cannot help feeling also what is beyond the limit; we are in the actual presence of a visible infinite. Demi-Gods and Great Gods. If then we look at these three classes of tangible, semi-tangible, and intangible objects, we shall see at once that while the first class lent itself to no religious development for fetishism or the worship of stones and bones is a retrogressive, not a progressive religious development the second class has supplied ample material for what we call demi-gods, while the third class contains the germs of most of the great gods of the ancient world. What Hesiod called the first-born gods were mostly identical with semi-tangible manifestations. 'Tell us,' he says, 'how at first gods and the earth arose, and the rivers, and the endless sea, with swollen waves, and the bright stars and the wide sky above; and those who arose hence, the gods, the givers of good things 1.' What we call spirits of the trees, or Dryades, spirits of the brooks, or Nymphs, were likewise originally semi-tangible percepts. Seneca, in one of his letters, says: We contemplate with awe the heads or sources of the great rivers. We erect altars to a rivulet which suddenly and vigorously breaks forth from the dark. We worship the springs of hot water, and certain lakes are sacred to us, on account of their darkness and unfathomable depth.' Here we have a recognition of the sense of the infinite as the source of religious imagination and worship. 1 Hesiod, Theog. i. 108: Εἴπατε δ ̓ ὡς τὰ πρῶτα θεοὶ καὶ γαῖα γένοντο, Intangible objects grow mostly into great gods, and when Ennius exclaims, Adspice hoc sublime candens, quem invocant omnes Iovem1, we see how to him the sublime light in the highest heaven was the first manifestation of the highest god. The Infinite in Man as an Object. But the infinite was not discovered behind the veil. of nature only, though its manifestation in physical phenomena was no doubt, as we shall see, the most primitive and the most fertile source of mythological and religious ideas. There were two more manifestations of the infinite and the unknown, which must not be neglected, if we wish to gain a complete insight into the theogonic process through which the human mind had to pass from its earliest days. The infinite disclosed itself not only in nature, but likewise in man, looked upon as an object, and lastly in man, looked upon as a subject. The Something behind Man. Man looked upon as an object, as a living thing, was felt to be more than a mere part of nature, more than a river, or a tree, or an animal. There was something in man, whether it was called breath or spirit or soul or mind, which was perceived and yet not perceived, which was behind the veil of the body, and from a very early time was believed to remain free from decay, even when illness and death had destroyed the body in which it seemed to dwell. There was nothing to force even the simplest peasant to believe that because he saw his father dead and his body decaying, therefore what was known as the man him1 Cic. N. D. ii. 25, 65. self, call it his soul, or his mind, or his person, had vanished altogether out of existence. A philosopher may arrive at such an idea, but a man of ordinary understanding, though terrified by the aspect of death, would rather be inclined to believe that what he had known and loved and called his father or mother, must be somewhere, though no longer in the body. We need not here inquire into the logical correctness of the argument on which a belief in the continuance of a personal existence is based. These questions belong to a much later time. All we have to do is to understand how natural the supposition was that there was such a continuance. It is perhaps too much to say that such a belief was universal; but it certainly was widely spread and is still very widely spread. In fact it constitutes a very large portion of religion and religious worship, and has been very fully examined of late by students of Natural Theology. The Infinite behind Man. If I call the recognition of an immortal element in man a perception of the infinite, I am well aware that I stretch the meaning of infinite beyond its usual limits. But I look in vain for another term equally comprehensive and less liable to ambiguity. The perception of something beyond the grasp of our senses, is always perception of something infinite, though in this case the infinite would have to be further defined as immortal. Religious Ideas springing from it. How religious ideas could spring from the perception of something infinite or immortal in our parents, grand-parents and ancestors, we can see even at the present day. Among the Zulus, for instance, Unkulunkulu or Ukulukulu, which means the greatgreat-grandfather, has become the name of god. It is true that each family has its own Unkulunkulu, and that his name varies accordingly1. But there is also an Unkulunkulu of all men (unkulunkulu wabantu bonke), and he comes very near to being a father of all men. Here also we can watch a very natural process of reasoning. A son would look upon his father as his progenitor; he would remember his father's father, possibly his father's grandfather. But beyond that his own experience could hardly go, and therefore the father of his own great-grandfather, of whom he might have heard, but whom he had never seen, would naturally assume the character of a distant unknown being; and if the human mind ascended still further, it would almost by necessity be driven to a father of all fathers, that is, to a creator of mankind, if not of the world. Animism. It is difficult to find a proper name for this belief in and worship of our fathers. It has been called Animism, but this has proved so misleading a name that hardly any scholar now likes to employ it. In itself that name would not be objectionable, but unfortunately the same name has also been used for a totally different phase of religious thought, namely for the recognition of an active, living, or even personal element in trees, rivers, mountains, and other parts of nature. As the German expression Naturbeseelung was wrongly rendered in English by Animism, we have had two Animism to deal with, 1 Callaway, Unkulunkulu, p. 103. and there have not been wanting attempts to show that the two sprang from the same source. Seelencult. This is, of course, thoroughly misleading. The belief in and worship of ancestral spirits is called in German Seelencult1, but, to make confusion worse confounded, Animism has been chosen by Lippert, the most powerful advocate of this theory, as a subdivision of Seelencult. Nay, worse still, from the idea, prevalent in some popular superstitions, that the soul of a deceased person may not only haunt his former abode, but may enter into anything that happens to be in the way, a stone or a shell or a log of wood, Fetishism has been identified with Animism, and has been defined as 'the capability of the soul to take possession of any thing whatsoever 2.' And as if this were not yet sufficiently chaotic, the ancient worship of nature-gods has been explained by one of these ancestral souls having been raised to the state of a fetish, and taking possession of heaven and earth, of sun, moon, and stars and all the rest. Thus, we are told, Jupiter himself was but a fetish, and a belief in him was due to fetishism, which was evolved from animism, which was a belief in our ancestors. If one considers what fetishism really is 3, namely the very last stage in the downward course of religion, this attempt to make a little-understood superstition of some modern Negro tribes the key to the religion of Greeks and 1 J. Lippert, Der Seelencult in seinen Beziehungen zur althebräischen Religion, 1881; Die Religionen der europäischen Culturvölker, 1881; Allgemeine Geschichte des Priestertums, 1883, 1884. 2 Gruppe, p. 241. 3 Hibbert Lectures, p. 54, 'Is Fetishism a Primitive Form of Religion?' |