A Short History of Freethought, Volume 1 6 – Robertson · Verses Across
Freethought · History of freethought
A Short History of Freethought, Volume 1 6Progress Under Ancient Religions (part 3)
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Freethought · History of freethought
A Short History of Freethought, Volume 1 6
Progress Under Ancient Religions (part 3)
RobertsonEnglish
Where this primitive form of atheistic rationalism originated we cannot now tell. But it was in some form current before the time of the Greek Evêmeros, who systematically developed it about 300 B.C.; for in a monotheistic application it more or less clearly underlies the redaction of much of the Hebrew Bible, where both patriarchal and regal names of the early period are found to be old God-names; and where the Sun-God Samson is made a "judge" --having originally been the Judge-God. In the Byblian writer, however, the purpose is not monotheistic, but atheistic; and the problem is whether this or that was the earlier development of the method. The natural presumption seems to be that the Hebrew adaptors of the old mythology used an already applied method, as the Christian Fathers later used the work of Evêmeros; and the citation from Thallos by Lactantius suggests that the method had been applied in Chaldea, as it was spontaneously applied by the Greek epic poets who made memorable mortals out of the ancient deities Odysseus and Æneas, Helen, Castor and Pollux, Achilles, and many more. It is in any case credible enough that among the much-travelling Phoenicians, with their open pantheon, an atheistic Evêmerism was thought out by the skeptical types before Evêmeros; and that the latter really drew his principles from Phoenicia. At any rate, they were there received, doubtless by a select few, as a means of answering the customary demand for "something in place of" the rejected Gods. Concerning the tradition that an ancient Phoenician, Moschus, had sketched an atomic theory, we may again say that, though there is no valid evidence for the statement, it counts for something as proof that the Phoenicians had an old repute for rationalism.
The Byblian cosmogony may be conceived as an atheistic refinement on those of Babylon, adopted by the Jews. It connects with the theogony ascribed to Hesiod (which has Asiatic aspects), in that both begin with Chaos, and the Gods of Hesiod are born later. But whereas in Hesiod Chaos brings forth Erebos and Night (Eros being causal force), and Night bears Æther and Day to Erebos, while Earth virginally brings forth Heaven (Uranos) and the Sea, and then bears the first Gods in union with Heaven, the Phoenician fragment proceeds from black chaos and wind, after long ages, through Eros or Desire, to a kind of primeval slime, from which arise first animals without intelligence, who in turn produce some with intelligence. The effort to expel Deity must have been considerable, for sun and moon and stars seem to arise uncreated, and the sun's action spontaneously produces further developments. The first man and his wife are created by male and female principles of wind, and their offspring proceed to worship the Sun, calling him Beel Samin. The other Gods are explained as eminent mortals deified after their death. See the details in Cory's Ancient Fragments, Hodges' ed. pp. 1-22. As to Moschus, cp. Renouvier, Manuel de philos. ancienne, 1844, i, 238; and Mosheim's ed. of Cudworth's Intellectual System, Harrison's tr. i, 20; also Cudworth's Eternal and Immutable Morality, same ed. iii, 548. On the general question of Phoenician rationalism, compare Pausanias's account (vii, 23) of his discussion with a Sidonian, who explained that Apollo was simply the sun, and his son Æsculapius simply the healing art.
At the same time there are signs even in Phoenician worship of an effort after an ethical as well as an intellectual purification of the common religion. To call "the" Phoenician religion "impure and cruel" is to obscure the fact that in all civilizations certain types and cults vary from the norm. In Phoenicia as in Israel there were humane anti-sensualists who either avoided or impugned the sensual and the cruel cults around them; as well as ascetics who stood by human sacrifice while resisting sexual licence. That the better types remained the minority is to be understood in terms of the balance of the social and cultural forces of their civilization, not of any racial bias or defect, intellectual or moral.
