Importance of the subject—Its Divisions. First Period: origin of the religious feeling—Primitive notions of the Infinite (Max Müller); Ancestor-worship (H. Spencer)—Fetichism, animism; Predominance of fear—Practical, utilitarian, social, but not moral character—Second period: (1) Intellectual evolution; Conception of a Cosmic Order first physical, then moral—Function of increasing generalisation; its stages; (2) Emotional evolution; Predominance of love; addition of the moral sentiment—Third Period: Supremacy of the rational element; Transformation into religious philosophy; Effacement of the emotional element—Religious emotion is a complete emotion—Manifold physiological states accompanying it; ritual, a special form of the expression of emotion—The religious sentiment as a passion—Pathology—Depressive forms: religious melancholy, demonomania—Exalted forms: ecstasy, theomania.
It must be confessed that psychologists have not troubled themselves greatly with the study of the religious sentiment. Some omit it altogether, while others content themselves with a brief reference in passing; they note the two essential elements whence it is derived—fear, and tender emotion (love)—without troubling themselves about the variable relations between these two elements, or the multiform changes undergone by them in the course of centuries, through the annexation of other emotional states.[188] As we cannot deny its importance, this abstention, or negligence, is not justifiable. To summon to our aid an ill-understood respect, to maintain that one religion only is true and all the others false, to allege that all are alike false,—these and other analogous modes of reasoning are not in any degree acceptable to psychology; for, even if we take up an extreme position, and admit that all manifestations of the religious sentiment are mere illusion and error, it remains none the less true that illusion and error are psychic states, and worthy of being studied as such by psychologists. To such, the religious sentiment is a fact which they have simply to analyse and to follow through its transformations without being competent to discuss its objective value or its legitimacy. Thus understood, the question bears on two principal points: primary manifestations and their evolution, i.e., the different elements which have constituted the religious sentiment during the various stages of its existence.
In every religious belief there are of necessity two parts: an intellectual element, a knowledge which constitutes the object of belief, and an emotional state, a feeling which accompanies the former and expresses itself in action. To any one deficient in the second element, the religious feeling is unknown, inaccessible; nothing remains to such persons but abstract metaphysical conceptions. The study of the religious sentiment, in its evolution, cannot dissociate these two elements; and it is the degree in which the element of knowledge is present which renders a precise division possible. I trace three periods: (1) that of perception and concrete imagination, where fear and the practical, utilitarian tendencies are predominant; (2) that of medium abstraction and generalisation, characterised by the addition of moral elements; (3) that of the highest concepts, where, the emotional element becoming more and more rarefied, the religious feeling tends to be confounded with the so-called intellectual feelings.
As usual, authorities are not agreed on the question of origin. Under what form did the religious sentiment first make its appearance? We must first put aside two extremely systematic answers, which, although differing in spirit, have this in common, that they are both purely intellectualist.
The first, a very ancient one, has found its latest and clearest interpreter in Max Müller, who thinks that the notion of the Divine, more especially under the form of the Infinite, preceded that of the gods. Our senses give us the finite, but “beyond, behind, beneath, and within the finite, the infinite is always present to our senses. It presses upon us, it grows upon us from every side. What we call finite in space and time, in form and word, is nothing but a veil or net which we ourselves have thrown over the infinite.”[189] What, then, is the infinite, he asks, but the object of all religions? The religion of the infinite precedes and comprehends all others, and as the infinite is implied by the senses (i.e., the limits to our sensory perceptions imply an unlimited region beyond), it follows that religion can, with as much right as reason, be called a development of our sensory perceptions. The earliest religion consisted in the adoration of various objects, taken, each in turn, and isolatedly, as incarnations of the notion of the Infinite. This is what Max Müller calls “Henotheism.” For him, polytheism and even fetichism are later developments, resulting from the breaking up of the primitive unity, and due to a disease of language: each name becomes a distinct deity; words are raised to the dignity of things, having their life, their attributes, and their legends: Nomina numina.
This last view, though it has had a certain vogue among linguists, is worth nothing as a psychological explanation, for it is quite clear that the word is only a starting-point or a vehicle for the process of thought, which is the sole agent of the metamorphosis. If the nomina become numina, it is by a disease of imagination or thought, rather than of language.[190]
As for the principal thesis, the alleged primitive notion of the Infinite, which is the source of henotheism, it is a metaphysical hypothesis of extreme improbability. Primitive man, enclosed within hard conditions of life, is practical and positive rather than a dreamer; he does not naturally tend towards the Beyond. But a better reason than this, and an entirely psychological one, is that he is incapable of attaining to even a medium degree of abstraction and generalisation. How could a savage, who cannot count up to four, form any idea whatever of the Infinite? Evidently, this notion of the Illimitable is far beyond him.
