appears, and disappears, and carries with it power of life and death?
Or instead of a serpent, consider the lion, or any other ferocious
animal. He makes his appearance in a country and creates havoc among
the flocks; one pursues him, but for some reason or other no shot
reaches him; he is invulnerable. He becomes increasingly audacious and
terrible; he disappears for weeks together, nobody knows where; he
reappears suddenly, nobody knows why; he defies the hunters with the
majesty that wild beasts sometimes show, in perfect consciousness of
their power. Behold! a veritable god.

It is well known that the aborigines worshipped the horses which the
Spaniards imported into America; according to Prescott, they preferred
to attribute the invention of firearms to the horses rather than to
the Spaniards. The fact is simply that the Spaniards were men like
themselves, and that the aborigines took their measure accordingly;
but an unknown animal came to them armed with an indefinite power.
Men adore nothing but what they are comparatively ignorant of, and
it is for that reason, whatever Mr. Spencer may say, that nature,
so long imperfectly known, afforded to religion a more generous and
inexhaustible aliment than humanity.

[Sidenote: Narrowness and insufficiency of Spencer’s formula.]

At bottom what Mr. Spencer regards as the true confirmation of his
doctrine is the relation it bears to the rest of his system; it
is for him an example simply of a universal law, a consequence of
evolution. According to this doctrine, everything seems to spring from
a primordial unity, from a single homogeneous belief—the belief in
a power more or less vague, exercised by the souls of the dead; this
belief, once given, undergoes a complete series of integrations and
differentiations, and ultimately becomes a belief in the regular action
of an unknown and universal power. Mr. Spencer seems to us to be right
in pitching upon the one homogeneous belief from which all others arise
by a process of evolution; but the formula of this belief that he
presents us with seems to us altogether too narrow and insufficient.
If one wishes to discover the idea which dominates both the cult for
the dead and the cult for the gods, one will find in it a natural
persuasion that nothing is absolutely and definitively inanimate, that
everything lives and possesses, therefore, intentions and volitions.
Man has deified the phenomena of nature, as he has immortalized his
ancestors, for the sole and only reason that, as a living being
possessed of a will, the most difficult thing in the beginning for him
to understand is the invincible determinism and absolute inertia of the
phenomena of the external world.[19]

      [19] See our _Morale anglaise contemporaine_, p. 579.

[Sidenote: Criticism of fetichism commonly a play on words.]

The adoration of natural forces, conceived as more or less analogous
to powerful living beings possessed of volition, has been denominated
sometimes fetichism, sometimes naturism. Messrs. Müller and Spencer
are agreed that fetichism is one of the later forms of religion, and
decline to treat it as primitive. On both sides of this interesting
discussion one desideratum seems to us to be beautifully conspicuous
by its absence, namely, precision of formula and agreement as to the
exact sense of terms. The words _fetich_, _animate being_, _inanimate
being_, and so forth, seem to us to have given rise to a number of
misunderstandings, on the part both of those who are defending the
fetich theory and of those who are attacking it. Let us cite some
examples: Max Müller has undertaken to define the word fetichism;
as was natural for a philologist he went in search of an etymology,
and he found, relying on Tylor, that fetichism (from the Portuguese
_feitiço_, derived from the Latin _factitius_, _artificial_) could not
designate anything but a superstitious reverence felt or shown for
certain knick-knacks that possessed no apparent title to any such
honourable distinction. The definition of Tylor and of Max Müller may
be philologically exact; unhappily, none of the philosophers who have
regarded fetichism as the basis of religion have ever employed that
word in the narrow and rigorous sense which Max Müller puts upon it;
they understood by it, as de Brosses and A. Comte did, the primitive
tendency to conceive external objects as animated by a life analogous
to that of man. They comprehended also, under the title of fetichism,
what Max Müller distinguishes from it so carefully under the names of
_physiolatry_, or the worship rendered to natural objects other than
gimcracks, and of _zoolatry_, or the worship of animals. The result is
that Max Müller’s refutations really do not concern the doctrine which
they are designed to combat, and over against which he sets up his own
doctrine. Similarly in regard to the definitions of M. Réville.[20]
To demonstrate that a cult for knick-knacks is not the primitive and
unique original of all human religions does not help us forward; the
problem remains where it was. Let us consider, therefore, not the
words, but the theory itself of the animation of nature, and let us
examine the objections that have been urged against it.

      [20] Fetichism, M. Réville also says, is logically a later
      belief. “A fetich is a vulgar object, possessing no value in
      itself, but which a negro preserves, venerates, adores, because
      _he believes that it is the dwelling place of a spirit_. And
      the choice of the said object is not absolutely arbitrary.
      A fetich possesses this very special distinction, that it
      is the property of the person who adores it. It is in this
      element of individual ownership—ownership by the tribe or
      the family—that the difference clearly appears between the
      object of a naturist religion, and the fetich, properly so
      called. However humble it may be—tree, rock, or rivulet—the
      first is independent, is accessible to all, to strangers as
      to indigenes, on the sole condition that they conform to the
      exigencies of the ritual or the cult. The sun shines for
      everybody, the mountain is accessible to all who scale its
      sides, the spring refreshes the passer-by, whatever be his
      tribe; the very tree which rises in the midst of the desert
      asks of the traveller some mark of deference, and does not
      trouble itself about his origin. One cannot appropriate a
      natural object. It is otherwise with a fetich. Once adopted by
      a family, it is in some sort in the service of that family and
      has nothing to do with others.” This definition of fetichism is
      quite special, and in no wise concerns _primitive fetichism_,
      conceived as an ascription of something analogous to the human
      will in all inanimate things.

[Sidenote: Children and even animals distinguish between animate and
inanimate.]

According to Messrs. Spencer and Müller the savage may legitimately
be compared to a child who mistakes a well-dressed doll for a living
being, or who punishes a door against which he has stumbled; the savage
is not so naïve. The very child is far from possessing all the naïveté
that is ascribed to him, in general he perfectly distinguishes between
the animate and the inanimate; and when he talks to his play-things,
and conducts himself before them as if they were alive he is not a dupe
of his own words, he is composing a diminutive drama simply, in which
he is an actor; he is making poetry and not mythology. “If his doll
should step up to him and bite him, he would be the first person to be
astonished.”[21] In the same way, a dog plays with a stick—the comedy
of the chase—he bites it, he tears it into pieces, he warms to his
game, which is still for him, when all is said, no more than a game.
Even the famous example of a child’s rage at inanimate objects against
which it has stumbled, an example which has done service in the pages
of all those who have written on religion,[22] is seriously damaged by
Mr. Spencer; according to him, mothers and nurses suggest to the child
absurd ideas which, but for them, it would not have; it is they, who,
if it has hurt itself against an inanimate object, affect to be angry;
and, to distract its attention from the pain, endeavour to excite its
anger also. The little comedy of the inanimate object is one in which
the child displays no initiative. In any event the example deals with
an ill-observed psychological phenomenon, which, for the present, can
be employed to support no theory whatever.

      [21] Spencer, _Principles of Sociology_.

      [22] See, among others, M. Vacherot, _La religion_.

[Sidenote: Savages mistaking a watch, etc., for animate lends no
support to fetichism.]

Similarly, according to Mr. Spencer, no employment can be made of the
mistakes committed by a savage in the presence of certain complex
products of the arts and of civilization; he believes these objects
to be alive, but how should he do otherwise? If he is deceived, it is
rather due to the degree of perfection attained by our art than to any
defect in his own intelligence. When the indigenes of New Zealand saw
Cook’s ship, they took it for a sailing whale. Anderson relates that
the Bushmen supposed that a carriage was an animate being and must be
provided with fodder; the complexity of its structure, the symmetry of
its parts, its moving wheels, naturally suggested no fragment of their
own experience of inanimate things. Just so the Esquimaux believed
that a music-box and a hand-organ were living beings. All these errors
are in a measure rational, but they are errors of a kind that really
primitive man would have no opportunity to commit. To suppose that he
was dominated by a natural tendency to assign life to things which were
not alive, to imagine that he went out of his way to confound things
which animals of a lesser degree of intelligence perfectly distinguish,
is to invert the whole course of evolution.

[Sidenote: Primitive man incurious.]

There are, in Mr. Spencer’s opinion, still other prejudices relative
to primitive man from which we should free ourselves. We believe him
to be voluntarily and incessantly occupied, as the modern infant
is, with the _why_ of things; we fancy him perpetually endeavouring
to satisfy a restless curiosity. Unhappily, if we are to trust our
experience of the lower races of man, it appears that the sentiment
of curiosity decreases directly as one approaches the savage state.
To awaken curiosity demands surprise; Plato was correct in regarding
astonishment as the beginning of philosophy. Well, what produces
astonishment is an unexpected breach in the chain of causation; but
for a primitive intelligence which has not yet achieved scientific
maturity, there is no such thing as natural causation and no such
thing as rational surprise.[23] The Fuegians, the Australians, show
the most complete indifference in the presence of matters for them
absolutely new and essentially surprising. According to Dampier, the
Australians whom he took on board paid no attention to anything in the
vessel except what was given them to eat. The very mirrors did not
succeed in astonishing savages of inferior race; they were amused with
them, but evinced neither surprise nor curiosity. When Park inquired
of the negroes, “What becomes of the sun at night? Is it the same sun
that rises the next day or another?”—they made him no reply and found
the question puerile. Spix and Martius report, that the minute one
begins to question a Brazil Indian about his language he shows signs
of impatience, complains of headache, and proves himself incapable
of mental labour. Similarly the Abipones, when they find themselves
unable to understand anything at a glance, soon become fatigued and
cry, “What, after all, does it amount to?” “It seems,” Sir John Lubbock
says, “as if the mind of the savage lives in a perpetual come and
go of pure feebleness, incapable of fixing itself upon anything. He
accepts what he sees as an animal does; he adapts himself to the world
about him spontaneously; astonishment, admiration, the very conditions
of worship are above him. Accustomed to the regularity of nature he
patiently awaits the succession of such phenomena as he has observed,
mechanical habit overbears all intelligence in him.”

      [23] Spencer, _Principles of Sociology_.

[Sidenote: Inexactitude of facts on which the fetich theory is founded.]

In effect, according to Mr. Spencer, all of the observed facts upon
which the old fetichistic theory was founded are chargeable with
inexactitude; they were taken from the narratives of the earlier
travellers, who rarely came into contact with any but races already
debauched and half civilized. Little by little, he says, the idea
that fetichism is primordial took possession of men’s minds and, as
prepossession constitutes nine-tenths of belief, it has rested master
of the field almost without a contest; I myself accepted it, although,
as I remember, with a vague feeling of discontent. This discontent
became positive doubt when I was better informed with regard to the
ideas of the savage. From doubt I passed to negation when I had once
tabulated the whole body of the facts relating to the most degraded
races.

[Sidenote: A priori demonstration of the priority of animism.]

Mr. Spencer undertakes even to demonstrate _a priori_ the falsity
of the fetich theory. What, he asks, is a fetich? An inanimate
object supposed to contain a being, of which the senses do not take
cognizance; such a conception is extremely complex, and above the
reach of primitive minds. The savage is so incapable of abstraction
that he can neither conceive nor express a colour as distinct from
some coloured object, a light as distinct from some light object—star
or fire, an animal which shall be neither a dog nor a cow nor a
horse; and he is asked to imagine an animate being in the heart of an
inanimate thing, an invisible power in the heart of a visible object,
in effect, a soul! Nothing less than the conception of a soul, in Mr.
Spencer’s judgment, will serve the fetich hypothesis; and primitive man
certainly could not attain the notion of a soul by mere observation of
nature. Before projecting this complex idea into the heart of things,
he must previously have constructed it, and as preparation for that,
Mr. Spencer says, he must have supplied himself with a theory of
death, and conceived the mind as surviving the body, and therefore as
separable from the body and as the motive principle of the body. It
is to his notions on death that man must look for any conception of
life in inanimate nature. Every fetich is a spirit, no spirit can be
for a primitive intelligence anything else than the spirit of someone
who is dead. Necessarily, therefore, a cult for the dead, spiritism,
must precede fetichism; the latter is no more than an extension, a
by-product, of the former.[24]

      [24] Mr. Spencer’s _Principles of Sociology_.

[Sidenote: Spencer’s attack not against a vital spot.]