The remark of E. Meyer (Gesch. des Alt. i, 211, § 175), that an ethical or mystical conception of the God was "entirely alien" to "the Semite," reproduces the old fallacy of definite race-characters; and Mr. Sayce, in remarking that "the immorality performed in the name of religion was the invention of the Semitic race itself" (Anc. Emp. p. 203; contrast Tiele, Outlines, p. 83), after crediting the Semitic race with an ethical faculty alien to the Akkadian (above, p. 66), suggests another phase of the same error. There is nothing special to the Semites in the case save degree of development, similar phenomena being found in many savage religions, in Mexico, and in India. (Meyer in later passages and in his article on Ba'al in Boscher's Lexikon modifies his position as to Semitic versus other religions.) On the other hand, there was a chaste as well as an unchaste worship of the Phoenician Ashtoreth. Ashtoreth Karnaim, or Tanit, the Virgin, as opposed to Atergates and Annit, the Mother-Goddesses, had the characteristics of Artemis. Cp. Tiele, Religion comparée, as cited, pp. 318-19; Menzies, History of Religion, pp. 159, 168-71; Kuenen, Religion of Israel, i, 91; Smith, Religion of the Semites, pp. 292, 458. [In Rome, Venus Cloacina, sometimes ignorantly described as a Goddess of Vice, was anciently "the Goddess of chaste and holy matrimony" (Ettore Pais, Ancient Legends of Roman History, Eng. tr. 1906, p. 199)]. For the rest, the cruelty of the Phoenician cults, in the matter of human sacrifice, was fully paralleled among the early Teutons. See Tiele, Outlines, p. 199; and the author's Pagan Christs, Pt. ii, ch. i, § 4.
§ 7. ANCIENT CHINA
Of all the ancient Asiatic systems that of China yields us the first clear biographical trace of a practical rationalist, albeit a rationalist stamped somewhat by Chinese conservatism. Confucius (Kung-fu-tse = Kung the Master) is a tangible person, despite some mythic accretions, whereas Zarathustra and Buddha are at best but doubtful possibilities, and even Lao-Tsze (said to have been born 604 B.C.) is somewhat elusive.
Before Confucius (551-478 B.C.), it is evident, there had been a slackening in religious belief among the governing classes. It is claimed for the Chinese, as for so many other races, that they had anciently a "pure" monotheism; but the ascription, as usual, is misleading. They saw in the expanse of heaven the "Supreme" Power, not as a result of reflection on the claims of other deities among other races, but simply as expressing their primordial tribal recognition of that special God, before contact with the God-ideas of other peoples. Monotheistic in the modern sense they could not be. Concerning them as concerning the Semites we may say that the claim of a primary monotheism for them "is also true of all primitive totemistic or clannish communities. A man is born into a community with such a divine head, and the worship of that God is the only one possible to him." Beside the belief in the Heaven-God, there stood beliefs in heavenly and earthly spirits, and in ancestors, who were worshipped with altars.
The remark of Professor Legge (Religions of China, p. 11), that the relation of the names Shang-Ti = Supreme Ruler, and T'ien = the sky, "has kept the monotheistic element prominent in the religion proper of China down to the present time," may serve to avert disputation. It may be agreed that the Chinese were anciently "monotheists" in the way in which they are at present, when they worship spirits innumerable. When, however, Professor Legge further says (p. 16) that the ancient monotheism five thousand years ago was "in danger of being corrupted" by nature worship and divination, he puts in doubt the meaning of the other expression above cited. He states several times (pp. 46, 51, 52) that the old monotheism remains; but speaks (p. 84) of the mass of the people as "cut off from the worship of God for themselves." And see p. 91 as to ancestor-worship by the Emperor. Tiele (Outlines, p. 27) in comparison somewhat overstresses the polytheistic aspect of the Chinese religion in his opening definition; but he adds the essential facts. Dr. Legge's remark that "the idea of revelation did not shock" the ancient Chinese (p. 13) is obscure. He is dealing with the ordinary Akkado-Babylonian astrology. Pauthier, on the contrary (Chine Moderne, 1853, p. 250), asserts that in China "no doctrine has ever been put forth as revealed."
As regards ancestral worship, we have record of a display of disregard for it by the lords of Lû in Confucius's time; and the general attitude of Confucius himself, religious only in his adherence to old ceremonies, is incompatible with a devout environment. It has been disputed whether he makes a "skeptic denial of any relation between man and a living God"; but an authority who disputes this complains that his "avoiding the personal name of Tî, or God, and only using the more indefinite term Heaven," suggests "a coldness of temperament and intellect in the matter of religion." He was, indeed, above all things a moralist; and concerning the spirits in general he taught that "To give one's self to the duties due to men, and, while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom." He would never express an opinion concerning the fate of souls, or encourage prayer; and in his redaction of the old records he seems deliberately to have eliminated mythological expressions. "I would say," writes Dr. Legge (who never forgets to be a missionary), "that he was unreligious rather than irreligious; yet, by the coldness of his temperament and intellect in this matter, his influence is unfavourable to the development of true religious feeling among the Chinese people generally, and he prepared the way for the speculations of the literati of medieval and modern times, which have exposed them to the charge of atheism."
