Myth and Science Part 6

When I speak or think of any object as white, I and others perfectly understand what is meant, and a representation of this quality is instantly formed in our minds, in the generic type which was gradually const.i.tuted by primitive man by the combination of numerous special sensations, obvious to the sight, and subsequently expressed in speech.

In order that the word which corresponds to the quality may have a given sense, it is necessary to perceive the form of the concrete sensation which gave rise to it; for although the representation is indefinite or generic, that is, not obvious to the external senses, yet it is not physiologically distinct from the sensation of the quality described; the perception of that quality is present by the aid of memory to the inner consciousness.

It is therefore evident that the physiological elements of consciousness are actually contained in so-called abstract ideas, although it is sometimes a.s.serted that they are purely spiritual and intellectual acts, remote from every physiological process of fact and sense. An actual physiological fact (colour in this instance) corresponds to the idea in the nervous centres, and reproduces the sensation due to the perception of special objects, whose physical quality of whiteness we have perceived, and this sensation makes part of the abstract, or rather indefinite conception.

In fact, all which is not actually present to the mind--and the present is an infinitesimal fraction of knowledge--is reproduced by the memory, and this is effected by the molecular movements of the human brain, and by what may be called the ethereal modifications which took place when the sensations, perceptions, and acts first occurred. If the cells vibrate, and the organs of the brain are affected by the recollection of past ideas and acts, just as when they actually occurred (and this appears from Schiff's experiences as to the increase of the brain in heat and volume during dreams), this vibration will be still more marked when any quality which affects our senses is reproduced in the mind.

The particular _form_ of the quality as it appears in a definite object is certainly wanting in the abstract conception; it remains in the first stage of pure sensation, like a spontaneous act of observation, and it is transformed into apprehension by the mental faculty. But the inward consciousness of the quality is actual, psychical, and physical. The abstract conception is a psychical symbol composed of idea and consciousness, or rather of act and consciousness; both are fused into a logical conception of indefinite form, yet consisting of real elements, that is, of cerebral motions and of sensations.

Estimated according to its genuine value, therefore, an abstract conception may be divided into three cla.s.ses--physical, moral, and intellectual. Whiteness and colours in general, levity and weight, hardness, sound, and the like qualities, are all abstract types which belong to the physical cla.s.s. Goodness, virtue, love, hatred, and anger must be a.s.signed to the moral cla.s.s; and equality, ident.i.ty, number, and quant.i.ty, etc., to the intellectual cla.s.s. Such abstract conceptions, without which human speech would be impossible, did not in the case of primitive man take the explicit and reflex form in which they are presented by mature science, and it is expedient to inquire what character they really a.s.sumed in the spontaneous exercise of thought and speech.

There is certainly a difference between the mythical and specific types and the intrinsic value of these abstract conceptions. The former served for the causative interpretation of the living system of the world, and had a superst.i.tious influence on the moral and social progress of mankind; the latter were merely the instrument of thought and speech, and were in spontaneous and daily use. But in spite of this difference, there was no radical and substantial diversity in the genesis of such conceptions, and the fundamental elements of perception were common to both. While the form varied, the primitive law and genesis remained the same.

We have shown that the perception of the phenomenon, as it affects the inner and external consciousness, necessarily involves the form of the subject, and the causative power which animates that form, and this becomes the intellectual source of special and specific myths. These myths, whether they are derived from physical or moral phenomena, are subsequently so completely impersonated as to be resolved into a perfectly human form. In the case of the abstract conceptions necessary in speech, such anthropomorphism does not generally occur; yet we see that sensation and a physiological genesis are inseparable from an abstract conception. Without such sensation of the phenomenon these conceptions would be unintelligible to the percipient himself and to others. In direct sensation, the phenomenon is external, and when it is reproduced in the mind the same cerebral motions to which that sensation was due are repeated.

It is an absolute law, not only of the human mind but of animal intelligence, that the phenomenon should generate the implicit idea of a thing and cause, and the necessity of this psychical law is also apparent in the abstract conception of some given quality. If the effect is not identical, it is at any rate a.n.a.logous. Primitive man did not take whiteness, for example, considered in itself, to be an active subject, like the specific natural myths which we have mentioned, but he regarded it as something which had a real existence, and he might under certain circ.u.mstances invest it with deliberate power.

If we have fully grasped this deep faculty of the mind, and the spontaneous animation of all phenomena, both external and internal, it will not be difficult to understand the reappearance of the same law in abstract conceptions. The sensation of the quality, and consequently of the phenomenon, is reproduced, and the phenomenon generates the implicit idea of a subject, and therefore of a possible cause in given circ.u.mstances. If such a law did not produce upon man the mythical personification of his primitive abstract conceptions, at any rate it involved a belief in the objective reality of these conceptions, which were implicitly held to possess an independent existence.

