The Religious Sentiment Part 12

The theologian explains it as the unrest of the soul penned in its house of clay; the physiologist attributes it to the unceasing effort of organic functions to adapt themselves to ever varying external conditions. They are both right, for the theologian, were his words translated into the language of science, refers to the _effort to adapt condition to function_, which is the peculiar faculty of intelligence, and which alone renders man unable to accept the comfort of merely animal existence, an inability which he need never expect to outlive, for it will increase in exact proportion to his mental development.

Action, not rest, as I have elsewhere said, must be his ideal of life.

In even his lowest levels man experiences this dissatisfaction. It may there be confined to a pain he would be free from, or a pleasure he dreams of. Always the future charms him, and as advancing years increase the number of his disappointments and bring with them the pains of decrepitude, he also recurs to the past, when youth was his, and the world was bright and gay. Thus it comes that most nations speak of some earlier period of their history as one characterized by purer public virtues than the present, one when the fires of patriotism burned brighter and social harmony was more conspicuous. In rude stages of society this fancy receives real credit and ranks as a veritable record of the past, forming a Golden Age or Saturnian Era. Turned in the kaleidoscope of the mythus, it a.s.sumes yet more gorgeous hues, and becomes a state of pure felicity, an Eden or a Paradise, wherein man dwelt in joy, and from which he wandered or was driven in the old days.

It is almost needless to quote examples to show the wide distribution of this myth. The first pages of the Vendidad describe the reign of Yima in "the garden of delight," where "there was no cold wind nor violent heat, no disease and no death." The northern Buddhist tells of "the land of joy," Sukhavati, in the far west, where ruled Amitabha, "infinite Light."[175-1] The Edda wistfully recalls the pleasant days of good King Gudmund who once held sway in Odainsakr, where death came not.[175-2]

Persian story has glad reminiscences of the seven hundred years that Jemschid sat on the throne of Iran, when peace and plenty were in the land.

The garden "eastward in Eden" of the Pentateuch, the land of Tulan or Tlapallan in Aztec myth, the islands of the Hesperides, the rose garden of Feridun, and a score of other legends attest with what strong yearning man seeks in the past the picture of that perfect felicity which the present never yields.

Nor can he be persuaded that the golden age has gone, no more to return.

In all conditions of progress, and especially where the load of the present was the most wearying, has he counted on a restoration to that past felicity. The paradise lost is to be regained. How it is to be done the sages are not agreed. But they of old were unanimous that some divinity must lend his aid, that some G.o.d-sent guide is needed to rescue man from the slough of wretchedness in which he hopelessly struggles.

Therefore in the new world the red men looked for the ruler who had governed their happy forefathers in the golden age, and who had not died but withdrawn mysteriously from view, to return to them, protect them, and insure them long bliss and ease. The ancient Persians expected as much from the coming of Craoshanc; the Thibetan Buddhists look to the advent of a Buddha 5000 years after Sakyamuni, one whose fortunate names are Maitreya, the Loving one, and Adjita, the Unconquerable;[176-1] and even the practical Roman, as we learn from Virgil, was not a stranger to this dream. Very many nations felt it quite as strongly as the Israelites, who from early time awaited a mighty king, the Messiah, the Anointed, of whom the Targums say: "In his days shall peace be multiplied;" "He shall execute the judgment of truth and justice on the earth;" "He shall rule over all kingdoms."

The early forms of this conception, such as here referred to, looked forward to an earthly kingdom, identified with that of the past when this was vigorous in the national mythology. Material success and the utmost physical comfort were to characterize it. It was usually to be a national apotheosis, and was not generally supposed to include the human race, though traces of this wider view might easily be quoted from Avestan, Roman, and Israelitic sources. Those who were to enjoy it were not the dead, but those who shall be living.

As the myth grew, it coalesced with that of the Epochs of Nature, and a.s.sumed grander proportions. The deliverer was to come at the close of this epoch, at the end of the world; he was to embrace the whole human kind in his kingdom; even those who died before his coming, if they had obeyed his mandates, should rise to join the happy throng; instead of a mere earthly king, he should be a supernatural visitant, even G.o.d himself; and instead of temporal pleasures only, others of a spiritual character were to be conferred. There are reasons to believe that even in this developed form the myth was familiar to the most enlightened wors.h.i.+ppers of ancient Egypt; but it was not till some time after the doctrines of Christianity had been cast into mythical moulds by the oriental fancy, that it was introduced in its completed form to modern thought. Although expressly repudiated by Jesus of Nazareth himself, and applied in maxim and parable as a universal symbol of intelligence to the religious growth of the individual and race, his followers reverted to the coa.r.s.er and literal meaning, and ever since teach to a greater or less extent the chiliastic or millennial dogma, often mathematically computing, in direct defiance of his words, the exact date that event is to be expected.

