Part 19

Turning now to Asia, we find in Brahmanism and Buddhism two systems of religion that are related to one another exactly as are Judaism and Christianity. The analogue of the Old Testament is a group of priestly hymnal writings known as the Vedas, which date back to about the fourteenth century before Christ lived. Their objects of worship at first are numerous invisible beings that actuate the things of the world, as in Greek theology, but later one of them assumes preeminence as the all-pervading essence of things,--Brahma. The precepts of Brahmanism enjoined adoration of the unseen powers and of their works, as well as practical rules of human conduct, such as those which divided a man's life into the four periods when he should be successively a student, the head of a family, a counselor, and a religious mendicant who should renounce the world of social activities and human desires. In earlier writings, the immortal state is a kind of heaven, but later it meant simply an absorption into Brahma, the eternal impersonal being.

Buddha was an orthodox Brahman reformer of the sixth century before our present era, just as Jesus was an orthodox Hebrew reformer. The essential creed of Buddha made his religion far more ethical than earlier forms, and placed it on a plane even above Christianity of later centuries. This creed relates to the element of human responsibility particularly, the other two remaining much as they were found by Buddha. According to his teachings, a man rested under an obligation to live nobly in the truest sense, and he acquired merit--karma--or lost it, in proportion to his deserts. At death a human soul is reincarnated, in a lower form of animal or even in a being residing in one of a series of unseen hells, if punishment is due; if a higher state is merited, progress is made through thousands of existences until perfection is rewarded by an eternal fusion with the essence of Brahma. It is because there is no escape from just punishment that Buddhism in its original form is properly denoted more ethical than a religion which teaches that sacrifice of any kind will exempt the sinner from deserved penalties and bring about the bestowal of unearned rewards.

Polytheism is the name given to a religion such as that of the Greeks or Romans, who believed in many gods and spirits of greater and lesser power. These supernatural beings, each in its own sphere, immediately directed the processes of nature and controlled the lives of men. One of them, Zeus, was regarded as the supreme "father of gods and men," who delegated specific duties to others; Ares was the god of battles, Hermes was the messenger, Athena implanted wisdom in the minds of men, and Poseidon ruled the sea. The gods were very human to the Greek mind, living in Olympus as men do upon earth, and even visiting the mortals. Their worship involved propitiatory sacrifices and rites as well as thanksgiving offerings when favors were bestowed. But although they were immortal, they did not allow the immortal souls of human beings to join them in their elysium, but compelled the disembodied shades to wander unhappily among the tombs and about their earthly abodes.

Roman theology and religion comprise almost identical forms of the three fundamental elements. The names are changed, and Zeus becomes Jove, his wife Hera is Juno, Ares is Mars, and Hermes is called Mercury. In all other respects, however, the two systems are as much alike as the Greek and Roman languages and Greek and Roman physique.

The religions of savagery are far less analytical, and much more naive in their reference of natural happenings to the direct interposition of malevolent and benevolent spirits. Their gods are numerous as in Greek religion, and likewise one of them is usually set up as the superior deity, to be the Tirawa of the Indian, the greater Atua of Polynesia, and the Mumbo Jumbo of a West African negro. There is no centralization of the supernatural powers, as in the Jehovah of Judaism and the still subtler Brahma of the Asian. Then, too, the gods must be concretely materialized for purposes of worship and sacrifice; consequently idols are made, to be regarded as the actual spirits themselves permanently or for the time being, and not viewed as representations of an ideal, like the statues of more advanced peoples. The immortal state is described in low religions in various ways that seem to be determined by what the believer himself most desires. The spirit of an American Indian goes to the happy hunting-grounds, where it mounts a spirit pony and forever pursues the ghosts of bison which it kills with spirit bow and arrows; to provide these necessaries his earthly possessions are laid beside his dead body. The Norseman was conducted to Valhalla and, attended by the Valkyrie as handmaidens, he eternally drank mead from the skull of an enemy and gloried over his mundane prowess in battle. It is unnecessary to expand the foregoing list, because the examples sufficiently represent the various grades of human religions. Regarding them as typical, we can see how universal are the three fundamental ideas with which we are concerned. Every race has its own conception of future bliss, as well as its conception of responsibility to the immortal and supernatural powers of the universe. Whatever may be the actual reality, and however closely the conceptions of one or another religion may approximate to the truth, such reality and approximation are not the subjects of the present discussion. Nor is it our purpose to bring out more explicitly the genetic relationship of one religion to another; the evolution of Buddhism from Brahmanism, the origin of Christianity from Judaism, and the divergent development of the several creeds of Christendom amply illustrate the nature of religious history. It is evolution here as elsewhere and everywhere.

