Part 5

III

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN EUROPEAN THOUGHT ON THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

F.B. JEVONS

The living beings that exist or have existed upon the earth are of kinds innumerable; and, in the opinion of man, the chief of them all is mankind. Man, for the simple reason that he is man, is anthropomorphic in all his judgements and not merely in his religious conceptions; he holds himself to be the standard and measure in all things. If his right so to regard himself were challenged, if he were called upon to justify himself for having taken his foot as a unit of measurement, or his fingers as the basis of his system of numbers, he might reply that anything will serve as a standard for weights and measures, provided that it never varies, but is always the same whenever referred to. But the reply, valid though it is, does not do full justice to man: it leaves room for the suspicion that a standard is something chosen by man in a purely arbitrary manner and without reference to the facts of nature. If that were really the case, then man's conception of himself as superior to the other animals on earth might be but a prejudice of an arbitrary kind. When, however, we consider, from the point of view of evolution, the place of man among the other animals that occupy or have occupied the earth, it is indubitable that the human organism is in point of time the latest evolved and the human brain is in point of complexity and efficiency the most highly developed. Further, the evidence of embryology goes to show that the organism which has eventually become human became so only by passing through successive stages, each of which has its analogue in some of the existing forms of animal life. Those forms of animal life exist side by side; and if we conceive them to be represented diagrammatically by vertical lines, differing in height according to their degree of evolution, the line representing the human organism will be the tallest, and may be considered to have become the tallest by successive increments or stages corresponding to the height of the various other parallel vertical lines.

When the conception of evolution, which had been employed to explain the origin of species and the descent of man, and which had been gained by a consideration of material organisms, came to be applied to the world of man's thoughts, to the non-material and spiritual domain, and to be used for the purpose of explaining the growth and the development of religion, it was natural that the conception which had proved so valuable in the one case should be applied without modification to the other--as natural as that the first railway coach should be built on the model of the stagecoach. The possibility that the theory of evolution might itself evolve, and in evolving change, was one that was not, and at that time could hardly be, present to the minds of those who were extending the theory and in the process of extending it were developing it. Yet the possibility was there, implicit in the very conception of evolution, which involves continuous change--change in continuity and continuity in change.

Any and every attempt to trace the evolution of religion seems at first necessarily to involve the assumption that from the beginning religion was there to be evolved. That was the position assumed by Robertson Smith in The Religion of the Semites, which appeared in 1889. At that date the aborigines of Australia were supposed to represent the human race in its lowest and its earliest stage of development. In them, therefore, if anywhere, we might expect to find what would be religion in its lowest and earliest stage indeed but still religion. Reduced to its lowest terms, religion, it was felt at first, must imply at least belief in a god and communion with him. If, therefore, religion was to be found amongst the representatives of the lowest and earliest stage in the evolution of humanity, belief in a god and communion with him must there be found. He who seeks finds. Robertson Smith found amongst the Australians totem-gods and sacramental rites. Indeed, it was at that time the belief universally held by students of the science of religion that in Australia a totem was a god and a god might be a totem. It was conjectured by Robertson Smith that in Australia the totem animal or plant was eaten sacramentally. Since, then, the totem in Australia was held to be both the god and the animal or plant in which the god manifested himself, it followed that in Australia we had, preserved to this day, the earliest form of sacrifice--that in which the totem animal was itself the totem god to whom it was offered as a sacrifice, and was itself--or rather himself--the sacramental meal furnished to his worshippers. The totem was eaten, it was conjectured, with the object of acquiring the qualities of the divine creature, or of absorbing them into the person of the worshipper. That the totem was eaten sacramentally rested, as has just been said, on the conjecture made by Robertson Smith in 1889; but in 1899 Dr. (now Sir James) Frazer declared that, thanks to the investigations of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, 'here, in the heart of Australia, among the most primitive savages known to us, we find the actual observance of that totem sacrament which Robertson Smith, with the intuition of genius, divined years ago, but of which positive examples have hitherto been wanting.'

