Religion.

Religion. The term has since the 16th century become naturalised in most European languages. It has even in the Teutonic tongues taken the place of the native terms formerly in use. As to its etymology, the derivation from relinquere is universally recognised to be inconsistent with phonetic laws; the necessity for assuming the existence of a lost transitive verb ligere, 'to look,' has not been made out; and the derivation from relegere (Cicero, Nat. Deor. ii. 28), which implies carefulness and attention to what concerns the gods to be the primary signification of the word, is better than that from religare (Lactantius, Inst. Div. iv. 28), which refers the origin of religion to a sense of dependence on or connection with Deity by the bond of piety, inasmuch as the latter does not accord with the way in which the ancient Romans used the terms religens and religiosus, and supposes in them a higher conception of religion than they are likely to have possessed. The Lactantian derivation, however, has not been shown to violate any known linguistic law; and the reason which Professor Max-Müller gives (Natural Religion, p. 35) as 'the real objection' to it does not apply to it at all. It is not 'the fact that in classical Latin religare is never used in the sense of binding or holding back.' Binding or holding back, or behind, or fast, is its common meaning in classical Latin; it is its meaning in Caesar, Cicero, Suetonius, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid. Its only other meaning is to unbind.

General terms equivalent in meaning to religion are not to be found even in such languages as Chinese, Sanskrit, Hebrew, or Arabic, and need not of course be looked for in the languages of uncultured peoples. There is no definition of religion in the Bible, nor any designation or description of it which applies to the heathen religions. The Fathers and Schoolmen attempted only to give a definition of true religion. The difficulty of framing a correct definition of religion is very great. Such a definition ought to apply to nothing but religion, and to differentiate religion from everything else, as, for example, from imaginative idealisation, art, morality, or philosophy. It should apply to everything which is naturally and commonly called religion; to religion as a subjective spiritual state, and to all religions, high or low, true or false, which have obtained objective his- torical realisation. And it should neither expressly nor by implication exclude any essential element of religion, but express in a general way all that is necessarily included in its nature, indispensable to its notion. Since the need for definitions of this kind was felt—i.e. since the comparative study of religions began to be cultivated—numerous attempts to supply it have been made, but few, if any, of the definitions of religion as yet proposed fulfil all the requirements. Those of Kant, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Strauss, Wundt, Pfeiderer, Herbert Spencer, Matthew Arnold, Tylor, John Caird, and Max-Müller have attracted most attention.

The classification of religions also presents great difficulties. To distribute them into (1) true and false religions, or (2) natural and revealed religions, or (3) natural and positive religions, or (4) religions of savage and of civilised peoples, or (5) book-religions and religions not possessed of sacred books, or (6) individual religions (i.e. founded by great individual teachers) and national or race religions (i.e. the collective products of peoples or races, the growth of generations), must obviously be scientifically inadequate and unsatisfactory, although some of the classifications thus obtained may not be without truth or interest. Max-Müller holds that 'the only scientific and truly genetic classification of religions is the same as that of languages,' and Maurice Vernet that they must be classified according to races. And there can be no doubt that, if religions, languages, and races are properly classified, the classifications will, on the whole, correspond or coincide. Still they ought to be classified independently, from a study of their own proper natures, and a complete accordance of their classifications is not to be looked for. The fact, for instance, that there are universal religions, religions not limited by language or race, must not be ignored or depreciated. Hegel's classification is very ingenious and suggestive. He distributes religions into religions of nature, religions of spirituality, and the absolute or Christian religion, answering respectively both to the chief stages of the historical realisation of religion, and to the childhood, youth, and manhood of humanity. The religions of nature are represented as including (1) immediate religion (sorcery and fetish-worship); (2) pantheistic religion, which comprehends the religion of measure (China), the religion of phantasy (Brahminism), and the religion of being-itself (Buddhism); and (3) religion which tends to freedom, and which is exemplified in the religion of the good or of light (ancient Persian), the religion of sorrow (Syrian), and the religion of mystery (Egypt). The religions of spirituality are held to be these three—the religion of sublimity (Hebrew), the religion of beauty (Greek), and the religion of the understanding (Roman). The classification of Von Hartmann is of the same character, being very ingeniously conformed to the needs of his own philosophy, and yet not conspicuously inconsistent with the facts. The classifications of Lubbock, Tylor, Spencer, Reville, and D'Alviella deserve attention as being based on an extensive and close study of religions, including those vague and rude religions to which it is especially difficult to assign appropriate places in a natural and comprehensive scheme of distribution. No general agreement, however, has been as yet reached either in determining the species of these religions or the order of their succession.

