RELIGION 



635 



superhuman anil semi-ethical beings Anthropo- 

 morphic polytheism. II. Ethical religions, which 

 are either (a) National nomistic (nomothetic) 

 religious communities Taoism, Confucianism, 

 Brahminism, Jainism and Primitive Buddhism, 

 Mazdaism, Mosaism, and Judaism; or (b) Univer- 

 Halistic religious communities Islam, Buddhism, 

 Christianity. 



Religion is virtually universal, although, of 

 course, neither the possibility nor the existence of 

 atheism can be reasonably denied. The instances 

 which Biichner, Lublx>ck, and others have adduced 

 to prove that there are whole peoples destitute of 

 religion will not stand the test of examination (see 

 Flint, Antitheistic Theories, Lecture vii. and Notes 

 xxv.-xxxL, and Roskoff, Reliyiotisioesen der rohesten 

 Naturvolker). Not one adequately attested case 

 of the kind has yet been produced ; and even if 

 such a case were established it would go only a 

 very little way towards proving that mau is not 

 naturally and normally a religious being. 



The starting-point of religious development has 

 been variously represented as fetichisra (De 

 Brasses, Comte, Tylor), belief in ghosts (Spencer, 

 Caspari, Le Bon), polytheism (Hume, Voltaire, 

 Dupuis), pantheism (Tholuck, Ulrici, Caird), heno- 

 theism (Schelling, Max-Muller, Von Hartmann), 

 and monotheism (Creuzer, Professor Rawlinson, 

 Canon Cook). All these representations are con- 

 jectural. The present state of our knowledge does 

 not enable us to decide what the primitive religion 

 was. Historical research does not take us back to 

 it. Nor does it show us what stages of religion 

 intervened Iwtween it and the earliest known 

 historical religions. The ways in which the ruder 

 phases of religion are represented by anthropolo- 

 gists and comparative theologians as having suc- 

 ceeded one another are merely more or less sug- 

 gestive hypotheses, founded on data both insuffi- 

 cient and ambiguous. All serial arrangements of 

 the kind ought to ! regarded as of a merely 

 logical, non-historical character, although they 

 may, perhaps, aid in leading to a discovery of 

 the historical order of development. Hence the 

 best mode of arranging the ruder religions may be 

 that which begins with the logically simplest phase 

 of religion, and assigns the others a place in the 

 order of their logical dependence and complexity. 

 Adopting this principle, Naturism, the worship of 

 natural objects regarded as powers or agents will 

 come first, implying as it does no original or 

 special faculty or tendency, and l>ein the direct 

 and natural interpretation of physical facts. It 

 may have many forms corresponding to the differ- 

 ences of the natural objects, and these forms may 

 imply very different degrees of intellectual capa- 

 bility and very different qualities of disposition in 

 the worshippers, although they have certainly not 

 been shown to be successive stages of religious 

 development. Nature-worship affords a basis for 

 all other forms of religion and worship, and in most 

 of them its presence as a constituent is obvious. 

 It is difficult, if not impossible, to conceive how 

 men could have risen to any higher stage of religion 

 except by means of it ; or how they could have 

 failed to enter it unless raised above it by a special 

 revelation. And the notion of a special revelation 

 to men who had not by natural means acquired 

 any belief in or thought of deity is scarcely con- 

 ceivable. Animism comes next as a natural result 

 of the growth of the idea of soul. It is often 

 indistinguishable or difficult to distinguish from 

 nature-worship, which is, as it were, implicit 

 animism, while animism is explicit nature-wor- 

 ship. When man has drawn a distinction between 

 body and life or soul, it is natural that he should 

 work it out in regard to himself, and then judge 

 of other things by himself ; and the phenomena of 



sleep and dreams, of swooning, apoplexy, ecstasy, 

 insanity, and death, all contribute to mould 

 his thoughts when once they have been turned 

 in this direction. Hence a third phase of religion, 

 Spiritism, in which the souls worshipped are 

 human, or conformed to the human type and con- 

 ceived of according to human experience, but 

 affected and modified by physical impressions and 

 analogies. The hypothesis of Mr Spencer that 

 religion begins at tins stage, the first deities being 

 deceased ancestors, and the first worship funeral 

 rites, takes no account of a vast mass of philologi- 

 cal evidence which establishes that the names of 

 the oldest known gods were descriptive of natural 

 phenomena, and of historical evidence which shows 

 that ancestor-worship has been grafted in various 

 localities on an older nature-worship. It also rests 

 on a very improbable assumption as to savage 

 man's mode of viewing natural objects worshipped, 

 and fails to explain the common features, similar- 

 ities, and analogies in the various mythologies, the 

 transformations of the ghosts into gods, the inferior 

 position of properly ancestral gods, and especially 

 the characteristics of nature-worship. The fourth 

 phase of religious development is Polytheism in 

 the special sense of the term, anthropological 

 mythology, the worship of divine individualities, 

 generally in origin nature-gods, but transformed 

 by imagination operating under the belief that 

 beings analogous to the human rule the course of 

 things. The fifth phase is that in which poly- 

 theism is subordinated to, or reduced under, a 

 Dualistic or Monistic conception of the divine. 

 The conception may lie mainly reached either by 

 speculative or ethical thought. The sixth phase is 

 represented by the Monotheistic religions the 

 Jewish, Christian, and Mohammedan. These 

 religions all claim to rest on special revelation. 

 In them only is belief in a plurality of gods 

 entirely transcended. Philosophical monism in a 

 religion does not cast out polytheism. Fetichism, 

 image-worship, totemism, shamanism, and sorcery 

 probably should be regarded not as distinct phases 

 or natural logical stages of religious development, 

 but as adjuncts and incidental perversions of 

 religion which presuppose its normal or logical 

 phases or stages. An adequate proof of this view 

 would necessarily dislodge and destroy a number 

 of current hypotheses. 



The theories regarding the psychological origin 

 and the essence of religion are numerous and 

 divergent. It was common among the atheists 

 of the 18th century to speak of religion as the in- 

 vention of individuals desirous of deceiving their 

 fellow men in order to further their own selfish and 

 ambitious views. Feuerbach, Lange, Spencer, and 

 others account for its appearance uy imagination, 

 illusion, or the misinterpretation of ordinary or 

 exceptional phenomena. Some zealous super- 

 naturalists have argued that it must have origin- 

 ated in a primitive revelation. It may be referred 

 exclusively to the intellectual province of human 

 nature. This mistake, however, is too gross to 

 have lieen often committed, and is sufficiently re- 

 futed by the obvious consideration that the measure 

 of religion is not the measure of intelligence or of 

 knowledge. Hegel did not, as is often said, fall 

 into the error of identifying religion with thought, 

 but only emphasised strongly the importance of 

 thought in religion. Peschel regards the principle 

 of causality, and Max-Muller the perception of the 

 infinite, as the roots of religion. And it may well 

 be admitted that without both of these intellectual 

 principles religion would be impossible. But are 

 they more than merely conditions of its appear- 

 ance ? The origin of religion is, of course, referred 

 to intellect by those who hold that God is known 

 intuitively, perceived directly, apprehended with- 