There is only one way of imparting a certain psychological verisimilitude to Max Müller’s view, viz., to strip it of its intellectualist character, and admit as its origin a feeling rather than a notion, a craving, a tendency, rather than a cognition. Of these two factors, which make up all religious belief, one intellectual, the other emotional, which has the priority? Did the notion produce the feeling, or the feeling excite the notion? Such is the problem which lies at the heart of all debates on the origin of religious manifestations. Some place it in the region of instinct: so Renan when he compares religion in humanity to the nest-building instinct of the bird. Others maintain that every feeling presupposes an object. “At first sight this latter theory seems to have logic on its side. It is clear that, in order to love or fear any being, one must have conceived the notion of his existence. Yet, however indispensable it may be to assume an intellectual operation at the beginning of religion, we must recognise that the feelings set in motion by this operation must have long preceded the most ancient formulas of primitive theology.”[191] For my own part, I am inclined to accept the priority of feeling, though unable to supply any arguments based on fact; the period of origins being also that of conjecture.
The second theory, that of Herbert Spencer, brings us down from the notion of the Infinite to the extremely terrestrial mental life of savages. It is well known that he reduces all primitive religions to the cult of ancestors—to necrolatry. The primordial fact is the conception of a spirit, or rather, of a double. The savage believes that he has a Sosia, or, in other words, a principal ego and a secondary ego. He infers the existence of this double from a great number of facts, to him inexplicable: his shadow, his reflection in the water, echoes, apparitions in dreams, fainting, trances, epilepsy, etc. The world is thus, for him, full of wandering spirits which he tries to propitiate. According to Spencer, fetichism and polytheism are only aberrant forms of ancestor-worship, and he tries to prove this by a series of arguments, through which we need not now follow him. Imperturbable in his systematic deduction, he even asserts that he can derive from the same root, by far-fetched and easily-controverted arguments, the adoration of animals, plants, and inanimate objects.[192] It is indisputable that a great number of beliefs have sprung from this root, but this conception, which is anthropomorphism carried to its extreme, is found to be too narrow to include all the facts. Tylor and others have criticised it with some vivacity, and I do not think that it now claims many adherents.
These two systematic hypotheses being put on one side, we may remind the reader how religious development seems to have taken place during this primitive period; for the march of evolution has not been everywhere and always the same—a difficulty already pointed out with regard to the social instinct. According to the best authorities, the most frequent form has been the following.
The first stage is that of fetichism, polydemonism, naturism—terms which in the history of religions are not quite synonymous, but which answer to the same psychical condition, the adoration of some object, living or not, which is perceived—i.e., apprehended as a concrete form, at the same time body and soul—or rather animated by a soul, judged to be benevolent or malevolent, useful or injurious; for there is scant justification for the opinion that the worshipper of a piece of wood or stone sees in it only a purely material object.
The second stage is that of animism or spiritism, “a belief in spirits having no substantial bond or necessary connection with determinate natural objects.” The spirit is conceived as independent, separable; it goes and comes, enters and departs; it is attributed not only to men, but also to animals: the savage tries to deprecate the wrath of the beast he has killed in hunting, the chief has his horses and dogs buried with him. Psychologically, this stage corresponds to a preponderance of the imagination over simple perception.
These primitive forms of religious belief originate in the tendency of the savage, and the child, perhaps also of the higher animal, to look upon everything as alive, to attribute desires, passions, will, to everything that acts, to form his ideas of nature from what he knows of his own nature. This anthropomorphism results from the awakening of reasoning thought under its baldest form: analogy, the first source of myth, language, arts, and even science. But those analogies, which to us are merely images, were realities to primitive man. It is needless to insist on so well known a point. We must remember, however, that this primitive god-creating operation is a projection from our activity rather than from our intelligence; it originates with man as a motor rather than as a thinking being.
So far we have considered nothing but the object of belief, perceived or imagined; but what does the believer feel? of what elements is the religious sentiment composed during this period? We may point out the following:
(1) First of all, the emotion of fear in its different degrees, from profound terror to vague uneasiness, due to the faith in an unknown, mysterious, impalpable Power, able to render great services, and, more especially, to inflict great injuries; for historians have always remarked that, in early times, it is always malevolent and terrible genii who are adored; the good and merciful ones are neglected; in the following periods this state of things will be reversed. During this period Power is the attribute of the gods.
(2) A second and much less marked characteristic consists in a certain attraction or sympathy which, though very slight, binds the worshipper to his deity. The saying “Primus in orbe Deos fecit timor” is not absolutely true; for fear has a tendency to withdrawal, flight, aversion, while in every worship there is at least some hope of moving the most maleficent power and exciting its compassion,—consequently an approach to it. Later on, this rudimentary attraction will become the essential point.
