comte, auguste - the positive philosophy vol III

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gestions which were coincident with corresponding social needs. The coincidence arose partly from that general property of all religious phases,—the vagueness of all faiths, which adapts them to be modified by all political exigencies, and thus to appear to sanction a suggestion when they merely respond to a want; and partly from the fact, special in each case, that the beliefs of any society must be mainly determined by the existing modifications of that society; so that opinions must necessarily present certain attributes in special harmony with corresponding social circumstances; and without this they could not retain their influence. By the first property an organization under a priesthood was rendered necessary, to prevent opinions so capable of abuse from being committed to the vulgar; and by the second, theological theories could not only consecrate all valuable suggestions, but could frequently produce some which were suitable to the contemporary social state. The first corresponds to what is vague and uncontrollable in each religious system; and the other to what is definite and susceptible of regulation; and the two supply each other’s deficiencies. As belief becomes simplified and organized, its social influence diminishes under the first aspect, on account of the restriction on speculation; but it is ever increasing under the second aspect, as we shall presently see, permitting superior men to make the utmost use of the civilizing virtue of this primitive philosophy. It is clear that the first of these modes of social action of any theology must prevail eminently in fetichism; and this agrees with our observation of the absence or imperfection of any religious organization; but this feet renders all analysis inextricable from the difficulty of discerning how much of the religious element was incorporated with the intricate web of a life which our familiar conceptions are so little adapted to unravel. We can only verify by some decisive examples the necessary reality of our theory; a thing which is easily done. As to the second mode, though it operated little during the fetich period, its precise nature enables us to obtain a better hold of it. An example or two will show its effect on the social progress of the race

All philosophers are agreed about the supreme importance of the institution of agricultural life, without which no further human regress would have been possible; but all do not see how religion was concerned in the transition. War, which is the chief temporal instrument of early civilization, has no important social influence till the nomads condition is left behind. The fierce conflicts of hunting and even of pastoral tribes, are like those of carnivorous animals, and only exercise activity and

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prepare for progress without producing immediate political results. The importance of subjecting Man to a fixed residence is thus obvious enough, on the one hand, and, on the other, the difficulty attending a change so little compatible in many ways with the character of infant humanity. There can be no doubt that a wandering life was natural to primitive Man, as we see it to be now to individuals below the reach of culture. This shows us how the intervention of spiritual influences may have been necessary to so great a change. It is usual to suppose that the condensation of numbers, as the race increased, would compel the tillage of the soil, as it had before compelled the keeping of flocks. But the explanation, though true as far as it goes, is insufficient; for, as we have seen before, want does not produce faculty. No social exigency will find its satisfaction if Man is not already disposed to provide it, and all experience shows that men will, in the most urgent cases, rather palliate each suffering as it arises, than resolve on a total change of condition which is repugnant to their nature. We know by observation what dreadful expedients men would adopt to reduce the excess of population, rather than exchange a nomadic for an agricultural life, before their intellectual and moral nature was duly prepared for it. The progression of the human being therefore caused the change though the precise date of its accomplishment must depend on external requirements; and above all, on the numbers needing food. Now, as agricultural life was certainly instituted before fetishism passed away, it is clear that there. must be in fetishism something favourable to the change. though we may not know precisely what it was. But I have no doubt about the essential principle. The worship of the external world be especially directed to the objects which are nearest and commonest, and this must tend to develops the originally feeble affection of men for their native soil. The moving lamentations of vanquished warriors for their tutelary gods were not about Jupiter, Minerva, or other abstract and general deities, whom they could find everywhere. but for their domestic gods; that is, pure fetiches. These were the special divinities whom the captives wept to leave behind, almost as bitterly as the tombs of their fathers, which wore also involved in the universal fetichism. Among nations which had reached polytheism before becoming agricultural, the religious influence necessary to the chance was chiefly due no doubt, to the remains of fetishism, which held a conspicuous place in polytheism up to a very advanced period. Such an influence then is an essential property of the first theological phase; and it would not have been strong enough in the subsequent reli-