Professor Tiele classifies religions as follows: I. Nature religions, which comprehend (a) Polydæmonistic magical religions under the control of animism; (b) Purified or organised magical religions—Therianthropic polytheism, (1) unorganised and (2) organised; (c) Worship of manlike but superhuman and semi-ethical beings—Anthropomorphic polytheism. II. Ethical religions, which are either (a) National nomistic (nomothetic) religious communities—Taoism, Confucianism, Brahminism, Jainism and Primitive Buddhism, Mazdaism, Mosaism, and Judaism; or (b) Universalistic religious communities—Islam, Buddhism, Christianity.

Religion is virtually universal, although, of course, neither the possibility nor the existence of atheism can be reasonably denied. The instances which Büchner, Lubbock, and others have adduced to prove that there are whole peoples destitute of religion will not stand the test of examination (see Flint, Antitheistic Theories, Lecture vii. and Notes xxv.-xxx., and Roskoff, Religionswesen der rohesten Naturvölker). Not one adequately attested case of the kind has yet been produced; and even if such a case were established it would go only a very little way towards proving that man is not naturally and normally a religious being.

The starting-point of religious development has been variously represented as fetichism (De Brosses, Comte, Tylor), belief in ghosts (Spencer, Caspari, Le Bou), polytheism (Hume, Voltaire, Dupuis), pantheism (Tholuck, Ulrici, Caird), henotheism (Schelling, Max-Müller, Von Hartmann), and monotheism (Creuzer, Professor Rawlinson, Canon Cook). All these representations are conjectural. The present state of our knowledge does not enable us to decide what the primitive religion was. Historical research does not take us back to it. Nor does it show us what stages of religion intervened between it and the earliest known historical religions. The ways in which the ruder phases of religion are represented by anthropologists and comparative theologians as having succeeded one another are merely more or less suggestive hypotheses, founded on data both insufficient and ambiguous. All serial arrangements of the kind ought to be regarded as of a merely logical, non-historical character, although they may, perhaps, aid in leading to a discovery of the historical order of development. Hence the best mode of arranging the ruder religions may be that which begins with the logically simplest phase of religion, and assigns the others a place in the order of their logical dependence and complexity. Adopting this principle, Naturism, the worship of natural objects regarded as powers or agents will come first, implying as it does no original or special faculty or tendency, and being the direct and natural interpretation of physical facts. It may have many forms corresponding to the differences of the natural objects, and these forms may imply very different degrees of intellectual capability and very different qualities of disposition in the worshippers, although they have certainly not been shown to be successive stages of religious development. Nature-worship affords a basis for all other forms of religion and worship, and in most of them its presence as a constituent is obvious. It is difficult, if not impossible, to conceive how men could have risen to any higher stage of religion except by means of it; or how they could have failed to enter it unless raised above it by a special revelation. And the notion of a special revelation to men who had not by natural means acquired any belief in or thought of deity is scarcely conceivable. Animism comes next as a natural result of the growth of the idea of soul. It is often indistinguishable or difficult to distinguish from nature-worship, which is, as it were, implicit animism, while animism is explicit nature-worship. When man has drawn a distinction between body and life or soul, it is natural that he should work it out in regard to himself, and then judge of other things by himself; and the phenomena of sleep and dreams, of swooning, apoplexy, ecstasy, insanity, and death, all contribute to mould his thoughts when once they have been turned in this direction. Hence a third phase of religion, Spiritism, in which the souls worshipped are human, or conformed to the human type and conceived of according to human experience, but affected and modified by physical impressions and analogies. The hypothesis of Mr Spencer that religion begins at this stage, the first deities being deceased ancestors, and the first worship funeral rites, takes no account of a vast mass of philological evidence which establishes that the names of the oldest known gods were descriptive of natural phenomena, and of historical evidence which shows that ancestor-worship has been grafted in various localities on an older nature-worship. It also rests on a very improbable assumption as to savage man's mode of viewing natural objects worshipped, and fails to explain the common features, similarities, and analogies in the various mythologies, the transformations of the ghosts into gods, the inferior position of properly ancestral gods, and especially the characteristics of nature-worship. The fourth phase of religious development is Polytheism in the special sense of the term, anthropological mythology, the worship of divine individualities, generally in origin nature-gods, but transformed by imagination operating under the belief that beings analogous to the human rule the course of things. The fifth phase is that in which polytheism is subordinated to, or reduced under, a Dualistic or Monistic conception of the divine. The conception may be mainly reached either by speculative or ethical thought. The sixth phase is represented by the Monotheistic religions—the Jewish, Christian, and Mohammedan. These religions all claim to rest on special revelation. In them only is belief in a plurality of gods entirely transcended. Philosophical monism in a religion does not cast out polytheism. Fetichism, image-worship, totemism, shamanism, and sorcery probably should be regarded not as distinct phases or natural logical stages of religious development, but as adjuncts and incidental perversions of religion which presuppose its normal or logical phases or stages. An adequate proof of this view would necessarily dislodge and destroy a number of current hypotheses.

