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Each belief, the positive and the negative, is inherent in man's mind and indispensable to his welfare. Each, however, is rendered barren or misleading by a fallacy due solely to the association of ideas. From the fallacy of magic man was delivered by religion; and there are reasons, I submit, for believing that it was by the same aid he escaped from the irrational restrictions of taboo.

The reader will have noticed for himself that the action of taboo is always mechanical; contact with the tabooed object communicates the taboo infection as certainly as contact with water communicates moisture, or an electric current an electric shock. The intentions of the taboobreaker have no effect upon the action of the taboo; he may touch in ignorance, or for the benefit of the person he touches, but he is tabooed as surely as if his motive were irreverent or his action hostile. Nor does the mood of the sacred persons, the Mikado, the Polynesian chief, the priestess of Artemis Hymnia, modify the mechanical action of taboo; their touch or glance is as fatal to friend as foe, to plant life as to human. Still less does the morality of the taboo-breaker matter; the penalty descends like rain alike upon the unjust and the just. In a word, there is no rational principle of action in the operation of taboo; it is mechanical; arbitrary, because its sole basis is the arbitrary association of ideas; irrational, because its principle is " that casual connection in thought is equivalent to causative connection in fact."1

On the other hand, the dominant conception of modern civilisation is that the universe is intelligible, that it is constructed on rational principles, and that the reasons of things may be discovered. This is the avowed axiom of metaphysics, which aims at proving the truth of its axiom by presenting an orderly and rational system of the universe. It is the tacit assumption, or the faith, of science, as is shown by the fact that, if a hypothesis, such as that of evolution, fails to account for all the facts which it professes to explain, the man of science infers, not that the facts themselves are unintelligible and not to be accounted for on rational principles, but that his hypothesis is at fault. The 1 A. Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, i. 95.

same assumption is made by the religious sentiment, which, even when most distressed, for example by the apparent triumph of injustice or by problems such as that of the origin of evil, still holds that the facts are capable ultimately of a satisfactory explanation.

The advance, then, which civilisation has made on savagery consists, partially at least, in shaking off the bonds imposed upon the mind by the association of ideas, in seeking a rational instead of a mechanical explanation of things; in fine, to return to the subject of this chapter, in the rationalisation of taboo. Now, wherever the operation of taboo is accepted as an ultimate fact which requires no explanation, there no advance towards its rationalisation can be made, and progress is impossible. But as soon as a taboo is taken up into religion, its character is changed; it is no longer an arbitrary fact, it becomes the command of a divine being, who has reasons for requiring obedience to his ordinances. Not all taboos, however, are taken up into religion; there is a process of selection and rejection. To the consideration of this process we shall return shortly; here all we are concerned with is to point out that when the taboos which receive the sanction of religion are regarded as reasonable, as being the commands of a being possessing reason, then the other taboos also may be brought to the test of reason, and man may gradually learn to disregard those which are manifestly unreasonable. The conviction begins to gain strength that God does not forbid things without a reason; at the same time, religion, by selecting certain taboos to receive its sanction, strengthens them and thereby relatively weakens the force of those which it rejects. The fact that the latter have not received the religious sanction creates a presumption that they are less binding, and makes it easier for man to discard them if they have no reason and no utility. Hence, all the elaborate precautions which are taken by the savage to prevent his food from becoming tabooed, dwindle down to the etiquette of the dining-table; the removal of a garment, lest it should be tabooed by the glance of a superior, is etiolated into civilised man's form of salutation; and the interdict from fire and water as a social penalty survives only in the cut direct. But though restrictions which are

manifestly unreasonable and useless have to a large extent been broken down, there are many which nevertheless continue to exist, because they are associated with occasions. and feelings, not religious indeed, but still sacred, for instance, the wearing of mourning. This reflection may serve to remind us that pure reason has no great motor power, and is only one of the factors in progress. Taboo has indeed

been rationalised, but not in all cases by reason. To understand this we must return to the taboos taken up into religion.

These taboos, as we have said, when they receive the sanction of religion receive a different character; they are no longer arbitrary facts, they are rules of conduct enjoined by a divine being. In the lower forms of religion they are scarcely more rational than other savage taboos, "but the restrictions on individual licence which are due to respect for a known and friendly power allied to man, however trivial and absurd they may appear to us in their details, contain within them germinant principles of social progress and moral order . . . to restrain one's individual licence, not out of slavish fear, but from respect for a higher and beneficent power, is a moral discipline of which the value does not altogether depend on the reasonableness of the sacred restrictions; an English schoolboy is subject to many unreasonable taboos, which are not without their value in the formation of character."1 In the higher forms of religion, however, the trivial and absurd restrictions are cast off, and those alone retained and emphasised which are essential to morality and religion. The higher forms of religion, however, are the fewer; the lower include the vast majority of mankind, and this fact suffices to show that there is nothing, even in "the respect for a known and friendly power allied to man," which makes it inevitable that religion should automatically rise from lower forms to higher and the highest, nor to confine ourselves to the matter in hand-is there anything automatic in the growing reasonableness of the sacred restrictions of the higher religions. If one religion differs from another in the reasonableness and moral value of its restrictions, the difference is due to some 1 Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 154.

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difference in their conditions. If the religion of one nation differs from that of another in this way, it must be due to some difference in the two nations; the one nation is more capable than the other of distinguishing between the restrictions which are trivial and the restrictions which are. of paramount importance for the progress of civilisation. But on examination it becomes apparent that it is not the mass of a nation which initiates any reform in religion, any discovery in science, any new form of art, any new teaching in morals. It is the individual reformer, artist or moral teacher, who starts the new idea, though it rests with the mass to accept his teaching. We have then two factors to take into account: the individual and the community. regards the former, no one pretends to have discovered the law of the distribution of genius, or to explain why one age or nation should be rich in men of genius and another barren. We can only accept the fact that Greece produced more geniuses in literature and art than any other country, and that there was a remarkable series of religious teachers in Israel. There is no law to account for the one fact or the other; nor can the manifestations of genius be exhibited as the natural consequence of any general conditions. On the other hand, the behaviour of the mass or generality of the nation in face of the new teaching may be traced to the general conditions at work upon them, and the law of the direction which the new teaching took among them may perhaps be ascertained; "and after all it is for the most part the conditions only, and not the originating causes of great spiritual movements, which admit of analysis at the hands of the historian." 1

It seems, then, that it is individual religious reformers who have carried out the selective process by which the innumerable taboos of savage life have been reduced to the reasonable restrictions which are essential to the well-being of mankind. And the prophets and religious teachers who have selected this and rejected that restriction have usually considered themselves in so doing to be speaking, not their own words or thoughts, but those of their God. This belief has been shared by the community they addressed, otherwise 1 Rashdall, Universities of Europe, i. 32.

the common man would not have gained the courage to break an ancient taboo. Certainly no mere appeal to reason would counterbalance that inveterate terror, just as it was no mere consideration of utility or of purely human interests which supplied the religious reformer with his zeal, or that prompted the denunciations of the prophets. Their message was a supernatural message; and in the same way the process by which mischievous taboos were weeded out may be termed a process not of Natural but of Supernatural Selection.

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