If we ask the psychological construction of this myth, and the ever present conditions of man's life which have rendered him always ready to create it and loath to renounce it, we trace the former distinctly to his sense of the purposive nature of the laws of thought, and the latter to the wide difference between desire and fulfilment. His intellectual nature is framed to accord with laws which are ever present but are not authoritative; they admonish but they do not coerce; _that_ is done surely though oft remotely by the consequences of their violation. At first, unaware of the true character of these laws, he fancies that if he were altogether comfortable physically, his every wish would be gratified. Slowly it dawns upon him that no material gratification can supply an intellectual craving; that this is the real want which haunts him; and that its only satisfaction is _to think rightly_, to learn the truth. Then he sees that the millennial kingdom is "not of this world;"

that heaven and earth may pa.s.s away, but that such truth as he seeks cannot pa.s.s away; and that his first and only care should be as a faithful and wise servant to learn and revere it.

The sentiments which created this mythical cycle, based as they are now seen to be on ultimate psychological laws, are as active to-day as ever.

This century has witnessed the rise of a school of powerful thinkers and true philanthropists who maintained that the n.o.blest object is the securing to our fellow-men the greatest material comfort possible; that the religious aspirations will do well to content themselves with this gospel of humanity; and that the approach of the material millennium, the perfectibility of the human race, the complete adaptation of function to condition, the "distant but not uncertain final victory of Good,"[179-1] is susceptible of demonstration. At present, these views are undergoing modification. It is perceived with more or less distinctness that complete physical comfort is not enough to make a man happy; that in proportion as this comfort is attained new wants develope themselves, quite as importunate, which ask what material comfort cannot give, and whose demand is neither for utility nor pleasurable sensation. Such wants are created by the sense of duty and the love of truth.

The main difference between the latest exponents of the utilitarian doctrines and the heralds of distinctively religious thought, is that the former consider that it is most important in the present condition of man for him to look after his material welfare; while the latter teach that if he first subject thought and life to truth and duty, "all these things will be added unto him." Wordsworth has cast this latter opinion, and the myths which are its types, into eloquent verse:

"Paradise and groves Elysian, Fortunate Fields--like those of old Sought in the Atlantic main, why should they be A history only of departed things, Or a mere fiction of what never was?

For the discerning intellect of man, When wedded to this goodly universe In love and holy pa.s.sion, shall find these A simple produce of the common day."

The incredulity and even derision with which the latter doctrine is received by "practical men," should not affright the collected thinker, as it certainly is not so chimerical as they pretend. The writer De Senancourt, not at all of a religious turn, in speculating on the shortest possible road to general happiness, concluded that if we were able to foretell the weather a reasonable time ahead, and if men would make it a rule to speak the truth as near as they can, these two conditions would remove nine-tenths of the misery in the world. The more carefully I meditate on this speculation, the better grounded it seems. The weather we are learning to know much more about than when the solitary Obermann penned his despondent dreams; but who shall predict the time when men will tell the truth?

I now pa.s.s to the third great mythical cyclus, which I have called that of the Hierarchy of the G.o.ds. This was created in order to define that unknown power which was supposed to give to the wish frustration or fruition. It includes every statement in reference to the number, nature, history and character of supernatural beings.

The precise form under which the intellect, when the religious conception of unknown power first dawns upon it, imagines this unknown, is uncertain. Some have maintained that the earliest religions are animal wors.h.i.+ps, others that the spirits of ancestors or chiefs are the primitive G.o.ds. Local divinities and personal spirits are found in the rudest culture, while simple fetichism, or the vague shapes presented by dreams, play a large part in the most inchoate systems. The prominence of one or the other of these elements depends upon local and national momenta, which are a proper study for the science of mythology, but need not detain us here. The underlying principle in all these conceptions of divinity is that of the _res per accidens_, an accidental relation of the thought to the symbol, not a general or necessary one. This is seen in the nature of these primitive G.o.ds. They have no decided character as propitious or the reverse other than the objects they typify, but are supposed to send bad or good fortune as they happen to be pleased or displeased with the votary. No cla.s.sification as good and evil deities is as yet perceptible.