The view that there was a very early "arrest of growth" in the Chinese religion (Menzies, History of Religion, p. 108), "before the ordinary developments of mythology and doctrine, priesthood," etc., had "time to take place," is untenable as to the mythology. The same writer had previously spoken (p. 107) of the Chinese system before Confucius as having "already parted with all savage and irrational elements." That Confucius would seek to eliminate these seems likely enough, though the documentary fact is disputed.
In the elder contemporary of Confucius, Lao-Tsze ("Old Philosopher"), the founder of Taouism, may be recognized another and more remarkable early freethinker of a different stamp, in some essential respects much less conservative, and in intellectual cast markedly more original. Where Confucius was an admirer and student of antiquity, Lao-Tsze expressly put such concern aside, seeking a law of life within himself, in a manner suggestive of much Indian and other Oriental thought. So far as our records go, he is the first known philosopher who denied that men could form an idea of deity, that being the infinite; and he avowedly evolved, by way of makeshift, the idea of a primordial and governing Reason (Tau), closely analogous to the Logos of later Platonism. Since the same idea is traceable in more primitive forms alike in the Babylonian and Brahmanic systems, it is arguable that he may have derived it from one of these sources; but the problem is very obscure. In any case, his system is one of rationalistic pantheism.
His personal relation to Confucius was that of a self-poised sage, impatient of the other's formalism and regard to prescription and precedent. Where they compare is in their avoidance of supernaturalism, and in the sometimes singular rationality of their views of social science; in which latter respect, however, they were the recipients and transmitters of an already classic tradition. Thus both had a strong bias to conservatism; and in Lao-Tsze it went the length of prescribing that the people should not be instructed. Despite this, it is not going too far to say that no ancient people appears to have produced sane thinkers and scientific moralists earlier than the Chinese. The Golden Rule, repeatedly formulated by Confucius, seems to be but a condensation on his part of doctrine he found in the older classics; and as against Lao-Tsze he is seen maintaining the practical form of the principle of reciprocity. The older man, like some later teachers, preached the rule of returning kindness for evil, without leaving any biographical trace of such practice on his own part. Confucius, dealing with human nature as it actually is, argued that evil should be met by justice, and kindness with kindness, else the evil were as much fostered as the good.
It is to be regretted that Christian writers should keep up the form of condemning Confucius (so Legge, Religions of China, p. 144; Life and Teachings of Confucius, 4th ed. p. 111 sq.; Douglas, p. 144) for a teaching the practice of which is normally possible, and is never transcended in their own Church, where the profession of returning good for evil merely constitutes one of the great hypocrisies of civilization. Dr. Legge does not scruple to resort to a bad sophism in this connection. "If," he says, "we only do good to them that do good to us, what reward have we?" He thus insinuates that Confucius vetoed any spontaneous act of benevolence. The question is not of such acts, but of kind acts to those who seek to injure us. On the other hand, Mr. Chalmers, who dedicates his translation of Lao-Tsze to Dr. Legge, actually taunts Lao-Tsze (p. 38) with absurdity in respect of his doctrine. Such is the sincerity of orthodox polemic. How little effect the self-abnegating teaching of Lao-Tsze, in turn, has had on his followers may be gathered from their very legends concerning him (Douglas, p. 182). There is a fallacy, further, in the Christian claim that Confucius (Analects, v, 11; xv, 23) put the Golden Rule in a lower form than that of the Gospels, in that he gave it the negative form, "Do not that which ye would not have done unto you." This is really the rational and valid form of the Rule. The positive form, unless construed in the restrictive sense, would merely prescribe a non-moral doing of favours in the hope of receiving favours in return. It appears, further, from the passage in the Analects, v, 11, that the doctrine in this form was familiar before Confucius.
