In spite of the effort that has been made by Professor Creuzer[127-1] to show that the classical nations rose to a higher use of prayer, one which made spiritual growth in the better sense of the phrase its main end; I think such instances were confined to single philosophers and poets. They do not represent the prayers of the average votary. Then and now he, as a rule, has little or no idea of any other answer to his prayer than the attainment of his wish.

As such petitions, however, more frequently fail than succeed in their direct object, and as the alternative of considering them impotent is not open to the votary, some other explanation of their failure was taught in very early day. At first, it was that the god was angered, and refused the petition out of revenge. Later, the indirect purpose of such a prayer asserted itself more clearly, and aided by a nobler conception of Divinity, suggested that the refusal of the lower is a preparation for a higher reward. Children, in well-ordered households, are frequently refused by parents who love them well; this present analogy was early seized to explain the failure of prayer. Unquestioning submission to the divine will was inculcated. Some even went so far as to think it improper to define any wish at all, and subsumed all prayer under the one formula, "Thy will be done." Such was the teaching of St. Augustine, whose favorite prayer was Da quod jubes, et jube quod vis, a phrase much criticized by Pelagius and others of his time as too quietistic.[128-1] The usual Christian doctrine of resignation proceeds in theory to this extent. Such a notion of the purpose of prayer leads to a cheerful acceptance of the effects of physical laws, effects which an enlightened religious mind never asks to be altered in its favor, for the promises and aims of religion should be wholly outside the arena of their operation. The ideal prayer has quite other objects than to work material changes.

To say, as does Mr. Hodgson, that its aim is the increase of the joyful emotions is far from sufficient. The same may be said of most human effort, the effort to make money, for instance. The indirect object of money-making is also the increase of the agreeable feelings. The similarity of purpose might lead to a belief that the aims of religion and business are identical.

Before we can fully decide on what, in the specifically religious sense of the word, is the answer to prayer, we should inquire as a matter of fact what effect it actually exerts, and to do this we should understand what it is as a psychological process. The reply to this is that prayer, in its psychological definition, is a form of Expectant Attention. It is always urged by religious teachers that it must be very earnest and continuous to be successful. "Importunity is of the essence of successful prayer," says Canon Liddon in a recent sermon. In the New Testament it is likened to a constant knocking at a door; and by a curious parity of thought the Chinese character for prayer is composed of the signs for a spirit and an axe or hammer.[129-1] We must "keep hammering" as a colloquial phrase has it. Strong belief is also required. To pray with faith we must expect with confidence.

Now that such a condition of expectant attention, prolonged and earnest, will have a very powerful subjective effect, no one acquainted with the functions of the human economy can doubt. "Any state of the body," observes the physiologist Mueller, "expected with certain confidence is very prone to ensue." A pill of bread-crumbs, which the patient supposes to contain a powerful cathartic, will often produce copious evacuations. No one who studies the history of medicine can question that scrofulous swellings and ulcerations were cured by the royal touch, that paralytics have regained the use of their limbs by touching the relics of the saints, and that in many countries beside Judea the laying on of hands and the words of a holy man have made issues to heal and the lame to walk.[130-1]

Such effects are not disputed by physicians as probable results of prayer or faith considered as expectant attention. The stigmata of St. Francis d'Assisi are more than paralleled by those of Louise Lateau, now living at Bois d'Haine in Belgium, whose hands, feet and side bleed every Friday like those of Christ on the cross. A commission of medical men after the most careful precautions against deception attributed these hemorrhages to the effect of expectation (prayer) vastly increased in force by repetition.[131-1] If human testimony is worth anything, the cures of Porte Royale are not open to dispute.[131-2]

The mental consequences of a prayerful condition of mind are to inspire patience under afflictions, hope in adversity, courage in the presence of danger and a calm confidence in the face of death itself. How mightily such influences have worked in history is shown in every religious war, and in the lives of the martyrs of all faiths. It matters not what they believed, so only that they believed it thoroughly, and the gates of Hades could not prevail against them.

No one will question that these various and momentous results are the legitimate effects or answers to prayers. But whether prayer can influence the working of the material forces external to the individual is a disputed point. If it cannot in some way do this, prayers for rain, for harvests, for safety at sea, for restoration to health, for delivery from grasshoppers[131-3] and pestilence, whether for our own benefit or others, are hardly worth reciting. A physicist expresses the one opinion in these words: "Science asserts that without a disturbance of natural law, quite as serious as the stoppage of an eclipse or the rolling of the St. Lawrence up the Falls of Niagara, no act of humiliation, individual or national, could call one shower from heaven or deflect toward us a single beam of the sun." "Assuming the efficacy of free prayer to produce changes in external nature, it necessarily follows that natural laws are more or less at the mercy of man's volition."[132-1]

This authoritative statement, much discussed at the time it was published, does not in fact express the assertion of science. To the scientific apprehension, man's volitions and his prayers are states of emotion, inseparably connected in their manifestations with changes in his cerebral structure, with relative elevation of temperature, and with the elimination of oxygen and phosphorus, in other words with chemico-vital phenomena and the transformation of force. Science also adds that there is a constant interaction of all force, and it is not prepared to deny that the force expended by a national or individual prayer may become a co-operating cause in the material change asked for, even if the latter be a rain shower. This would not affect a natural law but only its operation, and that much every act of our life does. The fact that persistency and earnestness in prayer—i. e., the increased development of force—add to its efficacy, would accord with such a scientific view. It would further be very materially corroborated by the accepted doctrine of the orders of force. A unit of electrical or magnetic force equals many of the force of gravity; a number of electrical units are required to make one of chemical force; and chemico-vital or "metabolic" force is still higher; whereas thought regarded as a form of force must be vastly beyond this again.

To render a loadstone, which lifts filings of iron by its magnetic force, capable of doing the same by the force of gravity, its density would have to be increased more than a thousand million times. All forces differ in like degree. Professor Faraday calculated that the force latent in the chemical composition of one drop of water, equals that manifested in an average thunderstorm. In our limited knowledge of the relation of forces therefore, a scientific man is rash to deny that the chemico-vital forces set loose by an earnest prayer may affect the operation of natural laws outside the body as they confessedly do in it.

Experience alone can decide such a question, and I for one, from theory and from observation, believe in the material efficacy of prayer. In a certain percentage of the cases where the wished-for material result followed, the physical force of the active cerebral action has seemed to me a co-operating cause. A physician can observe this to best advantage in the sickness of children, as they are free from subjective bias, their constitutions are delicately susceptible, and the prayers for them are in their immediate vicinity and very earnest.

But this admission after all is a barren one to the truly devout mind. The effect gained does not depend on the God to whom the prayer is offered. Blind physical laws bring it about, and any event that comes through their compulsive force is gelded of its power to fecundate the germs of the better religious life. The knowledge of this would paralyze faith.

Further to attenuate the value of my admission, another consideration arises, this time prompted not by speculative criticism, but by reverence itself. A scholar whom I have already quoted justly observes: "Whenever we prefer a request as a means of obtaining what we wish for, we are not praying in the religious sense of the term."[134-1] Or, as a recent theologian puts the same idea: "Every true prayer prays to be refused, if the granting of it would be hurtful to us or subversive of God's glory."[135-1] The real answer to prayer can never be an event or occurrence. Only in moments of spiritual weakness and obscured vision, when governed by his emotions or sensations, will the reverent soul ask a definite transaction, a modification in the operation of natural laws, still less such vulgar objects as victory, wealth or health.

The prayer of faith finds its only true objective answer in itself, in accepting whatever befalls as the revelation of the will of God as to what is best. This temper of mind as the real meaning of prayer was beautifully set forth by St. John: "If we know that he hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him."[135-2]

But this solution of the problem does not go far enough. Prayer is claimed to have a positive effect on the mind other than resignation. Joyful emotions are its fruits, spiritual enlightenment its reward. These are more than cheerful acquiescence, nor can the latter come from objects of sense.

The most eminent teachers agree in banishing material pleasure and prosperity from holy desires. They are of one mind in warning against what the world and the flesh can offer, against the pursuit of riches, power and lust. Many counsel poverty and deliberate renunciation of all such things. Nor is the happiness they talk of that which the pursuit of intellectual truth brings. This, indeed, confers joy, of which whoever has tasted will not hastily return to the fleshpots of the senses, but it is easy to see that it is not religious. Prayer and veneration have not a part in it. Great joy is likewise given by the exercise of the imagination when stirred by art in some of its varied forms, and a joy more nearly allied to religion than is that of scientific investigation. But the esthetic emotions are well defined, and are distinctly apart from those concerned with the religious sentiment. Their most complete satisfaction rather excludes than encourages pious meditations. That which prayer ought to seek outside of itself is different from all of these, its dower must be divine.

We need not look long for it. Though hidden from the wise, it has ever been familiar to the unlearned. Man has never been in doubt as to what it is. He has been only too willing to believe he has received it.

In barbarism and civilization, in the old and new worlds, the final answer to prayer has ever been acknowledged to be inspiration, revelation, the thought of God made clear to the mind of man, the mystical hypostasis through which the ideas of the human coincide with those of universal Intelligence. This is what the Pythian priestess, the Siberian shaman, the Roman sibyl, the Voluspan prophetess, the Indian medicine-man, all claimed in various degrees along with the Hebrew seers and the Mahometan teacher.[137-1]

The TRUTH, the last and absolute truth, is what is everywhere recognized as, if not the only, at least the completest, the highest answer to prayer. "Where I found the truth, there I found my God, himself the truth," says St. Augustine; and in a prayer by St. Chrysostom, the "Golden Mouth," unsurpassed in its grand simplicity, it is said: "Almighty Father, * * grant us in this world knowledge of Thy truth, and in the world to come, life everlasting." Never has the loftiest purpose of prayer been more completely stated. This it was that had been promised them by Him, to whom they looked as an Intercessor for their petitions, who had said: "I will send unto you the Comforter. * * When he, the Spirit of Truth, is come, he will guide you unto all truth."