III. Such is the theory of Mr. Spencer. And he would be right if the
partisans of primitive fetichism understood by fetich, as he does, a
material object at the heart of which the adorer imagines the existence
of a mysterious agent _distinct from this object itself_. But is this
notion of distinctness a necessary part, at least in the beginning, of
fetichism, or, as one says to-day, of naturism? Imagine a rock which
should detach itself unexpectedly from the mountain side, and roll
down to the hut of a savage; it stops suddenly just as it is on the
point of crushing his dwelling, it remains there pendent, menacing, to
all appearance ready at an instant’s notice to begin rolling again;
the savage fairly trembles at the sight of it. Do you believe that he
needs really to suppose the presence of some foreign agent, of a soul,
of an ancestral spirit in that stone to regard it as an object of fear
and of respect? Not at all. It is the rock itself which constitutes
his fetich, it is to the rock that he bows; he venerates it precisely
because he is far from supposing it, as you do, essentially and
eternally inert and passive; he ascribes to it possible intentions,
a maleficent or beneficent will. He says to himself: “It is asleep
to-day, but it was awake yesterday; yesterday it could have killed
me, and it did not want to.” Let the lightning strike a savage’s hut
three times in succession within a month, and he will easily recognize
that the thunder is ill-disposed toward him and, quite without any
preliminary need of personification in the way of endowing it with a
departed soul, he will set about adoring the thunder and conjuring it
not to do him harm. Mr. Spencer does not perceive that, at the very
beginning of his exposition, he ascribes to primitive man a conception
of nature analogous to the abstract mechanism of Descartes. Such a
conception once pre-supposed, it is plain that to regard an object or
a natural phenomenon as the centre of a cult, some new conception must
be added to it, and this new conception may well be that of a spirit.
Mr. Spencer, as he himself admits, looks upon fetichism as quite
analogous to modern spiritualism, which sees in turning tables and
oscillating chairs the work of disembodied souls; but nothing could be
more arbitrary than this analogy. It is quite impossible that primitive
man should stand in the same position that we do in the face of any
natural phenomenon; as he does not possess the modern metaphysical
idea of inert matter, he experiences no need to invent an indwelling
spirit before he can ascribe volition to it. If a savage should see a
table turn, he would say simply that the table was turning, no doubt,
because it wanted to turn, and that, for him, would be the end of it;
and if by chance it should be a matter of interest to him whether the
table turned or not, it would immediately become a fetich to him. The
conception of a fetich does not in the least presuppose, as Mr. Spencer
maintains, the conception of a soul; there is no such metaphysical
element in fetichism, and it is precisely on that account that this
form of religion must have preceded spiritism, which is always founded
on a more or less rudimentary metaphysics.

[Sidenote: For savages and children nature a society.]

For animals and savages, as for very young children, nature is
absolutely the opposite of what it appears to be nowadays to the
scholar and the philosopher: for them it is not a cold and neuter
habitat, in which man alone possesses aims and bends everything to
the fulfilment of his wishes; it is not a physical laboratory full
of inert instruments for the service of man. On the contrary, nature
is a society; primitive people see intention in everything. Friends
or enemies surround them on all sides; the struggle for existence is
one long pitched battle with imaginary allies against adversaries not
infrequently only too real. How should they understand that there is
a profound unity in nature which rigidly excludes from the chain of
things anything like individuality or independence? The only cause of
movement with which they are acquainted is desire; they reckon desire
or intention as the cause of every movement in nature, as of every
movement in their fellow-men and in animals; and they conceive that the
intentions of all of the diverse beings by which they find themselves
surrounded may be equally modified by prayer and offerings. Their
conception of nature is at once anthropomorphic and sociomorphic, as
is subsequently their conception of God. Nothing is more natural and
inevitable than this fashion of modeling the external world on the
internal, and the relations of things on the relations of men.

[Sidenote: Panthelism.]

If the word fetichism is too vague to designate this primitive state
of mind and gives rise to confusion, take another word; if the word
_panthelism_ were not a little barbarous it would better express this
stage of human intelligence in which one is inclined to ascribe to all
the phenomena of nature not indeed souls, as distinct from bodies, but
simply intentions, desires, volitions, as naturally inhering in the
objects themselves.

[Sidenote: English classification of things.]

But here we shall perhaps be reminded that, as Mr. Spencer says, the
distinction between things animate and inanimate is quite clear even
to the brute, and, _a fortiori_, to primitive man; so that primitive
man will not attribute desire or volition to a thing which he knows
to be inanimate—_animate_, _inanimate_; how we do come back to the
vague! Under each of these terms the modern man ranges a group of ideas
absolutely inaccessible to primitive man and to the lower animals.
Personally we deny that the distinction between animate and inanimate
was present in the earliest stages of intellectual evolution. Certainly
both the animal and the savage recognized a division of the phenomena
of nature into two classes; one is composed of the things which are
disposed to do them good or evil, the other is composed of those
which ignore them simply; that is the primitive distinction. As to an
acquaintance with animate and inanimate they are innocent of anything
of the kind; on this point, as on all others, they confine themselves
to the grossest sense-experience. Their senses inform them that certain
objects are beings who are altogether inoffensive, who eat nobody and
are not themselves good to eat; one gives them no further attention;
practically they do not exist. I one day asked a peasant woman the
name of a small plant. She looked at me with frank astonishment and
replied, with a shake of the head, “_Ce n’est rien_—it is nothing;
it is not good to eat!” That woman was on a level with primitive man.
In the eyes of the latter, as in the eye of an animal, one-half the
phenomena of nature are _nothing_—they do not count; one scarcely
sees them. The fruits on a tree, on the contrary, are _good to eat_.
The savage, however, perceives immediately that the fruit makes no
active resistance, does not cry out when he bites into it; and he
considers it, therefore, as on all accounts absolutely indifferent,
except that it is good to eat. But given a fruit that poisons him, he
promptly fears it and venerates it. Similarly with animals: stones
and vegetation hold equally aloof from the carnivora, are practically
as distant as the moon and the stars. The herbivora, on the contrary,
pay no attention to anything but vegetation. Natural objects being
thus parcelled off into two classes, the class of the indifferent and
inoffensive, and the class of the useful and hurtful, the animal soon
learns to recognize that in the second class the most important objects
are those which possess spontaneity of movement. But in his eyes—and
this is a fact of capital importance—spontaneity of movement is not
the exclusive sign of _life_, of interior activity; it is a sign simply
of utility, or of heightened danger for him. He is wholly preoccupied
with personal and practical consequences; he indulges in no superfluity
of inference in regard to the object itself; he does not speculate.
Moreover, a moving object which in nowise affects his sensibility
rapidly becomes quite as indifferent to him as a motionless object.
Animals soon become accustomed to the passage of railway trains: cows
browse tranquilly, partridges on the brow of a hill scarcely lift their
heads; and why? Because they have recognized in the locomotive an
inanimate mechanism?[25] Not in the least; they observe simply that the
locomotive never goes out of its way to damage them.

      [25] According to Mr. Spencer, the movement of a train does not
      appear spontaneous to animals because it is continuous; and
      therein lies the ground of their exemption from fright. On this
      reasoning, animals who live in the neighbourhood of stations
      should display fright at the arrival and departure of trains.
      Nothing of the kind is observable. They are equally incurious
      in regard to horses harnessed to wagons on a high-road.
      Speculative disinterestedness is altogether lacking in animals
      and savages; they live locked in the arms of sensation and
      desire; they spontaneously draw a circle about their ego, and
      whatsoever lies beyond lies beyond their intelligence.

[Sidenote: Belief that all things are animate natural to animals.]

This being the primitive conception of the world, we believe that the
more incapable an uncivilized being is of observing and reasoning
the more natural it should be for him to acquire the conviction that
objects which at first struck him as indifferent are not genuinely
inanimate, but are sometimes malevolent in their intentions toward him,
sometimes benevolent; that they possess in effect over him a quite
respectable degree of power. In other words the more intelligent an
animal or a savage becomes, the more superstitious he will be, and thus
by the very progress of mental evolution the primitive distinction
of objects into two classes will become dim—the distinction of
objects into those which are altogether indifferent and outside of the
society in which one lives, and those which are more or less worthy
of attention, more or less closely in practical relations with us.
Mental evolution has proceeded, believe us, in precisely the opposite
direction to that imagined by Mr. Spencer.

[Sidenote: Motion a material sign of life in them.]

Let us speak first of the more intelligent animals, before passing
to man. The more intelligent animals are often obliged to give their
attention to a class of objects in appearance indifferent to them
and to modify the imperfect ideas which they had at first conceived
in regard to them. Generally speaking, objects of this sort are
motionless; if immobility be not their essential distinguishing
characteristic, it is at least one of their principal distinguishing
characteristics. The instinct of self-preservation in a being
inevitably bestirs itself in the presence of every movement that looks
like a menace. Well, an animal is soon obliged to recognize that
indifferent objects possess in certain circumstances the attribute
of spontaneous movement, an attribute which is for him so vitally
interesting. I remember the surprise a kitten once showed when it
perceived the dead leaves rise in the wind and circulate about it;
at first it ran away, and then came back and pursued the leaves, and
smelt them, and touched them with its paw. Darwin relates that a dog
was one day lying near an open parasol on the lawn; the parasol moved
in the breeze, the dog began to bay, to growl furiously, and, every
time that the parasol moved again, began to growl afresh. Evidently it
was a new thing to Darwin’s dog that such an object as a parasol might
change its place without the visible intervention of some person; all
the dog’s classifications were thrown into disorder, he was no longer
certain whether he must class the parasol with things indifferent or
with things harmful. He would have experienced an analogous impression
if he had seen a paralytic patient, always theretofore motionless in
his armchair, suddenly rise and walk. An animal’s surprise is still
more strong when an object regarded as till then indifferent approaches
him and manifests its activity by an infliction of sudden pain. I
witnessed the astonishment of a cat which, having seen a red-hot coal
roll out of the stove door, leaped forward to play with it; he caught
it simultaneously with snout and paw, gave a cry of pain, and fled in
such fear that it was two days before he returned to the house. Mr.
Spencer himself cites another example which he has observed. The beast
was a formidable creature, half mastiff, half hound, who was playing
with a cane; he was leaping and gambolling, and holding it by the
ferule end. Suddenly the handle of the cane touched the ground and the
ferule was pushed forcibly back toward the dog’s palate. The animal
groaned, let the cane fall, and fled some distance away; and there
he manifested, it appears, a degree of alarm truly comic in a beast
apparently so ferocious. It was only after many cautious approaches
and much hesitation that he yielded to the temptation of taking hold
of the cane. Mr. Spencer, who supplies us with this fact, with great
impartiality concludes from it, as we also do, that it was the unusual
conduct of the cane which suggested to the dog the notion that it was
animate; but he hastens to add that before the vague idea of animation
thus given rise to in an animal could become definite in a man,
the intervention of some spiritualistic theory would be absolutely
necessary. One may well ask one’s self what spiritualism has to do with
the case.[26]

      [26] _Principles of Sociology._

[Sidenote: Instruments supposed to be animate by animals.]

One may learn from the preceding example something like what animals
conceive the inert instruments to be which they see us handling and
with which we sometimes strike them. The notion of an instrument, as
such, is relatively modern and was altogether unknown in the early
stages of evolution. An instrument, in the eyes of an animal as in
the eyes of primitive man, is almost a companion and an accomplice;
neither the one nor the other possesses any other notion in especial
of causation than that of a co-operation, mute agreement between two
associated beings. A lion, which Livingstone shot at and did not hit,
ran first to bite the stone which the bullet had struck; it was only
subsequently that he threw himself upon the hunter; the ball, the
gun, the hunter, were so many distinct and separate enemies that he
was bent on punishing in succession. Similarly, in an ancient list of
pains and penalties, one finds that the warrior is to lose his hand,
the blasphemer his tongue, the spy his ears. At this moment my dog
is at my side; the whip with which I corrected him this morning lies
upon a chair; the dog walks about that chair sniffing the air with
defiance and respect, and I do not believe he would have the courage
to touch it. He is aware, however, that when the whip hurt him, the
circumstances were quite different, that I was holding that dangerous
object in my hand, and that I was, in a sense, the first cause of his
chastisement. Still he is not perfectly reassured, as he would be in
the presence of an inert object. The impression he seems to have got
strikes me as comparable to that which a child receives from a serpent
behind a pane of glass; the child knows perfectly that under the actual
circumstances he is safe, but he cannot help saying to himself, “If the
circumstances were otherwise!”[27] Recollect that the Australian savage
treats the white man’s gun as a living and powerful being which he
adores and crowns with flowers and supplicates not to kill him. Legend
attributes a magic power to the swords of great captains, to Joyeuse
or to Durandal. In our own days, even, one sees combatants spend their
force not only against their enemies but against everything which
pertains to them; it is as if something were supposed to have passed
from the man into everything he possesses. Nothing is more difficult to
recognize than the profound indifference of nature.

