History of Religion. Allan Menzies
We take Edward von Hartmann as the representative of those who, like Mr. Max Müller, trace the origin of religion to the worship of the heavenly powers, but who carry back that worship to the earliest stage. Writers who disagree with his philosophy take grave exception to his treatment of religion, for he regards religion, as he considers consciousness itself, not as an original and inseparable element of human nature, but as a thing acquired by man on his way upwards; and he finds the original motive of religion to have lain in egoistic eudæmonism, in the selfish desire of happiness, which at that stage of man's life determined all his actions. The account, however, given by Von Hartmann of the beginning of religion in the adoration of the powers of nature is of singular freshness and power, and we can deduct from it, after stating it, the peculiarities arising out of his philosophical system.
The first religion that existed in the world had for its objects the heavenly powers. The objects worshipped are known, indeed, before religion begins; the illusions of early thought have settled on the heavenly powers before they are worshipped; on the outward object the mind has conferred the character of a living and acting being, which it is henceforth to wear. This transformation, poetic fancy, not mere logic and not merely utilitarian considerations, has brought about. But religion only begins when man sets himself to worship these beings, and to this he is driven by his material needs. Religion begins in a being as yet without religion and without morality. The need for food is the motive that brings about the change, for that pure egoist early man has seen that the powers of nature are able to help or hinder him in his search for a living; the sun can set his plants growing or can burn them up, and the thunderstorm can revive them. His happiness depends on these powers, and he seeks to set up relations with them. He seeks to gain as an ally the heavenly power who is so able to further or to thwart his aims; he makes known to it his wishes by calling upon it, and he offers presents to it. He worships the heavenly powers, and religion has begun. Worship lends to these powers, though they were known before, a fixity and reality they did not formerly possess. Von Hartmann is inclined to trace all the various worships of these powers, which have prevailed in the most different parts of the earth, to the same original centre, while at the same time he maintains that even if all the instances of this worship cannot be referred to any common origin, it must have arisen in this way, wherever men of the same nature dwelt; the psychological necessity of this development accounts for the appearance of this same religion in different lands and among dissimilar races.
The worship of the heavenly powers, accordingly, is with this writer the original religion. While admitting that the worship of domestic spirits grew up in the way described by the English anthropologists, he denies that Animism is ever a religion by itself without being combined with higher beliefs. He denies also that fetishism could ever be an original religious product, or that men could ever pass from having no religion to the religion of fetishism. Wherever it appears, it is a religion of decay. All the religion in the world has come from the worship of nature, which, whether arising at one centre or at several, spread over the world, and is to be recognised, clearly or dimly, in the religions of all lands.
This view of the origin of religion is shared in the main by Otto Pfleiderer,6 and other German writers. It was from the impressions made on man by the powers of nature, these scholars hold, and not from his belief in spirits, that his religion came. But it was not necessarily due to pure egoism, as Von Hartmann represents; the earliest religions need not, they hold, have been a mere attempt at bribery. The motives which first caused man to worship the heavenly powers surely arose from other needs than that for food alone. The intellectual craving, the desire to know the nature of the world he lived in, and to refer himself to the highest principle of it, as far as that could be attained; the æsthetic need, the desire to have to do with objects which filled his imagination; the moral need, the desire not to occupy a purely isolated position, but to place himself under some authority, and to feel some obligation, these also, though in the dimmest way, as matters of presentiment rather than clear consciousness, entered into the earliest worship of the heavenly powers. This view has the great advantage over that of Von Hartmann, that it makes the development of religion continuous from the first, instead of representing it as being originally a purely selfish thing, into which the character of affection and devotion only entered at some subsequent stage. If man's nature is essentially religious, then all that constitutes religion must have been with him from the first, in however unconscious and undeveloped form.
6 Philosophy of Religion, vol. iii. chap. i.
Conclusion.—We have enumerated the different kinds of gods worshipped by early man—fetishes, spirits, the powers of nature. We have found a general agreement that fetishism is not an original form of religion, but a product of the decay of higher forms in unfavourable conditions. As to the other two kinds of deities, it is impossible to deny that gods have been formed from the very first in each of these two ways. The domestic worship of the early world cannot be derived from nature-worship, but grew out of the belief awakened in early man, by the familiar experiences mentioned above. That the greater nature-worship, on the other hand, can be derived from the belief in spirits is an assertion which can never be proved, or even made probable; that it arose from the impressions produced on early man by the great objects and forces of nature, is a thing we can understand and believe. The minor nature-worship is also a very intelligible thing, even without Mr. Tylor's theory of souls to explain it. What more natural than that the savage should worship the great oak or the waterfall, or should think himself surrounded by invisible beings, even if he did not frame the latter on the model of the human soul? We arrive therefore at the conclusion that with the exception of the doctrines about death and the abode of spirits, we must regard the worship of nature as the root of the world's religion.
We must beware, however, of imputing to the thoughts of early men about their gods, any such qualities as consistency or regularity. The power of holding at one and the same time religious beliefs which are inconsistent with each other, is one which even in the most developed religions is by no means wanting; and how much more was this the case among men who lived before there was any exact thought! The savage could have a variety of gods of very different natures, who formed in his mind quite a happy family. When he found a new god, that did not oblige him to part with any old one; it was one god he was seeking, but he could not settle on one god as yet, when there were so many beings with a good claim to the position. He made his gods not out of nothing, but out of a great variety of experiences and impressions, and they acted and reacted on each other in an endless variety of ways. One god came to the front here and another there; an object was deified here from one reason and there from another; new gods in time turned old and were less thought of while forgotten gods of former days came back to memory and were worshipped once more. Endless change, endless recurrences of growth and of decay filled up those great spaces and periods, measureless and trackless almost as the expanses of the ocean, that were covered by the prehistoric life of mankind.
BOOKS RECOMMENDED
Jevons, Introduction to the History of Religion, 1896.
E. S. Hartland, in Proceedings of Oxford Congress of the History of Religion, p. 21, sqq.
Of the large class of books reporting the manners and beliefs of special savage races we may specify—
D. G. Brinton, The Myths of the New World, 1896.
W. W. Gill, Myths and Songs from the South Pacific, 1876.
Kingsley, Miss, West African Studies, 1899.
Callaway, The Religious System of the Amazulu, 1863–72.
Duff Macdonald, Africana, the Heart of Heathen Africa, 1882.
G. Grey, Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-Western and Western Australia, 1841.
Spencer and Gilpen. Native Tribes of Central Australia, 1899.
CHAPTER IV
EARLY DEVELOPMENTS—BELIEF
We have seen from what materials early man made his