Themis, a study of the social origins of Greek ... - Warburg Institute

xi] Religion and 'the Infinite' 489
grotesqueness. We may take Max Miiller's 1
typical
:
definition as
Religion is a mental faculty or disposition which, independent of, nay in
spite of sense and reason, enables man to apprehend the Infinite under different
names and under varying disguises.
Here we have the old Intellectualist fallacy in full force. The
protests of a host of scholars who felt the inadequacy and frigidity
and unreality of this Intellectualism induced Max Miiller 2 to
modify his definition as follows :
Religion consists in the perception of the infinite under such manifestations
as are able to influence the moral character of man.
Here we have a dim inkling of the truth. The notion of
social obligation as an element in religion begins to creep in.
Max Miiller's ' infinite ' was re-stated and re-emphasized by
Herbert Spencer 3 , but with a characteristic rationalist corollary.
According to him the essence and kernel of all religions was not
only the sense of mystery, but an instinctive desire and demand
to penetrate this mystery; man desired to know the unknown, the
unknowable.
Here is an element which all creeds have in common. Religions diametrically
opposed in their overt dogmas are yet perfectly at one in the tacit
conviction that the existence of the world with all it contains and all which
surrounds it is a mystery ever pressing for interpretation.
In the light of present anthropological knowledge the picture
called up for us by Herbert Spencer of the lonely individualistic
savage lost in contemplation of the All, and waking from his trance
eager to start on his career of elementary science, ' rerum
cog-
noscere causas,' is, if natural and illuminating at the time it was
written, now, in the light of a more familiar intimacy with the
savage mind, inadequate and even misleading. Wonder and awe,
as we have seen in discussing the Thunder-god 4 , were elements that
went to the making of religion, but the main objects of his cult,
i.e. the main foci of his attention, were his food-plants and his food-
animals; if he was an Australian his witchetty grubs, his emus,
his kangaroos. If he was a North American Apache, his bears.
1 Introduction to the Science of Religion, 1882, p. 13. The definition was put
forward verbally in 1873.
2 Natural Religion (Gifford Lectures, 1888), pp. 188, 193.
3 First Principles, 1875, p. 44.
4 Supra, p. 64.