it to the monastic life with its binding rules. It also has appealed to Christian thought. Liddon (Some Elements of Religion, Lecture I. 19) says: “Lactantius may be wrong in his etymology, but he has certainly seized the broad popular sense of the word when he connects it with the idea of an obligation by which man is bound to an invisible God.” Archbishop Trench (Study of Words) supposed that when “religion” became equivalent to the monastic life, and “religious” to a monk, the words lost their original meaning, but the Ancien Riwle, ante 1225, and the Cursor Mundi use the words both in the general and the more particular sense (see quotations in the New English Dictionary), and both meanings can be found in the Imitatio Christi and in Erasmus's Colloquia. (X.)
The study of the forms of belief and worship belonging to different tribes, nations or religious communities has only recently acquired a scientific foundation. The Greek historians early directed their attention to the ideas and customs of the peoples with whom they were brought into contact; and Herodotus has been called the “first anthropologist of religion.” Theopompus described the Persian dualism in the 4th century B.C., and when Megasthenes was ambassador to the court of Chandragupta, 302 B.C., he noted the religious usages of the middle Ganges valley. The early Christian Fathers recorded many a valuable observation of the Gentile faiths around them from varying points of view, sympathetic or hostile; and Eusebius and Epiphanius, in the 4th century A.D., attributed to the librarian of Ptolemy Philadelphus the design of collecting the sacred books of the Ethiopians, Indians, Persians, Elamites, Babylonians, Assyrians, Romans, Phoenicians, Syrians and Greeks. The Mahommedan Bīrūnī (b. A.D. 973) compared the doctrines of the Greeks, Christians, Jews, Manichaeans and Sufis with the philosophies and religions of India. Akbar (1542-1605) gathered Brahmans and Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians and Mahommedans at his court, and endeavoured to get translations of their scriptures. In the next century the Persian author of the Dabistan exhibited the doctrines of no less than twelve religions and their various sects. Meanwhile the scholars of the West had begun to work. Thomas Hyde (1636-1703) studied the religion of the ancient Persians; John Spencer (1630-1693) analysed the laws of the Hebrews; and Lord Herbert of Cherbury (De Religione Gentilium, 1645) endeavoured to trace all religions back to five “truly Catholic truths” of primitive faith, the first being the existence of God. The doctrine of a primeval revelation survived in various forms for two centuries, and appeared as late as the Juventus Mundi of W. E. Gladstone (1868, p. 207 ff.). David Hume, on the other hand, based his essay on The Natural History of Religion (1757) on the conception of the development of human society from rude beginnings, and all modern study is frankly founded on the general idea of Evolution.[1]
The materials at Hume's command, however, were destined to vast and speedy expansion. The Jesuit missionaries had already been at work in India and China, and a brilliant band of English students, led by Sir William Jones and H. T. Colebrooke, began to make known the treasures of Sanskrit literature, which the great scholars of Germany and France proceeded to develop. In Egypt the discovery of the Rosetta stone placed the key to the hieroglyphics within Western reach; and the decipherment of the cuneiform character enabled the patient scholars of Europe to recover the clues to the contents of the ancient libraries of Babylonia and Assyria. With the aid of inscriptions the cults of Greece and Rome have been largely reconstructed. Travellers and missionaries reported the beliefs and usages of uncivilized tribes in every part of the world, with the result that “ethnography knows no race devoid of religion, but only differences in the degree to which religious ideas have developed” (Ratzel, History of Mankind, i. 40). Meanwhile philosophy was at work on the problem of the religious consciousness. The great series of German thinkers, Lessing, Herder, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Schleiermacher and their successors, sought to explain religion by means of the phenomena of mind, and to track it to its roots in the processes of thought and feeling. While ethnography was gathering up the facts from every part of the globe, psychology began to analyse the forms of belief, of action and emotion, to discover if possible the key to the multitudinous variety which history revealed. From the historical and linguistic side attention was first fixed upon the myth, and the publication of the ancient hymns of the Rig Veda led Max Müller to seek in the common elements of Aryan thought for the secrets of primitive religion (essay on Comparative Mythology, 1856). The phenomena of day and night, of sunshine and storm, and other aspects of nature, were invoked by different interpreters to explain the conceptions of the gods, their origins and their relations. Fresh materials were gathered at the same time out of European folk-lore; the work begun by the brothers Grimm was continued by J. W. E. Mannhardt, and a lower stratum of beliefs and rites began to emerge into view beneath the poetic forms of the more developed mythologies. By such preliminary labours the way was prepared for the new science of anthropology.
Since the appearance of Dr E. B. Tylor's classical treatise on Primitive Culture (1871), the study of the origins of religion has been pursued with the utmost zeal. Comte had already described the primitive form of the religious consciousness as that in which man conceives of all external bodies as animated by a life analogous to his own (Philos. Positive, tome v., 1841, p. 30). This has been since designated as polyzoism or pantheism or panvitalism,[2] and represents the obscure undifferentiated groundwork out of which Tylor's Animism arises. Many are the clues by which it has been sought to explain the secret of primitive religion. Hegel, before the anthropological stage, found it in magic. Max Müller, building on philosophy and mythology, affirmed that “Religion consists in the perception of the infinite under such manifestations as are able to influence the moral character of man” (Natural Religion, 1899, p. 188). Herbert Spencer derived all religion from the worship of the dead (Principles of Sociology, i.), like Grant Allen, and Lippert in Germany. Mr Andrew Lang, on the other hand, supposes that belief in a supreme being came first in order of evolution, but was afterwards thrust into the background by belief in ghosts and lesser divinities (Magic and Religion, 1901, p. 224).[3] Dr Jevons finds the primitive form in totemism (Introd. to the History of Religion, 1896, chap. ix.). Mr J. G. Frazer regards religion (see his definition quoted below) as superposed on an antecedent stage of magic. In The Tree of Life (1905), Mr E. Crawley interprets it by the vital instinct, and connects its first manifestations with the processes of the organic life. The veteran Wilhelm Wundt (Mythus und Religion, ii. 1906, p. 177) recurs to the primitive conceptions of the soul as the source of all subsequent development. The origin of religion, however, can never be determined archaeologically or historically; it must be sought conjecturally through psychology. (J. E. C.)
A. Primitive Religion
There is a point at which the History of Religion becomes in its predominant aspect a History of Religions. The conditions that we describe by the comprehensive term “civilization” occasion a specification and corresponding differentiation of the life of societies; whence there result competing types of culture, each instinct with the spirit of propagandism and, one might almost say, of empire. It is an age of conscious selection as between ideal systems. Instead of necessitating a wasteful and precarious elimination of inadequate customs by the actual destruction of those who practise them—this being the method of natural selection, which, like some Spanish Inquisition, abolishes the heresy by wiping out the heretics one and all—progress now becomes possible along the more direct and less
- ↑ This does not, of course, preclude the possibility of degeneration in particular instances.
- ↑ Comte's own term “fetishism” was most unfortunately misleading (see Fetishism). Marett proposed the term “Animatism,” Folk Lore (1900), xi. p. 171.
- ↑ See his treatise on The Making of Religion (1898), and Hartland's article on “The ‘High Gods’ of Australia,” Folk Lore (1898), ix. p. 290.
