To consider the normal aspects of primitive life, as we see them in savage communities and trace them in early literature, is to realize the enormous hindrance offered to critical thinking in the primary stages of culture by the mere force of habit. “The savage,” says our leading anthropologist, “by no means goes through life with the intention of gathering more knowledge and framing better laws than his fathers. On the contrary, his tendency is to consider his ancestors as having handed down to him the perfection of wisdom, which it would be impiety to make the least alteration in. Hence among the lower races there is obstinate resistance to the most desirable reforms, and progress can only force its way with a slowness and difficulty which we of this century can hardly imagine.”1 Among the Bantu of South Africa, before the spread of European rule, “any person in advance of his fellows was specially liable to suspicion [of sorcery], so that progress of any kind towards what we should term higher civilization was made exceedingly difficult by this belief.”2 The real or would-be sorcerer could thus secure the elimination of the honest inventor; fear of sorcery being most potent as against the supposed irregular practitioner. The relative obstinacy of conservatism in periods and places of narrow knowledge is again illustrated in Lane’s account of the modern Egyptians in the first half of the nineteenth century: “Some Egyptians who had studied for a few years in France declared to me that they could not instil any of the notions which they had there acquired even into the minds of their most intimate friends.”3 So in modern Japan there were many assassinations of reformers, and some civil war, before Western ideas could gain a footing.4 The less the knowledge, in short, the harder to add to it.
It is hardly possible to estimate with any confidence the relative rates of progress; but, though all are extremely slow, it would seem that reason could sooner play correctively on errors of secular practice5 than on any species of proposition in religion—taking that word to connote at once mythology, early cosmology, and ritual ethic. Mere disbelief in a particular medicine-man or rain-maker who failed would not lead to any reflective disbelief in all; any more than the beating or renunciation of his fetish by a savage or barbarian means rejection of his fetishism, or than the renunciation of a particular saint by a modern Catholic6 means abandonment of prayer to saints for intercession.
The question as to whether savages do beat their idols is a matter in some dispute. Sir A. B. Ellis, a high authority, offers a notable denial to the current belief that negroes “beat their Gods if their prayers are unanswered.” “After an experience of the Gold Coast extending over thirteen years,” he writes, “I have never heard of, much less witnessed, anything of the kind, although I have made inquiries in every direction” (The Tshi-speaking Peoples, 1887, p. 194). Other anthropologists have collected many instances in other races—e.g., Fr. Schultze, Der Fetischismus, 1871, p. 130. In one case, a priest beats a fetish in advance, to secure his careful attention. (Id. pp. 90–91, citing the personal narrative of Bastian.) It seems to be a matter of psychic stage. The more primitive negro is as it were too religious, too much afraid of his Gods, who are not for him “idols,” but spirits residing in images or objects. Where the state of fear is only chronic another temper may arise. Among the Bataks of Sumatra disappointed worshippers often scold a God; and their legends tell of men who declared war on a deity and shot at him from a mountain. (Warneck, Die Religion des Batak, 1909, p. 7. Cp. Gen. ii, 4–9.) A temper of defiance towards deity has been noted in an Aryan Kafir of the Hindu-Kush. (Sir G. S. Robertson, The KÁfirs of the Hindu-Kush, 1899, p. 182.) Some peoples go much further. Among the Polynesians, when a God failed to cure a sick chief or notable, he “was regarded as inexorable, and was usually banished from the temple and his image destroyed” (W. Ellis, Polynesian Researches, 2nd ed. 1831, i, 350). So among the Chinese, “if the God does not give rain they will threaten and beat him; sometimes they publicly depose him from the rank of deity” (Frazer, Lectures on the Early History of Kingship, 1905, pp. 98–101. Cp. Ross, Pansebeia, 4th ed., 1672, p. 80).
There are many analogous phenomena. In old Samoa, in the ritual of mourning for the dead, the family God was first implored to restore the deceased, and then fiercely abused and menaced.7 See, too, the story of the people of Niue or Savage Island in the South Pacific, who in the time of a great pestilence, thinking the sickness was caused by a certain idol, broke it in pieces and threw it away (Turner, Samoa a Hundred Years Ago, 1884, p. 306). See further the cases cited by Constant, De la religion, 1824, vol. i, ptie. ii, pp. 32–34; and by Peschel, The Races of Man, Eng. tr. 1876, pp. 247–8, in particular that of Rastus, the last pagan Lapp in Europe, who quarrelled with his fetish stone for killing his reindeer in revenge for the withholding of its customary offering of brandy, and “immediately embraced Christianity.” (Compare E. Rae, The White Sea Peninsula, 1881, p. 276.) See again the testimony of Herman Melville in his Typee, ch. xxiv; and that of T. Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, ed. 1858, i, 236: “Sometimes the natives get angry with their deities, and abuse and even challenge them to fight.” Herodotos has similar stories of barbarians who defy their own and other deities (iv, 172, 183, 184). Compare the case of King Rum Bahadur of Nepaul, who cannonaded his Gods. Spencer, Study of Sociology, pp. 301–2. Also the anecdote cited by Spencer (Id. p. 160) from Sir R. Burton’s Goa, p. 167. Here there is no disbelief, no reflection, but simple resentment. Compare, too, the amusing story of a blasphemy by Rossini, told by Louis Viardot, Libre Examen, 6e Éd. pp. 166–67, note. That threats against the Gods are possible at a semi-civilized stage is proved by various passages in medieval literature. Thus in Caxton’s Charles the Grete, a translation from an older French original, Charles is made to say: “O lord God, if ye suffre that Olyver be overcome and that my ryght at thys tyme be loste and defyled, I make a vowe that al Crystyante shal be destroyed. I shal not leve in Fraunce chirche ne monasterye, ymage ne aulter,” etc. (Early Eng. Text Soc. rep. 1881, pp. 70–71.) Such language was probably used by not a few medieval kings in moments of fury; and there is even record that at the battle of Dunbar certain of the Scots Presbyterian clergy intimated to their deity that he would not be their God if he failed them on that day.