(3) A third characteristic resulting from the preceding is that the religious feeling is strictly practical and utilitarian; it is the direct expression of a narrow egoism. It connects itself with the self-preserving instinct of the individual or the group, and is in nowise, as Sergi has maintained it to be, a pathological symptom. Quite on the contrary, it is a weapon in the struggle for life; since it is not a matter of indifference whether those in power are for or against one. This by no means disinterested character is shown in the worship which rests entirely on the practical rule: Do ut des. Hence the oblations and sacrifices proportioned to the worshippers’ desires and requests, for which the deity owes his faithful ones an ample recompense. Hence incantations, magic, and sorcery, which are methods not only of alluring and appeasing the god, but of getting possession of him by stratagem and holding him in one’s power.
(4) Lastly, from this time forward, the religious feeling has a social character, or rather, the religious and social tendencies amalgamate into a whole. It strengthens the principle of authority, often in favour of the altruistic tendencies, which are still very weak. The chiefs, priests, sorcerers, speak and act in the name of a higher power, and keep up the social tie. The worship of the dead, which Spencer has made the mistake of generalising too much, is an element of stability, establishing a continuity between different generations. The community of worship and ritual is the objective and visible expression of social solidarity. I do not consider as belonging to this period institutions such as the religious oath, trial by ordeal, or others presupposing the addition of a novel element, which is still absent. But there are other customs, local or general—e.g., that of the tabu, existing in nearly the whole of Oceania and elsewhere under different forms, in which religion performs a social office, but a novel one (at least according to our present ideas), and safeguards institutions and conventions by terror, while still remaining outside the region of morality.
Except the intellectual feelings themselves, no emotional manifestation depends more on the intellectual development than the religious sentiment, because every religion implies some conception of the universe—a cosmology and a system of metaphysics. With the first period we have scarcely passed beyond the stage of imagination; with the second, reflection and generalisation, whose upward progress we are about to follow, make their appearance. The intellectual evolution and the emotional evolution must each be studied in turn during this second stage.
I. Intellectual Evolution.—We shall find it useful, moreover, to divide the study of the intellectual element into two questions: (1) the conception of a cosmic order, at first physical, afterwards moral; (2) the progressive march of generalisation from an almost unlimited multiplicity up to unity. These two processes have not always coincided or kept pace with one another.
(1) We have seen that, for primitive man, everything is alive, full of arbitrary caprices, desires, intentions, and especially mysteries, because everything is unforeseen: it is the reign of universal contingency. The formula, “everything is alive,” is, however, too absolute; it only suits those things which were seen to move and change—i.e., the majority, not the totality of things. It seems as if the absence of motion, stability, fixity, the want of reaction, had been a sort of revelation to a simple mind. Perhaps it was through the spectacle of the fixity of things that the notion of order or law made its very humble entry into the world. However that may be, it is certain that the depersonification of nature began early to mark the origin of science. In our present state of culture we find a difficulty in representing to ourselves a state of mind in which the idea of fixity in natural phenomena is almost nil; yet such a state of mind has existed, and there is no want of documents to prove it. The expression, “the new moon,” was not at first a metaphor: men wondered if the sun would always continue his course; the Mexicans anxiously awaited his new birth every fifty years; eclipses seemed to happen at random, and caused great terror, etc.[193] Gradually the spirit of observation and reflection arrived at constant relations, and introduced into the conception of Nature the ideas of order and regularity, diminishing in so far the domain of chance and contingency. This notion of a cosmic order has influenced religious conceptions; the government of the physical world was attributed to the gods; they are its regulators; each has his department where he is supreme. The co-existence of two opposite principles has been remarked in the religion of several nations in this period of their development: necessity being personified in an abstract, mysterious, inaccessible deity (Rita among the Aryans, Ma with the Egyptians, Tao with the Chinese, Moira or Nomos with the Greeks, etc.[194]); while contingency, or rather limited arbitrary power, was personified in more human gods having their legends, acting within their own special sphere, as, for instance, the gods of Greece. The latter are also sometimes divided into two categories, which is the first step towards simplification, one kind bestowing physical well-being—health, prosperity, riches; the other inflicting physical ills—disease, famine, tempest, shipwreck.
The notion of the cosmic order led to that of a moral order; the gods have first the physical government, in a later age the ethical government of the universe. The conception of higher powers, invested with moral attributes, has been, as we shall afterwards see, an important stage in the evolution of the religious sentiment. The very ancient opinion, still prevalent among many believers, that the crimes of men occasion epidemics, unchain the elements, cause floods and earthquakes, shows that the human mind, rightly or wrongly, has supposed an analogy between all the forms of order in the universe. Hence also the change of the physical dualism above mentioned into a moral dualism; the genii of light and darkness become respectively moral or immoral gods, good or bad counsellors, saviours or tempters; and in this period a faith in the superiority and definitive triumph of the good is firmly established. In short, the gods have as attributes first power, then intelligence, and lastly morality.