Lao-Tsze, on his part, had reduced religion to a minimum. "There is not a word in the Tâo Têh King [by Lao-Tsze] of the sixth century B.C. that savours either of superstition or religion." But the quietist and mystical philosophy of Lao-Tsze and the practicality of Confucius alike failed to check the growth of superstition among the ever-increasing ignorant Chinese population. Says our Christian authority: "In the works of Lieh-Tsze and Chwang-Tsze, followers of Lao-Tsze, two or three centuries later, we find abundance of grotesque superstition, though we are never sure how far those writers really believed the things they relate." In point of fact, Lieh-Tsze is now commonly held by scholars to be an imaginary personage, whose name is given to a miscellaneous collection of teachings and moral tales, much interpolated and added to long after the date assigned to him--circa 400 B.C. It contains a purely pantheistic statement of the cosmic problem, and among the apologues is one in which a boy of twelve years is made tersely and cogently to rebut the teleological view of things. The writers of such sections are not likely to have held the superstitions set forth in others. But that superstition should supervene upon light where the means of light were dwindling was a matter of course. It was but the old fatality, seen in Brahmanism, in Buddhism, in Egypt, in Islam, and in Christianity.
Confucius himself was soon worshipped. A reaction against him set in after a century or two, doctrines of pessimism on the one hand, and of universal love on the other, finding a hearing; but the influence of the great Confucian teacher Mencius (Meng-Tse) carried his school through the struggle. "In his teaching, the religious element retires still further into the background" than in that of Confucius; and he is memorable for his insistence on the remarkable principle of Confucius, that "the people are born good"; that they are the main part of the State; and that it is the ruler's fault if they go astray. Some rulers seem to have fully risen to this view of things, for we have an account of a rationalistic duke, who lived earlier than 250 B.C., refusing to permit the sacrifice of a man as a scapegoat on his behalf; and in the year 166 B.C. such sacrifices were permanently abolished by the Han Emperor Wen. But Mencius, who, as a sociologist, excels not only Lao-Tsze but Confucius, put his finger on the central force in Chinese history when he taught that "it is only men of education who, without a certain livelihood, are able to maintain a fixed heart. As to the people, if they have not a certain livelihood, it follows that they will not have a fixed heart." So clearly was the truth seen in China over two thousand years ago. But whether under feudalism or under imperialism, under anarchy or under peace--and the teachings of Lao-Tsze and Mencius combined to discredit militarism --the Chinese mass always pullulated on cheap food, at a low standard of comfort, and in a state of utter ignorance. Hence the cult of Confucius was maintained among them only by recognizing their normal superstition; but on that basis it has remained secure, despite competition, and even a term of early persecution. One iconoclastic emperor, the founder of the Ch'in or Ts'in dynasty (221 or 212 B.C.), sought to extirpate Confucianism as a means to a revolution in the government; but the effort came to nothing.
In the same way Lao-Tsze came to be worshipped as a God under the religion called Taouism, a title sometimes mistranslated as rationalism, "a name admirably calculated to lead the mind astray as to what the religion is." It would seem as if the older notion of the Tau, philosophically purified by Lao-Tsze, remained a popular basis for his school, and so wrought its degradation. The Taoists or Tao-sse "do their utmost to be as unreasonable as possible." They soon reverted from the philosophic mysticism of Lao-Tsze, after a stage of indifferentism, to a popular supernaturalism, which "the cultivated Chinese now regard with unmixed contempt"; the crystallized common-sense of Confucius, on the other hand, allied as it is with official ceremonialism, retaining its hold as an esoteric code for the learned. The evolution has thus closely resembled that which took place in India.
Nowhere, perhaps, is our sociological lesson more clearly to be read than in China. Centuries before our era it had a rationalistic literature, an ethic no less earnest and far more sane that that of the Hebrews, and a line of known teachers as remarkable in their way as those of ancient Greece who flourished about the same period. But where even Greece, wrought upon by all the other cultures of antiquity, ultimately retrograded, till under Christianity it stayed at a Chinese level of unprogressiveness for a thousand years, isolated China, helped by no neighbouring culture adequate to the need, has stagnated as regards the main mass of its life, despite some political and other fluctuations, till our own day. Its social problem, like that of India, is now more or less dependent, unfortunately, on the solutions that may be reached in Europe, where the problem is only relatively more mature, not fundamentally different.