Among prehistoric and savage races, who were ignorant of the laws and nature of cosmic forces, the greater or less weight of a thing did not involve any examination of the ma.s.s of a phenomenon, its distance, and the general laws of gravity; this differential weight was itself believed to be a thing which acted, and sometimes deliberately, acted in different ways on the different objects which they were comparing at the moment. In other words, gravity was regarded as something which existed independently of the bodies in which its properties were manifested.

This estimate of gravity, as an abstract quality or property, might be repeated of all other physical properties, as well as of those abstract conceptions which are moral and intellectual. Goodness came to be considered as a type, varying indeed in different peoples, according to their race, and their local, moral, and civil conditions, but as a type which corresponded to the mutual relations of men, and to their superst.i.tions and religious beliefs as to the nature of things.

In this case also the abstract conception of the good, the fitting, the useful, which constantly recur in popular speech are regarded, not as mythical powers personified in a human form, but as having a real existence in nature, as something extrinsic to the person or thing in which they are manifested, and as acting upon them as a living and causative power. The same may be said of all other abstract conceptions.

Hence, in addition to the formation of cosmic, moral, and intellectual myths, fashioned after the pattern of humanity, logical conceptions arose in the mind, necessary for the exercise of human speech and for a man's converse with himself, and these were regarded as having a real existence, manifested in things and persons and in the system of nature.

These ent.i.ties have their origin in the same faculty as the others; in every conception presented to the mind and reproducing the primitive sensation or emotion, the external or internal phenomenon implicitly generates the subject, and with this the cause. These abstract conceptions did not and do not result in the anthropomorphism of phenomena or ideas, but are transformed into ent.i.ties which have a real existence.

We must also observe the mobility and interchangeableness of these fetishes, myths, and imaginary ent.i.ties in the primitive times of the human race, and even in later ages; at one time the fetish acts as a myth, at another the myth has a logical existence. Of this there are many proofs in the traditions of ancient peoples, in the intellectual life of modern savages, and in that of the civilized nations to which we ourselves belong. The historic development does not always follow the regular course we have just described, although these are, in a strictly logical sense, the necessary stages of intellectual evolution.

Historically they are often jostled and confounded together by the lively susceptibility and alacrity of the imagination of primitive man, and it is precisely this characteristic which makes these marvellous ages so fertile in fanciful creations, and also in scientific intuitions.

Any one who is sufficiently acquainted with the ancient literature of civilized peoples, and with the legends of those which are rude and savage; any one who has reflected on the spontaneous value of words and conceptions in modern speech, must often have observed how myth a.s.sumed the form of a logical conception as time went on; and conversely how the logical ent.i.ty a.s.sumed the form of a myth, and how interchangeable they are. It is well known that the myths have been so far adapted to the necessities of speech as to be trans.m.u.ted into verbs; _libare_ from _liber_, which perhaps came in its turn from _liba_, a propitiatory cake, while _Libra_ was the genius who in mythological ages presided over fruitfulness and plenty. So again _juvare_, from the root _jov_, after it had already been used for the anthropomorphic _Jove_. We find in Plautus the verb _summanare_, from the G.o.d _Summa.n.u.s_, the nocturnal sky. Not only verbs but adjectives were derived in common speech from the mythical names of G.o.ds; from _Genius_, a multiform and universal power in ancient Latin mythology, we have _genialis_ and hence the expressions _genialis lectus_, _genialis h.o.m.o_, _genialis hiems_, and poets and philosophers apply the same epithet even to the elements and the stars. On the other hand, Virtue, Faith, Piety, and other like moral conceptions, first regarded as real, yet impersonal ent.i.ties, were transformed into a perfect myth, and into human forms worthy of divine worship.

Even in our own time, and not only among the uneducated people but among men of high culture--when they do not pause to consider the real value of words in the familiarity of daily conversation--any one who seeks for the direct meaning of the terms he uses will admit the truth of what I say. We constantly ascribe a real existence to abstract conceptions and qualities, treating them as subjects which have a substantial being, and which act for the most part with deliberate purpose, although they are not transformed as in the case of myths into human shapes.

In abstract, intellectual conceptions, such as those of equality, distance, number, and the like, the same faculty and the same elements are at work as in those which express physical and moral qualities.