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Having distinguished the three general elements of all religions, beyond which everything else is of minor importance, we now turn to the question as to the natural origin of these elements. Clearly they cannot arise independently, for the belief in supernatural and eternal spirits is closely connected with the conception of an immortal soul.

The first is the conception of infinite personalities that later become more or less merged into one supreme being. This begins with the idea of the soul as the human ego, conventionally regarded as something independent of the material body during life and immortal after death. The savage goes to sleep, and in his dreams he goes upon journeys and battles strenuously with other men and with beasts, only to find when he awakes that his body is not fatigued, and that it has not really taken part in the activities of his dream life. His companions about the fire also tell him that this is so, while he is equally sure that his essential self has been doing many things during the interval of sleep. In his dream life he finds himself joined by others whom he knows are dead. He sees again even those whose bodies he may have assisted in eating. His total world very soon comes to have an unseen region which is the abode of ordinarily invisible beings having the forms of men, with whom his own dream person can associate; this unseen sphere is furnished also with ghostly counterparts of the trees and rocks and waters with which he is familiar when he is awake. Before long his soul or ghost or spirit is conceived as something which possesses two qualities: it can be disassociated from his body and enter the spirit-world where it seems to defy all the laws of waking life, for with the quickness of thought it visits neighboring islands as readily as it passes to the next hut; and it possesses immortality, for it is exactly like the persistent spirit-individualities of those who have died before him. The other cause for the development of the conception of gods and God in the mind of the savage is the fact that things have been made which neither he nor any other man can make. He can dig a ditch, and make a house, and fashion a canoe, and build ramparts of earth; but human power has obviously been insufficient to construct rivers and mountains and forests and their denizens. Mankind itself has certainly been made in some way, for it exists. Because the savage cannot conceive of things being made excepting as they are made by the human hand, and because so much confronts him that is beyond the power of human construction, he comes to postulate the existence of man-like, but greater than human, personalities, and as he cannot see them in the light of day, they belong to the spirit-world to which souls go. Imagination sometimes gives human outlines to shadows among the moon-lit trees, so that elves and pixies, nymphs and fairies, become established in the world as the primitive man conceives it. Larger tasks are discharged by more important spirits, and everything natural thus becomes animated by supernatural beings. Thor was the god of thunder; Freia the goddess of spring and vernal awakening; Athena inspired the minds of men. Venus and Aphrodite played their special parts, also. But such powers as these, established by the untutored mind, needed to be accounted for, and so in the more advanced religions Jove and Jupiter were created as the more ultimate causes, in response to intellectual demands. By combining all powers into one, God and Brahma are the results.

Thus in merest outline the conception of the infinite personality works out its evolution. At all times, among primitive and higher religions, the powers are clothed with human forms, and gods are pictured as men endowed with intellects and passions, and motives of vengeance and benignity. Man cannot shape his postulated deities save in such forms, with the possible exception of the most philosophical concept of all, Brahma.

The second fundamental belief, namely, in immortality, owes its origin in greatest measure to the psychological processes described above. Another potent factor, however, has been the natural desire to continue existence hereafter, usually in order to reap rewards not bestowed here. This desire is implanted by nature through the operation of purely biological factors, and it has the value of an organic instinct. To specify more particularly, nature has placed every organic individual under the necessity of doing its utmost to prolong its own life in the interests of itself, of others of its tribe, and of its species. Extinction is not faced willingly by a human being endowed with full consciousness any more than it is passively tolerated by a lower animal which instinctively struggles with its foes until death. So the desire to continue alive--the "will to live"--is a natural instinct, which combines with the belief in persistent disembodied spirits and, no doubt, with many other elements, to develop the basic conception of some kind of an immortal existence.