      [27] Add that when an animal or primitive man has recognized
      that a certain object possesses a particular attribute, he
      often finds it difficult to recognize that simply analogous
      objects possess the same attribute. I was one day making a
      kitten run after a wooden ball as a dog would do; the ball
      struck it and hurt it; it cried out and I petted it and then
      wanted to begin playing once more; it would run willingly even
      after large stones when I threw them, but obstinately refused
      to run after the ball. So that it evidently conceived that
      the ball alone possessed the attribute of power to injure it;
      the kitten looked upon the ball, no doubt, with an evil eye,
      regarded it perhaps as an evil being who was unwilling to play;
      by a fault of generalization the kitten created for itself a
      sort of fetich which it did not adore indeed, but which it
      feared, and fear is a step toward adoration.

      Mr. Spencer himself admits in savages a certain inaptitude
      for generalization. This opinion, paradoxical as it may seem,
      is perhaps an important truth. If primitive intelligences,
      as M. Taine among others remarked, are especially prompt at
      noticing the superficial resemblances of things, that fact is
      not always a mark of genuine perspicacity, for the resemblance
      perceived between two sensations may be explicable less as
      an intelligent generalization than as a sort of confusion of
      the sensations themselves; if sensations are analogous or
      indistinct, they may naturally be mistaken for each other
      without any exercise whatsoever of intelligence. Thence the
      comparative insignificance of many examples taken from the case
      of language. True generalization seems to consist, more than
      anything else, in the reduction of facts to law; that is to
      say, in a conscious abstraction of differences, in a conscious
      recognition of the fundamental determinism which binds things
      up together and which precisely eludes both savages and animals.

      Note finally that the majority of animals and of savages, when
      they have once been deceived, are slow to recover from their
      error, are for a long time distrustful toward the object which
      has deceived them. A dog, coming home one evening, perceived
      an empty cask in an unusual place. He was extremely frightened
      and barked for a long time; it was only by day that he dared
      approach near the object of his alarm, and he examined and
      moved about it, and finally, like the frog in La Fontaine’s
      fable, recognized that the thing was inoffensive. If the cask
      in question had disappeared during the night, the dog would
      evidently have remembered it as a redoubtable being seen the
      evening before in the yard. A monkey, which I left in the room
      with a cardboard sheep one entire day, proved unable to the
      end entirely to satisfy itself that the sheep was inanimate. I
      believe, however, that this persuasion was ultimately achieved,
      for the monkey began finally to pluck the sheep’s wool and to
      treat it something too familiarly. But nature seldom permits us
      equally extended _tête-à-tête_ with objects that alarm us.

      Messrs. Spencer and Müller will call our attention to the fact,
      it is true, that cardboard sheep, no more than hand-organs
      or watches, exist _in rerum natura_. We reply that nature
      supplies primitive man with things much more astonishing: with
      rocks, and forests which can talk (the echo), with springs of
      hot water, with intermittent fountains. Mr. Fergusson (_Tree
      and Serpent Worship_) relates that in India he saw with his
      own eyes a tree which saluted the rising and setting sun, by
      lifting or lowering its boughs. Temples had formerly been
      reared in its neighbourhood. People came from all sides to
      see the marvellous tree. This tree was an old date-palm, half
      decayed, which hung above the road; in order to pass below it,
      it had been held back by a rope; but during this operation the
      fibres which composed the trunk were twisted like the threads
      in a rope. These fibres contracted toward midday in the heat of
      the sun; the tree untwisted and rose. It relaxed under the dew
      at evening and once more bowed down. (See M. Girard de Rialle,
      _Mythologie comparée_, t. i.)

[Sidenote: Conduct generates beliefs that justify it.]

Mr. Spencer, who denies that the child spontaneously strikes the table
which has wounded him, is not, however, unaware that a savage—the
Indian Tupis, for example—if he has bruised his foot against a stone,
leaps against it in fury and bites it like a dog. Mr. Spencer sees in
such facts a phenomenon wholly physical, the need for spending one’s
rage in violent muscular action; but this very need can but favour
the birth of a psychological illusion, of which the tenacity will be
proportionate to the intensity of the sentiment. The physical and the
moral are too closely bound up together for a physical expression of
anger not to be accompanied by a moral belief corresponding to the
action; if a powerful instinct induces us to treat a stone as an enemy,
we shall very really see an enemy in this stone.

[Sidenote: Romanes’ experiments.]

Mr. Romanes made some observations, of the same kind as those of Mr.
Spencer, upon a very intelligent Skye terrier. This terrier, like many
other dogs, was accustomed to play with dried bones, throwing them
into the air and endowing them with an appearance of life, for the
pleasure of chasing them afterward. Mr. Romanes attached a long slender
thread to a dried bone which he gave the dog to play with. After he had
played for some time Mr. Romanes chose an opportune moment, when the
bone had fallen to the ground some distance away, and the terrier was
approaching it; he drew the bone gently away, by means of the thread
attached to it. The attitude of the terrier changed entirely. The
bone, which he had been pretending to regard as living, appeared to
him to be really so, and his surprise knew no bounds. He approached it
nervously and cautiously, as Mr. Spencer describes in the observation
which he made; but the slow motion of the bone continued, and the dog
became more and more certain that the movement could not be explained
as resulting from the impulsion which he had communicated; his surprise
became terror, and he ran away and hid himself under the table, to
study from a distance the disconcerting spectacle of dried bones coming
to life again!

[Sidenote: Soap-bubble experiment.]

Another of Mr. Romanes’ experiments on the same dog shows that the
sentiment of the mysterious was, in this animal, quite powerful
enough to serve as an explanation of his conduct. Having taken the
terrier into a carpeted room, Mr. Romanes rolled some soap-bubbles
which an unsteady draft of air blew about the carpet. The dog took a
great interest in the matter, and seemed unable to decide whether the
bubbles were alive or not. At first he was very prudent, and followed
the bubbles at a distance, but as he was encouraged to examine them
more closely, he approached them with his ears up and his tail down,
in evident apprehension; the instant the bubble moved he drew back.
After a time, however, during which there was at least one bubble on
the floor, he took courage, and, the scientific spirit gaining the
upper hand over the sentiment of mystery, he became brave enough to
draw slowly near one of them and to put his paw upon it, not without
anxiety. Naturally the bubble burst, and his astonishment was vivid in
the extreme. Mr. Romanes made other bubbles, but could not persuade
the dog to approach them for a long time. After a while, however, he
started again in pursuit of one, and endeavoured with much caution
to put his paw upon it. The result was the same as before. After the
second attempt it was impossible to induce him to make a third, and
he ultimately ran out of the room and could not be coaxed back. The
same experiment, tried by Professor Delbœuf on his dog Mouston, gave
a still more striking result. At the blowing of the fourth bubble,
his wrath knew no bounds, but he no longer sought to seize it, he
contented himself with barking at it, in all the accents of rage, until
it burst. Professor Delbœuf wished to continue the experiment, and
attempted to do so, but, to his great regret, was obliged to break off
because of the frenzy into which the dog had worked himself. The moment
that Professor Delbœuf laid his hand upon the vessel containing the
soap-suds, the dog was no longer under his control. His condition was
evidently due, Professor Delbœuf says, to a contradiction between the
fact and his experience, that everything which is coloured is tangible.
He was in the presence of the unknown, with all its mysteries and
menaces; the unknown, which is the source of fear and of superstition.

[Sidenote: Fear of thunder in animals due to sense of mystery.]

According to Mr. Romanes the fear that many animals have of thunder
is due, in some sort, to a sentiment of mystery. He once possessed a
setter, which, he says, had not heard thunder until it had reached the
age of eighteen months, when it almost died of fear. He has observed
the same phenomenon in other animals, in diverse circumstances. The
fright of the setter in question was so strong that, subsequently,
when he heard some artillery practice and mistook it for thunder, his
aspect was positively pitiable, and in the midst of the chase he
endeavoured to hide himself, or to gain the house. After two or three
experiences of thunder his horror of cannon became greater than ever,
so much so that, in spite of his love for the chase, it was impossible
to coax him out of his kennel, so great was his fear that the artillery
practice might recommence and he be distant from the house. But the
keeper, who had had a wide experience of dogs, assured Mr. Romanes
that, if the dog were once taken to the battery and shown the veritable
cause for a noise analogous to that of thunder, he would become once
more fit for the hunt. Mr. Romanes does not doubt that such would have
been the case, for once, when sacks of apples were being emptied, it
made a noise in the house like distant thunder; the setter was very
restless, but when Mr. Romanes took him where the sacks were being
opened and showed him the real cause of the noise, his terror left
him, and on his return to the house he listened to the low rumbling in
perfect quietude.

[Sidenote: All natural phenomena tend to seem artificial to primitive
man.]

When one looks close one is surprised to see how many causes would
naturally lead one to attribute life, and life of an extraordinary and
mysterious character, to such and such really passive objects. Such
causes act evidently with greatly additional power upon the savage, the
primitive man, the man of the quaternary epoch, or upon the anthropoid,
as yet undiscovered, whose instruments have been found in the tertiary
period. Common animals, in effect, are almost lacking in attention;
from which it results that to produce any durable mental effect on
them, a prolonged repetition of the same sensation is necessary; they
must be accustomed to it. Moreover their crude intelligence takes
no impression from evanescent facts, they are unacquainted with the
external world except by averages. Exceptional facts strike them for
an instant, but presently glance off into oblivion. In this imperfect
machine, wear and tear is very rapid and the traces of phenomena
inevitably blur and become confounded. If animals possess a memory
for sensations, they lack an intellectual memory altogether; they are
capable of surprise, but not of remembering a surprise. To produce
in them a tenacious memory demands a setting of pain or pleasure, and
even then, if they recollect the sensation they experienced, they
readily forget the grounds of it. They feel passively, instead of
observing. From the moment where, with man, the spirit of observation
enters upon the scene everything is different; an exceptional fact,
for the same reason that it becomes rapidly effaced in an animal
intelligence, penetrates the more deeply into the memory of a man.
Moreover, man’s sphere of action is much wider than that of any animal,
and consequently the field of his experience is much more vast; the
more he modifies, voluntarily, the face of nature, the more capable he
becomes of recognizing and observing the variations which it presents,
independently of his interventions. Man possesses a notion unknown to
animals, the notion of _artificial_ things, of results deliberately
attained by self-conscious volition. One remembers that _fetich_ comes
from _factitius_, artificial. Man, being acquainted with the use of
fire, will regard, for example, a forest set ablaze by lightning from
entirely a different point of view from what any animal could: the
animal will flee without any other sentiment than that of alarm; the
man will naturally suppose the existence of some person who set it on
fire—who was acting, who was doing on a grand scale what he himself
sometimes does. Similarly with a boiling spring; this phenomenon lies
too far beyond the limits of animal intelligence to be especially
striking; but a man, on the other hand, who habitually goes to some
trouble to provide himself with boiling water, infers the existence of
some subterranean person who is heating water for purposes of his own.
All natural phenomena tend thus to appear artificial to the eyes of a
being who has once familiarized himself with the notion of artifice.
I was present recently among some members of the lower classes at the
flowing of an intermittent spring; not one of them was inclined to
believe the phenomenon a natural one, they regarded it as an effect
of some mechanism, of some artifice. The same belief is evidently
common among primitive people, with this difference, that artificial,
instead of suggesting mechanics, implies the notion of a superhuman and
marvelous power.

[Sidenote: Fetichism a logical theory to primitive man.]

Just as the animal finds the rationale of all things in a notion of
life and of activity, man tends to find a rationale of all things in a
conception of art and of scheming intelligence. For the one, surprising
phenomena are simply inexplicable conduct; for the other, they are the
complex effects of deliberative intelligence, they are master-pieces.
But the notion of activity, far from becoming effaced in the progress
of evolution, becomes simply more definite and more precise. Given
his incomplete experience, primitive man is perfectly logical in
attributing intelligence and consciousness to nature, he could not
rationally do otherwise; his mind is imprisoned in a blind alley, and
superstition is the sole outlet. At a given moment in human evolution,
superstition was perfectly rational.

[Sidenote: Seeming immanence of conscious life in nature.]

Even in our days, men of science are greatly embarrassed by their
inability to point out the precise line of demarcation between the
animate and the inanimate; and how should primitive man have grappled
with this problem? How distinguish, for example, between sleep and
death during one entire portion of life; during sleep, living bodies
lie inert, and why should not inert bodies sometimes prove to be alive?
At night especially, the whole becomes transformed, everything becomes
animate, a breath of wind suffices to make everything palpitate; it
seems as if all nature awakened after its day’s sleep; it is the hour
when wild beasts go in search of prey, and mysterious noises fill the
forest. The calmest imagination, under such circumstances, yields to
a temptation to see fantastic objects that are not. One night I was
walking on the sea-shore, and saw distinctly a gigantic beast moving
some distance away; it proved to be a perfectly motionless rock, in
the midst of others like it, but the waves, which alternately covered
and discovered it in part, lent it, to my eyes, some portion of
their own mobility. How many things in nature borrow thus from some
circumstance—from the wind, from a more or less uncertain light—an
appearance of life![28] Even when the eyes themselves would be
incapable of self-deception, the influence of the foolish terrors so
frequent among children and beings habituated to savage life would
count enormously. Emotional susceptibility is the more highly developed
among savages, in that it forms for them frequently a means of safety.
And primitive man is much more subject than we are to hallucinations
of the sort that are due to terror, and are not wholly fantastic, but
result from a fantastic interpretation of some genuine sense stimulus.
The traveller Park met two negroes on horseback; they fled from him at
a gallop in extreme terror, and meeting his followers in the course of
their flight reported that they had seen him dressed in the floating
robes of some redoubtable spirit. One of them affirmed that at sight
of Park he had felt himself enveloped in a breath of cold air from
heaven, which was like a jet of cold water. Suppress the word spirit in
this passage, which implies a pre-existing belief in the soul, and you
will perceive how hallucinations due to terror may well give birth to
beliefs all the more tenacious for the element of truth they contain.