If such flights be reckoned possible for Christian kings and clerics in the Christian era, there would seem to be no unlikelihood about the many stories of God-beating and God-defying among contemporary savages, though so good an observer as Sir A. B. Ellis may not have witnessed them in the part of Africa best known to him. The conclusion reached by Sir A. B. Ellis is that the negroes of the Gold Coast are not properly to be described as fetishists. Fetishism, on his view, is a worship of objects as in themselves endowed with magical power; whereas the Gold Coast negro ascribes no virtue to the object commonly called his fetish, regarding it simply as inhabited by a supernatural power. This writer sees “true fetishism” in the attitude of Italian peasants and fishermen who beat and ill-treat their images when prayers are not answered, and in that of Spaniards who cover the faces of their images or turn them to the wall when about to do anything which they think the saint or deity would disapprove of. On this view, fetishism is a later yet lower stage of religious evolution than that of the negro. On the other hand, Miss Kingsley takes fetishism to be the proper name of the attitude of the negro towards particular objects as divinely inhabited, and represents it as a kind of pantheism (West African Studies, 2nd ed. 1901, ch. v). And since, by her definition, “Gods of fetish” do not necessarily “require a material object to manifest themselves in” (p. 96), the term “fetish” is thus detached from all of its former meanings. It seems expedient, as a matter of terminology, to let fetishism mean both object- or image-worship and the belief in the special inhabiting of objects by deities, with a recognition that the beliefs may be different stages in an evolution, though, on the other hand, they are obviously likely to coalesce or concur. In the “Obeah” system of the negroes of the West Indies the former belief in the indwelling spirit has become, or has coalesced with, belief in the magical powers of the object (Keane, Man, Past and Present, 1900, p. 57).
As to defiance or contumely towards the Gods, finally, we have the testimony of the Swiss missionary Junod that the South African Thonga, whom he studied very closely, have in their ritual “a regular insulting of the Gods.” (Life of a South African Tribe, ii, 1912, p. 384.) Why not? “Prayers to the ancestors ... are ... absolutely devoid of awe” (p. 385), though “the ancestor-Gods are certainly the most powerful spiritual agency acting on man’s life” (p. 361); and “the spirits of the ancestors are the main objects of religious worship” (p. 344). The Thonga, again, use “neither idolatry nor fetishism,” having no “idols” (p. 388), though they recognize “hidden virtues” in plants, animals, and stones (p. 345). They simply regard their ancestor-Gods very much as they do their aged people, whom they generally treat with little consideration. But the dead can do harm, and must therefore be propitiated—as savages propitiate, with fear or malice or derision in their hearts, as the case may be. (Cp. p. 379.) On the other hand, despite the denial of their “fetishism,” they believe that ancestor-Gods may come in the shape of animals; and they so venerate a kind of palladium (made up like a medicine-man’s amulet) as to raise the question whether this kind of belief is not just that which Miss Kingsley called “fetish.” (Junod, pp. 358, 373–74.)
Whatever may be the essence, or the varieties, of fetishism, it is clear that the beating of idols or threatening of Gods does not amount to rational doubt concerning the supernatural. Some general approach to that attitude may perhaps be inferred in the case of an economic revolt against the burdens of a highly specialized religious system, which may often have occurred in unwritten history. We shall note a recorded instance of the kind in connection with the question whether there are any savage tribes without religion. But it occurs in the somewhat highly evolved barbarism of pre-Christian Hawaii; and it can set up no inference as to any development of critical unbelief at lower levels. In the long stage of lower savagery, then, the only approach to freethinking that would seriously affect general belief would presumably be that very credulity which gave foothold to religious beliefs to begin with. That is to say, without anything in the nature of general criticism of any story or doctrine, one such might to some extent supersede another, in virtue of the relative gift of persuasion or personal weight of the propounders. Up to a certain point persons with a turn for myth or ritual-making would compete, and might even call in question each other’s honesty, as well as each other’s inspiration.
Since the rise of scientific hierology there has been a disposition among students to take for granted the good faith of all early religion-makers, and to dismiss entirely that assumption of fraud which was so long made by Christian writers concerning the greater part of every non-Christian system. The assumption had been passed on from the freethinkers of antiquity who formulated the view that all religious doctrine had been invented by politicians in order to control the people.8 Christian polemists, of course, applied it to all systems but their own. When, however, all systems are seen to be alike natural in origin, such charges are felt to recoil on the system which makes them; and latterly9 Christian writers, seeing as much, have been fain to abandon the conception of “priestcraft,” adroitly representing it as an extravagance of rationalism. It certainly served rationalistic purposes, and the title of the supposititious medieval work on “The Three Impostors” points to its currency among unbelievers long ago; but when we first find it popularly current in the seventeenth century, it is in a Christian atmosphere.10 Some of the early deists and others have probably in turn exaggerated the amount of deliberate deceit involved in the formation of religious systems; but nevertheless “priestcraft” is a demonstrable factor in the process. What is called the psychology of religion has been much obscured in response to the demand of religious persons to have it so presented as to flatter them in that capacity.11 Such a claim cannot be permitted to overrule the fair inductions of comparative science.
