James H. Leuba

“ The thunder might be the voice of some monstrous animal. The surpassing variety, the magnitude and magnificence of nature, stimulate the imagination into more original activity than the apparitions of men and women in dreams or in trances. ”

“ The very possibility of deceiving himself reveals the superiority of man over animals, for self-deception requires a degree of independence from sense-observation, a capacity of constructive imagination, a susceptibility to auto-suggestion, not to be found in animals. That the first glimmer of these capacities should have plunged man in the darkness of primitive Magic and Religion, and made him the ridiculous fool he appears to be by the side of the matter-of-fact, intelligent animal is, however, a very striking and singular fact. ”

“ As belief in a God seems no longer possible, man seeks an impersonal, efficient substitute, belief in which will not mean disloyalty to science. For man will have life, and have it abundantly, and he knows from experience that its sources are not only in meat and drink, but also in ‘spiritual faith.’ It is this problem which the Comtists, the Immanentists, the Ethical Culturists, the Mental Scientists are all trying to solve. Any solution will have the right to the name Religion that provides for the preservation and the perfectioning of life by means of faith in a superhuman psychic Power. ”

“ A question of greater importance to the student of the origin of Religion is that of the lineage of the first god or gods, i.e. of the first unseen, personal agents with whom men entered into relations definite and influential enough to deserve the name Religion. Are they descended from ghosts, or are they nature-beings, or creators? I say, ‘descended’ from ghosts, for ghosts have not, originally, all the qualities required of a divinity. They are at first hardly greater than men, though somewhat different. ”

“ From the moment Religion appears, until the efficiency of Magic is totally discredited, we may expect to find these two modes of behaviour associated in men’s dealings with gods, except, however, where the god is clearly thought of as a world-creator. For the savage could hardly have the presumption of attempting to control a power he recognises as the maker of the human race and of the world. ”

“ We think because we will. Thought does not exist for itself; it is the instrument of desire. To discover ways and means of gratifying proximate or distant desires, needs, [Pg 7] cravings, is the function of intelligence. The psychologist speaks, therefore, of the instrumental character of thought, and considers cognition to be a function of conduct. The mastery of desire over thought is abundantly illustrated in the history of belief, and nowhere so strikingly as in Religion. ”

“ So that it is truer to the facts to say that the fundamental conception of science, so far from being identical with that of Magic, is absent from it. For the essential presupposition of science—the one that differentiates it alike from Magic and from Religion—is the acknowledgment of definite and constant quantitative relations between causes and effects, relations which completely exclude the personal element and the occult. If that scientific presupposition is absent from Magic and from Religion, it is implicitly present in mechanical behaviour. ”

“ If aggressive emotions are not conspicuous at the dawn of Religion, it is only because it so happens that the circumstances in which the least cultured peoples known to us live are such as to keep fear in the foreground of consciousness. Fear was the first of the well-organised emotional reactions. It antedated the human species, and appears to this day first in the young animal, as well as in the infant. No doubt, before the protective fear-reaction could have been established, the lust of life had worked itself out into aggressive habits, those for the securing of food, for instance. ”

“ In swinging back from Intellectualism to Voluntarism, modern psychology has accepted the fundamental truth excellently expressed by the Greek philosopher. ‘Will is not merely a function which sometimes accrues to consciousness, and is sometimes lacking; it is an integral property of consciousness.’ [5] Will without intelligence may be possible; but intelligence without will is not, not even in the case of so-called disinterested, theoretical thinking. There is, there can be, no thinking without desire, intention, or purpose. ”

“ Upon this I observe, first, that the acknowledgment of a fixed relation between actions or beliefs and their results is not peculiar to Magic; it is implied also in Religion and, more perfectly, in mechanical behaviour. Salvation is by the right practice, or by the right faith, or both. The gods cannot be approached and conciliated in any way; worshipper, no less than magician, has to conform to a definite ritual. In certain not entirely barbarous communities salvation or damnation is held to follow, respectively, belief or disbelief in no less than thirty-nine articles! ”

“ The opinion itself is tenable, but the defence of it, made as it is from the standpoint of the old English associationism, is unfortunately worthless. ‘Magic,’ he tells us, ‘is nothing but a mistaken application of the very simplest and most elementary process of the mind, namely, the association of ideas by virtue of resemblance or contiguity,’ while ‘Religion assumes the operation of conscious or personal agents, superior to man, behind the visible screen of nature. Obviously the concept of personal agent is more complex than a simple recognition of the similarity or contiguity of ideas.... ”

“ It seems highly probable that for generations the relations maintained with ghosts, nature-beings, and creators, by primitive man were too occasional and unofficial to permit of our regarding them as anything more than steps preliminary to the formation of Positive Religion.
Rites and ceremonies serve, in addition to their ostensible purpose, to complete the work of fixation begun by language. It is only when a belief has become embodied in a system of actions that it has attained the full measure of reality and durability of which it is capable. ”

“ But it would be absurd to conclude from the existence of derived magical practices that Magic, as a whole, is to be accounted for on a theory of ‘lapsed intelligence.’
Magic and Religion combine but never fuse.—When ghosts and nature-beings have become mental possessions of the savage, one may expect the sphere of Magic to extend so as to include these unseen, mysterious beings. Why should not [Pg 66] the magical power take effect upon ghosts and gods as well as upon men? The savage, like everybody else, is anxious to use every available means to secure his preservation and his advancement. ”

