Chapter III: Progress Under Ancient Religions (1)

§ 1. EARLY ASSOCIATION AND COMPETITION OF CULTS

When religion has entered on the stage of quasi-civilized organization, with fixed legends or documents, temples, and the rudiments of hierarchies, the increased forces of terrorism and conservatism are in nearly all cases seen to be in part countervailed by the simple interaction of the systems of different communities. There is no more ubiquitous force in the whole history of the subject, operating as it does in ancient Assyria, in the life of Vedic India and Confucian China, and in the diverse histories of progressive Greece and relatively stationary Egypt, down through the Christian Middle Ages to our own period of comparative studies.

In ages when any dispassionate comparative study was impossible, religious systems appear to have been considerably modified by the influence of those of conquered peoples on those of their conquerors, and vice versâ. Peoples who while at arm's length would insult and affect to despise each other's Gods, and would deride each other's myths, [121] appear frequently to have altered their attitude when one had conquered the other; and this not because of any special growth of sympathy, but by force of the old motive of fear. In the stage of natural polytheism no nation really doubted the existence of the Gods of another; at most, like the Hebrews of the early historic period, it would set its own God above the others, calling him "Lord of Lords." But, every community having its own God, he remained a local power even when his own worshippers were conquered, and his cult and lore were respected accordingly. This procedure, which has been sometimes attributed to the Romans in particular as a stroke of political sagacity, was the normal and natural course of polytheism. Thus in the Hebrew books the Assyrian conqueror is represented as admitting that it is necessary to leave a priest who knows "the manner of the God of the land" among the new inhabitants he has planted there.

See 2 Kings xvii, 26. Cp. Ruth i, 16, and Judges xvii, 13. The
account by Herodotos (ii, 171) of the preservation of the
Pelasgic rites of Dêmêtêr by the women of Arcadia points to the
same principle. See also hereinafter, ch. vi, § 1; K. O. Müller,
Introd. to a Sci. Study of Mythol., Eng. trans., p. 193; Adolf
Bastian, Der Mensch in der Geschichte, 1860, i, 189; Rhys,
Celtic Britain, 2nd ed., p. 69; Max Müller, Anthropological
Religion, p. 164; Gibbon, ch. xxxiv--Bohn ed., iii, 554, note;
Tylor, Primitive Culture, i, 113-15; and Dr. F. B. Jevons's
Introd. to the Hist. of Relig., 1896, pp. 36-40, where the fear
felt by conquering races for the occult powers of the conquered is
limited to the sphere of "magic." But when Dr. Jevons so defines
magic as to admit of his proposition (p. 38) that "the hostility
from the beginning between religion and magic is universally
admitted," he throws into confusion the whole phenomena of the
early official-religious practice of magic, of which sacrifice
and prayer are the type-forms that have best survived. And in
the end he upsets his definition by noting (p. 40) how magic,
"even where its relation to religion is one of avowed hostility,"
will imitate religion. Obviously magic is a function or aspect or
element of primitive religion (cp. Roskoff, Das Religionswesen der
rohesten Naturvölker, 1880, p. 144; Sayce, pp. 315, 319, 327, and
passim; and Tiele, Egyptian Rel., pp. 22, 32); and any "hostility,"
far from being universal, is either a social or a philosophical
differentiation. On the whole question compare the author's Pagan
Christs, 2nd ed., pp. 11-38. In the opinion of Weber (Hist. of
Ind. Lit., p. 264) the magic arts "found a more and more fruitful
soil as the religious development of the Hindus progressed";
"so that they now, in fact, reign almost supreme." See again
Dr. Jevons's own later admission, p. 395, where the exception of
Christianity is somewhat arbitrary. On this compare Kant, Religion
innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, B. iv, Th. ii, § 3.

Similar cases have been noted in primitive cults still surviving. Fear of the magic powers of "lower" or conquered races is in fact normal wherever belief in wizardry survives; and to the general tendency may be conjecturally ascribed such phenomena as that of the Saturnalia, in which masters and slaves changed places, and the institution of the Levites among the Hebrews, otherwise only mythically explained. But if conquerors and conquered thus tended to amalgamate or associate their cults, equally would allied tribes tend to do so; and, when particular Gods of different groups were seen to correspond in respect of special attributes, a further analysis would be encouraged. Hence, with every extension of every State, every advance in intercourse made in peace or through war, there would be a further comparison of credences, a further challenge to the reasoning powers of thoughtful men.

On the normal tendency to defer to local deities, compare Tylor,
Primitive Culture, as last cited; B. Thomson, The Fijians,
1908, p. 112; A. B. Ellis, The Tshi-Speaking Peoples of the Gold
Coast, 1887, p. 147, and The Ewe-Speaking Peoples, 1890, p. 55;
P. Wurm, Handbuch der Religionsgeschichte, 2te Aufl., p. 43 (as to
Madagascar); Sir H. Johnston, The Uganda Protectorate, 1902, ii,
589; Waitz, Anthropologie der Naturvölker, iii, 186; P. Kropotkin,
Memoirs of a Revolutionist, ed. 1908, p. 191; W. W. Skeat, Malay
Magic, 1900, pp. 56, 84; Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern
India, 1909, i, 86-87, 94, 100; iii, 188; iv, 170; v, 467-68;
W. H. R. Rivers, The Todas, 1906, p. 263; Rae, The White Sea
Peninsula, 1881, p. 262; Élie Reclus, Primitive Folk, pp. 254-56;
Grant Allen, Evolution of the Idea of God, 1897, pp. 289, 301-302;
Castrén, Vorlesungen über die Finnische Mythologie, 1853, p. 281;
Gummere, Germanic Origins, 1892, p. 140, citing Weinhold, Deutsche
Frauen, i, 105; Gobineau, Les religions et les philosophies dans
l'Asie centrale, 2e éd. p. 67; E. Higgins, Hebrew Idolatry and
Superstition, 1893, pp. 20, 24; Robertson Smith, Religion of
the Semites, 1889, p. 77; Wellhausen, Heidenthum, pp. 129, 183,
cited by Smith, p. 79; Lang, Making of Religion, p. 65; Frazer,
Golden Bough, 2nd ed. ii, 72. Above all, see the record in Old New
Zealand, "by a Pakeha Maori" (2nd ed. Auckland, 1863, p. 154),
of the believing resort of some white men to native wizards in
New Zealand.