Anthropological evidence suggests that, while religion clearly begins in primordial fear and fancy, wilful fraud must to some extent have entered into all religious systems alike, even in the period of primeval credulity, were it only because the credulity was so great. One of the most judicial and sympathetic of the Christian scholars who have written the history of Greece treats as unquestionable the view that alike in pagan and Christian cults “priestcraft” has been “fertile in profitable devices, in the invention of legends, the fabrication of relics, and other modes of imposture”;12 and the leading hierologist of the last generation pronounces decisively as to an element of intentional deceit in the Koran-making of Mohammed13—a judgment which, if upheld, can hardly fail to be extended to some portions of all other sacred books. However that may be, we have positive evidence that wilful and systematic fraud enters into the doctrine of contemporary savages, and that among some “primitives” known myths are deliberately propounded to the boys and women by the male adults.14 Indeed, the majority of modern travellers among primitives seem to have regarded their priests and sorcerers in the mass as conscious deceivers.15 If, then, we can point to deliberate imposture alike in the charm-mongering and myth-mongering of contemporary savages and in the sacred-book-making of the higher historical systems, it seems reasonable to hold that conscious deceit, as distinguished from childlike fabrication, would chronically enter into the tale-making of primitive men, as into their simpler relations with each other. It is indeed impossible to conceive how a copious mythology could ever arise without the play of a kind of imaginativeness that is hardly compatible with veracity; and it is probably only the exigencies of ecclesiastical life that cause modern critics still to treat the most deliberate fabrications and forgeries in the Hebrew sacred books as somehow produced in a spirit of the deepest concern for truth. An all-round concern for truth is, in fact, a late intellectual development, the product of much criticism and much doubt; hence, perhaps, the lenity of the verdicts under notice. Certain wild tribes here and there, living in a state of great simplicity, are in our own day described as remarkably truthful;16 but they are not remarkable for range of supernatural belief; and their truthfulness is to be regarded as a product of their special stability and simplicity of life. The trickery of a primitive medicine-man, of course, is a much more childlike thing than the frauds of educated priesthoods; and it is compatible with so much of spontaneous pietism as is implied in the common passing of the operator into the state of convulsion and trance—a transition which comes easily to many savages.17 But even at that stage of psychosis, and in a community where simple secular lying is very rare, the professional wizard-priest becomes an adept in playing upon credulity.18
It belongs, in short, to the very nature of the priestly function, in its earlier forms, to develop in a special degree the normal bias of the undisciplined mind to intellectual fraud. Granting that there are all degrees of self-consciousness in the process, we are bound to recognize that in all of us there is “the sophist within,” who stands between us and candour in every problem either of self-criticism or of self-defence. And, if the instructed man recognizes this clearly and the uninstructed does not, none the less is the latter an exemplification of the fact. His mental obliquities are not any less real because of his indifference to them than are the acts of the hereditary thief because he does them without shame. And if we consider how the fetish-priest is at every turn tempted to invent and prevaricate, simply because his pretensions are fundamentally preposterous; and how in turn the priest of a higher grade, even when he sincerely “believes” in his deity, is bound to put forward as matters of knowledge or revelation the hypotheses he frames to account for either the acts or the abstentions of the God, we shall see that the priestly office is really as incompatible with a high sincerity in the primitive stages as in those in which it is held by men who consciously propound falsities, whether for their mere gain or in the hope of doing good. It may be true that the priestly claim of supernatural sanction for an ethical command is at times motived by an intense conviction of the rightness of the course of conduct prescribed; but none the less is such a habit of mind fatal to intellectual sincerity. Either there is sheer hallucination or there is pious fraud.
Given, however, the tendency to deceit among primitive folk, distrust and detection in a certain number of cases would presumably follow, constituting a measure of simple skepticism. By force partly of this and partly of sheer instability of thought, early belief would be apt to subsist for ages like that of contemporary African tribes,19 in a state of flux.20 Comparative fixity would presumably arise with the approach to stability of life, of industry, and of political institutions, whether with or without a special priesthood. The usages of early family worship would seem to have been no less rigid than those of the tribal and public cults. For primitive man as for the moderns definite organization and ritual custom must have been a great establishing force as regards every phase of religious belief;21 and it may well have been that there was thus less intellectual liberty of a kind in the long ages of what we regard as primitive civilization than in those of savagery and barbarism which preceded them. On that view, systems which are supposed to represent in the fullest degree the primeval spontaneity of religion may have been in part priestly reactions against habits of freedom accompanied by a certain amount of skepticism. A modern inquirer22 has in some such sense advanced the theory that in ancient India, in even the earlier period of collection of the Rig-Veda, which itself undermined the monarchic character of the pre-Vedic religion, there was a decay of belief, which the final redaction served to accelerate. Such a theory can hardly pass beyond the stage of hypothesis in view of the entire absence of history proper in early Indian literature; but we seem at least to have the evidence of the Veda itself that while it was being collected there were deniers of the existence of its Gods.23
The latter testimony alone may serve as ground for raising afresh an old question which recent anthropology has somewhat inexactly decided—that, namely, as to whether there are any savages without religious beliefs.