The belief that this answer is at all times attainable has always been recognized by the Christian Church, Apostolic, Catholic, and Protestant. Baptism was called by the Greek fathers, "enlightenment" (Photismos), as by it the believer received the spirit of truth. The Romanist, in the dogma of infallibility, proclaims the perpetual inspiration of a living man; the Protestant Churches in many creeds and doctrinal works extend a substantial infallibility to all true believers, at least to the extent that they can be inspired to recognize, if not to receive divine verity.

The Gallican Confession of Faith, adopted in 1561, rests the principal evidence of the truth of the Scriptures on "le temoignage et l'interieure persuasion du Saint Esprit," and the Westminster Confession on "the inward work of the holy spirit." The Society of Friends maintain it as "a leading principle, that the work of the Holy Spirit in the soul is not only immediate and direct, but perceptible;" that it imparts truth "without any mixture of error;" and thus is something quite distinct from conscience, which is common to the race, while this "inward light" is given only to the favored of God.[138-1]

The non-juror, William Law, emphatically says: "The Christian that rejects the necessity of immediate divine inspiration, pleads the whole cause of infidelity; he has nothing to prove the goodness of his own Christianity, but that which equally proves to the Deist the goodness of his infidelity."[139-1] That by prayer the path of duty will be made clear, is a universal doctrine.

The extent to which the gift of inspiration is supposed to be granted is largely a matter of church government. Where authority prevails, it is apt to be confined to those in power. Where religion is regarded as chiefly subjective and individual, it is conceded that any pious votary may become the receptacle of such special light.

Experience, however, has too often shown that inspiration teaches such contradictory doctrines that they are incompatible with any standard. The indefinite splitting of Protestant sects has convinced all clear thinkers that the claim of the early Confessions to a divinely given power of distinguishing the true from the false has been a mistaken supposition. As a proof to an unbeliever, such a gift could avail nothing; and as evidence to one's own mind, it can only be accepted by those who deliberately shut their eyes to the innumerable contradictions it offers.[140-1]

While, therefore, in this, if anywhere, we perceive the only at once fit and definite answer to prayer, and find that this is acknowledged by all faiths, from the savage to the Christian, it would seem that this answer is a fallacious and futile one. The teachings of inspiration are infinitely discrepant and contradictory, and often plainly world-wide from the truth they pretend to embody. The case seems hopeless; yet, as religion of any kind without prayer is empty, there has been a proper unwillingness to adopt the conclusion just stated.

The distinction has been made that "the inspiration of the Christian is altogether subjective, and directed to the moral improvement of the individual,"[140-2] not to facts of history or questions of science, even exegetic science. The term illumination has been preferred for it, and while it is still defined as "a spiritual intelligence which brings truth within the range of mental apprehension by a kind of intuition,"[141-1] this truth has reference only to immediate matters of individual faith and practice. The Roman church allows more latitude than this, as it sanctions revelations concerning events, but not concerning doctrines.[141-2]

Looked at narrowly, the advantage which inspiration has been to religions has not so much depended on what it taught, as on its strength as a psychological motive power. As a general mental phenomenon it does not so much concern knowledge as belief; its province is to teach faith rather than facts. No conviction can equal that which arises from an assertion of God directly to ourselves. The force of the argument lies not in the question whether he did address us, but whether we believe he did. As a stimulus to action, prayer thus rises to a prime power.

Belief is considered by Professor Bain and his school to be the ultimate postulate, the final ground of intellection. It is of the utmost importance, however,—and this Professor Bain fails to do—to distinguish between two kinds of belief. There are men who believe and others who disbelieve the Koran or the Bible; I can accept or reject the historical existence of King Arthur or Napoleon; but, if I understand them, I cannot disbelieve the demonstrations of Euclid, nor the relations of subject and object, nor the formal laws of thought. No sane man, acquainted with the properties of numbers, can believe that twice three are ten, or that a thing can be thought as other than itself. These truths that "we cannot help believing," I have defined in the first chapter as absolute truths. They do not come to us through testimony and induction, but through a process variously called "immediate perception," "apprehension," or "intuition," a process long known but never satisfactorily explained.

All such truths are analytic, that is, they are true, not merely for a given time or place, but at all times and places conceivable, or, time and space out of the question, they still remain formally true. Of course, therefore, they cannot refer to historic occurrences nor phenomena. The modern position, that truth lies in facts, must be forsaken, and with the ancients, we must place it in ideas.

If we define inspiration as that condition of mind which is in the highest degree sensitive to the presence of such truth, we have of it the only worthy idea which it is possible to frame. The object of scientific investigation is to reach a truth which can neither be denied nor doubted. If religion is willing to content itself with any lower form of truth, it cannot support its claims to respect, let alone reverence.

It may be said that the subjects with which the religious sentiment concerns itself are not such as are capable of this absolute expression. This is, however, disclaimed by all great reformers, and by none more emphatically than by him who said: "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my statements (logoi) shall not pass away." There is clear reference here to absolute truths. If what we know of God, duty and life, is not capable of expression except in historic narrative and synthetic terms, the sooner we drop their consideration the better. That form sufficed for a time, but can no longer, when a higher is generally known. As the mathematical surpasses the historic truth, so the former is in turn transcended by the purely logical, and in this, if anywhere, religion must rest its claims for recognition. Here is the arena of the theology of the future, not in the decrees of councils, nor in the records of past time.

Inspiration, in its religious sense, we may, therefore, define to be that condition of mind in which the truths relating to deity and duty become in whole or in part the subjects of immediate perception.

That such a condition is possible will be granted. Every reformer who has made a permanent betterment in the religion of his time has possessed it in some degree. He who first conceived the Kosmos under logical unity as an orderly whole, had it in singular power; so too had he who looking into the mind became aware of its purposive laws which are the everlasting warrants of duty. Some nations have possessed it in remarkable fulness, none more so than the descendants of Abraham, from himself, who left his kindred and his father's house at the word of God, through many eminent seers down to Spinoza, who likewise forsook his tribe to obey the inspirations vouchsafed him; surpassing them all, Jesus of Nazareth, to whose mind, as he waxed in wisdom, the truth unfolded itself in such surpassing clearness that neither his immediate disciples nor any generations since have fathomed all the significance of his words.

Such minds do not need development and organic transmission of thought to enrich their stores. We may suppose the organization of their brains to be so perfect that their functions are always accordant with true reasoning, so self-prompting, that a hint of the problem is all they ask to arrive at its demonstration. Blaise Pascal, when a boy of twelve, whose education had been carefully restrained, once asked his father what is geometry. The latter replied that it is a method devised to draw figures correctly, but forbade any further inquiry about it. On this hint Pascal, by himself, unassisted, without so much as knowing the name of a line or circle, reached in a few weeks to the demonstration of the thirty-second problem of the first book of Euclid! Is it not possible for a mind equally productive of religious truth to surpass with no less ease its age on such subjects?

As what Newton so well called "patient thought," constant application, prolonged attention, is the means on which even great minds must rely in order to reach the sempiternal verities of science, so earnest continued prayer is that which all teachers prescribe as the only avenue to inspiration in its religious sense. While this may be conceded, collaterals of the prayer have too often been made to appear trivial and ridiculous.

In the pursuit of inspiration the methods observed present an interesting similarity. The votary who aspires to a communion with the god, shuts himself out from the distraction of social intercourse and the disturbing allurements of the senses. In the solitude of the forest or the cell, with complete bodily inaction, he gives himself to fasting and devotion, to a concentration of all his mind on the one object of his wish, the expected revelation. Waking and sleeping he banishes all other topics of thought, perhaps by an incessant repetition of a formula, until at last the moment comes, as it surely will come in some access of hallucination, furor or ecstasy, the unfailing accompaniments of excessive mental strain, when the mist seems to roll away from the mortal vision, the inimical powers which darkened the mind are baffled, and the word of the Creator makes itself articulate to the creature.

Take any connected account of the revelation of the divine will, and this history is substantially the same. It differs but little whether told of Buddha Sakyamuni, the royal seer of Kapilavastu, or by Catherine Wabose, the Chipeway squaw,[146-1] concerning the Revelations of St. Gertrude of Nivelles or of Saint Brigida, or in the homely language of the cobbler George Fox.

For six years did Sakyamuni wander in the forest, practising the mortifications of the flesh and combatting the temptations of the devil,before[TN-8] the final night when, after overcoming the crowning enticements of beauty, power and wealth, at a certain moment he became the "awakened," and knew himself in all his previous births, and with that knowledge soared above the "divine illusion" of existence. In the cave of Hari, Mohammed fasted and prayed until "the night of the divine decisions;" then he saw the angel Gabriel approach and inspire him:

"A revelation was revealed to him: One terrible in power taught it him, Endowed with wisdom. With firm step stood he, There, where the horizon is highest, Then came he near and nearer, A matter of two bowshots or closer, And he revealed to his servant a revelation; He has falsified not what he saw."[147-1]

With not dissimilar preparation did George Fox seek the "openings" which revealed to him the hollowness of the Christianity of his day, in contrast to the truth he found. In his Journal he records that for months he "fasted much, walked around in solitary places, and sate in hollow trees and lonesome places, and frequently in the night walked mournfully about." When the word of truth came to him it was of a sudden, "through the immediate opening of the invisible spirit." Then a new life commenced for him: "Now was I come up in Spirit through the flaming sword into the Paradise of God. All things were new: all the creation gave another smell unto me than before." The healing virtues of all herbs were straightway made known to him, and the needful truths about the kingdom of God.[147-2]

These are portraitures of the condition of entheasm. Its lineaments are the same, find it where we may.

