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That the divine personality does impress itself in these and other ways upon men, that it impresses itself unequally on different men, unequally on the same man at different times these things are all matters of immediate consciousness, are direct perceptions. Whether these perceptions correspond to actual facts is not a question for the historian of religion to discuss: the eye of the soul may or may not be constituted, as the eye of the body is said to be, in such a way that from its very structure it cannot but be a false guide as to the light. to the light. The historian, however, has to recognise that these perceptions do exist; that—whether there exists anything objective, corresponding to them or not they are facts of consciousness; that they are universal, though they may play a little or a large part or no part at all in the life of this man or that; that they form part of the continuum in religious evolution; and that they are specifically religious, not animistic. animism man projects his own personality on to external nature in religion he is increasingly impressed by the divine personality; and, however faint or ill-attended to we may imagine this consciousness to have been in the early stages of the evolution of religion, it is in and by itself a higher form of religious thought than we get in animal-worship, in totemism. At first sight this may appear to settle the question: evolution proceeds by lower forms to higher, totemism is the lower and therefore the original form. But in reality the question is not settled quite so easily. It is true that the advance, in religion as in other things, from lower to higher is a process of evolution. It is not true that every process of evolution is an advance: decay is a form of evolution as much as growth. In art that form survives which is best adapted to the taste of the age -and the age may have no taste; or it may have worse taste than the previous age or better, and there will then be a decline or an improvement in art, as the case may be. But decline and improvement are equally part of the evolution in art, for in each case that form survives which is best fitted to survive under the given conditions, though it is not necessarily or always or commonly the highest form of art. In morals and in religion, evolution thus may follow a

wavering course: first advance, then retrogression; then perhaps a fresh start is made by those who deviated, and they move in the right direction indeed, but not so accurately for the goal as those who never strayed; and everywhere it is the many who lapse, the few who hold right on-the progressive peoples of the earth are in the minority. Totemism, which is at least the worship of one god, declines into the worship of many gods; polytheism may in some few civilised peoples rise towards pantheism, but in most cases degenerates into fetishism; monotheism passes in one case from Judaism into Christianity, but in another into Mohammedanism; sacrifice degenerates from a sacrament into the making of gifts, and then, except in the case of Christianity, into mere magic used to constrain the gods to do the will of man.

It seems, then, that neither the course of evolution in general, nor that of religious evolution in particular, is so uniformly upward as to warrant the general proposition that of two related forms the higher must have been evolved out of the lower. Relapse is at least sufficiently common in the history of religion to make it conceivable that totemism was a degeneration from some simpler form of faith, for evolution does, though progress does not always, move from the simple to the complex, from less to more fully differentiated forms. Further, we have seen reason to believe 1 that the distinction between the natural and the supernatural has always been known to man; that it was only by slow degrees he came to attribute supernatural powers to the personal agents of animism; and later still, that he took an animal for his clangod. Here, then, we have the stage in religious development out of which, on the one hand, a relatively higher form of monotheism was evolved, and, on the other, by a process of degeneration but still of evolution, totemism was developed.

That it was only amongst one people of the earth that this simple and amorphous monotheism was developed into something higher, and everywhere else degenerated into the grosser form of animal-worship, is a fact which will not surprise us when we reflect that, though evolution is universal, progress is exceptional. Progress in higher 1 Supra, p. 18ff,

matters is always due to the minority, to individual thinkers, discoverers, reformers. And there is no known law of the distribution of genius: in literature and art, for instance, the great names are as frequent B.C. as A.D. Progress does not multiply them or produce them: they initiate it. That in historic times progress in religion is due to individual teachers, prophets, and reformers, may be taken to be undoubted; and we may venture to infer that whatever progress was made in prehistoric times was made in the same way. The growth of civilisation seems to have no power to increase the number of geniuses born in a century; and it would be difficult to prove that it is impossible for a mind of the highest powers to be born of a race in a rude and semi-civilised or even uncivilised state. But it may

perhaps be argued that a mind so born would fail to develop because of its unfavourable environment. Here, however, we must distinguish between the two kinds of knowledge, first the intuitive or immediate, and second that which is gained by means of inference, inductive or deductive. As regards the latter, a Newton might be born out of due season, in a race which knew no processes of mathematical inference, and so might fail, because he found no mental instruments, no mathematical methods, in existence, to do what otherwise he might have done. But this is not the case, or not so much so, with the knowledge which is intuitive: the artist of to-day has better means—materials and methods elaborated by his predecessors for expressing himself, but he has not a more direct perception of the truth than had the prehistoric artist who has bequeathed to us his sketches of the reindeer and the mammoth. Now, the artist's source of truth is his direct perception of things external; but of spiritual things the knowledge comes by inward intuition, by direct perception of things not apprehended by the outward senses. In the degree of this knowledge men vary; and of old as at the present day "the million rose to learn, the one to teach." We may explain this as due to revelation or to greater powers of spiritual insight or in some other way, but the fact remains that men do thus vary, and that it is the minority who teach, who reform religion and impart to it its progress.

Religious progress moves wholly on one line, that of personality, and is the unveiling, revealing disclosure of what is implied therein. But the divine personality impresses itself unequally on different minds, and it is to those most impressed by it that religious progress is due to them monotheism was disclosed, the divine personality was in their own belief revealed; and we cannot maintain it to be impossible or even improbable that such revelation may have been made even to primitive man.

CHAPTER XXVI

THE EVOLUTION OF BELIEF

BELIEFS are about facts-facts of external consciousness and internal consciousness-and are statements that facts are thus and thus. The ultimate test of a belief is whether the facts actually are as stated and believed to be-i.e. is the appeal to consciousness.

Differences of belief (which may be compared to the variations of organisms), so far as they are not due to erroneous logical processes, may be explained in one of two ways: (1) the powers of vision (spiritual, moral, æsthetic) may be supposed to vary from individual to individual, as do those of physical vision, and for the same (unexplained but not therefore supernatural) causes. This assumes that the facts are themselves always the same, but that one man, having better sight, sees them and their relations to each other better than other people, and therefore differently from other people. This accounts for the origin of different varieties of belief. The perpetuation of any variety depends solely on the conditions under which it occurs: whatever varieties of belief are not favoured by the conditions, by their environment, will perish-the rest will survive (the surviving belief will not necessarily be that of the keenest-sighted man, but that which accords with what the average sight can see of the facts). The survival of a new variety of belief implies harmony between the reformer's vision and the average man's view of the facts, on this theory; and therefore the theory fails to explain any advance-unless, indeed, we postulate that the new variety or "sport" at once alters the conditions and makes them favourable to itself and its own growth. Now this is what really takes place in the case of belief (bad

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