[For old discussions on the subject see Cicero, De natura deorum, i, 23; Cumberland, Disquisitio de legibus naturÆ, 1672, introd. (rejecting negative view as resting on inadequate testimony); Locke, Essay on the Human Understanding, Bk. I, ch. iii, § 9; ch. iv, § 8 (accepting negative view); protests against it by Vico (Scienza Nuova, 1725, as cited above, p. 26); by Shaftesbury (Letters to a Student, 1716, rep. in Letters, 1746, pp. 32–33); by Rev. John Milne, An Account of Mr. Lock’s Religion (anon.), 1700, pp. 5–8; and by Sir W. Anstruther, Essays Moral and Divine, Edinburgh, 1701, p. 24; further protests by Lafitau (Moeurs des sauvages ameriquains comparÉes aux moeurs des premiers temps, 1724, i, 5), following Boyle, to the effect that the very travellers and missionaries who denied all religion to savages avow facts which confute them; and general view by Fabricius, Delectus argumentorum et Syllabus scriptorum, Hamburghi, 1725, ch. viii. Cp. also Swift, Discourse Concerning the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, § 2.
BÜchner (Force and Matter, ch. on “The Idea of God”); Lord Avebury = Sir John Lubbock (Prehistoric Times, 5th ed., pp. 574–80; Origin of Civilization, 5th ed., pp. 213–17); and Mr. Spencer (Principles of Sociology, iii, § 583) have collected modern travellers’ testimonies as to the absence of religious ideas in certain tribes. Cp. also J. A. St. John’s (Bohn) ed. of Locke, notes on passages above cited, and on Bk. IV, ch. x, § 6. As Lord Avebury points out, the word “religion” is by some loosely or narrowly used to signify only a higher theology as distinct from lower supernaturalist beliefs. He himself, however, excludes from the field of “religion” a belief in evil spirits and in magic—here coinciding with the later anthropologists who represented magic and religion as fundamentally “opposed”—a view rejected even by some religionists. Cp. Avebury, Marriage, Totemism, and Religion, (1911), p. 116 sq.; Rev. E. Crawley, The Mystic Rose, 1902, p. 3; Prof. T. Witten Davies, Magic, Divination, and Demonology, 1898, pp. 18–24. The proved erroneousness of many of the negative testimonies has been insisted on by Benjamin Constant (De la Religion, 1824, i, 3–4); Theodore Parker (Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion, 1842 and 1855, ed. 1877, p. 16); G. Roskoff (Das Religionswesen der rohesten NaturvÖlker, 1880, Abschn. I and II); Dr. Tylor (Primitive Culture, 3rd ed., i, pp. 417–25); and Dr. Max MÜller (Introd. to the Science of Religion, ed. 1882, p. 42 sq.; Hibbert Lectures, p. 91 sq.; Natural Religion, 1889, pp. 81–89; Anthropological Religion, 1892, pp. 428–35.)
The Rev. H. A. Junod (Life of a South African Tribe, vol. ii, 1913, p. 346) shows how easily misconception on the subject may arise. Galton (Narrative of an Explorer, ch. viii, ed. 1891, p. 138) writes: “I have no conception to this day whether or no the Ovampo have any religion, for Click was frightened and angry if the subject of death was alluded to.” The context shows that the native regarded all questions on religious matters with suspicion. Schweinfurth, again, contradicts himself twice within three pages as to the beliefs of the Bongo in a “Supreme Being” and in a future state; and thus leaves us doubting his statement that the neighbouring race, the Dyoor, “put no faith at all in any witchcraft” (The Heart of Africa, 3rd ed. i, 143–45). Much of the confusion turns on the fact that savages who practise no worship have religious beliefs (cp. Max MÜller, Hibbert Lectures, ed. 1878, p. 17, citing Monsignor Salvado; and Carl Lumholtz, Among Cannibals, 1889, p. 284). The dispute, as it now stands, mainly turns on the definition of religion (cp. Chantepie de la Saussaye, Manual of the Science of Religion, Eng. tr. 1891, pp. 16–18, where Lubbock’s position is partly misunderstood). Dr. Tylor, while deciding that no tribes known to us are religionless, leaves open the question of their existence in the past.
A notable example of the prolongation of error on this subject through orthodox assumptions is seen in Dr. A. W. Howitt’s otherwise valuable work on The Native Tribes of South Australia (1904). Dr. Howitt produces (pp. 488–508) abundant evidence to show that a number of tribes believe in a “supernatural anthropomorphic being,” variously named Nurrundere, Nurelli, Bunjil, Mungan-ngaua, Daramalun, and Baiame (“the same being under different names,” writes Dr. Howitt, p. 499). This being he describes as “the tribal All-Father,” “a venerable kindly Headman of a tribe, full of knowledge and tribal wisdom, and all-powerful in magic, of which he is the source, with virtues, failings, and passions such as the aborigines regard them” (pp. 500–1). But he insists (p. 506) that “in this being, though supernatural, there is no trace of a divine nature,” and, again, that “the Australian aborigines do not recognize any divinity, good or evil” (p. 756), though (p. 501) “it is most difficult for one of us to divest himself of the tendency to endow such a supernatural being [as the All-Father] with a nature quasi-divine, if not altogether so.” Dr. Howitt does not name any European deity who satisfies him on the point of divinity! Obviously the Australian deities have evolved in exactly the same way as those of other peoples, Yahweh included. Dr. Howitt, indeed, admits (p. 507) that the Australian notions “may have been at the root of monotheistic beliefs.” They certainly were; and when he adds that, “although it cannot be alleged that these aborigines have consciously any form of religion, it may be said that their beliefs are such that, under favourable conditions, they might have developed into an actual religion,” he indicates afresh the confusion possible from unscientific definitions. The sole content of his thesis is, finally, that a “supernatural” being is not “divine” till the priests have somewhat trimmed him, and that a religion is not “actual” till it has been sacerdotally formulated. Dr. Howitt’s negations are as untenable as Mr. Andrew Lang’s magnification of the Australian All-Father into a perfect Supreme Being.