How is this similarity to be explained? Is it that this alleged inspiration is always but the dream of a half-crazed brain? The deep and real truths it has now and then revealed, the noble results it has occasionally achieved, do not allow this view. A more worthy explanation is at hand.

These preliminaries of inspiration are in fact but a parody, sometimes a caricature, of the most intense intellectual action as shown in the efforts of creative thought. The physiological characteristics of such mental episodes indicate a lowering of the animal life, the respiration is faint and slow, the pulse loses in force and frequency, the nerves of special sense are almost inhibited, the eye is fixed and records no impression, the ear registers no sound, necessary motions are performed unconsciously, the condition approaches that of trance. There is also an alarming similarity at times between the action of genius and of madness, as is well known to alienists.

When the creative thought appears, it does so suddenly; it breaks upon the mind when partly engaged with something else as an instantaneous flash, apparently out of connection with previous efforts. This is the history of all great discoveries, and it has been abundantly illustrated from the lives of inventors, artists, poets and mathematicians. The links of such a mental procedure we do not know. "The product of inspiration, genius, is incomprehensible to itself. Its activity proceeds on no beaten track, and we seek in vain to trace its footsteps. There is no warrant for the value of its efforts. This it can alone secure through voluntary submission to law. All its powers are centred in the energy of production, and none is left for idle watching of the process."[149-1]

The prevalent theory of the day is that this mental action is one essentially hidden from the mind itself. The name "unconscious cerebration" has been proposed for it by Dr. Carpenter, and he has amply and ably illustrated its peculiarities. But his theory has encountered just criticism, and I am persuaded does not meet the requirements of the case. Whether at such moments the mind actually receives some impulse from without, as is the religious theory, or, as science more willingly teaches, certain associations are more easily achieved when the mind is partially engaged with other trains of ideas, we cannot be sure. We can only say of it, in the words of Dr. Henry Maudsley, the result "is truly an inspiration, coming we know not whence." Whatever it is, we recognize in it the original of that of which religious hallucination is the counterfeit presentment. So similar are the processes that their liability to be confounded has been expressly guarded against.[150-1]

The prevalence of such caricatures does not prove the absence of the sterling article. They rather show that the mind is conscious of the possibility of reaching a frame or mood in which it perceives what it seeks, immediately and correctly. Buddhism distinctly asserts this to be the condition of "the stage of intuitive insight;" and Protestant Christianity commenced with the same opinion. Every prayer for guidance in the path of duty assumes it. The error is in applying such a method where it is incompatible, to facts of history and the phenomena of physical force. Confined to the realm of ideas, to which alone the norm of the true and untrue is applicable, there is no valid evidence against, and many theoretical reasons for, respecting prayer as a fit psychological preparation for those obscure and unconscious processes, through which the mind accomplishes its best work.

The intellect, exalted by dwelling upon the sublimest subjects of thought, warmed into highest activity by the flames of devotion, spurning as sterile and vain the offers of time and the enticements of sense, may certainly be then in the mood fittest to achieve its greatest victories. But no narrowed heaven must cloud it, no man-made god obstruct its gaze. Free from superstition and prejudice, it must be ready to follow wherever the voice of reason shall lead it. All inspired men have commenced by freeing themselves from inherited forms of Belief in order that with undiverted attention they might listen to the promptings of the divinity within their souls. One of the greatest of them and one the most free from the charge of prejudice, has said that to this end prayer is the means.[151-1]

He who believes that the ultimate truth is commensurate with reason, finds no stumbling-block in the doctrine that there may be laws through whose action inspiration is the enlightenment of mind as it exists in man, by mind as it underlies the motions which make up matter. The truth thus reached is not the formulae of the Calculus, nor the verbiage of the Dialectic, still less the events of history, but that which gives what validity they have to all of these, and moreover imparts to the will and the conscience their power to govern conduct.

FOOTNOTES:

[119-1] The "silent worship" of the Quakers is defended by the writers of that sect, on the ground that prayer is "often very imperfectly performed and sometimes materially interrupted by the use of words." Joseph John Gurney, The Distinguishing Views and Practice of the Society of Friends, p. 300. (London, 1834.)

[119-2] Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Voelker, Bd. I., s. 162.

[119-3] The learned Bishop Butler, author of the Analogy of Religion, justly gives prominence to "our expectation of future benefits," as a reason for gratitude to God. Sermons, p. 155. (London, 1841.)

[122-1] The expressions of Confucius' religious views may be found in The Doctrine of the Mean, chaps. xiii., xvi., the Analects, i., 99, 100, vii., and in a few other passages of the canonical books.

[126-1] An Inquiry into the Theory of Practice, p. 330.

[127-1] Symbolik und Mythologie der Alten Voelker. Bd. I., ss. 165, sqq. One of the most favorable examples (not mentioned by Creuzer) is the formula with which Apollonius of Tyana closed every prayer and gave as the summary of all: "Give me, ye Gods, what I deserve"—Doiete moi ta opheilomena. The Christian's comment on this would be in the words of Hamlet's reply to Polonius: "God's bodkin, man! use every man after his desert and who should 'scape whipping?"

[128-1] Aurelii Augustini, De Dono Perseverantiae, cap. xx. Comte remarks "Depuis St. Augustin toutes les ames pures ont de plus en plus senti, a travers l'egoisme Chretien, que prier peut n'etre pas demander." Systeme de Politique Positive, I., p. 260. Popular Protestantism has retrograded in this respect.

[129-1] Plath, Die Religion und Cultus der alten Chineser, s. 836. This author observes that the Chinese prayers are confined to temporal benefits only, and are all either prayers of petition or gratitude. Prayers of contrition are unknown.

[130-1] Numerous examples can be found in medical text books, for instance in Dr. Tuke's, The Influence of the Mind on the Body. London, 1873.

[131-1] The commission appointed by the Royal Academy of Medicine of Belgium on Louise Lateau reported in March, 1875, and most of the medical periodicals of that year contain abstracts of its paper.

[131-2] They may be found in the life of Pascal, written by his sister, and in many other works of the time.

[131-3] It is worthy of note, as an exponent of the condition of religious thought in 1875, that in May of that year the Governor of the State of Missouri appointed by official proclamation a day of prayer to check the advance of the grasshoppers. He should also have requested the clergy to pronounce the ban of the Church against them, as the Bishop of Rheims did in the ninth century.

[132-1] Tyndall, On Prayer and Natural Law, 1872.

[134-1] S. M. Hodgson, An Inquiry into the Theory of Practice, pp. 329, 330.

[135-1] The Rev. Dr. Thomas K. Conrad, Thoughts on Prayer, p. 54: New York, 1875.

[135-2] I. John, v. 15. "There are millions of prayers," says Richard Baxter, "that will all be found answered at death and judgment, which we know not to be answered any way but by believing it." A Christian Directory, Part II. chap. xxiii.

[137-1] "So wie das Gebet ein Hauptwurzel alter Lehre war, so war das Deuten und Offenbaren ihre urspruengliche Form." Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Voelker, Bd. I., s. 10. It were more accurate to say that divination is the answer to, rather than a form of prayer.

[138-1] Joseph John Gurney, The Distinguishing Views and Practices of the Society of Friends, pp. 58, 59, 76, 78. An easy consequence of this view was to place the decrees of the internal monitor above the written word. This was advocated mainly by Elias Hicks, who expressed his doctrine in the words: "As no spring can rise higher than its fountain, so likewise the Scriptures can only direct to the fountain whence they originated—the Spirit of Truth." Letters of Elias Hicks, p. 228 (Phila., 1861).

[139-1] Address to the Clergy, p. 67.

[140-1] See an intelligent note on this subject in the Rev. Wm. Lee's work, entitled The Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, pp. 44, 47 (London and New York, 1857).

[140-2] Rev. William Lee, u. s., p. 243.

[141-1] Blunt, Dictionary of Doctrinal and Historical Theology, s. v.

[141-2] There is a carefully written essay on the views of the Romish Church on this subject, preceding The Revelations of Saint Brigida (N. Y. 1875).

[146-1] Chusco or Catherine Wabose, "the prophetess of Chegoimegon," has left a full and psychologically most valuable account of her inspiration. It is published in Schoolcraft's History and Statistics of the Indian Tribes, Vol. I., p. 390, sqq.

[147-1] The Koran, Sura liii. This is in date one of the earliest suras.

[147-2] The Journal of George Fox, pp. 59, 67, 69.

[149-1] Wilhelm von Humboldt, Gesammelte Werke, Bd. iv., s. 278.

[150-1] In his treatise De Veritate, itself the subject, as its author thought, of a special revelation, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, gives as one of the earmarks of a real revelation: "ut afflatum Divini numinis sentias, ita enim internae Facultatum circa veritatem operationes a revelationibus externis distinguuntur." p. 226.

[151-1] Spinoza, Espistolae et Responsionnes, Ep. xxxiv.



THE MYTH AND THE MYTHICAL CYCLES.

SUMMARY.

Myths are inspirations concerning the Unknown. Science treats them as apperceptions of the relations of man and nature. Moments of their growth, as treated by mythological science. Their similar forms, explained variously, the topic of the philosophy of mythology. The ante-mythical period. Myths have centred chiefly around three subjects, each giving rise to a Mythical Cycle.

I. The Epochs of Nature.

The idea of Time led to the myth of a creation. This starting the question, What was going on before creation? recourse was had to the myth of recurrent epochs. The last epoch gave origin to the Flood Myths; the coming one to that of the Day of Judgment.