§ 8. MEXICO AND PERU
In the religions of pre-Christian Mexico and Peru we have peculiarly interesting examples of "early" religious systems, flourishing at some such culture-level as the ancient Akkadian, in full play at the time of the European Renaissance. In Mexico a partly "high" ethical code, as the phrase goes, went concurrently with the most frightful indulgence in human sacrifice, sustained by the continuous practice of indecisive war for the securing of captives, and by the interest of a vast priesthood. In this system had been developed all the leading features of those of the Old World--the identification of all the Gods with the Sun; the worship of fire, and the annual renewal of it by special means; the conception of God-sacrifice and of communion with the God by the act of eating his slain representative; the belief in a Virgin-Mother-Goddess; the connection of humanitarian ethic with the divine command; the opinion that celibacy, as a state of superior virtue, is incumbent on most priests and on all would-be saints; the substitution of a sacramental bread for the "body and blood" of the God-Man; the idea of an interceding Mother-Goddess; the hope of a coming Saviour; the regular practice of prayer; exorcism, special indulgences, confession, absolution, fasting, and so on. In Peru, also, many of those conceptions were in force; but the limitation of the power and numbers of the priesthood by the imperial system of the Incas, and the state of peace normal in their dominions, prevented the Mexican development of human sacrifice.
It seems probable that the Toltecs, who either fled before or were for the most part subdued or destroyed by the barbarian Chichimecs (in turn subdued by the Aztecs) a few centuries before Cortes, were on the whole a less warlike and more civilized people, with a less bloody worship. Their God, Quetzalcoatl, retained through fear by the Aztecs, was a comparatively benign deity opposed to human sacrifice, apparently rather a late purification or partial rationalization of an earlier God-type than a primitively harmless conception. Insofar as they were sundered by quarrels between the sectaries of the God Quetzalcoatl and the God Votan, though their religious wars seem to have been as cruel as those of the early Christians of North Africa, there appears to have been at work among them a movement towards unbloody religion. In any case their overthrow seems to stand for the military inferiority of the higher and more rational civilization to the lower and more religious, which in turn, however, was latterly being destroyed by its enormously burdensome military and priestly system, and may even be held to have been ruined by its own superstitious fears.
Among the recognizable signs of normal progress in the ordinary Aztec religion were (1) the general recognition of the Sun as the God really worshipped in all the temples of the deities with special names; (2) the substitution in some cults of baked bread-images for a crucified human victim. The question arises whether the Aztecs, but for their overwhelming priesthood, might conceivably have risen above their system of human sacrifices, as the Aryan Hindus had done in an earlier age. Their material civilization, which carried on that of the kindred Toltecs, was at several points superior to that which the Spaniards put in its place; and their priesthood, being a leisured and wealthy class, might have developed intellectually as did the Brahmans, if its economic basis had been changed. But only a conquest or other great political convulsion could conceivably have overturned the vast cultus of human sacrifice, which overran all life, and cherished war as a means of procuring victims.
In the kindred State of Tezcuco, civilization seems to have gone further than in Aztec Anahuac; and about the middle of the fifteenth century one Tezcucan king, the conqueror Netzahualcoyotl, who has left writings in both prose and verse, is seen attaining to something like a philosophic creed, of a monotheistic stamp. He is said to have rejected all idol-worship, and erected, as aforesaid, an altar "to the Unknown God," forbidding all sacrifices of blood in that worship. But among the Tezcucans these never ceased; three hundred slaves were sacrificed at the obsequies of the conqueror's son, Netzahualpilli; and the Aztec influence over the superior civilization was finally complete.
In Peru, again, we find civilization advancing in respect of the innovation of substituting statuettes for wives and slaves in the tombs of the rich; and we have already noted the remarkable records of the avowed unbelief of several Incas in the divinity of the nationally worshipped Sun. For the rest, there was the dubious quasi-monotheistic cult of the Creator-God, Pachacamac, concerning whom every fresh discussion raises fresh doubt.