The really important part of Dr. Howitt’s survey of the problem is his conclusion that the kind of belief he has described exists only in a specified area of Australia, and that this area is “the habitat of tribes ... where there has been the advance from group marriage to individual marriage, from descent in the female line to that in the male line” (p. 500). Messrs. Spencer and Gillen’s denial of the existence of any belief in a personal deity among the tribes of Central Australia (Northern Tribes, 1904, p. 491) appears to stand for actual fact.
As to the “divinity” of the ancestor-gods of the primitives, see Pagan Christs, 2nd ed. p. 41 sq.]
The problem has been unduly narrowed to the question whether there are any whole tribes so developed. It is obviously pertinent to ask whether there may not be diversity of opinion within a given tribe. Such testimonies as those collected by Sir John Lubbock [Lord Avebury] and others, as to the existence of religionless savages, are held to be disposed of by further proof that tribes of savages who had been set down as religionless on the evidence of some of themselves had in reality a number of religious beliefs. Travellers’ questions had been falsely answered, either on the principle that non-initiates must not be told the mysteries, or from that sudden perception of the oddity of their beliefs which comes even to some civilized people when they try to state them to an unbelieving outsider. Questions, again, could easily be misunderstood, and answers likewise. We find, for instance, that savages who scout the idea that the dead can “rise again” do believe in the continued disembodied existence of all their dead, and even at times conceive of them as marrying and procreating! On the whole, they conceive of a continuity of spirit-life on earth in human shape. To speak of such people as having no idea of “a life beyond the grave” would obviously be misleading, though they have no notion of a judgment day or of future rewards or punishments.24
Undoubtedly, then, the negative view of savage religion had in a number of cases been hastily taken; but there remains the question, as a rule surprisingly ignored, whether some of the savages who disavowed all belief in things supernatural may not have been telling the simple truth about themselves, or even about their families and their comrades. As one sympathetic traveller notes of the Samoyedes: “There can be no such thing as strict accuracy of grammar or expression among an illiterate people; nor can there be among these simple creatures any consistent or fixed appreciation even of their own forms of ... belief.... Having no object in arriving at a common view of such matters, each Samoyede, if questioned separately, will give more or less his own disconnected impression of his faith.”25 And this holds of unfaith. A savage asked by a traveller, “Do you believe” so-and-so, might very well give a true negative answer for himself;26 and the traveller’s resulting misconception would be due to his own arbitrary assumption that all members of any tribe must think alike.
A good witness expressly testifies: “In the tribe [of Australians] with which I was best acquainted, while the blacks had a term for ghost and believed that there were departed spirits who were sometimes to be seen among the foliage, individual men would tell you upon inquiry that they believed that death was the last of them” (Eaglehawk and Crow: A Study of the Australian Aborigines, by John Mathew, M.A., B.D., 1899, p. 146). As to the risk of wrong negative inferences, on the other hand, see pp. 145, 147.
One of the best of our missionary witnesses, H. A. Junod, in his valuable study of the South African Thonga, testifies both to the commonness of individual variation in the way of religious fancy and the occurrence of sporadic unbelief, usually ended by fear. Individuals freely indulge in concrete speculations—e.g., as to the existence of animal souls—which do not win vogue (Life of a South African Tribe, vol. ii, 1913, p. 342 sq.), though the reporter seems to overlook the possibility that such ideas may be adopted by a tribe. Freethinking ideas have, of course, by far the least chance of currency. “The young folks of Libombo used to blaspheme in their hearts, saying, ‘There are no Gods.’ But,” added the witness, “we very soon saw that there were some, when they killed one of us,” who trod on a snake (work cited, pp. 354–55). That testimony illustrates well the difficulties of rational progress in a primitive community. But at times the process may be encouraged by the environment. The early missionary Ellis gives an instance of a community in Hawaii that had abandoned all religious practices: “We asked them who was their God. They said they had no God; formerly they had many: but now they had cast them all away. We asked them if they had done well in abolishing them. They said ‘Yes,’ for tabu had occasioned much labour and inconvenience, and drained off the best of their property. We asked them if it was a good thing to have no God.... They said perhaps it was; for they had nothing to provide for the great sacrifices, and were under no fear of punishment for breaking tabu; that now one fire cooked their food, and men and women ate together the same kind of provisions.” (W. Ellis, Tour Through Hawaii or Owhyhee, 1827, p. 100.) The community in question had in their own way reached the Lucretian verdict, Tantum relligio potuit suadere malorum.
