Page:Collier's New Encyclopedia v. 07.djvu/576

LEFT RELIGION 490 BELIGION established it would go only a very little way toward proving that man is not naturally and normally a religious being. The starting point of religious develop- ment has been variously represented as fetishism (De Brosses, Comte, Tylor), belief in ghosts (Spencer, Caspari, Le Bon), polytheism (Hume, Voltaire, Du- puis), pantheism (Tholuck, Ulrici, Caird), henotheism (Schellin, P^ax Miiller, Von Hartmann), and monothe- ism (Creuzer, Professor Rawlinson, Canon Cook). All these representations are conjectural. The present state of our knowledge does not enable us to de- cide what the primitive religion was. Historical research does not take us back to it. Nor does it show us what stages of religion intervened between it and the earliest known historical reli- gions. The ways in which the ruder phases of religion are represented by anthropologists and comparative theo- logians as having succeeded one another are merely more or less suggestive hypotheses, founded on data both in- sufficient and ambiguous. All serial arrangements of the kind ought to be regarded as of a merely logical, non- historical character, though they may, perhaps, aid in leading to a discovery of the historical order of development. Hence the best mode of arranging the ruder religions may be that which be- gins with the logically simplest phase of religion, and assigns the others a place in the order of their logical dependence and complexity. Adopting this principle, Naturism, the worship of natural objects regarded as powers or agents, should come first, implying as it does no original or special faculty or tendency, and being the direct and natural interpretation of physical facts. It may have many forms corresponding to the differences of the natural objects, and these forms may imply very different degrees of intel- lectual capability and very different qualities of disposition in the worship- ers, though they have certainly not been shown to be successive stages of religious development. Nature worship affords a basis for all other forms of religion and worship, and in most of them its presence as a constituent is obvious. It is difficult, if not impossible, to conceive how men could have risen to any higher stage of religion except by means of it, or how they could have failed to enter it unless raised above it by a special rev- elation.^ And the notion of a special revelation to men who had not by natural means acquired any belief in or thought of deity is scarcely conceivable. Animism comes next as a natural result of the growth of the idea of soul. It is often indistinguishable or difficult to distinguish from nature worship, which is, as it were, implicit animism, while animism is explicit nature worship. When man has drawn a distinction be- tween body and life or soul, it is natural that he should work it out in regard to himself, and then judge of other things by himself; and the phenomena of sleep and dreams, of swooning, apoplexy, ecstasy, insanity, and death, all con- tribute to mold his thought when once they have been turned in this direction. Hence a third phase of religion, spirit- ism, in which the souls worshiped are human, or conformed to the human type and conceived of according to human experience, but affected and modified by physical impressions and analogies. The hypothesis of Mr. Spencer that religion begins at this stage, the first deities being deceased ancestors, and the first worship funeral rites, takes no account of a vast mass of philological evidence which establishes that the names of the oldest known gods were descriptive of natural phenomena, and of historical evidence which shows that ancestor wor- ship has been grafted in various locali- ties on an older nature worship. It also rests on a very improbable assumption as to savage man's mode of viewing natural ^ objects worshiped, and fails to explain the common features, similar- ities, and analogies in the various myth- ologies, the transformations of the ghosts into gods, the inferior position of properly ancestral gods, and es- pecially the characteristics of nature worship. The fourth phase of reli- gious development is Polytheism in the special sense of the term, anthropological mythology, the worship of divine indi- vidualities, generally in origin nature gods, but transformed by imagination operating under the belief that beings analogous to the human rule the course of things. The fifth phase is that in which polytheism is subordinated to, or reduced under, a Dualistic or Monistic conception of the divine. The conception may be mainly reached either by specu- lative or ethical thought. The sixtk phase is represented by the Monotheistic religions — the Jewish, Christian, and Mohammedan. These religions all claim to rest on special revelation. In thera only is belief in a plurality of gods en- tirely transcended. Philosophical mon- ism in a religion does not cast out polytheism. Fetishism, image worship, totemism, shamanism, and sorcery prob- ably should be regarded not as distinct phases or natural logical stages of re- ligious development, but as adjuncts and | incidental perversions of religion which ' pre-suppose its normal or logical phases ,