The third element, human responsibility to the infinite personality, is variously recorded in lower and higher religions. Its conception grows partly out of the feelings of awe and terror inspired by great works of nature such as the thunder-storm, the cyclone, and the volcano, while the orderly and regular workings of even everyday nature seem to demonstrate the direct control of the powers who rule man as well. The savage sees his crops destroyed by a tempest or drought; he attributes the disaster to the particular powers concerned with such things whom he must have angered unwittingly, and whom he must propitiate by sacrifice or penitence. His individual and tribal acts do not always accomplish the desired ends, and again the laws of infinite and ultimate powers must have been contravened, as he interprets the situation. Therefore his whole religious consciousness was exerted in the direction of finding out what was the ultimate constitution of nature, with which human activities must harmonize if they are to be successful. Bound by custom and convention and biological law, he looks about wonderingly to find the external authority for his bonds. To his mind this authority must be the host of spirits and gods who had made him and the things of his world. It is in this way that so many ethical elements have found places in religious doctrines, to be viewed as absolute rules of conduct coming from outside of nature, and not from nature itself, in the way the earlier sections of this chapter have shown.

Let us now summarize the results of the foregoing brief survey, conducted by the identical methods employed for the analysis of other bodies of fact. We have sought for those characteristics which are common to all religions of whatever time and place and race. Combined with many secondary and adventitious elements of other fields of thought and action, such as social, political, ethical, and psychological factors, they have proved to be the three essential beliefs in God or gods, human responsibility, and immortality. As a veritable backbone, they underlie and support the whole body of religious doctrine and organs of thought formed about them. We have seen, furthermore, that a natural explanation of the way these elements have originated can be discovered by the comparative student of religion, who describes also how they have variously evolved among different peoples. In all of this we have not questioned at any time the validity or reality of any one of these concepts; to ask whether or not they correspond actually to the truth is beyond our purpose, which is simply and solely to inquire whether even these mental conceptions furnish evidence of their evolution in the course of time. I believe that such evidence is found, and I believe also that this discovery must be of the greatest importance to everyone in formulating a system of religious belief, but the construction of this is not the task of science as such. Every individual must work out his own relation to the world on the basis of knowledge as complete as he can make it, but every individual must accomplish this end for himself. Because no two men can be exactly alike in temperament, intellect, and social situation, it is impossible for entire agreement in religious faith to exist. One's outlook upon the whole universe is and must be an individual matter; science and evolution are of overwhelming value, not by directing the mind to adopt this or that attitude toward the unseen, but by providing the seeker after the truth with definite knowledge about the things of the world, so that his position may be taken on the sound basis of reasonable and common-sensible principles.

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When we take up science and philosophy, or knowledge as a whole, after religion, it may seem that we have reversed the proper sequence. There are many reasons for following this course, inasmuch as "knowledge" is the all-inclusive category of thought; our world is after all a world of individual consciousness and ideas. In dealing with religion, ethics, social organization, and human culture, we have been concerned with the evolution of so many departments of thought and action; and now we are to develop a final conception of evolution as a universal process in the progress of all knowledge.

Let us look back over the history of mathematics. The primitive human individual did not need to count. He dealt with things as he met them, and he disposed of them singly and individually. A squirrel does not count the nuts it gathers; it simply accumulates a store, and it perishes or survives according to its instinctive ability to do this. Just so was primitive man. The savage, when he organized the first formed tribes, learned to count the days of a journey and the numbers engaged on opposite sides in battle. He employed the "score" of his fingers and toes, and our use of this very word is a survival of such a primitive method of counting. The abacus of the Roman and Chinese extended the scope of simple mathematical operations as it employed more symbolic elements. With the development of Arabic notation capable of indefinite expansion, the science progressed rapidly, and in the course of long time it has become the higher calculus of to-day. The conceptions of geometry have likewise evolved until to-day mathematicians speak of configurated bodies in fourth and higher dimensions of space, which are beyond the powers of perception, even though in a sense they exist conceptually. The behavior of geometrical examples in one dimension leads to the characteristics of bodies in two dimensions. Upon these facts are constructed the laws of three-dimensional space which serve to carry mathematical thought to the remoter conceptual spaces of which we have spoken. It may seem that we are recording only one phase of mental evolution, but in fact we are dealing with a larger matter, namely, with the progressive evolution of knowledge in the Kantian category of number.

