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 analytic distinction
between the subject and the object, and their respective effects, to
consider such phenomena as mechanical entities, subject to necessary and
eternal laws. The animal therefore accepts the idea suggested by his
spontaneous and subjective nature, that these phenomena are alive.
Grass, 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 passed 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 superstitions,
mythologies, and religions. This is also the process of science itself,
as far as the classifying 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 pass, 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 repetition in developing a subject on which we have
already touched, since without such repetition 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 circumstances, 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
shell in which they were first inclosed, the ignorant masses 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 superstitions, unless, in virtue of the
race to which they belong, the nobler 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 substituted for the gods and demi-gods, 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
assumed 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 assumes 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 hitherto 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 analogous process to a more or less vague conception
of monotheism.
This theory, true as to the principal forms which myth successively
assumes, 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 analyze 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 circumstances; 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 classifying 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 assuming 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.
Those readers who have gone with us so far will perceive that these were
not mere accidents of rare occurrence in animal life, but that they are
the necessary effect of mythical representation in its first stage,
although they cannot in any way be supposed to be produced by fetishism,
properly so called. For if the dog were frightened and agitated by the
movement of the umbrella, or ran away, as Herbert Spencer tells us, from
the stick which had hurt him while he was playing with it, it was
because an unusual movement or pain produced by an object to which habit
had rendered him indifferent, aroused in the animal the congenital sense
of the intentional subjectivity of phenomena, and this is really the
first stage of myth, and not of its subsequent form of fetishism.
I must therefore repeat that the first form of myth which spontaneously
arises in man as an animal, is the vague but intentional subjectivity of
the phenomena presented to his senses. This subjectivity is sometimes
quiescent and implicit, and sometimes active, in which case it may
arouse the fear of evil, or the hope of physical pleasures.
As in man the reflex power slowly and gradually grows--although at first
in an exclusively empirical form--so he slowly and gradually accepts the
first form of fetishism, which consists in the permanent and fixed
individuation of a phenomenon or object of nature, as a power which he
reflectively believes to be the artificer of good or evil.
In this stage it is no longer the phenomenon actually present which
arouses the apprehension of an intentional subjectivity, while its image
and efficacy disappear with the sensible object; the phenomenon, or the
inanimate or animate form, is reflectively retained by the memory, in
which it appears as a malignant or benignant power. In a word, the first
stage of fetishism, which is the second form of the evolution of myth,
is the universal and primitive sense of myth in nature, which man alone
is capable of applying permanently to some given phenomenon, such as
wind, rain, and the like, or lakes, volcanoes, and rocks, and these
remain fixed in the mind as powers of good or evil. In the earlier stage
of myth the scene is constantly changing, while in the latter, certain
objects or phenomena remain fixed in the memory, exciting the same
emotions whether they are present or absent, and to this consciousness
we may trace the dawn of worship.
Ethnography affords plain proofs of the fetishism which preceded the
civilization of many peoples, and among those which still remain in the
stage of fetishism we can trace the primitive form of a vague
impersonation of natural objects and phenomena.[28]
As we have already seen, every animal and unfamiliar object is in this
first stage of fetishism regarded as the external covering of a
spiritual power which has assumed what is believed to be the primordial
form of the fetish; this fetish takes the place of the natural
phenomenon, and is believed to be capable of exercising a direct
subjectivity which is vague but perfectly real.
We pass from this first form of fetish to the second, namely to the
veneration of objects, animals, plants, and the like, in which an
extrinsic power is supposed to be incarnated. Many ages elapsed before
man attained to this second stage of fetishism, since it was necessarily
preceded by a further and reflex elaboration of myth, namely, the
genesis of a belief in spirits.
