku who produced the wind by
his breath, made day by opening his eyes, and thunder
by lifting up his voice. His right eye became the
sun, his left eye the moon, his .blood gave birth to
the rivers, his flesh to the soil, his locks to the stars,
the hairs of his body to the trees, his bones to the
metals, his marrow to the pearls and diamonds, and
finally —by an analogy scarcely flattering to our race
the parasites upon him became men.^ The study of
the Edda reveals an analogous conception, that of the
giant Ymir, whose body and blood respectively produced
the earth and the ocean, whilst his head formed the
vault of heaven and his brain the clouds.^ The Yedas
likewise tell us of a primordial being, Purusha, whose
body, according to some stories, served the gods for the
creation of the universe, but who, according to others,
doubled himself into male and female to engender the
cosmic egg.^ Thus, again, the Chaldean traditions speak
^ A, Eeville, La Reliyion Chinoise, Paris, 1889, pp. 38, 39.
^ TJie Journey of Gylfe, viii. In Snorre Sturleson's Edda.

^ Monier Williams, Indian Wisdom, p. 24. In the Marianne
Islands they believe in a primordial being, Pontan, who charged his
sisters, when he form the heaven and the earth out of his chest
died, to
and shoulders, the sun and the moon out of his eyes, and the rainbow
V. MONOTHEISM. 219
of the monstrous Tiamat, the personification of Chaos,

whom Bel cut into halves to make heaven and earth;
though, according to another version, it was Bel who cut
off his own head to create gods and men with his blood.^
Finally, the idea rose that the being who had thus
severed himself into fragments still survived, or rather
that his disintegration was but apparent and did not
affect his substantial unity. This thought is found, alike
in the Yedic song chanted in honour of Yaruna, and in
the Egyptian hymn graven on the walls of El Xhargeh,
in terms identical with those of the Orphic poet of Greece,
who cries, "Zeus was the first. Zeus is the last. . . .
Zeus is the centre. It is by Zeus that all things were

made. Zens is the male. Zeus is the eternal female.
Zeus is the sun and the moon. For all these things lie
in the great body of Zeus."^ "Thou art youth and
age," said the scribe of El Khargeh in his turn. " Thou
art heaven, thou art earth ; thou art fire, thou art water,
thou art air, and whatever is in the midst of them."^
"Purusha," the Yedic poet exclaims, "is in truth the
universe. He is what is, what has been, and what
shall be;"^ and a hymn of the Atharva Yeda keeps
equally close to the same idea in this description of
Yaruna: "The two seas are the belly of Yaruna, and
even in this little pool of water he reposes."^
out of his eyebrows. —De Freyciuet, Voyage autour die monde, yol. ii.
Paris, 1829, p. 381.

^ Lenormant, Origines de Vhistoire, Paris, 1880, vol. i. p. 507
{Beginnings of History, London, p. 500).
2 J. Darmesteter, Essais orientaux, p. 125.
3 Le Page Renouf, Hihhert Lectures, 1879, p. 232.
* Rig-Veda, x. 90. 2. s Aiharva Veda, iv. 16. 3.
220 V. MONOTHEISM.
Are we to conclude that the religions whose theologies

these old documents reveal, developed on purely mate-
rialistic lines, as has been affirmed? To do so would
be to forget, at the very outset, that, at the period of
which we are speaking, no one dreamt, as yet, of a body,
even the body of the universe, without a soul to move
and to guide it.
^ , ,
It is this soul of the world, ''more spiritual
'
God as the '
^ ^
soul of the than the gods," as the Egyptians had it, that
becomes the true God. It remains to see
under what form it is conceived. It would be difficult
to give it the character of the double, although Plato,

consistently enough, represents it as an archetype of the
universe, pre-existing in the divine spirit. In general
it would be regarded rather as a subtle element pene-
trating all things, like heat or ether.
" Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus
Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet."-^
Thus the Stoics pictured it sometimes as a subtle

_
fire animating all portions of the world, sometimes as

ether, sometimes as life par excellence^ even deriving the
name of Zeus from the verb XT]v. The school of Ionia
sought the same principle sometimes in water with
Thales, sometimes in air with Anaximander ; while the
Pythagoreans found a supreme intelligence [vodi) at the,
origin of things.
Thus conceived, the soul of the world may remain
impersonal. But most of these systems had a religious
as well as. a philosophical side; and there their "first
principle," confounding itself with Zeus, recovered the
1 JSu. vi. 726, 727.
V. MONOTHEISM. 221
attributes of personality, reason, consciousness, pity,
love. ''
0, Thou, whosoever thou art, difficult to know,
Zeus, or necessity of nature, or spirit of man. Thee I
invoke, who treacling the secret path disposest mortal
affairs in accordance with justice !"^ Pythagoras, in his
philosophical teaching, might indeed represent the uni-
verse as developing out of the linked progression of num-
bers, starting from unity ; but this unity, the primordial
monad, was no other than Zeus Soter, placed at the centre
of the sphere; and the first derived numbers were the

equivalents of the great gods of the Hellenic pantheon.
The Stoics, on their side, though likening their "reason
of things" to the ether pervading nature, none the less
erected it into a real and living god, endowed with all
moral qualities, whether they called it by the name of

Zeus or not.
In India, even before the Yedic epoch, light was

regarded as the essential and general attribute of the chief
deities, as their very name devas indicates. It was but
a step to make light the common soul of the divine
beings and therefore the ^qHj par .excellence^ of which
the other gods merely represented the diverse names and
aspects. "Oh, Agni," says a hymn, "thou art born
Yaruna, thou becomest Mitra when kindled; all the
gods are in thee."^ "They have
styled him," says
another hymn, " Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni, for the
poets give many names to the one."^
Presently this identification was carried still further.

Seeing that fire is met, under some form or another,
1 Euripides, TroaJes, 885—888.

2 Rig-Veda, v. 3. 1. 3 Rig.Veda, i..l64. 46.
.
222 V. MONOTHEISM.
throughout nature, it was regarded as the element common

to gods and men, to beings and to things, the principle
that reveals itself in light, heat, movement, conscience;
and consequently the universal material, or rather the
universal soul. The idea of fire or of light itself finally
appeared too concrete, too material, to give form to the
idea of this subtle principle. " I am incomprehensible
in form," says Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, ^'more
subtle than the subtlest atoms ;....! am the light in
sun and moon, far, far beyond the darkness; I am the
brilliancy in flame, the radiance in all that's radiant ; . . .
the sound in ether, fragrance in the earth ; the seed eter-

nal of existing things, the life in all ; .... I dwell as
Wisdom in the heart of all ; I am the Goodness of the
good ; I am the Beginning, Middle, End ; eternal Time,
the Birth, the Death of all." i
Something less concrete, or at least less material, than

the fire or the light must be sought to serve as the form,
or rather the symbol, of this spiritual principle ; and it is
found in the breath, the prana or atman^ which also came

to symbolize the human soul. The atman^ that is to say,
the being that each one felt within himself, thus became
an emanation of the Paratman^ the supreme Soul, the
Unique without a second, who alone exists in himself.
Agni yields the first place in religion to Prajapati, the
Lord of creation; to Brahraanaspati, the Lord of prayer;
to Vicvakarman, the universal artificer, and other abstract
denominations which better lend themselves to a more
spiritual conception of the deity.^
1 Monier Williams, Indian Wisdom, pp. 144, 145.

2 A, Earth, Religions do Vlnde, p. 21; Eng. trans., pp. 29, 30.
V. MONOTHEISM. 223
As yet, however, '

we have not got beyond
The unique •' '
. .
Being, with- the auima mundi which directs the universe,

out a secou
^^^ intelligence animate and inspire
.
^^ ^.^^
individual beings ; and this point of view still implies
a certain opposition between God and the world. ^ But
neither India nor Greece could stop half-way in the
pantheistic reconstruction. Eeligious India, or, to speak
more Brahmanism which gave ever freer

accurately, the
admission to the Yedantic idealism, ended by inferring
the non-existence of the sensible world, which it regarded
as a pure illusion, the work of the deceiving Maya ; an
internal thought of the absolute Being, dreaming in and
throudi his successive creations. As to the nature of
this Being it can only be defined, say the Upanishads,

by means of negatives. Of anything which comes under
the range of our senses and can be defined, we may
say that God is not that. We cannot even affirm that
he exists, because that is to limit him by ascribing to
him the attribute of existence ; at the very most we can
^
The Egyptian hymns might declare tliat the supreme god was
tlie unique being without second, " the immanent and abiding in all
things" (Hymn of El Khargeh) ; but all the same he appears to have
been limited by matter, and in that respect Gnosticism may be briefly
described as the heir of the old Egyptian religion no less than of neo-
Platonism. "Admitting the eternity of an essentially inert matter,"
says M. Grebaut (Hymn to Ammon Ea, p. vi), " this religion inferred,
from the organization of this matter, the existence of a hidden being,

the prop of universal order ; the eternal principle of the truth, which
was that order realized; intelligent, good, almighty; adored in the
sun, the visible instrument which he uses in creating and maintaining
life, and so imparting truth in spite of all evil principles or
Typhonic
powers."
224 V. MONOTHEISM.
only say that in Him existence and non-existence are

combined.
In the same way amongst the Greeks, the neo-Pytha-
goreans and neo-Platonists, by dint of logically develop-
ing their respective principles, finally met in a pure
Pantheism. Plato had taught that God created the
world after an ideal type, which existed in his reason
from all eternity, as the plan of a city exists, before its
foundation, in the mind of The world was

an architect.
formed after an invisible model conceived by reason and
intelligence. Seeing that all visible things were tossed
about in a confused and disordered movement, the
Creator drew them from the bosom of disorder and
subjected them to order, "thinking the latter far pre-
ferable."^
This ideal plan, to which Plato ascribed an objective
existence, included the archetypes of all things; and
these archetypes realized themselves, so to speak, by
penetrating and fashioning matter, into which they
introduced a spark of real being. "Ideas are as it were
the models of nature. Things become like them, and
are their copies. The participation of things in ideas
consists in their resembling them."^ The God thus con-
ceived is still an active being, who thinks, wills, and
lives, although he does not directly iDtervcne in the
work of creation.
But the neo-Platonists of Alexandria relegated the
deity more and more completely into a sphere wholly
beyond conception, and, under pretext of removing his
^ Thmeus, § 10, 11. ^ Parmenidcs, § 13.
;;
V. MOXOTHEISM. 225
limitations, deprived hiui of the last attributes which

would justify worship.^ Proclus, like Plotinus, declared
that it was still possible to unite oneself to the deity,
withdrawing oneself from the restrictions of the pheno-
menal Avorld, by dint of renunciation and ecstasy. But
their latest successors declared that their God was as
inaccessible as he was unknowable. It seems as though

agnosticism were to be the logical conclusion and inevi-
table consequence of the whole ancient philosophy.
We may note that in China, too, where the official
religion re-organized by Confucius hardly rose above

the conception of a divine monarchy, imitated from the
Chinese empire, the philosophical sect of Taoists seems
to have risen at a single bound to the height of meta-
physical Pantheism. The Tao, that is to say the prin-
ciple or source of all things, is represented by Lao-tsze
as evading all definition, and even all comprehension.
'^
You look upon the Tao and you see it not, it has no
colour ;
you listen and you hear it not, it has no voice
you would handle it and you touch it not, it has no
body." 2 ''The Tao which can be expressed is not
the eternal Tao."^ Might one not suppose one was lis-
^ Philo says :
" He is incomprehensible : not even the whole uni-
much less the human mind, can contain the conception
verse, of him :
we know that he is, we cannot know what he is we may : see the

manifestations of him in his works, but it were monstrous folly to go
behind his woi'ks and inquire into his essence. He is hence unnamed
for names are the symbols of created things, whereas his only attribute
is to be." See Edwin Hatch, Hihhe.rt Lectures, 1888, p. 245.
2 Tao-te-King, chap. xiv. (translated by Stanislas Julien, Le livre de
la vote et de la vertu, Paris, 1842).
^ Ibid. chap. i. —The " Tao that can be named," which Lao-tsze
calls " the mother which produces all beings," is, according lu
^ —
226 V. MONOTHEISM.
tening to tlie Upanisliacls, as they declare God unknown ''
to those who profess to know him, known only to those

who profess not to know hini"?i
Amongst the Persians, Ahura-Mazda, exalted as his
position is, remains more or less limited by the temporary
existence of Ahriman, and this opposition is too marked
to allow of his absorbing his opponent into himself.
In the end, however, the two came to be regarded
as offspring or hypostases of "Time without limit,"
Zervanem Akaranem. The germ of this conception is
already found in the Avesta, where " time without limit"
is distinguished from the "time of long rule." In the
Minolcliired^ time without limit is assimilated to destiny, by
which all things take place. Finally, under the Sassanides,

Zervanem Akaranem becomes the Supreme Unity.
The ancient But, in the monotlieistic evolution which
^he^face*of
^^ have just witnessod, what becomes of
the Only God. the ancieut gods of polytheism ? "Were
they not destined to vanish with the conception of the
only God, into which all the individual forces of nature
had in some sense melted ?
I would point out, in the first place, that if the idea
of an only God can be reconciled with the real existence
M. Ch. de Haiiez, the indeterminate Tao made active by the ai^jpear-
ance of desire.
1 " He is truly known to him who conceives him not; he is unknown
to him who conceives him : he is incomprehensible to those Avho com-
prehend ; he is comprehended by those who comprehend him not."
Kena Upanishad, i, 2. 3, after de Harlez ; cf. Max Miiller, Sacred
Books of the East, vol. i. The Vjpanishads, p. 149.
2 J. Darmesteter, Ormazd and Ahriman, Paris, 1877, pt. iii. chap. i.
pp. 316 sqq.

