440 HISTORY OF RELIGION 



tionably shed light on many hitherto obscure problems in the history 

 of religion. The recognition of the intimate connection between the 

 social and political organization and religion has, however, a much 

 larger significance, which remains to be fully evaluated. Closely 

 related to this are the economic factors, which have influenced the 

 development of religion both indirectly, through the social organiza- 

 tion the conditions, for example, which make the horde rather than 

 the tribe the unit and directly, by determining occupation, con- 

 straining to migrations, and the like. This side of the subject has 

 only recently begun to receive the consideration it deserves, espe- 

 cially at the hands of French scholars, Tarde, Durkheim, and others. 

 The general trend of modern investigation has thus been to bring 

 out the complexity of the problem, the multiplicity of the factors 

 whose interaction has determined the development of religions. 



In the discussions of the last century the question of the origin of 

 religion has had a prominent place. In one sense, Why is man so 

 universally and obstinately religious? the question belongs to the 

 philosophy of religion; the history of religions can give no answer, 

 though it can put the theories of philosophers to the critical test by 

 comparison with the facts. But in the other sense in which the 

 question is often taken, What was the primitive form of religion? 

 the historian must again confess his inability to answer. There was 

 a time, not so long ago, when the Homeric poems or the hymns of the 

 Rig- Veda were imagined to be witnesses to primitive Indo-European 

 religion. The anthropologist makes a similar mistake when he 

 imagines that the religions of the lowest modern savages may be 

 regarded as survivals of primitive religion. The Australian black or 

 the Andaman islander is separated by as many generations from the 

 beginning of religion as his most advanced contemporaries; and in 

 these tens or hundreds of thousands of years there has been constant 

 change, growth and decay and decay is not a simple return to the 

 primal state. We can learn a great deal from the lowest existing 

 religions; but they cannot tell us what the beginning of religion was, 

 any more than the history of language can tell us what was the first 

 form of human speech. In like manner, attempts to define the stages 

 of religious development, as, for example, in Comte's scheme, Fetish- 

 ism, Polytheism, Monotheism, with a prophecy of Positivism, have 

 very little value even as a scheme of classification. 



Reviewing the progress of the last half-century, we see that the 

 field of investigation has been widened so that it now includes all 

 known religions, ancient and modern, from the lowest to the highest, 

 and that all the sources and the special sciences which throw light 



Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia, 1885, 2d ed. 1903; The Religion of the 

 Semites, 1889, 2d ed. 1894; Jevons, F. B., Introduction to the History of Religion, 

 1896. 