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gions if the great material change had not by that time been so well established on other grounds as to be able to relinquish the original one which was passing away. The reaction of the change upon theology is, at the same time, worthy of notice. It was then that fetishism assumed that highest form,—that of star-worship,—which was the transition stage

to polytheism. It is plain that the settled abode of agricultural peoples must fix their speculative attention upon the heavenly bodies, while their labours remarkably disclosed the influences of the sky: whereas, the only astronomical observations to be expected of a wandering tribe are of the polar star which guides their nocturnal course. Thus there is a double relation between the development of fetishism and the final establishment of agricultural life.

Another instance of the influence of fetichism on social progress is its occasioning the systematic preservation of serviceable animals, and also of vegetables. It has been shown that the first action of Man on the external world must be in the form of devastation, and his destructive propensities do their work in clearing the field for future operations. A propensity so marked among men as rude as they were vehement threatened the safety of all races, before the utility of any was known. The most valuable organic species wale the most exposed; and they must almost inevitably have perished if the first intellectual and moral advance of the human race had not intervened to restrain the tendency to indiscriminate destruction. Fetishism performed this office, not only by introducing agricultural life, but directly; and if it was done by a method which afterwards because excessively debased—the express worship of animals, it may be asked how else the thing could have been done. Whatever evils belonged afterwards to fetishism, it should be remembered how admirably it was adapted to preserve the most valuable animals and vegetables, and indeed all material objects requiring special protection. Polytheism rendered the same service, by placing everything under the care of some deity or other; but this was a less direct method than that of fetishism, and would not have sufficed in the first instance. No provision of the kind is to be found in monotheism; but neither is it so necessary in the more advanced stage of human progress to which it is adapted: yet the want of regular discipline in this order of relations is found to be a defect to this day, and one which is only imperfectly repaired by purely temporal measures. There can be no doubt that the moral effect of Man’s care of animals contributed largely to humanize him. His carnivorous constitution is one of the chief limitations of his

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pacific capabilities, favourable as is the growing subdivision of employments to the milder inclinations of the majority of society; and, honourable as is the Utopia of Pythagoras, imagined in an age when the destructive tendency prevailed in the highest portion of society, it is not the less opposed to Man’s nature and destiny, which oblige him to increase in all directions his natural ascendancy over the whole of the animal kingdom. On this account, and for the regulation of this power, laws are essential, as in every other case of power possessed: and fetichism must be regarded as having first indicated, in the only way then possible, an exalted kind of human institution, for the regulation of the most general political relations of all,—those of Man towards the external world, and especially the animal part of it. The selfishness of kind could not prevail among these relations without serious danger; and it must become moderate in proportion as the organisms rise to an increasing resemblance to our own. When the positive philosophy shall regulate these relations, it will be by constituting a special department of external nature, in regard to which a familiar knowledge of our interest in the zoological scale will have trained us in our duty to all living beings.

Such were, as nearly as we can estimate, the social influences of fetichism. We must now observe how it passed into polytheism.

There can be no doubt of the direct derivation of polytheism from fetichism, at all times and m all places. The analysis of individual development, and the investigation of the corresponding degrees of the social scale, alike disclose this constant succession. The study of the highest antiquity, when illustrated by sound sociological theories, verifies the same fact. In most theogonies the prior existence of fetichism is necessary to the formation of the gods of polytheism. The Greek gods that issued from the Ocean and the Earth, issued from the two principal fetiches; and we have seen how, in its maturity, polytheism incorporates strong remains of fetichism. Speculatively regarded this transformation of the religious spirit is perhaps the most radical that it has ever undergone, though we are unable, through its remoteness, to appreciate with any steadiness its extent and difficulty. From the comparative nearness and social importance of the transition to monotheism, we naturally exaggerate its relative importance; but in truth the interval to be passed was much narrower in the later case than in the earlier. If we reflect that fetichism supposed matter to be, in all forms, actually alive, while polytheism declared it to be nearly inert, and passively subject to the arbi-

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trary will of a divine. agent, it seems hardly imaginable how such a transition of views could be gradually made. Both are equally remote from the positive view,—that of the operation of natural laws, but they are no less opposed to each other, except in the one point of some express will being the cause of every incident: and thus it is a matter of the highest philosophical interest to ascertain the spontaneous mode of this memorable transition.