Stevenson, again, is evidently proceeding upon observation
when he makes his trader in The Beach of Falesà say: "We
laugh at the natives and their superstitions; but see how many
traders take them up, splendidly educated white men that have
been bookkeepers (some of them) and clerks in the old country"
(Island Nights' Entertainments, 1893, pp. 104-105). In Abyssinia,
"Galla sorceresses are frequently called in by the Christians of
Shoa to transfer sickness or to rid the house of evil spirits"
(Major W. Cornwallis Harris, The Highlands of Aethiopia, 1844,
iii, 50). On the other hand, some Sudanese tribes "believe in the
virtue both of Christian and Moslem amulets, but have hitherto lent
a deaf ear to the preachers of both these religions" (A. H. Keane,
Man, Past and Present, 1900, p. 50).

This tendency did not exclude, but would in certain cases
conflict with, the strong primitive tendency to associate every
God permanently with his supposed original locality. Tiele writes
(Hist. of the Egypt. Relig., Eng. trans. introd. p. xvii) that in
no case was a place given to the Gods of one nation in another's
pantheon "if they did not wholly alter their form, character,
appearance, and not seldom their very name." This seems an
over-statement, and is inconsistent with Tiele's own statement
(Hist. comparée des anc. relig. égyptiennes et sémitiques,
French trans., 1882, pp. 174-80) as to the adoption of Sumerian
and Akkadian Gods and creeds by the Semites. What is clear is
that local cults resisted the removal of their Gods' images;
and the attempt to deport such images to Babylon, thus affecting
the monopoly of the God of Babylon himself, was a main cause of
the fall of Nabonidos, who was driven out by Cyrus. (E. Meyer,
Geschichte des Alterthums, i (1884), 599.) But the Assyrians
invoked Bel Merodach of Babylon, after they had conquered Babylon,
in terms of his own ritual; even as Israelites often invoked
the Gods of Canaan (cp. Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, Relig. of the
Anc. Babylonians, p. 123). And King Mardouk-nadinakhe of Babylon,
in the twelfth century B.C., carried off statues of the Assyrian
Gods from the town of Hekali to Babylon, where they were kept
captive for 418 years (Maspero, Hist. anc. des peuples de l'orient,
4e éd. p. 300). A God could migrate with his worshippers from city
to city (Meyer, iii, 169; Sayce, p. 124); and the Assyrian scribe
class maintained the worship of their special God Nebo wherever
they went, though he was a local God to start with (Sayce, pp. 117,
119, 121). And as to the recognition of the Gods of different
Egyptian cities by politic kings, see Tiele's own statement,
p. 36. Cp. his Outlines, pp. 73, 84, 207.

A concrete knowledge of the multiplicity of cults, then, was obtruded on the leisured and travelled men of the early empires and of such a civilization as that of Hellas; [122] and when to such knowledge there was added a scientific astronomy (the earliest to be constituted of the concrete sciences), a revision of beliefs by such men was inevitable. [123] It might take the form either of a guarded skepticism or of a monarchic theology, answering to the organization of the actual earthly empire; and the latter view, in the nature of the case, would much the more easily gain ground. The freethought of early civilization, then, would be practically limited for a long time to movements in the direction of co-ordinating polytheism, to the end of setting up a supreme though not a sole deity; the chief God in any given case being apt to be the God specially affected by the reigning monarch. Allocation of spheres of influence to the principal deities would be the working minimum of plausible adjustment, since only in some such way could the established principle of the regularity of the heavens be formally accommodated to the current worship; and wherever there was monarchy, even if the monarch were polytheistic, there was a lead to gradation among the Gods. [124] A pantheistic conception would be the highest stretch of rationalism that could have any vogue even among the educated class. All the while every advance was liable to the ill-fortune of overthrow or arrest at the hands of an invading barbarism, which even in adopting the system of an established priesthood would be more likely to stiffen than to develop it. Early rationalism, in short, would share in the fluctuations of early civilization; and achievements of thought would repeatedly be swept away, even as were the achievements of the constructive arts.

§ 2. THE PROCESS IN INDIA

The process thus deducible from the main conditions is found actually happening in more than one of the ancient cultures, as their history is now sketched. In the Rig-Veda, which if not the oldest is the least altered of the Eastern Sacred Books, the main line of change is obvious enough. It remains so far matter of conjecture to what extent the early Vedic cults contain matter adopted from non-Aryan Asiatic peoples; but no other hypothesis seems to account for the special development of the cult of Agni in India as compared with the content and development of the other early Aryan systems, in which, though there are developments of fire worship, the God Agni does not appear. [125] The specially priestly character of the Agni worship, and the precedence it takes in the Vedas over the solar cult of Mitra, which among the kindred Aryans of Iran receives in turn a special development, suggest some such grafting, though the relations between Aryans and the Hindu aborigines, as indicated in the Veda, seem to exclude the possibility of their adopting the fire-cult from the conquered inhabitants, [126] who, besides, are often spoken of in the Vedas as "non-sacrificers," [127] and at times as "without Gods." [128] But this is sometimes asserted even of hostile Aryans. [129] In any case the carrying on of the two main cults of Agni and Indra side by side points to an original and marked heterogeneity of racial elements; while the varying combination with them of the worship of other deities, the old Aryan Varuna, the three forms of the Sun-God Aditya, the Goddess Aditi and the eight Adityas, the solar Mitra, Vishnu, Rudra, and the Maruts, imply the adaptation of further varieties of hereditary creed. The outcome is a sufficiently chaotic medley, in which the attributes and status of the various Gods are reducible to no code, [130] the same feats being assigned to several, and the attributes of all claimed for almost any one. Here, then, were the conditions provocative of doubt among the critical; and while it is only in the later books of the Rig-Veda that such doubt finds priestly expression, it must be inferred that it was current in some degree among laymen before the hymn-makers avowed that they shared it. The God Soma, the personification of wine, identified with the Moon-God Chandra, [131] "hurls the irreligious into the abyss." [132] This may mean that his cult, like that of his congener Dionysos in Greece, was at first forcibly resisted, and forcibly triumphed. At an earlier period doubt is directed against the most popular God, Indra, perhaps on behalf of a rival cult. [133] Later it seems to take the shape of a half-skeptical, half-mystical questioning as to which, if any, God is real.