(2) Let us now see the part played by increasing generalisation in the constitution of religious ideas.
When we wish to study the ascending degrees of generalisation, not in abstracto, but according to facts and documents, we may take as our guide the evolution of languages, or, better still, the progress of the scientific spirit (as, for instance, by following the methods of classification used in zoology, from antiquity up to the present day); we might also have recourse to the development of religion, for this is the same mental process applied to a different matter. It is sufficient to indicate the various steps in a very cursory manner.
It is a well known fact that the various races of mankind differ greatly in their powers of abstraction and generalisation; some can scarcely get beyond the concrete, while others disport themselves, easily and swiftly, in the region of the abstract. This difference of aptitude is expressed in their religions. Many peoples have never passed beyond polydemonism—i.e., the cult of individual genii; in other words, the realm of the concrete. Not to speak of savages, such was the religion of the ancient Chinese empire (Tiele); such the innumerable genii in the primitive religion of the Romans—a people not greatly inclined to abstractions.
Certain tribes have, even at the present day, words to designate every water-course in their country, but no general term for a river. To have found such a one is a step in progress. It is the same in the region of religious thought: by an analogous progress the spirit of each tree is subordinated to the deity of the forest, the various river-spirits to a river-god, etc. For a number of particular divinities is substituted one specific and pre-eminent divinity.
At a higher stage the mind seizes more remote resemblances and constitutes one god for water, one for fire, one for the earth, so that the spirits of the waters, the sky, and the earth are severally grouped under the dominion of one power, known in Greece as Zeus, Poseidon, or Hestia.
This generalising process which has taken place with regard to natural phenomena also goes on in the social order. There have been, successively, gods of clans, tribes, nations. We know how long religions—even complex and highly organised ones—have remained merely national: the god of a nation is its protector and guardian—watches over it and over nothing else; but his existence does not exclude that of other gods who are lords of other nations. The transition to the universal, extra-national religions was brought about by means of conquest and annexation, but also, and more particularly, by philosophical speculation.
At the point we have reached there are divine hierarchies, analogous, on one hand, to the ideal hierarchy of individuals, species, genera, on the other to the hierarchies of human society: they are conceived and constituted according to the human type. The anarchy of Vedic India is reflected in the mythology of the Vedas, the feudality of Egypt in its religion, Zeus resembles Agamemnon, the Peruvian Inca is descended from the sun, and applies to his empire the government of the solar deity; and “by an optical illusion, human society seems to be a copy of the Divine State.”[195]
In its movement towards absolute unity, the human mind has still some stages to pass through before reaching the term. It conceives of a divinity far superior to the rest, who, however, act under him (Jupiter optimus maximus), and whom he does not suppress. This is “monolatry” but not monotheism. We still find accommodations and compromises in the conceptions of triads (trinities) and dyads (associations of masculine and feminine divinities). In fact, pure monotheism is a conquest of the metaphysical spirit, which traces back the series of secondary causes to discover the first cause, rather than an intuition of popular consciousness.
This survey of ascending generalisation is somewhat schematic, and has been presented as an ideal restoration, though all its elements have been taken from reality. Some nations have attained the first stages only; others have, with much difficulty, passed beyond them; others have passed through several at a bound. Perhaps the evolution of religious ideas has not been in any two cases identical.
II. Emotional Evolution.—It has been justly said that religious feeling consists of two scales. One, in the key of fear, is composed of painful and depressive states: terror, fright, fear, veneration, respect, are its principal notes. The other, in the key of tender emotion, is composed of pleasurable and expansive states: admiration, confidence, love, ecstasy. One expresses a feeling of dependence; the other of attraction, going even as far as reciprocal union.
One of the first changes produced during this period of evolution is the predominance of the second scale; in the combination of two elementary emotions the proportional relation has changed, whence a change in the nature of the resultant emotion. We have seen this in the progressive effacement of the worship of the evil gods, in the suppression of sanguinary sacrifices, first in the case of men, then in that of animals; in the tendency to substitute for them simple acts of homage.
A second change, and one of especial importance, consists in the coalescence of the religious and the moral sentiment, which contract a union so close that to many people it seems necessary and indissoluble. We have seen that this is not the case, and that there are religions without morality. Primarily, the religious feeling is a special emotional form, the moral feeling is another form. There are, first of all, the purely naturalistic religions, afterwards the moral religions. A mass of facts demonstrate that, in the beginning, the religious feeling is not only quite a stranger to morality, but even in conflict with it. We know the bitter criticisms directed by the Greek philosophers against the reigning religion, bearing, as it did, the impress of myths springing from a primitive naturalism and understood neither by orthodox believers nor by the philosophers themselves. Contemporary criminologists have shown that prostitutes and even ferocious criminals are most assiduous in their devotional practices. This is because the religious feeling, in its origin and taken by itself, is fundamentally selfish[196], being nothing else but anxiety for one’s individual salvation. This superposition of the moral sentiment has taken place in all the great religions—i.e., all those which have had a complete evolution: in Brahmanism and especially in Buddhism when compared with the Vedic period, in the prophets of Israel, even among the Greeks, in the mysteries, etc. People end by believing that a right state of mind is the best of offerings.