This undeveloped stage of religious thought faded away, as general conceptions of man and his surroundings arose. Starting always from his wish dependent on unknown control, man found certain phenomena usually soothed his fears and favored his wishes, while others interfered with their attainment and excited his alarm. This distinction, directly founded on his sensations of pleasure and pain, led to a general, more or less rigid, cla.s.sification of the unknown, into two opposing cla.s.ses of beings, the one kindly disposed, beneficent, good, the other untoward, maleficent, evil.

At first this distinction had in it nothing of a _moral_ character. It is in fact a long time before this is visible, and to-day but two or three religions acknowledge it even theoretically. All, however, which claim historical position set up a dual hierarchy in the divine realms.

Ahura-mazda and Anya-mainyus, G.o.d and Satan, Jove and Pluto, Pachacamac and Supay, Enigorio and Enigohatgea are examples out of hundreds that might be adduced.

The fundamental contrast of pleasure and pain might be considered enough to explain this duality. But in fact it is even farther reaching. The emotions are dual as well as the sensations, as we have seen in the first chapter. All the operations of the intellect are dichotomic, and in mathematical logic must be expressed by an equation of the second degree. Subject and object must be understood as polar pairs, and in physical science polarization, contrast of properties corresponding to contrast of position, is a universal phenomenon. a.n.a.logy, therefore, vindicates the a.s.sumption that the unknown, like the known, is the field of the operation of contradictory powers.

A variety of expression is given this philosophic notion in myths. In Egypt, Syria, Greece and India the contrast was that of the s.e.xes, the male and female principles as displayed in the operations of nature. The type of all is that very ancient Phrygian cult in which by the side of Ma, mother of mountains and mistress of herds, stood Papas, father of the race of shepherds and inventor of the rustic pipe.[183-1] Quite characteristic was the cla.s.sification of the G.o.ds wors.h.i.+pped by the miners and metal workers of Phrygian Ida. This was into right and left, and the general name of Dactyli, Fingers, was given them. The right G.o.ds broke the spells which the left wove, the right pointed out the ore which the left had buried, the right disclosed the remedies for the sickness which the left had sent. This venerable division is still retained when we speak of a _sinister_ portent, or a _right_ judgment.

It is of physiological interest as showing that "dextral pre-eminence"

or right-handedness was prevalent in earliest historic times, though it is unknown in any lower animal.

The thoughtful dwellers in Farsistan also developed a religion close to man's wants by dividing the G.o.ds into those who aid and those who harm him, subject the one cla.s.s to Ahura-Mazda, the other to Anya-Mainyus.

Early in their history this a.s.sumed almost a moral aspect, and there is little to be added to one of the most ancient precepts of their law--"Happiness be to the man who conduces to the happiness of all."[184-1]

When this dual cla.s.sification sought expression through natural contrasts, there was one which nigh everywhere offered itself as the most appropriate. The savage, the nomad, limited to the utmost in artificial contrivances, met nothing which more signally aided the accomplishment of his wishes than _light_; nothing which more certainly frustrated them than _darkness_. From these two sources flow numerous myths, symbols, and rites, as narratives or acts which convey religious thought to the eye or the ear of sense.

As the bringers of light, man adored the sun, the dawn, and fire; a.s.sociated with warmth and spring, his further meditations saw in it the source of his own and of all life, and led him to connect with its wors.h.i.+p that of the reproductive principle. As it comes from above, and seems to dwell in the far-off sky, he located there his good G.o.ds, and lifted his hands or his eyes when he prayed. As light is necessary to sight, and as to see is to know, the faculty of knowing was typified as enlightenment, an inward G.o.d-given light. The great and beneficent deities are always the G.o.ds of light. Their names often show this. Deva, Deus, means the s.h.i.+ning one; Michabo, the great white one; the Mongols call Tien, the chief Turanian G.o.d, the bright one, the luminous one; the northern Buddhist prays to Amitabha, Infinite Light; and the Christian to the Light of the World.