V. monotheism:. 227
of terrestrial beings, there is no reason wliy it should

not harmonize equally well with the belief in inter-
mediate beings, superior to human nature, but taking
part in the affairs of this world. The monotheistic

transformation of almost all the historical religions seems,
in this matter, merely to have brought upon the ancient
deities a fate analogous to that which the polytheistic
transformation of nature - worship brought upon the

secondary spirits, when it threw them into a subordinate
rank as agents, servants, messengers, and ministers of
the chief gods. Thus the establishment of monotheism
has not generally constituted so sharp and radical a
revolution as one might have supposed, especially where
it has remained the privilege of the enlightened few.
Even Buddhism, though it could dispense with any
deity at all, did not attack the existence of the ancient
Yedic gods ; it was content to represent them as beings
who had raised themselves by their merits above the

level of humanity in the scale of transmigration —some-
thing like those " planetary brothers of man" whom a
contemporary of our own (who certainly cannot be sus-
pected of any tenderness for religious dreamings), the

author of The Irreligion of the Future, M. Guyau, ima-
gines may, somewhere in the universe, represent a higher
product of the universal evolution. ^ Islam preserves
the angels and the djinns of previous beliefs, to say
nothing of the almost superhuman position which it
assigns to its founder. Post-exilian Judaism is, no

doubt, reputed the monotheistic religion 2âr excellence.
Nevertheless, it surrounds Yahveh with angels and
*
L irreligion de Vavenir, Paris, 1887, p. 446.
q2
228 V. MONOTHEISM.
archangels, powers, dominations, and thrones, which

rephice, at a higher degree of abstraction, the Bene
Elohim of a former time, and play a part analogous to

that of the demons in the Greek philosophy of the latest
period.
,, • In the worships which I have inst men-
Hypostases, -^
^
_
demiurges, tioned, it may be maintained that the reten-

niediators. . ., .,,...,.
tion of the ancient divinities was a concession
to popular traditions ; and that these divinities, though
retained in the religious system, were only there as
survivals.! But, at any rate, this will not apply to
the monotheism that takes a pantheistic turn. Here,
in fact, the existence of superhuman beings, inter-
mediate between the absolute God and the visible
world, becomes necessary to explain the passage from

the infinite to the finite, from the noumenal to the
phenomenal world. IN'ot only was this passage incom-

prehensible in itself, but the erection of the deity into
the Absolute must have had the eftect of breaking all
his direct ties with man, and thus putting an end to the
very possibility of the relations which constitute worship.

To was nothing for it but to
re-establish them, there
throw across the abyss a chain of superhuman powers

bordering on the one side upon supreme perfection, and
on the other upon the sensible world. Iôw the ancient
gods, already arranged by polytheism in a hierarchy,
were naturally marked out for this office of hypostases
and of demiurges.
1 According to strict Islamite doctrine Allah alone should be
addressed in prayer or invocation, for except him nothing and no
—
one "can help or hurt." Ignace Goldziher, ie culte des saints chez
les Musulmam, in the Revue de VHistoire des Religions,
vol ii. p. 262.
—
V. MONOTHEISM. 229
Thus in latest period of the classical paganism the

neo-Platonist doctrine of emanation established a whole
chain of intermediary beings between God and man,
growing in perfection as they approached the Supreme
Being and as they freed themselves from every mate-
rial bond and again the demonology of Plutarch and
;
Porphyry filled the world with demons arranged in a

hierarchy, with the ancient gods of paganism at their
head; and the combination of these two conceptions
inspired a last eSort to bring paganism into harmony
with the philosophical and universalistic tendencies of
the time.
It should be remarked that, almost everywhere, as the
supreme God became more powerful and majestic, the
popular conscience had spontaneously fixed upon some
other divine personage nearer to its own sentiments,
aspirations, or even passions, to fulfil the function of

interceder, or rather mediator, between man and the
Sovereign of the skies. This mission had already been
exercised in a subordinate degree by all the super-
human beings, from the genii of the hearth to the souls
of the deceased; and now it generally, but not necessarily,
fell to a personification of the sun; perhaps because
mythology had almost universally made him the mythical
hero of quasi-human adventures, the ideal type of man
exposed to the extreme vicissitudes of fortune, more
accessible than the other deities to sentiments of sym-
pathy and pity. Passing alternately between death and
life, he had necessarily become the pledge, and to a
certain extent the dispenser, of immortality. Finally,
he was a divinity essentially visible cleus cer-ius, as

230 V. MONOTHEISM.
Aiirelian calls him — more regular in Ms "ways than fire
or the wind, more personal than the heaven, more active

than the moon, more beneficent than the thunderbolt.
Did he not fulfil his function of mediator by tracing the
road that leads between heaven and earth ? We need
not be surprised, then, that as the chief gods of the
great pantheons withdrew behind the veil of metaphysical
speculation, we note a remarkable revival by which gods
hitherto regarded as secondary mount to the first place
in adoration and worship. It was so with Merodach in
Mesopotamia, Yishnu in India, Helios and Mithra in
the Eoman empire. And if we have not a parallel
phenomenon to note in Egypt, it is because there the
absolute God was in some sense drawn directly from the
solar personality. Osiris or Ammon became the Unique
Being ''
more mysterious than the gods," without ceasing
to be the deity who dies each day to be born again, who
fights with the darkness, and who judges the dead.
Even in the religion of Israel we find that, in pro-
portion as Yahveh actually becomes "he who is," he
deputes to his angels all the interventions that appear
incompatible with his growing majesty. It is the angel
of Yahveh who reveals himself in the form of flame,
who consumes the flesh of the sacrifice, who struggles
with Jacob, who reveals himself to Moses, and so on.
Later on, this role is taken by abstractions, such as the
Word, the Yoice, the Name, the Glory, the Wisdom, the
Breath Yahveh, considered objectively, and, in a way,
of
detached from God himself. In the 8th chapter of

Proverbs, Wisdom, that is to say the intelligence of
God, who conceives the world, is already almost per-
—
V. MONOTHEISM. 231
sonified. She is represented as existing side by side

with God, she is called his ''foster-child," and she
"rejoiced beforehim at all times." ^ "I alone," says
the same Wisdom, as represented in a later work, " have
fixed the limits of the beaven and hollowed tbe depths
of the sea ; I have established my dominion over every
portion of the eartb and over all the nations." ^ In
the same —
way the Word perhaps the only human power
which can apparently create and not only fashion, since it
can make the image of a thing arise solely by naming it
appears as early as in Isaiah in the character of messenger,

or agent, despatched by the Eternal to execute his orders,
a veritable angel, like Ossa (Fame), the messenger of
Zeus.^ When Yahveh was so far exalted above the
universe as to be incomprehensible in his essence —an
idea already formulated by the author of Ecclesiasticus
(xliii. 27 — 33)— or, indeed, as soon as he was conceived
as too pure to come into direct contact with matter, all
active and creative power is lodged in his abstract inter-
mediaries. Thus the Helleuized Jews of Alexandria,
such as Aristobulus, and above all Philo, had no diffi-
culty in concentrating these intermediaries into a kind

of hypostasis, which, under the Greek name of Logos,
bore a singular resemblance to the anima mimdi of the
Stoics, and the intelligible world of Platonism.
Amongst the Hindus, the Brahmans took care to
retain the principal popular deities in their religious
system, while placing at their head the three great
gods of the post-Yedic epoch, Brahma, Yishnu, and
^ Proverbs viii. 30. 2 Ecclesiasticus xxiv. 5, 6.
3 Iliad, ii. 93, 94.

232 V. MONOTHEISM.
Qiva, themselves regarded as hypostases of a neuter and

impersonal Brahma. Thus —inspired doubtless by the
necessities of worship — side by side with the metaphysical
idealism which regarded the universe as a product of
universal illusion, they taught a kind of exoteric theology
which allowed some objective reality to the world of
men and of gods. The impersonal Brahma was thought
to evolve the universe from his own substance, like a
spider spinning its web out of its own entrails, and to
re-absorb it in an endless series of evolutions and dis-
solutions.^
EeligioTis We must not forget that the first corollary

syncretism.
^£ ^ truly pantheistic religion is not so much
toleration of all forms of worshij), as a tendency to
embrace them all in a single syncretistic system. The
one God is the same for all. What, then, does the name
they give him matter? As for the secondary deities,
are they not all alike equivalent and interchangeable
hypostases of the Deity ? He who adores them all still
fails, in the sum of the phases they represent, to grasp the

divine unity reflected in the infinity of beings and things.
We have already seen how, in Egypt, the gods were
regarded sometimes as the members, sometimes as the
varying names, of the one Being ; and how the concep-
tion of the one Being still left the existence of the
gods unchallenged alike in jDopular worship and in theo-
logical speculation. Amongst the Hindus, the system
of incarnations or avatars (literally, descents) provided a
means of absorbing into Brahmanism the locid deities
that might otherwise have checked the worship of the

^ Baith, Rdigions of India, p. 47.
—
V. MONOTHEISM. 233
Devas. Buddha himself thus became an incarnation of

Vishnu.i
The classical paganism owed its last period of vigour
to the growing conviction that the gods of all the peoples
were equivalent, or rather that they were connected with
the same deified forces and were a part of the same divine
order. Every one has heard of the chapel in which
Alexander Severus placed Jesus, Abraham, Orpheus, and
Alexander the Great, side by side with ApoUonius of
Tyana. The same emperor, whose reign marks the
culmination of religious toleration in Eome, took part
indifferently in the worship of Jupiter, Mithra, Serapis,
and Baal. He is even said to have contemplated the
erection of a temple to Christ. And he certainly con-
firmed the Christians in the possession of a church in
the Transtiberine district which had once been public
property, and which was claimed by the public autho-
rities.
M. Jean Edville, in his Histoire de la Religion a Rome

sons les Severes —which might equally well be entitled,
''How Paganism met its End" —has shown with great

clearness and judgment that this syncretistic tendency
resulted at once in prolonging the existence and in
facilitating the fall of the ancient beliefs ; for it united
all the worships of the time in a kind of vague, solar

monotheism.^ The gods of the old national pantheons
^ Conversely, the Japanese Buddhists taught that the gods of Shin-

toism were manifestations of the Buddha. Religious Systems of the
World, p. 90.
2 La Religion a Rome sous les Severes, Paris, 1886, chap. x.

—
234 V. MONOTHEISM.
were too deeply compromised by particularism and by

theirown mythological past to lend themselves to the
new part they were now called upon to play. On the
other hand, the abstractions of the theosophical schools
Eeason, Wisdom, even the Word —lacked the vivid and
anthropomorphic characteristics needed to secure them
the homage and sympathy of the masses. But when, in
the bosom of Alexandrine theology, the hypostasis of
the Logos became flesh in the person of Jesus, who was
already the centre of a moral doctrine answering to the
aspirations of the age, then, indeed, a religion was born
destined to conquer all its rivals, and to preside for more
than fifteen centuries over the destinies of Western civi-
lization.
The Christian The question has often been discussed,

theodicy,
îiether the rise of Christianity hastened
the fall of the ancient world, and whether it must be
held responsible for the long intellectual night of the
Middle Ages. The truth is, that the ancient civilization
was irrevocably doomed, and that Christianity itself
was involved in the decline which followed the fall
of ancient paganism. It is not my present purpose
to trace the history of Christian theology during the
centuries which followed. You know how it oscil-
lated between a monotheism, in which the persons of
the Trinity approximated to simple hypostases of the
Deity, and a veritable Tritheism, which accentuated the
distinction of the three persons to the prejudice of the
divine unity. The reconciliation of these two extreme
terms remained impossible : it was a mystery which the
V. MONOTHEISM. 235
believer must admit without professing to explain it;

such was the decree of the Church, raised in its capacity
of living interpreter of the Deity above the very Scrip-
tures themselves.
"No doubt the conception of God, or rather Theology,
gave rise to innumerable speculations in the Middle
Ages. But these speculations were bound down to the
bed of Procrustes provided by an orthodoxy that was
often itself a mere mechanical compromise between con-
tradictory opinions. Nominalists and realists, rational-
ists and mystics, were successively condemned as soon

as they attempted to draw out the logical consequences
of their respective principles. We have nothing but
respect for the labours of such thinkers as Scotus Erigena,
Abelard, St. Bernard, Eoger Bacon, David of Dinant,
Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas, who kept the
light of philosophic culture burning during those dark
days. But whatever services some of these scholars
may have rendered in elaborating logical and philo-
sophical method, and whatever influence some may still
retain in orthodox cii'cles, the labours of Scholasticism

can hardly be regarded as having made any more sub-
stantial contributions to the advancement of the religious
problem than are due to the intermittent and often
irregular explosions of the heresies which were one
after another drowned in blood.
The Eeformation re-opened a gate to the spiiit of free
inquiry, and thereupon philosophical criticism, to which
the Eenaissance had given a new life and vigour, straight-
way applied to the dogmas of Christianity the methods
it has long ago dii'ected against the theodicy of Greek
paganism.
236 V. MONOTHEISM.
God identi- "^^^ ^^^^ ^^ ^^^ ^^^ ^^^^ reduced to the

fiedwith the conception of Unity, freed from mytliical
absolute unity ^ i j
.
by modern functions, released from the limitations of

^ ^'
anthropomorphism, stripped of every attri-
bute common to human nature, till German idealism,
treading in the steps of Spinoza, reduced it once more to
the conception of sole and absolute Being. Even intel-
ligence, justice, and love, have once more been challenged
as attributes of the Deity, because they imply the notion
of a personal and therefore a limited being. The pessi-
mist philosophers allow at most a kind of unconscious
will to the Deity; the Evolutionists reduce, or, if you
will, expand it into "an Infinite and Eternal Energy,
from which all things proceed." ^ In a word, we find
ourselves returning from every side to the Inaccessible
of the latest neo-Platonists.
In truth, it is not the existence of God that modern
philosophy and science challenge. Or, if criticism has
attempted any such task, it has only been as a philo-
sophic exercise. Systems may, if they choose, forbid
us to think about such questions, but whenever we do
think about them —and will not that be always? — we
shall find this idea of God embedded in our consciousness
as the very foundation of all relative existence. "What
science really has proscribed is a belief in aeons, avatars,
mediators — in a word, ''secondary gods;" and this it is
which complicates with a new difficulty every attempt

at religious reconstruction.
We have just seen how the ancient philosophy, by the
expedient of hypostases and divine emanations, found
^ Herbert Spencer, Ecclesiastical Institutions, p. 843.
I
V. MONOTHEISM. 237
means, not only of giving the deities formerly worshipped

a place in a rational system, but even creating fresh
deities when it suppressed the old ones. But now, if
there is one axiom which has sunk deeper than another

into our minds, it is that all phenomena are ruled by
laws, and that outside the contingent world thus orga-
nized there is room for naught save the One Absolute
Being from whom all things proceed.
Gods and demons have disappeared, to return no
more. Or, if their equivalents exist anywhere in the
universe, here on our planet at least we must perforce
admit that they have no power making themselvesof
felt or known ; and we are more and more tempted to

make Cicero's words our own: "Think not that any
such thing can happen as we often see in plays, that
some god, coming down from heaven, should join the
assemblies of men, hold intercourse on the earth, and
converse with mortals."^
If any intermediaries between man and God, as now
conceived, exist, they can only be our own faculties,
such as Eeason, or Conscience, or such abstractions as

Moral Order, the Law of Progress, Humanity, and so
forth. But these are entities with no personal and

discrete existence ; they can only take shape by becom-
ing attributes of something or of some one. This is
why Unitarians, and the Eationalistic communities of

modern Christendom, in general, have come to reverence
the Ideal in that man who seems in their eyes most

nearly to approach it, even if not to realize it in all
its plenitude. And so, too, the Positivists, in pro-
^ Oratio de haruspicum responsis, cap. xxviii.

