THE DUKE OF ARGYLE

(1823-1900)

EORGE DOUGLAS CAMPBELL, eighth Duke of Argyle, whose "Reign of Law" and kindred essays published during the

last half of the nineteenth century gave him international celebrity, was born in Dumbartonshire, Scotland, April 30th, 1823. Both in politics and literature he represented the best tradition of English aristocratic liberalism. At various times during his public career he was Lord Privy Seal, Postmaster-General, and Secretary for India. Among his works are "The Reign of Law"; "Primeval War"; "The Unity of Nature"; "Geology and the Deluge," and "The Unseen Foundations of Society." He died April 23d 1900.

IT

THE UNITY OF NATURE

T IS a part of the unity of nature that the clear perception of any one truth leads almost always to the perception of some other, which follows from or is connected with the first. The same analysis which establishes a necessary connection between the self-consciousness of man and the one fundamental element of all religious emotion and belief establishes an equally natural connection between another part of the same self-consciousness and certain tendencies in the development of religion which we know to have been widely prevalent. For although in the operations of our own mind and spirit, with their strong and often violent emotions, we are familiar with a powerful agency which is in itself invisible, yet it is equally true that we are familiar with that agency as always working in and through a body. It is natural, therefore, when we think of living agencies in nature. other than our own, to think of them as having some form, or at least as having some abode. Seeing, however, and knowing the work of those agencies to be work exhibiting power and resources so much greater than our own, there is obviously unlimited scope for the imagination in conceiving what that form and where that

abode may be. Given, therefore, these two inevitable tendencies of the human mind-the tendency to believe in the existence of personalities other than our own, and the tendency to think of them as living in some shape and in some place—we have a natural and sufficient explanation, not only of the existence of religion, but of the thousand forms in which it has found expression in the world. For as man since he became man, in respect to the existing powers and apparatus of his mind, has never been without the consciousness of self, nor without some desire of interpreting the things around him in terms of his own thoughts, so neither has he been without the power of imagination. By virtue of it he recombines into countless new forms not only the images of sense, but his own instinctive interpretations of them. Obviously we have in this faculty the prolific source of an infinite variety of conceptions, which may be pure and simple or foul and unnatural, according to the elements supplied out of the moral and intellectual character of the minds which are imagining. Obviously, too, we have in this process an unlimited field for the development of good or of evil germs. The work which in the last chapter I have shown to be the inevitable work of reason when it starts from any datum which is false, must be, in religious conceptions above all others, a work of rapid and continuous evolution. The steps of natural consequence, when they are downward here, must be downward along the steepest gradients. It must be so because the conceptions which men have formed respecting the supreme agencies in nature are of necessity conceptions which give energy to all the springs of action. They touch the deepest roots of motive. In thought they open the most copious fountains of suggestion. In conduct they affect the supreme influence of authority, and the next most powerful of all influences, the influence of example. Whatever may have been false or wrong, therefore, from the first, in any religious conception, must inevitably tend to become worse and worse with time, and with the temptation under which men have lain to follow up the steps of evil consequence to their most extreme conclusions.

Armed with the certainties which thus arise out of the very nature of the conceptions we are dealing with when we inquire into the origin of religion, we can now approach that question by consulting the only other sources of authentic information, which are, first, the facts which religion presents among the

existing generations of men, and, secondly, such facts as can be. safely gathered from the records of the past.

On one main point which has been questioned respecting existing facts, the progress of inquiry seems to have established beyond any reasonable doubt that no race of men now exists so savage and degraded as to be, or to have been when discovered, wholly destitute of any conceptions of a religious nature. It is now well understood that all the cases in which the existence of such savages has been reported are cases which break down upon more intimate knowledge and more scientific inquiry.

Such is the conclusion arrived at by a careful modern inquirer, Professor Tiele, who says: "The statement that there are nations or tribes which possess no religion, rests either on inaccurate observations or on a confusion of ideas. No tribe or nation has yet been met with destitute of belief in any higher beings, and travelers who asserted their existence have been afterward refuted by facts. It is legitimate, therefore, to call religion, in its most general sense, a universal phenomenon of humanity."

Although this conclusion on a matter of fact is satisfactory, it must be remembered that, even if it had been true that some savages do exist with no conception whatever of living beings higher than themselves, it would be no proof whatever that such was the primeval condition of man. The arguments adduced in a former chapter, that the most degraded savagery of the present day is or may be the result of evolution working upon highly unfavorable conditions, are arguments which deprive such facts, even if they existed, of all value in support of the assumption that the lowest savagery was the condition of the first progenitors of our race. Degradation being a process which has certainly operated, and is now operating, upon some races, and to some extent, it must always remain a question how far this. process may go in paralyzing the activity of our higher powers or in setting them, as it were, to sleep. It is well, however, that we have no such problem to discuss. Whether any savages exist with absolutely no religious conceptions is, after all, a question of subordinate importance; because it is certain that, if they exist at all, they are a very extreme case and a very rare exception. It is notorious that, in the case of most savages and of all barbarians, not only have they some religion, but their religion is one of the very worst elements in their savagery or their barbarism.

Looking now to the facts presented by the existing religions of the world, there is one of these facts which at once arrests attention, and that is the tendency of all religions, whether savage or civilized, to connect the personal agencies who are feared or worshiped with some material object. The nature of that connection may not be always-it may not be even in any case -perfectly clear and definite. The rigorous analysis of our own thoughts upon such subjects is difficult, even to the most enlightened men. To rude and savage men it is impossible. There is no mystery, therefore, in the fact that the connection which exists between various material objects and the beings who are worshiped in them or through them is a connection which remains generally vague in the mind of the worshiper himself. Sometimes the material object is an embodiment; sometimes it is a symbol; often it may be only an abode. Nor is it wonderful that there should be a like variety in the particular objects which have come to be so regarded. Sometimes they are such material objects as the heavenly bodies. Sometimes they are natural productions of our own planet, such as particular trees, or particular animals, or particular things in themselves inanimate, such as springs, or streams, or mountains. Sometimes they are. manufactured articles, stones, or blocks of wood cut into some shape which has a meaning either obvious or traditional.

The universality of this tendency to connect some material objects with religious worship, and the immense variety of modes in which this tendency has been manifested, is a fact which receives a full and adequate explanation in our natural disposition to conceive of all personal agencies as living in some form and in some place, or as having some other special connection with particular things in nature. Nor is it difficult to understand how the embodiments, or the symbols, or the abodes, which may be imagined and devised by men, will vary according as their mental condition has been developed in a good or in a wrong direction. And as these imaginings and devices are never, as we see them now among savages, the work of any one generation of men, but are the accumulated inheritance of many generations, all existing systems of worship among them must be regarded as presumably very wide departures from the conceptions which were primeval. And this presumption gains additional force when we observe the distinction which exists between the fundamental conceptions of religious belief and the forms of worship

which have come to be the expression and embodiment of these. In the religion of the highest and best races, in Christianity itself, we know the wide difference which obtains between the theology of the church and the popular superstitions which have been developed under it. These superstitions may be, and often are, of the grossest kind. They may be, indeed, and in many cases are known to be, vestiges of pagan worship which have survived all religious revolutions and reforms; but in other cases they are the natural and legitimate development of some erroneous belief accepted as part of the Christian creed. Here, as elsewhere, reason working on false data has been, as under such conditions it must always be, the great agent in degradation and decay.

From essays on "Nature and Religion."