The intervention of the scientific spirit has only recently been direct and explicit; but not the less has it been concerned in all the successive modifications of the religious Spirit. It Man had been no more capable than monkeys and carnivorous animals of comparing, abstracting, and generalizing, he would have remained for ever in the rude fetichism which their imperfect organization forbids their surmounting Man however can perceive likeness between phenomena, and observe their succession: and when these characteristic faculties had once found aliment and guidance under the first theological instigation, they gathered strength perpetually, and by their exercise reduced, more and more rapidly, the influence of the religious philosophy by which they had been cherished. The first general result of the rise of this spirit of observation and induction seems to me to have been the passage from fetichism to polytheism, beginning, as all such changes do, with the highest order of minds, and reaching the multitude at last. To understand this, we must bear in mind that, as all fetich faith relates to some single and determinate object, the belief is of an individual and concrete nature. This quality suits weld with the particular and unconnected character of the rudely material observations proper to an infant state of the human mind: so that the exact accordance between the conception and the investigation that is found wherever our understandings are at work, is evident in the present case. The expansion of the spirit of observation caused by the first theory, imperfect as it was, must destroy the balance which, at length, cannot be maintained at all but by some modification of the original philosophy. Thus the great revolution which carried men on from fetichism to polytheism is due to the same mental causes, though they may not be so conspicuous, that now produce all scientific revolutions,—which always arise out of a discordance between facts and principles. Thus did the growing generalization of human observations necessitate the same process in regard to the corresponding theological conceptions, and occasion the transformation of fetichism into simple polytheism; for the difference between n the divinities of the two systems is the essential one

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that the gods, properly so called, have, from their indeterminate residence, a more general and abstract character. Each undertakes special order of phenomena, but in a great number of bodies at the same time; so that each rules a department of some extent; whereas the fetich is inseparable from the one object in which it resides. When certain phenomena appeared Galilee in various substances, the corresponding fetiches must have formed a group. and at length coalesced into one principal one, which thus became a god; that is, an ideal and usually invisible agent, whose residence is no longer rigorously fixed. Thus when the oaks of a forest, in their likeness to each other, suggested certain general phenomena, the abstract being in whom so many fetiches coalesced was no fetich, but the god of the forest. Thus, the intellectual transition from fetichism to polytheism is neither more nor less than the ascendancy of specific over individual ideas, in the second stage of human childhood, social as well as personal. As every essential disposition is, on our principles, inherent in humanity from the beginning, this process must have already taken place, in certain cases; and the transition was thus, no doubt, much facilitated; as it was only necessary to extend and imitate what had already been done. Polytheism itself may have been primitive in certain cases, where the individual had a strong natural tendency to abstraction, while his contemporaries, being more impressible than reasonable, were more struck by differences than resemblances. As this exceptional condition does not indicate any general superiority, and the cases must have been few and restricted, my theory is not affected by them. They are interesting to us only as showing how the human mind was subjected to its first great philosophical transition, and carried through it.

Thus it is that the purely theological nature of the primitive philosophy was preserved, in the conception that phenomena were governed by Will and not by laws; while, again, it was profoundly modified by the view of matter being no longer alive but inert, and obtaining all its activity from an imaginary external being. The intellectual and social consequences of the change will appear hereafter. The remark that occurs in this place is that the decline of the mental influence of the religious spirit, while its political influence is rising, may be distinctly perceived at this stage. When each individual thing lost its character of essential life and divineness, it became accessible to the scientific spirit, which might be humble enough in its operation, but was no longer excluded by theological intervention. The change is evidenced by the corresponding

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steady diminution of the number of divinities, while their nature was becoming more abstract and their dominion more extended. Each god took the place of a troop of fetiches, which were thenceforth permitted, or reduced, to serve as his escort. We shall hereafter recognize the same process, in the succession of monotheism to polytheism.