II. The Paradise lost and to be re-gained.

To man, the past and the future are ever better than the present. He imagines a Golden Age in the past and believes it will return. The material Paradise he dreams of in his ruder conditions, becomes a spiritual one with intellectual advancement. The basis of this belief.

III. The Hierarchy of the Gods.

The earliest hierarchy is a dual classification of the gods into those who help and those who hinder the fruition of desire. Light and darkness typify the contrast. Divinity thus conceived under numerical separateness. Monotheisms do not escape this. The triune nature of single gods. The truly religious and only philosophic notion of divinity is under logical, not mathematical unity. This discards mythical conceptions.



CHAPTER V.

THE MYTH AND THE MYTHICAL CYCLES.

Returning again to the definition of the elemental religious sentiment—"a Wish whose fruition depends upon unknown power"—it enables us to class all those notions, opinions and narratives, which constitute mythologies, creeds and dogmas, as theories respecting the nature and action of the unknown power. Of course they are not recognized as theories. They arise unconsciously or are received by tradition, oral or written, and always come with the stamp of divinity through inspiration and revelation. None but a god can tell the secrets of the gods.

Therefore they are the most sacred of all things, and they partake of the holiness and immutability which belong to the unknown power itself. To misplace a vowel point in copying the sacred books was esteemed a sin by the Rabbis, and a pious Mussulman will not employ the same pen to copy a verse of the Koran and an ordinary letter. There are many Christians who suppose the saying: "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My Words shall not pass away," has reference to the words of the Old and New Testament. "What shall remain to us," asked Ananda, the disciple of Buddha, "when thou shalt have gone hence into Nirvana?" "My Word (dharma)," replied the Master. Names thus came to be as holy as the objects to which they referred. So sacred was that of Jehovah to the Israelites that its original sound was finally lost. Such views are consistent enough to the Buddhist, who, assuming all existence to be but imaginary, justly infers that the name is full as much as the object.

The science of mythology has made long strides in the last half century. It has left far behind it the old euphemeristic view that the myth is a distorted historical tradition, as well as the theories not long since in vogue, that it was a system of natural philosophy, a device of shrewd rulers, or as Bacon thought, a series of "instructive fables." The primitive form of the myth is now recognized to be made up from the notions which man gains of the manifestations of force in external nature, in their supposed relations to himself. In technical language it may be defined as the apperception of man and nature under synthetic conceptions.[156-1]

This primitive form undergoes numerous changes, to trace and illustrate which, has been the special task assumed by the many recent writers on mythology. In some instances these changes are owing to the blending of the myth with traditions of facts, forming a quasi-historical narrative, the saga; in others, elaborated by a poetic fancy and enriched by the imagination, it becomes a fairy tale, the maerchen. Again, the myth being a product of creative thought, existing in words only, as language changes, it alters through forgetfulness of the earlier meanings of words, through similarities in sounds deceiving the ear, or through a confusion of the literal with the metaphorical signification of the same word. The character of languages also favors or retards such changes, pliable and easily modified ones, such as those of the American Indians, and in a less degree those of the Aryan nations, favoring a developed mythology, while rigid and monosyllabic ones, as the Chinese and Semitic types, offer fewer facilities to such variations. Furthermore, tribal or national history, the peculiar difficulties which retard the growth of a community, and the geographical and climatic character of its surroundings, give prominence to certain features in its mythology, and to the absence of others. Myths originally diverse are blended, either unconsciously, as that of the Roman Saturn with the Greek Cronus; or consciously, as when the medieval missionaries transferred the deeds of the German gods to Christian saints. Lastly, the prevailing temperament of a nation, its psychology, gives a strong color to its mythical conceptions, and imprints upon them the national peculiarities.

The judicious student of mythology must carefully weigh all these formative agents, and assign each its value. They are all present in every mythology, but in varying force. His object is accomplished when he can point out the causal relation between the various features of a myth and these governing agencies.

Such is the science of mythology. The philosophy of mythology undertakes to set forth the unities of form which exist in various myths, and putting aside whatever of this uniformity is explainable historically, proposes to illustrate from what remains the intellectual need myths were unconsciously framed to gratify, to measure their success in this attempt, and if they have not been wholly successful, to point out why and in what respect they have failed. In a study preliminary to the present one, I have attempted to apply the rules of mythological science to the limited area of the native American race; in the present chapter I shall deal mainly with the philosophy of mythology.

The objection may be urged at starting that there is no such unity of form in myths as the philosophy of mythology assumes; that if it appears, it is always explainable historically.

A little investigation sets this objection aside. Certain features must be common to all myths. A divinity must appear in them and his doings with men must be recorded. A reasonable being can hardly think at all without asking himself, "Whence come I, my fellows, and these things which I see? And what will become of us all?" So some myth is sure to be created at an early stage of thought which the parent can tell the child, the wise man his disciple, containing responses to such questions.

But this reasoning from probability is needless, for the similarity of mythical tales in very distant nations, where no hypothesis of ancient intercourse is justified, is one of the best ascertained and most striking discoveries of modern mythological investigation.[159-1] The general character of "solar myths" is familiar to most readers, and the persistency with which they have been applied to the explanation of generally received historical facts, as well as to the familiar fairy tales of childhood, has been pushed so far as to become the subject of satire and caricature. The myths of the Dawn have been so frequently brought to public notice in the popular writings of Professor Max Mueller, that their general distribution may be taken as well known. The same may be said of the storm myths. Wilhelm von Humboldt, who thought deeply on the religious nature of man, said early in this century: "Wholly similar myths can very readily arise in different localities, each independent of the others."[160-1]

This similarity is in a measure owing to the similar impressions which the same phenomenon, the sunrise or the thunder-storm for instance, makes on the mind—and to this extent the science of mythology is adequate to its explanation. But that it falls short is so generally acknowledged, that various other explanations have been offered.

These may be classed as the skeptical explanation, which claims that the likeness of the myths is vastly exaggerated and much more the work of the scholar at his desk than of the honest worshipper; the historical explanation, which suggests unrecorded proselytisms, forgotten communications and the possible original unity of widely separated nations; the theological explanations, often discrepant, one suggesting caricatures of the sacred narrative inspired by the Devil, another reminiscences of a primeval inspiration, and a third the unconscious testimony of heathendom to orthodoxy;[161-1] and lastly the metaphysical explanation, which seems at present to be the fashionable one, expressed nearly alike by Steinthal and Max Mueller, which cuts the knot by crediting man with "an innate consciousness of the Absolute," or as Renan puts it, "a profound instinct of deity."

The philosophy of mythology, differing from all these, finding beyond question similarities which history cannot unriddle, interprets them by no incomprehensible assumption, but by the identity of the laws of thought acting on similar impressions under the guidance of known categories of thought. Nor does it stop here, but proceeds to appraise these results by the general scheme of truth and error. It asks for what psychological purpose man has so universally imagined for himself gods—pure creations of his fancy;—whether that purpose can now or will ultimately be better attained by an exercise of his intellect more in accordance with the laws of right reasoning; and thus seeking to define the genuine food of the religious desire, estimates the quality and value of each mythological system by the nearness of its approach to this standard.

The philosophy of mythology, starting with the wish or prayer as the unit of religious thought, regards all myths as theories about the unknown power which is supposed to grant or withhold the accomplishment of the wish. These theories are all based upon the postulate of the religious sentiment, that there is order in things; but they differ from scientific theories in recognizing volition as an efficient cause of order.

The very earliest efforts at religious thought do not rise to the formation of myths, that is, connected narratives about supernatural beings. All unknown power is embraced under a word which does not convey the notion of personality; single exhibitions of power which threaten man's life are supposed to be the doings of an unseen person, often of a deceased man, whose memory survives; but any general theory of a hierarchy, or of the world or man, is not yet visible. Even such immature notions are, however, so far as they go, framed within the category of causality; only, the will of the god takes the place of all other force. This stage of religious thought has been called Animism, a name which does not express its peculiarity, which is, that all force is not only supposed to proceed from mind, but through what metaphysicians call "immanent volition," that is, through will independent of relation. Mind as "emanant volition," in unison with matter and law, the "seat of law," to use an expression of Professor Boole's, may prove the highest conception of force.

As the slowly growing reason reached more general notions, the law which prescribes unity as a condition of thought led man early in his history to look upon nature as one, and to seek for some one law of its changes; the experience of social order impressed him with the belief that the unseen agencies around him also bore relations to each other, and acknowledged subjection to a leader; and the pangs of sickness, hunger and terror to which he was daily exposed, and more than all the "last and greatest of all terribles, death," which he so often witnessed, turned his early meditations toward his own origin and destiny.

Around these three subjects of thought his fancy busied itself, striving to fabricate some theory which would solve the enigmas which his reason everywhere met, some belief which would relieve him from the haunting horror of the unknown. Hence arose three great cycles of myths, which recur with strangely similar physiognomies in all continents and among all races. They are the myths of the Epochs of Nature, the Hierarchy of the Gods, and of the Paradise lost but to be regained. Wherever we turn, whether to the Assyrian tablets or to the verses of the Voluspa, to the crude fancies of the red man of the new world or the black man of the African plateau, to the sacred books of the modern Christian or of the ancient Brahman, we find these same questions occupying his mind, and in meaning and in form the same solutions proffered. Through what intellectual operations he reached these solutions, and their validity, as tested by the known criteria of truth, it is the province of the philosophy of mythology to determine.

Let us study the psychological growth of the myth of the Epochs of Nature. This tells of the World, its beginning, its convulsions and its ending, and thus embraces the three minor cycles of the cosmogonical, the cataclysmal and the eschatological myths.