From the Catholic standpoint, Dr. E. L. Fischer has argued that
"Varuna is in the ontological, physical, and ethical relation
the highest, indeed the unique, God of ancient India"; and that
the Nature-Gods of the Veda can belong only to a later period in
the religious consciousness (Heidenthum und Offenbarung, 1878,
pp. 36-37). Such a development, had it really occurred, might
be said to represent a movement of primitive freethought from
an unsatisfying monotheism to a polytheism that seemed better
to explain natural facts. A more plausible view of the process,
however, is that of von Bradke, to the effect that "the old
Indo-Germanic polytheism, with its pronounced monarchic apex, which
... constituted the religion of the pre-Vedic [Aryan] Hindus, lost
its monarchic apex shortly before and during the Rig-Veda period,
and set up for itself the so-called Henotheism [worship of deities
severally as if each were the only one], which thus represented
in India a time of religious decline; a decline that, at the end
of the period to which the Rig-Veda hymns belong, led to an almost
complete dissolution of the old beliefs. The earlier collection of
the hymns must have promoted the decline; and the final redaction
must have completed it. The collected hymns show only too plainly
how the very deity before whom in one song all the remaining
Gods bow themselves, in the next sinks almost in the dust before
another. Then there sounds from the Rig-Veda (x, 121) the wistful
question: Who is the God whom we should worship?" (Dyâus Asura,
Ahuramazda, und die Asuras, Halle, 1885, p. 115; cp. note, supra,
p. 30). On this view the growth of monotheism went on alongside
of a growth of critical unbelief, but, instead of expressing that,
provoked it by way of reaction. Dr. Muir more specifically argues
(Sanskrit Texts, v, 116) that in the Vedic hymns Varuna is a God
in a state of decadence; and, despite the dissent of M. Barth
(Religions of India, p. 18), this seems true. But the recession
of Varuna is only in the normal way of the eclipse of the old
Supreme God by a nearer deity, and does not suffice to prove a
growth of agnosticism. M. Fontane (Inde Védique, 1881, p. 305)
asserts on other grounds a popular movement of negation in the
Vedic period, but offers rather slender evidence. There is better
ground for his account of the system as one in which different
cults had the upper hand at different times, the devotees of
Indra rejecting Agni, and so on (pp. 310-11).

To meet such a doubt, a pantheistic view of things would naturally arise, and in the Vedas it often emerges. [134] Thus "Agni is all the Gods"; and "the Gods are only a single being under different names." [135] For ancient as for more civilized peoples such a doctrine had the attraction of nominally reconciling the popular cult with the skepticism it had aroused. Rising thus as freethought, the pantheistic doctrine in itself ultimately became in India a dogmatic system, the monopoly of a priestly caste, whose training in mystical dialectic made them able to repel or baffle amateur criticism. Such fortifying of a sophisticated creed by institutions--of which the Brahmanic caste system is perhaps the strongest type--is one of the main conditions of relative permanence for any set of opinions; yet even within the Brahmanic system, by reason, presumably, of the principle that the higher truth was for the adept and need not interfere with the popular cult, there were again successive critical revisions of the pantheistic idea.

Prof. Garbe (Philosophy of Anc. India, sect. on Hindu Monism)
argues that all monistic, and indeed all progressive, thinking in
ancient India arose not among the Brahmans, who were conscienceless
oppressors, but among the warrior caste; citing stories in the
Upanishads in which Brahmans are represented as receiving such
ideas from warriors. The thesis is much weakened by the Professor's
acceptance of Krishna as primarily a historic character, of the
warrior class. But there is ground for his general thesis, which
recognizes (p. 78) that the Brahmans at length assimilated the
higher thought of laymen. Max Müller puts it that "No nation was
ever so completely priestridden as the Hindus were under the sway
of the Brahmanic law. Yet, on the other side, the same people were
allowed to indulge in the most unrestrained freedom of thought,
and in the schools of their philosophy the very names of their
Gods were never mentioned. Their existence was neither denied
nor asserted...." (Selected Essays, 1881, ii, 244). "Sankhya
philosophy" [on which Buddhism is supposed to be based], "in
its original form, claims the name of an-îsvara, 'lordless' or
'atheistic,' as its distinctive title" (ibid. p. 283).