The theories regarding the psychological origin and the essence of religion are numerous and divergent. It was common among the atheists of the 18th century to speak of religion as the invention of individuals desirous of deceiving their fellow men in order to further their own selfish and ambitious views. Feuerbach, Lange, Spencer, and others account for its appearance by imagination, illusion, or the misinterpretation of ordinary or exceptional phenomena. Some zealous supernaturalists have argued that it must have originated in a primitive revelation. It may be referred exclusively to the intellectual province of human nature. This mistake, however, is too gross to have been often committed, and is sufficiently refuted by the obvious consideration that the measure of religion is not the measure of intelligence or of knowledge. Hegel did not, as is often said, fall into the error of identifying religion with thought, but only emphasised strongly the importance of thought in religion. Peschel regards the principle of causality, and Max-Müller the perception of the infinite, as the roots of religion. And it may well be admitted that without both of these intellectual principles religion would be impossible. But are they more than merely conditions of its appearance? The origin of religion is, of course, referred to intellect by those who hold that God is known intuitively, perceived directly, apprehended with- out medium; but both psychology and history, both internal analysis and external observation, seem to disprove this hypothesis. Religion has often been resolved into feeling or sentiment. Thus Lucretius, Hobbes, and Strauss have traced it mainly to fear; the followers of Ritschl to a desire to secure life and its goods amidst the uncertainties and evils of earth; the disciples of Schleiermacher to a feeling of absolute dependence, of pure and entire passiveness; and others—e.g. Brinton and Newman Smyth—to the religious feeling regarded either as a distinct primary feeling or a peculiar compound feeling. Kant represented religion as essentially a sanction for duty, and Matthew Arnold has defined it as ‘morality touched by emotion,’ ‘ethics heightened, enkindled, lit up by feeling.’ This great diversity of views of itself indicates what investigation is found to confirm—viz., that religion is a vast and complex thing, an inexhaustible field for psychological study. Almost all the views referred to have some truth in them, and most of them are only false in so far as they assume themselves to be exclusively true. The whole nature of man has been formed for religion, and is engaged and exercised in religion. Every principle of that nature which has been singled out as the root of religion has really contributed to its rise and development. The study of religion as a process of mind, and of the factors which condition and determine its development, is the special task of the psychology of religion, a department of research to which many contributions have been made since Hume initiated it in his Natural History of Religion (1759) by showing the importance of the distinction between the causes and the reasons of religion.

A religion is a group or whole of religious phenomena—of religious beliefs, practices, and institutions—so closely connected with one another as to be thereby differentiated from those of any other religion. Each religion has had a history, and its rise and spread, formation and transformations, as a religion can only be truly traced by being historically traced. Also religions are historically connected, are related to one another, and have influenced one another, in ways which may be discovered, and can only be discovered, by historical research. Hence the History of Religions is also the history of religion, not an aggregation of the histories of particular religions, but a truly general history. Like the histories of art, industry, science, and society in general, it is found on examination to have been a process of development in which each stage of religion has proceeded gradually from antecedent factors and conditions. The precise nature of the development can only be ascertained by investigation of the history itself. No hypothesis of development should be assumed as a presupposition of such investigation. Naturalistic apriorism is as illegitimate in historical inquiry as theological or metaphysical apriorism. The history of religion is not only of great importance in itself, but indispensable to the right understanding of general history, of the history of art, of philosophy, &c. It has been studied with more zeal and success during the 19th century than in all the preceding ages. The history of religious beliefs is, of course, only a part of the history of religions. It is, however, distinguishable, although inseparable, from it, and is often and conveniently designated Comparative Theology. It comprehends comparative mythology and the history of doctrines, myths being beliefs which are mainly the products of imagination and doctrines of reflection.