On the foundation thus laid by the intuition of Robertson Smith and approved in 1899 by Sir James Frazer, a simple and complete theory of the evolution of religion was possible. In any one tribe there were several totem-kins. The totem of each kin was divine, but the personality of a totem was so undeveloped in conception that, though it might, and on the theory did, develop into a deity, it was originally more of the nature of a spirit than a god, and totemism proper might easily pass into polydaemonism, that is a system in which the beings worshipped were conceived to possess a personality more clearly defined than that attributed to totems but less developed than that assigned to deities. From the beginning each tribe had worshipped a plurality of totems; it was, therefore, readily intelligible that, as these totems came to be credited with more and more definite and developed personality, the plurality of totems became not only a polydaemonism, but afterwards a plurality of deities, and a system of polytheism came to be established. From polytheism then, amongst the Israelites, monotheism was conceived to have been gradually developed.

On this theory the evolution of religion was, if we may so describe it, linear or rectilinear: the process consisted in a series of successive stages. In some cases, as for instance among the aborigines of Australia, it never rose higher than its starting-point, totemism; in others, as for instance in Samoa, it became polytheism without ceasing to be totemism; in others again, as for instance amongst the Aryan peoples, it became so completely polytheistic that even conjecture can discover but few indications or 'survivals' of the totemism from which it is supposed to have developed; and the polytheism of the Israelites was so completely superseded by monotheism that the very existence of an earlier stage of polytheism could be as strenuously denied in their case as the pre-existence of totemism could be denied amongst the polytheistic Aryans. Nevertheless the theory was that if we represent the growth of the various religions of the world diagrammatically by vertical lines parallel to one another but of various lengths, one line standing for totemism, a longer line for polydaemonism, a still longer one for polytheism, and the longest of all for monotheism, we should see that the line of growth has been the same in all cases, and that it is in their length, or (shall we say?) in their height alone that the various lines differ, and that the longest line culminates in monotheism only because it has been, so to speak, pulled out in the same way that a telescope when closed, may be extended. The evolution of religion on this view has been a process literally of 'evolution' or unfolding: the idea of a god and of communion with him has been present from the beginning; and, much though religion may have changed, it remains to the end essentially the same thing. This view of the process of religious evolution we may fairly term 'the pre-formation theory'; for on this theory each stage is pre-formed in the stage immediately preceding it, and in the earliest stage of all were all succeeding stages contained pre-formed, though it depended on circumstances whether the seed should spring up, and how many stages of its growth it should accomplish.

Robertson Smith's theory of the evolution of religion is in effect a form of the pre-formation theory, and is liable to the same difficulties as dog the theory of pre-formation in all its applications. On the theory, if we cut open a seed we should find within it the plant pre-formed; if we analyse totemism, the seed from which, in Robertson Smith's view, all other forms of religion have grown in orderly succession one after the other, we find in it religion in all its stages pre-formed. In fact, however, if we cut open an acorn we do not find a miniature oak-tree inside. The presumption, therefore, is that neither in totemism, if we dissect it, shall we find religion pre-formed. Indeed, there is the possibility that totemism, on dissection, will be found to have no such content--that the hope or expectation of finding anything in it is as vain, is as much doomed to disappointment, as is the expectation of the child who cuts open his drum, thinking to find inside it something which produces the sound.