      [28] Mr. H. Russell, the explorer of the Pyrenees, remarks the
      fantastic effects produced by the moonlight in the mountains.
      As the moonlight replaced the previous shadow on the faces
      and the angles of the rocks, he says, in an account of the
      ascension of the peak of Eriste, they seemed so plainly to
      move that once he mistook one of them for a bear and cocked
      the revolver at his side. The same explorer remarks also the
      surprising transformations which natural objects undergo at
      nightfall and at daybreak. At dawn, he says, there is a sort of
      universal shiver which seems to animate everything; the sound
      of the neighbouring cascade changed frequently; at break of
      day, after having groaned and thundered alternately, it begins
      to scold. For in the morning in the mountains, he says, sounds
      gain magnitude, they swell, and torrents in especial lift their
      voices as if angry; with the arrival of the day the air becomes
      sonorous and sound carries farther. He has experienced this, he
      says, frequently, but does not understand the cause.—_Alpine
      Club_, 1887.

[Sidenote: Dreams.]

Dreams also have played a considerable rôle in the genesis of
superstitions, as Epicurus and Lucretius remarked, and the labours of
Messrs. Tylor and Spencer have proved. Primitive language supplies
no means of saying, “I dreamt that I saw”; one must say simply, “I
saw.” Well, in the dreams which the savage himself can scarcely
distinguish from reality, he sees nothing but a perpetual series of
metamorphoses, of the transformation of men into ferocious beasts,
and of ferocious beasts into men; he dreams that he picks up a stone,
and that it comes to life in his hand; he looks out upon a motionless
lake, and it becomes suddenly a crawling mass of crocodiles and of
serpents.[29] How can Mr. Spencer maintain, after that, that primitive
man can distinguish with some degree of certainty the animate from the
inanimate? Not only during dreams, but during wakefulness, everything
suggests to primitive man the notion of changes of substance and magic
metamorphoses. Eggs, which are inanimate, change into birds or insects;
dead flesh becomes living worms; an effigy, under the influence of
memory, seems to live again and to respire.[30]

      [29] Spencer’s _Sociology_.

      [30] Savages imagine that they see the eyes of portraits move.
      I myself saw a child of two years old, accustomed to play
      with engravings, one day in a great fright snatch away its
      grandmother’s finger, which was resting on the picture of a
      ferocious beast. “Big beast bite grandmamma!” These ideas,
      which totally ignore the profound and definitive difference
      between animate and inanimate, are fixed in the human mind.
      A man of distinguished education once maintained to me quite
      seriously that certain petrifactive springs in the Pyrenees
      possessed the power of changing sticks into serpents. For one
      capable of imagining that a bit of wood might thus become a
      serpent, what difficulty would there be in believing that
      the bit of wood is alive (even a bit of dead wood), that the
      spring is alive (in especial a spring with such marvellous
      properties), and finally that the mountain itself is alive;
      everything is animate to eyes like that, and possessed of magic
      power.

[Sidenote: Primitive man humanizes nature.]

An animal is not sufficiently master of its sensations to follow their
course throughout their successive modifications; it is not in any
proper sense a witness, as man is, of the progress, of the perpetual
movement and transformation of all things; nature is, for it, a
series of detached pictures of which it does not seize the contrasts.
When man, on the contrary, follows attentively the more or less slow
evolution of things, he perceives the effacement of every fundamental
difference between the animate and the inanimate, he observes a
process of blind mechanical labour, which produces life in objects in
appearance quite inert. Is there not something rationally profound
and justifiable in the very naïveté with which he interprets nature?
Poetry is often philosophy in its most penetrating form. Who has not
asked himself sometimes if a puissant and hidden spring of life does
not circulate unknown to us in the high mountains, in the still trees,
and in the restless ocean, and if mute nature does not live in one long
course of meditation upon themes unknown to us? And since even nowadays
we ourselves are full of such vague doubts as that, do we imagine that
it would be easy to convince one of these primitive men of his error,
when he fancies that he feels the beating of what the Germans call the
“heart of nature”? After all is the primitive man wrong? Everything
about us does live, nothing is inanimate except in appearance, inertia
is a word simply; all nature is one universal aspiration, modern
science alone can measure with some approach to accuracy the activity
with which all things are saturated, and show it to us, here existent
in a state of diffusion, there in a state of concentration, and
self-conscious, and make us acquainted with the difference between
the higher organisms and the lower organisms, and between the latter
and mechanisms and rudimentary groupings of bits of matter. For
primitive man, to whom all these distinctions, all the gradations are
impossible, there is but one thing evident, and that is that the whole
of nature lives; and he naturally conceives this life on the model of
his own, as accompanied by self-consciousness, by an intelligence the
more astonishing in that it is mysterious. Moreover he is a man, and
_humanizes_ nature; he lives in society with other men, and conceives
all things in terms of social relations of friendship or of enmity.

[Sidenote: And divinizes it.]

From the humanization to the divinization there is but one step; let us
endeavour to make it. Whoever says _god_, means a living and powerful
being worthy, in some especial degree, of fear, of respect, or of
gratitude. Primitive man possesses already, let us suppose, some notion
of life; he needs now to be supplied with some notion of power, which
alone is capable of inspiring him with reverence, and this notion it
does not seem difficult for a being to obtain, who sees in all nature
an expression of a manifold conscious life, and who must recognize in
certain great phenomena the manifestation of a will much more powerful
than that of any man, and consequently more redoubtable and worthy of
respect. Here also, however, we encounter serious objections from Mr.
Spencer and from anthropologists like M. Le Bon; the question becomes
more complex.

[Sidenote: Natural phenomena quite striking enough to be adored on
their own account.]

According to Mr. Spencer, as we have seen, the most important phenomena
of nature, and among others the rising and the setting of the sun,
are precisely those which must be least striking to primitive man;
they cannot appear to him to be _extraordinary_ because they happen
every day; so that he experiences before them neither surprise nor
admiration. This argument is very ingenious, but is it not also a
little sophistical? If it were pushed to the end it would amount simply
to the fact that there is nothing surprising or unusual in nature,
nothing which breaks with the preconceived association of ideas,
nothing which seems to manifest the sudden intervention of strong
or violent powers. The fact, however, is quite the contrary; nature
is full of surprises and of terrors. The day may be fine; suddenly
the clouds gather and the thunder rolls—the fear of thunder felt by
animals has already been spoken of; in the mountains especially the
rumbling, re-echoing, fills them with unspeakable terror. Droves of
cattle lose all control of themselves and throw themselves headlong
down precipices. It is with great difficulty that the herdsman by
his presence and exhortations keeps his herd in order; probably the
beasts see in the herdsman a powerful friend, capable of protecting
them against this terrible being whom the Hindus call the “howler.” If
animals tremble thus before the thunder, it is unlikely that primitive
man should see nothing in it abnormal and extraordinary. Similarly
with the hurricane, which seems like an enormous respiration, as of
a universe out of breath. Similarly with the tempest: one knows the
Basque proverb: “If you want to learn to pray, go to sea.” Everyone
who finds himself in the hands of a victorious enemy is naturally
inclined to beg for mercy. Let there supervene a sudden calm; at the
moment when the tempest was about to break, let the sun reappear like
a great smiling face, chasing away the cloud with his arrow of gold,
and will it not seem a benevolent auxiliary; will it not be received
with cries of joy and enthusiasm? Nature is incessantly showing us thus
some unexpected change of scene, producing some theatrical effect which
inevitably suggests some anthropomorphic drama, in which the elements
and the stars are the actors. How many strange things happen in the sky
when once the attention is directed thither! Eclipses of the moon and
of the sun, and the very phases of the moon, are abundantly calculated
to astonish the very savages whom Messrs. Spencer and Müller declare to
be incapable of astonishment. Note, too, that the simple view of the
stars at night provokes a lively admiration in anyone who is accustomed
to sleep under a roof. I remember still my surprise, when, as a child,
I was awake for the first time in the night and lifted my eyes by
chance on high and perceived the heaven glittering with stars; it was
one of the most striking impressions of my life.[31]

      [31] Let us remember in this connection that, according to
      Wuttke, J. G. Müller, and Schultze, a cult for the moon and
      nocturnal stars must have preceded that of the sun, contrary
      to the weight of opinion heretofore. The moon’s phases were
      calculated to take the attention of primitive people, and must
      early have done so. One must, however, in this connection be on
      one’s guard against generalizing too quickly and believing that
      the evolution of human thought has in all places followed the
      same route. Habitats differ too widely for there not to have
      been in the beginning an infinite diversity in the religious
      conceptions entertained by different peoples. In Africa, for
      example, it is evident _a priori_ that the sun does not possess
      all the characteristics of a divinity. It is never desired or
      regretted, as in a northern country; it is, to all appearance
      at least, rather maleficent than beneficent; and the Africans
      adore by preference the moon and stars, the gentle radiance of
      which affords them light without oppressive heat, refreshes
      and reposes them from the fatigues of the day. The moon is
      considered by them as a male and all-powerful being, of which
      the sun is the female. It is when the new moon arises, after
      its period of absence from the heavens, and begins once more
      the round of its visible phases, that it is received and
      saluted with an especial demonstration of cries and dances.
      The Congo blacks go the length of seeing in the moon a symbol
      of immortality (M. Girard de Rialle, _Mythologie comparée_,
      p. 148). America, on the contrary, has been the centre of the
      worship of the sun. In general it seems that agriculture must
      of necessity result in the triumph of sun worship over moon
      worship, for the labourer is more dependent upon the sun than
      the hunter or the warrior. According to J. G. Müller, savage
      and warlike races have displayed a preference for the moon.

In effect, earth and sky incessantly furnish mankind with new
impressions capable of stimulating the most torpid imagination, and
of appealing to the whole round of human and social sensibilities:
fear, respect, gratitude. With these three elements it is easy to
account for the genesis of the religious sentiment.[32] If, then, our
ancestors adored the dawn, we do not believe, with Max Müller, that it
was because it seemed to open the gates of heaven and reveal to them a
vision of the infinite; we do not admit, with Mr. Spencer, that a cult
for the stars is reducible in the last resort to a simple confusion of
names, and was originally but an off-shoot from ancestor worship due
originally to the soul of some ancestor, who was metaphorically called
in his lifetime by the name of the sun or of some star. It seems to us
that one might quite well worship the sun and the stars on their own
account, or rather on account of the relation they bear to us.

      [32] As has been remarked, the adoration of natural forces has
      been observed under two forms. It has been addressed sometimes
      to regular and calm phenomena (Chaldeans, Egyptians), sometimes
      to changing and portentous phenomena (Jews, Indo-Europeans). It
      almost always results in the personification of these forces.

[Sidenote: Summary.]

To sum up, the simplest, the most primitive conception that man can
form of nature is to regard it, not as a manifold of interdependent
phenomena, but as a multitude of conscious and voluntary beings, more
or less independent and endowed with extreme power, capable of acting
upon each other and upon mankind. Scientific determinism cannot but be
a much later conception, incapable of suggesting itself in the early
stages of human thought. The world once conceived thus as a collection
of physically powerful, voluntary beings, man comes, in the course
of time, to endow these beings, morally and socially, with qualities
according to the manner in which they conduct themselves toward him.
“The moon is naughty this evening,” a child said to me; “it will not
show itself.” Primitive man said also that the hurricane was naughty,
the thunder was naughty, and so forth, whereas the sun, the moon, the
fire, when they gave him pleasure, were good and beneficent. Well,
given a world of voluntary beings sometimes good, sometimes evil, armed
with irresistible power, easy to irritate, prompt to take vengeance as
man is himself, are they not gods? And if primitive man thus possesses
gods, does he not also possess a religion as the ceremonial which
regulates his social relations with the gods? To create a religion we
need, in effect, to add but one idea to those already dealt with—the
idea that it is possible by such and such conduct, by offerings, by
supplications, to influence the superior beings with which nature
is peopled; but this idea, which seems to us quite simple, did not,
however, appear before a relatively advanced stage of intellectual
evolution. A savage animal is scarcely acquainted with any other means
of influencing other beings than biting, growling, and menacing;
if these means fail, he counts on flight. A mouse has no hope of
influencing a cat in any manner whatsoever; once between the cat’s
paws, it knows there is but one resource, to run away; still the animal
ultimately, and in especial at the period of courtship, learns to
recognize the power of caresses and attentions; it does not, however,
occur to him to employ these means toward any but individuals of the
same species. Moreover, the animals must be social before the language
of manners can attain even a very humble degree of development; the
animal confines itself generally to caresses with the tongue, with the
head, with the tail. Evidently, also, such means would be inappropriate
in regard to beings which did not possess a hide and coat of hair; an
animal would not lick a tree or a stone, even if it attributed to them
an unwonted degree of power. So that even if the brute, as Auguste
Comte supposed, really possessed fetichistic conceptions more or
less vague, it would experience a complete inability to manifest its
goodwill in any manner whatsoever toward its rudimentary fetiches.

