MORALS IN EVOLUTION

PART II

THE BASIS

CHAPTER I

THE EARLY PHASES OF THOUGHT

1. THE history of law and custom gives us one aspect of ethical evolution. It sets forth the standard of conduct, or rather the standards recognized by different societies at different times. But behind the question of the moral standard is that of the moral basis, the grounds on which morality rests, the spirit in which it is conceived. For besides the question what kind of action is expected from us by our neighbours, our rulers, our spiritual pastors and masters, moral philosophy has to recognize the further question how it is that these expectations arise. On what grounds do rules of action rest, what authority promulgates them and by what sanction are they enforced? If it happens to be the interest of any individual to disobey them, what reason, other than physical compulsion, can be assigned for adhering to them? What is the penalty of disobedience? What, if wrong is done, are the means of reconciliation? In other words, behind the question of the moral standard there is the philosophical question of the nature of moral obligation, of moral authority, of the moral sanction, or, to use one expression for them all, there is the question of the basis of the moral order.

To understand how men have conceived this question, and what sort of answers they attempted to propound for it, is the

VOL. II.

B

task that remains for us. But to understand ethical evolution on this side we have first to turn to departments of thought that are not in their origin ethical. For men's views of what is right are necessarily steeped in influences derived from their whole outlook upon the world, the range of their mental capacity, their conception of the creating, sustaining, and governing causes of things, their theories of human life and society. We cannot therefore thoroughly understand the history of ethics without knowing something of the general development of thought. At the same time we cannot here deal with this development in all its fulness. We must refer to it only so far as it throws light upon our special question. We shall have, that is, to take account of what men think and of how they think upon certain fundamental questions that affect practice.

It follows that we shall have to examine however concisely some leading features of religious development. Indeed, according to one usage of terms we should have to concern ourselves with nothing else. For a man's religion is sometimes held to include the sum and substance of his vital thought, the final meaning for him of his total outlook upon the world, and if so it clearly includes ethics as a part. In a historical study, however, it is more convenient to consider religious belief as consisting in the conception of spiritual forces which control or affect affairs. In that sense religion and ethics, though intimately related, are not identical, nor is the religious view of the governance of the world, though vastly important, the only view with which we shall have to deal. We shall distinguish, though we shall not therefore separate, the religious, the ethical, the scientific and other lines of development, and follow each in turn so far as is necessary for our purpose.

2. Beginning our survey with the lower grades of thought, we shall first attempt to characterize primitive conceptions, religious or other, of the forces with which man has to deal. This will be the subject of the present chapter. The next chapter will deal with the bearing of these ideas upon Ethics.1 To form a just

1 The relation of religion so conceived to ethics is perhaps the central question both of religious and of ethical development, and few relations in sociology are harder to define in general terms. We cannot say that religion is the parent of morality, nor that morality begets religion.

conception of the lowest order of religious conceptions is, from the nature of the case, a matter of great difficulty. The beliefs held by primitive men are by no means uniform, nor have they always been clearly understood by those who report them. Without dogmatizing as to questions of origin we may begin our account with the undoubtedly rude and early conception to which the name of Animism has been given by anthropologists. (Animism is in the broadest sense the theory of spirits, and the name and the definition are so far open to criticism that the theory of a single Creator might be said to be covered by the general term.) But when we look a little further into the matter we find that the kind of spirits intended where the term Animism is used have certain distinguishing characteristics. To begin with, Animism sees spirits everywhere, not one spirit that underlies all things, but separate spirits underlying all manner of things as the efficient causes of their qualities and actions. This feature of Animism may be said to be a predominant form of belief throughout the savage world.1 A stone,

Nor are they intrinsically independent factors which occasionally interact, for at times they fuse with one another and move forward in a single stream. At other times they part, yet they retain their influence upon one another and seem destined to reunion at a later stage.

While the belief in the soul of man is probably universal, and the human soul is, as Professor Tylor says, the model on which the souls of animals and inanimate things are formed, the question how far the conception is extended by primitive races is one to which it would be hazardous to give any general answer. If the tendency to attribute all actions to a spirit were erected into an avowed principle, and consistently applied, everything capable of being conceived as a distinct object would become also the seat of a spirit. That this would involve much duplication, and, so to say, overlapping would present no difficulty to the animistic mode of thought, which does in fact frequently conceive a greater object as animated by one spirit, while the lesser objects which form its parts have each a spirit of its own. Thus among the Chinese one of man's chief gods is the Shen pervading the Earth as a single entity and those which dwell in its several parts, its mountains, hills, rivers, meres, rocks and stones, are likewise his divinities." (De Groot, vol. iv., p. 325.) The conception, if we try to think it out, raises questions of identity and of individuality which might puzzle us, but probably do not puzzle primitive man. Be this as it may, the tendency to people things with spirits with indiscriminate profusion is widespread if not universal in the primitive world. For numerous instances see Frazer, Golden Bough, vol. iii., p. 43 seq. E. g. "The Mantras, an aboriginal race of the Malay Peninsula, 'find or put a spirit everywhere, in the air they breathe, in the land they cultivate, in the forests they inhabit, in the trees they cut down, in the caves of the rocks. According to them the demon is the cause of everything that turns out ill. If they are sick, a demon is at