Of the nature of a freethinking departure, among the early
Brahmanists as in other societies, was the substitution of
non-human for human sacrifices--a development of peaceful
life-conditions which, though not primitive, must have ante-dated
Buddhism. See Tiele, Outlines, pp. 126-27 and refs.; Barth,
Religions of India, pp. 57-59; and Müller, Physical Religion,
p. 101. Prof. Robertson Smith (Religion of the Semites, p. 346)
appears to hold that animal sacrifice was never a substitute
for human; but his ingenious argument, on analysis, is found to
prove only that in certain cases the idea of such a substitution
having taken place may have been unhistorical. If it be granted
that human sacrifices ever occurred--and all the evidence goes
to show that they were once universal--substitution would be an
obvious way of abolishing them. Historical analogy is in favour
of the view that the change was forced on the priesthood from the
outside, and only after a time accepted by the Brahmans. Thus
we find the Khârvâkas, a school of freethinkers, rising in the
Alexandrian period, making it part of their business to denounce
the Brahmanic doctrine and practice of sacrifice, and to argue
against all blood sacrifices; but they had no practical success
(Tiele, p. 126) until Buddhism triumphed (Mitchell, Hinduism, 1885,
p. 106; Rhys Davids, tr. of Dialogues of the Buddha, 1899, p. 165).

In the earliest Upanishads the World-Being seems to have been figured as the totality of matter, [136] an atheistic view associated in particular with the teaching of Kapila, [137] who himself, however, was at length raised to divine status, [138] though his system continues to pass as substantially atheistic. [139] This view being open to all manner of anti-religious criticism, which it incurred even within the Brahmanic pale, [140] there was evolved an ideal formula in which the source of all things is "the invisible, intangible, unrelated, colourless one, who has neither eyes nor ears, neither hands nor feet, eternal, all-pervading, subtile, and undecaying." [141] At the same time, the Upanishads exhibit a stringent reaction against the whole content of the Vedas. Their ostensible object is "to show the utter uselessness--nay, the mischievousness--of all ritual performances; to condemn every sacrificial act which has for its motive a desire or hope of reward; to deny, if not the existence, at least the exceptional and exalted character of the Devas; and to teach that there is no hope of salvation and deliverance except by the individual self recognizing the true and universal self and finding rest there, where alone rest can be found." [142]

And the critical development does not end there. "In the old Upanishads, in which the hymns and sacrifices of the Veda are looked upon as useless, and as superseded by the higher knowledge taught by the forest-sages, they are not yet attacked as mere impositions. That opposition, however, sets in very decidedly in the Sutra period. In the Nirukta (i, 15) Yâska quotes the opinion of Kautsa, that the hymns of the Veda have no meaning at all." [143] In short, every form of critical revolt against incredible doctrine that has arisen in later Europe had taken place in ancient India long before the Alexandrian conquest. [144] And the same attitude continued to be common within the post-Alexandrian period; for Panini, who must apparently be dated then, [145] "was acquainted with infidels and nihilists"; [146] and the teaching of Brihaspati, [147] on which was founded the system of the Khârvâkas--apparently one of several sections of a freethinking school called the Lokâyatas [148] or Lokâyatikas--is extremely destructive of Vedic pretensions. "The Veda is tainted by the three faults of untruth, self-contradiction, and tautology.... The impostors who call themselves Vedic pandits are mutually destructive.... The three authors of the Vedas were buffoons, knaves, and demons: All the well-known formulas of the pandits, and all the horrid rites for the queen commanded in the Asvamedha--these were invented by buffoons, and so all the various kinds of presents to the priests; while the eating of flesh was similarly commanded by night-prowling demons." [149]

To what extent such aggressive rationalism ever spread it is now quite impossible to ascertain. It seems probable that the word Lokâyata, defined by Sanskrit scholars as signifying "directed to the world of sense," [150] originally, or about 500 B.C., signified "Nature-lore," and that this passed as a branch of Brahman learning. [151] Significantly enough, while the lore was not extensive, it came to be regarded as disposing men to unbelief, though it does not seem to have suggested any thorough training. At length, in the eighth century of our era, it is found applied as a term of abuse, in the sense of "infidel," by Kumârila in controversy with opponents as orthodox as himself; and about the same period Sankara connects with it a denial of the existence of a separate and immortal soul; [152] though that opinion had been debated, and not called Lokâyata, long before, when the word was current in the broader sense. [153] Latterly, in the fourteenth century, on the strength of some doggerel verses which cannot have belonged to the early Brahmanic Lokâyata, it stands for extreme atheism and a materialism not professed by any known school speaking for itself. [154] The evidence, such as it is, is preserved only in Sarva-darsana-samgraha, a compendium of all philosophical systems, compiled in the fourteenth century by the Vedantic teacher Mâdhavâchâra. [155] One source speaks of an early text-book of materialism, the Sutras of Brihaspati; [156] but this has not been preserved. Thus in Hindu as in later European freethought for a long period we have had to rely for our knowledge of freethinkers' ideas upon the replies made by their opponents. It is reasonable to conclude that, save insofar as the arguments of Brihaspati were common to the Khârvâkas and the Buddhists, [157] such doctrine as his or that of the later Lokâyatikas cannot conceivably have been more than the revolt of a thoughtful minority against official as well as popular religion; and to speak of a time when "the Aryan settlers in India had arrived at the conviction that all their Devas or Gods were mere names" [158] is to suggest a general evolution of rational thought which can no more have taken place in ancient India than it has done to-day in Europe. The old creeds would always have defenders; and every revolt was sure to incur a reaction. In the Hitopadesa or "Book of Good Counsel" (an undated recension of the earlier Panchatantra, "The Five Books," which in its first form may be placed about the fifth century of our era) there occur both passages disparaging mere study of the Sacred Books [159] and passages insisting upon it as a virtue in itself [160] and otherwise insisting on ritual observances. [161] They seem to come from different hands.

The phenomenon of the schism represented by the two divisions
of the Yazur Veda, the "White" and the "Black," is plausibly
accounted for as the outcome of the tendencies of a new and an
old school, who selected from their Brahmanas, or treatises of
ritual and theology, the portions which respectively suited
them. The implied critical movement would tend to affect
official thought in general. This schism is held by Weber to
have arisen only in the period of ferment set up by Buddhism;
but other disputes seem to have taken place in abundance in the
Brahmanical schools before that time. (Cp. Tiele, Outlines,
p. 123; Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., pp. 10, 27, 232; Max Müller,
Anthropol. Relig., 1892, pp. 36-37; and Rhys Davids, Buddhism,
p. 34.) Again, the ascetic and penance-bearing hermits, who were
encouraged by the veneration paid them to exalt themselves above
all save the highest Gods, would by their utterances of necessity
affect the course of doctrine. Compare the same tendency as seen
in Buddhism and Jainism (Tiele, pp. 135, 140).