These conceptions, which as civilization advances ultimately become mere intellectual symbols necessary for logical speech, are at first formed by the actual comparison of things, and therefore by the aid of the senses. Even if we were to a.s.sert with some schools of thought that they were formed _a priori_ in the mind, sensation would still be necessary as the occasion of displaying them. When such conceptions are expressed in words there is a physiological recurrence to the mind of what may be termed the shadow of previous sensations or perceptions, which are united in an intellectual type to give rise to such conceptions. And in the appearance of this phenomenal basis, thought unconsciously fulfils the fundamental law of a.s.suming, or I might say of actually _feeling_, the reality of the subject.

It must be remembered that in speaking of these ent.i.ties created by the intellect, I refer to the primitive ages of human thought, or to the notions of ignorant people, and also to the spontaneous language of educated men, who in ordinary conversation do not pause to consider the simple and logical value of their expressions. We are only giving the natural history of the intelligence, which necessarily excludes the a.n.a.lytic and refining processes of rational science. An educated man will, for example, say or write that ident.i.ty is a most important principle of logic as well as that of contradiction, although he is perfectly aware that such expressions only imply an abstract form of cognition; he follows the natural and primitive process of the intellect, and for the moment expresses these conceptions as if they were real ent.i.ties in the organism of science and of the world. Any one may find a proof of this fact in himself, if he will consider the ideas immediately at work in his mind at the moment of expressing similar conceptions. And if this is true of those who pursue a rational course of thought, it is true in a still more imaginative and mythical sense at the dawn of intellectual life, both among modern savages and in the case of the ignorant common people.

Let us briefly sum up the truth we have sought to establish. Special fetishes first had their origin by the innate exercise and historical development of the human intelligence, by the necessary conditions of the perception, and of subsequent apprehension; these were only the animation of each external or internal phenomenon, as it occurred, and this was the primitive origin of myth, both in man and animals. In the case of animals the fetish or special myth is transitory, appearing and disappearing in accordance with his actual perceptions; while in man there is a persistent image of the fetish in his mind, to which he timidly ascribes the same power as to the thing itself. The specific types of these fetishes naturally arise from the mental combination of images, emotions, and ideas into a whole, and these impersonations generate the various forms of anthropomorphic polytheism. As the synthetic mental process goes on, these varied forms of polytheism are gradually united in one general but still anthropomorphic form, which is commonly called monotheism.

In addition to these spontaneous and anthropomorphic myths, which serve for the fanciful explanation of the system of the world, and the moral ideas of social and individual life, other myths arise which are not anthropomorphic, but which ascribe a substantial existence to abstract conceptions of physical, moral, or intellectual matters; conceptions necessary for the formulation of human speech. For although primitive languages, of which we have some examples remaining in the language of savage peoples, are almost inconceivably concrete, yet speech is impossible without expressions of form, or abstract conceptions which are moulded and adapted to that intuition of the relations of things which is always taking place in the mind.[27] The mythical human form does not indeed appear in these conceptions, but a substantial ent.i.ty is involved in them which sometimes, as we have seen, may even a.s.sume the aspect of a complete myth.

A careful a.n.a.lysis of the process of our intelligence has shown that this habitual personification of the phenomenon or abstract conception is due to the innate faculty of perception, since the appearance of any phenomenon necessarily produces the idea of a subject actuated by deliberate purpose; this law is equally constant in the case of animals, in whom, however, it does not issue in a rational conception. The objection of ourselves into nature, the personification of its phenomena and myths in general, are common to all, while they take a more fanciful form in the case of primitive man; they are the constant and necessary result of the perception of external and internal phenomena. This personification includes moral and intellectual as well as physical phenomena, and it always proceeds in the same way, from special phenomena to specific types, and hence to abstract perceptions.

In this way we have established the important fact that the primitive personification of every external or internal phenomenon, the origin of all myths, religions, and superst.i.tions, is accomplished by the same necessary psychical and physical law as that which produces sensation.

That is, men, as well as animals, begin by thinking and feeling in a mythical way, owing to the intrinsic const.i.tution of their intellectual life; and while animals never emerge from these psychical conditions, men are gradually emanc.i.p.ated from them, as they become able to think more rationally, thus finding redemption, truth, and liberty by means of science.

We now propose to unite in a single conception this necessity of our intellect, at once the product and the cause of perception, and of the spontaneous vivification of phenomena; since the law may be expressed in a compendious form.