Nature is known to man only as force, which manifests itself in change. He is so constituted that "the idea of an event, a change, without the idea of a cause, is impossible" to him. But in passing from the occurrence to its cause the idea of Time is unavoidable; it presents itself as the one inevitable condition of change; itself unwearing, it wears out all else; it includes all existence, as the greater does the less; and as "causation is necessarily within existence,"[165-1] time is beyond existence and includes the nonexistent as well. Whatever it creates, it also destroys; and as even the gods are but existences, it will swallow them. It renders vain all pleasures, and carries the balm of a certain oblivion for all woes.

This oppressive sense of time, regarded not in its real meaning as one of the conditions of perception, but as an active force destroying thought as well as motion, recurs continually in mythology. To the Greek, indefinite time as Cronos, was the oldest of the gods, begetting numberless children, but with unnatural act consuming them again; while definite time, as the Horae, were the blithe goddesses of the order in nature and the recurrent seasons. Osiris, supreme god of the Egyptians, was born of a yet older god, Sev, Time. Adonis and Aeon acknowledge the same parentage.[165-2] The ancient Arab spoke of time (dahr, zaman) as the final, defining principle; as uniting and separating all things; and as swallowing one thing after another as the camel drains the water from a trough.[166-1] In the Koran it is written: "Time alone destroys us." Here and there, through the sacred songs of the Parsees, composed long before Aristotle wrote, beyond all the dust and noise of the everlasting conflict of good and evil, of Ahura Mazda and Anya-Mainyus, there are glimpses of a deeper power, Zeruana Akerana, Eternal Duration, unmoved by act or thought, in the face of which these bitter opponents are seen to be children, brethren, "twin sons of Time."[166-2] The Alexandrian Gnostics, in their explanations of Christian dogmas, identify Aeon, infinite time, with God the Father, as the source and fount of existence; not merely as a predicate of the highest, but the Highest himself.

This heavy-weighing sense of the infinity of duration, and the urgency of escaping from the weariness of thinking it, led to the construction of the myth of the Creation. Man devised it so that he might be able to say, "in the beginning." But a new difficulty met him at the threshold—as change must be in existence, "we cannot think of a change from non-existence to existence." His only refuge was to select some apparently primordial, simple, homogeneous substance from which, by the exertion of volition, things came into being. The one which most naturally suggested itself was water.[167-1] This does in fact cover and hide the land, and the act of creation was often described as the emerging of the dry land from the water; it dissolves and wears away the hard rock; and, diminishing all things, itself neither diminishes nor increases. Therefore nearly all cosmogonical myths are but variations of that one familiar to us all: "And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together in one place, and let the dry land appear; and it was so." The manifestation of the primordial energy was supposed to have been akin to that which is shown in organic reproduction. The myths of the primeval egg from which life proceeded, of the mighty bird typical of the Holy Spirit which "brooded" upon the waters, of Love developing the Kosmos from the Chaos, of the bull bringing the world from the waters, of Protogonus, the "egg-born," the "multispermed," and countless others, point to the application of one or the other, or of both these explanations.[167-2]

In them the early thinkers found some rest: but not for long. The perplexity of the presence of this immediate order of things seemed solved; but another kept obtruding itself: what was going on before that "beginning?" Vain to stifle the inquiry by replying, "nothing."[168-1] For time, which knows no beginning, was there, still building, still destroying; nothing can be put to it, nor anything taken from it. What then is left but the conclusion of the Preacher: "That which hath been, is now; and that which is to be, hath already been?" Regarding time as a form of force, the only possible history of the material universe is that it is a series of destructions and restorations, force latent evolving into force active or energy, and this dissipated and absorbed again into latency.

Expressed in myths, these destructions and restorations are the Epochs of Nature. They are an essential part of the religious traditions of the Brahmans, Persians, Parsees, Greeks, Egyptians, Jews, Mexicans, Mayas, and of all nations who have reached a certain stage of culture. The length of the intervening periods may widely differ. The kalpa or great year of the Brahmans is so long that were a cube of granite a hundred yards each way brushed once in a century by a soft cloth, it would be quite worn to dust before the kalpa would close: or, as some Christians believe, there may be but six thousand years, six days of God in whose sight "a thousand years are as one day," between the creation and the cremation of the world, from when it rose from the waters until it shall be consumed by the fire.

There were also various views about the agents and the completeness of these periodical destructions. In the Norse mythology and in the doctrine of Buddhism, not one of the gods can survive the fire of the last day. Among the Greeks, great Jove alone will await the appearance of the virgin world after the icy winter and the fiery summer of the Great Year. The Brahmans hold that the higher classes of gods outlive the wreck of things which, at the close of the day of Brahm, involves all men and many divinities in elemental chaos; while elsewhere, in the later Puranas and in the myths of Mexico, Peru, and Assyria, one or a few of the race of man escape a deluge which is universal, and serve to people the new-made earth. This latter supposition, in its application to the last epoch of nature, is the origin of the myth of the Flood.

In its general features and even in many details, the story of a vast overflow which drowned the world, and from which by the timely succor of divinity some man was preserved, and after the waters had subsided became the progenitor of the race, is exceedingly common among distant tribes, where it is impossible to explain it as a reminiscence of a historic occurrence, or by community of religious doctrine. In Judea Noah, in India Manu, in Chaldea Xisuthrus, in Assyria Oannes, in Aztlan Nata, in Algonkin tradition Messou, in Brazil Monan, etc., are all heroes of similar alleged occurrences. In all of them the story is but a modification of that of the creation in time from the primeval waters.[170-1]

"As it was once, so it shall be again," and as the present age of the world wears out, the myth teaches that things will once more fall back to universal chaos. "The expectation of the end of the world is a natural complement to the belief in its periodical destructions." It is taught with distinctness by all religious systems, by the prophetess in the Voluspa, by the Hebrew seers,[171-1] by the writer of the Apocalypse, by the Eastern sages, Persian and Indian, by the Roman Sibyl, and among the savage and semi-civilized races of the New World.

Often that looked for destruction was associated with the divine plans for man. This was an addition to the simplicity of the original myth, but an easy and a popular one. The Indian of our prairies still looks forward to the time when the rivers shall rise, and submerging the land sweep from its surface the pale-faced intruders, and restore it to its original owners. Impatient under the ceaseless disappointments of life, and worn out with the pains which seem inseparable from this condition of things, the believer gives up his hopes for this world, and losing his faith in the final conquest of the good, thinks it only attainable by the total annihilation of the present conditions. He looks for it, therefore, in the next great age, in the new heaven and the new earth, when the spirit of evil shall be bound and shut up, and the chosen people possess the land, "and grow up as calves of the stall."[172-1]

This is to be inaugurated by the Day of Judgment, "the day of wrath, the dreadful day," in which God is to come in his power and pronounce his final decrees on those who have neglected the observance due him. The myth, originally one relating to the procession of natural forces, thus assumed with the increasing depth of the religious sentiment more and more a moral and subjective coloring, until finally its old and simple form was altogether discarded, or treated as symbolic only.

The myth of the Epochs of Nature was at first a theory to account for the existing order of nature. For a long time it satisfied the inquiring mind, if not with a solution at least with an answer to its queries. After geologic science had learned to decipher the facts of the world's growth as written on the stones which orb it, the religious mind fondly identified the upheavals and cataclysms there recorded with those which its own fancy had long since fabricated. The stars and suns, which the old seer thought would fall from heaven in the day of wrath, were seen to be involved in motions far beyond the pale of man's welfare, and, therefore, the millennial change was confined to the limits of our planet. Losing more and more of its original form as an attempted explanation of natural phenomena, the myth now exists in civilized nations as an allegorical type of man's own history and destiny, and thus is slowly merging into an episode of the second great cycle of the mythus, that of the Paradise lost and regained. It, too, finds its interpretation in psychology.

Broadly surveying the life of man, philosophers have found in it much matter fit either for mockery or tears. We are born with a thirst for pleasure; we learn that pain alone is felt. We ask health; and having it, never notice it till it is gone. In the ardent pursuit of enjoyment, we waste our capacity of appreciation. Every sweet we gain is sauced with a bitter. Our eyes forever bent on the future, which can never be ours, we fritter away the present, which alone we possess. Ere we have got ourselves ready to live, we must die. Fooling ourselves even here, we represent death as the portal to joy unspeakable; and forthwith discredit our words by avoiding it in every possible way.

Pitiable spectacle of weakness and folly, is it capable of any explanation which can redeem man from the imputation of unreason? Is Wisdom even here justified of her children by some deeper law of being?

The theologian explains it as the unrest of the soul penned in its house of clay; the physiologist attributes it to the unceasing effort of organic functions to adapt themselves to ever varying external conditions. They are both right, for the theologian, were his words translated into the language of science, refers to the effort to adapt condition to function, which is the peculiar faculty of intelligence, and which alone renders man unable to accept the comfort of merely animal existence, an inability which he need never expect to outlive, for it will increase in exact proportion to his mental development. Action, not rest, as I have elsewhere said, must be his ideal of life.

In even his lowest levels man experiences this dissatisfaction. It may there be confined to a pain he would be free from, or a pleasure he dreams of. Always the future charms him, and as advancing years increase the number of his disappointments and bring with them the pains of decrepitude, he also recurs to the past, when youth was his, and the world was bright and gay. Thus it comes that most nations speak of some earlier period of their history as one characterized by purer public virtues than the present, one when the fires of patriotism burned brighter and social harmony was more conspicuous. In rude stages of society this fancy receives real credit and ranks as a veritable record of the past, forming a Golden Age or Saturnian Era. Turned in the kaleidoscope of the mythus, it assumes yet more gorgeous hues, and becomes a state of pure felicity, an Eden or a Paradise, wherein man dwelt in joy, and from which he wandered or was driven in the old days.