For most religions, the supreme question is that of human destiny. Its history, having traversed two periods, the one naturalistic, the other moral, shows once more that the religious and the moral sentiment are, in their origin, two totally distinct feelings.
During the first period, we find no idea of retribution according to men’s works. The life after death is a continuation or copy of the earthly life, sometimes resembling it exactly, sometimes better,—most often worse. We know the complaint of Achilles, in the Odyssey (xi), where Homer has left us a vivid picture of this primitive belief; men remain slaves, masters, chiefs, or kings, as they were during life. Nay, certain tribes, projecting their aristocratic prejudices into the other world, believed that the souls of chiefs alone were immortal.
During the second period there arises a belief in a preliminary judgment on men’s actions, decisive of their future destiny. The conceptions of this future life are various: temporary or eternal penalties and rewards, transmigration upwards or downwards, total liberation (Nirvana), etc., but all resting on a moral idea. This notion appears at an early age among the Egyptians, in the judgment of Osiris and the weighing of the souls. In the “Book of the Dead,” of which a copy was placed in the tomb with every mummy, the defunct addresses to the god a long enumeration of the good deeds he has done and the faults he has not committed; it is remarkable that he speaks, not of his oblations, but of his virtues.[197]
At the point we have reached, the religious feeling has attained the height of its development, and can henceforth only decline, so that the third period need not detain us long. It may be summed up in the following formula: an ever-growing predominance of the intellectual (rational) element, a gradual effacement of the emotional element as it tends to approximate to the intellectual feelings and to come under that category.
When the march of thought towards unity has reached its limit in pure monotheism, the work of theologians and especially of metaphysicians tends to refine the conception of divinity, assumed as First Cause, or moral ideal, or both at once, but always as an inaccessible ideal, visible only in occasional glimpses. The logical, necessary, inevitable consequence is the weakening of the emotional state. In fact, we may lay down the following principle:—
From the perception to the image, and from the image to the concept, the concomitant emotional element keeps on diminishing, other things being equal; for we must take into account differences of temperament and individual variations. This is only a summary way of stating what I have so often said in Part I.: emotional states, beyond all others, depend on physiological (visceral, motor, and vaso-motor) conditions. Now it is clear that perception is the operation which most rigorously demands complex organic conditions. Among images or representations there are two categories: the vivid and intense imagination approximates, by its hallucinatory tendency, to the percept; while the cold and dull imagination, which is a bare outline of things, approaches the nature of a concept. Finally, the pure concept, reduced almost entirely to a sign, a substitute for reality, is as much detached from organic conditions as it is possible for a psychic state to be; it requires a minimum of physiology. In consequence, emotion, attacked at its source, flows very scantily; and of the religious feeling properly so called there remains only a vague respect for the unknowable—for the x—the last survival of fear and a certain attraction towards the ideal which is the last remnant of the love dominant during the second period.
We might say in clearer and simpler terms that religion tends to become a religious philosophy, which is an entirely different thing, for each corresponds to a distinct psychological condition, one being a theoretic construction of argumentative reason, the other the living work of a group of persons or an inspired great man, involving the whole man, his thoughts and feelings. This distinction is extremely important and throws light on our subject.
It would be easy to show that the great religions, at the height of their development, become transmuted into a subtle metaphysic, accessible to philosophers only. For the sake of impartiality, and not to shock any one, let us place ourselves in a remote period. In India, the religion which begins with the naturalism of the Vedas is organised, becomes social and moral with Brahmanism, and attains a transcendental ideality in the Bhâgavad-Gitâ. Take the following passage, chosen at random among a hundred similar ones:—"I am [Krishna is speaking] incomprehensible in form, subtler than the subtlest of atoms. I am the light of the sun and moon; beyond the darkness I am the brightness of flame, the rays of everything that shines, sound in the ether, perfume on the earth, the eternal seed of all that exists, the life of everything. As wisdom, I live in the hearts of all. I am the goodness of the good, I am the beginning, the middle and the end, eternity of time, the death and birth of all."
Is this religion, or metaphysics, or rather a beautiful philosophical poem, which moves us by the splendour of its images? For such a doctrine to become a real religion it must be concreted and condensed. That we may not, however, seem to cavil and dispute about words, or come to an arbitrary decision that the one thing is a religion and the other a religious philosophy, we may state the question in an objective form. As soon as religious thought ceases to have a worship or a ritual, and indeed finds itself incompatible with such, it is a philosophical doctrine. Stripped of all external and collective character, of all social form, it ceases to be a religion, and becomes an individual and speculative belief. Such is the deism of the eighteenth century, with all analogous conceptions, where feeling is only present in a very slight, almost imperceptible, degree.
