Folklore; Manners and customs; Mythology; Religion
or a stream. How, to use Mr. Müller's own manner, did these people,
when they saw a stream, have mentally, at the same time, 'a feeling of
_infinite_ powers'? If this is not the expression of a theory of
'innate religion' (a theory which Mr. Müller disclaims), it is capable
of being mistaken for that doctrine by even a careful reader. The
feeling of 'powers infinite, invisible, divine,' _must_ be in the
heart, or the mere sight of a river could not call it forth. How did
the feeling get into the heart? That is the question.
The ordinary anthropologist distinguishes a multitude of causes, a
variety of processes, which shade into each other and gradually
produce the belief in powers invisible, infinite, and divine. What
tribe is unacquainted with dreams, visions, magic, the apparitions of
the dead? Add to these the slow action of thought, the conjectural
inferences, the guesses of crude metaphysics, the theories of isolated
men of religious and speculative genius. By all these and other forces
manifold, that emotion of awe in presence of the hills, the stars, the
sea, is developed. Mr. Max Müller cuts the matter shorter. The early
inhabitants of the earth saw a river, and the 'mere sight' of the
torrent called forth the feelings which (to us) seem to demand ages of
the operation of causes disregarded by Mr. Müller in his account of
the origin of Indian religion.
The mainspring of Mr. Müller's doctrine is his theory about
'apprehending the infinite.' Early religion, or at least that of
India, was, in his view, the extension of an idea of Vastness, a
disinterested emotion of awe.[202] Elsewhere, we think, early religion
has been a development of ideas of Force, an interested search, not
for something wide and far and hard to conceive, but for something
practically _strong_ for good and evil. Mr. Müller (taking no count in
this place of fetiches, ghosts, dreams and magic) explains that the
sense of 'wonderment' was wakened by objects only semi-tangible,
trees, which are _taller_ than we are, 'whose roots are beyond our
reach, and which have a kind of life in them.' 'We are dealing with a
quartenary, it may be a tertiary troglodyte,' says Mr. Müller. If a
tertiary troglodyte was like a modern Andaman Islander, a Kaneka, a
Dieyrie, would he stand and meditate in awe on the fact that a tree
was taller than he, or had 'a kind of life,' 'an unknown and
unknowable, yet undeniable something'?[203] Why, this is the sentiment
of modern Germany, and perhaps of the Indian sages of a cultivated
period! A troglodyte would look for a 'possum in the tree, he would
tap the trunk for honey, he would poke about in the bark after grubs,
or he would worship anything odd in the branches. Is Mr. Müller not
unconsciously transporting a kind of modern malady of thought into
the midst of people who wanted to find a dinner, and who might worship
a tree if it had a grotesque shape, that, for them, had a magical
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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