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homonyms, it was believed that the corresponding things were transformations of each other, and new fictions were invented to make these metamorphoses intelligible. Or again, a word which had ceased to be understood, was the origin of fables designed to give it a meaning. The creative work of language continued then, making constructions ever more and more complex, and then mythology came to endow each god with a biography, ever more and more extended and complete, the result of all of which was that the divine personalities, at first confounded with things, finally distinguished and determined themselves.
This is how the notion of the divine is said to have been constructed. As for the religion of ancestors, it was only a reflection of this other.1 The idea of the soul is said to have been first formed for reasons somewhat analogous to those given by Tyior, except that according to Max Muller, they were designed to account for death, rather than for dreams.2 Then, under the influence of diverse, partially accidental, circumstances,3 the souls of men, being once disengaged from the body, were drawn little by little within the circle of divine beings, and were thus finally deified themselves. But this new cult was the product of only a secondary formation. This is proven by the fact that deified men have generally been imperfect gods or demi-gods, whom the people have always been able to distinguish from the genuine-deities.4
II
This doctrine rests, in part, upon a certain number of linguistic postulates which have been and still aw very much questioned. Some have contested the reality of many of the similarities which Max Muller claimed to have found between the names of the gods in the various European languages. The interpretation which he gave them has been especially doubted : it has been asked if these names, far from being the mark of a very primitive
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religion, are not the slow product, either of direct borrowings or of natural intercourse with others.1 Also, it is no longer admitted that the roots once existed in an isolated state as autonomous realities, nor that they allow us to reconstruct, even hypotheti-cally, the original language of the IndoEuropeans.2 Finally, recent researches would tend to show that the Vedic divinities did not all have the exclusively naturistic character attributed to them by Max Muller and his school.3 But we shall leave aside those questions, the discussion of which requires a special competence as a philologist, and address ourselves directly to the general principles of the system. It will be important here not to confound the naturistic theory with these controverted postulates ; for this is held by numbers of scholars who do not make language play the predominating role attributed to it by Max Muller.
That men have an interest in knowing the world which surrounds them, and consequently that their reflection should have been applied to it at an early date, is something that everyone will readily admit. Co-operation with the things with which they were in immediate connection was so necessary for them that they could not fail to seek a knowledge of their nature. But if, as naturism pretends, it is of these reflections that religious thought was bom, it is impossible to explain how it was able to survive the first attempts made, arid the persistence with which it has maintained itself
1Anthropological Religion, pp. 128—130.
2This explanation is not as good as that of Tyior. According to Max Muller. men could not admit that life stopped with death ; therefore they concluded that there were two beings within them, one of which survived the body. But it is hard to see what made them think that life continued after the body was decomposed.
3For the details, see Anthrop. Rel., pp. 351 ff.
4Anthrop. Ret., p. 130.—This is what keeps Max Muller from considering Christianity the climax of all this development. The religion of ancestors, he says, supposes that there is something divine in man. Now is that idea not the one at the basis of the teaching of Christ ? (ibid., pp. 378 ff.). It is useless to insist upon the strangeness of the conception which makes Christianity the latest of the cults of the dead.
1See the discussion of the hypothesis in Gruppe, Griechishen Kulte und Mythen. pp. 79-184.
2bee Meillet, Introduction и Vetude comparative des langues indo-europeennes, P. 1х9. ythra, ia. Journal Asiatique,
X, No. i, July-August, 1907, pp. 143 ff.
3 Uldenberg, Die Religion des Vedas, pp. 59 ff. ; Meillet, Le dieu Iranien
becomes unintelligible. If we have need of knowing the nature of things, it is in order to act upon them in an appropriate manner. But the conception of the universe given us by religion, especially in its early forms, is too greatly mutilated to lead to temporarily useful practices. Things become nothing less than living and thinking beings, minds or personalities like those which the religious imagination has made into the agents of cosmic phenomena. It is not by conceiving of them under this form or by treating them according to this conception that men could make them work for their ends. It is not by addressing prayers to them, by celebrating them in feasts and sacrifices, or by imposing upon themselves fasts and privations, that men can deter them from working harm or oblige them to serve their own designs. Such processes could succeed only very exceptionally and, so to speak, miraculously. If, then, religion's reason for existence was to give us a conception of the
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world which would guide us in our relations with it, it was in no condition to fulfil its function, and people would not have been slow to perceive it : failures, being infinitely more frequent than successes, would have quickly shown them that they were following a false route, and religion, shaken at each instant by these repeated contradictions, would not have been able to survive.