It was, however, not on a priori grounds like these that Sir James Frazer was led eventually to combat and deny the existence, 'in the heart of Australia, amongst the most primitive savages known to us' of 'that totem sacrament which', in 1899 he declared, 'Robertson Smith, with the intuition of genius' had divined years before it was actually observed. It was by the evidence of new facts, discovered by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, that Sir James Frazer was compelled to abandon Robertson Smith's theory of the evolution of religion. Robertson Smith had seen, or had thought he saw, amongst the Australians sacramental rites and the worship of totem gods. Sir James Frazer is now compelled by the evidence of the facts to hold that in what he calls 'pure totemism', i.e., in totemism as we find it in Australia, 'there is nothing that can properly be described as worship of the totems. Sacrifices are not presented to them, nor prayers offered, nor temples built, nor priests appointed to minister to them. In a word, totems pure and simple are never gods, but merely species of natural objects, united by certain intimate and mystic ties to groups of men.' It seems, therefore, according to Frazer, that in totemism, when dissected, there is no religion, just as in the child's drum, when cut open, there is--nothing. Yet, we may reflect, on the battle-field from a drum proceeds a great and glorious sound, inspiring men to noble deeds. Whereas ex nihilo nil fit: from nothing naturally nothing comes. If, however, something does come, it is not from nothing that it comes. Amongst the most primitive savages known to us, men are united to their totems, as Frazer admits, by 'certain intimate and mystic ties'.

What then is it in totemism from which, on Sir James Frazer's view, something comes? We might, perhaps, have expected that it was from the 'mystic' bond uniting man with the world which is not only around him but of which he is part, and in which he lives and moves and has his being. To say so, however, would be to admit that in totemism there was something not only 'mystic' but potentially religious. And Sir James Frazer does not follow that line of thought, so dangerous in his view. On the contrary, he maintains that 'the aspect of the totemic system, which we have hitherto been accustomed to describe as religious, deserves rather to be called magical'. The totem rites which Robertson Smith had interpreted as being sacramental and as being intended as a means of communion with the totem-gods Sir James Frazer regards as merely magical: 'totemism,' he says, 'is merely an organized system of magic intended to secure a supply of food.'

We may remark, in passing, that if totemism is 'mere' magic, there is indeed (as Sir James holds) no worship in totemism, but in that case in totemism there can be no such 'intimate and mystic ties' between the totem and the totem-kin as Sir James at first maintained there was. But be that as it may, according to Sir James Frazer, 'in the heart of Australia, amongst the most primitive savages known to us,' we find totemism; and totemism on examination proves to be 'merely an organized system of magic'. If now we start by assuming these premisses, or by granting these postulates for the sake of argument, we can, indeed, erect on them a theory of the evolution of religion. But if we so start, we must do as Sir James Frazer did in the first edition of The Golden Bough: we must hold that religion is but a developed form of magic. En route it may have changed considerably in appearance, but in fact and fundamentally it remains the same thing. In all the lower forms of religion, and in most of the higher, there are practices which are by common consent and beyond doubt magical. This indisputable fact lends colour to the view that religion was in its origin nothing but magic, and that religion is, to those who can see the facts as they are, nothing but magic to this day: the magician was but a priest, and the priest, claiming superhuman power, is but a magician still. Prayers were at first but spells, and even now are supposed, by simple repetition, to produce their effects.

If against this view it be objected that one of the most constant facts in the history of all religions, from the lowest to the highest, is that religion has at all times carried on war against sorcery, witchcraft, and magic, that in the lowest stages of man's evolution witches have been 'smelt out' by the witch-finder, and that in the higher stages of civilization witches have been persecuted, tortured, and burnt, the reply made to the objection is that the war against witchcraft and magic is due simply to the jealousy and resentment which regular practitioners of any art, e.g., medicine, have ever displayed and do still display towards irregular, unprofessional practitioners. This reply, however, is now generally admitted to be one which it is impossible to accept in the case of religion for the simple reason that it does not account for the facts. The plain fact which wrecks this attempted explanation is that magic is punished and witches are burnt not because witch-finders or priests are jealous of them, but because the community dreads them and feels their very existence to be a danger. It is the community which feels the world of difference there is between magic and religion.