But in the later form of the Vedânta, "the end of the Veda," a monistic and pantheistic teaching holds its ground in our own day, after all the ups and downs of Brahmanism, alongside of the aboriginal cults which Brahmanism adopted in its battle with Buddhism; alongside, too, of the worship of the Veda itself as an eternal and miraculous document. "The leading tenets [of the Vedânta] are known to some extent in every village." [162] Yet the Vedântists, again, treat the Upanishads in turn as a miraculous and inspired system, [163] and repeat in their case the process of the Vedas: so sure is the law of fixation in religious thought, while the habit of worship subsists.

The highest activity of rationalistic speculation within the Brahmanic fold is seen to have followed intelligibly on the most powerful reaction against the Brahmans' authority. This took place when their sphere had been extended from the region of the Punjaub, of which alone the Rig-Veda shows knowledge, to the great kingdoms of Southern India, pointed to in the Sutras, [164] or short digests of ritual and law designed for general official use. In the new environment "there was a well-marked lay-feeling, a widespread antagonism to the priests, a real sense of humour, a strong fund of common sense. Above all there was the most complete and unquestioned freedom of thought and expression in religious matters that the world had yet witnessed." [165]

The most popular basis for rejection of a given system--belief in another--made ultimately possible there the rise of a practically atheistic system capable, wherever embraced, of annulling the burdensome and exclusive system of the Brahmans, which had been obtruded in its worst form, [166] though not dominantly, in the new environment. Buddhism, though it cannot have arisen on one man's initiative in the manner claimed in the legends, even as stripped of their supernaturalist element, [167] was in its origin essentially a movement of freethought, such as could have arisen only in the atmosphere of a much mixed society [168] where the extreme Brahmanical claims were on various grounds discredited, perhaps even within their own newly-adjusted body. It was stigmatized as "the science of reason," a term equivalent to "heresy" in the Christian sphere; [169] and its definite rejection of the Vedas made it anti-sacerdotal even while it retained the modes of speech of polytheism. The tradition which makes the Buddha [170] a prince suggests an upper-class origin for the reaction; and there are traces of a chronic resistance to the Brahmans' rule among their fellow-Aryans before the Buddhist period.

"The royal families, the warriors, who, it may be supposed,
strenuously supported the priesthood so long as it was a question
of robbing the people of their rights, now that this was effected
turned against their former allies, and sought to throw off the
yoke that was likewise laid upon them. These efforts were, however,
unavailing: the colossus was too firmly established. Obscure
legends and isolated allusions are the only records left to us
in the later writings of the sacrilegious hands which ventured
to attack the sacred and divinely consecrated majesty of the
Brahmans; and these are careful to note at the same time the
terrible punishments which befel those impious offenders" (Weber,
Hist. Ind. Lit., p. 19).

The circumstances, however, that the Buddhist writings were from the first in vernacular dialects, not in Sanskrit, [171] and that the mythical matter which accumulated round the story of the Buddha is in the main aboriginal, and largely common to the myth of Krishna, [172] go to prove that Buddhism spread specially in the non-Aryan sphere. [173] Its practical (not theoretic) [174] atheism seems to have rested fundamentally on the conception of Karma, the transition of the soul, or rather of the personality, through many stages up to that in which, by self-discipline, it attains the impersonal peace of Nirvana; and of this conception there is no trace in the Vedas, [175] though it became a leading tenet of Brahmanism.

To the dissolvent influence of Greek culture may possibly be
due some part of the success of Buddhism before our era, and
even later. Hindu astronomy in the Vedic period was but slightly
developed (Weber, Hist. Ind. Lit., pp. 246, 249, 250); and "it
was Greek influence that first infused a real life into Indian
astronomy" (Id. p. 251; cp. Letronne, Mélanges d'Érudition, 1860
(?), p. 40; Narrien, Histor. Acc. of Orig. and Prog. of Astron.,
p. 33, and Lib. Use. Kn. Hist. of Astron., c. ii). This implies
other interactions. It is presumably to Greek stimulus that we must
trace the knowledge by Aryabhata (Colebrooke's Essays, ed. 1873,
ii, 404; cp. Weber, p. 257) of the doctrine of the earth's
diurnal revolution on its axis; and the fact that in India as in
the Mediterranean world the truth was later lost from men's hands
may be taken as one of the proofs that the two civilizations alike
retrograded owing to evil political conditions. In the progressive
period (from about 320 B.C. onwards for perhaps some centuries)
Greek ideas might well help to discredit traditionalism; and their
acceptance at royal courts would be favourable to toleration
of the new teaching. At the same time, Buddhism must have been
favoured by the native mental climate in which it arose.