Superstitious fear is one of the elements of religion which, after
all, is well within the capacity of an animal, but this fear cannot
in an animal produce even the first steps of an embryo cult. An
animal is ignorant of the means of touching, of captivating, of the
infinitely complex language of affection and reverence. Comparatively
inaccessible to pity himself, he has no notion how to act to excite
pity in another; the conception of a gift, of an offering, so essential
to the relations of men to each other and to their gods is, save in
rare instances, to it unknown. The most primitive cult is always
essentially a counterfeit of an advanced social state; an imitation,
in an imaginary commerce with the gods, of a commerce already existing
among men united by complex ties. Religion implies a nascent art of
sociability, an elementary acquaintance with the springs which regulate
the conduct of beings in society; there is a certain rhetoric in
prayer, in genuflections and prostrations. Everything of that kind
is far beyond the range of the lower animals. One may discover among
them, however, some traces of the process of evolution which man
must have followed. It is, in especial, under domestication that an
animal’s manners reach their highest development. Their association
with a superior being resembles, more closely than anything else in
nature, the state in which primitive man believed himself to live with
his gods. The dog seems at times to put up a veritable prayer to the
master who is beating it, when it crawls at his feet and whimpers.
This attitude, however, provoked by the fear of a blow, is perhaps in
a large measure instinctive and not reflectively designed to excite
pity. The true prayer of the dog consists in licking the hand which
wounds him; the story is well known of the dog that licked the fingers
of his master while the latter was pitilessly practising upon him an
experiment in vivisection. I myself observed an analogous fact in an
enormous dog from the Pyrenees whose eye I had to cauterize; he might
have crushed my hand, and he simply licked it feverishly. It is almost
an example of religious submission; the sentiment which is observable
in embryo in the dog is the same as that which in its complete
development appears in the Psalms and the book of Job. The lower
animals display such a sentiment toward no other being but man. As to
man himself, he displays it only toward his gods, toward an absolute
chief or a father. Profound, however, as this sentiment is in some
animals, their expression of it is quite imperfect; though I remember a
case in which the action of licking, so habitual with dogs, was almost
like a human kiss. I was embracing my mother, at the door of the house,
before leaving for a journey, when my Pyrenees dog ran up to us, and,
placing his paws upon our shoulders literally kissed both of us. From
that time on (we have tried the experiment) he never sees us embrace
each other without coming to demand his kiss.

[Sidenote: Notion of Compensation.]

Another well-known fact, and worthy of remark, is the following: when a
dog or even a cat has committed some reprehensible act, has eaten the
roast or done something clumsy, it comes toward one with a thousand
little attentions; in so much that I have found myself able to divine
when my dog had committed a peccadillo simply by observing his unwonted
demonstrations of friendship. The animal hopes therefore, by force of
his social graces and attentions, to prevent his master from holding a
grudge against him, to deprecate the wrath that his culpable conduct
ought legitimately to arouse, and to awaken in its stead some degree
of benevolence by his demonstrations of submission and affection.
This notion of compensation becomes later an important element in the
religious cult. The Neapolitan brigand who dedicates a wax candle to
the altar of the Virgin; the mediæval lord, who, after having killed
his next of kin, rears a chapel to some saint, the hermit who lacerates
his chest with his hair shirt in order to avoid the more redoubtable
pangs of hell, reason precisely after the same fashion as my dog, they
are endeavouring, like him, to conciliate their judge, and, to be quite
frank, to corrupt him; for superstition rests in a great measure upon
the belief that it is possible to corrupt God.

[Sidenote: Notion of conscious gift.]

The most difficult notion to discover among animals is that of the
voluntary and conscious gift; the solidarity observed among certain
insects, for example the ant, which causes them to hold all their
goods in common, is something too instinctive and irreflective; a
veritable gift must address itself to some determinate person, and not
to an entire society; it must possess a degree of spontaneity that
excludes any hypothesis of pure instinct; and finally, it must be as
far as possible a sign of affection, a symbol. And the more symbolic
its character, the more religious, properly speaking, it will be;
religious offerings are more than anything else a symbolic testimony of
respect; piety scarcely plays a part in them, one does not in general
believe that they answer to any real need on the part of the gods,
one believes that they will be rather accepted by them than seized
upon with avidity. The notion of a gift, therefore, presupposes a
certain delicacy and refinement. Some germ of this sentiment, however,
we discover precisely in a dog observed by Mr. Spencer. This dog, a
very intelligent and very valuable spaniel, met one morning, after an
absence of some hours, a person of whom he was very fond. He amplified
his ordinary greeting by an addition which was not habitual; he drew
back his lips in a sort of smile, and, once out of doors, offered other
demonstrations of fidelity. As a hunter he had been trained to bring
game to his master. He no doubt regretted that there was no game at the
moment for him to bring as a means of expressing his affection; however
he rummaged about, and seizing presently a dead leaf, carried it to
his master with a multitude of caressing gestures.[33] Evidently the
leaf possessed for the dog no more than a symbolic value; he knew that
it was his duty to retrieve game, and that the action of retrieving
gave pleasure to his master, and he wished to accomplish this action
under his eyes, as to the object itself it made little difference; it
was his goodwill that he wished to show. The dead leaf was a veritable
offering, it possessed a sort of moral value.

      [33] H. Spencer, _Appendix to the Principles of Sociology_.

[Sidenote: Elements of which religion is compounded within the reach of
the lower animals.]

Thus animals may acquire, by contact with man, a certain number of
sentiments which enter later into human religion. The monkey in
this respect, as in all others, seems much in advance of the other
animals. Even in the savage state a number of simiæ display gestures of
supplication to deprecate the firing of a gun at them:[34] They possess
the sentiment of pity, since they ascribe it to others. Who knows but
that there may be in this mute prayer more of real religious sentiment
than exists sometimes in the psittacism of certain believers? Animals
in general employ in their relations with man the maximum of the means
of expression at their disposal, and it is not their fault if the means
are limited; they seem to consider man as a really royal being, a thing
apart in nature.[35] Must one conclude, as is sometimes done, that man
is a god in the eyes of the rest of the animal kingdom? Not altogether;
the lower animals see man too close; even in an embryonic religion one
must not be able to touch God with one’s finger; in religion as in art,
there is an advantage in perspective. My dog and I are companions;
sometimes he is jealous, sometimes he pouts. I am unhappily in no
respect, in his eyes, on a pedestal. There are, however, evidently
exceptions, cases in which the master seems to preserve his prestige.
I believe that under certain circumstances man has appeared to some
members of the lower animals as endowed with a power so extraordinary
that he must have awakened some vague religious sentiments; if man
is sometimes a god to his fellow-men, he may well be so to the lower
animals. I am aware that in the judgment of certain philosophers, and
even of certain men of science, religion is the exclusive appanage
of the human race, but up to this point we have found in primitive
religion no more than a certain number of simple ideas, not one of
which, taken separately, is above the reach of the lower animals. Just
as industry, art, language, and reason, so religion also has its roots
in the nebulous and confused consciousness of the animal. The animal,
however, rises to such ideas only at moments. He is unable to maintain
himself at their level, to synthesize them, to reduce them to a system.
His attention is too mobile for him to regulate his conduct by them.
Even if an animal were quite as capable of conceiving a god as is the
lowest of savages, he would remain forever incapable of a religious
cult.

      [34] Brehm, _Revue scientifique_, p. 974, 1874.

      [35] Espinas, _Sociétiés animales_, p. 181.

[Sidenote: Primitive religion a paraphysics.]

We have seen that the birth of religion is not a species of theatrical
effect in nature, that preparation is being made for it among the
higher animals, and that man himself achieves it gradually, and
without shock. In this rapid effort to trace the genesis of primitive
religions, we have found no need to rely upon the conceptions of
the soul, of spirit, of the infinite, of a first cause, nor upon
any metaphysical sentiment. These ideas are of later date; they are
the product of religion, rather than the roots of it. The basis of
religion was in the beginning quite positive and natural; religion is
simply a mythical and sociomorphic theory of the physical universe,
and it is only at its summit, at an advanced degree of evolution,
that it comes into contact with metaphysics. Religion lies beyond
and at the side of science. Superstition, in the strict sense of
the word, and primitive religion were one, and it is not without
reason that Lucretius compares the two: _relligio_, _superstitio_.
To be present at the birth of religion is to perceive an erroneous
scientific conception, gathering other errors or incomplete verities
to itself, entering into one body of belief with them, and ultimately,
little by little, subordinating them. The earliest religions were
systematized and organized superstitions. Be it added that in our
judgment superstition consists simply in an ill-conducted scientific
induction, in a mistaken effort of human reason; and we do not wish to
be understood as intending by that the mere play of the imagination;
we do not wish to be understood as holding that religion is founded
in the last resort on a species of recreation of the mind. How often
the birth of religion has been attributed to an alleged appetite for
the marvellous, for the extraordinary, which is supposed to seize upon
young peoples as upon infants! A singularly artificial explanation for
a very natural and profound tendency. To say the truth, what primitive
peoples were in search of when they built up their different religions
was an explanation, and the least surprising explanation possible,
the explanation most in harmony with their rude intelligence, the
most rational explanation. It was infinitely less marvellous for an
ancient to suppose that the thunder came from the hand of Indra or
of Jupiter, than to believe it to be the product of a certain force
called electricity; the myth was for him a much more satisfying
explanation; it was the most plausible one that he could hit upon,
given his intellectual habitat. So that if science consists in relating
things, Jupiter and Jehovah may be regarded as rudimentary scientific
conceptions. If they are no longer such, the reason is simply that we
have discovered the natural and regular laws which supersede them.
When a task, so to speak, begins to perform itself, one dismisses the
employee who had previously been charged with it; but one should be
careful not to say that he was previously good for nothing, that he
had been stationed there by caprice or by favour. If our gods seem
nowadays to be purely honorary, the fact was otherwise at a previous
period. Religions are not the work of caprice; they correspond to an
invincible tendency in man, and sometimes in the lower animals, to try
to understand what passes before his eyes. Religion is nascent science,
and it was with purely physical problems that it at first essayed to
grapple. It was a physics _à côté_, a paraphysics, before becoming a
science _au delà_, a metaphysics.

CHAPTER II.

RELIGIOUS METAPHYSICS.

    I. Animism or polydemonism—Formation of the dualist
      conception of spirit—Social relations with spirits.

    II. Providence and miracles—The evolution of the dualist
      conception of a special providence—The conception of
      miracles—The supernatural and the natural—Scientific
      explanation and miracles—Social and moral modifications
      in the character of man owing to supposed social relations
      with a special providence—Increasing sentiment of
      irresponsibility and passivity and “absolute dependence.”

    III. The creation—Genesis of the notion of creation—The
      dualistic elements in this idea—Monism—Classification
      of systems of religious metaphysics—Criticism of the
      classification proposed by Von Hartmann—Criticism of the
      classification proposed by Auguste Comte.

_I. Animism._

[Sidenote: Legitimate and illegitimate metaphysics.]

