CHAPTER VII.

RELIGION.

I. RELIGIOUS IDEAS OF PRIMITIVE MAN.

I MUST begin by declaring, to avoid any misunderstanding, that I leave entirely on one side all revealed religion. Revealed religion commands our faith and subjugates our reason; science requires freedom of search and appeals to facts. Now positive facts, in all that concerns the religious ideas and ceremonies of our earliest ancestors, are as yet very few in number, so few indeed that there is not, to my knowledge, a single one from which any certain conclusion can be drawn. We are therefore reduced to induction and analogy, and both of these means of proof are often deceptive. Yet it cannot be denied that God has always revealed himself to man in his works, and whatever Statius may say, the gods are not merely the creation of fear. The mind has an equal share with the heart in the conception of a divine Being, of a Supreme Cause; but this idea was of slow progressive development in primitive man, advancing almost imperceptibly by an instinctive and spontaneous movement. Just as the knowledge of our ego and of the exterior world was not acquired spontaneously, without effort, reflection, or experience, so the idea of the existence of God, at first embryonic, so to speak, has need, in order to attain its complete development, of slow and successive efforts of the human mind which has conceived it. Here we have not, as yet, direct intuition; there is only slow and painful labour, which, from induction to induction, reflection to reflection, leads us at length to this supreme affirmation: God is.' (Compayré.)

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M. Ampère has given us an interesting account of a young American girl named Laura Bridgman, deaf and dumb from her birth, and shortly afterwards deprived of her sight by an illness. She was consequently reduced to the senses of touch, taste, and smell. Dr. Howe and his wife undertook the education of this child. By their united efforts, and their wonderful patience and humanity, they succeeded in teaching Laura to read and write, and even the two simplest rules of arithmetic, addition and subtraction. She even acquired the notion of a God, in the same way as philosophers, by the idea of causality. 'There are things which men cannot produce,' she said; 'the rain, for instance.' Here M. Ampère justly remarks, 'It was not the spectacle of nature speaking to her understanding; nature was veiled, and the thunder was dumb to her; the sensation produced by the fall of a drop of water was sufficient to give rise in her mind to this question as to the cause, which man asks of necessity, and to which there is but one answer: God.'

Primitive man followed no other method. The modern savage thinks but little, but he feels readily and keenly. The great scenes of nature which are ever before his eyes, the unceasing peril which threatens his life, poor and uncultivated as it is, the conviction so often impressed by his own weakness, the pressing need of some support, that inborn yearning for the unknown,' that love of mystery so deeply rooted in the human heart: here are more than enough reasons to lead man to the conception of a Supreme Cause, to the notion of a divine Being.

The idea of God is at first individual, infinitesimal, sometimes strange and childish; it grows purer and larger with the growth of the natural intelligence and acquired instruction of him who conceives it. Then from being individual it becomes collective; and finally, passed from one to the other, it progresses gradually until it attains to this formula, of which the abstraction borders on the incom

Yes, the God we must believe in is a hidden God,' say the Roman Catholics themselves.

FIRST CONCEPTION OF DEITY.

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prehensible: Power, love, and wisdom, united yet divided, compose His being.'

Man, then, as he came from nature's hands, was endowed with too weak an understanding to enable him to attain at once to a clear and precise knowledge of the divinity; still less was he capable of understanding the refined and almost mystic dogma of the higher religions, for dogma is the work of science and religion, the expression of their results. But in the beginning it was nothing but the expression of the thought of the individual, a thought soon submitted by others to an examination more or less severe, then adopted by the majority of the tribe, and passing afterwards into a collective belief. It is easy to understand that there may have existed, that people still exist in a savage condition, without a generally recognised dogma, and consequently without religion, using the word in its most commonly accepted meaning. On this essential point we think we may place great confidence in the evidence of Livingstone, Sir Samuel Baker, Dr. Monnat, Dalton, Lichtenstein, and many other travellers as learned as they are trustworthy. Now these travellers assure us that in the interior of Africa, in America, and elsewhere there are entire tribes who have no idea of the divinity, no notion of a future life; we may even go so far as to say no idea of morals. Dr. Monnat says, speaking of the Mincopies, or inhabitants of the Andaman Isles: They cover themselves with mud and tattooing, but they wear no clothes; they seem indeed to be deprived of any sense of shame, and many of their customs are like those of the brute. They have no idea of a Supreme Being, nor religion, nor any belief in a future life. . . . They possess no dogs nor domestic animals of any kind.' Another modern traveller, Sir Samuel Baker, affirms that the negro of Central Africa has not the remotest idea of a Supreme Being, or First Cause of the universe, and his understanding is incapable of such a conception. The feeling of adoration is unknown to him. He possesses no representation of any deity whatever. For him, immortality is purely genealogical; the indi

