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SCIENCE. 



THE UNITY OF NATURE. 

 By the Duke of Argyll, 

 IX. 



THE ORIGIN OF RELIGION CONSIDERED IN THE LIGHT 

 OF THE UNITY OF NATURE. 



(Continued.) 



The considerations set forth in the previous chapter 

 indicate the fallacies which lie in our way when we en- 

 deavor to collect from the worship of savage nations any 

 secure conclusions as to the origin of Religion. Upon 

 these fallacies, and upon no more safe foundation, 

 Comte built up his famous generalization of the four 

 necessary stages in the history of Religion. First came 

 Fetishism, then Polytheism, and then Monotheism, and 

 last and latest, the heir of all ages, Comtism itself, or the 

 Religion of Humanity which is to be the worship of the 

 future. 



Professor Max Muller has done admirable service in 

 the analysis and in the exposure which he has given us 

 of the origin and use of the word " Fetishism," and of 

 the theory which represents it as a necessary stage in 

 the development of Religion. 1 It turns out that the word 

 itself and the fundamental idea it embodies, is a word 

 and an idea derived from one of those popular superstitions 

 which are so common in connection with Latin Chris- 

 tianity. The Portuguese sailors who first explored the 

 West Coast of Africa were themselves accustomed to 

 attach superstitious value to beads, or crosses, or images, 

 or charms and arnuh ts of their own. These were called 

 " feticos." They saw the negroes attaching some simi- 

 lar value to various objects of a similar kind, and these 

 Portuguese sailors therefore described the negro worship 

 as the worship of "fetigos." President de Brosses, a 

 French philosopher of the Voltairean epoch in literature, 

 then extended the term Fetish so as to include not only 

 artificial articles, but also such great natural fea- 

 tures as trees, mountains, rivers and animals. In this 

 way he was enabled to classify together under one in- 

 discriminate appellation many different kinds of worship 

 and many different stages in the history of religious de- 

 velopment or decay. This is an excellent example of 

 the crude theories and false generalizations which have 

 been prevalent on the subject of the origin of Religion. 

 First, there is the assumption that whatever is lowest in 

 savagery must have been primeval — an assumption 

 which, as we have seen, is in all cases improbable, and 

 in many cases must necessarily be false. Next there is 

 great carelessness in ascertaining what is really true-even 

 of existing savages in respect to their religious beliefs. 

 It has now been clearly ascertained, that those very 

 African negroes whose superstitious worship of material 

 articles supposed to have some mysterious powers or 

 virtues, is most degraded, do nevertheless retain behind 

 and above this worship certain beliefs as to the nature 

 of the Godhead, which are almost as far above their 

 own abject superstitions as the theology of a F6n- 

 elon is above the superstitions of an ignorant 

 Roman Catholic peasant. It is found that some 

 African tribes have retained their belief in one Su- 

 preme Being, the Creator of the world, and the circum- 

 stance that nevertheless no worship may be addressed 

 to Him has received from Professor Max Muller an ex- 

 planation which is ample. " It may arise from an ex- 

 cess of reverence quite as much as from negligence. 

 Thus the Odjis or Cohantis call the Supreme Being by 

 the same name as the sky ; but they mean by it a Per- 

 sonal God, who, as they say, created all things and is 

 the Giver of all good things. But though He is omni- 

 present and omniscient, knowing even the thoughts of 

 men, and pitying them in their distress, the government 



1 Hibbert Lectures. 1878, 



of the world is, as they believe, deputed by Him to in- 

 ferior spirits, and among these, again, it is the malevolent 

 spirits only who require worship and sacrifice from man." 5 

 And this is by no means a solitary case. There are 

 many others in which the investigations of missionaries 

 respecting the religious conceptions of savage nations 

 have revealed the fact that they have a much higher 

 theology than is indicated in their worship. 



The truth is, that nowhere is the evidence of develop- 

 ment in a wrong direction so strong as in the many 

 customs of savage and barbarous nations which are 

 more or less directly connected with Religion. The 

 idea has long been abandoned that the savage lives in a 

 condition of freedom as compared with the complicated 

 obligations imposed by civilization. Savages, on the 

 contrary, are under the tyranny of innumerable customs 

 which render their whole life a slavery from the cradle 

 to the grave. And what is most remarkable is the irra- 

 tional character of most of these customs, and the diffi- 

 culty of even imagining how they can have become es- 

 tablished. They bear all the marks of an origin far 

 distant in time — of a connection with doctrines which 

 have been forgotten, and of conceptions which have run, 

 as it were, to seed. They bear, in short, all the marks 

 of long attrition, like the remnants of a bed of rock 

 which has been broken up at a distant epoch of geolog- 

 ical time, and has left no other record of itself than a 

 few worn and incoherent fragments in some far-off con- 

 glomerate. Just as these fragments are now held to- 

 gether by common materials which are universally dis- 

 tributed, such as sand or lime, so the worn and broken 

 fragments of old religions are held together, in the shape 

 of barbarous customs, by those common instincts and 

 aspirations of the human mind which follow it in all its 

 stages, whether of growth or of decay. 



The rapidity of the processes of degradation in Re- 

 ligion, and the extent to which they may go, depends on 

 a great variety of conditions. It has gone very far in- 

 deed, and has led to the evolution of customs and beliefs 

 of the most destructive kind among races which, so far 

 as we know, have never been exposed to external condi- 

 tions necessarily degrading. The innate character of this 

 tendency to corruption, arising out of causes inherent in 

 the nature of Man, becomes indeed all all the more strik- 

 ing when we find that some of the most terrible practices 

 connected with religious superstition, are practices which 

 have become established among tribes which are by no 

 means in the lowest physical condition, and which inhabit 

 countries highly blest by Nature. Perhaps there is no ex- 

 ample of this phenomenon more remarkable than the 

 " customs " of Dahomey, a country naturally rich in pro- 

 ducts, and affording every facility for the pursuits of a 

 settled and civilized life. Yet here we have those terrible 

 beliefs which demand the constant, the almost daily sacri- 

 fice of human life, with no other aim or purpose than to 

 satisfy some imaginary Being with the sight of clotted gore, 

 and with the smell of putrefying human flesh. This is only 

 an extreme and a peculiarly terrible example of a general 

 law, the operation of which is more or less clearly seen in 

 every one of the religions of the heathen world, whether 

 of the past or of the present time. In the very earliest 

 ages in which we become acquainted with the customs 

 of their worship, we find these in many respects strange 

 and unaccountable, except on the supposition that even 

 then they had come from far, and had been subject to 

 endless deviations and corruptions through ages of a long 

 descent. 



Of no Religion is this more true than of that which 

 was associated with the oldest civilization known to us — 

 the civilization of Egypt. So strange is the combination 

 here of simple and grand conceptions with grotesque 

 symbols and with degrading objects of immediate wor- 



3 Hibbert Lectures, pp. 107, 108. 