The upshot of the preceding chapter is that every religion in its
beginning consisted of a mistaken system of physics; and between a
mistaken system of physics and certain forms of metaphysics there
is often no difference but one of degree simply. Magnify some
scientific error, reduce it to a system, explain heaven and earth
by it, and it will be a metaphysics—in the bad sense. Whatever one
universalizes—error or truth—acquires metaphysical significance, and
possibly it is more easy to universalize in this way the false than
the true; truth possesses always a greater concreteness than error,
and therefore offers greater resistance to arbitrary fashioning. Let a
modern man of science develop his knowledge as he will, and enlarge the
circle of known phenomena; so long as he holds vigorously by scientific
methods he will never be able to pass at a bound from the sphere of
phenomena to the sphere of things in themselves. The conscientious
man of science is prisoned within the limits of knowledge, his
thought has no outlet. But let him once break the chain of logic which
confines him, and behold him free. His false hypothesis grows without
obstacle or check from reality; he lands at a bound up to his neck in
metaphysics. The fact is, one may arrive at a system of metaphysics
in two ways—incontinently, by a logical solecism and an exaggeration
of some false premise _ad infinitum_, or by following the chain of
known truth to the point at which it disappears in eternal night, and
by endeavouring to peer into the darkness by the light of hypothesis:
in the first case metaphysics is simply a logically developed mistake
which gains in magnitude what it loses in reality, an illegitimate
negation of science; in the second case it is a hypothetical extension
of truth, in some sort a legitimate supplement to science.

We are approaching the moment when religious physics became transformed
into metaphysics; the period when the gods retreated from phenomenon
to phenomenon, and took refuge ultimately in the supersensible; the
period when heaven and earth first became distinct and separate;
although, to be quite accurate, the distinguishing characteristic of
religion even at the present day is an incoherent mixture of physics
and metaphysics, of anthropomorphic or sociomorphic theories in regard
to nature and to the supernatural. The foundation of every primitive
religion is reasoning by analogy, that is to say, the vaguest and least
sound of logical methods. At a later date the mass of naïve analogies
constituting any one religion is criticised and systematized and
completed by tentative induction or regular deduction.

[Sidenote: Primitive metaphysics a fetichistic monism.]

Man, as we have seen, begins by creating a natural society, including
animals, plants, and even minerals, which he endows with a life similar
to his own: he believes himself to be in communication with them in
matters of volition and intention, just as he is in communication with
other men and animals. But in thus projecting something analogous to
his own life, to his power of volition and of his social relations and
responsibilities, into the existence of external things, he does not,
at first, dream of any distinction between the animating principle and
the body which it animates; he conceives as yet no such distinction in
his own case. The earliest stage of religious metaphysics, therefore,
is not a sort of vague monism relative to the divine principle, the
indwelling divinity of things, τὸ θεῖον, as Messrs. Müller and Von
Hartmann affirm, but a vague monism in regard to the soul and body,
which at first are conceived as one. The whole world is a society of
living _bodies_.

[Sidenote: Becomes a dualistic animism. Separate existence of the soul.]

The conception which is most analogous to the preceding is that of
distinct and separate souls animating each its body, of spirits capable
of quitting each its dwelling-place. It is this that historians of
religion mean by animism. What is remarkable in this conception is its
dualistic character. It contains the germ of the opposition between
soul and body. The dualistic conception arises slowly from a number of
naïve analogies. The first are borrowed from the fact of respiration.
Does not one fairly hear the departure of the breath animating a living
body, in what one calls the last gasp? Other analogies are borrowed
from the physical fact of the shadow cast by the sun; one seems to see
the spirit marching side by side with the body, and even changing its
place when the body is motionless. Shadow has played a large rôle in
the paraphysics of primitive peoples; shadows people the other world.
In the third place, during sleep it is incontestable, on the premises
that primitive man has at his disposal, that the spirit sometimes makes
long journeys, for the sleeper often recollects wandering, hunting,
or making war in distant countries, at a time when his companions are
perfectly aware that his body has lain motionless. Fainting also seems
to be a case in which something dwelling in us suddenly leaves and
presently comes back again. Lethargy is a more striking example of the
same thing. Visions in delirium, hallucinations in madness, or even
in dreams, deal with beings who are invisible to others; fantastic
beings who appear to savages as real as any others. Also it is well
known that fools and innocents were regarded, until modern times, as
inspired and sacred. Other nervous maladies—hysteria, “possession,”
somnambulism—add their quota of precision to the conception of a
spirit animating the body, dwelling in it, quitting it more or less at
will, tormenting it, etc.

Thus, by degrees, there arises the conception of a subtle mode of being
eluding touch, and commonly vision even, capable of a life independent
of the body it inhabits, and more powerful than the body. Man comes to
believe himself to be living in a society with beings other than those
who appeal directly and grossly to his senses; he believes himself to
be living in a society of spirits.

[Sidenote: Ghosts.]

That is not all. The problem of death early engaged the attention of
primitive people. They considered it altogether as a physical affair;
they explained it, as Messrs. Tylor and Spencer (following Lucretius)
have shown, by a number of inductions drawn from observations on sleep,
lethargy, and dream. A sleeping body awakes, it seems to follow that a
dead body will awake; that is the line of reasoning. Moreover, the dead
come back in dreams, or in the demi-hallucinations of the night and of
fear. The modern conception of pure spirit is an indirect and later
consequence of a belief in immortality, it is not itself the principle
of it. A cult for the dead, for the manes, as the Romans said, is
partly explicable on moral or psychological grounds, as, for example,
by a prolongation of filial respect and fear, and partly on grounds
altogether material and gross. A cult for the dead rests on a naïve
theory based on sentiment; it is semi-physical and semi-psychological.
The nature of a departed soul has been conceived in very different
ways. Among the Dakota Indians of North America, one’s double goes up
into the air, one’s _third_ rejoins the spirits, one’s fourth and last
soul stays by the body; an instance of a very complicated theory formed
out of elements altogether primitive. In general, the belief is that
the souls of the dead go to join ancestral souls in another world,
which is commonly a distant land from which the tribe has migrated
in former times—affording an example of a social tie which survives
death. The Greeks and Romans believed that, if the body was deprived
of sepulture, its shadow could not penetrate into its proper place of
abode; it remained on earth and haunted the living—a remnant of former
beliefs in the necessity of sepulture and the maintenance of friendly
relations with the society of the dead.[36]

      [36] See the author’s _Morale d’Épicure_ (_Des idées antiques
      sur la mort_) 3d edition, p. 105.

[Sidenote: Analogies between ghosts and living people.]

The dead were to be conciliated by the same means as the living, by
supplications and gifts. The gifts were the same as those which are
acceptable to the living—food, arms, costumes, horses, servants. In
Dahomey, when a king dies, a hundred of his soldiers are immolated on
his tomb as a body guard. Much the same thing was done among the Incas
of Peru. At Bali all the women of the harem are immolated upon the
grave of the defunct sultan. In Homer, Achilles slaughtered his Trojan
prisoners on the funeral pyre of Patroclus, together with the horses
and the dogs of his dead friend. The Fiji islanders used to immolate a
man at the foot of each pillar in the home of a chief, as a guard for
the edifice. In our days, spirits are still so numerous, in the eyes
of certain people, that an Arab, for example, when he throws a stone,
breathes an apology to such spirits as he may strike.[37] The universe
is populated by anthropomorphic societies.

      [37] See Le Bon, _L’Homme et les Sociétés_, t. ii.

[Sidenote: Care of vengeance committed to ghosts.]

It was to spirits that the care of one’s vengeances was confided.
According to Tylor, two Brahmans, believing that a man had robbed them
of fifty rupees, took their own mother and, with her consent, cut off
her head in order that her shadow might torment and pursue the robber
till death. Among the Alfourous of Moluccas children are buried alive
up to the neck, and left there under the scorching sun with their
mouths full of pepper and salt, so that, dying in an agony of thirst,
their souls may go in a state of fury in search of the enemy against
whom they have been sent. It is always some social exigency, some
hatred, some vengeance, some punishment, that leads one to enter into
commerce with spirits.

[Sidenote: Summary.]

In effect, all historical treatises unite to show that animism or
polydemonism has at one time or other been universal. It immediately
succeeded fetichism or concrete naturism, the primitive belief, in
which animating soul and animated body were not distinguished.

A belief in separately existing spirits, or spiritism, as Mr. Spencer
calls it, which contains the germ of the belief in revisitants from
the other world, constitutes the primitive origin of the more refined
metaphysical system called spiritualism. This last system, founded also
upon the notion of the fundamental duality of man, and of every living
being, leads to the notion of a society of spirits.

Let us now consider the inherent necessity under which animism lies of
developing into theism.

_II. Providence and Miracles._

[Sidenote: From ghosts to divinity a single step.]

From the notion of a spirit to that of a divinity is but one step.
It suffices to conceive the spirit as sufficiently powerful and
redoubtable to reduce us in some considerable measure to a state of
dependence. Spirits, manes, gods, subsist in the beginning on an
indistinct sentiment of terror. The instant that spirits can separate
themselves from the body and perform mysterious actions of which we are
incapable, they begin to be divine; it is for this reason that death
may change a man into a species of god.

[Sidenote: Development of notion of special providence.]

Spirits are not only powerful, however; they are also clairvoyant,
prevoyant—they are acquainted with things that lie beyond our
knowledge. More than that, they are benevolent or hostile; they
are related to us in various social or antisocial ways. Here we
have the elements of the notion of divine providence. The second
semi-metaphysical idea, which lies in germ at the bottom of every
religion, is, therefore, this of perspicacious spirits, of favouring
or unfavouring deities, of providences. “This being is well or ill
disposed toward me; he may work me good or harm.” Such is the first
naïve formulation of the theory of divine providence. One must
not expect to find, in the beginning, the notion of a general,
directing intelligence, but simply that of a social tie between
particular voluntary, well-disposed or ill-disposed beings. The notion
of providence, like all other religious notions, was at first a
superstition. A savage, on his way to some undertaking, meets a serpent
and succeeds in his enterprise; it was the serpent that brought him
luck: behold a providential accident! Gamblers at the present time
are quite as superstitious. The fetich theory of providence still
subsists, in the belief in medals, scapularies, and so forth.[38]
Observation inevitably results in the perception of causal relations
among phenomena; the trouble is, simply, that to the primitive mind
every coincidence appears to be a cause; _post hoc, ergo propter hoc_.
Any object that is a party to any such coincidence is a lucky object,
good to have in one’s power, a portable providence, so to speak. Thus
there arises the notion of a destiny, a bias in phenomena toward good
or evil, which imposes itself upon the previously existing conception
of nature as animated or peopled by spirits. The _post hoc, ergo
propter hoc_—that is to say, the belief in the influence of phenomena
immediately preceding or concomitant to the main event, and in the
influence of a present action upon some future event—is the germ of
superstitions both in regard to providence and to destiny. And out of
the idea of destiny, of fortune, of necessity, grows in process of time
the scientific notion of determinism and universal reciprocity.

      [38] A belief in relics, pushed so far by the earlier
      Christians and by so many Catholics to-day, is, too, a sort
      of faith in fetiches or amulets. From the earliest period of
      Christianity the faithful were accustomed to go to the Holy
      Land to obtain water from the Jordan, and gather dust from the
      soil that the feet of Christ had trod, and to break pieces from
      the true cross, which St. Paulin of Nole says, “possesses in
      all its parts a vital force in so much that although its wood
      be every day clipped off by innumerable pilgrims, it remains
      intact.” Relics are supposed not only to cure the body, but
      the soul of those who touch them: Gregory sent to a barbarous
      king the chains that had served to manacle the apostle Paul;
      assuring him that the same chains which had manacled the body
      of the saint could deliver the heart from sin.

      This superstition for relics, common in the Middle Ages, was
      held in all its naïveté by Bishop Gregory of Tours. He relates
      that one day when he was suffering from a pain in the temples,
      a touch from the hangings about the tomb of St. Martin cured
      him. He repeated the experiment three times with equal success.
      Once, he tells, he was attacked by a mortal dysentery; he
      drank a glass of water in which he had dissolved a pinch of
      dust scraped up on the tomb of the saint, and his health was
      restored. One day a bone stuck in his throat, he began praying
      and groaning, and kneeled before the tomb; he stretched out
      his hand and touched the hangings and the bone disappeared.
      “I do not know,” he says, “what became of it, for I neither
      threw it up nor felt it pass downward into my stomach.” At
      another time his tongue became swollen and tumefied; he licked
      the railing of the tomb of St. Martin and his tongue became
      of its natural size. St. Martin’s relics go the length even
      of curing toothache. “Oh, ineffable theriac!” cries Gregory
      of Tours, “ineffable pigment! admirable antidote! celestial
      purge! superior to all the drugs of the faculty! sweeter than
      aromatics, stronger than all unguents together! Thou cleanest
      the stomach like scammony, the lungs like hyssop; thou purgest
      the head like pyrethrig.”

[Sidenote: Systematic subordination among the gods.]

Little by little, by the growth of experience, man achieves the
conception of an orderly subordination among the different voluntary
beings with whom he peoples the earth, a sort of unification of
special providences, a more or less regular organization of the world.
Responsibility for current events retreats from cause to cause into the
distance, from powerful being to still more powerful being; primitive
man still insists on believing that every event is still the sign,
the expression of a volition. Once more his faith is dualistic: he
conceives the world as dependent upon the will of some one or more
superior beings who direct it, or suspend at need the ordinary course
of things.

