Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/164

154 The mind proceeds from the known to the unknown. This is the highway that leads to science, but on condition that the traveler does not wander from it to launch himself into hasty conclusions. The philosophers of the last century, seeking to explain how primitive man fell under the yoke of positive religions, maintained that they were invented by the priests; some added, and by kings. It is true that priests and governments have used religious too much for personal or political interests. But that is no reason for believing that they invented them.

Good sense teaches that the existence of the priest is posterior to the birth of the religious sentiment. Besides this, nothing is more contrary to the tendencies of contemporary science than to regard man as a lump of dough indefinitely plastic in the hands of legislators and mystagogues. Not only is it henceforth averred that all known peoples have religious faiths, in the sense that they admit the existence of superhuman powers intervening in the destiny of the individual, but I shall also have occasion to show that they all possess—at least in a rudimentary state—the essential elements of worship, prayer, sacrifice, and symbols; and that these elements are clad with analogous forms among the most diverse races, and that, wherever we can trace the course of religious evolution, we see faiths passing through phases, if not identical, coming under general laws. Religions make themselves, and are not invented.

From the fact that some kings and heroes have been deified, a few philosophers have concluded that all the gods were deified men. In this way, according to Evémère, among the ancients, the first chiefs or the first sages, having obtained domination by means of their physical or intellectual superiority, have had a supernatural power attributed to them, and have consequently received divine honors. If we had asked this philosopher whence the first believer derived the idea of the supernatural and divine to apply it to kings and priests, he would have been greatly embarrassed to answer us. Evémère's school, resting upon a tradition that Zeus once reigned in Crete, and on the fact that his tomb is shown there, maintained that the master of Olympus was an ancient Cretan sovereign, deified by his subjects. We know now that Ζενς πατήρ is found among the Romans, the Hindoos, and the Germans, under the names respectively of Jupiter, Dyaus-Pitar, Zio, or Tyr, and with the general character of Heaven-father, the first form of "father who is in heaven."

Another school obtained a better conception of the real character of the gods, when it associated them with Nature deified in its phenomena. As early as the sixth century before our era, Theogenes of Rhegium declared that Apollo, Helios, and Hephaestos were fire under different aspects—Hera the air, Poseidon water, Artemis the