On the other hand, darkness was connected with feelings of helplessness and terror. It exposed him to attacks of wild beasts and all accidents.

It was the precursor of the storm. It was like to death and the grave.

The realm of the departed was supposed to be a land of shadows, an underground region, an unseeing Hades or h.e.l.l.

The task would be easy to show many strange corroborations of these early chosen symbols by the exacter studies of later ages. Light, as the indispensable condition of life, is no dream, but a fact; sight is the highest sentient faculty; and the luminous rays are real intellectual stimulants.[186-1] But such reflections will not escape the contemplative reader.

I hasten to an important consequence of this dual cla.s.sification of divinities. It led to what I may call the _quantification of the G.o.ds_, that is, to conceiving divinity under notions of number or quant.i.ty, a step which has led to profound deterioration of the religious sentiment.

I do not mean by this the distinction between polytheism and monotheism.

The latter is as untrue and as injurious as the former, nor does it contain a whit the more the real elements of religious progress.

It is indeed singular that this subject has been so misunderstood. Much has been written by Christian theologians to show the superiority of monotheisms; and by their opponents much has been made of Comte's _loi des trois etats_, which defines religious progress to be first fetichism, secondly polytheism, finally monotheism. Of this Mr. Lewes says: "The theological system arrived at the highest perfection of which it is capable when it subst.i.tuted the providential action of a single being, for the varied operations of the numerous divinities which had before been imagined."[187-1] Nothing could be more erroneous than the spirit of this statement; nothing is more correct, if the ordinary talk of the superiority of monotheism in religion be admitted.

History and long experience show that monotheistic religions have no special good effect either on the morals or the religious sensibility of races.[187-2] Buddhism,[187-3] Mohammedanism and Judaism are, at least in theory, uncompromising monotheisms; modern Christianity is less so, as many Catholics pray to the Virgin and Saints, and many Protestants to Christ. So long as _the mathematical conception of number_, whether one or many, is applied to deity by a theological system, it has not yet "arrived at the highest perfection of which it is capable."

For let us inquire what a monotheism is? It is a belief in one G.o.d as distinct from the belief in several G.o.ds. In other words, it applies to G.o.d the mathematical concept of unity, a concept which can only come into cognition by virtue of contrasts and determinations, and which forces therefore the believer either to Pantheism or anthropomorphism to reconcile his belief with his reason. No other resource is left him.

With monotheism there must always be the idea of numerical separateness, which is incompatible with universal conceptions.

Let him, however, clear his mind of the current admiration for monotheisms, and impress upon himself that he who would form a conception of supreme intelligence must do so under the rules of pure thought, not numerical relation. The logical, not the mathematical, unity of the divine is the perfection of theological reasoning. Logical unity does not demand a determination by contrasts; it conveys only the idea of ident.i.ty with self. As the logical attainment of truth is the recognition of ident.i.ties in apparent diversity, thus leading from the logically many to the logically one, the a.s.sumption of the latter is eminently justified. Every act of reasoning is an additional proof of it.[188-1]

Nor does the duality of nature and thought, to which I have alluded, in any wise contradict this. In pure thought we must understand the dichotomic process to be the distinction of a positive by a privative, both logical elements of the same thought, as I have elsewhere shown.

The opposites or contraries referred to as giving rise to the dualistic conceptions of divinity are thus readily harmonized with the conception of logical unity. This was recognized by the Hindoo sage who composed the Bhagavad Gita, early in our era. Krishna, the Holy One, addressing the King Ardjuna says: "All beings fall into error as to the nature of creation, O Bharata, by reason of that delusion of natural opposites which springs from liking and disliking, oh thou tormentor of thy foes!"[189-1]

The subst.i.tution of the conception of mathematical for logical unity in this connection has left curious traces in both philosophy and religion.

It has led to a belief in the triplicate nature of the supreme Being, and to those philosophical triads which have often attracted thinkers, from Pythagoras and Herac.l.i.tus down to Hegel and Ghiberti.

Pythagoras, who had thought profoundly on numbers and their relations, is credited with the obscure maxim that every thought is made up of a definite one and an indefinite two (a ??a? and an a???st?? d?a?). Some of his commentators have added to rather than lessened the darkness of this saying. But applied to concrete number, it seems clear enough. Take any number, ten, for example, and it is ten by virtue of being a _one_, one ten, and because on either side counting upward or downward, a different number appears, which two are its logical determinants, but, as not expressed, make up an _indefinite two_.