238 V. MONOTHEISM.
claiming the Eeligion of Humanity, have but organ-

ized the worship of those types which have contributed
most to the development of human society. But here
we must admit that the saints of the Comtist calendar,
and the Jesus of Liberal Protestantism himself, are no
longer in any sense hypostases of the Deity ; for they are
no longer superhuman beings, freed from the normal con-
ditions of humanity, nor are they the necessary and per-
manent media of the Deity in his relations with the world.
We are perpetually thrown back, then, on the unknown,
unknowable Being of the latest Alexandrines as the
object of religion. Yet neither religion nor philosophy,
•nor even science, compels us to be content with this
purely negative solution.
The eternal ^® ^^® awaro what the Unknowable has

and infinite bocomo in the hauds of Herbert Spencer. The
energy whence ^
. ,
all things couclusion to which his brilliant and daring

scientific generalizations lead him is not only
a belief in the positive existence of the Absolute, but a
vindication of our right to attribute to that supreme
reality the characters of unity, activity, immanence,
omnipresence, and eternity, which make it " the infinite
and eternal energy whence all things proceed." ^
1 Mr. Spencer has been reproached with this as a contradiction

and
an inconsistency. Perhaps the great representative of Evolutionism
would have done better had he used the term Incomprehensible
rather than Unknowable, to mark our inability to express, or even
adequately to conceive, either the essence or the attributes of that
almighty energy. But we may remark tliat he himself is careful to
distinguisli between two kinds of knowledge ; the definite knowledge,
the laws of which are formulated by logic, and the indefinite knowledge,
which can only be formulated by the aid of symbols. If I understand
—
V. MONOTHEISiT. 239
It is true that he refuses to assign to this energy the

attributes of conscience, of goodness, and of personality,
as we conceive them in the system of our relations with
the finite world ; but he explains that this is simply

because of our inability to seize the true modes of the
Infinite. "Is it not just possible," he asks of those

who accuse him of want of religion, "that there is
a mode of being as much transcending Intelligence

and Will as these transcend mechanical motion ? It is
t]-ue that we are totally unable to conceive any such
hiffher mode of beinsc. But this is not a reason for
questioning its existence ; it is rather the reverse. Have

we not seen how utterly incompetent our minds are to
form even an approach to a conception of that which

underlies all phenomena? Is it not proved that this
incompetency is the incompetency of the conditioned to

grasp the unconditioned ? Does it not follow that the
ultimate Cause cannot in any respect be conceived by
us because it is in every respect greater than can be
conceived?"^
The power, Some of Spencer's disciples, the right
not ourselves,
that malces tor o as WO may
^[^„ J
Call them of Evolutionism,
righteousness, havo gouc stiU further, sometimes with the
more or less formal sanction of the master.^ From the
him riglitly, it is because it is an object of this imperfect knowledge

only that he qualifies the supreme reality as unknowable. First
Principles, chap. iv. § 26, p. 88.
1 First Principles, chap. v. § 31, p. 109.
See his letter to the Rev. Minot Savage, author of The Religion
2
of Evolution (Boston, 187G), in which he congratulates him on having

"exposed the religiousand ethical bearings of the evolution doctrines."
" I rejoice very much," adds Mr. Spencer, " to see that those doctrines
240 V. monotheism;
fact that all observable

phenomena, that is to say the con-
tingent manifestations of Energy, realize themselves in
accordance with law, they have concluded that the reign
of law is one of the modes in which the Unknowable
operates, and they have taken occasion herefrom to attri-
bute to the supreme Power, if not a conscious and deter-
mined goal like the objects pursued by man, at any rate
a tendency to secure the utterance of universal order in
the moral as in the physical world. "While such a
tendency," says Mr. John Fiske, "cannot be regarded
as indicative of purpose in the limited anthropomorphic
sense, .... the objective aspect of that which,
it is still
when regarded on its subjective side, we call Purpose." ^

In fact, not only does order exist in the universe, but this
order is progressive, as we are taught successively by
astronomy, geology, paleontology, and the history of civi-
lization. This progress manifests itself first in the physical
domain, where it takes the form of growing complexity and
adaptation of organisms ; next, in the spiritual domain,
where it reveals itself in the rise and development of
morality. Thus "the infinite and eternal energy whence
are coming to the front. It is high time that something should he
done towards making the people see that there remains for them, not
a mere negation of their previous ethical and religious beliefs, which,
as you say, have a definite scientific and unshakable foundation
I have been long looking forward to the time when something of this
kind might be done, and it seems to me you are the man to do it."
This letter, published with Mr. Spencer's sanction, in The Christian
Register of Boston, March 29, 1883, is all the more significant, inas-
much Mr. Savage attributes to evolution a goal
as in some sort pre-
determined.
^ John Fiske, The Idea of God as affected hij Modern Knowledge,

Boston, 1885, p. xxiv.
V. MONOTHEISM. 241
all things proceed" becomes a regulating power of wliicli

we have the right to say that it tends to good, even
though its ultimate goal should for ever escape our vision.
Not that I am called upon to take sides as between
the various explanations of the world current in our day,
or even to enumerate the systems which a history of
philosophy would have to deal with. If I have dwelt
on the theology of Evolutionism, it is because that
philosophy is so much in vogue that it forces us to pay
special attention to it, and further because it is the one
amongst all the great syntheses of our day which breaks
most completely with the traditions and the methods of
the past. But I should be the first to admit that it
has no right to claim the monopoly of conformity

with the demands of science. Side by side with those
who attempt to complete Spencer's doctrine on the

lines indicated by the spiritual and moral demands of
our nature, it is but rightVto refer, however rapidly, to
the attempts of those thinkers who remain faithful in.
their philosophic constructions to the method of internal

observation. It would be mere dogmatic narrowness to
deny the legitimacy of this method, provided always that
its advocates, while themselves laying greater stress on
ideas of immanence, side by side with those of develop-
ment, are careful not to put themselves into opposition
with any facts established by impartial observation of
nature. Indeed, for that matter, we may go as far as to
assert that German Idealism long anticipated the gene-
ralizations of the science of to-day.
The attitude just indicated is notably that of Eobert

Flint, Thomas Ilill Green, F. W. Newman, James Mar-
R
—
242 .
V. MONOTHEISM.
tineau, and Matthew Arnold, in England ; of Pfleiderer,

Wundt, andtheNeo-Hegelians, in Germany; of Paul Janet,
Vaclierot, Secretan, and Fouillê, in France ; of E. Waldo
Emerson and Francis E. Abbott, in the United States,
whether they have chosen Will rather than Force to
express, in terms of our own experience, the action of the
power at the source of things ; or whether they have re-
garded spirit and matter as two phases of one mysterious
reality rising into self-consciousness in man; or whether
they have sought in our moral aspirations the reflexion of
a higher ideal, which reveals at once the objective exist-
ence and the essential nature of the Deity. It is impos-
sible to predict the measure in which these speculations
are destined respectively to influence the theology of the
future, though the present tide of philosoj^hy seems to flow
more strongly than ever through the channels opened out

by Kant and Hegel but the essential point is, that the
;
systems whose best-known representatives I have just

enumerated, while differing widely on many questions as
to which metaphysicians have always differed, neverthe-
less agree in representing the history of the world as an

evolution the progressive development of which bears
witness to the universal presence and unceasing action
of an eternal Power "not ourselves that makes for
righteousness."
Mr. Herbert Spencer's formula, thus completed by
Matthew Arnold's, perhaps furnishes the point of recon-
ciliation between the philosophy of evolution and the
religious school of positivism, by allowing these two
systems to supplement each other without bating a jot
of their respective principles. In the words of the
;
V. MONOTHEISM. 243
American Positivist, W. Frey, ''The intense feeling of

gratitude and admiration which [the Positivists] feel
towards humanity will become only deeper and stronger

if humanity be regarded as mediator between man and
the infinite, because then will come into play the strongest
chord of religious sentiment, i.e. man's yearning for the

Infinite."!
And, again, this conclusion enables us to combine the
fact ofhuman freedom with the demands of scientific
determinism, if we can but admit the theory of idea-
forces, so brilliantly expounded in France by M. A.
Fouillee. According to his teaching, the idea of liberty,
when once developed in the conscience, leads human

activity to take its bearings afresh. "It is realized
by being desired." Its very birth is itself the natural

and logical result of evolution, the development of a
germ present in all nature as the manifestation of the
primordial Will. " First comes a war of forces, brute
fatality, infinite confusion of beings striking one against
another without recognition, in a sort of blind miscon-
ception ; then progressive organization, which allows
consciousness to emerge, and, with consciousness, will
then progressive union of beings gradually recognizing
one another as brethren. The evil will will be tran-
sient, the ojffspring of mechanic necessity or intellectual
ignorance. The good will, on the contrary, will be per-
manent, fundamental, normal, and will spring from the
very roots of the being itself. To bring it into distinct
existence in oneself will be to pass out of the transient
1 Boston, Index for Aug. 8th, 1882.
r2
244 V. MONOTHEISM.
and the individual for the benefit of the permanent and

the universal, to become truly free, and therefore to
love."i
It cannot be denied, then, that there exist in our times
all the elements of a monotheistic faith reconcilable with
the demands of the most exacting reason. All that
modern science postulates is the unity of the productive
power and the unchangeableness of the laws in accord-
ance with which it manifests itself. And, as Dr. James
Martineau has well observed, modern -science, so con-
ceived, " does not even disturb us with a new idea ; for
Evolution is only growth; it merely raises the question
hozv far into the field of IS'ature that idea can properly
be carried, —a question surely of no religious signifi-
cance The Unity of the Causal Power —which
is all that the spreading network of analogies can esta-
blish — cannot possibly be unwelcome to those who regard
it all as the working of One Mind,"^ or even, I would
add, as the utterance of a mysterious force seeking an
end.
^ A. Fonillee, La Libert e et le Determim'sme, second edition, Paris,
1884, pp. 355, 356.
'•^
Preface to John James Tayler's Retrospect of the Religions Life of
Eiigland, second edition, London, 1876, p. 32,
—
Lecture YI.
THE FUTURE OF WORSHIP AS DEDUCED

FROM' ITS PAST.
Hitherto we have been conceraed with

Evolution of
the incentives the development of the idea oi
pi't p/-<i'i
Ood m the
to worship. • « i i
'
consciousness oi man i i
as he slowly ascended
i
towards the higher regions of intellectual and moral

culture. It remains to examine the corresponding modi-
fications which this development of doctrine has produced
in the inward springs and outward manifestations of
worship. Theology, interesting as its problems may
be in themselves, derives its general significance from
the measure in which it forms the character and influ-
ences the life of man. Of the three motives which have
been the main factors of religion from the very first,
to wit, fear, admiration, and sympathy, —the first hardly

survives except as that emotion of awe called forth by
the thought of the Absolute, by the contrast between
human weakness and the irresistible might of the uni-
versal evolution, and by the certain punishment which
sooner or later overtakes the least attempt to violate the
order of the universe, in the moral as in the physical
domain. Fear, then, is transformed into respect for the
moral law and reverence for its mysterious Author. And,
by the same evolution, the second flictor passes from the
irreflective to the reasoning stage, as admiration for the
246 VI. THE FUTURE OF WORSHIP.
divine work is deepened by the science that enables us

to form a loftier and broader conception of the universal
harmony. And, finally, both these elements tend to lose
themselves in the third, which alone can leap the barriers
between man and the Deity.
Transforma- The old adage. Si vis amarij ama^ may here
eeXment'of ^® applied. As soou as men believed them-
loveofGod. by the
selves loved gods, the gods were
straightway loved by them and ; this feeling, that had
hardly existed at the outset, became ever more generous
and powerful as respect for the moral superiority of the
deity reinforced it. Henceforth sin was shunned and
virtue practised, not with a view to reward in this world
or the next, but simply to please the object of love.
The belief in the rewards of a future life, whether it
take the form of metempsychosis, of j)ersonal survival,

or of resurrection, may fade and disappear ; but love of
God, if strong enough, may adequately replace it as a
chief incentive to virtue and love ; and I would even add
that it is a nobler because a more disinterested motive.^
The religion of the categorical imperative no doubt
touches an equally certain and equally exalted spring of
action; but in enjoining duty because it is duty, it
remains a severe and abstract philosophy, like the Stoic-

ism of former times, and can never be more than the
privilege of a select few. Love is accessible to all,
whether its object be the God of the Christians dying on

the Cross to redeem humanity, or the sage of Kapila-
^ Abelard notes that fear of hell has no moral value, and that the
only true penitence is inspired, not by fear of punishment, but by love
of God. — Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, vol. iv. p. 259.

