In this very finite sphere does the religion of those early days have its being.' If we dissolve these assertions into their constituent elements, we shall find that they have absolutely no bearing whatever on the question at issue. We wanted to know how the concept of any so-called gods or divine powers arose, of beings to whom at a later time sacrifices may be offered; and we are told that the faithful knows that his sacrifice will support the sun-god in his fight against the demons of night! (p. 276.) But here everything which we wish to account for is taken for granted. When people had arrived at the conception of a sun-god and of nocturnal demons, the whole battle of the human intellect was won. But who ever told them of a sun-god, or, as we should say, what perceptions led them on to such a concept and such a name? Then again, whence came that idea that a sacrifice could invigorate the sun-god? We are told that man learnt it from his ancestors. Yes, but we want to know how his ancestors learnt it. We are really speaking of two totally different periods in the development of human thought. If man has once arrived at the idea of bright deities, we can understand why he should call them his friends; but why did he call anything bright deities? Then again, the idea that an intoxicating beverage like Soma, taken by the sacrificer, should invigorate the god fighting against the dragon, is so late, so secondary, even in so late and so secondary a phase of religion as we see represented in the Veda, that it is difficult enough to discover all the missing links in the intellectual chain that led to it. But to suppose that religion could begin with Indra drinking Soma offered at a sacrifice, is like supposing that the Aryan language could begin with French. And is it really a very finite sphere of thought, if people have actually brought themselves to believe, not only that there are bright gods in heaven, but that these gods in heaven can hear our prayers, and that, though unseen themselves, they are able to increase the cattle of the faithful and destroy their enemies? Where in all our finite experience is there any evidence for such thoughts, thoughts which become intelligible only by patient research, just as French words become intelligible only, if we trace them back through various phases to Latin, and from Latin to some Aryan root the meaning of which is sometimes. so different that, without a knowledge of the intermediate links, we could never believe that the two had any organic relationship at all. Germs of the Infinite in the Veda. Any one who is able to understand the Veda, will find no difficulty in discovering the true germs of the infinite in the conception of what the Vedic poets call devas. It makes no difference whether we call those poets primitive or modern, savage or civilised, so long as we know what thoughts they were capable of. Now the thought of the infinite, in space and time at least, was certainly not beyond their grasp. When a Vedic poet, such as Vasishtha, stood on a high mountain in the land of the Seven Rivers, as he called the Punjab, and let his eye travel across land and water as far as it could reach, had he not a perception of the infinite? When a Greek hero, such as Odysseus, was tossed about on the vast commotion of the waves, seeing no stars and no land anywhere, had he no perception of the infinite? And are we so different from them? The Infinitely Great. When we ourselves,-savages as we are, according to Bacon, in spite of all our syllogisms 1,- have learnt to look upon the boundless earth with its boundless ocean, no longer as a stupendous mass, but as a small globe or globule, moving with other globes across the infinite firmament; when wider infinitudes than the infinite firmament open before us, and the sun, which was once so near and dear to us, becomes a fiery mass, the magnitude of which defies our power of imagination; when afterwards, the magnitude of the sun and its distance from us, which is expressed in millions of miles, dwindle down again into nothing as compared with the nearest star, which, we are told, lies twenty millions of millions of miles from our earth, so that a ray of light, if travelling with the velocity of 187,000 miles in a second, would take more than three years in reaching us;-nay even this is not yet all,-when we are assured by high astronomical authorities that there are more than one thousand millions of such stars which our telescopes have discovered, and that there may be millions of millions of suns within our sidereal system which are as yet beyond the reach of our best telescopes; and that even that sidereal system need not be regarded as single within the universe, but that thousands of millions of sidereal systems may be recognised in the galaxy 2-if we listen to all this, do we not feel the overwhelming pressure of the 1 See De Bonald, Mél. i. 100. 2 See R. A. Proctor, in Secular Thought, April 21, 1888. infinite, the same infinite which had impressed the mind of Vasishtha and Odysseus, and from which no one can escape who has eyes to see or ears to hear? The Infinitely Small. But there is another infinite, the infinitely small, which is even more wonderful than the infinitely distant and great. When we turn away our eyes from the immensity which surrounds us, and look at one small drop of water taken from the boundless ocean, a new universe seems to open before us. There are in that drop of water atoms of atoms moving about, some visible, some invisible, some hardly imaginable. A high authority, Sir Henry Roscoe, has told us that the chemists are now able to ascertain the relative position of atoms so minute that millions upon millions of them can stand upon a needle's point.' Is not that infinitude of atoms as wonderful as the infinitude of stars? Infinite Inseparable from Finite. I maintain then that the infinite is the necessary complement of the finite in every human mind, that it was involved in the first perceptions and became part of the silent clockwork within us, though it may have taken thousands of years before the necessity was felt to give it its final expression, as the Infinite, or the Unknown, or the Beyond. The Concept of Cause. And it is the same with the idea of cause and causality. There may be ancient, there may be modern savages, who have no such word as cause. Does that prove that they had no other expression for that concept? When we now speak of the cause of the world, we could in the childhood of our thought and language have said no more than the father or progenitor of heaven and earth,' ganitâ dyâ vâprithivyoh; or, if our thought dwelt more on the forming and shaping of the world, the carpenter of heaven and earth, tvashtâ (TÉKTOV) dyâ vâprithivyoh. When afterwards it was felt to be less important to dwell on the act of begetting or shaping, when in fact it was felt desirable to drop these special features, human thought and language reduced the begetter and shaper to a mere maker or creator. And when those names also were felt to be too full of meaning, they were lightened once more till they conveyed no more than author, source, origin, principle, cause. This is the historical and genetic account of the concept of cause. It began with a real maker, like unto ourselves when we do a thing and see that it is done; it ended with something that is neither human, nor divine, nor even real in the sense of perceptible by the senses- -a mere cause. I hope that I have thus made it clear in what sense I consider the perception of the infinite to have, from the very beginning, formed an ingredient, or if you like, a necessary complement to all finite knowledge1. I am quite willing to admit that finite and infinite are not always quite adequate terms to express all that we want to express, and that I sometimes should prefer visible and invisible, known and unknown, definite and indefinite. But every one of these expressions proves even more inadequate in certain circumstances than finite and infinite, and if technical terms have once been properly defined, I do not see how they can be misunderstood. This point has been carefully reasoned out by D. G. Thompson in his Religious Sentiments, London, 1888. |