It is undeniably true that errors have been able to perpetuate themselves in history ; but, except under a union of very exceptional circumstances, they can never perpetuate themselves thus unless they were true practically, that is to say, unless, without giving us a theoretically exact idea of the things with which they deal, they express well enough the manner in which they affect us, either for good or for bad. Under these circumstances, the actions which they determine have every chance of being, at least in a general way, the very ones which are proper, so it is easily explained how they have been able to survive the proofs of experience.1 But an error and especially a system of errors which leads to, and can lead to nothing but mistaken and useless practices, has no chance of living. Now what is there in common between the rites with which the believer tries to act upon nature and the processes by which science has taught us to make use of it, and which we now know are the only efficacious ones ? If that is what men demanded of religion, it is impossible to see how it could have maintained itself, unless clever tricks had prevented their seeing that it did not give them what they expected from it. It would be necessary to return again to the over simple explanations of the eighteenth century.2
Thus it is only in appearance that naturism escapes the [80]
Leading Conceptions of the Elementary Religion
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objection which we recently raised against animism. It also makes religion a system of hallucinations, since it reduces it to an immense metaphor with no objective value. It is true that it gives religion a point of departure in reality, to wit, in the sensations which the phenomena of nature provoke in us ; but by the bewitching action of language, this sensation is soon transformed into extravagant conceptions. Religious thought does not come in contact with reality, except to
1 In this category are a large number of the maxims of popular wisdom.
2 It is true that this argument does not touch those wlio see in religion a code (especially of hygiene) whose provisions, though placed under the sanction of imaginary beings, are nevertheless well founded. But we shall not delay to discuss a conception so insupportable, and which has, in fact, never been sustained in a systematic manner by persons somewhat informed upon the history of religions. It is difficult to see what good the terrible practices of the initiation bring to the health which they threaten ; what good the dietetic restrictions, which generally deal with perfectly clean animals, have hygienically ; how sacrifices, which take place far from a house, make it more solid, etc. Undoubtedly there are religious precepts which at the same time have a practical utility ; but they are lost in the mass of others, and even the services which they render are frequently not without some drawbacks. If there is a religiously enforced cleanliness, there is also a religious filthiness which is derived from these same principles. The rule which orders a corpse to be carried away from the camp because it is the seat of a dreaded spirit is undoubtedly useful. But the same belief requires the relatives to anoint themselves with the liquids which issue from a corpse in putrefaction, because they are supposed to have exceptional virtues.—From this point of view, magic has served a great deal more than religion.
cover it at once with a thick veil which conceals its real forms : this veil is the tissue of fabulous beliefs which mythology brought forth. Thus the believer, like the delirious man, lives in a world peopled with beings and things which have only a verbal existence. Max Muller himself recognized this, for he regarded myths as the product of a disease of the intellect. At first, he attributed them to a disease of language, but since language and the intellect are inseparable for him, what is true of the one is true of the other. " When trying to explain the inmost nature of mythology," he says, " I called it a disease of Language rather than of Thought. . . . After I had fully explained in my Science of Thought that language and thought are inseparable, and that a disease of language is therefore the same thing as a disease of thought, no doubt ought to have. remained as to what I meant. To represent the supreme God as committing every kind of crime, as being deceived by men, as being angry with his wife and violent with his children, is surely a proof of a disease, of an unusual condition of thought, or, to speak more clearly, of real madness."1 And this argument is not valid merely against Max Muller and his theory, but against the very principle of naturism, in whatever way it may be applied. Whatever we may do, if religion has as its principal object the expression of the forces of nature, it is impossible to see in it anything more than a system of lying fictions, whose survival is incomprehensible.
