Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, January 1885Various
General
Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, January 1885
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Literature -- Periodicals
Setting out with the statement that “unlike the ordinary consciousness,
the religious consciousness is concerned with that which lies beyond
the sphere of sense,” I went on to show that the rise of this
consciousness begins among primitive men with the belief in a double
belonging to each individual, which, capable of wandering away from him
during life, becomes his ghost or spirit after death; and that from
this idea of a being eventually distinguished as supernatural, there
develop, in course of time, the ideas of supernatural beings of all
orders up to the highest. Mr. Harrison has alleged that the primitive
religion is not belief in, and propitiation of, the ghost, but is
worship of “physical objects treated frankly as physical objects” (p.
498). That he has disproved the one view and proved the other, no one
will, I think, assert. Contrariwise, he has given occasion for me to
cite weighty authorities against him.
Next it was contended that in the assemblage of supernatural beings
thus originating in each tribe, some, derived from chiefs, were
superior to others; and that, as the compounding and recompounding of
tribes gave origin to societies having social grades and rulers of
different orders, there resulted that conception of a hierarchy of
ghosts or gods which polytheism shows us. Further it was argued that
while, with the growth of civilization and knowledge, the minor
supernatural agents became merged in the major supernatural agent, this
single great supernatural agent, gradually losing the anthropomorphic
attributes at first ascribed, has come in our days to retain but
few of them; and, eventually losing these, will then merge into a
consciousness of an Omnipresent Power to which no attributes can be
ascribed. This proposition has not been contested.
In pursuance of the belief that the religious consciousness naturally
arising, and thus gradually transformed, will not disappear wholly, but
that “however much changed it must continue to exist,” it was argued
that the sentiments which had grown up around the conception of a
personal God, though modified when that conception was modified into
the conception of a Power which cannot be known or conceived, would not
be destroyed. It was held that there would survive, and might even
increase, the sentiments of wonder and awe in presence of a Universe of
which the origin and nature, meaning and destiny, can neither be known
nor imagined; or that, to quote a statement afterwards employed, there
must survive those emotions “which are appropriate to the consciousness
of a Mystery that cannot be fathomed and a Power that is omnipresent.”
This proposition has not been disproved; nor, indeed, has any attempt
been made to disprove it.
Instead of assaults on these propositions to which alone I am
committed, there have been assaults on various propositions
gratuitously attached to them; and then the incongruities evolved have
been represented as incongruities for which I am responsible.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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