The Making of Religion - Andrew Lang

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was supposed to have 'a life,' as far as one makes out, before the idea of separable soul was developed, at least if savages arrived at the theory of universal animation as children are said to do.

      We are dealing here quite conjecturally with facts beyond our experience.

      In any case, early man excogitated (by the hypothesis) the abstract idea of Life, before he first 'envisaged' it in material terms as 'breath,' or 'shadow.' He next decided that mere breath or shadow was not only identical with the more abstract conception of Life, but could also take on forms as real and full-bodied as, to him, are the hallucinations of dream or waking vision. His reasoning appears to have proceeded from the more abstract (the idea of Life) to the more concrete, to the life first shadowy and vaporous, then clothed in the very aspect of the real man.

      Mr. Tylor has thus (whether we follow his logic or not) provided man with a theory of active, intelligent, separable souls, which can survive the death of the body. At this theory early man arrived by speculations on the nature of life, and on the causes of phantasms of the dead or living beheld in 'dreams and visions.' But our author by no means leaves out of sight the effects of alleged supernormal phenomena believed in by savages, with their parallels in modern civilisation. These supernormal phenomena, whether real or illusory, are, he conceives, facts in that mass of experiences from which savages constructed their belief in separable, enduring, intelligent souls or ghosts, the foundation of religion.

      While we are, perhaps owing to our own want of capacity, puzzled by what seem to be two kinds of early philosophy—(1) a sort of instinctive or unreasoned belief in universal animation, which Mr. Spencer calls 'Animism' and does not believe in, (2) the reasoned belief in separable and surviving souls of men (and in things), which Mr. Spencer believes in, and Mr. Tylor calls 'Animism'—we must also note another difficulty. Mr. Tylor may seem to be taking it for granted that the earliest, remote, unknown thinkers on life and the soul were existing on the same psychical plane as we ourselves, or, at least, as modern savages. Between modern savages and ourselves, in this regard, he takes certain differences, but takes none between modern savages and the remote founders of religion.

      Thus Mr. Tylor observes:

      'The condition of the modern ghost-seer, whose imagination passes on such slight excitement into positive hallucination, is rather the rule than the exception among uncultured and intensely imaginative tribes, whose minds may be thrown off their balance by a touch, a word, a gesture, an unaccustomed noise.'[18]

      I find evidence that low contemporary savages are not great ghost-seers, and, again, I cannot quite accept Mr. Tylor's psychology of the 'modern ghost-seer.' Most such favoured persons whom I have known were steady, unimaginative, unexcitable people, with just one odd experience. Lord Tennyson, too, after sleeping in the bed of his recently lost father on purpose to see his ghost, decided that ghosts 'are not seen by imaginative people.'

      We now examine, at greater length, the psychical conditions in which, according to Mr. Tylor, contemporary savages differ from civilised men. Later we shall ask what may be said as to possible or presumable psychical differences between modern savages and the datelessly distant founders of the belief in souls. Mr. Tylor attributes to the lower races, and even to races high above their level, 'morbid ecstasy, brought on by meditation, fasting, narcotics, excitement, or disease.' Now, we may still 'meditate'—and how far the result is 'morbid' is a matter for psychologists and pathologists to determine. Fasting we do not practise voluntarily, nor would we easily accept evidence from an Englishman as to the veracity of voluntary fasting visions, like those of Cotton Mather. The visions of disease we should set aside, as a rule, with those of 'excitement,' produced, for instance, by 'devil-dances.' Narcotic and alcoholic visions are not in question.[19] For our purpose the induced trances of savages (in whatever way voluntarily brought on) are analogous to the modern induced hypnotic trance. Any supernormal acquisitions of knowledge in these induced conditions, among savages, would be on a par with similar alleged experiences of persons under hypnotism.