The main differentiation of Buddhism from Brahmanism, again, is its ethical spirit, which sets aside formalism and seeks salvation in an inward reverie and discipline; and this element in turn can hardly be conceived as arising save in an old society, far removed from the warlike stage represented by the Vedas. Whatever may have been its early association with Brahmanism [176] then, it must be regarded as essentially a reaction against Brahmanical doctrine and ideals; a circumstance which would account for its early acceptance in the Punjaub, where Brahmanism had never attained absolute power and was jealously resisted by the free population. [177] And the fact that Jainism, so closely akin to Buddhism, has its sacred books in a dialect belonging to the region in which Buddhism arose, further supports the view that the reaction grew out of the thought of a type of society differing widely from that in which Brahmanism arose. Jainism, like Buddhism, is substantially atheistic, [178] and like it has an ancient monkish organization to which women were early admitted. The original crypto-atheism or agnosticism of the Buddhist movement thus appears as a product of a relatively high, because complex, moral and intellectual evolution. It certainly never impugned the belief in the Gods; on the contrary, the Buddha is often represented as speaking of their existence, [179] and at times as approving of their customary worship; [180] but he is never said to counsel his own order to pray to them; he makes light of sacrifice; and above all he is made quite negative as to a future life, preaching the doctrine of Karma in a sense which excludes individual immortality. [181] "It cannot be denied that if we call the old Gods of the Veda--Indra and Agni and Yama--Gods, Buddha was an atheist. He does not believe in the divinity of these deities. What is noteworthy is that he does not by any means deny their bare existence.... The founder of Buddhism treats the old Gods as superhuman beings." [182] Thus it is permissible to say both that Buddhism recognizes Gods and that it is practically atheistic.

"The fact cannot be disputed away that the religion of Buddha
was from the beginning purely atheistic. The idea of the Godhead
... was for a time at least expelled from the sanctuary of the
human mind, [183] and the highest morality that was ever taught
before the rise of Christianity was taught by men with whom the
Gods had become mere phantoms, without any altars, not even an
altar to the unknown God" (Max Müller, Introd. to the Science of
Religion, ed. 1882, p. 81. Cp. the same author's Selected Essays,
1881, ii, 300.)

"He [Buddha] ignores God in so complete a way that he does not even
seek to deny him; he does not suppress him, but he does not speak
of him either to explain the origin and anterior existence of man
or to explain the present life, or to conjecture his future life
and definitive deliverance. The Buddha knows God in no fashion
whatever" (Barthélemy Saint-Hilaire, Le Bouddha et sa Religion,
1866, p. v).

"Buddhism and Christianity are indeed the two opposite poles with
regard to the most essential points of religion: Buddhism ignoring
all feeling of dependence on a higher power, and therefore denying
the very existence of a supreme deity" (Müller, Introd. to Sc. of
Rel., p. 171).

"Lastly, the Buddha declared that he had arrived at [his]
conclusions, not by study of the Vedas, nor from the teachings
of others, but by the light of reason and intuition alone"
(Rhys Davids, Buddhism, p. 48). "The most ancient Buddhism
despises dreams and visions" (Id., p. 177). "Agnostic atheism
... is the characteristic of his [Buddha's] system of philosophy"
(Id., p. 207).

"Belief in a Supreme Being, the Creator and Ruler of the Universe,
is unquestionably a modern graft upon the unqualified atheism of
Sákya Muni: it is still of very limited recognition. In none of
the standard authorities ... is there the slightest allusion to
such a First Cause, the existence of which is incompatible with
the fundamental Buddhist dogma of the eternity of all existence"
(H. H. Wilson, Buddha and Buddhism, in Essays and Lectures,
ed. by Dr. R. Rost, 1862, ii, 361. Cp. p. 363).

On the other hand, the gradual colouring of Buddhism with popular mythology, the reversion (if, indeed, this were not early) to adoration and worship of the Buddha himself, and the final collapse of the system in India before the pressure of Brahmanized Hinduism, all prove the potency of the sociological conditions of success and failure for creeds and criticisms. Buddhism took the monastic form for its institutions, thus incurring ultimate petrifaction alike morally and intellectually; and in any case the normal Indian social conditions of abundant population, cheap food, and general ignorance involved an overwhelming vitality for the popular cults. These the orthodox Brahmans naturally took under their protection as a means of maintaining their hold over the multitude; [184] and though their own highest philosophy has been poetically grafted on that basis, as in the epic of the Mahâbhârata and in the Bhagavat Gita, [185] the ordinary worship of the deities of these poems is perforce utterly unphilosophical, varying between a primitive sensualism and an emotionalism closely akin to that of popular forms of Christianity. Buddhism itself, where it still prevails, exhibits similar tendencies. [186]

It is disputed whether the Brahman influence drove Buddhism
out of India by physical force, or whether the latter decayed
because of maladaptation to its environment. Its vogue for some
seven hundred years, from about 300 B.C. to about 400 A.C.,
seems to have been largely due to its protection and final
acceptance as a State religion by the dynasty of Chandragupta
(the Sandracottos of the Greek historians), whose grandson
Asoka showed it special favour. His rock-inscribed edicts (for
which see Max Müller, Introd. to Science of Rel., pp. 5-6, 23;
Anthrop. Relig., pp. 40-43; Rhys Davids, Buddhism, pp. 220-28;
Wheeler's Hist. of India, vol. iii, app. 1; Asiatic Society's
Journals, vols. viii and xii; Indian Antiquary, 1877, vol. vi)
show a general concern for natural ethics, and especially for
tolerance; but his mention of "The Terrors of the Future" among
the religious works he specially honours shows (if genuine) that
normal superstition, if ever widely repudiated (which is doubtful),
had interpenetrated the system. The king, too, called himself
"the delight of the Gods," as did his contemporary the Buddhist
king of Ceylon (Davids, Buddhism, p. 84). Under Asoka, however,
Buddhism was powerful enough to react somewhat on the West, then
in contact with India as a result of the Alexandrian conquest
(cp. Mahaffy, Greek World under Roman Sway, ch. ii; Weber's
lecture on Ancient India, Eng. tr., pp. 25-26; Indische Skizzen,
p. 28 [cited in the present writer's Christianity and Mythology,
p. 165]; and Weber's Hist of Ind. Lit., p. 255 and p. 309, note);
and the fact that after his time it entered on a long conflict
with Brahmanism proves that it remained practically dangerous to
that system. In the fifth and sixth centuries of our era Buddhism
in India "rapidly declined"--a circumstance hardly intelligible
save as a result of violence. Tiele, after expressly asserting the
"rapid decline" (Outlines, p. 139), in the next breath asserts that
there are no satisfactory proofs of such violence, and that, "on
the contrary, Buddhism appears to have pined away slowly" (p. 140:
contrast his Egypt. Rel., p. xxi). Rhys Davids, in his Buddhism,
p. 246 (so also Max Müller, Anthrop. Rel., p. 43), argues for a
process of violent extinction; but in his later work, Buddhist
India, he retracts this view and decides for a gradual decline
in the face of a Brahmanic revival. The evidences for violence
and persecution are, however, pretty strong. (See H. H. Wilson,
Essays, as cited, ii, 365-67.) Internal decay certainly appears
to have occurred. Already in Gautama's own life, according to the
legends, there were doctrinal disputes within his party (Müller,
Anthrop. Rel., p. 38); and soon heresies and censures abounded
(Introd. to Sc. of Rel., p. 23), till schisms arose and no fewer
than eighteen sects took shape (Davids, Buddhism, pp. 213-18).