Herbert Spencer and Tylor are among the writers who have given a
masterly description of this phase of the human intellect, and history
and ethnography have confirmed the accuracy of their researches and
conclusions. The shadow cast by a man's own body, the reflection of
images in the water, natural echoes, the reappearance of images of the
departed in dreams, the general instinct which leads man to vivify all
he sees, produced what may be called the reduplication of man in
himself, and the savage's primitive theory of the human soul. Originally
this soul was multiplied into all these natural phenomena, but it was
afterwards distributed by the mythical faculty into three, four, five,
or more powers, personifying the spirits. This belief in a multiplicity
of souls in man is not only still extant among more or less rude peoples
of the present day in Asia, Europe, Africa, America, and Polynesia, but
it is also the foundation of the belief of more civilized nations on the
subject, including our own Aryan race. Birch and others observe that the
Egyptians ascribed four spirits to man--Ba, Akba, Ka, and Khaba. The
Romans give three:
"Bis duo sunt homines, manes, caro, spiritus, umbra."
The same belief is found among nearly all savages. The Fijians
distinguish between the spirit which is buried with the dead man and
that more ethereal spirit which is reflected in the water and lingers
near the place where he died. The Malagasy believe in three souls, the
Algonquin in two, the Dakotan in three, the native of Orissa in four.
Since a fetish, strictly so called, is the incarnation of a power in
some given object, it must be preceded by this rude belief in spirits
and shades. Such a complex elaboration takes time, since it involves a
previous creation of powers, spirits or the shades of men; these lead to
the belief in independent spirits of various origin, which people the
heavens and all parts of the world. Hence arose the belief in
transmigration, the necessary prelude to the theory of the incarnation,
which was ultimately constituted by fetishism. The comparative study of
languages shows that including the Aryan and Semitic races, the belief
in spirits was developed in all peoples, and in all of them we also find
a belief in the transmigration of souls.
The transmigration of the human soul was first believed to take place in
the body of a new-born child, since at the moment of death the soul of
the dying person entered into the fetus. The Algonquins buried the
corpses of their children by the wayside, so that their souls might
easily enter into the bodies of the pregnant women who passed that way.
Some of the North American tribes believed that the mother saw in a
dream the dead relation who was to imprint his likeness on her unborn
child. At Calabar, when the mother who has lost a child gives birth to
another, she believes that the dead child is restored to her. The
natives of New Guinea believe that a son who greatly resembles his dead
father has inherited his soul. Among the Yorubas the new-born child is
greeted with the words: "Thou hast returned at last!" The same ideas
prevail among the Lapps and Tartars, as well as among the negroes of the
West Coast of Africa. Among the aborigines of Australia the belief is
widely diffused that those who die as black return as white men.
Primitive and ignorant peoples perceive no precise distinction between
man and brutes, so that, as Tylor observes, they readily accept the
belief of the transmigration of the human soul into an animal, and then
into inanimate objects, and this belief culminates in the incarnation of
the true fetish. Among some of the North American tribes the spirits of
the dead are supposed to pass into bears. An Eskimo widow refused to eat
seal's flesh because she supposed that her husband's soul had migrated
into that animal. Others have imagined that the souls of the dead passed
into birds, beetles, and other insects, according to their social rank
when still alive. Some African tribes believe that the dead migrate into
certain species of apes.
By pursuing this theory, as we shall presently show more fully, the
transition was easy to the incarnation of a spirit, whether that of a
man or of some other being, into any object whatever, which was thereby
invested with beneficent or malignant power. It is easy to show that in
this second stage of fetishism, which some have believed to be the
primitive form of myth, there would be no further progress in the
mythical elaboration of spirits, their mode of life, their influence and
possible transmigrations. This elaboration is indeed a product of the
mythical faculty, but in a rational order; it is a logical process,
mythical in substance, but purely reflective in form. For which reason
it was impossible for animals to attain to this stage.
Some peoples remained in this phase of belief, while others advanced to
the ulterior and polytheistic form. This may also be divided into two
classes; those who classify and ultimately reduce fetishes into a more
general conception, and those whose conception takes an anthropomorphic
form. Let us examine the genesis of both classes.