Natural science began with the savage's rough classification of the things with which he dealt in everyday life. As facts accumulated, lifeless objects were grouped apart from living organisms, and in time two great divisions of natural science took form. Physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, and the like describe the concrete world of matter and energy, while the biological sciences deal with the structure, development, interrelationships, and vital activities of animals and plants. Surely knowledge has evolved with the advance in all of these subjects from decade to decade and from year to year. And just as surely must evolution continue, for the world has not stopped developing, and therefore the great principles of science must undergo further changes, even though they are the best summaries that can be formulated at the present time.

Philosophy deals with general conceptions of the universe. When we look back through the ages we find men picturing the world as an aggregate of diverse and uncorrelated elements--earth, air, fire, and water. The synthesis of facts and the construction of general principles down through Bacon, Newton, and Schopenhauer to modern world conceptions results in the unification of all--"the choir of heaven and furniture of earth." The lineal descendant of the long line of ancestral philosophies is the monism which sees no difference between the living and lifeless worlds save that of varying combinations of ultimate elements which are conceived as uniform "mind-stuff" everywhere. Whether or not this universal conception of totality is true, remains for the future to show. For us the important truth is that here, as in all other departments of knowledge, evolution proves to be real.

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In closing the present description of the basis, nature, and scope of the doctrine of evolution, I find great difficulty in choosing the right words for a concise statement of the larger values and results of this department of science. So much might be said, and yet it is not fitting for the investigator to preach unduly. The lessons of the doctrine must be brought home to each individual through personal conviction. But because I firmly believe in the truth of the statement made in the opening pages, namely, that science and its results are of practical human value, it is in a sense my duty as an advocate of evolution to make this plain.

The method of science is justified of its fruits. At the very beginning we learned how, and how only, sure knowledge can be obtained and how it differs from a belief which may or may not correspond with the truth. Based upon facts of smaller or larger groups, scientific laws are so many summaries of past experience, and they describe in concise conceptual shorthand the manifold happenings of nature. Their difference from belief inheres in their ability to serve as guides for everyday and future experience. This entire volume is a plea for the employment of common-sense as we look upon and interpret the world in which we have our places and in which we must play our roles. Our search for truth will be rewarded in so far as we organize our common-sense observations into clear conceptions of the laws of nature's order.

The doctrine of evolution enjoins us to learn the rules of the great game of life which we must play, as science reveals them to us. It is well to remember that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but because evolution is true always and everywhere, an understanding of its workings in any department of thought and life clears the vision of other realms of knowledge and action. Perhaps the greatest lesson is at the same time the most practical one. It is that, however much we may concern ourselves with ultimate matters, our immediate duties are here and now, and we cannot escape them without giving up our right to a place in nature. We are taught by science that we live under the control of certain fundamental biological, social, and ethical laws; we might well wish that they were otherwise, but having recognized them we have no recourse save to obey them. Evolution as a complete doctrine commands every one to live a life of service as full as hereditary endowments and surrounding circumstances will permit. Thus we are taught that the immediate problems of life ought to concern us more than questions as to the ultimate nature of the universe and of existence.

Every one can find something worth while in the lessons of evolution, summarized in the foregoing statements. The atheist, who declines to personify the ultimate powers of the universe, may, nevertheless, find direction for his life in the principles brought to light by science. The agnostic, who doubts the validity of many conventional dicta that may not seem well grounded, can also find something to believe and to obey. Finally, the orthodox theist of whatever creed may discover cogent reasons for many of his beliefs like the Golden Rule previously accepted through convention; and he must surely welcome the fuller knowledge of their sound basis in the materials and results of comparative analytical study. To every one, then, science and evolution offer valuable principles of life, but great as their service has been, their tasks are not yet completed, and cannot be completed until the end of all knowledge and of time.

INDEX

Achatinellidae, 103, 104.

Activities, instinctive and reflex, 203, 205, 208; of familiar animals, 208, 209; differ from instinct, 209, 210.

Adaptation, universal relation to environment, 15; principle of, 17; degenerate forms enlarge our conception of, 50; results of larval short cuts in development, 71; 109, 213.

Africa, fauna of, 103, 164, 165.

Agassiz, a believer in special creation, 98.