Phthisis

“ S. “And it is also intellectual; for intellectual facts can be only seen by an intellectual being.”
P. “True.”
S. “And also moral; for moral facts can only be seen by a moral being.”
P. “True also.”
S. “But this spirit is evidently not a man; it remains therefore, that it must be some demon.”
P. “But why one of the greatest?”
S. “Tell me, Phaethon, is not God to be numbered among facts as they are?”
P. “Assuredly; for he is before all others and more eternal and absolute than all.”
S. “Then this spirit of truth must also be able to see God as he is.” ”

“ Now, if we are, I will not say to do justice to the view that fetichism is the primitive religion of mankind or a stage from which other modes of religious thought have been developed, but if we are simply to understand it, we must clearly distinguish it from the view—somewhat paradoxical to say the least—that fetichism has no religious value, and yet is the source of all religious values. ”

“ More time and sharper acumen than many writers on the subject possess are needed for the formation of a valid idea of the religious conceptions of these people. A five-year-old girl playing with her doll is a better medium for studying primitive mythologies than the heaviest volumes of anthropologists and ethnographists.
I believe that much that is said about fetich-worship rests on no solid foundation; neither a kind of worship nor any serious service is addressed to the harmless toy we call a fetich, but only a mysterious good or evil spirit is fancied to dwell within it. ”

“ If fetichism be indeed one of the earliest factors of faith in the supernatural; if it be, in its rudest forms, most powerful in proportion to other elements of faith among the least cultivated races (and that Mr. Müller will probably allow) —among what class of cultivated peoples will it longest hold its ground? Clearly, among the least cultivated, among the fishermen, the shepherds of lonely districts, the peasants of outlying lands—in short, among the people. Neglected by sacred poets in the culminating period of purity in religion, it will linger among the superstitions of the rustics. ”

“ Think for a moment of a "spiritual faculty," so bright as to anticipate all essential spiritual verities, —the universal possession of humanity,—which yet terminates in leaving the said humanity to grovel in every form of error, between the extremes of Fetichism, which consecrates a bit of stone, and Pantheism, which consecrates all the bits of stone in the universe, in fact, a sort of comprehensive Fetichism;—which leaves man to erect every thing into a God, provided it is none,—sun, moon, stars, a cat, a monkey, an onion, uncouth idols, sculptured marble ”

“ Students may hold that we hardly know enough to justify us in talking about the origin of religion, while at the same time they may believe that Fetichism is one of the earliest traceable steps by which men climbed to higher conceptions of the supernatural. Meanwhile Mr. Max Müller supports his own theory, that fetichism is a 'parasitical growth,' a 'corruption' of religion, by arguments mainly drawn from historical study of savage creeds, and from the ancient religious documents of India. ”

“ In Rome, it is at least probable that fetichism, as in Greece, was partly a survival, partly a new growth from the primal root of human superstitions. As to Catholicism, the records of Councils, the invectives of the Church, show us that, from the beginning, the secondary religion in point of time, the religion of the Church, laboured vainly to suppress, and had in part to tolerate, the primary religion of childish superstitions. The documents are before the world. ”

“ Go not too high or too low, for the sake of heavens and earth; else men and gods will suffer. The Fates alone know whether evil is to come of this. Yet if your heart fails you, as I hope, abide here and I will make the journey, as I am wont to do."
But Phaethon held to his choice and bade his father farewell. He took his place in the chariot, gathered up the reins, and the horses sprang away, eager for the road. ”

“ Müller says, speaking of the Indians (p. 205) : 'The concept of gods was no doubt growing up while men were assuming a more and more definite attitude towards these semi-tangible and intangible objects'—trees, rivers, hills, the sky, the sun, and so on, which he thinks suggested and developed, by aid of a kind of awe, the religious feeling of the infinite. We too would say that, among people who adore fetiches and ghosts, the concept of gods no doubt silently grew up, as men assumed a more and more definite attitude towards the tangible and intangible objects they held sacred. ”

“ By its essence, then, Fetissism is a rude and sensual superstition, the faith of abject fear, and of infant races that have not risen, and are, perhaps, incapable of rising to theism—the religion of love and the belief of the [344] highest types of mankind. But old creeds die hard, and error, founded upon the instincts and feelings of human nature borrows the coherence and uniformity of truth. ”

“ However, it is safe to say it is greater than that of Fetichism. The constant evil of war in public, and slavery in private; the arbitrary character assigned to the Gods; the influence of the priesthood, laying more stress on the ritual and the creed than on the life; the exceeding outwardness of many popular forms of worship; the constant separation made between Religion and Morality; the indifference of the priesthood in Greece, their despotism in India,—do not offer a very favourable picture of the influence of Polytheism in producing a beautiful life. ”

“ Idolatry proper regards the idol as the symbol and representative of a spiritual being who exists apart from the material object, though he manifests himself through it. Fetichism, however, identifies the divinity with the material thing, and worships the stock or stone; spirit is not conceived of as existing apart from body. Belief in spiritual beings and a future state is therefore proof of a religion higher in kind than fetichism. ”

“ What use of Nature, what enjoyment of the universe, what savour of the elements, does the soul not enjoy by the agency of the flesh?" Think, he says, of the services rendered to the soul by the senses, by speech, by all the arts, interests and ingenuities dependent on the flesh; think of what the flesh does by living and dying. [53] The Jove of Phidias is not the world's great deity, because the ivory is so much, but because Phidias is so great; and did God give less of hand and thought, of providence and love, to the matter of which he made man? ”

“ The Truth represented by Fetichism is this: The unknown God is present in Matter; spiritual power is the strongest of forces. Its error was to make Matter God. The truth of Polytheism is: God is present, and active, everywhere; in Space, in Spirit; breathes in the wind; speaks in the storm; inspires to acts of virtue; helps the efforts of all true men. ”