The Psychology of Religion, the History of Religions, and Comparative Theology are clearly distinct, and ought not to be confounded. At the same time they are closely connected. They agree in that they are alike occupied with religion as an empirical fact. Hence they may be regarded as parts of a comprehensive science, to which it might be well to confine the designation ‘Science of Religions,’ instead of using it in the vague and ambiguous way which is so common. Thus understood, the Science of Religions may be said to deal with religion as a phenomenon of experience, whether outwardly manifested in history or inwardly realised in consciousness; to seek to describe and explain religious experience so far as it can be described and explained without transcending the religious experience itself. Its students have only to ascertain, analyse, explain, and exhibit experienced fact. Were religion a physical fact, to study it merely as a fact would be enough. The astronomer, the naturalist, the chemist have no need to judge their facts; they have only to describe them, analyse them, and determine their relations. But it is otherwise with the students of religion, of morality, of art, of reasoning. They soon come to a point where they must become judges of the phenomena and pronounce on their truth and worth. Experience in the physical sphere is experience and nothing more; experience in the spiritual sphere is very often experience of what is irreverent and impious, immoral and vicious, ugly and erroneous, foolish or insane. Has the mind simply to describe and analyse, accept, and be content with such experience? Even the logician and the aesthetician will answer in the negative, will claim to judge their facts as conforming to or contravening the laws of truth and the ideals of art. Still more decidedly must the moralist and the student of religion so answer. Religion, then, is not completely studied when it is only studied historically. Hence it must be dealt with by other sciences or disciplines than those which are merely historical. What these are, and how they are related to religion, the writer has elsewhere endeavoured to show.

All the particular theological sciences or disciplines treat of particular aspects of religion or of religion in particular ways. Their relationships to one another can only be determined by their relationship to it. They can only be unified and coordinated in a truly organic manner by their due reference to it. When religion is studied not merely in particular aspects and ways, but in its unity and entirety, with a view to its comprehension in its essence and all essential relations, it is the object of the Philosophy of Religion. Although a distinct and essential department of philosophy, and the highest and most comprehensive theological science, the philosophy of religion could only appear in an independent and appropriate form when both philosophy and theology were highly developed. It is, therefore, of comparatively recent origin, and indeed has been chiefly cultivated in Germany during the 19th century.

The Hibbert Lectures of Max-Müller, Renouf, Kuenen, Rhys, Rhys Davids, Sayce, and Rhys; Max-Müller's Natural Religion and Physical Religion; Tiele's Outlines of the History of Religion, and art. ‘Religions’ in Ency. Brit.; De La Saussaye's Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte; A. Lang's Myth, Ritual, and Religion; Reville's Religions des Peuples non-civilisées, &c., treat of the history of religion. Allott's Psychology and Theology, Newman Smyth's Religious Feeling, Brinton's Religious Sentiment, D. Greenleaf Thompson's Religious Sentiments of the Human Mind, Happel's Anlage des Menschen zur Religion, and Ulrichi's Gott und Mensch deal with the psychology of religion. There are two valuable works on the history of the philosophy of religion—Pfeiderer's (trans. by Stewart and Menzies) and Pünjer's (trans. in part by Hastie); also treatises on Religionsphilosophie by Hegel, Krause, Ohlert, Taut, Apelt, Stöckl, Hartmann, Teichmüller, and Rauwenhoff. Of works in English, see books on the philosophy of religion by Morell, Caird, Morris, Lotze (trans.) and Sabatier (trans. 1897); and Jevons, Introduction to the History of Religion (1896). There are, besides the relevant paragraphs on religion in the articles on Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, Etruria, Greece, India, Japan, Rome, &c., separate articles on the various religions of the world, sects Christian and other, and religious doctrines throughout this work, including those on