So the number one, thought as concrete unity, is really a trinity, made up of its definite self and its indefinite next greater and lesser determinants. The obscure consciousness of this has made itself felt in many religions when they have progressed to a certain plane of thought.

The ancient Egyptian G.o.ds were nearly all triune; Phanes, in the Orphic hymns the first principle of things, was tripart.i.te; the Indian trinities are well known; the Celtic triads applied to divine as well as human existence; the Jews distinguished between Jehovah, his Wisdom and his Word; and in Christian religion and philosophy the doctrine of the trinity, though nowhere taught by Christ, has found a lasting foothold, and often presents itself as an actual tritheism.[190-1]

The triplicate nature of number, thus alluded to by Pythagoras, springs from the third law of thought, and holds true of all concrete notions.

Every such notion stands in necessary relation to its privative, and to the logical concept of next greater extension, _i. e._, that which includes the notion and its privative, as I explained in the first chapter. This was noted by the early Platonists, who describe a certain concrete expression of it as "the intelligential triad;" and it has been repeatedly commented upon by later philosophers, some of whom avowedly derive from it the proof of the trinitarian dogma as formulated by Athanasius. Even modern mathematical investigations have been supposed to point to a _Deus triformis_, though of course quite another one from that which ancient Rome honored. A late work of much ability makes the statement: "The doctrine of the Trinity, or something a.n.a.logous to it, forms, as it were, the avenue through which the universe itself leads us up to the conception of the Infinite and Eternal One."[191-1] The explanation of this notion is the same as that of the "Trinity of the Gentiles," always. .h.i.therto a puzzling mythological concept.

For reasons previously given, an a.n.a.lysis of the formal law itself does not yield these elements. They belong to a certain cla.s.s of values a.s.signed it, not to the law itself; hence it is only when deity is conceived under the conditions of numerical oneness that the tripart.i.te const.i.tution of a whole number makes itself felt, and is applied to the divine nature.

The essence of a logical unit is ident.i.ty, of a mathematical, difference. The qualities of the latter are limitations--_so much of a thing_; those of the former are coincidences--_that kind of a thing_.

To be sure it is no easy matter to free ourselves from the habit of confounding ident.i.ty and individuality. We must cultivate a much greater familiarity with the forms of thought, and the character of universals, than every-day life requires of us, before the distinction grows facile.

The individual, not the species, exists; our own personality, our thinking faculty is what we are most certain of. On it rests the reality of everything, the Unknown as well. But the rejection of a mathematical unity does not at all depreciate the force of such an argument.

Individuality regarded as mathematical unity rests on the deeper law of logical ident.i.ty from which the validity of numbers rises; it is not the least diminished, but intensified, in the conception of a Supreme Intelligence, as the font of truth, though the confinements and limitations of the mathematical unit fall away, and all contrasts disappear.

The reverse conception, however, has prevailed in religious systems, polytheistic or monotheistic. Man has projected on the cloudy unknown the magnified picture of his own individuality and shuddered with terror at the self-created plantasm,[TN-9] like the peasant frightened by the spectre of the Brocken, formed by the distorted image of himself. In his happier moments, with his hopes gratified, the same vice of thought, still active, prevented him from conceiving any higher ideal than his better self. "Everywhere the same tendency was observed; the G.o.ds, always exaggerations of human power and pa.s.sions, became more and more personifications of what was most admirable and lovable in human nature, till in Christianity there emerged the avowed ideal man." What could it end in but anthropomorphism, or pantheism, or, rejecting both, a Religion of Humanity, with a background of an imbecile Unknowable?

Is it necessary to point out how none of these conclusions can satisfy the enlightened religious sentiment? How anthropomorphism,which[TN-10]

makes G.o.d in the image of man, instead of acknowledging that man is made in the image of G.o.d, belittles divinity to a creature of pa.s.sions and caprices? How pantheism, increasing G.o.d at the expense of man, wipes out the fundamental difference of true and false, calls bad "good in the making," and virtually extinguishes the sense of duty and the permanence of personality? And how the denial of all possible knowledge of the absolute digs away the only foundation on which sanity can establish a religion, and then palms off material comfort as the proper food for religious longing?