Unless, again, such witnesses as Moffat be unfaithful reporters as well as mistaken in their inferences, some of the natives with whom they dealt were all but devoid of the ordinary religious notions27 which in the case of other natives have enabled the missionaries to plant their doctrines. Nor is there anything hard of belief in the idea that, just as special religious movements spread credence in certain periods, a lack of active teachers in certain tribes may for a time have let previously common beliefs pass almost out of knowledge. If it be true that the Black Death wrought a great decline in the ecclesiastical life of England in the fourteenth century,28 a long period of life-destroying conditions might eliminate from the life of a savage tribe all lore save that of primary self-preservation. Moffat incidentally notes the significant fact that rain-makers in his time were usually foreigners to the tribes in which they operated.29
The explanation is partly that given by him later, that “a rain-maker seldom dies a natural death,”30 most being executed as impostors for their failures. To this effect there are many testimonies.31 Among the Bushmen, says Lichtenstein, when a magician “happens to have predicted falsely several times in succession, he is thrust out of the kraal, and very likely burned or put to death in some other way.”32 “A celebrated magician,” says Burton again, “rarely if ever dies a natural death.”33 And it is told of the people of Niue, or Savage Island, in the South Pacific, that “of old they had kings; but as they were the high priests as well, and were supposed to cause the food to grow, the people got angry with them in times of scarcity, and killed them; and as one after the other was killed, the end of it was that no one wished to be king.”34 So, in Uganda, if a chief and his medicine-men cannot make rain, “his whole existence is at stake in times of distress.” One chief was actually driven out; and the rain-doctors always live on sufferance.35 In such a state of things religion might well lose vogue.
Among some peoples of the Slave Coast, it appears, the regular priests, despite their power and prestige, are always under suspicion by reason of their frequent miscarriages; and they are—or were—not unfrequently put to death.36 Here there is disbelief in the priest without disbelief in the God. But a disbelief in the priest which tended to exterminate him might well diminish religion.
On the other hand, a relative indifference to religion in a given tribe might result from the influence of one or more leading men who spontaneously doubted the religious doctrine offered to them, as many in Israel, on the face of the priestly records, disbelieved in the whole theocratic polity. In modern times preachers are constantly found charging “unbelief” on their own flocks, in respect not of any criticism of religious narrative or dogma, but of simple lack of ostensible faith in doctrines of prayer and Providence nominally accepted.37 Among peasants who have never seen a freethinking book or heard a professed freethinker’s arguments may be heard expressions of spontaneous unfaith in current doctrines of Providence.
This is but a type of variations possible in primitive societies. Despite the social potency of primitive custom, variation may be surmised to occur in the mental as in the physical life at all stages; and what normally happens in savagery and low civilization appears to be a cancelment of the skeptical variation by the total circumstances—the strength of the general lead to supernaturalism, the plausibility of such beliefs to the average intelligence, and the impossibility of setting up skeptical institutions to oppose the others. In civilized ages skeptical movements are repeatedly seen to dwindle for simple lack of institutions; which, however, are spontaneously set up by and serve as sustainers of religious systems. On the simpler level of savagery, skeptical personalities would in the long run fail to affirm themselves as against the institutions of ordinary savage religion—the seasonal feasts, the ceremonies attending birth and death, the use of rituals, images, charms, sorcery, all tending to stimulate and conserve supernatural beliefs in general. Only the abnormally courageous would dare outspokenly to doubt or deny at all; and their daring would put them in special jeopardy.38 The ancient maxim, Primus in orbe deos fecit timor, is verified by all modern study of primitive life.39 It is a recent traveller who gives the definition: “Fetishism is the result of the efforts of the savage intelligence seeking after a theory which will account for the apparent hostility of nature to man.”40 And this incalculable force of fear is constantly exploited by the religious bias from the earliest stages of sorcery.41
The check to intellectual evolution would here be on all fours with some of the checks inferribly at work in early moral evolution, where the types with the higher ideals would seem often to be positively endangered by their peculiarity, and would thus be the less likely to multiply. And what happened as between man and man would further tend to happen at times as between communities. Given the possible case of a tribe so well placed as to be unusually little affected by fear of enemies and the natural forces, the influence of rationalistic chiefs or of respected tribesmen might set up for a time a considerable anti-religious variation, involving at least a minimizing of religious doctrine and practices. Such a case is actually seen among the prosperous peoples of the Upper Congo, some of whom, like the poorer tribes known to Moffat, have no “medicine-men” of their own, and very vague notions of deity.42 But when such a tribe did chance to come into conflict with others more religious, it would be peculiarly obnoxious to them; and, being in the terms of the case unwarlike, its chance of survival on the old lines would be small.
Such a possibility is suggested with some vividness by the familiar contrast between the modern communities of Fiji and Samoa—the former cruel, cannibalistic, and religious, the latter much less austerely religious and much more humane. The ferocious Fijians “looked upon the Samoans with horror, because they had no religion, no belief in any such deities [as the Fijians’], nor any of the sanguinary rites which prevailed in other islands” (Spencer, Study of Sociology, pp. 293–94, following J. Williams, Narrative of Missionary Enterprise in the South Sea Islands, ed. 1837, pp. 540–41; cp. the Rev. A. W. Murray, Forty Years’ Mission Work, 1876, p. 171). The “no religion” is, of course, only relatively true. Mr. Lang has noticed the error of the phrase “the godless Samoans” (cp. Turner, Samoa a Hundred Years Ago, 1884, pp. 16–17); but, while suggesting that the facts are the other way, he admits that in their creed “the religious sentiment has already become more or less self-conscious, and has begun to reason on its own practices” (Myth, Ritual, and Religion, ii, 34; 2nd ed., ii, 58).