Max Muller thought he escaped this objection, whose gravity he felt, by distinguishing radically between mythology and religion, and by putting the first outside the second. He claims the right of reserving the name of religion for only those beliefs which conform to the prescriptions of a sane moral system and a rational theology. The myths were parasitic growths which, under the influence of language, attached themselves upon these fundamental conceptions, and denatured them. Thus the belief in Zeus was religious in so far as the Greeks considered him the supreme God, father of humanity, protector of laws, avenger of crimes, etc. ; but all that which concerned
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the biography of Zeus, his marriages and his adventures, was only mythology.1
But this distinction is arbitrary. It is true that mythology has an aesthetic interest as well as one for the history of religions; but it is one of the essential elements of the religious life, nevertheless. If the myth were withdrawn from religion, it would be necessary to withdraw the rite also ; for the rites are generally addressed to definite personalities who have a name, a character, determined attributes and a history, and they vary according to the manner in which these personalities are conceived. The cult rendered to a divinity depends upon the character attributed to him ; and it is the myth which determines this character. Very frequently, the rite is nothing more than the myth put in action; the Christian communion is inseparable from the myth of the Last Supper, from which it derives all its meaning. Then if all mythology is the result of a sort of verbal delirium, the question which we raised remains intact: the existence, and especially the persistence of the cult become inexplicable. It is hard to understand how men have continued to do certain things for centuries without any object. Moreover, it is not merely the peculiar traits of the divine personalities which are determined by mythology ; the very idea that there are gods or spiritual beings set above the various departments of nature, in no matter what manner they may be represented, is essentially mythical.2 Now if all that which appertains to the notion of gods conceived as cosmic agents is blotted out of the religions of the past, what remains ? The idea of a divinity in itself, of a transcendental power upon which man depends and upon which he supports himself ? But that is only an abstract and philosophic conception which has been fully realized in no historical religion ; it is without interest for the science of religions.3 We must therefore avoid
1 Contributions to the Science of Mythology, I, pp. 68 f.
1Lectures on the Science of Language. II, p. 456 fi. ; Physic. Rel., pp. 276 ff.— Also Breal, Melanges, p. 6, " To bring the necessary clarity into this question of the origin of mythology, it is necessary to distinguish carefully the gods. which are the immediate product of the human intelligence, from the fables, which are its indirect and involuntary product."
2Max Muller recognized this. See Physic. Rel., p. 132, and Comparative Mythology, p. 58. " The gods are nomina and not numina, names without being and not beings without name."
3It is true that Max Muller held that for the Greeks, " Zeus was, and remained, in spite of all mythological obscurations, the name of the Supreme Deity " (Science of Language, II, p. 478). We shall not dispute this assertion,
distinguishing between religious beliefs, keeping some because they seem to us
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to be true and sane and rejecting others because they shock and disconcert us. All myths, even those which we find the most unreasonable, have been believed.1 Men have believed in them no less firmly than in their own sensations ; they have based their conduct upon them. In spite of appearances, it is therefore impossible that they should be without objective foundation.
However, it will be said that in whatever manner religions may be explained, it is certain that they are mistaken in regard to the real nature of things : science has proved it. The modes of action which they counsel or prescribe to men can therefore rarely have useful effects : it is not by lustrations that the sick are cured nor by sacrifices and chants that the crops are made to grow. Thus the objection which we have made to naturism would seem to be applicable to all possible systems of explanation.
Nevertheless, there is one which escapes it. Let us suppose that religion responds to quite another need than that of adapting ourselves to sensible objects : then it will not risk being weakened by the fact that it does not satisfy, or only badly satisfies, this need. If religious faith was not born to put man in harmony with the material world, the injuries which it has been able to do him in his struggle with the world do not touch it at its source, because it is fed from another.
If it is not for these reasons that a man comes to believe, he should continue to believe even when these reasons are contradicted by the facts. It is even conceivable that faith should be strong enough, not only to support these contradictions, but also even to deny them and to keep the believer from seeing their importance ; this is what succeeds in rendering them inoffensive for religion. When the religious sentiment is active, it will not admit that religion can be in the wrong, and it readily suggests explanations which make it appear innocent ; if the rite does not produce the desired results, this failure is imputed either to some fault of execution, or to the intervention of another, contrary deity. But for that, it is necessary that these religious ideas have their source in another sentiment than that betrayed by these deceptions of experience, or else whence could come their force of resistance ?
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III
But more than that, even if men had really had reasons for remaining obstinate, in spite of all their mistakes, in expressing cosmic phenomena in religious terms, it is also necessary that these be of a nature to suggest such an interpretation. Now when could they have gotten such a property ? Here again we find ourselves in the presence of one of those postulates which pass as evident only because they have not been criticized. It is stated as an axiom that in the natural play of physical forces there is all that is needed to arouse within us the idea of the sacred ; but when we closely examine the proofs of this proposition, which, by the way, are sufficiently brief, we find that they reduce to a prejudice.