When the popular belief in spirits had free development, the number of
spirits and powers was countless, as many examples show. To give a
single instance--the Australians hold that there is an innumerable
multitude of spirits; the heavens, the earth, every nook, grove, bush,
spring, crag, and stone are peopled with them. In the same way, some
American tribes suppose the visible and invisible world to be filled
with good and evil spirits; so do the Khonds, the Negroes of New Guinea,
and, as Castren tells us, the Turanian tribes of Asia and Europe.
Consequently, fetishes, which are the incarnation of these spirits in
some object, animate or inanimate, natural or artificial, are
innumerable, since primitive man and modern savages have created such
fetishes, either at their own pleasure or with the aid of their priests,
magicians, and sorcerers.
Man's coordinating faculty, in those races which are capable of
progressive evolution, does not stop short at this inorganic
disintegration of things; he begins a process of classification and, at
the same time, of reduction, by which the numerous fetishes are, by
their natural points of likeness and unlikeness in character and form,
reduced to types and classes, which, as we have already shown, comprise
in themselves the qualities of all the particular objects of the same
species which are diffused throughout nature.
By this spontaneous process of human thought, due to the innate power of
reasoning, man has gradually reduced the chaos of special fetishes to a
tolerably systematic order, and he then goes on to more precise
simplification. Let us try to trace in this historic fact the
classifying process at the moment when the first form of polytheism
succeeds to irregular and anarchical fetishism.
In the Samoan islands, a local god is wont to appear in the form of an
owl, and the accidental discovery of a dead owl would be deplored, and
its body would be buried with solemn rites. The death of this particular
bird does not, however, imply the death of the god himself, since the
people believe him to be incarnated in the whole species. In this fact
we see that a special fetish is developed into a specific form; thus a
permanent type is evolved from special appearances.
Acosta has handed down to us another belief of the comparatively
civilized Peruvians, which recalls the primitive genesis of their
mythical ideas. He says that the shepherds used to adore various stars,
to which they assigned the names of animals; stars which protected men
against the respective animals after whom they were called. They held
the general belief that all animals whatever had a representative in
heaven, which watched over their reproduction, and of which they were,
so to speak, the essence. This affords another example of the more
general extension and classification, and, at the same time, of the
reduction of the original multitude of fetishes.
Some of the North American Indians asserted that every species of animal
had an elder brother, who was the origin of all the individuals of the
species. They said, for example, that the beaver, which was the elder
brother of this species of rodents, was as large as one of their cabins.
Others supposed that all kinds of animals had their type in the world of
souls, a _manitu_, which kept guard over them. Ralston, in his "Songs of
the Russian People," tells us that Buyan, the island paradise of Russian
mythology, contains a serpent older than all others, a larger raven, a
finer queen bee, and so of all other animals. Morgan, in his work upon
the Iroquois, observes that they believe in a spirit or god of every
species of trees and plants.
From these beliefs and facts, drawn from different peoples and different
parts of the world, we can understand how a vague and inorganic
fetishism gradually became classified into types which constitute the
first phase of polytheism. The logical effort which transformed the
manifold beliefs into types goes on, but from their vague and indefinite
nature, not only the power, but also the extrinsic form of man is easily
infused into them, so that they are invested with human faculties and
sensations, and also with the anthropomorphic form and countenance of
which we have spoken elsewhere. In fact, when the special fetishes which
are naturally alike are united in a single type, the object, animal, or
phenomenon which corresponds to it in this early stage of polytheism is
no longer perceived, but a _numen_ is evolved from this type, which has
not only human power, but a human form; and hence follow the specific
idols of serpents, birds, and all natural phenomena, in which the
primitive fetish has been incarnated.[29]
In this second stage of polytheism, anthropomorphism appears in an
external form, and the specific type is transformed into the idol which
represents and dominates over it, inspiring the commission of beneficent
or hurtful acts. Of this it is unnecessary to adduce examples, since all
the mythologies which have reached this polytheistic stage are
anthropomorphic, and in these the specific type, which serves as the
first step to polytheism, subsequently becomes a completely human idol.
