Читать книгу The Non-religion of the Future: A Sociological Study - Guyau Jean-Marie - Страница 9

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.

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.

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.

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]

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.

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.

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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.