It is almost needless to quote examples to show the wide distribution of this myth. The first pages of the Vendidad describe the reign of Yima in "the garden of delight," where "there was no cold wind nor violent heat, no disease and no death." The northern Buddhist tells of "the land of joy," Sukhavati, in the far west, where ruled Amitabha, "infinite Light."[175-1] The Edda wistfully recalls the pleasant days of good King Gudmund who once held sway in Odainsakr, where death came not.[175-2] Persian story has glad reminiscences of the seven hundred years that Jemschid sat on the throne of Iran, when peace and plenty were in the land.

The garden "eastward in Eden" of the Pentateuch, the land of Tulan or Tlapallan in Aztec myth, the islands of the Hesperides, the rose garden of Feridun, and a score of other legends attest with what strong yearning man seeks in the past the picture of that perfect felicity which the present never yields.

Nor can he be persuaded that the golden age has gone, no more to return. In all conditions of progress, and especially where the load of the present was the most wearying, has he counted on a restoration to that past felicity. The paradise lost is to be regained. How it is to be done the sages are not agreed. But they of old were unanimous that some divinity must lend his aid, that some god-sent guide is needed to rescue man from the slough of wretchedness in which he hopelessly struggles.

Therefore in the new world the red men looked for the ruler who had governed their happy forefathers in the golden age, and who had not died but withdrawn mysteriously from view, to return to them, protect them, and insure them long bliss and ease. The ancient Persians expected as much from the coming of Craoshanc; the Thibetan Buddhists look to the advent of a Buddha 5000 years after Sakyamuni, one whose fortunate names are Maitreya, the Loving one, and Adjita, the Unconquerable;[176-1] and even the practical Roman, as we learn from Virgil, was not a stranger to this dream. Very many nations felt it quite as strongly as the Israelites, who from early time awaited a mighty king, the Messiah, the Anointed, of whom the Targums say: "In his days shall peace be multiplied;" "He shall execute the judgment of truth and justice on the earth;" "He shall rule over all kingdoms."

The early forms of this conception, such as here referred to, looked forward to an earthly kingdom, identified with that of the past when this was vigorous in the national mythology. Material success and the utmost physical comfort were to characterize it. It was usually to be a national apotheosis, and was not generally supposed to include the human race, though traces of this wider view might easily be quoted from Avestan, Roman, and Israelitic sources. Those who were to enjoy it were not the dead, but those who shall be living.

As the myth grew, it coalesced with that of the Epochs of Nature, and assumed grander proportions. The deliverer was to come at the close of this epoch, at the end of the world; he was to embrace the whole human kind in his kingdom; even those who died before his coming, if they had obeyed his mandates, should rise to join the happy throng; instead of a mere earthly king, he should be a supernatural visitant, even God himself; and instead of temporal pleasures only, others of a spiritual character were to be conferred. There are reasons to believe that even in this developed form the myth was familiar to the most enlightened worshippers of ancient Egypt; but it was not till some time after the doctrines of Christianity had been cast into mythical moulds by the oriental fancy, that it was introduced in its completed form to modern thought. Although expressly repudiated by Jesus of Nazareth himself, and applied in maxim and parable as a universal symbol of intelligence to the religious growth of the individual and race, his followers reverted to the coarser and literal meaning, and ever since teach to a greater or less extent the chiliastic or millennial dogma, often mathematically computing, in direct defiance of his words, the exact date that event is to be expected.

If we ask the psychological construction of this myth, and the ever present conditions of man's life which have rendered him always ready to create it and loath to renounce it, we trace the former distinctly to his sense of the purposive nature of the laws of thought, and the latter to the wide difference between desire and fulfilment. His intellectual nature is framed to accord with laws which are ever present but are not authoritative; they admonish but they do not coerce; that is done surely though oft remotely by the consequences of their violation. At first, unaware of the true character of these laws, he fancies that if he were altogether comfortable physically, his every wish would be gratified. Slowly it dawns upon him that no material gratification can supply an intellectual craving; that this is the real want which haunts him; and that its only satisfaction is to think rightly, to learn the truth. Then he sees that the millennial kingdom is "not of this world;" that heaven and earth may pass away, but that such truth as he seeks cannot pass away; and that his first and only care should be as a faithful and wise servant to learn and revere it.

The sentiments which created this mythical cycle, based as they are now seen to be on ultimate psychological laws, are as active to-day as ever. This century has witnessed the rise of a school of powerful thinkers and true philanthropists who maintained that the noblest object is the securing to our fellow-men the greatest material comfort possible; that the religious aspirations will do well to content themselves with this gospel of humanity; and that the approach of the material millennium, the perfectibility of the human race, the complete adaptation of function to condition, the "distant but not uncertain final victory of Good,"[179-1] is susceptible of demonstration. At present, these views are undergoing modification. It is perceived with more or less distinctness that complete physical comfort is not enough to make a man happy; that in proportion as this comfort is attained new wants develope themselves, quite as importunate, which ask what material comfort cannot give, and whose demand is neither for utility nor pleasurable sensation. Such wants are created by the sense of duty and the love of truth.

The main difference between the latest exponents of the utilitarian doctrines and the heralds of distinctively religious thought, is that the former consider that it is most important in the present condition of man for him to look after his material welfare; while the latter teach that if he first subject thought and life to truth and duty, "all these things will be added unto him." Wordsworth has cast this latter opinion, and the myths which are its types, into eloquent verse:

"Paradise and groves Elysian, Fortunate Fields—like those of old Sought in the Atlantic main, why should they be A history only of departed things, Or a mere fiction of what never was? For the discerning intellect of man, When wedded to this goodly universe In love and holy passion, shall find these A simple produce of the common day."

The incredulity and even derision with which the latter doctrine is received by "practical men," should not affright the collected thinker, as it certainly is not so chimerical as they pretend. The writer De Senancourt, not at all of a religious turn, in speculating on the shortest possible road to general happiness, concluded that if we were able to foretell the weather a reasonable time ahead, and if men would make it a rule to speak the truth as near as they can, these two conditions would remove nine-tenths of the misery in the world. The more carefully I meditate on this speculation, the better grounded it seems. The weather we are learning to know much more about than when the solitary Obermann penned his despondent dreams; but who shall predict the time when men will tell the truth?

I now pass to the third great mythical cyclus, which I have called that of the Hierarchy of the Gods. This was created in order to define that unknown power which was supposed to give to the wish frustration or fruition. It includes every statement in reference to the number, nature, history and character of supernatural beings.

The precise form under which the intellect, when the religious conception of unknown power first dawns upon it, imagines this unknown, is uncertain. Some have maintained that the earliest religions are animal worships, others that the spirits of ancestors or chiefs are the primitive gods. Local divinities and personal spirits are found in the rudest culture, while simple fetichism, or the vague shapes presented by dreams, play a large part in the most inchoate systems. The prominence of one or the other of these elements depends upon local and national momenta, which are a proper study for the science of mythology, but need not detain us here. The underlying principle in all these conceptions of divinity is that of the res per accidens, an accidental relation of the thought to the symbol, not a general or necessary one. This is seen in the nature of these primitive gods. They have no decided character as propitious or the reverse other than the objects they typify, but are supposed to send bad or good fortune as they happen to be pleased or displeased with the votary. No classification as good and evil deities is as yet perceptible.

This undeveloped stage of religious thought faded away, as general conceptions of man and his surroundings arose. Starting always from his wish dependent on unknown control, man found certain phenomena usually soothed his fears and favored his wishes, while others interfered with their attainment and excited his alarm. This distinction, directly founded on his sensations of pleasure and pain, led to a general, more or less rigid, classification of the unknown, into two opposing classes of beings, the one kindly disposed, beneficent, good, the other untoward, maleficent, evil.

At first this distinction had in it nothing of a moral character. It is in fact a long time before this is visible, and to-day but two or three religions acknowledge it even theoretically. All, however, which claim historical position set up a dual hierarchy in the divine realms. Ahura-mazda and Anya-mainyus, God and Satan, Jove and Pluto, Pachacamac and Supay, Enigorio and Enigohatgea are examples out of hundreds that might be adduced.

The fundamental contrast of pleasure and pain might be considered enough to explain this duality. But in fact it is even farther reaching. The emotions are dual as well as the sensations, as we have seen in the first chapter. All the operations of the intellect are dichotomic, and in mathematical logic must be expressed by an equation of the second degree. Subject and object must be understood as polar pairs, and in physical science polarization, contrast of properties corresponding to contrast of position, is a universal phenomenon. Analogy, therefore, vindicates the assumption that the unknown, like the known, is the field of the operation of contradictory powers.

A variety of expression is given this philosophic notion in myths. In Egypt, Syria, Greece and India the contrast was that of the sexes, the male and female principles as displayed in the operations of nature. The type of all is that very ancient Phrygian cult in which by the side of Ma, mother of mountains and mistress of herds, stood Papas, father of the race of shepherds and inventor of the rustic pipe.[183-1] Quite characteristic was the classification of the gods worshipped by the miners and metal workers of Phrygian Ida. This was into right and left, and the general name of Dactyli, Fingers, was given them. The right gods broke the spells which the left wove, the right pointed out the ore which the left had buried, the right disclosed the remedies for the sickness which the left had sent. This venerable division is still retained when we speak of a sinister portent, or a right judgment. It is of physiological interest as showing that "dextral pre-eminence" or right-handedness was prevalent in earliest historic times, though it is unknown in any lower animal.