After this anthropomorphic classification has been reached by logical
elaboration, a new field is opened for the reduction of special types
into those which are more general, as had been previously the case in
the early stages of myth. By continually concentrating, and at the same
time by enlarging the value of the conception, it is united in a single
form which constitutes the dawn and genesis of monotheism. This
methodical process, which is characteristic of human thought, may be
traced in all peoples which have really attained to the monotheistic
idea, in the Aryan and Semitic races, in China, Japan, and Egypt, in
Peru and Mexico; the belief may also be obscurely traced in an inchoate
form among savage and inferior tribes, as, for example, among the
Indians of Central and North America, and among some of the inhabitants
of Africa and barbarous Asia.
While this conception took a more or less definite form among the more
advanced peoples, the earlier and debased myths maintained their ground,
and still continue to do so. Of this we have examples in Europe itself,
and among its more civilized peoples which have been transplanted
elsewhere; for while in one direction a capacity for classification
leads to a purer monotheistic conception, and even to rational science,
the great majority of the common people, and even of those of higher
culture, still hold many ideas which are polytheistic and
anthropomorphic, and some which really belong to the debased stage of
fetishism and vulgar superstition.
Other causes contribute to produce the natural and intrinsic concurrence
of the several stages of myth which are found existing together in the
life of a people. Such, for example, is the conquest effected by a more
civilized nation over another race, inferior by nature or retarded by
other circumstances. The mythical ideas of the conquered people remain,
and are even diffused through the lower classes of the conquering race;
or they are ingrafted by a synthetic and assimilating process, so as to
modify other mythical and religious beliefs. This compound of various
stages and various beliefs also occurs through the moral and
intellectual diffusion of dogma, without the acquisition of really new
matter. Manifest proofs of these various stages of myth, co-existent
together, may be traced in the development of the Vedic ideas among the
earlier aboriginal nations, and conversely; as in the case of the Aztecs
and Incas in Mexico and Peru, whose earlier beliefs were mixed with
those of their conquerors. The same thing may be observed in the
development of Judaism during the Babylonish captivity, in the biblical
and messianic doctrines which were grafted on pagan beliefs, and in the
teaching of Islam, as it was adopted in the East and among the black
races of Africa.
We must make allowance for these extrinsic accidents if we are to
describe correctly the natural course and logical evolution of myth.
Even with respect to the special evolution of myth in a separate people,
unmixed with others, while it is normal in what may be termed its
general form and categorical phases, yet like all natural objects and
phenomena, and much more in all which concerns the human mind, there are
variations in its forms, and it attains its ends by many ways.
If we take a wider view of the general and reciprocal influences of
ethnic myths; as respects the historic results of mythologies, we shall
see that if every race evolved its sphere of myth in accordance with the
canons laid down by us, their effect upon each other would work together
for a common result more quickly than when each is taken apart. The
reader must allow me to make my meaning clear by the following passage
from my work on the "Dottrina razionale del Progresso," which I
published in 1863, in the "Politecnico," Milan, on the fusion of the
monotheistic conception of the Semitic race with the beliefs of Greece
and Rome at the dawn of Christianity:--
"Christianity was originally based on the absolute idea of the divine
first Principle, to which one portion of the Semitic race had attained
by intellectual evolution, and by the acumen of the great men who
brought this idea to perfection. Either because of their clearer
consciousness, or from their environment and the physical circumstances
of the race, the Semitic people passed from the primitive ideas of
mythology to the conception of the absolute and infinite Being, while
other races still adhered to altogether fanciful and anthropomorphic
ideas of this Being. Our race had an Olympus, like the others, and
throughout its history this Olympus was always assuming new forms,
although a human conception was the basis of its religious ideas. The
Chinese and Semitic races were the first to rise to the conception of an
absolute first principle, but in both cases the conception was more or
less unfruitful.