a tree, a blade of grass, the wind, an animal, a human being, a mountain, a river, the sea, the sky, the sun, the rain, an epidemic disease-any or all of these may be conceived by the savage mind as the dwelling-place or the manifestation, as the case may be, of a spiritual agency which controls their behaviour; and this spiritual agency may be the object of fear or worship, of prayer and supplication, possibly of cajolement or abuse, finally of actual physical violence. Naturally not all spirits move men alike. Harmless inanimate things are seldom at this stage the objects of much solicitude, unless by some accident of belief they are associated with a powerful spirit for some special reason. Thus, among the Tshi of the West African coast everything is supposed to be animated by indwelling spirits, but little attention is paid to the spirits of bushes, grasses, stones. More dangerous ones, as the spirits of the rivers and lagoons, the sea, the mountains, are the objects to which the Tshi cult devotes attention.1 Nevertheless, spirits may inhabit the most unpromising exterior; thus an essential part of Australian belief is the indwelling of spirits in certain objects, generally oblong pebbles 2 called "churinga." But these fall within the explanthe bottom of it; if an accident happens, it is still the spirit who is at work; thereupon the demon takes the name of the particular evil of which he is supposed to be the cause."" (Frazer, iii. 48.)

1 Ellis, Yoruba-speaking Peoples, p. 276.

2 Stone-worship must be ranked among the most paradoxical developments of animism-a stone being to our minds the very type of the inanimate. Jevons (History of Religion, pp. 131-144) inclines to think that it is in most cases derivative, the stone having been originally an altar, but admits (p. 137) that the worship of remarkably shaped rocks would belong to primitive animism. Sir A. Lyall (Asiatic Studies, First Series, p. 12) ascribes the primitive worship of stones in India to "that simple awe of the unusual which belongs to no particular religion." We have here something simpler and more primitive than animism itself, to which further reference will be made later. The next stage is that the stone is the dwelling-place of a spirit. At a higher stage it is connected by a myth with some "saint, demi-god, or full-blown deity." Finally it may remain in a spiritual religion as a mere symbol. Sir A. Lyall "knew a Hindu officer of great shrewdness and very fair education, who devoted several hours daily to the elaborate worship of five round pebbles, which he had appointed to be his symbol of omnipotence. Although his general belief was in one all-pervading Divinity, he must have something symbolic to handle and address." (Asiatic Studies, First Series, p. 13.) For a discussion of the fetichistic and symbolic views of stone-worship, see also Tylor, Primitive Culture (ed. 1903), vol. ii., p. 160. Whatever its character stoneworship as an element in early religion is widespread. De la Saussaye (Manual of the Science of Religion, Eng. Trsl. i., p. 85 ff.) finds it among

ation hinted above, for they were stones carried about by the men of the Alcheringa, the ancestors of the "great long-ago," who deposited their souls in them and left them by some tree or cave, from whence at times they pass into the children of the present generation. For the spirit-and that takes us to the second point in the theory of Animism—as in some sort it dwells in the material thing, so it is also almost invariably separable from it. The spirit of man goes out in dreams, and appears to other people. Sometimes it leaves him temporarily when he sneezes, and hence it is well to pray for a blessing on him in such a moment, as we do unto this day. It quits him in trances; it leaves him finally at death. Since the spirit is a mere attenuated double of the man himself, it appears also in his shadow,1 and can be seen mocking him when he stands by the side of a pool.

These different appearances of the double, or spirit, have not escaped savage man, and have led him in many cases to an almost bewildering multiplication of souls.2 With that multiplication we need not now concern ourselves, we attend only to the fact of the soul's transmigrations. This impalpable entity is itself, it may be, transferred from one dwelling-place to another, leaving the outer seeming unaltered. The souls of the dead may pass into tigers as among the Malays, and often also in India, and in that form they may take vengeance on those who harm them in this life. And sometimes, the tiger is not killed if possible, for fear of injuring a dead relative,3 but is greatly feared for his supernatural even more than his physical prowess. The soul may wander away voluntarily in the South Sea Islanders, in Central Asia, among the Finns, Laps, Negroes, ancient Peruvians, Hindoos, ancient Hebrews, ancient Arabs, Greeks, Romans, in the Hebrides and in medieval Europe, and while recognizing the blend, hard to distinguish, of the altar, the fetich and the symbol, is inclined to conclude that the safest explanation of the cult is the Tacitean "ratio in obscuro."

1 For instances of the shadow or reflection as the soul, see Tylor, i., p. 430; Golden Bough, vol. i., p. 285. With this idea we may connect the use of a picture as a supplementary home or body for the soul of the deceased, which so often plays a prominent part in the cult of the dead, e. g. in ancient Egypt and in China. (De Groot, i., p. 113.) The distinction between regarding the picture (1) as a receptacle for the dead man's soul, and (2) as the dead man himself in a new form, is one which on animistic principles cannot be drawn with any clearness or consistency.

2 For illustrations, see Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 434. 3 Waitz, v. i. 166.