Let us note, however, that in these periods of intellectual refinement, feeling does not lose its rights: it has its revenge in mysticism. In all great religions which have reached their highest point, the antagonism between the two elements of belief, the rational and the emotional, shows itself in the opposition between dogmatists and mystics. History is full of their mutual antipathy: in Christianity we find it, from the Gnostics, through the schools of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, to the “pure love” of the seventeenth century and later. The same may be said of other religions: Islam, in spite of its dry monotheism and the poverty of its ritual, has not escaped the universal law; it has had, and still has, its mystical sects. When we study them we find that, for all the differences of time, place, race and belief, the mystics, caring little for rigorous dogmatism, all show a singularly strong family likeness to each other. In this case it is argument which divides and feeling which unites.
We have still to examine one question relating to the emotional element alone: is religious emotion a complete emotion? It is worth while lingering over this, since many writers (not to mention those who omit it altogether) set it down as a variety of the intellectual feelings—i.e., of the coldest form of emotional life.
A complete emotion, as we know, includes, besides the purely psychic state, a somatic resonance, a vibration of the organism, consisting (a) of changes in the circulation, the respiration, and the functions in general; (b) of movements, gestures and actions which constitute its proper mode of expression. Without these, there is merely an intellectual state. Does religious emotion fulfil these two conditions?
(a.) It has its physiological accompaniment; it penetrates as far into the organism as any other. Since by its very nature it contains, though in varying proportion, two elements, depression and exaltation, let us very briefly survey their physiological relations.
Depression is related to fear and under its acute forms has been confounded with it. Does not the worshipper entering a venerated sanctuary show all the symptoms of pallor, trembling, cold sweat, inability to speak—all that the ancients so justly called sacer horror? Physical and mental weakness makes us religious through consciousness of human frailty. Austerities, macerations—in short, the asceticism which is an institution in the so-called pessimistic religions—though springing from a multitude of causes which need not here be inquired into, prove at least that the physiological factor is not regarded as indifferent. The Hindoo ascetics of the early ages were able, by their insensate mortification, to dethrone the gods and take their places—gods in their turn. The widespread belief that austerities contribute to salvation is a very much modified form of this.
Exaltation is related to love and tends to union, to possession. The history of all ages abounds in physiological procedures made use of for the artificial production of enthusiasm in the etymological sense of the word, which implies having the deity within one’s self.
There are inferior forms: the mechanical exaltation produced by dancing, or by the rhythmical music of primitive tribes, which excites them and places them in a favourable mental attitude for inspiration. Toxic exaltation: soma, wine, the Dionysiacs, the Mænads. The sanguinary means so widespread in the cults of Asia Minor: the Bona Dea and Atys, the Corybantes, the Galli, who mutilated and gashed themselves with sword strokes; in the Middle Ages, the Flagellants; and in our own day, Fakirs, dervishes, etc.
There are higher, less materialistic forms: the collective excitement of pilgrimages and revivals, where the emotion of each individual is increased by that of the rest; the artificial means, known from antiquity, of attaining ecstasy, i.e., full possession; the frequent confusion, which has so often excited the wrath of theologians, between the language of carnal and that of mystical love.[198]
All these facts are well known, and thousands of others are recorded in history. It is convenient to recall them in order to show that they have their psychological reasons; they are not aberrations, as might seem to be the case at first sight, but the necessary conditions of intense emotion. If it is objected that some of them border on madness, we may reply that every violent passion does the same, and sometimes crosses the border-line.
(b.) The religious sentiment, again, is attached to material conditions by its mode of expression, which is ritual. Ritual practices are not, as many think, purely exterior and artificial, accessory and adventitious; they are a spontaneous creation, originating in the nature of things. Every religion, great or insignificant, is an organism constituted by a fundamental belief attached to percepts, images, or concepts, plus certain secondary notions which are sometimes mutually contradictory, plus an emotional state. All this forms a living whole, which evolves, vegetates, or retrogrades. This organic character distinguishes the positive religions from the purely theoretical and metaphysical conceptions, which are not alive, never have lived, and are nothing but pure speculation. Now, as every animal organism, from the infusoria to man, has its relational life,—i.e., relations with external agents,—so religion, as an organism, has its life of relations with the supernatural and mysterious powers on which man believes himself to be dependent. This life is expressed by rites, which are means of action, methods of establishing a relation.
The history of ritual is a chapter of the expression of the emotions. The only difference is this: emotional expression, in the sense given to the words by Duchenne, Darwin, their successors, and the world in general, has an individualist character, showing fear, anger, love, etc.; while ritual expression has a social character; being the spontaneous product of a collectivity, of a group, which has become fixed and permanent, erected into an institution by the influence of society, and safeguarded by tradition. On this subject I cannot enter into detail; it is sufficient to remind the reader that ritual is psychic in its origin. There have been two principal phases in its development.