Both in physical, moral, and intellectual myths, and in the substantial ent.i.ty infused into abstract conceptions, the external or internal phenomenon immediately generates the idea of a subject, since it is a fundamental law of our mind to _entify (entificare)_ every object of our perception, emotion, or consciousness. If any one should object to this neologism, in spite of its adequate expression of the original function of the intelligence, we reply that the use and necessity of the verb _identify_ have been accepted in the neo-Latin tongues, and therefore _entify_, which has the same root and form, can hardly be rejected, since it, like the former, signifies an actual process of thought. We therefore adopt the word without scruple, since new words have often been coined before when they were required to express new conceptions and theories.

The primitive and constant act of all animals, including man, when external or internal sensation has opened to them the immense field of nature, is that of _entifying_ the object of sensation, or, in a word, all phenomena. Such _entification_ is the result of spontaneous necessity, by the law of the intrinsic faculty of perception; it is not the result of reflection, but it is immediate, innate, and inevitable.

It is an eternal law of the evolution of the intelligence, like all those which rule the order of the world.

We do not only proclaim in this fact a law of psychological importance, but also the origin of myths, and in a certain sense of science, since myth is developed by the same methods as science. These two streams flow from one and the same source, since the _entification_ of phenomena is proper both to myth and science; the former _entifies_ sensations, and the latter ideas, since science by reversion to law and rational conception finally attains to the primitive ent.i.ty. And finally, if an imaginative idea of a cause is active in myth from the first, the conception of a cause is equally necessary to science. It is her business to explain the reason of things, and in what they rationally consist:

"Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas."

CHAPTER VII.

THE HISTORICAL EVOLUTION OF MYTH AND SCIENCE.

In the foregoing pages we have reached the primordial fact of our psychical and physical nature, in which, as it appears to us, both myth and science have their origin. After first considering the animal kingdom as a whole, we have seen that the interaction between external phenomena and the consciousness of an organism results in the spontaneous vivification of the phenomenon in question, so that the origin of the mythical representation of nature is found in the innate faculty of animal perception.

Nor could it be otherwise. The internal activity and intrinsic sense of conscious and deliberate life which inspires animals and men, while the latter are still ignorant of the rational order of things, is necessarily reflected both in the external objects of perception and in the internal emotions, as if they were operating causes independent of the will of the percipient. It is impossible for an animal, which is unable by voluntary observation to make, any a.n.a.lytic distinction between the subject and the object, and their respective effects, to consider such phenomena as mechanical ent.i.ties, subject to necessary and eternal laws. The animal therefore accepts the idea suggested by his spontaneous and subjective nature, that these phenomena are alive.

Gra.s.s, fruits, plants, water, the movement of material bodies, ordinary and extraordinary meteors, all are implicitly apprehended by him as subjects endowed with will and purpose after the manner of mankind. Nor can the living subjectivity of the phenomenon ever be gauged by the animal in whom the deliberate power of reflection is wanting. His life is consequently pa.s.sed in a world of living subjects, not of phenomena and laws which mechanically act together; it is, so to speak, a permanent _metaphor_.

Man himself, so far as his animal nature is concerned, acts in the same way, and although he subsequently attains to the exercise of reasoning powers in virtue of the psychical reduplication of himself, the primitive faculty persists, and hence comes the mythical creation of a peculiar world of conceptions which give rise to all superst.i.tions, mythologies, and religions. This is also the process of science itself, as far as the cla.s.sifying method and intrinsic logical form are concerned. The historical source of the two great streams of the intellect, the mythical and the scientific, is found in the primitive act of _entifying_ the phenomenon presented to the senses.

We must briefly describe the evolution of these two mythical and scientific faculties of the mind; we must investigate the mode and cause of their divergence from a common source, through what transformations they pa.s.s, in order to see in what way the one is gradually dried up, while the other increases in volume and force. The reader must forgive us if we use some repet.i.tion in developing a subject on which we have already touched, since without such repet.i.tion the present historical explanation would be obscure.

The first stage of knowledge consists in the observation of the things which surround us, and this first stage, which is necessary also in science, is the common property of animals. Their observation of themselves and of external things is psychologically and physiologically the same as that of man, and in both cases there is a subjective animation of the phenomena themselves. The primitive source of science in its observation of phenomena was the same as that of myth and of the special fetish; without such observation it would have had no existence.

In immediate succession to this primitive fact, which is common to the whole animal kingdom, there arose--if we consider the general process without the limitations of circ.u.mstances, places, time, and a thousand accidents--two kinds of faculties which were identical in form, although they had different effects, and produced opposite results. For in the case of mythical entification the tendency to impersonation was always increasing and becoming more distinctly zoomorphic and anthropomorphic, and in this form it was crystallized or mummified, while science on the other hand was always enlarging its sphere and dissipating the first mythical form of its conception, until nothing was left but a purely rational idea.

