Jevons Comparative Religion

1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-3-7481-2895-3
Verlag: BoD - Books on Demand
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 258 Seiten

The use of any science lies in its application to practical purposes. For Christianity, the use of the science of religion consists in applying it to show that Christianity is the highest manifestation of the religious spirit. To make this use of the science of religion, we must fully and frankly accept the facts it furnishes, and must recognise that others are at liberty to use them for any opposite purpose. But we must also insist that the science of religion is limited to the establishment of facts and is excluded from passing judgment on the religious value of those facts. The science of religion as a historical science is concerned with the chronological order, and not with the religious value, of its facts; and the order of those facts does not determine their value any more in the case of religion than in the case of literature or art. But if their value is a question on which the science refuses to enter, it does not follow that the question is one which does not admit of a truthful answer: science has no monopoly of truth. The value of anything always implies a reference to the future: to be of value a thing must be of use for some purpose, and what is purposed is in the future. Things have value, or have not, according as they are useful or not for our purposes. The conviction that we can attain our purposes and ideals, the conviction without which we should not even attempt to attain them is faith; and it is in faith and by faith that the man of religion proposes to conquer the world. It is by faith in Christianity that the missionary undertakes to convert men to Christianity. The comparative value of different religions can only be ascertained by comparison of those religions; and the missionary, of all men, ought to know what is to be learnt from such comparison. It is sometimes supposed (wrongly) that to admit that all religions are comparable is to admit that all are identical; but, in truth, it is only because they differ that it is possible to compare them.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jevons, F. B.

Leseproben

IMMORTALITY

The missionary, like any other practical man, requires to know what science can teach him about the material on which he has to work. So far as is possible, he should know what materials are sound and can be used with safety in his constructive work, and what must be thrown aside, what must be destroyed, if his work is to escape dry-rot and to stand as a permanent edifice. He should be able to feel confidence, for instance, not merely that magic and fetichism are the negation of religion, but that in teaching that fact he has to support him the evidence collected by the science of religion; and he should have that evidence placed at his disposal for effective use, if need be.

It may be also that amongst much unsound material he will find some that is sound, that may be used, and that he cannot afford to cast away. He has to work upon our common humanity, upon the humanity common to him and his hearers. He has to remember that no man and no community of men ever is or has been or ever can be excluded from the search after God. And his duty, his chosen duty, is to help them in that search, and as far as may be to make the way clear for them, and to guide their feet in the right path. He will find that they have attempted to make paths for themselves; and it is not impossible that he will find that some of those paths for some distance do go in the right direction; that some of their beliefs have in them an element of truth, or a groping after truth which, rightly understood, may be made to lead to Christianity. It is with one of those beliefs—the belief in immortality—that I shall deal in this lecture.

It is a fact worthy of notice that the belief in immortality fills, I will not say a more important, but a more prominent, place in the hearts and hopes of uncivilised than of civilised man; and it is also a fact worthy of notice that among primitive men the belief in immortality is much less intimately bound up with religion than it comes to be at a later period of evolution. The two facts are probably not wholly without relation to one another. So long as the belief in immortality luxuriates and grows wild, so to speak, untrained and unrestrained by religion, it developes as the fancy wills, and lives by flattering the fancy. When, however, the relations of a future life to morality and religion come to be realised, when the conception of the next world comes to be moralised, then it becomes the subject of fear as well as of hope; and the fancy loses much of the freedom with which it tricked out the pictures that once it drew, purely according to its own sweet liking, of a future state. On the one hand, the guilty mind prefers not to dwell upon the day of reckoning, so long as it can stave off the idea; and it may succeed more or less in putting it on one side until the proximity of death makes the idea insistent. Thus the mind more or less deliberately dismisses the future life from attention. On the other hand, religion itself insists persistently on the fact that you have your duty here and now in this world to perform, and that the rest, the future consequences, you must leave to God. Thus, once more, and this time not from unworthy motives, attention is directed to this life rather than to the next; and it is this point that is critical for the fate both of the belief in immortality and of religion itself. At this point, religion may, as in the case of Buddhism it actually has done, formally give up and disavow belief in immortality. And in that case it sows the seed of its own destruction. Or it may recognise that the immortality of the soul is postulated by and essential to morality and religion alike. And in that case, even in that case alone, is religion in a position to provide a logical basis for morality and to place the natural desire for a future life on a firmer basis than the untutored fancy of primitive man could find for it.