vidual survives only in his descendants. If he performs any superstitious ceremony, if he sacrifices birds, it is only to seek in their convulsive motions prognostications relating to the ordinary interests of life; but no essentially religious idea is connected with the practice, invented by the imagination of a magician, and maintained by blind tradition. Livingstone affirms that among the Bechuanas and all Central African tribes there is a total absence of worship, idols, and of all religious ideas.' Still more recently Sir Massinger Bradley spoke of an Australian tribe which lived on the shores of the lake in a district situated in 35° lat. south, and 139° 30′ east long. Their language is monosyllabic, 'consisting,' he says, 'of cries more or less resembling those of animals. They have no superstitions of any kind, and have not the least notion of a future life.2

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Lastly, we are informed by the scientific commission of Mexico that the Indians in the neighbourhood of Santiago, whose physical character resembles that of the Chinese and the Mongols, had no religious ideas before the coming of the Conquerors. Many writers who are authorities on this matter,' says Sir John Lubbock, ‘are of opinion that no people is destitute of some sort of religion. This theory, however, does not agree with the statements of many trustworthy observers. Sailors, merchants, and philosophers, Catholic priests and Protestant missionaries, in ancient and modern times, and in every quarter of the globe, concur in affirming that there are races without any species of religion. Their testimony has the more weight that in many cases this fact has greatly surprised the observer, and was in complete opposition to all his preconceived ideas. On the other hand, it must be owned that travellers have denied the existence of a religion, because the creed it professed was entirely contrary to our own. The question as to the universal existence of religion among men is after all, in great measure, a matter of definition. If to constitute a religion a mere feeling Report of the Anthropological Society of Paris, p. 227, 1864. 2 Revue Scientifique, Nov. 15, 1873, p. 473.

INSTINCTIVE RELIGIOUS IDEAS.

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of fear, the single idea in man that there are very likely beings more powerful than himself, be sufficient, it may, I think, be admitted that the entire human race is in possession of religion.'

Professor Broca, on his part, in a paper remarkable for its good sound sense and scientific loyalty, agrees with several of the most distinguished members of the Anthropological Society of Paris in declaring that he has no doubt whatever that there are among the inferior races peoples without worship, dogma, metaphysical ideas, or collective belief, and consequently without religion.' It is needless. to say that after such an assertion, M. Broca, far from considering the religious instinct as universal and inseparable from human nature, sees in it where it exists merely one form of submission to a higher authority, an effect of the teaching received in childhood, but not an original characteristic faculty.

This opinion found, as we have said, a number of adherents in the Anthropological Society of Paris. M. de Quatrefages continues nevertheless to believe that the religious instinct is one of the original and essential characteristics of humanity, and he reckons in the list of theistic and even religious people, the Australians, the Melanesians, the Hottentots, the Kaffirs, the Bechuanas, the Yebous, the Mincopies, in fine, all the races among whom the authors we have quoted deny the existence of all religious ideas. (The Human Race,' page 349.)

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If we accept the Abbé Lamennais' definition of religion, as the assemblage of all the necessary laws of creation,' it is evident that, under this acceptation, religion is only accessible to philosophers who have long studied these laws; but if we accept this other definition of the same author, the union of man with God and of man with man,' it is not less evident that religion may be understood, felt, and practised as well by the savage as by men who have attained to an advanced state of civilisation.

Report of the Anthropological Society of Paris, 1866, p. 53.