;
VI. THE FUTURE OF WORSHIP. 247
vastu renouncing the l!îrvana to teach men the way of
salvation ; whether it concentrate itself on the unlimited

power of which the whole universe is the harmonious
manifestation, or whether it address itself to the grand-
etre Humanity of which Comte aspired to be the revealer
and the apostle.
This has been understood by all the higher religions,

including not only Christianity, but the mystic sects of
Brahmanism and even of Islam. For all alike have striven
to place love — or rather the desire to realize the com-
pletest possible unity with the Deity —above knowledge,
above even obedience, as the highest principle of life.
Love of God, it is true, is in danger of culminating in

a mysticism which engulfs man in sterile contempla-
tions and selfish ecstasies. Thus amongst the Hindus

the outpourings of love for God have always culminated
in ascetic negation of action and even of thought. But
as the love of God may vary in degree, so likewise it
may show itself in more or less worthy forms. When
the good of the universe is regarded as the essential
purpose of the Deity, and when it is just this very con-
ception that strikes the chords of sympathy in the human

heart, then the desire to please the supremely loved being
does not assert itself as an exclusive and jealous senti-

ment, but as an irresistible impulse to love what the loved
one loves. Thus it becomes the love of man in God
and yet more, transcending the limits of humanity, it em-
braces all creatures in a common sympathy which may
even pierce the unknown spaces with the torch of imagi-
nation, and seek in other worlds beings to love and one
day to aid.
After declaring that tlie first commandment is to love

God with all the heart, and all the soul, and all the mind,
and all the strength, did not Jesas add that the second,
which bids us love our neighbour as ourself, was like
unto the first ? (Matt. xxii. 36 —
40). " Love is practical
in its nature," says a modern Indian winter; " if genuine,
it must come out in action ; love that is not active, is no
love at all."^ I need not insist on the splendid develop-
ment of charitable and philanthropic works which sprang
and still springs from the Wesleyan movement. It proves,
better than any argument, that mysticism, when it falls
on good ground, may assume an essentially fruitful and

practical character, by conceiving the .love of God as the
source of all moral activity, and grafting the love of man
upon it. The life of a Channing, a Theodore Parker, a
Eammohun Eoy, or a Keshub Chunder Sen, and the
institutions founded and developed in England and
America and on the European continent by the liberal
Protestants of every shade, prove that the religious source
of this devotion to humanity is not to be found in the
belief in the supernatural, but in a sense of fraternity
begotten by communion with God, and in a disinterested
desire to share in the divine work of human regeneration.
This development of the religious sentiment has not
taken place at a single stroke. We can trace its gradual
growth in the history of the several religious institutions
which combine in worship.
Disappearance I pointed out at the close of my second
I^^cture that the external or practical mani-
elenuitrof
worship. festations of religion may be classed, even
^ Brahmo Public Opinion^ Jan. 23rd, 1879.
amongst the most backward peoples, under the five fol-
lowing heads: prayer, sacrifice, magic, divination, and

symbolism. Some of these are recalcitrant to all pro-
gress or even transformation. Such appear to be the

processes of sorcery, which remain, amongst ourselves,
exactly what they were in antiquity and still are amongst
the savages. The whole religious development has gone
on outside them. Everywhere rejected or despised by
the modern churches, they have taken refuge amongst
the lower classes or if they have kept their place here
;
and there in official liturgies, it is only on condition of

ascribing the whole merit of their traditional efficacy to
the free intervention of the Deity ; and even these sur-
viving concessions to weak souls are falling more and
more into discredit, and their final extinction is easy to
foresee.
Divination has completely disappeared from the bosom

of the great contemporary religions. It is true enough
that faith in the inflexibility of the divine decrees, or,
in other words, in the immutability of the order esta-
blished by the gods, gave a fresh impulse to divination
in the ancient polytheisms, but it was also the begin-
ning of the end ; for when the art of predicting breaks

away from the arbitrary intervention of the superhuman
powers and attaches itself to the connected order of
cause and effect, it escapes from the domain of religion
and enters into that of science. No sooner had astrology
given birth to astronomy, than its own progress was
decisively arrested. The almanac of Nostradamus shows
no advance on the processes of the astrological tablets of
ancient Chaldea. Here, too, progress is impossible be-
yond a certain point, and astrological divination is defi-

among popular superstitions.
nitely relegated to its place
The Pythian and the Sybil henceforth are dumb, or
rather their awful voices find no echo save in the dege-
nerate tongue of the wizard and the fortune-teller.
But other institutions which date from the origins of
religion maintain their place in our worship, because
their nature was susceptible of modification in accordance
with the changed aspect of the deity itself.
The evolution ^® hsLYO scon that Originally prayer was

of prayer,
essentially petition. When religion is pene-
trated by the moral idea, no doubt material blessings are
still sought, but at the same time the superhuman powers
are implored for pardon of sins or even for power to resist
temptation. The Bible itself has no more exalted utter-

ances of repentance than some of the Chaldeo-Assyrian
hymns which Francois Lenormant has well called " Peni-
tential Psalms," or the staves of some of the Yedic chants

addressed to the gods of justice or pity, Yaruna, Agni,
Aditi, and others.
Another stage of advance is marked when men ask
for no specified favours from the gods, but throw them-
selves upon their insight and their goodness, in the belief
that they know best what is good for their worshippers.
Thus the cry of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane
implied absolute self-abandonment to an almighty and
all-loving Providence :
" Father, not my will, but thine,
be done " (Luke xxii. 42).
But can prayer survive the rejection, not only of belief
in miracles, but of all belief in the intermittent and arbi-

trary intervention of the Deity ? Surely it may remain as
a subjective expression of the loftiest religious aspirations

of man, transformed into the spontaneous utterance of
that gratitude, admiration and love, which the normal
unfolding of the divine works inspires. As petition,
prayer may disappear; but as invocation, as homage,

and, above all, as self-dedication to the task of moral
co-operation with the Deity, it will remain as long as
the religious sentiment itself abides.
The poetry which personifies everything has surely

the right to ascribe the most elevated attributes of
human nature to the supreme Eeality. Profoundly reli-
gious minds have admitted that prayer can have no

effect on the Deity, yet have not renounced it. Even
should we become convinced that invocations are no
more than monologues, and wake no echo outside our
own consciousness, like the Comtist prayers addressed to
the grand-Hre^ Humanity, we might yet draw from
this communion with our Ideal such strength as comes
from any effusion that raises us above the relative and
the transitory, and places our feet in the region of the
Eternal and the Absolute. Nevertheless, it is only if we
believe in the real existence of an omnipresent Power,
even though we refuse to define its attributes, that
prayer, or, if you prefer it, invocation, gives to the
spiritual, moral, and even sesthetic faculties of the human
soul their highest satisfaction. This truth is amply illus-
trated by some of the liturgies in use in Theistic or Free

Christian Churches.
The evolution ^^^^ begins by supposing the superhuman

of sacntice.
lêiugs to eat and drink like men. The Cari-
bees think they hear their cemis cracking their jaws
when they are eating the provisions placed in special

huts for them. So, too, the Negroes of Labode pro-
fessed to hear the gurgling and smack as their fetish
drank the bottle of rum they had put within his reach.
Such illusions may be maintained by the fact that
sooner or later the food is decomposed or carried off by
animals, and the drink evaporates or sinks into the ground.
A Eussian traveller amongst the Ostyaks now and
again empties a horn of snuff which has been set before
an idol, and in the morning the people say the god must
have been hunting, he has snuffed so much.^ This ex-
plains the prevalence of certain forms of sacrifice which
facilitate the disappearance of the offerings, e.g. burying
or immersing them for subterranean or aquatic deities,
and burning them for celestial or atmospheric ones.
Fire is more especially charged with this mission, not

only because it so soon reduces combustible objects to
volatile forms, but further because it seems to bear
them to heaven in the smoke. " Agni," says the Eig-
Yeda, ''
the offering which thou encirclest on all sides,
unhurt, that alone goes to the gods."^ Thus fire, per-
sonified as the agent of sacrifice, assumes an ever more
important place as the mightiest and most formidable
deities are located in the sky. The Yedas call it the
"Divine Priest appointed for sacrifice."^ The Proto-
Chaldeans named it the " Supreme Pontiff on the face of
the Earth."* The Chinuks implore it to intercede with
^ Tjlor, Primitive Culture, vol. ii. p. 345 (3rd edition, p. 381).
2 Rig-Veda, 1. 1. 4. 3 jjjia, l. 1. 1.
* Tiele, Aiicienncs leligions de VEgy;pte et des jêtiples semitiques,
p. 176.
the Great Spirit to obtain abundant game, swift horses,

and plenty of male children for them. Amongst the
Egyptians, Ptah, the god of the Cosmic Fire, has a son
Imhoteb, whose name means, "I come in the sacrifice"
or "in peace," and who personified, as Tiele assures us,
the fire of sacrifices regulated according to the sacred

book.^
S 3iritnalizin<r
^^^ custom of Committing sacrifice to the
of sacrifice, fiê gavo rise, in its turn, to the belief that
the gods only consumed the essence, transmitted to
them in the form of smoke or odour. This is the idea
of the Eedskin who smokes his calumet in honour of
the Great Spirit. "Fire and Earth," cry the Osages,

"smoke with me and helj) me to overthrow my foes."^
The brothers Lander tell us of a village on the ISTiger

where they had slaughtered an ox, and the natives asked
them to roast it under a certain fetish, that the latter
might have the benefit of the smell. ^ The same order

of ideas re-appears in the offerings of burnt fat amongst
so many peoples, from the Jews and Greeks down to the
Zulus, and the burning of incense or perfumes which
still prevails in most parts of the world. "The smell
of burning says Homer, "rose to heaven on the
fat,"
billows of smoke ;"^ and we know that holocausts long

continued to be a "sweet savour to Yahveh."^ And
^ Tiele, Anciennes Religions de VEgypte et des pcupJes sernitiques,
p. 64 {History of the Egyptian Religion, p. 94).
^ Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. ii. p. 347 (3rd edition, p. 383).
Richard and John Lander, Journal of an Expedition to explore

^
the Course and Termination of the Niger, London, 1832, vol. iii.
pp. 104 sq., under date Oct. 29.

* Uiad, i. 317. ^ Cf. Genesis viii. 21.
again, in proportion as the distinction between body

and soul is carried down to inanimate things, the belief
tends to arise that the superhuman beings confine them-
selves to consuming the spiritual part, or double, of the
sacrifice. I have already cited the Negro's explanation
that it was not the tree that ate the sacrifice, but the
spirit of the tree that ate the spirit of the sacrifice.
Some critics have thought that this is almost too subtle
to be true, but we find the same thing more or less
explicitly formulated in the most diverse parts of the
world.
And now note these consequences. It matters little
what may become of the sacrifice itself ; it may be thrown
away, left there to decay, or abandoned to animals, just as
well as buried or burned. ]ây, the worshippers may eat
it themselves ; and this latter alternative tends to pre-
vail, in the first place because it saves waste, and in the
next place as a means of entering into communion with
the gods by sharing their repast, and as giving the
sacrifice a higher character of solemnity as a social and
religious festival. Unquestionably these are the ideas
which lie at the root of those sacrificial banquets which
are common to all organized religions.^ Sometimes the
^ It is interesting to note that an analogous superstition has survived
in European where the beJief prevails that the repast of the
countries,
survivors helps to redeem the soul of the departed. Indeed, in some
parts of Flanders pannekoeken (fritters) are still made on All-Souls-
day, to be eaten for the benefit of the departed. Every pannekoeke
swallowed redeems a soul. MM. Henry Havard and Ginisty respec-
tively report that at Bruges and at Dixmude men are hired to consume
as many of these dainties as possible, since they are found to injure
the digestions of the living as much as they benefit the souls of the
dead.
material portion of the sacrifices is handed over to the

priests, who are thus directly interested in their multi-
plication :
" That which remains of the meal offering
shall be for Aaron and his sons " (Lev. ii. 3) ; or, finally,
it is given to the poor, as in certain temples in the India

of to-day.i
Transforma- ^lic belief that the gods only eat the soul
tion of
oirerings into
q£ ^j^^ victim, ^
combined with the e-rowinsj
'-' ^
homage, convictiou that theii* existence and felicity
are independent of human generosity, diminishes the
objective importance of sacrifice, and tends to make the
idea of homage preponderate over that of actual gifts or
services.
Hence flow two results, contradictory enough in ap-

pearance, the one manifesting itself as an aggravation,
and the other as an attenuation, of sacrifice.
On the one hand, since the intention alone constitutes
the virtue of sacrifice, its value will be proportioned to
the privation the worshij)per inflicts upon himself, and
the worth of the thing sacrificed in his own eyes. The
Greeks, with whom hospitality was a sacred institution
under the special protection of Zeus, at one period
sacrificed strangers to the Lycian Zeus, perhaps because
a curious perversion of the argument just indicated led
them to regard this as an eminently precious offering.^
We know what efficacity the Semites attached to the
sacrifice of the first-born son. When the king of Moab
was besieged in his capital by the united forces of Israel,
^ A. Clievvillon, Dans I'lnile, in the Revue des Deux Mondes for

March 1st, 1891, p. 100.
^ Cf. F. A. Maury, Religions de la Grece anltqife, vol. i. p. 184.
Judah and Edom, he sacrificed his eldest son on the

ramparts, and this was enough to make the investing
army raise the siege. In like manner, when Carthage
was reduced to the last extremities, the best families
were compelled to give up their first-born sons to be

burnt in a huge hollow statue of Baal-Hamman. But
the hideous sacrifice did not prevent the triumph of
Eome. Hence, too, the idea, always favoured by certain
religions, that the absolute surrender of person and pro-
perty constitutes the sacrifice of highest worth in the
eyes of the Deity, because it is the most complete.
Hence, too, that form of asceticism which consists in
self-imposed fasting and abstinence, regarded as an
expiation, and carried to the point of systematic renun-
ciation, solely to please the Deity, of everything not
absolutely necessary for the bare maintenance of a life
reduced to its simplest elements.
Attenuation ^^^t, on the other hand, since homage is

ofsacriace. ^-^^ essence of sacrifice, the intention ought
to be enough ; and no hesitation need be felt in ofi'ering
a part for the whole, the inferior as a substitute for the

superior, or the image instead of the reality. This three-
fold method of attenuation has had a specially beneficent
eff'ect in eliminating human sacrifice.
(a.) The Part for the Whole.
The idea of substituting the part for the whole gave

rise to those religious mutilations by which the wor-
shipper (and especially the priest, who was supposed to
give himself entirely to the Deity) sacrificed a part of
his body as a substitute for his whole being. Sometimes
VI. THE FUTURE OF WOESHIP. 257
it is a finger, a tootti, a piece of flesh, or a lock of hair,

sometimes a few drops of blood.
In the time of Claudius, the Druids, who had for-
merly practised human sacrifice on a large scale, con-
tented themselves with pouring a little blood upon the
altar.^The same thing takes place in India, where
the Brahmans retain the sacrifice of human blood
in certain solemnities, but only ''
a quarter as much
as a lotus-leaf will hold." ^ In Greece, Pausanias
tells us that the altar of Artemis at Sparta had to
be sprinkled with the blood of human victims chosen
by lot. Lycurgus substituted the practice of flogging
boys before the altar till the blood came.^ In Central
America, where human sacrifice reached such monstrous
proportions, Quetzalcoatl, the least sanguinary of the
Mexican deities, was supposed to have substituted simple
bleeding.^ Finally, it is by no means certain that the
Jewish circumcision was not a similar attenuation. In
fact, we read in Exodus that when Moses on his way to
Egypt had stopped at a hostelry, Yahveh met him and
sought to slay him, but Zipporah hastened to circumcise
her child, and thus saved her husband.^
^ Pomponius Mela, Chorograj^liia, iii. 2 (18).