It is then with primitive man or with the lower races that we will begin, and with "the comparative universality of their belief in the continued existence of the soul after the death of the body" (Tylor, Primitive Culture , II, i). Now, the classical theory of this belief is that set forth by Professor Tylor in his Primitive Culture . Whence does primitive man get his idea that the soul continues to exist after the death of the body? the answer given is, in the first place, from the fact that man dreams. He dreams of distant scenes that he visits in his sleep; it is clear, from the evidence of those who saw his sleeping body, that his body certainly did not travel; therefore he or his soul must be separable from the body and must have travelled whilst his body lay unmoving and unmoved. But he also dreams of those who are now dead, and whose bodies he knows, it may be, to have been incinerated. The explanation then is obvious that they, too, or their souls, are separable from their bodies; and the fact that they survive death and the destruction of the body is demonstrated by their appearance in his dreams. About the reality of their appearance in his dreams he has no more doubt than he has about the reality of what he himself does and suffers in his dreams. If, however, the dead appeared only in his dreams, their existence after death might seem to be limited to the dream-time. But as a matter of fact they appear to him in his waking moments also: ghosts are at least as familiar to the savage as to the civilised man; and thus the evidence of his dreams, which first suggested his belief, is confirmed by the evidence of his senses.

Thus the belief in the continued existence of the soul after the death of the body is traced back to the action of dreams and waking hallucinations. Now, it is inevitable that the inference should be drawn that the belief in immortality has thus been tracked to its basis. And it is inevitable that those who start with an inclination to regard the belief as palpably absurd should welcome this exhibition of its evolution as proof conclusive that the belief could only have originated in and can only impose upon immature minds. To that doubtless it is a perfectly sound reply to say that the origin of a belief is one thing and its validity quite another. The way in which we came to hold the belief is a matter of historical investigation, and undoubtedly may form a very fascinating enquiry. But the question whether the belief is true is a question which has to be considered, no matter how I got it, just as the question whether I am committing a trespass or not in being on a piece of ground cannot be settled by any amount of explaining how I got there. Or, to put it in another way, the very risky path by which I have scrambled up a cliff does not make the top any the less safe when I have got there.

But though it is perfectly logical to insist on the distinction between the origin and the validity of any belief, and to refuse to question or doubt the validity of the belief in immortality merely because of the origin ascribed to it by authorities on primitive culture,—that is no reason why we should not examine the origin suggested for it, to see whether it is a satisfactory origin. And that is what I propose now to do. I wish to suggest first that belief in the appearance of the dead, whether to the dreamer or the ghost-seer, is an intellectual belief as to what occurs as a matter of fact; and next that thereby it is distinguished from the desire for immortality which manifests itself with comparative universality amongst the lower races.

Now, that the appearance of the dead, whether to the waking or the sleeping eye, is sufficient to start the intellectual belief will be admitted alike by those who do and those who do not hold that it is sufficient logically to warrant the belief. But to say that it starts the desire to see him or her whom we have lost, would be ridiculous. On the contrary, it would be much nearer the truth to say that it is the longing and the desire to see, once again, the loved one, that sets the mind a-dreaming, and first gives to the heart hope. The fact that, were there no desire for the continuance of life after the death of the body, the belief would never have caught on—that it either would never have arisen or would have soon ceased to exist—is shown by the simple consideration that only where the desire for the continuance of life after death dies down does the belief in immortality tend to wane. If any further evidence of that is required it may be found in the teaching of those forms of philosophy and religion which endeavour to dispense with the belief in immortality, for they all recognise and indeed proclaim that they are based on the denial of the desire and the will to live. If, and only if—as, and only as—the desire to live, here and hereafter, can be suppressed, can the belief in immortality be eradicated. The basis of the belief is the desire for continued existence; and that is why the attempt to trace the origin of the belief in immortality back to the belief in dreams and apparitions is one which is not perfectly...