Thus early in our inquiry we may gather, from a fairly complete historical case, the primary laws of causation as regards alike the progress and the decadence of movements of rationalistic thought. The fundamental economic dilemma, seen already in the life of the savage, presses at all stages of civilization. The credent multitude, save in the very lowest stages of savage destitution, always feeds and houses those who furnish it with its appropriate mental food; and so long as there remains the individual struggle for existence, there will always be teachers ready. If the higher minds in any priesthood, awaking to the character of their traditional teaching, withdraw from it, lower minds, howbeit "sincere," will always take their place. The innovating teacher, in turn, is only at the beginning of his troubles when he contrives, on whatever bases, to set up a new organized movement. The very process of organization, on the one hand, sets up the call for special economic sustenance--a constant motive to compromise with popular ignorance--and, on the other hand, tends to establish merely a new traditionalism, devoid of the critical impulse in which it arose. [187] And without organization the innovating thought cannot communicate itself, cannot hold its own against the huge social pressures of tradition.

In ancient society, in short, there could be no continuous progress in freethinking: at best, there could but be periods or lines of relative progress, the result of special conjunctures of social and political circumstance. So much will appear, further, from the varying instances of still more ancient civilizations, the evolution of which may be the better understood from our survey of that of India.

§ 3. MESOPOTAMIA

The nature of the remains we possess of the ancient Babylonian and Assyrian religions is not such as to yield a direct record of their development; but they suffice to show that there, as elsewhere, a measure of rationalistic evolution occurred. Were there no other ground for the inference, it might not unreasonably be drawn from the post-exilic monotheism of the Hebrews, who, drawing so much of their cosmology and temple ritual from Babylon, may be presumed to have been influenced by the higher Semitic civilizations in other ways also. [188] But there is concrete evidence. What appears to have happened in Babylonia and Assyria, whose religious systems were grafted on that of the more ancient Sumer-Akkadian civilization, is a gradual subordination of the numerous local Gods (at least in the thought of the more philosophic, including some of the priests) to the conception of one all-pervading power. This process would be assisted by that of imperialism; and in the recently-recovered code of Hammurabi we actually find references to Ilu "God" (as in the European legal phrase, "the act of God") without any further God-name. [189] On the other hand, the unifying tendency would be resisted by the strength of the traditions of the Babylonian cities, all of which had ancient cults before the later empires were built up. [190] Yet, again, peoples who failed in war would be in some measure led to renounce their God as weak; while those who clung to their faith would be led, as in Jewry, to recast its ethic. The result was a set of compromises in which the provincial and foreign deities were either treated genealogically or grouped in family or other relations with the chief God or Gods of the time being. [191] Certain cults, again, were either kept always at a higher ethical level than the popular one, or were treated by the more refined and more critical worshippers in an elevated spirit; [192] and this tendency seems to have led to conceptions of purified deities who underlay or transcended the popular types, the names of the latter being held to point to one who was misconceived under their grosser aspects. [193] Astronomical knowledge, again, gave rise to cosmological theories which pointed to a ruling and creating God, [194] who as such would have a specially ethical character. In some such way was reached a conception of a Creator-God as the unity represented by the fifty names of the Great Gods, who lost their personality when their names were liturgically given to him [195]--a conception which in some statements even had a pantheistic aspect [196] among a "group of priestly thinkers," and in others took the form of an ideal theocracy. [197] There is record that the Babylonian schools were divided into different sects, [198] and their science was likely to make some of these rationalistic. [199] Professor Sayce even goes so far as to say that in the later cosmogony, "under a thin disguise of theological nomenclature, the Babylonian theory of the universe has become a philosophical materialism." [200]

It might be taken for granted, further, that disbelief would
be set up by such a primitive fraud as the alleged pretence of
the priests of Bel Merodach that the God cohabited nightly with
the concubine set apart for him (Herodotos, i, 181-82), as was
similarly pretended by the priests of Amun at Thebes. Herodotos
could not believe the story, which, indeed, is probably a late
Greek fable; but there must have been some skeptics within the
sphere of the Semitic cult of sacred prostitution.

As regards freethinking in general, much would depend on the
development of the Chaldæan astronomy. That science, growing out of
primitive astrology (cp. Whewell, Hist. of the Induct. Sciences,
3rd ed. i, 108), would tend to discredit, among its experts,
much of the prevailing religious thought; and they seem to have
carried it so far as to frame a scientific theory of comets
(Seneca, citing Apollonius Myndius, Quaest. Nat., vii, 3;
cp. Lib. Use. Kn. Hist. of Astron., c. 3; E. Meyer, Gesch. des
Alterthums, i, 186; and Weber, Ind. Lit., p. 248). Such knowledge
would greatly favour skepticism, as well as monotheism and
pantheism. It was sought to be astrologically applied; but, as
the horoscopes varied, this was again a source of unbelief (Meyer,
p. 179). Medicine, again, made little progress (Herod., i, 197).