2 A. de Gubernatis, Mi/fhologie des plantes, vol. ii. p. 209.
^ Pausanias, iii. 16. 10.
* A. Keville, Hibhert Lectures, 188Jf, p. 64.
^ Ex. iv. 24 — 26.

That this was the original significance of circum-
cision seems to follow very clearly from the passage of Sanchuniathon
which sa^^s that after a famine and a pestilence, Cronos first sacrificed
his only son, and then circumcised himself and compelled his com-
panions to do the like. See M. Lenormant, Origines de Vhistoire, 18S0,
vol. i. p. 546 (Beginnings of History, p. 531). When some important —

S
In many cases only the hides or the head, the horns

or the entrails, of the slaughtered animal are sacrificed.
The extreme of attenuation in this matter is realized by
the Parsees, who, instead of sacrificing an ox, confine
themselves to burning a few of his hairs. In like
manner, the Peruvians were satisfied with pulling a hair
out of their eyebrows and blowing it towards the idol.^
(b.) The Inferior for the JStiperior.
Elsewhere the burden or cruelty of human sacrifice is
lightened by committing criminals, captives, slaves, or

animals, to the knife, as a substitute for the more pre-
cious victims. Thus Yahveh allowed Abraham to offer
him a ram as a substitute for Isaac. In Greece, likewise,
the slaughter of an animal was substituted in certain
sacrifices for that of a human victim ; but, in fidelity to
the ancient usage of the ritual tradition, a man was first
led up to the altar, and then suffered to escape.^
(c.) The Image for the Reality.
Wherever we find human figures offered to the deities

— for instance, the statuettes thrown into the Tiber at a
certain period of the year —we may be sure the practice
is a survival from ancient human sacrifices. The same
kind of attenuation has affected the sacrifice of animals,
and in general every kind of offering which involved the
personage in Fiji is smitten with disease, they circumcise, not the

invalid, but his son or some young man who volunteers to submit to
the operation.
1 A. Reville, HiUert Lectures, 1884, P- 219.
2 A. Maury, Religions de la Grece antique, vol. ii. p. 105.
worshipôer in considerable loss. Thus, amongst the

Greeks, worshippers too poor to sacrifice animals confined
themselves to offering paste or wooden effigies of them.^
The same idea re-appears in the wax or metal "ex-votos,"
representing diseased members, suspended round the
chapels of saints or madonnas who have a reputation for
working miracles. Tavernier noted the same usage in
India.2
This form of substitution is fostered by the popular
belief that a portrait is equivalent to the original. The
Egyptians went so far as to believe that the double of
the food painted for the benefit of the deceased on the
walls of the tombs, would reproduce itself indefinitely
in the other world, as long as its representation con-

tinued here. It was this same confusion between the
copy and the original, manifested in connection with
another order of ideas, that gave birth to the practice of
destroying or burying the image of a man as a means of
compassing his death.

By another step forward, it may come to be supposed
that the sacrifice itself can be replaced by a simple pan-
tomime. The Semites were often satisfied with passing
their victims through or between the flames, and the
same usage is found amongst the Malagassy, the ancient
Mexicans, the Malays, and the Burmese. We must be
careful, however, to inquire whether this may not some-
times be a form of purification, like that of baptism by
water, and nothing more ; for amongst savages and in
^ A. Maury, Religions cle la Grhe antique, vol. ii. pp. 95, 9G, 100,
101.
2 See Revue des traditions jpojnilaires, 1889, vol. iv. p. 20.
s2
the lower strata of civilized peoples the same practice

often expresses widely different ideas. In the sixteenth
century, for instance, there were certain parts of Scot-
land in which, as soon as a child was brought home from
baptism, it was swung three or four times over a flame,
with the words, " Let the flame consume thee now or
never." ^
. If the intention is all that signifies, it is not unnatural
for the deity to be satisfied with the bare beginning of the
sacrifice. We
remember how Yahveh held Abraham's
all
arm at the moment when the knife was already raised

to strike Isaac, saying, "Lay not thy hand upon the
child, . . . now I know that thou fearest God" (Gen.

xxii. 12). It is interesting to observe that analogous
traditions arose amongst the Greeks and Chinese. It

'was said that at Lacedemon the oracle had required
the sacrifice of Helen to put an end to a plague, but
at the moment when the sacrificer raised the steel, an
Eagle suddenly snatched it from his hand.'^ In China
the Emperor Tang offered himself as a voluntary victim
to put an end to a drought ; but as he was preparing for

the consummation of the sacrifice, heaven sent abundant
rain.3 In all these cases, the consummation of the
ceremony is averted only by an event independent of

the human Avill; but such precedents would be inter-
preted as manifest signs that the deity no longer required
human sacrifices.
1 J. Brand, Ohservations on Popular Antiquities, London, 1841, vol.

ii. p. 48.
2 Maury, Religions de la Grece antique, vol ii. pp. 104 sq.

3 A. Eeville, La Religion chinoise, vol. i. p. 207.
—
VI. THE FUTURE OF WORSHIP. .

261
Even the representation, or the performance of the

preliminaries, might thus become superfluous formalities.
The mental sacrifices of the Brahman who leads a solitary
life in the heart of the forest, are more efficacious than

the most sacred sacrificial rites of external worship.
The penetration of religion by morals
Moral trans- n -n
formation of tends to modify the idea of sacrmce pro-
foundly, if not completely to suppress all
offerings to the Deity. " I desire mercy and not sacri-
fice," the prophet Hosea makes the Eternal say: ''and

the knowledge of God, more than burnt offerings."^ In
that ancient country, China, —where sacrifice is the basis
of the whole cultus and is offered everywhere, where

the very professors never open their courses without
offering fruits and lentils to the deceased philosophers
Confucius wrote, twenty-three centuries ago, " The per-
fume comes not from the grain [of the sacrifice]. It is
purity and virtue that make it." ^ In India, where the
priestly schools teach that sacrifice makes man the equal,
if not the superior, of the Gods, the sacred poem of the
Mahabharata includes such maxims as this :
" The obla-
tion to Agni, the life in the forest, emaciation of the

body, all these may be but in vain unless the mind be
unspotted."^
It is not surprising, then, that the sacrifice of pro-
pitiation has all but disappeared from the universalist

religions. Judaism, in its synagogues, realizing the
ecclesiastical ideal of the ancient prophets, has dispensed
1 Hosea vi. 6. Cf. Isaiah i. 10—17, and Matthew v. 23, 24.
2 Girard de Rialle, Mytliologie comparee, p. 214.

3 Mahabharata, iii. {Vana-parva)^ 13446.
262 VI. THE FUTUEE OF WORSHIP.
with it, at least in theory, ever since the destruction

of the Temple. Buddhism, Christianity and Islam
have officially rejected it. But popular usages have
hitherto been too strong for the reforming spirit. The'
infiltration of Hindu superstition has opened Buddhism
to oblations in honour of the Master who preached the
uselessness of sacrifices. Islam has been forced to tolerate
the continuance of bloody funeral sacrifices. Thus about
forty years ago, at the funeral of Mehemet Ali, Viceroy
of Egypt, eighty buffaloes were slain at the tomb.^
It is to be noted that the Mussulmans interpret these
sacrifices as expiatory, and believe that they blot out the
venial sins of the dead; and it is in this same special
acceptation that sacrifice has been maintained, or if you
will re-introduced, into Christianity; for we find the
Eoman Church encouraging the custom of giving alms,
creating pious foundations, and celebrating masses, as
a set-off against sins. On the other hand, we note
how the longing for purification, so widely spread in
the last days of Paganism, the belief that sacrifice alone
could blot out transgressions, and the conviction that
the efficacity of the sacrifice must be proportional to
the importance of the victim, in combination with the
character impressed on the Messianic hopes by the post-
exilian prophets, begot the belief that nothing short of
the voluntary sacrifice of a God could affect the salvation
of fallen humanity. Thus was formed the Christian
dogma of the vicarious expiation on the Cross. And
^ Ignace Goklziher, Revue de Vhistoive des religions, vol. x. p. 351.
The same thing took place more recently at the funeral of Ismail Pasha.
See the Journal des debuts for Jan. 20th, 1892.

VI. THE FUTURE OF "WORSHIP. ^00
wlien the celebration of the Lord's Supper —a symbol

instituted by Jesus in reminiscence of the Jewish Pass-
over —received a mystic interpretation, which may per-
haps be traced back to the rites of the Greek Mysteries,
the ancient institution of sacrifice was re-incorporated in
the Catholic worship under the form of a sacrament.^
We know how the Eeformation proscribed offerings
for the redemption of sins together with the trade in
indulgences; and how, in due course, liberal Protes-
tantism has rejected the dogma of expiation through the
blood of Christ, and retained the Lord's Supper only as

a commemorative celebration. An analogous movement
has arisen in progressive Judaism and in reformed
Brahmanism, where repentance is declared to be the
only means of redeeming trespasses, and good works in
the largest sense the only way of pleasing the deity.^
If amongst such communities incense still smokes here

and there on the altar, or flowers decorate the temple on
certain anniversaries, it is no longer in the vain hope of

gratifying the senses of the Deity, but to find vent for
that aesthetic feeling which is never more in place than
when associated with the most exalted and inspiring
emotions of the human heart. Within as without the
religious communions, if sacrifice has disappeared, the

spirit of sacrifice, henceforth anchored in human nature,
has become identified with obedience to duty and devo-

tion to every just cause. Abnegation has ceased to be
asceticism, and has become emancipation from the tyranny
1 Edwin Hatch, Hihhert Lectures, 1888, pp. 300 sq.
2 Compare Goblet d'Alviella, Oontemporarij Evolution of Religious

Thought in England, America and India, London, 1885, passim.
264 VI. THE FUTITRE OF WOESHIP.
of the passions. Finally, the generosity which enlarges

the resources of education and beneficence, is still a pious
work, for it co-operates with that Power which makes
us toil for progress in the spirit of enlightenment and
love.
The evolution Subjective symbols, that is to say acts or

of symbolism.
Qi^jgc^^g ^bich serve to embody our inward
sentiments, still find daily application in our religious as
in our social life. Those only have disappeared which
were inconsistent with the dignity of man or with a
serious view of life ; and therefore those which now
survive bid fair to endure as long as religion seeks to
find external, and, above all, collective expression.
Indeed, man avails himself of them, not only to make his
inmost feelings palpable as it were to the Deity, but also
to realize them to himself, and above all to communicate
them to his fellows.
And so too with those figurative symbols which

aim at representing a divinity or his attributes. A
process of slowly developed selection has more and more
thrown into the background such images as wound
morality, humanity, or even good taste. And as for those
which are open to no such objection, their maintenance
depends less ujDon the nature of the symbols than upon
the permanence of the sentiments to which they give
expression. The divine omniscience may be represented
by an eye surrounded by a glory, and Providence by a
hand issuing from a cloud, as long as men continue to
attribute to the Deity the knowledge and providential
guidance of the affairs of this world. And even a
theriomorphic symbol, like that of the serpent biting its
own tail, need not be banished as long as we feel any

need of giving a sensible form to our conception of the
Infinite and of Eternity. So too with the symbols, or

rather the idiograms drawn from the Scriptures, that
serve to represent the name of the Deity, such as the

sacred Tetragram of the Hebrews, the Alpha and Omega
of Primitive Christianity, the AUM of the Hindus.
And all this applies still more to the emblems which
have come to typify the various forms of worship, such
as the Cross of the Christians, the Crescent of Islam, the
Wheel of the Buddhist, to say nothing of that combination
of the Cross and the Crescent with the AUM of the Brah-
mans and the trident of the Qivaites, which some Indian
Brahmoists have inscribed on the frontage of their temples
to signify their syncretistic attitude towards the chief
cults of their country.^
'^--
Imitative Imitative symbols have perhaps filled a
symbols,
more important place than any others, for
while transforming worship into a veritable dramatic

representation of the life of the Deity, they also satisfy
that longing for union with the Deity by assimilation
(^6fxo[(joa-i9 TO) Oew) which is an essential factor in worship.