During the primitive period, ritual is the immediate and direct expression of the religious sentiment, and bears the stamp of the national character. Among the Greeks, it was graceful and joyous, as is fitting for divinities who are merely superior and happy human beings. Among the early Romans it has an agricultural and family character, is formalist and methodical; the omission of the minutest detail invalidates the sacrifice. The Mexicans immolated human hecatombs to divinities who were intoxicated with blood. Rationalist religions, being half philosophical, have little ritual and a dry liturgy; they resemble persons of phlegmatic temperament, whose gestures are rare and restrained. The religions of the imagination and the heart, on the other hand, manifest themselves by the splendour and exuberance of their ceremonies.
In the second period, we have the passage from the literal to the figurative; ritual becomes symbolism. Since it is a means of expression, a language, it is quite natural that this should be so, and this phase corresponds to that of metaphor in spoken language. Thus the offering of a lock of hair, or a figure made of dough, becomes a substitute for human sacrifice. Having reached this point, ritual can no longer be understood except through its history; but worshippers still use it, without fully knowing its meaning, just as they use metaphors without knowing their derivation, or being able to trace them back to their primary sense. Lastly, there are some rites which are simply survivals, analogous to a frown when we are perplexed, vestiges of certain ways of feeling and acting which have been, but have long ago disappeared.
The religious feeling is therefore a complete emotion, with its train of physiological manifestations, and those writers who have classed it among the intellectual feelings have only considered it under its higher forms, and when it is on the point of extinction. At the period of its fullest development, but rarely under either its primitive or its intellectualised form, the religious feeling may become a passion, yielding to no other in tenacity and violence, which has its own special name: religious fanaticism. It borders on madness without quite crossing the line. This passion would require a psychological monograph to itself; and there is no lack of documents whence to compose one. We may gather from these facts:
1. New proofs of the fundamental independence of the religious and of the moral sentiments. In religious wars, persecution, the torture inflicted on heretics, the murder of the chiefs of the opposite party, are held to be meritorious acts; all which seems inexplicable to persons of calm and deliberate sense. They would be less astonished if they would consider that religious emotion, when it reaches the point of a paroxysm of passion, becomes as uncontrollable as violent love, and, like it, must have satisfaction; that there is the firm belief in a right, superior to human obligations, because of higher origin (a belief attaining its highest degree in theomania, of which we shall speak presently); and that the religious sentiment and the moral sentiment, though having numerous points of contact and moments of fusion, are yet, in their nature, essentially distinct, because answering to two totally distinct tendencies of human nature.
2. We find a proof of the tendency of the religious feeling to unite, group, socialise. Unity of belief creates the religious community, as community of external and internal interests creates the civil community. Both tend to expel dissidents (internal enemies), and to conquer external enemies—in this case, the heathen.
The distinct or vague consciousness of the conditions of a society’s existence, i.e., its instinct of conservation, determines its morality and its way of acting. National religions, therefore, which are the same thing as civil society, proselytise only slightly, or not at all: the Greeks never tried to convert the Persians, neither did the Romans the Gauls. The universal religions (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism) forming societies other than, and outside nationality, and transcending it, have aimed at spiritual conquest, i.e., at their social extension.
IV.
The question whether there exist any tribes completely devoid of all religious belief has been extensively discussed. That there are any such seems doubtful, when we take into account, on the one hand, the reticence of the savage towards strangers with regard to his own feelings and beliefs; and on the other, the scanty psychological equipment of travellers, who frequently understand by religion only a developed and organised cult. The fact, even were it proved, would be but of slight value, since it could only be the case among the very lowest specimens of humanity.[199] A question scarcely ever asked is this: Are there individuals (not social groups) utterly without religious feeling? We must eliminate idiots, imbeciles, and the uneducated deaf and dumb; we are speaking of normal men living in some society or other, all of which have a religion. I am distinctly inclined to answer in the affirmative, though I find no decisive observation on this point. The case would be analogous to those of moral blindness already studied, to the absence, if it exists, of all æsthetic feeling; it would denote a lacuna in the emotional life. It should be noted that it is only in this department that such a lacuna can occur. No normal man, living in a society, can have his mind closed to religious ideas, can ignore their existence, their object, their significance; but they may have no hold on him, may remain within his consciousness as a foreign substance, originating no tendency and exciting no emotion; they may be conceived without being felt.
I have already reminded the reader that the religious feeling may become a violent passion; it may even pass this limit, take a chronic form, and enter the region of pathology. For the alienist, religious madness is not a morbid entity, but a symptom; it sometimes exists by itself, but is more often associated with epilepsy, hysteria, and the forms of melancholia. From a psychological point of view, it has to be studied by itself, as a complement to the normal state. Considered thus, from the purely psychological standpoint, its manifestations, though very diverse, may be reduced to a simple classification: the depressive, or asthenic; and the exalted, or sthenic forms.