The thoughtful dwellers in Farsistan also developed a religion close to man's wants by dividing the gods into those who aid and those who harm him, subject the one class to Ahura-Mazda, the other to Anya-Mainyus. Early in their history this assumed almost a moral aspect, and there is little to be added to one of the most ancient precepts of their law—"Happiness be to the man who conduces to the happiness of all."[184-1]

When this dual classification sought expression through natural contrasts, there was one which nigh everywhere offered itself as the most appropriate. The savage, the nomad, limited to the utmost in artificial contrivances, met nothing which more signally aided the accomplishment of his wishes than light; nothing which more certainly frustrated them than darkness. From these two sources flow numerous myths, symbols, and rites, as narratives or acts which convey religious thought to the eye or the ear of sense.

As the bringers of light, man adored the sun, the dawn, and fire; associated with warmth and spring, his further meditations saw in it the source of his own and of all life, and led him to connect with its worship that of the reproductive principle. As it comes from above, and seems to dwell in the far-off sky, he located there his good gods, and lifted his hands or his eyes when he prayed. As light is necessary to sight, and as to see is to know, the faculty of knowing was typified as enlightenment, an inward god-given light. The great and beneficent deities are always the gods of light. Their names often show this. Deva, Deus, means the shining one; Michabo, the great white one; the Mongols call Tien, the chief Turanian god, the bright one, the luminous one; the northern Buddhist prays to Amitabha, Infinite Light; and the Christian to the Light of the World.

On the other hand, darkness was connected with feelings of helplessness and terror. It exposed him to attacks of wild beasts and all accidents. It was the precursor of the storm. It was like to death and the grave. The realm of the departed was supposed to be a land of shadows, an underground region, an unseeing Hades or hell.

The task would be easy to show many strange corroborations of these early chosen symbols by the exacter studies of later ages. Light, as the indispensable condition of life, is no dream, but a fact; sight is the highest sentient faculty; and the luminous rays are real intellectual stimulants.[186-1] But such reflections will not escape the contemplative reader.

I hasten to an important consequence of this dual classification of divinities. It led to what I may call the quantification of the gods, that is, to conceiving divinity under notions of number or quantity, a step which has led to profound deterioration of the religious sentiment. I do not mean by this the distinction between polytheism and monotheism. The latter is as untrue and as injurious as the former, nor does it contain a whit the more the real elements of religious progress.

It is indeed singular that this subject has been so misunderstood. Much has been written by Christian theologians to show the superiority of monotheisms; and by their opponents much has been made of Comte's loi des trois etats, which defines religious progress to be first fetichism, secondly polytheism, finally monotheism. Of this Mr. Lewes says: "The theological system arrived at the highest perfection of which it is capable when it substituted the providential action of a single being, for the varied operations of the numerous divinities which had before been imagined."[187-1] Nothing could be more erroneous than the spirit of this statement; nothing is more correct, if the ordinary talk of the superiority of monotheism in religion be admitted.

History and long experience show that monotheistic religions have no special good effect either on the morals or the religious sensibility of races.[187-2] Buddhism,[187-3] Mohammedanism and Judaism are, at least in theory, uncompromising monotheisms; modern Christianity is less so, as many Catholics pray to the Virgin and Saints, and many Protestants to Christ. So long as the mathematical conception of number, whether one or many, is applied to deity by a theological system, it has not yet "arrived at the highest perfection of which it is capable."

For let us inquire what a monotheism is? It is a belief in one god as distinct from the belief in several gods. In other words, it applies to God the mathematical concept of unity, a concept which can only come into cognition by virtue of contrasts and determinations, and which forces therefore the believer either to Pantheism or anthropomorphism to reconcile his belief with his reason. No other resource is left him. With monotheism there must always be the idea of numerical separateness, which is incompatible with universal conceptions.

Let him, however, clear his mind of the current admiration for monotheisms, and impress upon himself that he who would form a conception of supreme intelligence must do so under the rules of pure thought, not numerical relation. The logical, not the mathematical, unity of the divine is the perfection of theological reasoning. Logical unity does not demand a determination by contrasts; it conveys only the idea of identity with self. As the logical attainment of truth is the recognition of identities in apparent diversity, thus leading from the logically many to the logically one, the assumption of the latter is eminently justified. Every act of reasoning is an additional proof of it.[188-1]

Nor does the duality of nature and thought, to which I have alluded, in any wise contradict this. In pure thought we must understand the dichotomic process to be the distinction of a positive by a privative, both logical elements of the same thought, as I have elsewhere shown. The opposites or contraries referred to as giving rise to the dualistic conceptions of divinity are thus readily harmonized with the conception of logical unity. This was recognized by the Hindoo sage who composed the Bhagavad Gita, early in our era. Krishna, the Holy One, addressing the King Ardjuna says: "All beings fall into error as to the nature of creation, O Bharata, by reason of that delusion of natural opposites which springs from liking and disliking, oh thou tormentor of thy foes!"[189-1]

The substitution of the conception of mathematical for logical unity in this connection has left curious traces in both philosophy and religion. It has led to a belief in the triplicate nature of the supreme Being, and to those philosophical triads which have often attracted thinkers, from Pythagoras and Heraclitus down to Hegel and Ghiberti.

Pythagoras, who had thought profoundly on numbers and their relations, is credited with the obscure maxim that every thought is made up of a definite one and an indefinite two (a monas and an aoristos duas). Some of his commentators have added to rather than lessened the darkness of this saying. But applied to concrete number, it seems clear enough. Take any number, ten, for example, and it is ten by virtue of being a one, one ten, and because on either side counting upward or downward, a different number appears, which two are its logical determinants, but, as not expressed, make up an indefinite two.

So the number one, thought as concrete unity, is really a trinity, made up of its definite self and its indefinite next greater and lesser determinants. The obscure consciousness of this has made itself felt in many religions when they have progressed to a certain plane of thought. The ancient Egyptian gods were nearly all triune; Phanes, in the Orphic hymns the first principle of things, was tripartite; the Indian trinities are well known; the Celtic triads applied to divine as well as human existence; the Jews distinguished between Jehovah, his Wisdom and his Word; and in Christian religion and philosophy the doctrine of the trinity, though nowhere taught by Christ, has found a lasting foothold, and often presents itself as an actual tritheism.[190-1]

The triplicate nature of number, thus alluded to by Pythagoras, springs from the third law of thought, and holds true of all concrete notions. Every such notion stands in necessary relation to its privative, and to the logical concept of next greater extension, i. e., that which includes the notion and its privative, as I explained in the first chapter. This was noted by the early Platonists, who describe a certain concrete expression of it as "the intelligential triad;" and it has been repeatedly commented upon by later philosophers, some of whom avowedly derive from it the proof of the trinitarian dogma as formulated by Athanasius. Even modern mathematical investigations have been supposed to point to a Deus triformis, though of course quite another one from that which ancient Rome honored. A late work of much ability makes the statement: "The doctrine of the Trinity, or something analogous to it, forms, as it were, the avenue through which the universe itself leads us up to the conception of the Infinite and Eternal One."[191-1] The explanation of this notion is the same as that of the "Trinity of the Gentiles," always hitherto a puzzling mythological concept.

For reasons previously given, an analysis of the formal law itself does not yield these elements. They belong to a certain class of values assigned it, not to the law itself; hence it is only when deity is conceived under the conditions of numerical oneness that the tripartite constitution of a whole number makes itself felt, and is applied to the divine nature.

The essence of a logical unit is identity, of a mathematical, difference. The qualities of the latter are limitations—so much of a thing; those of the former are coincidences—that kind of a thing.

To be sure it is no easy matter to free ourselves from the habit of confounding identity and individuality. We must cultivate a much greater familiarity with the forms of thought, and the character of universals, than every-day life requires of us, before the distinction grows facile. The individual, not the species, exists; our own personality, our thinking faculty is what we are most certain of. On it rests the reality of everything, the Unknown as well. But the rejection of a mathematical unity does not at all depreciate the force of such an argument. Individuality regarded as mathematical unity rests on the deeper law of logical identity from which the validity of numbers rises; it is not the least diminished, but intensified, in the conception of a Supreme Intelligence, as the font of truth, though the confinements and limitations of the mathematical unit fall away, and all contrasts disappear.

The reverse conception, however, has prevailed in religious systems, polytheistic or monotheistic. Man has projected on the cloudy unknown the magnified picture of his own individuality and shuddered with terror at the self-created plantasm,[TN-9] like the peasant frightened by the spectre of the Brocken, formed by the distorted image of himself. In his happier moments, with his hopes gratified, the same vice of thought, still active, prevented him from conceiving any higher ideal than his better self. "Everywhere the same tendency was observed; the gods, always exaggerations of human power and passions, became more and more personifications of what was most admirable and lovable in human nature, till in Christianity there emerged the avowed ideal man." What could it end in but anthropomorphism, or pantheism, or, rejecting both, a Religion of Humanity, with a background of an imbecile Unknowable?

Is it necessary to point out how none of these conclusions can satisfy the enlightened religious sentiment? How anthropomorphism,which[TN-10] makes God in the image of man, instead of acknowledging that man is made in the image of God, belittles divinity to a creature of passions and caprices? How pantheism, increasing God at the expense of man, wipes out the fundamental difference of true and false, calls bad "good in the making," and virtually extinguishes the sense of duty and the permanence of personality? And how the denial of all possible knowledge of the absolute digs away the only foundation on which sanity can establish a religion, and then palms off material comfort as the proper food for religious longing?

The long story of religious effort is not from fetichism to monotheism, as Comte read it; nor is its only possible goal inside the limits of the ego, as Feuerbach and the other Neo-Hegelians assert; but it is on its theoretical side to develope with greater and greater distinctness the immeasurable reality of pure thought, to dispense more and more with the quantification of the absolute, and to avoid in the representation of that Being the use of the technic of concrete existence.