“ What magic shares with science is not the belief in the fundamental principle we have named, but the desire to gain the mastery over the powers of nature and the practice of the experimental method. The experimentation of Magic is, however, so limited and so unconscious that it can hardly be assimilated to the modern scientific method. ”

“ Yet so it is; before any speculation on power, before any induction or deduction, before any abstract notion of the nature of spirit and matter, animals have learned to deal quite well with what we call physical and personal forces. How did they do it? The study under experimental conditions of the establishment of new reactions in animals reveals the process very clearly. Imagine a cat shut up in a cage, the door of which can be opened by pressing down a latch. When weary of confinement the cat begins to claw, pull, and bite, here, there, and everywhere. ”

“ Unorganised religiosity must be, it seems, the necessary precursor of organised Religion; it is its larval stage. But it does not by any means disappear from society when a system of definite relations with gods, or with impersonal sources of religious inspiration, has been developed. In all societies there is always a large number of people who live in the limbo of organised Religion. They are open to the influence of religious agents, in which they believe more or less cold-heartedly, without ever entering into definite and fixed relations with them. ”

“ If animal plays serve a highly valuable purpose in affording practice in sense-observation and motor-co-ordination, Magic makes its chief call upon the imagination; in this consists one of its most far-reaching values. It becomes a training for the achievement of those higher mental syntheses requiring the momentary disregard of the actual sense-impressions, from which it is so difficult to liberate oneself, in behalf of the accumulated experience of a whole life. ”

“ I would not object even to its being termed the earliest philosophy, provided it be granted that the progress of the human race was already well under way when it appeared. But when it is assumed, as it is by many, that the animistic conception of nature is necessary to, and antedates, the establishment of Magic, I must dissent and affirm that a very large number of magical practices neither presuppose, nor in any way involve, a belief in animism, and that there are good reasons for [Pg 65] considering them original, i.e. not corruptions of practices primitively implying that belief. ”

“ Yet animals do not practise the magical art. This fact should be sufficient to make one realise the insufficiency of ‘a simple [mistaken] recognition of the similarity and contiguity of ideas’ as an explanation of the origin of Magic. An animal might observe the colour-likeness between carrots and jaundice (not, however, unless practical dealings with them had attracted his attention to the colour) , and ‘coat’ and ‘master’ might follow each other in a dog’s mind. ”

“ Here are two instances of the combination of Magic with Religion. ‘In the Babar Archipelago, when a woman desires to have a child, she invites a man, who is himself the father of a large family, to pray on her behalf to Upulero, the spirit of the sun. A doll is made of red cotton, which the woman clasps in her arms, as if she would suckle it. ”

“ The second objection to the assumption that the trial-and-error method could have led to the establishment of magical and religious habits arises from the inability of animals to act towards unperceived objects as if they were actually present. A dog never welcomes by gambols or licks the hand of an absent friend, while Religion, and at times Magic, show primitive man in more or less systematic relations with powers he has never sensed. ”

“ The conception of the Source of Psychic Energy, without the belief in which no Religion can exist, has undergone very interesting transformations in the course of historical development. The human or animal form ascribed to the gods in the earlier Religions became less and less definite. At the same time the number of gods decreased. The culmination of this double process was Monotheism, in which the One, Eternal, Creator and Sustainer of life was no longer necessarily framed in the shape of man or beast: though still anthropopathic, he might be formless. ”

“ In speaking of Religion as an activity, or as a type of behaviour, I would not be understood to exclude from it whatever does not express itself in overt acts, in rites of propitiation, submission, or adoration. For, just as man’s relations with his fellow-men are not all directly expressed, or expressible, in actions, so his relations with gods, or their impersonal substitutes, may not have any visible form ”

“ A Maker cannot, moreover, be an enemy to those who issue from him, but must, it seems, appear as the Great Ancestor, benevolently inclined towards his offspring. Incomparable greatness, creative power, benevolence, are as many attributes favourable to the appearance of a Religion in the high sense which, as we shall see, W. Robertson Smith gives to the word. ”

“ In this biological view of Religion, its necessary and natural spring is the same as that of non-religious life, i.e. the ‘will to live’ in its multiform appearances, while the ground of differentiation between the religious and the secular is neither specific feelings nor emotions, nor yet distinctive impulses, desires, or purposes, but the nature of the force which it is attempted to press into service. ”

“ If, with this conception in mind, we turn to Religion, we shall understand it to be compounded of will, thought, and feeling, bearing to each other the relation which belongs to them in every department of life. ”

“ The slowness with which our modern ritual has been envolved should be sufficient to undeceive any one inclined to think that the establishment of the initial religious rites presented no difficulty.
That a belief in ghosts may coincide with only a pre-religious stage of culture is not a mere supposition. There are tribes in South-East Australia among which it is customary to make fires in the graves, and to place in them water, food, and weapons. Yet we are told that these people have no system of propitiation or of worship. ”

“ The first of the two differences I intend to bring out, is that if a particular action is to be learned by an animal, the gratification of the actuating desire must follow immediately, or nearly so, upon the performance of the successful act, and be frequently repeated at short intervals; whereas in man, as far as Magic and Religion are concerned, the results may follow quite irregularly upon the performance, often only long after, and, not infrequently, not at all. ”