Mr. Lang, as usual, leans to the view that Pachacamac stands for a primordial and "elevated" monotheism (Making of Religion, pp. 263-70), while admitting the slightness of the evidence. Garcilasso, the most eminent authority, who, however, is contradicted by others, represents that the conception of Pachacamac as Creator, needing no temple or sacrifice, was "philosophically" reached by the Incas and their wise men (Lang, p. 262). The historical fact seems to be that a race subdued by the Incas, the Yuncas, had one temple to this deity; and that the Incas adopted the cult. Garcilasso says the Yuncas had human sacrifices and idols, which the Incas abolished, setting up their monotheistic cult in that one temple. This is sufficiently unlikely; and it may very well have been the fact that the Yuncas had offered no sacrifices. But if they did not, it was because their material conditions, like those of the Australians and Fuegians, had not facilitated the practice; and in that case their "monotheism" likewise would merely represent the ignorant simplicity of a clan-cult. (Compare Tylor, Primitive Culture, ii, 335 sq.; Brinton, Myths of the New World, p. 52.) On the other hand, if the Incas had set up a cult without sacrifices to a so-called One God, their idea would be philosophical, as taking into account the multitude of clan-cults as well as their own national worships, and transcending these.
But the outstanding sociological fact in Incarial Peru was the absolute subjection of the mass of the people; and though its material development and political organization were comparable to those of ancient Persia under the Akhamenidæ, so that the Spanish Conquest stood here for mere destruction, there is no reason to think that at the best its intellectual life could have risen higher than that of pre-Alexandrian Egypt, to which it offers so many resemblances. The Incas' schools were for the nobility only. Rationalistic Incas and high priests might have ruled over a docile, unlettered multitude, gradually softening their moral code, in connection with their rather highly-developed doctrine (resembling the Egyptian) of a future state. But these seem the natural limits, in the absence of contact with another civilization not too disparate for a fruitful union.
In Mexico, on the other hand, an interaction of native cultures had already occurred to some purpose; and the strange humanitarianism of the man-slaying priests, who made free public hospitals of part of their blood-stained temples, suggests a possibility of esoteric mental culture among them. They had certainly gone relatively far in their moral code, as apart from their atrocious creed of sacrifice, even if we discount the testimony of the benevolent priest Sahagun; and they had the beginnings of a system of education for the middle classes. But unless one of the States which habitually warred for captives should have conquered the others--in which case a strong ruler might have put an end to the wholesale religious slaughter of his own subjects, as appears to have been done anciently in Mesopotamia--the priests in all likelihood would never have transcended their hideous hallucination of sacrifice. Their murdered civilization is thus the "great perhaps" of sociology; organized religion being the most sinister factor in the problem.
§ 9. THE COMMON FORCES OF DEGENERATION
It is implied more or less in all the foregoing summaries that there is an inherent tendency in all systematized and instituted religion to degenerate intellectually and morally, save for the constant corrective activity of freethought. It may be well, however, to note specifically the forms or phases of the tendency.
1. Dogmatic and ritual religion being, to begin with, a more or less general veto on fresh thinking, it lies in its nature that the religious person is as such less intelligently alive to all problems of thought and conduct than he otherwise might be--a fact which at least outweighs, in a whole society, the gain from imposing a terrorized conformity on the less well-biassed types. Wherever conduct is a matter of sheer obedience to a superhuman code, it is ipso facto uncritical and unprogressive. Thus the history of most religions is a record of declines and reformations, each new affirmation of moral freethought ad hoc being in turn erected into a set of sheer commands. To set up the necessary ferment of corrective thought even for a time, there seems to be needed (a) a provocation to the intelligence, as in the spectacle of conflict of cults; and (b) a provocation to the moral sense and to self-interest through a burdensome pressure of rites or priestly exactions. An exceptional personality, of course, may count for much in the making of a movement; though the accident of the possession of kingly power by a reformer seems to count for much more than does genius.
2. The fortunes of such reactions are determined by socio-economic or political conditions. They are seen to be at a minimum, as to energy and social effect, in the conditions of greatest social invariability, as in ancient Egypt, where progress in thought, slow at best, was confined to the priestly and official class, and never affected popular culture.
3. In the absence of social conditions fitted to raise popular levels of life and thought, every religious system tends to worsen intellectually in the sense of adding to its range of superstition--that is, of ignorant and unreasoning belief. Credulity has its own momentum. Even the possession of limitary sacred books cannot check this tendency--e.g., Hinduism, Judaism, Mohammedanism, Mazdeism, Christianity up till the age of doubt and science, and the systems of ancient Egypt, Babylon, and post-Confucian China. This worsening can take place alongside of a theoretic purification of belief within the sphere of the educated theological class.
