Part 15 (2/2)
The mind revolved round a new centre. It began to spin like a little eddy round its own axis. It studied ITSELF first and became deeply concerned about its own pleasures and pains, losing touch the while with the larger life which once dominated it--the life of Nature, the life of the Tribe. The old unity of the spirit, the old solidarity, were broken up.
(1) See Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness (Philadelphia, 1901), pp. 1 and 39; also W. McDougall's Social Psychology (1908), p. 146--where the same age is tentatively suggested.
I have touched on this subject before, but it is so important that the reader must excuse repet.i.tion. There came an inevitable severance, an inevitable period of strife. The magic mirror of the soul, reflecting nature as heretofore in calm and simple grace, was suddenly cracked across. The new self-conscious man (not all at once but gradually) became alienated from his tribe. He lapsed into strife with his fellows.
Ambition, vanity, greed, the love of domination, the desire for property and possessions, set in. The influences of fellows.h.i.+p and solidarity grew feebler. He became alienated from his great Mother. His instincts were less and less sure--and that in proportion as brain-activity and self-regarding calculation took their place. Love and mutual help were less compelling in proportion as the demands of self-interest grew louder and more insistent. Ultimately the crisis came. Cain murdered his brother and became an outcast. The Garden of Eden and the Golden Age closed their gates behind him. He entered upon a period of suffering--a period of labor and toil and sorrow such as he had never before known, and such as the animals certainly have never known. And in that distressful state, in that doleful valley of his long pilgrimage, he still remains to-day.
Thus has the canker of self-consciousness done its work. It would be foolish and useless to rail against the process, or to blame any one for it. It had to be. Through this dismal vale of self-seeking mankind had to pa.s.s--if only in order at last to find the True Self which was (and still remains) its goal. The pilgrimage will not last for ever. Indeed there are signs that the recent Great War and the following Events mark the lowest point of descent and the beginning of the human soul's return to sanity and ascent towards the heavenly Kingdom. No doubt Man will arrive again SOME day at the grace, composure and leisurely beauty of life which the animals realized long ago, though he seems a precious long time about it; and when all this nightmare of Greed and Vanity and Self-conceit and Cruelty and l.u.s.t of oppression and domination, which marks the present period, is past--and it WILL pa.s.s--then Humanity will come again to its Golden Age and to that Paradise of redemption and peace which has for so long been prophesied.
But we are dealing with the origins of Religion; and what I want the reader to see is that it was just this breaking up of the old psychologic unity and continuity of man with his surroundings which led to the whole panorama of the rituals and creeds. Man, centering round himself, necessarily became an exile from the great Whole. He committed the sin (if it was a sin) of Separation. Anyhow Nemesis was swift. The sense of loneliness and the sense of guilt came on him. The realization of himself as a separate conscious being necessarily led to his attributing a similar consciousness of some kind to the great Life around him. Action and reaction are equal and opposite. Whatever he may have felt before, it became clear to him now that beings more or less like himself--though doubtless vaster and more powerful--moved behind the veil of the visible world. From that moment the belief in Magic and Demons and G.o.ds arose or slowly developed itself; and in the midst of this turmoil of perilous and conflicting powers, he perceived himself an alien and an exile, stricken with Fear, stricken with the sense of Sin.
If before, he had experienced fear--in the kind of automatic way of self-preservation in which the animals feel it--he now, with fevered self-regard and excited imagination, experienced it in double or treble degree. And if, before, he had been aware that fortune and chance were not always friendly and propitious to his designs, he now perceived or thought he perceived in every adverse happening the deliberate persecution of the powers, and an accusation of guilt directed against him for some neglect or deficiency in his relation to them. Hence by a perfectly logical and natural sequence there arose the belief in other-world or supernatural powers, whether purely fortuitous and magical or more distinctly rational and personal; there arose the sense of Sin, or of offence against these powers; there arose a complex ritual of Expiation--whether by personal sacrifice and suffering or by the sacrifice of victims. There arose too a whole catalogue of ceremonies--ceremonies of Initiation, by which the novice should learn to keep within the good grace of the Powers, and under the blessing of his Tribe and the protection of its Totem; ceremonies of Eucharistic meals which should restore the lost sanct.i.ty of the common life and remove the sense of guilt and isolation; ceremonies of Marriage and rules and rites of s.e.x-connection, fitted to curb the terrific and demonic violence of pa.s.sions which else indeed might easily rend the community asunder. And so on. It is easy to see that granted an early stage of simple unreflecting nature-consciousness, and granting this broken into and, after a time, shattered by the arrival of SELF-consciousness there would necessarily follow in spontaneous yet logical order a whole series of religious inst.i.tutions and beliefs, which phantasmal and unreal as they may appear to us, were by no means unreal to our ancestors. It is easy also to see that as the psychological process was necessarily of similar general character in every branch of the human race and all over the world, so the religious evolutions--the creeds and rituals--took on much the same complexion everywhere; and, though they differed in details according to climate and other influences, ran on such remarkably parallel lines as we have noted.