The attraction of the view that religion is but magic under another name, that prayers are to the end but spells, that 'priest' is but 'magician' written differently, is that it is a simplicist theory. It simplifies things. It exhibits religion as evolved out of magic and as containing at the end nothing more or other than was present at the beginning in magic. It is but a variant of the pre-formation theory of the evolution of religion. In fine, the notion that in magic we have religion pre-formed is the counterpart of the idea that we can find religion pre-formed in totemism. In both cases we secure continuity in the process of evolution apparently, but the continuity secured is appearance merely and is gained only at the price of ignoring the facts.

It is not surprising, therefore, that in the later, enlarged editions of The Golden Bough, Sir James Frazer has given up the view that religion evolved out of magic, being moved thereto by the fact, as he says, that there is 'a fundamental distinction and even opposition of principle between magic and religion'. There is, in Frazer's present view, no continuity between the magic which came first and the religion which came ages later: between them is an absolute breach of continuity, a fundamental distinction, an opposition of principle. 'The principles of thought on which magic is based,' Frazer says, 'resolve themselves into two: first, that like produces like; and, second, that things which have once been in contact with each other continue to act on each other.' These beliefs are due to the association of ideas: if two things are more or less like one another, or if two things have gone together in our experience of the past, the sight of the one will make us think of the other and expect to find it. So strong is the expectation which is thus created that in the savage it amounts to absolute belief; and magic consists in acting on that belief, in setting like to produce like, with the firm conviction that thus (by magic) man can obtain all that he desires. For long ages, according to Frazer, man acted on that belief, and only eventually did he discover that magic did not always act. This discovery set him thinking and led him to the inference that at work in the world there must be supernatural powers or beings, that the course of nature and of human life is controlled by personal beings superior to man. And that inference, according to Sir James Frazer's definition, constitutes religion.

The fundamental distinction, then, and even opposition of principle between magic and religion, is that in the one case man thinks that he can gain all that he desires by means of magic, and that in the other he turns with offerings and supplication to the personal beings superior to man whom he imagines to control the course of nature and of human life.

Whether the distinction which Sir James Frazer draws between magic and religion will hold depends partly on whether his definitions of magic and religion are acceptable. In his account of magic there at least appears to be some confusion of thought. On the one hand, he says, 'it must always be remembered that every single profession and claim put forward by the magician, as such, is false; not one of them can be maintained without deception, conscious or unconscious.' This pronouncement makes it easy for us to understand that even the savage would eventually find magic an unsatisfactory method of gratifying his desires, a deception in fact. On the other hand, Sir James apparently contradicts himself, that is to say, he denies that every single profession or claim put forward by the magician is false, and says, 'however justly we may reject the extravagant pretensions of magicians and condemn the deceptions which they have practised on mankind, the original institution of this class of man has, take it all in all, been productive of incalculable good to humanity.' The ground for this second pronouncement, so contradictory of the first, is that magicians, Sir James tells us, 'were the direct predecessors, not merely of our physicians and surgeons but of our investigators and discoverers in every branch of natural science.' Thus, though he no longer regards priests as transmogrified magicians, he does regard magicians as the earliest men of science, and does regard science, therefore, as a highly developed stage of magic. This view logically follows from the premisses from which it starts; and if it is felt to be unacceptable, we shall naturally be inclined to scrutinize the premisses once more and more carefully. When we do so scrutinize them, we see that the principles of thought on which Sir James Frazer assumes magic to be based are in effect the principles from which science started: they are the beliefs that like produces like--the basis of the law of causation--and that things which our experience shows to have gone together in the past tend always to go together--which is one way of stating our belief in the uniformity of nature. If then these principles of thought are the principles on which magic as well as science is based, then science and magic are the same thing, and we have only to choose whether we will say that magic is not magic but undeveloped science, or that science is not science but merely magic transmogrified. Thus, the pre-formation theory once more reasserts itself: magic is the seed in which science is prefigured or pre-formed.