Christian writers have undertaken to show that such deterioration went on continuously in India from the beginning of the Vedic period, popular religion sinking from Varuna to Indra, from Indra to the deities of the Atharva Veda, and from these to the Puranas (cp. Dr. J. Murray Mitchell, Hinduism Past and Present, 1885, pp. 22, 25, 26, 54). The argument, being hostile in bias from the beginning, ignores or denies the element of intellectual advance in the Upanishads and other later literature; but it holds good of the general phenomena. It holds good equally, however, of the history of Christianity in the period of the supremacy of ignorant faith and absence of doubt and science; and is relatively applicable to the religion of the uneducated mass at any time and place.
On the other hand, it is not at all true that religious history is from the beginning, in any case, a process of mere degeneration from a pure ideal. Simple statements as to primitive ideas are found to be misleading because of their simplicity. They can connote only the ethic of the life conditions of the worshipper. Now, we have seen (p. 28) that small primitive peoples living at peace and in communism, or in some respects well placed, may be on that account in certain moral respects superior to the average or mass of more civilized and more intelligent peoples. [As to the kindliness and unselfishness of some savages, living an almost communal life, and as to the scrupulous honesty of others, there is plenty of evidence--e.g., as to Andaman islanders, Max Müller, Anthrop. Relig., citing Colonel Cadell, p. 177; as to Malays and Papuans, Dr. Russel Wallace, Malay Archipelago, p. 595 (but cp. pp. 585, 587, 589); as to Esquimaux, Keane, Man, p. 374; Reclus, Primitive Folk, pp. 15, 37, 115 (but cp. pp. 41-42). In these and other cases unselfishness within the tribe is the concomitant of the communal life, and represents no conscious ethical volition, being concurrent with phases of the grossest tribal egoism, in some cases with cannibalism, and with the perpetual oppression of women. In the case of the preaching of unselfishness to the young by the old among the Australians, where Lubbock and his authorities see "the tyranny of the old" (Origin of Civilization, 5th ed. pp. 451-52) Mr. Lang sees a pure primeval ethic. Obviously the other is the true explanation. The closest and best qualified observers testify, as regards a number of tribes: "So far as anything like moral precepts are concerned in these tribes ... it appears to us to be most probable that they have originated in the first instance in association with the purely selfish ideas of the older men to keep all the best things for themselves, and in no case whatever are they supposed to have the sanction of a superior being" (Spencer and Gillen, North. Tribes of Cent. Australia, 1904, p. 504).]
The transition from that state to one of war and individualism would be in a sense degeneration; but on the other hand the entirely communistic societies are unprogressive. Broadly speaking, it is by the path of social individuation that progress in civilization has been made, the early city States and the later large military States ultimately securing within themselves some of the conditions for special development of thought, arts, and knowledge. The residual truth is that the simple religion of the harmless tribe is pro tanto superior to the instituted religion of the more civilized nation with greater heights and lower depths of life, the popular religion in the latter case standing for the worse conditions. But the simple religion did not spring from any higher stage of knowledge. The old theorem revived by Mr. Lang (Making of Religion), as to religion having originally been a pure and highly ethical monotheism, from which it degenerated into animism and non-moral polytheism, is at best a misreading of the facts just stated. Mr. Lang never asks what "Supreme Being" and "monotheism" mean for savages who know nothing of other men's religions: he virtually takes all the connotations for granted. And as regards the most closely studied of contemporary savages our authorities come to an emphatic conclusion that they have no notion whatever of anything like a Supreme Being (Spencer and Gillen, North. Tribes of Cent. Austr. pp. 491-92. Cp. A. H. Keane, Man, p. 395, as to the "Great Spirit" of the Redskins). For the rest, Mr. Lang's theory is demonstrably wrong in its ethical interpretation of many anthropological facts, and as it stands is quite irreconcilable with the law of evolution, since it assumes an abstract monotheism as primordial. In general it approximates scientifically to the eighteenth-century doctrine of the superiority of savagery to civilization. (See it criticized in the author's Studies in Religious Fallacy, and Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. pp. 37-43, 46 sq.)