The particular issue by which the transition was effected is easily found, when we consider that it must be through the phenomenon which appears the most general and abstract, and the most universal in its influence. The stars answer to this description, when once their isolated and inaccessible position had fixed men’s attention in preference to the nearer objects which had at first engrossed it. The difference in conception between a fetich and a god must be smaller in the case of a star than of any other body; and it was this which made astrolatry, as I observed before, the natural intermediary state between the two first theological phases. Each sidereal fetich, powerful and remote, was scarcely distinguishable from a god; and especially in an age when men did not trouble themselves with nice distinctions. The only thing necessary to get rid of the individual and concrete character altogether, was to liberate the divinity from his imprisonment in one place and function, and to connect him by some real or apparent analogy with more general functions; thus malting him a god, with a star for his preferred abode. This last transformation was so little necessary that, throughout nearly the whole polytheistic period, it was only the planets that, on account of their special variations, were subjected to it. The fixed stars remained true fetishes till they were included with everything in the universal monotheism.

In order to complete our estimate of this part of the human evolution, in which all the principles of subsequent progress must be implicated, I must point out, the manifestations of the metaphysical spirit which here present themselves. If the theological is modified by the scientific spirit, this is done only through the metaphysical spirit which rises with the decline of the theological, till the positive prevails over them both. The more recent dominion of the metaphysical spirit may be the most engrossing to us; but perhaps its operation when it was a mere gradation of the theological philosophy might appear to be of higher importance, if we could estimate the change wrought by it, and were in possession of any precise evidence. When bodies ceased to be divinely alive by their own nature, they must have some abstract property which rendered them fit to receive the action of the supernatural agent,—an action which could not be immediate when the agent had a wider influ-

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ence and an unfixed abode. Again, when a group of fetiches yield up their common attributes to a single god, and that god is regarded as living, in spite of his abstract origin, the conception is metaphysical in its whole character,—recognizing, as it does, personified abstractions.

For the universal characteristic of the metaphysical state, as a transitional condition of the understanding, is a radical confusion between the abstract and the concrete point of view, alternately assumed to modify theological conceptions; now to render abstract what was before concrete, when each generalization is accomplished, and now to prepare for a new concentration the conception of more general existences, which were hitherto only abstract. Such is the operation of the metaphysical spirit on the theological philosophy, whose fictions had offered the only intelligible ground to human understanding while all that it could do was to transfer to everything out of itself its own sense of active existence. Distinct from every substance, though inseparable from it, the metaphysical entity is more subtile and less definite than the corresponding supernatural action from which it emanates; and hence its aptitude to effect transitions which are invariably a decline, in an intellectual sense, of the theological philosophy. The action is always critical, as it preserves theology while undermining its intellectual basis; and it can appear organic only when it is not too preponderant, and in as far as it contributes to the gradual modification of the theological philosophy, to which, especially in a social view, must he referred whatever may appear to be organic in the metaphysical philosophy. These explanations must at first appear obscure; but the applications we shall have to make of them will render them unquestionable as we proceed. Meantime, it was impossible to defer them, and to neglect the true origin of the metaphysical influence, concerned as it is in the great transition from fetichism to polytheism. Resides the immediate scientific necessity, it is certainly desirable to trace, from the cradle of humanity upwards, that spontaneous and constant rivalry, first intellectual and then political, between the theological and the metaphysical spirit, which, protracted to the present moment, and necessary till the preparatory revolution is accomplished, is the main cause of our disturbed and conflicting condition.

