The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/Review: Müller - Anthropological Religion
Professor Müller having promised in the Gifford lectures of 1890 a trinity of courses upon Natural Religion, has now completed two of them; it is to be hoped his life will be spared to crown the series with the last. In these courses his object is to show that man, without a special revelation, has gained a belief in God, the soul's immortality, and future retribution. Natural Religion is treated (1) as Physical (or Historical) Religion, or the conquest of the idea of the Infinite or Divine through observation of Nature, (2) as Anthropological (or Rational) Religion, or the gradual growth in man of belief in something Infinite, Immortal, and Divine, and (3) as Psychological Religion, or Philosophy of Religion, or the development of the relation of the Divine or Infinite to the human soul. The last course is to be given hereafter. The author contends that the highest concept of Deity is gained without external revelation and is within the reach of every human being by this three-fold route of Nature, Man, and Self.
In a style always familiar, vivid, and captivating, he discusses in this volume the discovery of soul in man and the universe, or Anthropological Religion. In the first and second lectures, he vindicates freedom of religious discussion as conceived by Lord Gifford in founding the lectureship. In the third and fourth, he gives a résumé of the course on Physical Religion, restates his theories of the origin of the concept of cause and agency in nature, and again deals with comparative mythology and the universality of belief in the Infinite as exemplified in the Indo-European religions. In the sixth lecture he arrives at one of the foci of the argument of the book, — the discovery of soul in man and in the universe. This is developed positively in the seventh lecture, while the fifth and sixth are mainly occupied with the theories of Herbert Spencer concerning animism and worship of ancestors. These are vigorously excluded from confidence as one-sided and partial accounts of the origin of religion. In similar wise, fetishism, totemism, euhemerism are rejected as wholly one-sided explanations. Animism or spiritism, and consequently fetishism, always presupposes the anima in man. Ancestor worship is an important ingredient in ancient and modern religions, but is not, as Mr. Spencer contends, the root of every religion. Belief in departed spirits and worship of ancestors always presupposes soul in man and nature, and is combined among the Aryan peoples with prior belief in gods. In like manner in the eighth lecture the theory that Soul in man and nature is suggested by dreams and shadows and apparitions or ghosts, is treated as extremely one-sided. Primitive man, before he could arrive at the fancy that his soul was like a dream or an apparition, must have already possessed the concept of a soul. The ninth lecture is quite extensively a survey of burial rites among the peoples illustrating his argument. The tenth lecture discusses the general opinion of mankind concerning the departed, as bearing upon the author's postulates, and the eleventh lecture passes in review the theories as to the state of posthumous souls entertained by the Greeks. The last two lectures contain a statement of the results of the argument. The three streams of development of the idea of the Infinite or Divine unite and discharge themselves into the great current of Christianity, itself a natural though special and crowning revelation. For Professor Müller, believing that history is a revelation of the Infinite along the three lines of Physical, Anthropological, and Psychological Religion, sets aside local or temporal miracles in all ages as inferior and unnecessary, and anticipates with impatience the banishment of these unscientific beliefs from the realm of theology. He accepts, however, the fact of the resurrection of Christ as not indeed contra naturam, but as an unexplained natural phenomenon.
It may be added that De Pressensé, in his Origins, and in his later book, The Ancient World and Christianity, hastily assumes that Müller regards sensuous perception as the source of religious ideas. Müller himself rejects this as a mere suspicion of his position, and De La Saussaye has remarked upon the total injustice of such an inference. Müller's view fairly interpreted is that the idea of the Infinite is not the product of mere perception of nature, but is called forth from its slumbers in man's soul. It is a concomitant sentiment. It is difficult to see how nature or heroes can be deified without a prior concept of Deity in the soul. A sensuous perception is never wholly sensuous, since the a priori elements of the reason operate upon the sense-perceptions. Müller accepts the Kantian view of casuality, and believes that in the "starry heavens above and in the moral law within man," we have a true basis for Physical and Anthropological Religion.