Little by little we learn that the really true is never true in fact, that the really good is never good in act.[194-1] Carefully cherishing this distinction taught by mathematics and ethics, the religious mind learns to recognize in that only reality darkly seen through the glass of material things, that which should fix and fill its meditations. Passing beyond the domain of physical law, it occupies itself with that which defines the conditions of law. It contemplates an eternal activity, before which its own self-consciousness seems a flickering shadow, yet in that contemplation is not lost but gains an evergrowing personality.

This is the goal of religious striving, the hidden aim of the wars and persecutions, the polemics and martyrdoms, which have so busied and bloodied the world. This satisfies the rational postulates of religion. Does some one say that it does not stimulate its emotional elements, that it does not supply the impulses of action which must ever be the criteria of the true faith? Is it not a religion at all, but a philosophy, a search, or if you prefer, a love for the truth?

Let such doubter ponder well the signification of truth, its relation to life, its identity with the good, and the paramount might of wisdom and a clear understanding, and he will be ready to exclaim with the passionate piety of St. Augustine: "Ubi inveni veritatem, ibi inveni Deum meum, ipsam veritatem, quam, ex quo didici, non sum oblitus."

From this brief review of its character, the Myth will be seen to be one of the transitory expressions of the religious sentiment, which in enlightened lands it has already outgrown and should lay aside. So far as it relates to events, real or alleged, historic or geologic, it deals with that which is indifferent to pure religion; and so far as it assumes to reveal the character, plans and temper of divinity, it is too evidently a reflex of man's personality to be worthy of serious refutation where it conflicts with the better guide he has within him.

FOOTNOTES:

[156-1] In this definition the word apperception is used in the sense assigned it by Professor Lazarus—the perception modified by imagination and memory. "Mythologie ist eine Apperceptionsform der Natur und des Menschen." (Zeitschrift fuer Voelkerpsychologie, Bd. i., s. 44). Most recent mythologists omit the latter branch of the definition; for instance, "A myth is in its origin an explanation by the uncivilized mind of some natural phenomenon." (John Fiske, Myths and Myth Makers, p. 21). This is to omit that which gives the myth its only claim to be a product of the religious sentiment. Schopenhauer, in calling dogmas and myths "the metaphysics of the people," fell into the same error. Religion, as such, is always concrete.

[159-1] Half a century ago the learned Mr. Faber, in his Origin of Pagan Idolatry, expressed his astonishment at "the singular, minute and regular accordance" between the classical myths. That accordance has now been discovered to be world-wide.

[160-1] "Ganz gleiche Mythen koennen sehr fueglich, jede selbststaendig, an verschiedenen Oerter emporkommen." Briefe an Woelcker.

[161-1] The last two are the modern orthodox theories, supported by Bryant, Faber, Trench, De Maistre and Sepp. Medieval Christianity preferred the direct agency of the Devil. Primitive Christianity leaned to the opinion that the Grecian and Roman myth makers had stolen from the sacred writings of the Jews.

[165-1] Sir Wm. Hamilton, Lectures on Metaphysics. Appendix, p. 691.

[165-2] Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie, Bd. ii., s. 107.

[166-1] Th. Noeldeke, Zeitschrift fuer Voelkerpsychologie, Bd. iii., s. 131.

[166-2] See a note of Prof. Spiegel to Yacna, 29, of the Khordah-Avesta.

[167-1] He ygra physis arche kai genesis panton.

Plutarch, De Iside.

According to the Koran and the Jewish Rabbis, the throne of God rested on the primeval waters from which the earth was produced. See a note in Rodwell's translation of the Koran, Sura. xi.

[167-2] I have discussed some of these myths in the seventh chapter of the Myths of the New World.

[168-1] How it troubled the early Christians who dared not adopt the refuge of the Epochs of Nature, may be seen in the Confessions of St. Augustine, Lib. XI, cap. 10, et seq. He quotes the reply of one pushed by the inquiry, what God was doing before creation: "He was making a hell for inquisitive busy-bodies." Alta spectantibus gehennas parabat.

[170-1] Many interesting references to the Oriental flood-myth may be found in Cory's Ancient Fragments. See also, Dr. Fr. Windischmann, Die Ursagen der Arischen Voelker, pp. 4-10. It is probable that in very ancient Semitic tradition Adam was represented as the survivor of a flood anterior to that of Noah. Maimonides relates that the Sabians believed the world to be eternal, and called Adam "the Prophet of the Moon," which symbolized, as we know from other sources, the deity of water. Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon, More Nevochim, cap. iv. In early Christian symbolism Christ was called "the true Noah"; the dove accompanied him also, and as through Noah came "salvation by wood and water," so through Christ came "salvation by spirit and water." (See St. Cyril of Jerusalem's Catechetical Lectures, Lect. xvii., cap. 10). The fish (ichthus) was the symbol of Christ as well as of Oannes. As the second coming of Christ was to be the destruction of the world, how plainly appear the germs of the myth of the Epochs of Nature in the Judaeo-Christian mind!

[171-1] Besides the expressions in the Book of Ecclesiastes and the later prophets, the doctrine is distinctly announced in one of the most sublime of the Psalms (xc), one attributed to "Moses the Man of God."

[172-1] Malachi, ch. iv., v. 2.

[175-1] C. F. Koppen, Die Lamaische Hierarchie, s. 28.

[175-2] Odainsakr, o privative, dain death, akr land, "the land of immortal life." Saxo Grammaticus speaks of it also. Another such land faintly referred to in the Edda is Breidablick, governed by Baldur, the Light-god.

[176-1] C. F. Koppen, Die Lamaische Hierarchie und Kirche, p. 17.

[179-1] John Stuart Mill, Theism, p. 256.

[183-1] Creuzer, Symbolik und Mythologie, Bd. II., s. 47

[184-1] This is the first line of Yacna, 42, of the Khordah-Avesta. The Parsees believe that it is the salutation which meets the soul of the good on entering the next world.

[186-1] "Sight is the light sense. Through it we become acquainted with universal relations, this being reason. Without the eye there would be no reason." Lorenz Oken, Elements of Physio-Philosophy, p. 475.

[187-1] History of Philosophy, Vol. II. p. 638 (4th ed.)

[187-2] "The intolerance of almost all religions which have maintained the unity of God, is as remarkable as the contrary principle in polytheism." Hume, Nat. Hist. of Religion, Sec. ix.

[187-3] "The Lamas emphatically maintain monotheism to be the real character of Buddhism." Emil Schlagintweit, Buddhism in Tibet, p. 108.

[188-1] No one has seen the error here pointed out, and its injurious results on thought, more clearly than Comte himself. He is emphatic in condemning "le tendance involontaire a constituer l'unite speculative par l'ascendant universel des plus grossieres contemplations numerique, geometrique ou mecaniques." Systeme de Politique Positive; Tome I., p. 51. But he was too biassed to apply this warning to Christian thought. The conception of the Universe in the logic of Professor De Morgan and Boole is an example of speculative unity.

[189-1] Bhagavad Gita, ch. iv.

[190-1] See the introduction by Mr. J. W. Etheridge to The Targums of Onkelos and Jonathan Ben Uzziel (London, 1862). St. Augustine believed the trinity is referred to in the opening verses of Genesis. Confessiones, Lib. xiii. cap. 5. The early Christian writer, Theophilus of Antioch (circa 225), in his Apologia, recognizes the Jewish trinity only. It was a century later that the dogma was defined in its Athanasian form. See further, Isaac Preston Cory, Ancient Fragments, with an Inquiry into the Trinity of the Gentiles (London, 1832).

[191-1] The Unseen Universe, p. 194.

[194-1] "A good will is the only altogether good thing in the world."—Kant. "What man conceives in himself is always superior to that reality which it precedes and prepares."—Comte.



THE CULT, ITS SYMBOLS AND RITES.

SUMMARY.

The Symbol represents the unknown; the Rite is the ceremony of worship.

A symbol stands for the supernatural, an emblem for something known. The elucidation of symbolism is in the laws of the association of ideas. Associations of similarity give related symbols, of contiguity coincident symbols. Symbols tend either toward personification (iconolatry), or toward secularization. The symbol has no fixed interpretation. Its indefiniteness shown by the serpent symbol, and the cross. The physiological relations of certain symbols. Their classification. The Lotus. The Pillar. Symbols discarded by the higher religious thought. Esthetic and scientific symbolism (the "Doctrine of Correspondences").

Rites are either propitiatory or memorial. The former spring either from the idea of sacrifice or of specific performance. A sacrifice is a gift, but its measure is what it costs the giver. Specific performance means that a religious act should have no ulterior aim. Vicarious sacrifice and the idea of sin.

Memorial rites are intended to recall the myth, or else to keep up the organization. The former are dramatic or imitative, the latter institutionary. Tendency of memorial rites to become propitiatory. Examples.



CHAPTER VI.

THE CULT, ITS SYMBOLS AND RITES.

As the side which a religious system presents to the intellect is shown in the Myth, so the side that it presents to sense is exhibited in the Cult. This includes the representation and forms of worship of the unknown power which presides over the fruition of the Prayer or religious wish. The representation is effected by the Symbol, the worship by the Rite. The development of these two, and their relation to religious thought, will be the subject of the present chapter.

The word Symbolism has a technical sense in theological writings, to wit, the discussion of creeds, quite different from that in which it is used in mythological science. Here it means the discussion of the natural objects which have been used to represent to sense supposed supernatural beings. As some conception of such beings must first be formed, the symbol is necessarily founded upon the myth, and must be explained by it.