4. Even primary conditions of material well-being, if not reacted upon by social science or a movement of freethought, may in a comparatively advanced civilization promote religious degeneration. Thus abundance of food is favourable to multiplication of sacrifice, and so to priestly predominance. The possession of domesticated animals, so important to civilization, lends itself to sacrifice in a specially demoralizing degree. But abundant cereal food-supply, making abundant population, may greatly promote human sacrifice--e.g., Mexico.
The error of Mr. Lang's method is seen in the use he makes (work cited, pp. 286-289, 292) of the fact that certain "low" races--as the Australians, Andamanese, Bushmen, and Fuegians--offer no animal sacrifice. He misses the obvious significance of the facts that these unwarlike races have as a rule no domesticated animals and no agriculture, and that their food supply is thus in general precarious. The Andamanese, sometimes described (Malthus, Essay on Population, ch. iii, and refs.; G. W. Earl, Papuans, 1853, pp. 150-51) as very ill-fed, are sometimes said to be well supplied with fish and game (Peschel, Races of Man, Eng. tr. 1876, p. 147; Max Müller, Anthrop. Rel. citing Cadell, p. 177); but in any case they have had no agriculture, and seem to have only occasional animal food in the shape of a wild hog (Colebrooke in Asiatic Researches, iv, 390). The Australians and Fuegians, again, have often great difficulty in feeding themselves (Peschel, pp. 148, 159, 334; Darwin, Voyage, ch. 10). It is argued concerning the Australian aborigines that "as a rule they have an abundance" (A. F. Calvert, The Aborigines of Western Australia, 1894, p. 24); but this abundance is made out by cataloguing the whole edible fauna and flora of the coasts and the interior, and ignores the fact that for all hunting peoples food supply is precarious. For the Australian, "the difficulty of capturing game with his primitive methods compels him to give his whole time to the quest of food" (Keane, Man, p. 148). In the contrary case of the primitive Vedic Aryans, well supplied with animals, sacrifices were abundant, and tended to become more so (Müller, Nat. Relig. pp. 136, 185; Physical Relig. p. 105; but cp. pp. 98, 101; Mitchell, Hinduism, p. 43; Lefmann, Geschichte des alten Indiens, in Oncken's series, 1890, pp. 49, 430-31). Of these sacrifices that of the horse seems to have been in Aryan use in a most remote period (cp. M. Müller, Nat. Rel. pp. 524-25; H. Böttger, Sonnencult der Indogermanen, Breslau, 1891, pp. 41-44; Preller, Römische Mythologie, ed. Köhler, pp. 102, 299, 323; Griechische Mythologie, 2te Aufg. i, 462; Frazer, Golden Bough, ii, 315). Max Müller's remark (Physical Religion, p. 106), that "the idea of sacrifice did not exist at a very early period," because there is no common Aryan term for it, counts for nothing, as he admits (p. 107) that the Sanskrit word cannot be traced back to any more general root; and he concedes the antiquity of the practice. On this cp. Mitchell, Hinduism, pp. 37-38; and the author's Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. p. 122. The reform in Hindu sacrifice, consummated by Buddhism, has been noted above.
5. Even scientific knowledge, while enabling the thoughtful to correct their religious conceptions, in some forms lends itself easily to the promotion of popular superstition. Thus the astronomy of the Babylonians, while developing some skepticism, served in general to encourage divination and fortune-telling; and seems to have had the same effect when communicated to the Chinese, the Hindus, and the Hebrews, all of whom, however, practised divination previously on other bases.
6. Finally, the development of the arts of sculpture and painting, unaccompanied by due intellectual culture, tends to keep religion at a low anthropomorphic level, and worsens its psychology by inviting image-worship. It is not that the earlier and non-artistic religions are not anthropomorphic, but that they give more play for intellectual imagination than does a cult of images. But where the arts have been developed, idolatry has always arisen save when resisted by a special activity or revival of freethought to that end; and even in Protestant Christendom, where image-worship is tabooed, religious pictures now promote popular credulity and ritualism as they did in the Italian Renaissance. So manifold are the forces of intellectual degeneration--degeneration, that is, from an attained ideal or stage of development, not from any primordial knowledge.
