no direct evidence, of course, is attainable. Man is now supposed to have existed upon the earth for perhaps more than fifty thousand years, and the earliest or most rudimentary beliefs known to have existed in historical times can be regarded only as survivals of thought in no respect necessarily primitive.
Arguments from the probable course of evolution, and various indirect arguments from analogy and from the application of ordinary common sense, furnish all the light that is possible on this question.
The simplest and most permanent element of religion in general is admitted to be a vague sense of wonder and awe in the presence of the external universe. Emotions of wonder and awe depend upon a consciousness of something mysterious or unexplained, and a consciousness of the lack of explanation can not arise until some perception has been gained of the relation of cause and effect.
The processes of evolution have been continuous, according to Mr. Spencer and modern men of science, from the inanimate world to man, or, at any rate, from the first speck of protoplasm that appeared on the earth's surface. With the first emergence of conscious perception on the earth of cause and effect, that is, practically, with the rise of reason as distinguished from instinct, must be placed the first beginning of the qualities or habits of thought or feeling that in time became religion. In an interesting essay on "Fetichism in Animals," Mr. Romanes has collected several instances of a sense of the mysterious, accompanied by wonder and awe or alarm in the higher animals. Of a like nature is the terror of a horse at the first sight of a steam-engine, of a dog at a person who makes unaccountable grimaces at it, and of most animals at the sound of thunder.
The sense of the mysterious, combined with instinctive or even conscious wonder and terror at unaccountable phenomena, can not, however, in itself be said to constitute religion. It is an element, but only one element, of religion. Even a sense of entire dependence upon external or higher powers would not, as Canon Liddon well said, be sufficient. "What is this power? That is a question which must be answered before feeling can determine its complexion."[1] The power to ask, much more the power to devise some answer to such a question as this, belongs clearly to a much later stage of evolution than does the simple perception of cause and effect that gives rise, as has been seen, to a sense of the mysterious. Phenomena must have been vaguely felt and contemplated, and from time to time wondered at, long before curiosity would be excited as to their nature; primitive savages would for ages observe natural movements without much intellectual curiosity, simply observing that the sun and moon moved, and animals and other things moved, without asking why they moved, but merely noticing and recording the fact of their motion.
The sense of the mysterious, which is one chief element of religion,
- ↑ H. P. Liddon, "Some Elements of Religion," London, 1873, p. 11.