For the length and complexity of these discussions, their importance must be my excuse. Any irrationality at our starting-point would have vitiated the whole of my historical investigation, while the first stage of human development is little known and confusedly apprehended.

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The second period will be comparatively easy to present, as it has been better explored, and is less remote in character from our own experience. We learn already, however, the efficacy of the positive philosophy in transferring us to the successive points of view from which the phases of human development may be understood, without losing any of the homogeneousness and independence of its own rational decisions. The value of this property, which is owing to the relative spirit of the new philosophy, will appear more and more as we proceed, and will enable us to comprehend the whole of human history without supposing plan to have ever been in his organization intellectually or morally different from what he is now. If I have inspired any kind of intellectual sympathy in favour of fetichism, which is the lowest aspect of the theological philosophy, it will be easy to show henceforth that the spirit of each period has been not only the most suitable to the corresponding situation, but accordant with the special accomplishment of a determinate process, essential to the development of human nature.

Chapter VIII

Second Phase: Polytheism.—Development of the Theological and Military System

Monotheism occupies so large a space in the view of modern minds, that it is scarcely possible to form a just estimate of the preceding phases of the theological philosophy; but thinkers who can attain to anything like impartiality in their review of religious periods may satisfy themselves by analysis, and in spite of appearances, that polytheism, regarded in its entire course, is the principal form of the theological system. Noble as we shall find the office of monotheism to have been, we shall remain convinced that polytheism was even more completely and specially adapted to satisfy the social needs of the corresponding period. Moreover, we shall feel that, while every state of the theological philosophy is provisional, polytheism has been the most durable of any; while monotheism, being the nearest to the entire cessation of the theological regime was best fitted to guide civilized humanity through its transition from the ancient to the modern philosophy.

Our method must be to take an abstract view of each of the essential properties of polytheism; and then to examine the various forms of the corresponding regime. In doing this, I shall regard Polytheism in the broad popular sense, as it was understood by the multitude and ex-

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pressed by Homer, and not under any allegorical aspect that erudite and imaginative minds may find in it. It is only under a monotheistic view that the ancient gods can be symbolically regarded. In the infant state of human reason, a great number of gods was required for a great variety of objects, their special attributes being correspondent to the infinite diversity of phenomena; and they were perfectly distinct and independent of each other. This view, prescribed by analysis, is confirmed by all contemporary records, in which I suppose our scholars will hardly fool; for the hazy symbolism which they themselves propose.

We have seen that, intellectually speaking, fetishism was more closely incorporated with human thought than any other religion; that the conversion into polytheism was in fact a decline. But the effect of polytheism upon human imagination, and its social efficacy, rendered the second period that of the utmost development of the religious spirit, though its elementary force was already impaired. The religious spirit it has indeed never since found so vast a field, and so free a scope, as under the regime of a direct and artless theology, scarcely modified, as yet, by metaphysics, and in no way restrained by positive conceptions, which are traceable at that period only in some unconnected and empirical observations on the simplest cases of natural phenomena. As all incidents were attributed to the arbitrary will of a multitude of supernatural beings, theological ideas must have governed minds in a more varied, determinate, and uncontested way than under any subsequent system. If we compare the daily course of active life as it must have been with the sincere polytheist, with what it is now to the devoutest of monotheists, we cannot but admit, in opposition to popular prejudice, that the religious spirit must have flourished most in the first case,—the understanding of the polytheist being beset, on all occasions and under the most varied forms, by a multitude of express theological explanations; so that his commonest operations were spontaneous acts of special worship, perpetually kept alive by a constant renewal of form and object. The imaginary world then filled a much larger space in men’s minds than under the monotheistic system, as we may know by the constant complaints of Christian teachers about the difficulty of keeping the disciples of their faith up to the true religious point of view: a difficulty which could scarcely have existed under the more familiar and less abstract influence of a polytheistic faith. Judged by the proper criterion of all philosophy, its degree of contrast with the doctrine of the invariableness of natural laws, polytheism more imperfect than monotheism, as we