If we wish to escape from this conclusion, if we wish to maintain the validity of science and yet always to remember 'that every single profession and claim put forward by the magician, as such, is false--not one of them can be maintained without deception, conscious or unconscious', we must consider whether Sir James Frazer's account of magic, according to which the principles of magic are identical with those of science, is the only account that can be given of magic; and for that purpose we may contrast it with the view of Wilhelm Wundt. But before doing so, since Sir James Frazer holds that there is 'a fundamental distinction and even opposition of principle between magic and religion', it will be well to try to see not only what he means by magic, but also whether his description or definition of religion is acceptable.

Whereas Robertson Smith held that religion, reduced to its very lowest terms, must imply at least belief in a god and communion with him, Frazer considers religion to be the belief that the course of nature and of human life is controlled by personal beings superior to man. By the one view stress is laid on the mystic side of religion, on the communion which is effected through sacrifice; by the other view stress is laid on the power which the gods may be induced by prayer and supplication to exercise for the benefit of man. Our first reflection, therefore, is that any view of religion, to be comprehensive, cannot confine itself to either of these aspects singly, but must find room for both--for both prayer and sacrifice. They cannot be mutually exclusive, nor can they be simply juxtaposed, as though they were atoms unrelated to one another, accidental neighbours in the same district. There must be a higher unity, not created by or subsequent to the coalescence of elements originally independent of each other, but a higher unity of which both prayer and sacrifice are manifestations. This higher unity, I venture to suggest, is the first principle of religion; and, if it is not explicitly recognized as the first principle of religion either by Robertson Smith or by Frazer, that may well be because their attention is concentrated on the earlier stages in the evolution of religion, when as yet it is not conspicuous and is, therefore, though in fact operative, liable to be overlooked. As Ferrier has said, 'first principles of every kind have their influence, and indeed operate largely and powerfully long before they come to the surface of human thought and are articulately expounded.' What then is the first principle of religion which only after long ages of evolution rose to the surface of human thought, and which, though it had been operative largely and powerfully, came only in the slow course of human evolution to be articulately expounded? The first principle of religion is love--love of one's neighbour and one's God.

In the light of that first principle it is manifest that prayer and sacrifice are not fundamentally unrelated and accidentally juxtaposed: a sacrifice accompanied not even by unspoken prayer, prompted by no desire, no wish for anything whatever, is a meaningless concept. Equally unmeaning and unintelligible is the idea of a prayer which involves no sacrifice--whether by sacrifice we understand the offering of gifts or the sacrifice of self. But perhaps it may be said that, even though love alone can lead to sacrifice of self, still it is undeniable that prayers may be put up and sacrifices be offered by a man for the sake of what he is going to get by doing so; and that that is what Sir James Frazer means when he sees in religion the belief that beings superior to man may be induced by prayer so to order things that man may get his heart's desire. Then, indeed, we get a continuity of evolution, a continuity between magic and religion, which Frazer perhaps did not intend wholly to deny: that is to say the continuous thread running through both magic and religion and uniting them is desire. Desire is continuous, though the means of gratifying it change. In one stage of evolution magic is the means; in another, religion. But throughout we find the process of evolution to be continuous--change in continuity and continuity in change.

Now it is indeed undeniable that prayer and sacrifice may be made by a man for the sake of what he is going to get, and may from the beginning have been made, partly at least, from that motive. But if evolution in one of its aspects is change, then one of the changes brought about by evolution in religion is precisely that prayer and sacrifice come to be regarded as no longer a means whereby a man can get his desires accomplished--his will done--but as the indispensable condition for doing God's will. Prayer then becomes communion with God, and the sacrifice of self the living exhibition of love--the first principle of religion, the principle which manifests itself now in prayer and now in sacrifice.

