Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/147

Rh licism, and saw in Catholicism the complete realization of Christianity) — it has been decided and taken for granted by the cultured crowd (always eager and prompt to accept the lowest view) that religion is only one special, long-outlived phase in the development of humanity, and a hindrance to its further progress. It is taken for granted that humanity has passed through two stages, the religious and the metaphysical, and has now entered on a third and highest one—the scientific; and that all religious manifestations among men are mere survivals of humanity's spiritual organ, which, like the fifth toe-nail of the horse, has long lost all meaning or importance.

It is taken for granted that the essence of religion lies in fear evoked by the unknown forces of Nature, in belief in imaginary beings, and in worship of them, as in ancient times Democritus supposed, and as the latest philosophers and historians of religion assert.

But, apart from the consideration that belief in invisible, supernatural beings, or in one such being, does not always proceed from fear of the unknown forces of nature—as we see in the case of hundreds of the most advanced and highly-educated men of former times (Socrates, Descartes, Newton) as well as of our own day, whose recognition of the existence of a supreme, supernatural being, certainly did not proceed from fear of the unknown forces of Nature—the assertion that religion arose from men's superstitious fear of the mysterious forces of Nature really affords no answer to the main question, 'What was it in men that gave them the conception of unseen, supernatural beings?'

If men feared thunder and lightning, they feared them as thunder and lightning; but why should they invent some invisible, supernatural being, Jupiter, who lives somewhere or other, and sometimes throws arrows at people?

Men struck by the sight of death would fear death ; but why should they invent souls of the dead with whom they entered into imaginary intercourse ? From thunder men might hide. Fear of death might make