Part 6

Thus, on the 'dispersive' view of the evolution of religion, Buddhism is a radiation from the common centre, from the heart of man, though it radiates in a direction very different from that followed by any other religion. The direction is indeed one which, as the history of religion shows, it has been impossible for man long to follow, for, wherever Buddhism has been established, it has relapsed; and the Buddha, who strove to divert man from prayer and from the worship of gods, has himself become a god to whom prayer and worship are addressed. Whether in the future the direction may be pursued more permanently than it has been by Buddhism up to now lies with the future to show.

Buddhism, however, on the 'dispersive' view of the evolution of religion, is not the only radiation from the common centre, of which we have to take account, in addition to fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism. From the human heart also proceeds 'the religion of humanity', the Positivist Church. Here, as originally in Buddhism, the conception of a divine personality plays no part; but here the human personality, the very existence of which is denied by the Buddha, is raised to a high, indeed to the highest, level. There is no such thing as an individual, if by 'individual' is meant a man existing solely by himself, for a man can neither come into existence nor continue in existence by himself alone. It is an essential part of the conception of personality that it includes fellowship: a person to be a person must stand in some relation to other persons. They are presented to him, the subject, as objects of his awareness; and he, the subject, is also an object of their awareness. Humanity is thus a complex, in which alone persons are found and apart from which they have in fact no existence. Humanity thus plays in Positivism, as a religion, the part of 'the great Being', le grand Être, which in other religions is fulfilled by God, but with this difference, that humanity is human always and never divine.

The ruler of a country steers the ship of state, but he is a pilot only metaphorically. Whether the terms worship and prayer are used more than metaphorically by the Positivist seems hard to decide. On the one hand, if it is felt that worship and prayer are indispensable to religion, it may be argued that in religions other than Positivism they prove not only on analysis, but in the course of history, to be, as by Positivism they are recognized to be, of purely subjective import. On the other hard, it may be that they provide merely a means of transition from the religions of the past to the religion of the future.

Another matter of interest is the place of morality in Positivism as a religion. According to M. Alfred Loisy in his book La Religion, morality and religion are bound up together. They cannot exist apart from one another: they might, he says, 'be dissociated in fact and thought, were it not that they are inseparable in the life of humanity.' And in his view morality is summed up in the idea of duty. He says, 'in the beginning was duty, and duty was in humanity, and duty was humanity. Duty was at the beginning in humanity. By it all things were made, and without it nothing was made.' Thus, where duty is, there also is religion. Not only, according to Loisy, has that always been so in every stage through which the evolution of religion has passed, but it will also be the case with the religion of the future. Thus the conception of evolution which Loisy holds is the same as that entertained by Robertson Smith, the difference being that, whereas on the one view the idea of God and of communion with Him has been present from the beginning, and, much though it may have changed, it remains to the end the same thing; on the other view it is the idea of duty--the duty which is humanity--that was in the beginning and will continue to the end. Both views are applications of the 'pre-formation' theory of evolution.

But Positivism perhaps is not necessarily tied to the 'pre-formation' theory. It seems equally capable of being fitted in to the 'dispersive' theory, and of being regarded as an emanation or radiation proceeding direct from the human heart. It may be so regarded, if we consider the essence of it to be found not in the concept of duty, which seems to imply the existence of some superior who imposes duties on man, but in that love of one's fellow-man which, to be love, must be given freely, and simply because one loves. The sense of obligation, the feeling of duty, obedience to the commandments of authority and to the prohibitions which the community both enforces and obeys, are, all of them, various expressions of the primitive feeling of taboo--a feeling of alarm and fear. If we confine our attention to this set of facts, we may say, with M. Loisy, 'in the beginning was duty, and duty was in humanity'. We may however hesitate to follow him when he goes on to say, 'by duty all things were made, and without it nothing was made'. We may hesitate and the Positivist may hesitate, because, primitive though the feeling of fear may be, the feeling of love is equally original: on it and in it the family and society have their base and their origin; and to it they owe not only their origin but their continuance. Love however is not a matter of duty and obedience; it is not subject to commandment or prohibition; nor does it strive by commands or authority to enforce itself. In the process by which duty--legal and moral obligation--evolves out of the primitive feeling of taboo, love is not implicated: love springs from its own source, the human heart, and runs its own course. Taboo may have existed from the beginning; but to the end, whatever its form--duty, obligation, obedience to authority--it remains in character what it was at first, prohibitive, negative. Love alone is creative: without it 'was not anything made that was made'.