I. The depressive forms spring up and grow on the soil of melancholia. Their physiological criteria are the symptoms so often described—lowering of the vital functions, and so on. Their emotional criterion is fear in all its varieties, ranging from the simple scruple to panic terror; and the intellectual criterion, the possession by a fixed idea. Religious madness follows a course depending on character, education, environment, epoch, and form of belief. So those who believe in predestination are tortured by the idea of having committed the unpardonable sin. This obsession, frequent among Protestants, is rare among Catholics, who admit the possibility of absolution.[200]
One form, which we might call subjective, consists in religious melancholy pure and simple, in which the patient believes himself continually guilty, rejected, damned. In its anxious form it is characterised by scruples about everything, lamentations over imaginary crimes or faults. This state is connected with two primary emotions, both of which have a depressive character: on one side fear, on the other the self-feeling under its negative form of humility and dejection. An unconscious or conscious course of reasoning leads the subject to a feeling of abjectness and self-contempt; he tries to weaken himself, to make himself worthy of pity. Asceticism, though, rightly or wrongly, invoking moral reasons in its own favour, rests on the fundamental desire of depreciating the individual, at least in this life. This appears, even in its simple and mitigated forms, but still more in its extravagances (the monasticism of the fifth century, Simeon Stylites, etc.), in the cases of castration, mutilation, partial destruction, and finally, in the religious suicide of the Hindoos who threw themselves before the car of Jaganath.
A second form, which for want of a better term may be called objective, is demoniac melancholia—the delusion of obsession or possession,—which, formerly superabundant in all religions, has now become rarer.[201] In obsession, or external demonomania, the patient is not in the true sense possessed; he hears, sees, feels, smells the spirits who are obstinately determined on his ruin, but he does not feel them within him. In possession, or internal demonomania, they are inside him. There is doubling of the personality, with sensory, visceral, and psychomotor hallucinations, these last consisting of internal voices which the possessed person hears speaking inside him and in spite of himself.
II. The morbid exaltation of the religious feeling is derived from attraction and love, as depression springs from fear. Related to joy, and sometimes to megalomania, it is accompanied by partial or total augmentation of both the physical and psychical life.
Ecstasy is a transitory and comparatively passive form. Seen from without, it resembles catalepsy in the insensibility to external impressions, and suspension of sensory activity. It differs from it on the motor side. The ecstatic has not the “flexibility of wax” and the complete immobility; he can move, walk, speak, and his face can assume any given expression. Seen from within, ecstasy is an intense state of consciousness, of which the recollection remains after awaking, while catalepsy is attended by unconsciousness, or, at least, complete oblivion. Its psychology is simple enough, if, neglecting details, we confine ourselves to the essential conditions. The confessions of ecstatics, which are tolerably numerous, agree in their principal features: (1) restriction of the area of consciousness, with one intense and overmastering representation serving as the pivot and only centre of association; (2) an emotional state—rapture—a form of love in its highest degree, with desire and the pleasure of possession, which, like profane love, only finds its end in complete fusion and unification (ἐνῶσις of the Alexandrians). The declarations of the great mystics, however involved they may be in metaphor, leave us in no doubt on this point;[202] and their critics, even theologians, have reproached them with frequently being mistaken in the nature of their love.
A more stable and active form of religious exaltation is theomania—i.e., “a mental state in which the subject believes himself to be God, or at least inspired by Him to reveal His will to men.” To draw a hard and fast line between the founders of religions, the reformers, the promoters of religious orders, and pure theomaniacs, is as difficult as to indicate the precise point at which a violent love becomes madness. We might make use of a practical test, and say that the one has succeeded where the others have failed, but this would be too simple, success and failure depending on a variety of causes. This discussion, moreover, is out of place here. It is sufficient to remark that theomania is, in its psychical characteristics, the complete antithesis to demonomaniac melancholia. Instead of the sorrow of the possessed person with the enemy lodged in his own body, we find an unalterable joy, which can be affected neither by persecution, nor misfortunes, nor tortures. To the feeling of abjectness is opposed the delusion of grandeur. However modest a man may be by nature, or as a result of reflection, he cannot with impunity believe himself chosen by the Deity as His prophet, to speak and act in His name.
The preceding sketch, whence I have purposely eliminated details and observations (of which, as is well known, there is no lack), has but one object—viz., to show that the primary constituents of the religious sentiment may serve as a guide to its pathology, which rests entirely on fear and love. I may add that none among morbid emotions has—and still more, has had—a more marked tendency to rapid propagation in epidemic form: a further proof that, in its nature, it is not so much individual as social.