[Sidenote: Development of belief in miracle.]

It is at this stage in the evolution of religion that the conception
of miracles appears. The notion of miracles is at first very vague in
primitive religions; the period at which this notion begins to become
definite marks the initiation of a further step in the development
of religion. If, in effect, the marvellous has in all times formed
a necessary element in the constitution, it did not possess in the
beginning the same character as nowadays; it was not so definitely
distinguished from the natural order of things. Human intelligence
had not yet distinguished scientific determinism and supernaturalism.
A natural phenomenon! The bare idea is almost modern; that is to
say, the idea of a phenomenon subject to immutable laws, bound up
together with the whole body of other phenomena and forming with them
a single unit. What a complex conception, and how far above the reach
of primitive intelligence! What we call a miracle _is_ a natural
phenomenon to a savage, he sees miracles every hour; properly speaking,
he sees nothing else but miracles, that is to say, surprising events.
Primitive man, in effect, takes no notice of what does not surprise
him (surprise, it has been said, is the father of science), and one of
the immediate characteristics, in his opinion, of what surprises him,
is that it is intentional.[39] That it should be so no more shocks
him, than a paradox shocks a philosopher. The savage is not acquainted
with the laws of nature, he has no notion of their being universal
to prevent his admitting exceptions to them. A miracle is simply to
him a sign of a power like his own, acting by methods unknown to him
and producing effects above the limits of his own capacity. Are such
effects _infinitely_ above his capacity? No such notion enters into the
question; it suffices that they be above it at all to make him bow down
and adore.

      [39] Etymologically, miracle signifies simply surprising. The
      Hindus do not even possess a special word for a supernatural
      event; miracle and spectacle in their language are one. The
      supernatural, that is to say, is for them simply an object
      of contemplation and admiration, an event which stands out
      prominently from the general monotony which attracts the eye.

[Sidenote: Marks a degree of intellectual progress.]

The belief in miracles, so anti-scientific nowadays, marks a
considerable progress in the intellectual evolution. It amounts, in
effect, to a limitation of divine intervention to a small number of
extraordinary phenomena. A conception of universal determinism is, in
fact, beginning to make its appearance. The belief in dualism, in the
separation between spirit and body, becoming constantly more marked,
ends in the belief in distinct and separate powers.

[Sidenote: Conception of God as Providence more essential than that of
Him as First Cause.]

Belief in a power miraculously distributing good and evil, in a
Providence, is the most vital element in religion. The most important
act in every religion, indeed, is propitiation and entreaty; well,
this act is not simply directed toward God as such, but toward God as
a presiding divinity, a power capable of favouring or disfavouring
us. And the great Oriental religions have reached their present state
of perfection without any special effort to make the notion of God
precise, without specially insisting upon any of his distinguishing
attributes except such as are subsidiary to this notion of a Providence
awarding good and evil; and popular fancy hastens to ascribe the
accomplishment of this distribution to genii, to good and evil spirits;
it need go no further, it need not penetrate to the Great Being, to
the infinite, so to speak, to the noumenon, and to the abyss which,
in effect, is to it a comparative matter of indifference. Even in
religions of Christian origin—in especial, in Catholicism, and the
Greek Church—God is not always addressed directly; saints, angels,
the Virgin, the Son, the Holy Spirit, are much more frequently invoked
as mediators. There is something vague, and obscure, and terrible,
in God the Father; He is the creator of heaven and hell, the great
and somewhat ambiguous principle of goodness, and, in some dim way,
of evil. One may see in Him the germ of an indirect personification
of nature, which is so indifferent to man, so hard, so inflexible.
Christ, on the contrary, is the personification of the best elements
of humanity. The responsibility for ferocious laws, maledictions,
eternal punishments, is laid upon the shoulders of the Old Testament
Deity hidden behind His cloud, revealed only in the lightning and
the thunder, reigning by terror, and demanding the life even of His
Son as an expiatory sacrifice. At bottom, the real God adored by the
Christians is Jesus, that is to say, a mediating Providence whose
function is to soften down the asperities of natural law, a Providence
who distributes nothing but good and happiness, whereas nature
distributes good and evil with equal indifference. It is Jesus we
invoke, and it is to the personification of Providence rather than to
that of the first cause of the world that humanity has kneeled these
two thousand years.

[Sidenote: Increasing opposition between notion of Providence and
science.]

A belief in miracles and in a Providence comes, in the course of its
development, into sharper and sharper conflict with a belief in the
order of nature. Man gives himself up to an exclusive preoccupation
with what he supposes to be the means of ameliorating his destiny and
that of his fellows: providential interference with the course of
nature, sacrifice, and prayer are his great means of action on the
world. He lives in the supernatural. There exists always, in the early
stages of every religion, a certain sentiment of evil, of suffering,
of terror; and to correct it the believer takes refuge in miracles.
Providence is thus the primitive means of progress, and man’s first
hope lay in the superhuman.

[Sidenote: Practical evil of belief in Providence.]

Fear of evil, and belief that it can be cured by divine intervention,
were the origin of prayer. A positive religion, even in our days, can
scarcely rest content with the conception of a God who simply sits at
a distance and watches the march of a world which he regulated, once
for all, at the beginning of time. He must absolutely show himself
from time to time in our midst, we must feel the proximity of his hand
ready to sustain us, he must be able to suspend the course of nature to
our profit. Piety requires the stimulus of a belief in the immediate
and present possibility of miracles, in their past existence, in their
present existence even, and in one’s power of invoking them by prayer.
Thus the believer opposes to the conception of ordinary determinism,
as the regulating principle of the external world, a faith in a being
capable at any moment of tampering with it; and he counts upon this
power being exercised, he counts upon invoking it, he puts his hope in
supernatural means not less than in natural means, and sometimes even
to the neglect of the latter.

[Sidenote: Miracles not frauds.]

As Littré remarked, the mind may behave in three ways in regard to
miracles: adore them, reject them as a mystification, or explain them
by natural means. Primitive times, Antiquity, and the Middle Ages
adored miracles; the eighteenth century rejected them as impostures
and made game of them. It was then that the theory, that the founders
of religion were impostors simply, was generally prevalent. One of
the most necessary and most serious incidents in the human drama was
simply mistaken for a bit of comedy. It was forgotten that men do not
devote a whole lifetime to falsehood; the theory of imposture was a
psychological as well as historical error. A man—even an actor or a
politician—is always sincere on some side or other; at some period or
other a man inevitably says what he thinks, even if only by mistake.
Even certain palinodes, provoked by self-interest, are explicable by an
unconscious deviation, under the influence of some passion, rather than
by an altogether conscious and brazen determination to deceive; and
even when one lies with all one’s heart, one inevitably believes, or
soon comes to believe, some part of one’s own falsehood. The reproach
of hypocrisy, of comedy and falsehood, has been uttered a hundred
times in the course of history, and it has usually been a mistake.
In the eighteenth century the same men who prepared and achieved the
French Revolution were fond of accusing the prophets and Apostles,
the revolutionists of an early date, of insincerity and fraud. To-day
such an accusation can no longer be sustained against the sacred
books, and the men of the eighteenth century are themselves accused
of hypocrisy. For M. Taine, for example, almost all the leaders of
the French Revolution lie under the reproach of insincerity, and the
very people who sustained them were not, in his judgment, moved by
the ideas which they proclaimed, but by the grossest self-interest.
The fact is, there are always two points of view from which historic
events may be regarded: that of personal interests, which come to the
surface as seldom as possible, and that of the general and generous
ideas which, on the contrary, are complacently given prominence in
public speeches and writings. If it is useful for the historian to
divine the interested motives which contributed to the production of
a historical event, it is irrational to refuse to lend some measure
of credence to the higher motives which justified it and which may
well have lent their influence to that of self-interest. The human
heart is not a one-stringed instrument. The revolutionists had faith
in the Revolution, in the rights which they were vindicating, in
equality and fraternity; they even believed, sometimes, in their own
disinterestedness, as the Protestants believed in the Reformation, as
Christ and the prophets believed in their own inspiration; as even in
our days, by a belated superstition, the Pope believes in his own
infallibility. There is in every faith some element of the naïveté
which a child shows in its little semi-conscious hypocrisies, in its
caresses which mask a demand and its smiles which are the efflorescence
of satisfied desire. But without a certain element of genuineness,
a certain element of real naïveté in the faith of the believers, no
religion could exist, no revolution would be achieved, no important
change would be produced in the life of humanity. Intellectual
affirmation and action are always proportionate: to act is to believe
and to believe is to act.

[Sidenote: But illusions.]

In our days, miracles are beginning to be scientifically explained.
They are phenomena simply; frequently they were witnessed and described
in good faith, but with insufficient knowledge. Everyone is acquainted,
for example, with the biblical miracle according to which Isaiah
“brought again the shadows of the degrees, which was gone down in the
sun dial of Ahaz, ten degrees backward”; indeed the miracle has been
reproduced. Mr. Guillemin[40] demonstrates by geometrical reasonings
that, by inclining the dial slightly toward the horizon, the shadow
may be made gradually to creep a certain distance backward. In the
same way, the successive appearances of Jesus after his burial have
been paralleled by a recent event in the United States: a criminal,
at whose execution all his fellow-prisoners were present, appeared to
all of them successively the next day, or the day after. The latter is
a remarkable instance of collective hallucination, which shows that
a group of individuals living in, so to speak, the same emotional
habitat may well be struck at the same time by the same vision, without
there being, on their part, either conscious or unconscious fraud or
collusion. A third miracle, of an altogether different kind, has also
been scientifically explained: I mean the colouring of the fleece of
the flocks of Laban and of Jacob; the effect was obtained by a process
well-known to the Egyptians, and mentioned by Pliny. Matthew Arnold
believes that the miraculous cures also are not pure legend simply,
that they bear witness to the great influence of mind over matter.
Jesus really did exorcise devils, that is to say, the mad passions
which howled about him. And thus may be understood in their true sense
the words: “What does it matter whether I say, _Thy_ sins are forgiven
thee! or whether I say Arise and walk?” and again: “Thou art made
whole; sin no more, lest a worse thing befall thee.” Jesus himself
must have known, as Socrates and Empedocles did, though even in a more
extraordinary degree, that he possessed a moral and physical power, a
virtue, which he himself did not understand and which seemed to him a
divine gift. He knew himself to be morally and symbolically the healer
of the deaf, the blind, the paralytic, a physician of souls; and the
cures that he wrought in cases of hysteria, more or less temporary but
real, forced him to attribute to himself a superhuman power over the
body also.

      [40] _Actes de la Société helvét. des sc. nat._, August, 1877.

[Sidenote: Usually explicable by the science of nervous phenomena.]

The science of the nervous system, which dates almost entirely from our
days, may be taken as a perpetual running commentary on the history
of miracles. Perhaps a full quarter of the marvellous facts observed
and revered by humanity fall into place within the limits of this
new science. A physician, or observer, in the midst of his subjects
is like a prophet; those who surround him are incessantly obliged to
recognize in him an occult power, which he himself does not understand;
physician and patient, observer and observed, live equally in the realm
of the extraordinary. The facts of partial insensibility, of catalepsy
followed by a reawakening like a rising from the dead, of mental
suggestion taking place even at a distance, all these facts, which are
well known, and are each day becoming more and more explicable, are
even for us at the present moment on the confines of the miraculous;
they are detaching themselves, under our very eyes, from the sphere of
religion, and falling within the compass of science. The observer who
notices for the first time that he can transmit an almost compulsive
command by a look, by a pressure of the hand, and even, it appears
nowadays, by a simple tension of his will, must experience a species of
surprise, even of fright, of almost religious disquietude at finding
himself armed with such a power. He must begin to understand that
the mythical and mystical interpretation of such facts is an affair
of delicate discrimination, that lay beyond the stretch of primitive
intelligence.

[Sidenote: Often by less recondite knowledge.]

Even the miracles which do not belong simply to the less explicable
phenomena of the nervous system tend increasingly to appear to the
historian as having been possessed of some foundation in fact. All
that was subjective in them is the element of the marvellous and the
providential. The miracles really were produced, but in the human
heart; and instead, in any proper sense, of engendering faith they
proceeded from it and are explicable by it. An English missionary[41]
who made a journey in Siberia relates that at the moment of his
arrival at Irkutsk a fire was consuming three-fourths of the town; a
chapel, however, had been spared and the Russian clergy saw in this
fact a miracle; the English missionary explained it very simply by the
observation that the rest of the town had been built up of wood, and
that the chapel was of brick. But the missionary, who denies anything
like providential intervention in the above mentioned case, admits
providential intervention the same day in regard to another point; for
he relates that but for one of his horses having run away he would have
arrived too soon at Irkutsk, and would have had his baggage burned in
the fire, and offers thanks to God because his horse had been inspired
to break the traces. The same natural causes which suffice, according
to this excellent gentleman, to explain why the Russian church was
spared, suffice no longer when the luggage of an Anglican missionary,
the special _protégé_, is involved. Every believer is inclined thus to
interpret miraculously the mercies that have been shown to him. From
the height of a stall or the pulpit of a church one sees the events of
this world at a particular angle; from the stall or pulpit of another
church one sees them at another angle, and for purposes of scientific
verity the events must be looked down upon from the stalls and pulpits
of every church—unless one rejects churches altogether.