Taking the phenomena all along the line of evolution, we are led to the generalization that the rationalistic tendency, early or late, like the religious tendency, is a variation which prospers at different times in different degrees relatively to the favourableness of the environment. This view will be set forth in some detail in the course of our history.
It is not, finally, a mere surmise that individual savages and semi-savages in our own time vary towards disbelief in the supernaturalism of their fellows. To say nothing of the rational skepticism exhibited by the Zulu converts of Bishop Colenso, which was the means of opening his eyes to the incredibility of the Pentateuch,43 or of the rationalism of the African chief who debated with Sir Samuel Baker the possibility of a future state,44 we have the express missionary record that the forcible suppression of idolatry and tabu and the priesthood by King Rihoriho in the island of Hawaii, in 1819, was accomplished not only “before the arrival of any missionary,” but on purely common-sense grounds, and with no thought of furthering Christianity, though he had heard of the substitution of Christianity for the native religion by Pomare in Tahiti. Rihoriho simply desired to save his wives and other women from the cruel pressure of the tabu system, and to divert the priests’ revenues to secular purposes; and he actually had some strong priestly support.45 Had not the missionary system soon followed, however, the old worship, which had been desperately defended in battle at the instigation of the conservative priests, would in all probability have grown up afresh, though perhaps with modifications. The savage and semi-savage social conditions, taken as a whole, are fatally unpropitious to rationalism.
A parallel case to that of Rihoriho is that of King Finow of the Tonga Islands, described by Mariner, who was his intimate. Finow was noted for his want of religion. “He used to say that the Gods would always favour that party in war in which there were the greatest chiefs and warriors”—the European mot strictly adapted to Fiji conditions. “He did not believe that the Gods paid much attention in other respects to the affairs of mankind; nor did he think that they could have any reason for doing so—no more than men could have any reason or interest in attending to the affairs of the Gods.” For the rest, “it is certain that he disbelieved most of the oracles delivered by the priests,” though he carefully used them for political and military purposes; and he acquiesced in the usage of human sacrifices—particularly on his own account—while professing to deplore the taste of the Gods in these matters. His own death seems to have been the result of poisoning by a priest, whom the king had planned to strangle. The king’s daughter was sick, and the priest, instead of bringing about her recovery by his prayers, hardily explained that the illness was the act of the Gods in punishment of the king’s frequent disrespect to them. Daughter and father were alternately ill, till the former died; and then it was that the king, by disclosing his resolve to strangle the priest, brought on his own death (1810). A few warriors were disposed to take revenge on the priest; but the majority, on learning the facts, shuddered at the impious design of the late king, and regarded his death as the natural vengeance of the Gods. But, though such “impiety” as his was very rare, his son after him decided to abolish the priestly office of “divine chieftain,” on the score that it was seen to avail for nothing, while it cost a good deal; and the chiefs and common people were soon brought to acquiesce in the policy.46
Such cases appear to occur in many barbarous communities. It is recorded of the Kaffir chief Go that he was perfectly aware of the hollowness of the pretensions of the magicians and rain-makers of his tribe, though he held it impolitic to break with them, and called them in and followed their prescriptions, as did his subjects.47 Of the Galeka chief Segidi it is similarly told that, while his medicine-men went into trances for occult knowledge preparatory to a military expedition, he carefully obtained real information through spies, and, while liberally rewarding his wizards, sent his sons to school at Blythswood.48 Yet again, in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, we have the story of King Edwin’s priest, Coifi, naÏvely avowing that he saw no virtue in his religion,49 inasmuch as many men received more royal favours than he, who had been most diligent in serving the Gods.50 Such a declaration might very well have been arranged for by the Christian Bishop Paulinus, who was converting the king, and would naturally provide for Coifi; but on any view a process of skepticism had taken place in the barbarian’s mind.51
Other illustrations come from the history of ancient Scandinavia. Grimm notes in several Norse sagas and songs expressions of contempt for various Gods, which appear to be independent of Christian influence;52 and many warriors continued alike the Christian and the Pagan deities. In the saga of King Olaf Tryggvason, who enforced Christianity on Norway, it is declared by one chief that he relied much more on his own arm than on Thor and Odin; while another announced that he was neither Christian nor Pagan, adding: “My companions and I have no other religion than the confidence of our own strength and in the good success which always attends us in war.” Similar sentiments are recorded to have been uttered by Rolf Krake, a legendary king of Denmark (circa 500);53 and we have in the Æneid the classic type—doubtless drawn from barbaric life—of Mezentius, divum contemptor, who calls his right arm his God, and in dying declares that he appeals to no deity.54 Such utterances, indeed, do not amount to rational freethinking; but, where some could be thus capable of anti-theism, it is reasonable to surmise that among the more reflective there were some capable of simple atheism or non-belief, and of the prudence of keeping the fact to themselves. Partial skepticism, of course, would be much more common, as among the Aryan Kafirs of the Hindu-Kush, with whom, before their conquest by the Ameer of Afghanistan, a British agent found among the younger men an inclination to be skeptical about some sacred ceremonies, while very sincere in their worship of their favourite deity, the God of war.55