It can hardly be doubted, finally, that in Babylonia and Assyria
there were idealists who, like the Hebrew prophets, repudiated
alike image-worship and the religion of sacrifices. The latter
repudiation occurs frequently in later Greece and Rome. There,
as in Jerusalem, it could make itself heard in virtue of the
restrictedness of the power of the priests, who in imperial
Babylonia and Assyria, on the other hand, might be trusted to
suppress or override any such propaganda, as we have seen was
done in Brahmanical India.

Concerning image-worship, apart from the proved fact of pantheistic
doctrine, and the parallels in Egypt and India, it is to be noted
that Isaiah actually puts in the mouth of the Assyrian king
a tirade against the "kingdoms of the idols" or "false gods,"
including in these Jerusalem and Samaria (Isa. x, 10, 11). The
passage is dramatic, but it points to the possibility that in
Assyria just as in Israel a disbelief in idols could arise from
reflection on the spectacle of their multitude.

The chequered political history of Babylon and Assyria, however, made impossible any long-continued development of critical and philosophical thought. Their amalgamations of creeds and races had in a measure favoured such development; [201] and it was probably the setting up of a single rule over large populations formerly at chronic war that reduced to a minimum, if it did not wholly abolish, human sacrifice in the later pre-Persian empires; [202] but the inevitably subject state of the mass of the people, and the chronic military upset of the government, were conditions fatally favourable to ordinary superstition. The new universalist conceptions, instead of dissolving the special cults in pantheism, led only to a fresh competition of cults on cosmopolitan lines, all making the same pretensions, and stressing their most artificial peculiarities as all-important. Thus, when old tribal or local religions went proselytizing in the enlarged imperial field, they made their most worthless stipulations--as Jewish circumcision and abstinence from pork, and the self-mutilation of the followers of Cybelê--the very grounds of salvation. [203] Culture remained wholly in the hands of the priestly and official class, [204] who, like the priesthoods of Egypt, were held to conservatism by their vast wealth. [205] Accordingly we find the early religion of sorcery maintaining itself in the literature of the advanced empires. [206] The attitude of the Semitic priests and scribes towards the old Akkadic as a sacred language was in itself, like the use of sacred books in general, long a check upon new thought; [207] and though the Assyrian life seems to have set this check aside, by reason of the lack of a culture class in Assyria, the later Babylonian kingdom which rose on the fall of Assyria was too short-lived to profit much by the gain, being in turn overthrown in the second generation by Cyrus. It is significant that the conqueror was welcomed by the Babylonian priests as against their last king, the inquiring and innovating Nabonidos [208] (Nabu-nahid), who had aimed at a monarchic polytheism or quasi-monotheism. He is described as having turned away from Mardouk (Merodach), the great Babylonian God, who accordingly accepted Cyrus in his stead. It is thus clear that Cyrus, who restored the old state of things, was no strict monotheist of the later Persian type, but a schemer who relied everywhere on popular religious interests, and conciliated the polytheists and henotheists of Babylon as he did the Yahweh-worshipping Jews. [209] The Persian quasi-monotheism and anti-idolatry, however, already existed, and it is conceivable that they may have been intensified among the more cultured through the peculiar juxtaposition of cults set up by the Persian conquest.

Mr. Sayce's dictum (Hib. Lect., p. 314), that the later ethical
element in the Akkado-Babylonian system is "necessarily" due
to Semitic race elements, is seen to be fallacious in the light
of his own subsequent admission (p. 353) as to the lateness of
the development among the Semites. The difference between early
Akkadian and later Babylonian was simply one of culture-stage. See
Mr. Sayce's own remarks on p. 300; and compare E. Meyer (Gesch. des
Alt., i, 178, 182, 183), who entirely rejects the claim made for
Semitic ethics. See, again, Tiele, Outlines, p. 78, and Mr. Sayce's
own account (Anc. Em. of the East, p. 202) of the Phoenician
religion as "impure and cruel." Other writers take the line of
arguing that the Phoenicians were "not Semites," and that they
differed in all things from the true Semites (cp. Dr. Marcus
Dods, Israel's Iron Age, 1874, p. 10, and Farrar, as there
cited). The explanation of such arbitrary judgments seems to be
that the Semites are assumed to have had a primordial religious
gift as compared with "Turanians," and that the Hebrews in turn
are assumed to have been so gifted above other Semites. We shall
best guard against à priori injustice to the Semites themselves,
in the conjunctures in which they really advanced civilization,
by entirely discarding the unscientific method of explaining the
history of races in terms of hereditary character (see below, §
6, end).

§ 4. ANCIENT PERSIA

The Mazdean system, or worship of Ahura Mazda (Ormazd), of which we find in Herodotos positive historical record as an anti-idolatrous and nominally monotheistic creed [210] in the fifth century B.C., is the first to which these aspects can be ascribed with certainty. As the Jews are found represented in the Book of Jeremiah [211] (assumed to have been written in the sixth century B.C.) worshipping numerous Gods with images: and as polytheistic and idolatrous practices are still described in the Book of Ezekiel [212] (assumed to have been written during or after the Babylonian Captivity), it is inadmissible to accept the unauthenticated writings of ostensibly earlier prophets as proving even a propaganda of monotheism on their part, the so-called Mosaic law being known to be in large part of late invention and of Babylonian derivation. [213] In any case, the mass of the people were clearly image-worshippers. The Persians, on the other hand, can be taken with certainty to have had in the sixth century an imageless worship (though images existed for other purposes), with a supreme God set above all others. The Magian or Mazdean creed, as we have seen, was not very devoutly held by Cyrus; but Dareios a generation later is found holding it with zeal; and it cannot have grown in a generation to the form it then bore. It must therefore be regarded as a development of the religion of some section of the "Iranian" race, centering as it does round some deities common to the Vedic Aryans.