"The gradual transition from consciousness to conception, from the fact
to the idea, from the idol to the law, from the symbol to the thought,
from the finite to the infinite, is the characteristic and essential
course taken by the human mind. But, practically, this process is more
gradual or more rapid, is retarded or advanced, attains its aim or stops
short in its first rudiments, according to the race in which it occurs.
So it was that, as we have just said, the Chinese and Semitic races were
the first to reach the final goal of this psychological progress; other
peoples, such as the Aryans and their offshoots, savages and partially
civilized races, remained in the early stages of this dialectic scale.
Undoubtedly, in our own race, the early religious conceptions which
constituted a simple worship of nature in various forms were constantly
becoming of purer character, and they were not only exalted in their
spiritual quality, but in the Greek and Roman religions they attained to
something like scientific precision. Yet even in these higher
aspirations the race did not surrender its mythical faculty, to which it
was impelled by its physical and psychological constitution, and the
pure conception was unconsciously overshadowed by symbolic ideas. We can
plainly see how far this symbolism, peculiar to the race, obscured the
minds of Plato and Aristotle, and of almost all the subsequent
philosophers. In the Semitic and Chinese races this inner symbolism of
the mind, with reference to the interpretation of nature, was less
tenacious, intense, and productive, and they soon freed themselves from
their mental bonds in order to rise to the conception of the absolute
Being, distinct from the world. When this idea had been grasped by rude
and popular intuition, men of the highest intellectual power perfected
the still confused conception, and founded upon it science, civil and
political institutions, and national customs.
"The idea of Christianity arose in the midst of the Semitic people
through him whose name it bears, and who perfected the religious idea
of his nation. This idea, in its Semitic simplicity, consisted in a
belief in the existence of one, eternal, infinite God, the immediate
creator of all things; it included the tradition of man's loss of his
original felicity, and the promise of a restoration of all peoples, and
of the Israelites in particular, to their former condition of earthly
happiness. Christ appeared, and while he upheld the Mosaic law and its
original idea, he declared himself to be the promised deliverer, sent of
God; the Son of God, which among the Semitic people was the term applied
to their prophets. His moral teaching gave a more perfect form to the
old law, and by his example he afforded a model of human virtue worthy
of all veneration; the germs of a marvelous civilization were to be
found in his moral and partially new teaching. The same doctrine had
been, to some extent, inculcated by the Jewish teachers, and the schools
of Hillel and Gamaliel were certainly not morally inferior to his own,
as we learn from the tradition of the Talmud, and from some passages in
the Acts of the Apostles. The origin, development, and teaching of
primitive Christianity were therefore essentially Semitic, since it had
its origin in a people of that race, and in a man of that people. Yet
the Semitic race did not become Christian; and, after so many ages have
elapsed, it still rejects Christianity. It was the Aryan race, to which
we Europeans belong, which adopted this teaching and became essentially
Christian, although this race is psychologically the most idolatrous of
the world, as far as the aesthetic idol--not the common fetish--is
concerned. Let us inquire into the cause of this remarkable fact.
"As soon as the teaching of Christ was adopted by those familiar with
Aryan civilization and opinions, an idea repugnant to Semitic
conceptions, and still unintelligible to that race, was evolved from
it--I mean the idea that the human Christ, the Son of God, was God
himself. The Semite holds that God is so far exalted above all creation,
so great and eternal in comparison with the littleness of the world and
of man, that God incarnate is not merely a blasphemy but an unmeaning
and absurd phrase. Such a dogma was therefore energetically repudiated,
and the Semitic race submitted to persecution and dispersal rather than
accept it. This is the real reason why Christianity has not been
received and will never be received by the Semitic race. When Mahomet
reorganized and perfected the Arab creed, he preserved intact the
Semitic principle of the absolute and incommunicable nature of God: the
Semitic religion has ever held that there is one God, and his prophet. |
