myths, seemed either an ignorant distortion, or a willful disguise of the pure and profound doctrines taught in the earliest ages of the world.
From Germany, where the symbolical school of Creuzer had pretended to find in the ancient fables allegories veiling the treasures of primitive religion, this illusion passed to France and to England, where it still has many adepts.
A more complete and more minute study of the documents in which it was believed the echoes of primitive humanity could be found, has discovered that they contain much chaff mixed with the good grain; that they depict, not a monotheism in its decline, but a monotheism in course of formation; and that they are the product of a long sacerdotal elaboration, not the primary expression of the religious feeling in its contact with Nature.[1]
Nowhere has the contradiction between the theory of original perfection in religion, and the accumulated conclusions of archæology, ethnography, experimental psychology, general history, and religious science appeared to me more marked than in the recent work of M. de Pressensé on the "Origins," precisely because the writer in it impartially expounded all the facts acquired or legitimately presumed by contemporary science. He shows that the religious sentiment has been exalting and purifying itself since prehistoric times. Does not the logical conclusion from this seem to be that that sentiment began with most imperfect and gross manifestations? But M. de Pressensé, generalizing from the fact that a confused belief in a supreme divinity is met among some savages addicted to the practices of fetichism, concludes that monotheism was the primitive faith of man. "Because man in his extreme degradation," he says, "tried to find the divine idea and attach himself to it, he must necessarily have possessed it primitively in its grandeur."[2] M. de Pressensé approaches the problem of our moral and religious origins with the preconceived notion of a fall, of a degradation suffered by mankind for having violated the moral law, during a first trial of liberty. He does not see that this explanation explains nothing, and that it leaves intact the question, how mankind could at first have realized the divine idea in its plenitude—except by causing to intervene at the beginning, as M. de Pressensé seems inclined to do, a supernatural revelation, or by holding with the poet—
"L'homme est un dieu tombé qui se souvient des cieux"
(Man is a fallen god, who has memories of the sky).
- ↑ Mr. Max Müller has done me the honor to quote a passage from my lectures on India, in which I brought out the contrast of the ancient Brahmanic philosophy with the idolatry, almost fetichism, with which the stranger's eyes are struck on his arrival in Hindostan. But by this, I in no way intended to maintain that the vulgar practices of Hindooism were a degradation of the Vedic theology, still less that that represented the original and complete condition of the Hindoo conceptions.
- ↑ E. de Pressensé, "Les Origines," Paris, 1883, p. 491.