From this point of view, then, Sir James Frazer's account of religion will be considered unacceptable: it makes religion and magic alike but means whereby man has--vainly--sought to satisfy desire. And the implication is that the day of both alike is over. But if Frazer's account of religion is unacceptable, his account of magic also is open to criticism. He wavers between two opinions about magic: at one time he regards it as all falsehood and deception, at another as the source from which science springs, just as at one time he considered magic fundamentally the same as religion and then again as fundamentally different from religion. When Frazer is bent upon identifying magic and science, he attributes to primitive man a theory of causation (that like produces like): magic is based, he says, upon 'the views of natural causation embraced by the savage magician'. On the other hand, according to Wilhelm Wundt in his Völkerpsychologie, primitive man has no notion whatever of natural causation: primitive man, Wundt says, has only one way of accounting for events--if something happens, somebody did it. If any one mysteriously falls ill and dies, the question at once presents itself to the savage mind, who did it? How any one could contrive to make the man fall ill and die is, to the man's relations, thoroughly and disquietingly mysterious. The one thing clear to them is that somebody possesses and has exercised this mysterious and horrible power. The person who, in the opinion not only of the relatives but also of all or most of the community, naturally would do this sort of thing differs in some way--in his appearance or habits--from the average member of the community, and accordingly is credited, or discredited, with this mysterious and dreadful power. Such a person, according to Wundt, is a magician. Such an event is a marvel: so long as it is supposed to be brought about by a man, it is a piece of magic; when it is ascribed (as, according to Wundt, it comes in later, though not in primitive times, to be ascribed) to a god, it is a miracle.

If science then does not work magic, there must be a fundamental distinction between science and magic, an absolute opposition of principles. The principles of thought on which magic is based cannot be, as Frazer maintains, the same as those which give to science its validity. In fine, the belief in magic seems to be based not on any principle of thought, but upon the assumption that, if something happens, somebody must have done it, and therefore must have had the power to do it.

Wundt, whilst differing from Frazer in his description of magic, is at one with him in believing that before religion existed there was an age of magic. But Wundt's view that marvels are magic when supposed to have been done by man, but miracles when supposed to have been done by a god or his priests, suggests the possibility that, as the belief in magic is found usually, if not always, to exist side by side with the belief in miracles, the two beliefs may from the beginning have co-existed, that the age of magic is not prior in the course of evolution to the age of religion. This possibility, it will be admitted, derives some colour at least from the way in which the theory of evolution is employed to account for the origin of species: different though reptiles are from birds, the serpent from the dove, both are descended from a common ancestor, the archaeopteryx. If this instance be taken as typical of the process of evolution in general, then the course of evolution is not, so to speak, linear or rectilinear, but--to use M. Bergson's word--'dispersive'. To suppose that religion is descended from magic would then be as erroneous as to suppose that birds are descended from reptiles or man from the monkey. The true view will be that the course of evolution is not linear, is not a line produced for ever in the same direction, not a succession of stages, but is 'dispersive', that from a common starting point many lines of evolution radiate in different directions. The course of evolution is not unilinear but multilinear; it runs on many lines which diverge, but all the diverging lines start from the same point.

If we apply this conception of evolution in general to the evolution of religion in particular--and Bergson, I should say, does not--then the centre of dispersion, common to all religions, is the heart of man. The forms of religion evolving, emanating and radiating from that common centre are, let us say, fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism. If we wish to avoid, in the theory of religious evolution, an error analogous to that of supposing birds to be descended from reptiles, we must decline to suppose that monotheism is simply polytheism evolved, or that polytheism is descended from fetishism. We must consider that each of these three forms of religion is terminal, in the sense that no one of them leads on to, or passes into, either of the other two. All three forms of religious life may, and indeed do, exist side by side with one another, just as the countless forms of physical life may be found existing side by side. The foraminifera exist now, as they existed millions of years ago; but the fact that they co-exist with higher forms of physical life does not show that the higher forms of life are but foraminifera in a more highly evolved form. Similarly, the fact that fetishism exists side by side with polytheism, or polytheism with monotheism, does not show that one is but a higher form of another: we must consider each to be a terminal form, as incapable of producing another, as it is impossible to conceive that the serpent develops into the dove.