I have given examples of these practices, which ori-
ginally implied a naturalistic conception of the uni-

verse, surviving in the popular traditions and even in
the religious rites of our own The scope of imita-
times.
tive symbols was still further enlarged when anthropo-

morphism reached the point of ascribing not only the
sentiments, but the features of man to the deities. These
1 Cf. P. C. Mozoomdar, The Life and Teachings of Keshuh Chunder
Sen, Calcutta, 1887, p. 501.
imitative symbols then developed into a mythology in

action, a true scenic presentation, especially where
art had risen high enough to be capable of combining
aesthetic enjoyment with the satisfaction of religious
sentiment. On the other hand, when the anthropo-
morphic character under which the gods were rej)resented
began to raise a blush, their adventures came to be
regarded more and more as having an allegorical signifi-
cance. Here again, however, the imitative symbolism
was modified in two parallel directions, the one esoteric
or mystic, and the other exoteric or popular.
The first of these movements gave rise to the mysteries
of Greece, in which the neophytes were put into com-
munication with the superhuman powers by means of
ancient rites more or less discordant with the progress
of thought and conscience, but exalted, and, so to speak,
transfigured, by being made the vehicles of some lofty
form of metaphysical or moral teaching.
The second movement secularized the legends of the
gods more and more, until it culminated in the profane
theatre. This took place not only in Greece, but in
Persia, India, and even Polynesia, where the corporation
of the Areoi put the mystic adventures of the gods
upon the stage.^ You know how our own theatre rose
out of religious representations which bore the name of
Mysteries in the Middle Ages, and which are still cele-
brated in certain parts of Germany, notably at Ober-
Ammergau.
Finally, the imitative symbols, or rather the longing
for communion by means of imitation which lies at
^ Eeville, Religions dee peujpJes non-civilises, vol. ii. p. 85.
the bottom of all forms of worship, shows a tendency to

change its character under pressure of moral ideas, and
to turn to another object than the material reproduction
of divine acts.
Wehave seen that even such backward peoples as
the Hottentots perform dances in honour of the moon,
in which they imitate her movements. When the earth
trembles, the Caribees begin dancing because, as they
say, when our mother dances, surely we ought to dance
too. Many peoples perform ceremonies at the Winter
solstice, in which they symbolize the death and resurrec-
tion of the sun others, again, such as the Tartars and
;
the Andaman islanders, abstain from work between sun-

set and In former times, there were places in
sunrise.
Germany, Denmark, and Belgium, where no one might

drive a carriage for twelve days after the winter solstice.
The sun rests, as M. Gaidoz puts it ; so his symbol, the
wheel, must rest too. In some localities, as Schwartz
and Kuhn tell us, the prohibition extended to other

kinds of work, such as spinning or carrying dung to the
fields. It was like a Sabbath of twelve days.^
Nowhere, perhaps, has the sentiment which leads men
to imitate the celestial bodies been more naively ex-
pressed than in the prayer of an old Samoyed to the sun,
mentioned by Gastrin :
" Oh Jilibeambaertje, I get up
when you get up; I go to bed when you go to bed." ^ But
it is the same thought, at a further stage of abstraction
and generalization, which re-appears in the Chinese theory
^ H. Gaidoz, Le dieu gaulois du soJeil et le sijmholisme de he roue,
Paris, 1886, p. 32.
2 Vorlesungen iiher die Flnnitsche Mytliuhgie, St. Peteisburg, 1853,
p. 16.
that man ought to conduct himself methodically, accord-

ing to fixed rules, in order to imitate the ways whereby
heaven determines the movement of the stars and the
phenomena of the earth. " I believe," says Cicero in
his turn, "that the gods have put immortal souls into
human bodies that beings may exist .... who shall
contemplate the order of the heavenly things, and imitate
it in the regulated constancy of their lives." ^ Truly it
is a far cry from the astronomical dunces of the Hotten-

tots to the sublime precept of Leviticus: "Be ye holy,
for I the Eternal, your God, am holy;" or to the pro-
found saying of Plato: "God is supremely just, and
nothing resembles him more than whosoever of us
becomes just to the uttermost degree."^ But I am not
debasing Greek philosophy or Israelitish faith, if I show
that in this matter both alike are attached, by an unin-
terrupted chain of intellectual and religious links, to the
first naive stammerings of the human conscience as it
seeks communion with its ideal.
<^ , ,. It sometimes happens that symbols pass

Symbolism as '••'•
. .
an ally of into fctishes or into formulae of conjuration.

reli'T'ious pro-
gres's and free. This is when the analogies which they
inquiry,
g^prcss are taken for real relations. Thus
ablution, which began by being a ceremony of cleanliness
and decency, a suitable prelude to entering into relations
with the great, or with the gods, subsequently became

an easily comprehensible symbol of purification, and
often ended by drawing to itself a supernatural virtue.
And in like manner certain forms of sacrifice easily —
explained on the notion that the gods feed upon the
^ De Seneaiute, cap. xxi, § 77. ^ Theoetetus, § 85.
Vr. THE FUTURE OF WORSHIP. 2G9
offerings —became pure symbols when these gods were

supposed to be satisfied with the mere intention, and
finally passed into veritable sacraments, with power to
regenerate the faithful and even to assure them im-
mortality. An example is furnished by the sacrifice of
the bull in the mysteries of Mithra. But more often the
opposite phenomenon is witnessed ; that is to say, objects
once regarded as the actual body of the Deity, or acts

regarded as expressing a real relation with the gods, gra-
dually acquire a purely symbolic character. Thus, fire,
which was regarded as a divine being by the ancient Per-

sians, and, for that matter, by all the Indo-Europeans, is
now modern Parsees no more than a symbol

in the eyes of
of the supreme being, Ahura Mazda. The Chaldeans
long deified the planets themselves ; but afterwards they
simply regarded them as symbols of the great gods, and
indeed a star became the generic sign of divinity in
the cuneiform writing. It is probable that, with the
Greeks as with the Egyptians, many of the gods were at
first represented under the forms of certain animals.

The Egyptians were content with modifying their phy-
siognomy by adding tmits borrowed from man but ;
the Greeks completely anthropomorphized their ancient

animal deities, while retaining the animal which origi-
nally represented them in the several religious centres,
as the companion or the symbol of the god.
This aptitude of symbols for modifying their meaning
without changing their shape, combined with the afi'ec-
tiou always felt for traditional forms, is one of the chief

causes of their longevity athwart all religious revolu-
tions. It would not be hard to establish a direct line
of filiation between emblems still current in Eastern

and Western religions and the most ancient motives of
Assyrian iconography; for example, the aureole as a
symbol of celestial glory. The thunderbolt of the
Greeks, which is also employed to this very day in the
ritual all over the Buddhistic East, under the well-known
form of the dordj^ may be traced in both forms alike to
the double trident which appears in the hands of the
storm-god in the sculptures of the Mesopotamian palaces.
The Phoenix, before representing the resurrection on
Christian sarcophagi, was a symbol of apotheosis on the
imperial medals of pagan Eome ; and in yet more ancient
times, it had served the Egyptians as an emblem of the
annual re-birth of the sun.
The spectacle is not unfamiliar of religions borrowing
almost all their symbolic images from the forms of
worship which they profess to combat or replace. When
the Persians had established themselves in Mesopotamia,
they adapted the Chaldean iconography to the figurative
representation of their own beliefs, and it was from pagan
art that the Christianity of the Catacombs drew the
greater part of its allegorical subjects. In Buddhism,
the rites successively engrafted upon the doctrine of the
Buddha borrowed their material from the previous forms
of worship in India, particularly those of the sun, though
of course a new signification was given to them.^
We may note, in this connection, that symbolism —that

is to say, the power of attaching a new meaning to any
given image — on the one hand aids the transition from
1 Cf. Goblet D'Alviella, La Migration des symholes, Paris, 1891,
pp. 332 sqq.
—
YI. THE FUTURE OF WORSHIP. 271
tlie traditional conception to a higher one, and on the

other hand facilitates the co-existence, under a common
form of worship, of the widest diversity of beliefs. This
advantage of symbolism is especially perceptible in such
religions as Brahmanism, Buddhism, and even Judaism,

and a certain number of Clmstian communities which
have no central authority to define their dogmas and
interpret their liturgies. In such cases, respect for
external forms may actually aid the emancipation of
men's minds ; as M. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu has shown
in the instance of the Old Believers, in his striking study
of religion in the empire of the Czars. ^ Indeed, when
unity simply consists in respecting an external form,
there is nothing to prevent one section of the faithful
preserving the full sacramental value of a rite,. whilst
others accept it in a purely symbolic sense, and attribute

any meaning that suits them to the symbol. Symbolism
is the natui-al ally alike of mysticism and of free inquiry
that is to say, of the two great foes which the orthodox
spirit has always had to fear within the Churches them-
selves.
^, ,
"We have seen that when the distinction
The evolu-
tion of the between the priest and the sorcerer had been
established, the latter, in his capacity of
exorcist, still exercised his functions, first at the side of
the priest, and then below him, since the latter had the
monopoly of the relations with the higher deities.
Finally, the priest expelled the sorcerer from the ofiicial
cultus altogether, while himself assuming one of his
rival's chief functions, namely, exorcism.
^ L'Enqnre des Tzars, vol. iii. p. 336.

It is easy to understand that in primitive societies,

where the family is the property of its head, the latter
prays and sacrifices to assure the prosperity of his
belongings. Such, at least, is the religious condition
in which we first find the patriarchal communities of the
Indo-Europeans, the Hebrews, and the Chinese. The
same system prevails to this day amongst the Malagassy,'
the Khonds, the Ostyaks, and even the Samoans. By a
natural extension of this principle, it is the chief of the
tribe, and subsequently of the nation, who acts for the
community in approaching the gods, whether he invokes

his own special deities, as with certain Negroes, or ad-
dresses the general gods of his people, as in Polynesia.

This is the origin of the sacrificing kings, regarded as
religious as well as civil and military chiefs, whom we
find amongst the ancient Chinese, Chaldeans, Egyptians,
Assyrians, Persians, and on a smaller scale among the
Mangaians, the New Zealanders, the Chinuks, and others.
It was probably the same with the Greeks down to
Homeric times and -we know that when the Eomans
;
abolished royalty, they still maintained a special func-

tionary, bearing the name of rex sacrorum^ with a view
to the celebration of certain sacrifices.
Such an organization may result in a complete theo-
cracy, if the religious interest secures the first place. This
seems to have happened in ancient Peru, and to a certain
extent in Assyria and Egypt ; but the multiplication of

the duties of government on the one hand, and the grow-
ing complexity of rites on the other, often induced the
chief to delegate his sacerdotal functions. This delega-
tion was at first temporary, as when Numa appointed the
flamens as liis substitutes during his absence. Amongst

the Blantyres of Western Africa, "if the chief is from
home, his wife will act; and if both are absent, his
younger brother."^
This temporary delegation tends to become permanent,
in virtue of the prestige which surrounds its recipients.
The chiefs relieve themselves altogether of their religious

functions, in favour of chaplains retained about their
persons, or priests set over the chief sanctuaries. Thus
the sacerdotal office, like that of the sorcerer, tends to
become a special profession. Among the Hindus, the
Brahmanic families seem to have been constituted, in
the first instance, under petty local rajahs, who entrusted
them with the conduct of divine service.^ Amongst the
Israelites, every head of a family was originally a cohen ;
but influential men gradually took private chaplains into
their service to preside over their domestic sanctuaries,
as we learn from the history of Micah (Judges xvii.).
Establish- At first, these priests were no more than

ment and j i. £ 4.-
•
^ ^
i
overthrow of delegates or lunctionaries, as we see clearly

theocracies,
enough in China, where the functions of
public worship are assigned to the various administrative
officers of the empire ; and in classical antiquity, where
the principal priests were sometimes directly elected by
the people, just like other magistrates. Meanwliile, as
the sacerdotal class grew in power and importance, it
tended to close itself as an independent order, either by

drawing in recruits from outside, as in the case of the
Druidical colleges, or by making itself hereditary, like
^ See H. Spencer, Ecclesiastical Institutions, p. 729.

2
Cf. Mann, xii. 46.
T
the Brahmans and Levites. In Eussia, we have seen the

actual establishment of a sacerdotal tribe in the heart of
Christianity within modern times. I refer to the white
clergy, or parish priesthood, on whom marriage is obliga-
tory, whom the force of circumstances has erected into a

genuine hereditary caste, supplying the whole perso7tnel
of the Eussian Church, from father to son.^
Naturally enough, when once the clergy have become

independent, they tend to become supreme in the State.
"With this view, they centralize themselves and group
themselves in a hierarchy, at the head of which stands
the high-priest ; as at Jerusalem after the restoration of
the Temple, or at Thebes under the degenerate descend-
ants of Eameses. And, again, the members of the priest-
hood propagate the belief that the faithful require their
mediation in addressing the gods, that they alone are com-

missioned to distribute the divine favours, with authority
to bind and to loose in the name of the Supreme Power,
and therefore that they form a class of beings superior to
the rest of humanity, and clothed with a portion of the
divine authority. Finally, the whole direction of private
and public affairs passes into their hands, and so a second
form of theocracy is developed. Under this regime, God

is supposed to govern through the agency of his min-
isters^ whether the latter assume direct power, as in
ancient Ethiopia, and quite recently in the States of the
Church, or exercise it through the medium of lay dele-
gates, as in the Japan of the Mikado, the Thibet of
the Grand Lama, or the Paraguay of the Jesuits. And
note that the clergy may exercise this universal rule
^ Leroy Beaulieu, UEmpire des Tzars, vol. iii. pp. 260 sqq.
;
VI. THE rUTUEE OF WOESHIP. 275
without even organizing themselves in a rigorous hier-

archy; witness the Brahmans, who have no ecclesiastical
centralization, but none the less have exercised, on the

bare prestige of their hereditary functions, an authority
without example in the ecclesiastical history of the world.
When once the theocracy has succeeded in acquiring
the civil power, it only remains for it to take in hand the
education of the successive generations, and it would
then seem to be raised above all risk of overthrow save
by a shock from outside. And yet it is evident that
such a regime cannot be prolonged indefinitely. There
will always be independent spirits who challenge some
dogma, or at any rate canvass some point of disci-
pline; and they will wake a more or less emphatic
response in the nation, in proportion to the correspond-
ence of their views with the intellectual and moral wants
of the time. Little by little, this opposition to the pre-
tensions of the spiritual authority on the field of dogma
will grow into a vindication of the right of free inquiry,
and this vindication in its turn will end —perhaps after
long and bloody struggles — in bringing about the rupture
of the union of Church and State.
Doubtless dogmatic intolerance survives civil intole-
rance. But one consequence of the separation of Church

and State will be, that the faithful will tend to group
themselves in ever more numerous and ever less stable
ecclesiastical associations. And this again will lead, on
the one hand, to a stronger affirmation of the rights of
free inquiry, and, on the other hand, to a still further
reduction of the authority of the priest. In principle he

is now no more than a chosen officer of the community
t2
276 VI. THE FUTURE OE WORSHIP.
he loses Ms supernatural authority, and henceforth he

confines himself to the functions of the religious and
moral educator.
The astorate
Thus restricted, there is no reason why the
under the pastoral ofiice should not continue to exist
conditions . , ^ . , t • • ,-
of modem indefinitely. As long as religious societies
^0^^^^-
remain, they will need presidents, secretaries,
lecturers, and administrators of every kind. Nay, it seems
likely that the functions of the minister will increase in
real importance, in proportion as he concentrates himself
on his mission of moral educator, and as that mission
assumes a more and more important place amongst the
practical objects of religious association. We must note,
however, that the minister has more in common with the

prophet than with the priest and the prophet may be ;
genealogically traced to the diviner or seer, who in his

turn descends from the primitive sorcerer. Thus the sor-
cerer avenges himself, in his descendant, upon the priest

who once expelled him but the really important point iq
;
this reversal of the tables is, that it heralds the triumph
of private inspiration fructified by the moral sentiment,

over the theory of sacerdotal mediation between the
faithful and the Deity.
To sum up. The whole development of worship that is —

to say, of acts of propitiation —
may be characterized as
follows: —
at first, the deities demand the worship of the
faithful with a selfish object, and the faithful render it
with a similar purpose; gradually, duties towards our

neighbours introduce themselves amongst the obligations
of religion, side by side with duties towards the gods ;
. :
and jS,nally, these two orders of ideas melt into one

another, under the influence of the conception that " the
service of humanity " is the best, if not the only, way of
serving the Deity.
T - Does it follow that all worship,