“ S. “But if, again, she said the same thing to Phaethon, she would still speak by the spirit of truth?”
“By no means, Socrates,” said I, laughing.
S. “Be silent, fair boy; you are out of court as an interested party. Alcibiades shall answer. If Lyce, being really mad with love, like Sappho, were to believe Phaethon to be fairer than you, and say so, she would still speak by the spirit of truth?”
A. “I suppose so.”
S. “Do not frown; your beauty is in no question. Only she would then be saying what is not true?” ”

“ In particular, I reflect that, as a matter of fact, the theistic theory is born of highly suspicious parentage,—that Fetichism, or the crudest form of the theory of personal agency in external nature, admits of being easily traced to the laws of a primitive psychology ”

“ It is the Unknown which men worship in common things; at this stage, man, whose emotions are understood, is never an object of adoration. [4]
Fetichism is the infancy of Religion. Here the religious consciousness is still in the arms of rude, savage life, where sensation prevails over reflection. It is a deification of Nature, “All is God, but God himself.” It loses the Infinite in the finite; worships the creature more than the Creator. Its lowest form—for in this lowest deep there is a lower deep—is the worship of beasts ”

“ Our object has been to defend the 'primitiveness of fetichism.' By this we do not mean to express any opinion as to whether fetichism (in the strictest sense of the word) was or was not earlier than totemism, than the worship of the dead, or than the involuntary sense of awe and terror with which certain vast phenomena may have affected the earliest men. We only claim for the powerful and ubiquitous practices of fetichism a place among the early elements of religion, and insist that what is so universal has not yet been shown to be 'a corruption' of something older and purer. ”

“ In fetiches, he ignorantly recognises something that possesses power of an abnormal sort, and the train of ideas which leads him to believe in and to treasure fetiches is one among the earliest springs of religious belief. ”

“ As the disease advances, the action of the heart becomes feeble; and the appearance of the blood indicates a carbonaceous admixture. The carbonaceous deposit seems to supersede or supplant the formation of other morbid bodies in the substance of the lungs—such as tubercle; for in individuals belonging to families in which there exists an undoubted phthisical diathesis, tubercle is never found on dissection. ”

“ That Fetissism is a belief common to man in the childhood of his spiritual life, may be proved by the frequent and extensive remains of the faith which the cretinism of the Hamitic race has perpetuated amongst them to the present day, still sprouting like tares even in the fair field of revealed religion. The dread of ghosts, for instance, which is the mainstay of Fetissism, is not inculcated in any sacred book, yet the belief is not to be abolished. Thus the Rakshasa of the Hindus is a disembodied spirit, doing evil to mankind ”

“ The tendency to personification which distinguishes mythology was due to the instinct of uncivilized humanity to impute to external objects a consciousness similar to that by which men are governed—in other words, to regard them as living agents with wills and passions like our own. If fetichism be the rudimentary phase of this instinct, polytheism indicates an advance by which the mind has passed from the mere recognition of spiritual power in nature to the investment of that power with personal and corporeal qualities. ”

“ As to adoration of material objects frankly regarded as such, fetichism is a secondary derivative, and not the first form of the religious sentiment.
Another philosophical prejudice, of a contrary bearing, is the one that represents the historical religions as the feeble echo of a primitive monotheism, qualified by natural religion. It seemed to receive a striking confirmation in the first half of this century, when the most ancient monuments of Eastern thought put off their veils before our dazzled eyes. ”

“ Fetichism proper gradually becomes limited to objects possessing a marked individuality. A particular mountain or river is worshipped bodily (as it is even now by the Hindoos and the South Sea Islanders) as a divinity in itself, not the mere residence of one, long after invisible gods have been imagined as rulers of all the great classes of phaenomena, even intellectual and moral, as war, love, wisdom, beauty, &c. ”

“ The writings of the Greeks, the Romans, the Scandinavians and the Hindoos, the Chinese and Persians, are full of miracles. In Fetichism all is miracle, and its authority, therefore, the best in the world. ”

“ The ignorance and degradation of fetichism are His, as well as the highest revelations of spiritual truth. A certain class of evolutionists tell us that God contrived the serpent's poison-fang and the mother's tender instinct with "the same creative indifference." And the broad pantheism which overrides the distinctions of eternal right and wrong, and divests God of all moral discriminations, puts Vedantism and Fetichism, Christianity and Witchcraft, upon the same basis. The Bhagavad Gita and the Gospel both enjoin the brotherhood of men, but what are the meanings which they give to this term? ”

“ Why not at once introduce a new religion?* since religions keep and are relished in proportion as they are salted with absurdity, inside and out? and all of them must have one great crystal of it for the centre; but Philosophy pines and dies unless she drinks limpid water. When Pherecydes and Pythagoras felt in themselves the majesty of contemplation, they spurned the idea that flesh and bones and arteries should confer it: and that what comprehends the past and the future should sink in a moment and be annihilated for ever. ”

“ When “every clove of garlic is a God,” as in Fetichism, each man is his own priest; but when a troop of Fetiches are condensed into a single God, and he is invisible, all cannot have equal access to him, for he is not infinite, but partial; chooses his own place and time. ”

“ There is no envy, strife, or confusion in the divine consciousness, to justify hostility among men; He hears equally the prayer of all, and gives them infinite good at last. No priesthood is needed to serve Him. Under Fetichism every man could have access to his God, for divine symbols were more numerous than men; miracles were performed every day; inspiration was common, but of little value; the favour of the Gods was supposed to give a wonderful and miraculous command over Nature. Under Polytheism, only a chosen few had direct access to God ”