They talk about the marvel which men should feel as they discover the world. But really, that which characterizes the life of nature is a regularity which approaches monotony. Every morning the sun mounts in the horizon, every evening it sets ; every month the moon goes through the same cycle ; the river flows in an uninterrupted manner in its bed ; the same seasons periodically bring back the same sensations. To be sure, here and there an unexpected event
though it is historically contestable ; but in any case, this conception of Zeus could never have been more than a glimmer in the midst of all the other religious beliefs of the Greeks.
Besides this, in a later work, Max Muller went so far as to make even the notion of god in general the product of a wholly verbal process and thus of a mythological elaboration (Physic. Rel., p. 138).
1 Undoubtedly outside the real myths there were always fables which were not believed, or at least were not believed in the same way and to the same degree, and hence had no religious character. The line of demarcation between tables and myths is certainly floating and hard to determine. But this is no reason for making all myths stories, any more than we should dream of making all stories myths. There is at least one characteristic which in a number of cases suffices to differentiate the religion from myth : that is its relation to the cult.
sometimes happens : the sun is eclipsed, the moon is hidden behind clouds, the river overflows. But these momentary variations could only give birth to equally momentary impressions, the remembrance of which is gone after a little while ; they could not serve as a basis for these stable and permanent systems of ideas and practices which constitute religions. Normally, the course of nature is uniform, and uniformity could never produce strong emotions. Representing the savage as filled with admiration before these marvels transports much more recent sentiments to the beginnings of history. He is much too accustomed to it to be greatly surprised by it. It requires culture and reflection to shake off this yoke of habit and to discover how marvellous this regularity itself is. Besides, as we have already remarked,1 admiring an object is not enough to make it appear sacred to us, that is to say, to mark it with those characteristics which make all direct contact with it appear a sacrilege and a profanation. We misunderstand what the religious sentiment really is, if we confound it with every impression of admiration and surprise.
But, they say, even if it is not admiration, there is a certain impression which men cannot help feeling in the presence of nature. He cannot come in contact with it, without realizing
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that it is greater than he. It overwhelms him by its immensity. This sensation of an infinite space which surrounds him, of an infinite time which has preceded and will follow the present moment, and of forces infinitely superior to those of which he is master, cannot fail, as it seems, to awaken within him the idea that outside of him there exists an infinite power upon which he depends. And this idea enters as an essential element into our conception of the divine.
But let us bear in mind what the question is. We are trying to find out how men came to think that there are in reality two categories of things, radically heterogeneous and incomparable to each other. Now how could the spectacle of nature give rise to the idea of this duality ? Nature is always and everywhere of the same sort. It matters little that it extends to infinity :
beyond the extreme limit to which my eyes can reach, it is not different from what it is here. The space which I imagine beyond the horizon is still space, identical with that which I see. The time which flows without end is made up of moments identical with those which I have passed through. Extension, like duration, repeats itself indefinitely ; if the portions which I touch have of themselves no sacred character, where did the others get theirs ? The fact that I do not see them directly, is not enough to transform them.1 A world of profane things may well be unlimited ; but it remains a profane world. Do they say that the physical forces with which we come in contact exceed our own ? Sacred forces are not to be distinguished from profane ones simply by their greater intensity, they are different;
they have special qualities which the others do not have. Quite on the contrary, all the forces manifested in the universe are of the same nature, those that are within us just as those that are outside of us. And especially, there is no reason which could have allowed giving a sort of preeminent dignity to some in relation to others. Then if religion really was born because of the need of assigning causes to physical phenomena, the forces thus imagined would have been no more sacred than those conceived by the scientist to-day to account for the same facts.2
1See above, p. 28.
1More than that, in the language of Max Miiller, there is a veritable abuse of words. Sensuous experience, he says, implies, at least in certain cases, " beyond the known, something unknown, something which I claim the liberty to call infinite " (Natural Rel., p. 195 ; cf. p. 218). The unknown is not necessarily the infinite, any more than the infinite is necessarily the unknown if it is in all points the same, and consequently like the part which we know. It would be necessary to prove that the part of it which we perceive differs in nature from that which we do not perceive.
2Max Muller involuntarily recognizes this in certain passages. He confesses that he sees little difference between Agni, the god of fire, and the notion of ether, by which the modem physicist explains light and heat (Phys. Rel., pp. "б f.). Also, he connects the notion of divinity to that of agency (p. 138) or of a causality which is not natural and profane. The tact that religion represents the causes thus imagined, under the form of personal agents, is not enough to explain how they got a sacred character. A personal agent can be profane, and also, many religious forces are essentially impersonal.