There seems, therefore, no necessity to regard the 'pre-formation' theory of evolution, rather than the 'dispersive theory, as essential to Positivism.

Common to all the views about the evolution of religion that have been mentioned in this paper is the belief that, the more religion changes, the more it remains the same thing. If identified with duty, then duty it was in the beginning, and duty it will remain to the end. For those who conceive it to be merely magic, magic it was and magic it remains. Those who define it as belief in a god and communion with him find that belief in the earliest as well as the latest stages. All would agree in rejecting Bergson's view of evolution--that in evolution there is change, but nothing which changes. All would agree that in the evolution of religion there is something which, change though it may, remains the same thing, and that is religion itself. But on the question what religion is, there is no agreement: no definition of religion as yet--and there have been many attempts to define it--has gained general acceptance. We may even surmise, and admit, that no attempt ever will be successful. Such admission, indeed, may at first to some seem equivalent to admitting that religion is a nullity, and the admission may accordingly be welcomed or rejected. But a moment's reflection will show that the admission has no such consequence. None of our simple feelings can be defined: pleasure and pain can neither be defined; nor, when experienced, doubted. And some of our general terms, those at any rate which are ultimate, are beyond our power either to define or doubt: no one imagines that 'life' can be defined, but no one doubts its existence. And religion both as a term and as a fact of experience is ultimate, and, because ultimate, incapable of definition. It is not to be defined but only to be felt. It is an affair not merely of the intellect, but still more of the heart.

In what sense, then, can we speak of the evolution of religion? Evolution implies change; and no one doubts that there have been changes in religion. No one can imagine that it has from the beginning till now remained identically the same. What seems conceivable is that throughout there has been, not identity but continuity--change indeed in continuity but also continuity in change. The child 'learns to speak the words and think the ideas, to reproduce the mode of thought, as he does the form of speech' of the community into which he is born. In the speech, thought, and feelings--even in the religious feelings--of the community, from generation to generation, there is continuity, but not identity. From generation to generation they are not identical but are continuously changing; and they change because each child who takes them over reproduces them; and, in reproducing them, changes them, not much in most cases, but very considerably in the case of men of genius and the great religious reformers. The heart is the treasure-house in which not only old things are stored, but from which also new things are brought forth. The process of evolution implies indeed that the old things, though not everlasting, persist for a time; but it also implies the manifestation of that which, though continuous with the old, is at the same time new. It is from the heart of man, of some one man, that what is new proceeds: the community it is which is conservative of the old. The heart of man, or man himself, exhibits both change in continuity and continuity in change.

The acorn, the sapling, and the oak are different stages of one continuous process. But it is the same tree throughout the whole process. So, too, perhaps it may be said, religion is a term which includes or is applicable to all stages in the one process, and not to the stage of monotheism alone, or of polytheism alone, or even to those stages alone in which there is a reference to personal beings. Each of these stages is a stage in the process of religion but no stage is by itself the whole process. But this view of the evolution of religion regards religion as though it were an organism, self-subsistent, existing and evolving as independently of man as the oak-tree does; whereas in truth religion has no such independent existence or evolution. It is not from polytheism that monotheism proceeds; nor does polytheism proceed from fetishism: it is from the heart of man that they and all other forms of religion emanate and radiate. To conceive fetishism, polytheism, and monotheism as three successive stages in one process, to represent the evolution of religion by a straight line marked off into three parts, or any other number of parts, is to forget that they do not produce one another but that each emanates from the heart of man. The fact that they emanate in temporal succession does not prove that one springs from the other.