^^ as a special
^
Is worship _
destined to utterance of the relations of man to God, is
destmed to disappear r There are not want-

ing, even amongst Theists, generous spirits who allow a
natural reaction against the abuses of religious formalism
to hurry them into the belief in the inevitable, if not
speedy, extinction of all religious practices. The founders
of the Ethical movement have already made a practical

attempt to establish their bond of communion solely on
the identity of their humanitarian and progressive aspira-
tions. One of the most authoritative exponents of this
system in England, Dr. Stanton Coit, writes as follows
" We believe that by declaring devotion to the good of the
world to be the bond, and the whole bond, of religious
union, we shall ultimately induce men to remove all other
qualifications for membership in the Churches ; and that,
immediately, men who are now outside of all religious
fellowship, or who chafe under the dogmatic restraint of
the Church, will form themselves into societies for the
spread of goodness." 1 And he adds these enthusiastic
words :
" This idea of forming societies in devotion to
good character and right conduct, we believe stands equal
in dignity and power with Christ's conception of a King-
dom of God on earth, and that it comes to-day with all
the freshness and vigour of a new social revelation, for
^ T?ie Ethical Movement defined, in Religious Systems of the World,

pp. 538, 539.
wHch, however, the ages of Christian development have

been preparing men's hearts and intellects."
Surely such associations can render signal service to

the ideas of practical toleration and devotion to man.
But considerable as their action on our feelings and our
manners may become, I cannot believe that they will
succeed in satisfying all the wants of which worship is
the organ. It is not only — as has been maintained in

a fit of aristocratic and masculine arrogance —women,
children and the lower classes, who will feel the need of
being elevated by religion beyond the narrow limits of a
frivolous or material existence, nor is it only minds too
much busied with the affairs of daily life to be able to
attain to any higher culture, that experience this same
demand. Without an appeal to the resources of poetry,
music, painting, and of all the combinations of art which

unite in worship to symbolize the sesthetic aspects of the
ideal, even the most cultured of men must be sensible of
a void, and must feel himself paralyzed in his attempt
to express his aspirations towards the infinite and the
absolute.
I doubt whether religious progress will take the form
of a collective entry into newly created religious asso-
ciations with a theology in harmony with the require-
ments of science, and a cultus reduced to its purely
rational manifestations. When we think of the attrac-
tion of the old forms, we are more inclined to believe
that religious progress will be achieved by the gradual
emancipation of thought within the bosom of existing
communions, or at least in such of them as lend them-
selves to a gradual modification of their beliefs.
There exist in most of the Churches three classes:

those who accept the dogmas and the ceremonies in the
spirit inwhich they have been handed down to them ;
those who accept them through force of habit, through

a feeling of respect, through a vague desire to call down
the Divine sanction on the most solemn acts of life, or
simply through an idea of setting a good example to

others ; and, finally, those who have seen into the real
meaning of religious questions, aad who are pursued,
even in ecclesiastical matters, by the longing for improve-
ment. This last class has long been liberalizing religion,
though it has too often been weeded out as fast as it
grew, by trials for heresy, by the choking atmosphere
of intolerance, or simply by the compulsory subscription
to dogmatic articles. In many communions, liberty of

thought now enjoys a tacit toleration ; only let it become
a formally recognized right, and there will be nothing to
prevent the union of respect for ancient forms with the
development of new ideas. Nay, more : the respect felt
for these ancient symbols will be all the more sincere

and unanimous when they have ceased to fetter free
inquiry and have become historical monuments, venerable
by and worthy of all preservation for
their very antiquity,
the sake of the link which they have established between

the aspirations of the present, and the beliefs, the senti-
ments, the enthusiasms, perhaps the dangers and the
sufferings, of the generations that are past. Here sym-
bolism culminates in syncretism.
The future of Why should WO uot look forward to a state
the churches,
^f things in which the principal religions of
the actual world — Christianity, Buddhism, Brahmanism,
Judaism, Confucianism, and Islam — shall regard each

other simply as different forms of worship in the bosom
of a single Church, and shall apply to their religious dif-
ferences the fine expression of a Eussian bishop " Our :
confessional partitions do not mount as high as heaven" ?^
Doubtless such an ideal of religious peace and union still
seems far distant ; but amongst enlightened minds of

varied communions we trace the growing thought that
all religions are good if they help us to live worthily,
and even that they are all true in so far as they help us
to realize the presence of a higher Power working, in
accordance with law, for the good of the universe. The
belief in the continuity of religious progress implies that
no Church possesses the absolute truth, and that all have

the right to seek it by the light of conscience and of
reason. Graft this idea upon the conviction of our inca-
pacity to represent the supreme Eeality otherwise than
by symbols, and you will be driven to the conclusion
that all rites have a purely relative value, the only

measure of which is the service they render to the pro-
gress of human culture.
In this connection, a remarkable sign of the times has
recently appeared in London. I refer to the lectures
organized by the South Place Ethical Society, in which
men belonging to the most divergent sects were invited
successively to expound the chief points of their respec-
tive religions. I am aware that their language must
have been influenced by the surrounding medium ; but
making all allowances for that, is it not curious and sug-
gestive that all of them —Jews, Parsees, and Positivists,
^ Leroy Bcaulieu, V Empire des Tzars, vol. iii. p. 583.

as well as Baptists, Methodists, Independents, Anglicans,

and Unitarians —agreed in proclaiming the existence of a
great Church above all denominations, a communion of
all who do their duty and work for the advancement of
the human race. "The life and work of Baptists," said
the Rev. John Clifford, President of the BajDtist Union,

''
is a valuable part of British Christianity, only so far as
it has become one of the successive steps in which the
human spirit has been forced onward by the immanent
logic of the religious life in its organic development.
Service to humanity, in its higher ranges of life and
work, is the supreme test of the worth of Churches."^
I am convinced that this point of view will gain more
and more adherents, especially in the bosom of the Pro-
testant Churches,^ As for the sects that are determined
^ Religious Systems of ike World, p. 428.
2 As these sheets are passing through the press, I have received a
circular from a Committee formed to organize a Central Congress of
Eeligions at Chicago in 1893 during the Exhibition, side by side with
the sectarian gatherings which are sure to be arranged. " Now that
the nations are being brought into closer and friendlier relations," it
runs, " the time is apparently ripe for new manifestations and develop-
ments of religious fraternity Convinced that of a truth God is
no respecter of persons, but that in every nation he that feareth Him
and worketh righteousness is accepted of Him, we affectionately invite
the representatives of all faiths to aid us in presenting to the world, at
the Exhibition of 1893, the religious harmonies and unities of hnmanity,
and also in showing forth the moral and spiritual agencies which are
at the root of human progress." The remarkable thing about this
circular is, that it is signed by sixteen ministers representing all the
confessions of the United States, from a Catholic Archbishop (Mgr.
P. A. Feehan) and an Episcopalian Bishop (the Rt. Rev. W. E. McLaren)
to a Unitarian of the advanced Western School (the Rev. Jenkin Lloyd
Jones) and a Jewish Rabbi (the Rev. E. S. Hirsch), — the President
being a Presbyterian (the Rev. J. H. Barrows).
282 VI. THE FUTURE OF WOESHIP.
to cling to the letter of their traditional formulse, they

will see their ranks thinned more and more by the defec-
tion of all who wish to advance with the age. And will
these latter, in their turn, end by uniting on the basis of
their larger conception of the Deity and his action on the
universe, or will they simply go to swell the ranks of
the indifferent, who have lost all interest in religious
questions, and in many cases failed to replace them by any
other interests of an exalted or wide-reaching type ? This
question is all the more worth investigation, because it
presents itself once more in connection with the masses of

the people, who are every day more completely estranged
from the religious movement in the great cities and the
industrial centres of Europe. This is a factor which we
cannot neglect when investigating the prospects of reli-
gion itself —not merely this or that form of worship —in
the society of the near future.
Religion and ^^^ Working classes are not indiflferent to

the people,
religion. They are positively hostile to it.
For they reproach it with having done nothing to better

their condition, with having entered into an alliance
with the rich and strong, and finally with having drawn
off to the problematic solutions of a future life the
attention which ought to be directed to the reform of
the life that now is. This hostility has been specially
accentuated since Socialism rose to offer the masses a
new ideal in which material amelioration of their lot
is combined with the satisfaction of the sentiments of
harmony and justice. Yerily, the Churches have enough
to do to clear themselves of the reproach thus levelled
against them. The boast that Eeligion is the synonym
—
YI. THE FUTURE OF WORSHIP. 283
of Socialism, if Socialism means replacing the interest of
the individual by the interest of society as the goal of all
our action, stands in dire need of such illustration as it
may receive from the part which all Christian com-

munities are now rousing themselves to take in social
movements.
And, on the other side, I do not hesitate to add that
Socialism will become religious or will cease to be. I
mean, that to achieve enduring results it will have to
borrow from Eeligion its best elements of altruism and

abnegation, together with the idea of a superhuman
Power making for the material and moral progress of
humanity.
Pure science can but establish the presence of a force
tending to develop life upon the earth. It is dumb when
we ask if this progressive life is destined to culminate in
an increase of the welfare of individuals. Nay, its great
law of the struggle for existence seems rather to dis-
courage the hope of general well-being and universal

harmony which is the key-stone of the Socialist ideal.
Doubtless one may conceive a society of the higher
peoples in the bosom of the human race withdrawing
themselves from the general conflict, or rather uniting to
wage that conflict with the rest of nature, and by —
means of a wise direction of social forces, combined with
the systematic limitation of the number of births
banishing from their midst the scourges of war and
penury. But, in the first place, to realize this Utopia,
which is not without its grandeur, what lever have the
State-Socialists to reckon on ? Surely not the harmony
of individual interests, for they proclaim the impotence
284 VT. THE FUTURE OF WORSHIP.
of individualism and call on us to renounce it. Is it the

sense of duty ? But, to say nothing of their depriving
that sentiment of its religious basis, they have generally
adopted materialistic explanations of the universe, which
logically tend to undermine the foundations of moral
obligation and therefore the very conception of duty, by
destroying the idea of human liberty and responsibility.
The need of I do not deny that it is reason which
%reliensive" Tcveals, and whicli alone can reveal, the dif-

niotivethan
fgrent kinds of duty resultin"j from men's
*' '-'
individual
interest, ncccssary relations with each other ; but even
should science succeed in showing that the true good of
the individual invariably coincides with the requirements
of the general good, it will still have to find the means
of enforcing respect for this principle upon those who
continue to think otherwise, or who deliberately prefer
immediate satisfaction, or who are seduced by the over-

mastering force of human passions.
The need of appealing to some stronger control than

that of mere instincts or longings is so evident, that
the founder of the Positivist school had recourse to
the love of humanity to suppress the revolt of individual

interest; but this amounts to an indirect return to the
religious idea, which in Comte's system takes Humanity

instead of Deity for its object. And, as Mr. Herbert
Spencer has well remarked, "to suppose that this rela-
tively evanescent form of existence ought to occupy
our minds so exclusively as to leave no space for a
consciousness of that Ultimate Existence of which it
is but one form out of multitudes — an Ultimate Exist-

ence which was manifested in infinitely varied ways
before liumanity arose, and will be manifested in infi-
nitely varied otherways when humanity has ceased to

be, seems very strange—to me, indeed, amazing." ^
The love of humanity can doubtless inspire noble and
fruitful devotion ; but does it not lose its rational basis
when it rests solely upon certain specific resemblances
of human beings one to another ? And does it not
wantonly fling away its most powerful means of action,
when it assigns the reign of justice and of general hap-
piness as the goal of human eff'ort, but at the same time
refuses to enwrap this noble purpose in the larger desire
with the Power that rules the universe ?