      We do not differ from known savages in being able to bring on non-normal psychological conditions, but we produce these, as a rule, by other methods than theirs, and such experiments are not made on all of us, as they were on all Red Indian boys and girls in the 'medicine-fast,' at the age of puberty.

      Further, in their normal state, known savages, or some of them, are more 'suggestible' than educated Europeans at least.[20] They can be more easily hallucinated in their normal waking state by suggestion. Once more, their intervals of hunger, followed by gorges of food, and their lack of artificial light, combine to make savages more apt to see what is not there than are comfortable educated white men. But Mr. Tylor goes too far when he says 'where the savage could see phantasms, the civilised man has come to amuse himself with fancies.'[21] The civilised man, beyond all doubt, is capable of being enfantosmé.

      In all that he says on this point, the point of psychical condition, Mr. Tylor is writing about known savages as they differ from ourselves. But the savages who ex hypothesi evolved the doctrine of souls lie beyond our ken, far behind the modern savages, among whom we find belief not only in souls and ghosts, but in moral gods. About the psychical condition of the savages who worked out the theory of souls and founded religion we necessarily know nothing. If there be such experiences as clairvoyance, telepathy, and so on, these unknown ancestors of ours may (for all that we can tell) have been peculiarly open to them, and therefore peculiarly apt to believe in separable souls. In fact, when we write about these far-off founders of religion, we guess in the dark, or by the flickering light of analogy. The lower animals have faculties (as in their power of finding their way home through new unknown regions, and in the ants' modes of acquiring and communicating knowledge to each other) which are mysteries to us. The terror of dogs in 'haunted houses' and of horses in passing 'haunted' scenes has often been reported, and is alluded to briefly by Mr. Tylor. Balaam's ass, and the dogs which crouched and whined before Athene, whom Eumaeus could not see, are 'classical' instances.

      The weakness of the anthropological argument here is, we must repeat, that we know little more about the mental condition and experiences of the early thinkers who developed the doctrine of Souls than we know about the mental condition and experiences of the lower animals. And the more firmly a philosopher believes in the Darwinian hypothesis, the less, he must admit, can he suppose himself to know about the twilight ages, between the lower animal and the fully evolved man. What kind of creature was man when he first conceived the germs, or received the light, of Religion? All is guess-work here! We may just allude to Hegel's theory that clairvoyance and hypnotic phenomena are produced in a kind of temporary atavism, or 'throwing hack' to a remotely ancient condition of the 'sensitive soul' (füklende Seele). The 'sensitive' [unconditioned, clairvoyant] faculty or 'soul' is 'a disease when it becomes a state of the self-conscious, educated, self-possessed human being of civilisation.'[22] 'Second sight,' Hegel thinks, was a product of an earlier day and earlier mental condition than ours.

      Approaching this almost untouched subject—the early psychical condition of man—not from the side of metaphysical speculations like Hegel, but with the instruments of modern psychology and physiology, Dr. Max Dessoir, of Berlin, following, indeed, M. Taine, has arrived, as we saw, at somewhat similar conclusions. 'This fully conscious life of the spirit,' in which we moderns now live, 'seems to rest upon a substratum of reflex action of a hallucinatory type.' Our actual modern condition is not 'fundamental,' and 'hallucination represents, at least in its nascent condition, the main trunk of our psychical existence.'[23]

      Now, suppose that the remote and unknown ancestors of ours who first developed the doctrine of souls had not yet spread far from 'the main trunk of our psychical existence,' far from constant hallucination. In that case (at least, according to Dr. Dessoir's theory) their psychical experiences would be such as we cannot estimate, yet cannot leave, as a possibility influencing religion, out of our calculations.

      If early men were ever in a condition in which telepathy and clairvoyance (granting their possibility) were prevalent, one might expect that faculties so useful would be developed in the struggle for existence. That they are deliberately cultivated by modern savages we know. The Indian foster-mother of John Tanner used, when food was needed, to suggest herself into an hypnotic condition, so that she became clairvoyante

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