The common centre and starting-point of fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism on this view (the 'dispersive' view) of the evolution of religion lies in the heart of man, in a consciousness, originally vague in the extreme, of the personality and superiority to man of the being or object worshipped. In all these three forms of religion there is worship, and in all three forms the being worshipped is personal. Further, a special tie is felt to exist between the worshipper and the personality worshipped: religion is the bond of union between them, and it is also a bond which unites the worshippers to one another. It is by its very nature a bond of union, a means of communion between persons, human and divine. That is the mystic aspect of religion which finds expression in the rite of sacrifice and in the sacramental meals which are felt somehow to bind together, or rather to reunite and keep together, the worshippers and their god. This communion however is not merely mystic: it has its practical effects inasmuch as it affects the conduct of the worshipper and enables him to do what without it he would not have had strength to do.

If fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism radiate from a common centre, the heart of man, then the heart of man must also be regarded as the starting-point of magic. If they spring straight from the heart, though in different directions, dispersively, then magic must also start from the common centre; and, though its divergence from religion tends to become total, at first, and indeed it may be for long, the discrepancy between them is rather felt uneasily than recognized clearly. Categories, such as those of cause and effect, identity and difference, which are the common property of civilized thought, and which among us, Mr. L.T. Hobhouse says, 'every child soon comes to distinguish in practice, are for primitive thought interwoven in wild confusion.' Two categories, which in primitive thought are thus interwoven in wild confusion, are, it may be suggested, religion and magic; and only in the dispersive process of evolution do they tend to become discriminated. In ancient Egypt, in Babylon, in Brahminism, religion fails to disentangle itself from magic; and not even has Christianity always succeeded in throwing it off. Different as we may conceive magic and religion to be, the fact remains that at first they grow up intertwined together. In the lower forms of religion magic is worked not only by magicians but by priests as well; spells and prayers are hardly to be distinguished from one another. The idea that 'priest' is but 'magician' writ differently, that prayers are but spells under another name, is now obsolete. The truth may be that religion neither follows on, nor is evolved from magic, but that both radiate from a common centre, the heart of man; and that at first both are attempts made by man to secure the fulfilment of his desires, to do his will, though eventually he finds that the way to control nature is to obey her, not to try to command her by working magic; and that it is in endeavouring to do God's will, not his own, that man finds peace at the last.

In the three forms of religion which thus far we have taken into account, fetishism, polytheism, monotheism, religion is felt to be a personal relation--a relation between the human personality and some personality more than human; and the human heart is reaching out and groping after some divine personality, if peradventure it may find Him. But there is yet another form of religion proceeding from the human heart in which this does not seem to be the case--and that is Buddhism. The Buddha definitely renounced the search after God and would not allow his disciples to engage in the pursuit. Practically the pursuit was useless, according to the Buddha: escape from suffering is all that man can want or strive or hope for. Escape from suffering is possible only by cessation from existence; and that cessation from existence, here and hereafter, can be attained by man himself, who can reach Nirvana without the aid of gods, if gods there be. From the point of view of metaphysics the idea that there is any relation between the human personality and the divine falls to the ground, according to the Buddha, because, whether there be gods or not, at any rate there is no human personality. As in a conflagration--and according to the Buddha the whole world, burning with desire, is in a state of conflagration--the flames leap from one house that is burning to the next, so in its transmigrations the self, or rather the character, Karman, like a flame, leaps from one form of existence to another. The flame indeed appears to be there all the time the fire is burning; but the flame has no permanence, it is changing all the time the process of combustion is going on; and 'I' have no more permanence than the flame. 'I' only appear to be there as long as the process of life goes on. And as the flame only continues so long as there is something for it to feed on, so the process of transmigration or re-birth continues only so long as the thirst for being continues: the escape from re-birth is conditional on the extinction of that thirst or desire; and the disciple who has succeeded in putting off lust and desire has attained to deliverance from death and re-birth, has attained to rest, to Nirvana.