      [41] _Through Siberia_, by Henry Lansdell, with illustrations
      and maps; London, 1882.

[Sidenote: Miracles essential to religion.]

Religions create miracles by the very need that they themselves feel
for them, they create them as evidence in their own support; miracles
enter as a necessary element into the process of mental evolution which
engenders religion. The distinguishing mark of the word of God is that
it alters the order of natural phenomena. Mohammedanism alone made its
way in the world without the assistance of visible and gross evidence
in its favour, appealing not to the eyes but to the spirit, as Pascal
would say; and in this respect it may perhaps claim an intellectual
elevation that Judaism and Christianity cannot. But if Mohammed refused
the gift of miracles, with a good faith that Moses seems not to have
possessed, his disciples hastened to force it upon him, and have
supplied his life and death with an appropriate setting of marvellous
legend. Ground of belief must be had; the messenger of God must present
some visible sign by which he may be recognized.

[Sidenote: Prevalence of belief in special providence.]

It is evident that divine providence or protection must have been
conceived in the beginning as quite _special_, and not as acting by
general laws. The course of the world was one continual series of
divine interventions in the natural order of things, and in the affairs
of men; divinities lived in the midst of mankind, in the midst of
the family, in the midst of the tribe. This result may be explained
as due to the very character of primitive humanity. Primitive man,
who is the most credulous, is evidently also the least responsible
of mankind; incapable of governing himself, he is always willing
to abandon himself to the management of somebody else; in every
circumstance of life he needs to share some part of his burden. If a
misfortune happens to him, he relies on anybody or anything rather
than on himself. This characteristic, which has been remarked in a
number of races of mankind, is especially visible in infants and in
infant peoples. They lack patience to follow without skipping a link
in the chain of cause and effect; they do not understand how any
human action can produce any great effect, and are, in general, much
astonished at the disproportion which exists between effects and their
causes—a disproportion which is only explicable in their eyes by the
intervention of some foreign cause. Hence the need, so remarkable in
feeble minds, to discover some other than the real explanation for
a phenomenon; the real explanation is never, in their eyes, truly
sufficient. For a vanquished soldier, the defeat is never sufficiently
explained by scientific grounds; for example, by his own cowardice, by
the ill-management of the men on the field, by the ignorance of the
leaders; before the explanation is complete the notion of treason must
always be added. Just so, if one of the lower classes has an attack
of indigestion, he will not admit that he has eaten too much; he will
complain of the quality of the food, and perhaps even suggest that
somebody has tried to poison him. In the Middle Ages, when there was
pestilence, it was the fault of the Jews; at Naples the people beat the
images of the saints when the harvest is not good. All these facts are
explicable in the same way; an uncultivated mind cannot bring itself
to accept a result which is disagreeable to it, cannot resign itself
to having been unexpectedly disconcerted by the mere brute course of
things, to say with Turenne, when he was asked how he lost a battle:
“By my own fault.” The notion of a special providence allies itself
with his natural disposition; it permits man to wash his hands of all
responsibility, no matter what happens. A result which it would be
too much trouble to foresee, and to obtain by mere natural means, can
always be demanded at the hand of Providence; one waits for it instead
of working for it; and if one is deceived in one’s expectations one
lays the blame on the Deity. In the Bible, kings are never guilty
except toward God, their incapacity is simply impiety; but it is always
easier to be pious than to be capable.

[Sidenote: Belief in Providence tames people for absolute monarchy.]

At the same time that the naïve irresponsibility of primitive people
thus accommodates itself to the providential government of the world,
it accommodates itself no less to the despotic government of a monarch
or of an aristocracy. The principle of despotism is at bottom identical
with that of a supernatural, external providence; the latter also
demands a certain renunciation or abdication in the direction of
events. One lets one’s self go, one confides one’s self to someone
else, and by this means one winks at the cruellest of frauds, the
defraudment of one’s own volition; another wills and determines in
one’s stead. One limits one’s self to desiring and hoping, and prayers
and supplications take the place of action and of work. One floats with
the stream in a state of relaxation; if things turn ill there is always
someone for one to blame, to curse, or to wheedle; if, on the contrary,
things turn out well, one’s heart overflows with benedictions, not to
mention that one secretly attributes some part (man is so made) of
the result obtained to one’s self. Instead of saying, “I determined
that it should be so,” one says, “I asked, I prayed for it.” It is so
easy to believe that one is helping to manage the state, or govern
the earth, when one has murmured two words into the ear of a king
or a god—when, like the fly in the fable, one has simply buzzed an
instant about the great rolling wheel of the world. Propitiatory prayer
possesses a power which is great in proportion to its vagueness; it
seems to be able to do everything precisely because it cannot ever do
anything in especial. It exalts man in his own eyes because it enables
him to obtain the maximum of effect with the minimum of effort. What a
penchant the people have always felt for destiny and men of destiny!
How every appeal to the people, in behalf of men of destiny, has in all
times succeeded in taking the suffrage of the masses! A sentiment of
submission to the decrees of Providence, who is destiny personified,
has been the excuse of every form of indolence, of every cowardly
adherence to custom. And if one carries it to its logical conclusion,
to what else does the indolent sophism of the Orientals amount? It is
true that the precept, “Heaven will aid thee,” is habitually corrected
by the precept, “Aid thyself.” But efficiency to aid one’s self demands
initiative, and audacity, and a spirit of revolt against an unwelcome
course of things; efficiently to aid one’s self one must not say,
“God’s will be done,” but “My will be done”; one must be a rebel in
the midst of the passive multitude, a sort of Prometheus or Satan. It
is difficult to say to one, “Whatever happens, whatever exists, is what
it is, by the irresistible and special will of God,” and nevertheless
to add, “Do not submit to the accomplished facts.” In the Middle Ages
men consoled themselves in the midst of tyranny and poverty by thinking
that it was God himself who was oppressing them, and dared not rise
against their masters for fear they might be rising really against God.
To preserve social injustice it had to be apotheosized. What was really
no more than a human right had to be made divine.

[Sidenote: Personal initiative a defiance of the gods.]

The sentiment of personal initiative, like that of personal
responsibility, is quite modern and incapable of being developed in
the atmosphere of bigotry and narrowness in which man has long lived
with his gods. To say to one’s self, “I can undertake something new;
I shall have the audacity to introduce a change into the world; to
make an advance; in the combat against brute nature I shall shoot the
first arrow, without waiting, like the soldier of antiquity, till the
auspices have been consulted”—would have looked like an enormity to
men of former times; to men who did not take a step without consulting
their gods and carrying their images before them to show the way.
Personal initiative was, on the face of it, a direct offence against
Providence, an encroachment on His rights; to strike the rock as Moses
did, before having received the order to do so from God, would have
been to expose one’s self to His wrath. The world was the private
property of the Most High. It was not permitted to a man to employ
the forces of nature without special leave; man was in the position
of a child, who is not allowed to play with the fire; except that the
reason for prohibiting the child is not the same—we do not prohibit
children from playing with the fire because we are “jealous” of them.
The jealousy of the gods is a conception which has survived till the
present day, although it is incessantly retreating before the progress
made by human initiative. Machinery, the product of modern times, is
the most powerful enemy that the notion of a Providence has ever had to
wrestle with. One knows how the innocent winnowing machine was cursed
by the priests, and looked upon with an eye of hatred by the peasants,
because it imprisoned and employed in the service of man an essentially
providential force—that of the wind. But malediction was useless,
the wind could not refuse to winnow the wheat; the machine vanquished
the gods. There, as everywhere, human initiative carried the day.
Science found itself in direct opposition to the special intervention
of Providence, and appropriated and subdued the forces of nature to
an end, in appearance, not divine but natural. A man of science is a
disturbing element in nature, and science an anti-providence.

[Sidenote: Man practically a domestic animal in the house of the gods:
resulting enfeeblement of character.]

Before the earliest developments of science, primitive man found
himself, as a result of his imagination, in a state of domesticity
in the world, analogous to that to which he had himself reduced
certain animals; and this state exerted a profound influence upon
the character of such animals, deprived them of certain capacities
and endowed them, in turn, with others. Some of them—certain birds,
for example—become under domestication almost incapable of finding
and providing themselves with their necessary food. More intelligent
animals like the dog, who might in a case of absolute necessity rely
upon himself for indispensables, contract nevertheless a habit of
subjection to man which creates a corresponding need: my dog is not
at ease except when he knows that I am near; if anything causes me
to go away, he is restless and nervous; in the presence of danger he
runs between my legs, instead of taking refuge in flight, which would
be the primitive instinct. Thus every animal which knows itself to be
watched and protected in the details of its life by a superior being,
necessarily loses its primitive independence, and if its primitive
independence should be once more restored, it would be unhappy, would
experience an ill-defined fear, a vague sentiment of enfeeblement.
Just so in the case of primitive and uncultivated man: once he is
habituated to the protection of the gods, this protection becomes
for him a veritable need; if he is deprived of it, he falls into
a state of inexpressible discomfiture and inquietude. Add that, in
this case, he will soon provide himself with a substitute; to escape
from the intolerable solitude which doubt creates within him, he
will take refuge in his gods or his fetiches, under the influence of
a sentiment identical with that which sends the dog to take refuge
between the legs of his master. To attain some idea of the force of
such a sentiment among primitive human beings, one must remember that
the surveillance of the gods is much more extended and more scrupulous
even than that of man over domestic animals, or of a master over his
slaves. Primitive man feels his god or his genii at his side at every
step, in all the circumstances of life; he is accustomed to being
never alone, to the presence of someone by him keeping step with him;
he believes that every word that he says and every act that he does
is witnessed and judged. No domestic animal is accustomed to so high
a degree of subjection; he knows perfectly that our protection is not
always efficacious and that we are sometimes mistaken about him, that
we caress him when he ought to be punished, etc. Cats, for instance,
know that man cannot see in the dark: one evening a white cat made
ready to commit an abominable misdemeanour within two steps of me,
not suspecting that its colour would betray it to an attentive eye,
even in the obscurity. Primitive men sometimes practised an analogous
cunning in regard to their gods; they did not yet believe in the
complete sovereignty, in the absolute ubiquity, of Providence. But by
a process of logical development, Providence is ultimately believed
to extend to everything, to envelop one’s whole life; the fear of God
becomes to man a perpetual prohibition against his passions, a hope in
God’s aid his perpetual recourse. Religion and science possess this
much in common, that they result in enveloping us equally in a network
of necessities; but what distinguishes science is that it makes us
acquainted with the real order and causes of phenomena, and by that
fact permits us to modify that order at will; by showing us the fact
and nature of our dependence, science supplies us with the means of
conquering a comparative independence. In religion, on the contrary,
the mythical and miraculous element introduces an unforeseen factor,
the divine will, a special providence, into the midst of events, and
by that fact deceives one as to the true means of modifying the real
course of things. The instant one believes one’s self to be dependent
upon Jupiter or Allah, one ascribes a greater efficacy to propitiation
than to action; and it follows that the greater one perceives one’s
dependence to be the more completely one believes one’s self to be
without defence against it; the more complete the submission is to God,
the more complete one’s resulting submission becomes to the established
fact. The feeling of an imaginary dependence upon supernatural beings
thus increases the general dependence of man in relation to nature.
Thus understood, the notion of a special providence, of a divine
tutelage, has resulted in the protracted maintenance of the human
soul in a state of genuine minority; and this state of minority,
in its turn, has rendered the existence and surveillance of divine
protectors a necessity. When, therefore, the believer refuses an offer
of emancipation from the dependence which he has voluntarily accepted,
the reason is that he feels a vague sentiment of his own insufficiency,
of his irremediably belated coming of age; he is a child, who does not
dare stray far from the paternal roof; he does not possess the courage
to walk alone. The child who should show a precocious independence,
and should early learn to go its own road, would not improbably become
simply dissipated; his precocity might well be depravity in disguise.
Similarly in history, the irreligious, the sceptics, the atheists,
have been frequently spoiled children, precocious in the bad sense;
their freedom of spirit was only a high form of mischief. The human
race, like the individual, long needed surveillance and tutelage; so
long as it experienced this need it leaned inevitably upon a belief
in a providence external to itself and to the universe, capable of
interfering in the course of things, and of modifying the general laws
of nature by particular acts of volition. Subsequently, by the progress