By Andrew Lang, M.A., LL.D. London, New York and Bombay: Longmans, Greene & Co. 1898.1
In his dedicatory letter to Principal Donaldson, Mr. Lang intimates that these chapters on the early history of religion “may be taken as representing the Gifford Lectures” delivered by him; “though in fact,” he adds, “they contain very little that was spoken from Lord Gifford’s chair.” Unsystematic, diffuse, repetitious, desultory, “jotty,” the whole discussion, nevertheless, not only is clothed with that piquant literary quality which Mr. Lang gives his writings, but is also of undeniable scientific importance.
The object of the book is to discuss afresh the origin of the two fundamental beliefs which lie at the base of what we call “Religion”—the belief in God and the belief in the immortality of the soul. If these beliefs arose, comments Mr. Lang, “in actual communion with Deity (as the first at least did, in the theory of the Hebrew Scriptures), or if they could be proved to arise in an unanalysable sensus numinis, or even in ‘a perception of the Infinite’ (Max Müller), religion would have a divine, or at least a necessary source. To the Theist, what is inevitable cannot but be divinely ordained; therefore religion is divinely preordained; therefore, in essentials, though not in accidental details, religion is true.… But if religion, as now understood among men, be the latest evolutionary form of a series of mistakes, fallacies, and illusions, if its germ be a blunder, and its present form only the result of progressive but unessential refinements on that blunder, the inference that religion is untrue—that nothing actual corresponds to its hypothesis—is very easily drawn” (p. 51). The latter view has attained among anthropologists almost the position of a fixed truth. The current teaching is briefly that man first derived the conception of “spirit” from the phenomena of sleep, dreams, shadow, trance, and hallucination; that his first worship was directed to the souls of his dead kindred and to spiritual existences fashioned on the same lines; and that, as the result of a variety of processes, these “spirits” prospered until they became gods, and at last one of them became supreme: thus “the ideas of God and of the soul are the result of early fallacious reasonings about misunderstood experiences” (p. 1). Even so, Mr. Lang is not prepared to acknowledge that “religion” may be lightly set aside as only a huge blunder. “All our science itself is the result of progressive refinements upon hypotheses originally erroneous, fashioned to explain facts misconceived.” Why may not our religion likewise, “even granting that it arose out of primitive fallacies and false hypotheses,” have yet “been refined, as science has been, through a multitude of causes, into an approximate truth” (p. 51)? But it seems more directly to the point to ask whether the current teaching is accordant with the facts. Mr. Lang thinks that it is not. And it is the object of this book to show that in two crucial points it is not; or, as he more coyly expresses it, that “there are two points of view from which the evidence as to religion in its early stages has not been steadily contemplated” (p. 2). He proposes to reopen the matter at these two points and to raise anew the two questions: Whether man arrived at belief in the existence of a “soul” solely through a misinterpretation of such simple phenomena as those of sleep and dreams; and whether man attained the conception of God through an evolution from the idea of “spirit.” To both questions he returns a negative reply. And it is the purpose of his book to validate these two negative replies.
Mr. Lang justly points out that the two positions thus taken up by him are independent of each other. The establishment of them both would be, of course, the ruin of the presently dominant theory of the origin of religion. But the establishment of both is not essential for that result. It might well be that man arrived at the notion of “spirit” through a misinterpretation of the phenomena of dreams and the like, and yet, if his idea of God is not a development of his doctrine of “spirit,” this fact would have no bearing on the validity of his doctrine of God. Mr. Lang unites the discussion of the two questions in this volume thus, not because they are essential to one another, but because he conceives that the developed idea of religion, as prevalent among the higher races at present, is a complex of the two ideas of the immortality of the soul and of the existence of an infinite moral Ruler and Judge. He is, therefore, at pains to investigate the origins of both ideas. His book thus falls into two very different portions. In the first he seeks to bring forward indications that “the savage theory of the soul may be based, at least in part, on experiences which cannot … be made to fit into any purely materialistic system of the universe” (p. 2). In the second he presents evidence which shows that the idea of God was not dependent on or derived from the idea of “spirit,” but was of wholly independent origin, and was capable of a very high development apart from the aid of the idea of “spirit”—though, of course, this idea supplied a formula by which the Mighty Being already envisaged could be more adequately conceived, as well as an elevating conception of man’s own nature. The importance of thus separating the idea of God from that of “spirit” is obvious. But we do not see why the idea of immortality also may not equally validly and with equal advantage be separated from that of “spirit.” Men believed in God, as Mr. Lang shows, without the aid of any metaphysical conception of “spirit.” Why might they not equally readily have believed in their own future existence apart from a conscious elaboration of a doctrine of “spirit”? It is also a question worth asking at this point, What does Mr. Lang mean by “spirit”? In this query we may indeed place our finger on a weak point in the book. Mr. Lang does not seem to keep clearly before him any consistent definition of this term, fundamental though it is to his whole argument. He seems to use it prevailingly as equivalent to “ghost,” and to conceive it merely negatively as over against solid matter. Indeed, as we read his pages we are reminded of the old scholastic pleasantry which replied to the query, “What is matter?” “Never mind”; and to the query, “What is mind?” “No matter.” But what “spirit” is as distinguished from what it is not, Mr. Lang does not seem to stop to consider. If, however, “spirit” means, positively, nothing but thinking, feeling, willing being—that is, if it is practically a synonym for “person”—then, of course, every person has the idea of “spirit” (undeveloped of course) given in the most immediate and intimate action of his self-consciousness: and the idea of a personal Ruler is already the idea of a spiritual God and, as well, the idea of the continued life of a person is already the idea of spiritual immortality. The metaphysical development of this conception is, to be sure, a different matter. We are, meanwhile, confused, and we think Mr. Lang confuses himself, by his undefined usage of the term. We think, had he clearly discriminated the differing connotations of the word, he would have argued that the idea of “spirit” (= ghost) was no more necessary to the belief in immortality than it is to the belief in God: and would have sought (and found) evidence of early belief in continued life and in future rewards and punishments either before or certainly apart from the emergence in thought of any developed metaphysics of “spirit.” Certainly, at all events, such a state of mind is not uncommon to-day. The whole first section of Mr. Lang’s book, thus, appears to us unnecessary to his avowed purpose. It is not required to show that men arrived at the conception of “spirit” by a valid pathway in order to obtain a valid starting-point for belief in immortality. In the order of developing thought, the idea of immortality would rather precede that of “spirit” in this sense: men would naturally believe in their own future existence before they fully wrought out a theory of the mode of that existence. Nevertheless we are grateful for the chapters which investigate the possible and the actual grounds on which savage men may have come to the conviction of the existence of a something in man different from his bodily organism which they could speak of as “that in men which makes them live,” and which they pictured as subject of experiences beyond the confines of the merely bodily life.