to co-operate
Thus Comtism has succeeded in gathering a few select

groups, and earning the sympathy of all generous
minds but its religious influence, in the sense which it
;
attaches to the term, does not exist as far as the masses

are concerned.
Growth of Again, it is a mere illusion to suppose that

pessimism.
^^^ general spread of a certain degree of
comfort, or even the suppression of all social inequali-
ties would be enough to satisfy the legitimate aspirations
of humanity. However fully you secure to man the
necessaries and even the enjoyments of life, his cup
will always be embittered, if only by the disease that
lies in wait for him at every turn, by the death that
prematurely snatches from him those he loves, by the

old age which throws an ever-darkening shadow over
his path, not to speak of the eternal longing which
^ In the controversy with Mr. F. Harrison, re-published as The Nature
and Reality of Religion, New York, 1885, p. 95 ; cf. Study of Sociology,
p. 312.
;
ever develops his wants in advance of his means of

satisfying them, and constitutes at once the grandeur
and the misery of human nature. And suppose we
treated this infinite susceptibility to further desires as
a disease, and succeeded in killing the germs of it in
our hearts, — would not this contracting of our per-
sonality result in diminished powers of reaction against
the fatalities of nature, in loss of the chief joys of life,
and ultimately in a full career of pessimistic reaction ?
If pessimism dominates Eastern society, it is not

because the lot of man is intolerable there — for it is only
in comparison with our own that it appears to be so

it is because centuries of political despotism and moral
relaxation have robbed the Orientals of elasticity of will.
If the same disease has begun to attack our Western
society in the full swing of wealth and knowledge, it is
in large measure because the significance of the individual

has been disputed and belittled by the prevalence of a
philosophy that denies to man the very possibility of
aiming at freedom.
What are we to expect, then, if this purely mechanical

conception of the universe should serve as a type for
the whole organization of social life after the communist
or collectivist ideals ? In that case, pessimism will no
longer confine its attacks to the delicate and super-refined
spirits whom want of any higher interest has disgusted
with life; but it will invade the masses. The spirit of com-
petition and personal initiative, that scapegoat on whose
head all our social and economic sins are laid, will be
found to have carried with it into the desert all the stimu-
lating motives which give variety and worth to existence.
Vr. THE FUTURE OF WORSHIP. 287
And remember that we are not speaking of an exalted

and generous pessimism like that of the Stoics, which
could at least take refuge in the impenetrable fortress of
thehuman soul, nor yet of a tender and expansive pessi-
mism like that of the Buddha, which after leading through
enlightenment to renunciation leads back through love
to action, but of a selfish and apathetic pessimism, on
which no light of hope will break and which no rays
of self-abnegation will warm. And this will continue
until some Boddhisattva shall come again to teach men

that nought save all-embracing love can enable us to
escape the fetters of personality, and that the true
path of self-annihilation is the path of self-devotion ; or
perhaps until a Jesus shall come, once more to reveal to
suffering humanity the forgotten truth that there is a
Father in heaven who cares for the moral amelioration
of the world, and that the best way of serving Him is
the way of brotherly love. Then will the new dawn be

followed by a new day.
Danger of a Turning our attention to another quarter,
reaction.
^^ ^^^ ^^j^ whether we are so sure of the
future as to be free of all apprehension of a return of
supernaturalism, perhaps under the forms most opposed
to the present drift of men's minds. It is impossible to
deny that a mystic reaction has already set in throughout

the West. Who knows where it will stop, should it
find sustenance in a desperate rally of conservative inte-

rests, or in the decisive bankruptcy of revolutionary
theories ? It is easy to foresee that the classes in posses-
sion, taken as a whole, will always prefer superstition to
spoliation ; and as for the masses, who reckon on their
full access to power for removing all inequalities from

the earth, is there not room to fear that on the inevitable
day which brings home to them the impotence of the
State to realize their ideals, they will fling themselves
into the arms of the first religion that can offer them
the mirage of some new millennium ? Such a movement
might well become irresistible should it happen to coin-
cide with one of those periods of stagnation or even of
retarded progress which occur from time to time in the
development or co-ordination of scientific discovery.
Yet more. There is solidarity between all the branches

of freedom. Every attempt to enslave man on the eco-
nomic field must sooner or later re-act upon the realms
of thought. In this connection we cannot too gravely
consider the warning addressed to the evolutionary spirit
by the great forraulator of evolutionism himself, when,
in spite of his optimistic tendencies, he thus concludes
his synthesis of the religious development : "If, instead
of further progress under that system of voluntary
co-operation which constitutes industrialism properly so
called, there should be carried far the system of pro-
duction and distribution under State-control, constituting
a new form of compulsory co-operation, and ending in
a new type of coercive government, the changes above
indicated, determined as they are by individuality of
character, will probably be arrested and opposite changes
initiated."^
Brighter Doubtless you will think I have painted a
^the Mure
^ dark picture ; but when one tries to fathom
of religion,
^j^g future, ouc must take account of the
^ Herbert Spencer, Ecclesiastical Institutions, § 654 (p. 824).
extremest possibilities ; and, even in the face of all that

can be urged, those who believe with me that the freedom
of man is destined to pass unscathed through the present
crisis, will still have a right to expect that the religious
evolution will, after all, pursue its way on the great lines
that I have sketched in these Lectures, gradually puri-
fying the main factors of religion, and making for the
establishment of a universal cultus at once rational and
fruitful.
It has been asked whether the " eternal and infinite

Energy" of evolutionism can succeed any better than
the inaccessible God of Neo-platonism or the impersonal
Brahma of the Vedantic schools, in inspiring man with
emotions and aspirations that can crystallize round the
religious sentiment and express themselves in worship.^
Note that this Energy — so called for want of a better
name, and not to be confounded with Force^ as revealed
to us in our own conception of physical effort ^ —presents
itself to our minds, not only as the supreme Eeality
but also as a Power superior to all known forces, and at
the same time essentially mysterious in its being. Now
the idea of power, combined with that of mystery, is the
essential basis and invariable characteristic of the Object
of the religious sentiment. But I have also shown that
another factor must enter into worship, namely, the
possibility of coming into relations with this mysterious
^ Compare the trenchant but often unfair criticism which Mr.
Frederick Harrison has brought to bear upon the religion of the
Unknowable in his controversy with Mr. Herbert Spencer in Tlte
Nature and Reality of Religion: a Controversy between Frederick
Harrison and Herbert Spencer, New York, 1885, p. 49.
2 Herbert Spencer, First Princijyles, §§18 and 50.
U
Power. Now in the face of an Energy, anonymous,

deaf, blind, dumb, inexorable as the ancient Fate, man
may well exjêrience a kind of sacred horror —nay, a
fascination under which his brain whirls —without such
feelings in any degree influencing his conduct in the
face of the unknown Power which inspires it. At the
most, one could but exclaim with Littre :
" Infinity,
alike material and intellectual .... is revealed to us
under its two-fold aspect of reality and inaccessibility.
It is an ocean which beats upon our shores, for which
we have neither barque nor sail, but the clear vision of
which is as salutary as it is awe-inspiring." ^
Even Mr. Spencer's remark that the supreme Eeality

may be endowed with modes of existence as superior
to intelligence and will as the latter are to mechanical
movement, cannot save the divine manifestations from
sterility, as far as the actions of man are concerned, if
he, man, feels incapable of representing them under any
form drawn from his own concepts.
But it is no longer so when, without attempting
further to define this incomprehensible Power, we assign
to it the function of securing the order of the universe.
The great problem on the solution of which the direction
of the religious movement of the future depends, is not
why the Absolute realizes itself under the limitations of
time and space. This question appeals to our metaphysical
curiosity alone, and its insolubility presents no obstacle
to the development of the religious sentiment. What
in truth aSects, and even rends, our labouring thought,
^ Aujuste Comte et la ]philoso2jhie positive, third edition, Paris, 1877,

p. 505.
VI. THE ''future op WORSHIP. 291
is the question, perfectly formulated by Mr. Graham,

"whether Chance or Purpose governs the world." ^ On
the answer to this question it depends whether there is
such a thing as duty, and even whether life is worth

living.
^ ,
Conclusion.
. One of our greatest natural philosophers
*-" •'-'-
The concep- declared, speaking, on a memorable occasion,
tion of God ^ . . .
in the 01 material athcism ''I have noticed during

:
years of self-observation that it is not in

hours of clearness and vigour that this doctrine com-
mends itself to my mind ;
that in the presence of stronger
and healthier thought it ever dissolves and disappears,
as offering no solution of the mystery in which we dwell,
and of which we form a part."-
Atheism, properly so called, has always been to me
what you, in England, call unthinkahle ; for my mind is
incapable of conceiving of the transient and the finite

without an underlying Absolute, the direct source of all
phenomena and their laws. In moments of philosophical

depression — which I have not escaped any more than the
majority of my generation —what I have asked myself
has not been whether there is a God in whom we live
and move and have our being ; it has been whether that
mysterious Power has any purpose, and specifically any
beneficent purpose, in the universe. But I too have felt
these doubts disappear as my thought became " stronger
and healthier," and as I have contemplated the whole
^ TJie Creed of SciPMce, Religious, Moral, and Social, second edition,

London, 1884, p. 49.
^ J. Tyi\(\di\\, Address delivered hcfore the British Association assem-

bled at Belfast, with Additions, London, 1874, p. viii.
292 YI. THE rrTURE OF WORSHIP.
moral and religious evolution of humanity, continuing

and crowning the organic evolution of the universe, or
at least that part of it which comes within the field of
our observation. At bottom, pessimism can only esta-

blish itself in the minds of those who think that pleasure
is the goal of life, or —which comes to the same —that
life has no goal at all. It disappears when one thinks
that the highest aim of man consists in taking a share
in the work by which God himself is perfecting the
universe.
This brings us back to the religious theory which
we have seen to reach its fullest utterance amongst the
Jews and the Persians, but which has really never been
absent from any religion which identified the moral with
the divine order. God is, but his work is bein(/ done.
And here on earth it is done above all by humanity,
which alone is conscious of it, and conscious therefore of
an alliance with the divine Power in the struggle for
good. Who shall deny that this community of aspiration
and effort may give birth in man —even though he have
no assurance of literal reciprocity — the
to feelings of grati-
tude and affection which the Comtists even claim for their
collective humanity ? Who shall deny that it may give
rise to that unalterable faith in the final result of the
alliance between man and the Divinity which inspired

the ancient jDrophets when, in the midst of perils and
disasters, they preached, and in preaching prepared for,
the great day of Yahveh, the triumph of justice and

brotherhood in the world ?
Such an eschatology, however, necessarily involves

freedom of the imagination to expatiate in the future, in
this world or another. If, as Mr. Spencer says, every
evolution after culminating in a perfect equilibrium, must

be followed by a corresponding dissolution or, in other ;
terms, if the ameliorations progressively and laboriously

acquired by humanity must on some fatal day melt in a
cataclysm in which humanity itself will perish together
with all known beings ; if, in a word, the history of the
universe is, as the Eleatic and Stoic philosophers and
the Brahmans have alike believed, no more than a per-
petual re-beginning, —then man will ask himself whether,
in truth, it is worth while to devote oneself to mere

ephemeral conquests, and whether the Power that makes
for righteousness is not working like a squirrel in a
cage-wheel, capable of amusing an idle spectator, but

incapable of rousing those feelings on which religion
lives. For a man to believe in the ideal and devote
himself to it, the future must be assured, either in the
expectation of another world in which the injustice of
the terrestrial life may be righted, or in the indefinite
progress of humanity towards a perfection which, if never

absolutely realized, may be indefinitely approached. Hap-
pily, astronomers and physicists agree in declaring that
the destruction of our planetary system is a hypothesis
based on premature assertions ; that our risks of dissolu-
tion, even supposing them to be established, may always

be indefinitely adjourned by forces acting in a contrary
sense and, finally, that there is nothing to exclude the
;
future possibility of communication between the worlds.^
1 IL Guyau, L'ir religion de Vavenir, pp. 441 sq.

— " Perhaps some
day, when full self-cousciousness has been reached, it will produce a
corresponding power adequate to arrest the march of dissolution at

It is true that science can neither answer our ques-

tions as to personal immortality, ^ nor demonstrate mathe-
matically that the world advances towards a goal. At the
very most, it can but raise a presumption, and conclude,
with John Stuart Mill, that "there is a large balance of
probability in favour of creation by intelligence." ^ To
transform that probability into certainty will perhaps
always need an act of faith, but at any rate it will be an
act of rational faith, that is to say, of faith which cannot
be contradicted by reason and which is postulated by the
demands of moral obligation graven on our consciences,
just as the belief in the universality of law and even in
the conservation of energy are acts of faith postulated by
the demands of the logical consistency graven on our
minds. For us, as for the rishis of India, the scribes
of Thebes, and the philosophers of Greece, this is the
supreme conclusion by which religion completes science,
and in this sense we may repeat with that great American
the point it may then have reached. Beings capable of distinguishing,
in the infinite complication of cosmic movements, those which favour
their evolution from those which tend to destroy it, would perhaps be
capable of resisting the latter, and thus securing the definitive triumph
of the more desired combinations."
^ "At first sight it might appear that the doctrine [of evolution],
as applied to the subjective world,
by removing the broad distinction
between the human and the animal mind, would discourage the hope
of a future life for man's soul. Yet it may be found, after all, that it
leaves the question very much where it was. It may perhaps be said
that it favours the old disposition to attribute immortality to those
lower forms of mind with which the human mind is found to be con-
tinuous." — James Sully, in his article on "Evolution," prepared, with
Prof. Huxley's assistance, for i\\Q Enajdopcedia Britannica, ninth edition,
vol. viii. p. 772 &.
2 Three Essays on Religion, London, 1834, p. 174.

tliinker, and mystic in one, Ealpli Waldo

rationalist
Emerson, " The whole course of things goes to teach ns

faith ! We need only obey."^
Doubtless the world may still witness many philosophi-
cal revolutions and reactions. If we may read the future
in the past, religions may yet follow and replace each
other ; forms of worshij) may rise as different from ours
as the synagogue was from the temple, or the churches
of the early Christians from the pagan sanctuaries. Attri-
butes which many of us regard as essential to the Deity
may be cancelled by the theological system which shall
gain the ascendant. We or our children may have to
many a cherished conception of the action of
relinquish
God and the destiny of man. Nay, " God" may die, as
his known and unknown predecessors the Baalim and —
the Teotl, Assur and Amnion, Odin and Jupiter, have
died; as his contemporaries of to-day, the Brahm oi
Hindustan, the Allah of Islam, Ormuzd " the Lord
Omniscient," Thian " the Celestial Emperor," and even
Yaliveh "the Holy One of Israel," shall one day die;
but what cannot die is the conception, enshrined in these
names, of a mysterious and superhuman Power, realizing
himself in all the laws of the known universe, revealing
himself to man in the voice of conscience and the spec-
tacle of the world.
Here we have the truth implicitly contained in that
three-fold illusion out of which, as we have seen, reli-
gion sprang — the erroneous extension of the idea of
personality, the confusion between concomitance and
^ Spiritual Laics, in his Works, two vols., Londou, 1882, vol. i.
p. 59.
causality, and the failure to distinguish between dreams

and reality. Here we have the truth which will remain
when it has freed the conception of the Deity from
all the confusions which originally covered it, and
the parasitical accretions which have since laid hold
of it, when it has stripped off, as so many borrowed
plumes, anthropomorphic attributes and moral limita-
tions, and has set forth the existence of deity as Unity
and the action of deity as Harmony. Here, then, we
stand at last before the impenetrable veil which will
ever separate the Deity, in its grandeur and its majesty,
from our eyes, but which does not cut off either the
manifestations of its power or the revelations of its law,
or, may be, even the mysterious radiation of an attractive
force answering to our terms of sympathy and love.
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