It is thus seen to be inaccurate to say, as has been said by an accomplished antagonist of apriorism, that “under the yoke of tribal custom skepticism can hardly arise: there is no place for the half-hearted: as all men feel alike, so all think alike: skepticism arises when beliefs are put into formal propositions.”56 It is broadly true that “there is no place for” the doubter as such in the tribal society; but doubters do exist. Skepticism—in the sense in which the term is here used, that of rational disbelief—may even be commoner in some stages of the life of tribal customs than in some stages of backward civilization loaded with formulated creeds. What is true is that in the primitive life the rationalism necessarily fails, for lack of culture and institutions, to diffuse and establish itself, whereas superstition succeeds, being naturally institution-making. Under such conditions skepticism is but a recurrent variation.57
It is significant, further, that in the foregoing cases of unbelief at the lower levels of civilization it is only the high rank of the doubter that secures publication for the fact of the doubt. In Hawaii, or Tonga, only a king’s unbelief could make itself historically heard. So in the familiar story of the doubting Inca of Peru, who in public religious assembly is said to have avowed his conclusion that the deified Sun was not really a living thing, it is the status of the speaker that gives his words a record. The doubt had in all likelihood been long current among the wise men of Peru; it is indeed ascribed to two or three different Incas;58 but, save for the Incas’ promulgation of it, history would bear no trace of Peruvian skepticism. So again in the Acolhuan State of Tezcuco, the most civilized in the New World before the Spanish conquest, the great King Netzahualcoyotl is found opposing the cults of human sacrifice and worshipping an “unknown God,” without an image and with only incense for offering.59 Only the king in such an environment could put on record such a conception. There is, in fact, reason to believe that all ancient ameliorations of bloody rites were the work of humane kings or chiefs,60 as they are known to have been among semi-savages in our own day.61 In bare justice we are bound to surmise that similar developments of rationalism have been fairly frequent in unwritten history, and that there must have been much of it among the common folk; though, on the other hand, the very position of a savage king, and the special energy of character which usually goes to secure it, may count for much in giving him the courage to think in defiance of custom. In modern as in early Christian times, it is always to the chief or king of a savage or barbarous tribe that the missionary looks for permission to proceed against the force of popular conservatism.62 Apart from kings and chiefs, the priesthood itself would be the likeliest soil for skepticism, though, of course, not for the open avowal of it.
There are to be noted, finally, the facts collected as to marked skeptical variation among children;63 and the express evidence that “it has not been found in a single instance that an uneducated deaf-mute has had any conception of the existence of a Supreme Being as the Creator and Ruler of the Universe.”64 These latter phenomena do not, of course, entitle us to accept Professor Gruppe’s sweeping theorem that it is the religious variation that is abnormal, and that religion can have spread only by way of the hereditary imposition of the original insanity of one or two on the imagination of the many.65 Deaf-mutes are not normal organisms. But all the facts together entitle us to decide that religion, broadly speaking, is but the variation that has chiefly flourished, by reason of its adaptation to the prevailing environment thus far; and to reject as unscientific the formulas which, even in the face of the rapidly-spreading rationalism of the more civilized nations, still affirm supernaturalist beliefs to be a universal necessity of the human mind.
On the same grounds, we must reject the claim—arbitrarily set up by one historian in the very act of showing how religion historically oppugns science—that all sacred books as such “are true because they have been developed in accordance with the laws governing the evolution of truth in human history; and because in poem, chronicle, code, legend, myth, apologue, or parable, they reflect this development of what is best in the onward march of humanity.”66 In this proposition the opening words, “are true because” are strictly meaningless. All literature whatever has been developed under the same general laws. But if it be meant that sacred books were specially likely to garner truth as such, the claim must be negated. In terms of the whole demonstration of the bias of theology against new truth in modern times, the irresistible presumption is that in earlier times also the theological and theocratic spirit was in general hostile to every process by which truth is normally attained. And if the thesis be limited to moral truth, it is still less credible. It is, in fact, inconceivable that literature so near the popular level as to suit whole priesthoods should be morally the best of which even the age producing it is capable; and nothing is more certain than that enlightened ethic has always had to impeach or explain away the barbarisms of some sacred books. The true summary is that in all cases the accepted sacred books have of necessity fallen short not only of scientific truth and of pure ethic, but even of the best speculation and the best ethic of the time of their acceptance, inasmuch as they excluded the criticism of the freethinking few on the sacred books themselves. There is sociological as well as physical science, and the former is flouted when the whole freethinking of the human race in the period of Bible-making is either ignored or treated as worthless.
It is probable, for instance, that in all stages of primitive religion there have been disbelievers in the value of sacrifice, who might or might not dare to denounce the practice. The demurrers to it in the Hebrew prophetic literature are probably late; but they were in all likelihood anticipated in early times. Among the Fijians, for whom cannibalism was an essentially religious act, and the privilege of the males of the aristocracy, there were a number of the latter who, before and apart from the entrance of Christianity, abominated and denounced the practice, reasoning against it also on utilitarian grounds, while the orthodox made it out to be a social duty. There were even whole towns which revolted against it and made it tabu; and it was by force mainly of this rationalistic reaction that the missionaries succeeded so readily in putting down the usage.67 It is impossible to estimate how often in the past such a revolt of reason against religious insanity has been overborne by the forces of pious habit.