When this evolution takes place in peoples and races which are incapable of improvement, or have a limited capacity for advanced civilization, the faculty of myth remains in the ascendant; and as past and present history shows, mythical stagnation and intellectual barrenness may follow, until intellectual development is arrested and even destroyed.

If on the other hand the evolution takes place in peoples and races capable of indefinite civilization, myth gradually disappears and science shines forth victoriously.

Even in historical and civilized races the two cycles go on together, since while robust intellects throw off as they advance the mythical sh.e.l.l in which they were first inclosed, the ignorant ma.s.ses continue their devotions to fetishes and myths, which they can infuse even into the grandest religious teaching. They perhaps might also perish, crystallized in their miserable superst.i.tions, unless, in virtue of the race to which they belong, the n.o.bler minds were gradually to succeed in illuminating and raising them into a purer atmosphere. In our Aryan race, and in our own country we have all seen the ideas of Christianity transformed into the earlier fetishes and pagan myths; the saints are merely subst.i.tuted for the G.o.ds and demi-G.o.ds, for the deities of groves, of the sea and of war, as they are found in ancient mythology.

The legends of the saints and of Christ himself are grafted on similar legends of the ancient religions of Greece and Rome, and Paradise has a.s.sumed the appearance and form of Olympus. The paintings still extant in the catacombs of Rome, which mark the transformation of the old into the new religion, speak plainly enough by their symbols and figures.

Myth is logically identical with the scientific process in its intrinsic character; starting from a vague subjectivity which gradually a.s.sumes a human shape, the first intellectual vitality is lost, unless it is revived by a higher impulse. Science, on the other hand, which begins in myth, gradually divests this subjectivity of its anthropomorphic character, until pure reason is attained, and with this the power of indefinite progress.

The theory which has. .h.i.therto been generally accepted by mythologists, even by those who profess Comte's great principle of historical evolution, is that man began with special fetishes, that these were combined in comprehensive types to form polytheistic hierarchies, and hence he rose by an a.n.a.logous process to a more or less vague conception of monotheism.

This theory, true as to the princ.i.p.al forms which myth successively a.s.sumes, is not accurate with respect to the stages of development, and it is also erroneous in some particulars of the actual history of the various mythologies of different peoples.

In the early chapters of this work we have briefly touched on such a development, and the reader must pardon us for returning to the subject, now that we have to give an historical account of the process of evolution. In fact, the fetish, in the general sense of the term, is not the first form of myth which is revealed in the dawn of human life. In order to estimate its positive value, it is necessary to a.n.a.lyze such a conception with greater accuracy, and then to verify it historically with the help of the science of ethnology.

The first manifestations of mythical ideas must be considered in man as an animal; that is, as the result of his spontaneous intercourse with the world, independently of the psychical faculty peculiar to himself, after he had acquired by subsequent evolution of mind and body the faculty and habit of reflection. This first stage does not involve any definite fetish, that is, an immediate belief in a special object which exerts its influence on the human soul, even when it is remote and unseen: such a fetish is a secondary stage in human development. The first mythical representations of animals, and of man, so far as his animal nature is concerned, are not confined to fixed objects, which can be retained in the mind as operative under all circ.u.mstances; they are indefinite, and diffused through all the phenomena which are successively perceived and vivified. The unseen wind which rises and falls, the moving cloud, the flash of lightning and roar of thunder, the dawn, the rushing torrent--when any of these things are perceived by animals and primitive men, they are endowed with subjective life and are supposed to act with deliberate purpose; and this is the first form of myth. But when they are not present (I here speak of the animal nature of man) they do not remain in the mind as persistent beings to which the tribute of worship inspired by hope or fear must be paid; these and other phenomena only inspire such sentiments when they are actually present.

It is no vain distinction which I mate between the first vague and intermittent form of myth suggested by phenomena actually present, and that of the first stage of fetish: this distinction marks the difference between the mythical representation of animals and the cla.s.sifying and reflective process peculiar to man.

Comte was the first to remark, quite incidentally, that animals might sometimes attain to the idea of a fetish; Darwin gave the instance of a dog which was scared by the movement of an open umbrella in a meadow, although he remained quiet when it was unshaken by the wind; and Herbert Spencer, partly accepting these ideas, adduces two somewhat similar instances of the behaviour of dogs. It seems to us that these great men are mistaken on the one hand in a.s.suming that the first essential origin of myth is not to be found in the animal kingdom, and on the other in supposing that these facts have only an _accidental_ value, and that animals only occasionally acquire a vague consciousness of the fetish.