Nor can we say that values--religious or aesthetic--are to be determined on the simple principle that the latest edition is the best. To say that an editio princeps has value only for the bibliophile is to admit that all values are personal, as are all thoughts and all feelings, all goodness and all love.

FOR REFERENCE

Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites (A. & C. Black, 1889).

J.G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (Macmillan & Co., 1890-1915).

Grant Allen, The Evolution of the Idea of God (Grant Richards, 1897).

H. Bergson, L'Évolution créatrice (F. Alcan, 1908).

F.B. Jevons, The Idea of God in Early Religions (1910), and Comparative Religion (1913) (Cambridge University Press).

G.F. Moore, History of Religions (T. & T. Clark, 1914).

A. Loisy, La Religion (E. Nourry, 1917).

RECENT TENDENCIES IN EUROPEAN POETRY

WITH OCCASIONAL REFERENCES TO THE NOVEL, DRAMA, AND CRITICISM

PROFESSOR C.H. HERFORD

When Matthew Arnold declared that every age receives its best interpretation in its poetry, he was making a remark hardly conceivable before the century in which it was made. Poetry in the nineteenth century was, on the whole, more charged with meaning, more rooted in the stuff of humanity and the heart of nature, less a mere province of belles-lettres than ever before. Consciously or unconsciously it reflected the main currents in the mentality of European man, and the reflection was often most clear where it was least conscious. Two of these main currents are:

(1) The vast and steady enlargement of our knowledge of the compass, the history, the potencies, of Man, Nature, the World.

(2) The growth in our sense of the worth of every part of existence.

Certain aspects of these two processes are popularly known as 'the advance of science', and 'the growth of democracy'. But how far 'science' reaches beyond the laboratory and the philosopher's study, and 'democracy' beyond political freedom and the ballot-box, is precisely what poetry compels us to understand; and not least the poetry of the last sixty years with which we are to-day concerned.

How then does the history of poetry in Europe during these sixty years stand in relation to these underlying processes? On the surface, at least, it hardly resembles growth at all. In France above all--the literary focus of Europe, and its sensitive thermometer--the movement of poetry has been, on the surface, a succession of pronounced and even fanatical schools, each born in reaction from its precursor, and succumbing to the triumph of its successor. Yet a deeper scrutiny will perceive that these warring artists were, in fact, groups of successive discoverers, who each added something to the resources and the scope of poetry, and also retained and silently adopted the discoveries of the past; while the general line of advance is in the direction marked by the two main currents I have described. Nowhere else is the succession of phases so sharp and clear as in France. But since France does reflect more sensitively than any other country the movement of the mind of Europe, and since her own mind has, more than that of any other country, radiated ideas and fashions out over the rest of Europe, these phases are in fact traceable also, with all kinds of local and national variations, in Italy and Spain, Germany and England, and I propose to take this fact as the basis of our present very summary and diagrammatic view. The three phases of the sixty years are roughly divided by the years 1880 and 1900.

The first, most clearly seen in the French Parnassians, is in close, if unconscious, sympathy with the temper of science. Poetry, brought to the limit of expressive power, is used to express, with the utmost veracity, precision, and impersonal self-suppression, the beauty and the tragedy of the world. It sought Hellenic lucidity and Hellenic calm--in the example most familiar to us, the Stoic calm and 'sad lucidity' of Matthew Arnold.

The second, best seen in the French Symbolists, was directly hostile to science. But they repelled its confident analysis of material reality in the name of a part of reality which it ignored or denied, an immaterial world which they mystically apprehended, which eluded direct description, frustrated rhetoric, and was only to be come at by the magical suggestion of colour, music, and symbol. It is most familiar to us in the 'Celtic' verse of Mr. Yeats and 'A.E.'.