Finally, to make the whole matter clear, let me repeat that this event, the inbreak of Self-consciousness, took place, or BEGAN to take place, an enormous time ago, perhaps in the beginning of the Neolithic Age.
I dwell on the word ”began” because I think it is probable that in its beginnings, and for a long period after, this newborn consciousness had an infantile and very innocent character, quite different from its later and more aggressive forms--just as we see self-consciousness in a little child has a charm and a grace which it loses later in a boastful or grasping boyhood and manhood. So we may understand that though self-consciousness may have begun to appear in the human race at this very early time (and more or less contemporaneously with the invention of very rude tools and unformed language), there probably did elapse a very long period--perhaps the whole of the Neolithic Age--before the evils of this second stage of human evolution came to a head. Max Muller has pointed out that among the words which are common to the various branches of Aryan language, and which therefore belong to the very early period before the separation of these branches, there are not found the words denoting war and conflict and the weapons and instruments of strife--a fact which suggests a long continuance of peaceful habit among mankind AFTER the first formation and use of language.
That the birth of language and the birth of self-consciousness were APPROXIMATELY simultaneous is a probable theory, and one favored by many thinkers; (1) but the slow beginnings of both must have been so very protracted that it is perhaps useless to attempt any very exact determination. Late researches seem to show that language began in what might be called TRIBAL expressions of mood and feeling (holophrases like ”go-hunting-kill-bear”) without reference to individual personalities and relations.h.i.+ps; and that it was only at a later stage that words like ”I” and ”Thou” came into use, and the holophrases broke up into ”parts of speech” and took on a definite grammatical structure. (2) If true, these facts point clearly to a long foreground of rude communal language, something like though greatly superior to that of the animals, preceding or preparing the evolution of Self-consciousness proper, in the forms of ”I” and ”Thou” and the grammar of personal actions and relations. ”They show that the plural and all other forms of number in grammar arise not by multiplication of an original 'I,' but by selection and gradual EXCLUSION from an original collective 'we.'” (3) According to this view the birth of self-consciousness in the human family, or in any particular race or section of the human family, must have been equally slow and hesitating; and it would be easy to imagine, as just said, that there may have been a very long and 'golden' period at its beginning, before the new consciousness took on its maturer and harsher forms.
(1) Dr. Bucke (Cosmic Consciousness) insists on their simultaneity, but places both events excessively far back, as we should think, i.e. 200,000 or 300,000 years ago. Possibly he does not differentiate sufficiently between the rude language of the holophrase and the much later growth of formed and grammatical speech.
(2) See A. E. Crawley's Idea of the Soul, ch. ii; Jane Harrison's Themis, pp. 473-5; and E. J. Payne's History of the New World called America, vol. ii, pp. 115 sq., where the beginning of self-consciousness is a.s.sociated with the break-up of the holophrase.
(3) Themis, p. 471.
All estimates of the Time involved in these evolutions of early man are notoriously most divergent and most difficult to be sure of; but if we take 500,000 years ago for the first appearance of veritable Man (h.o.m.o primigenius), (2) and (following Professor W. J. Sollas) (3) 30,000 or 40,000 years ago for the first tool-using men (h.o.m.o sapiens) of the Ch.e.l.lean Age (palaeolithic), 15,000 for the rock-paintings and inscriptions of the Aurignacian and Magdalenian peoples, and 5,000 years ago for the first actual historical records that have come down to us, we may perhaps get something like a proportion between the different periods. That is to say, half a million years for the purely animal man in his different forms and grades of evolution. Then somewhere towards the end of palaeolithic or commencement of neolithic times Self-consciousness dimly beginning and, after some 10,000 years of slow germination and pre-historic culture, culminating in the actual historic period and the dawn of civilization 40 or 50 centuries ago, and to-day (we hope), reaching the climax which precedes or foretells its abatement and transformation.
(2) Though Dr. Arthur Keith, Ancient Types of Man (1911), pp. 93 and 102, puts the figure at more like a million.
(3) See Ancient Hunters (1915); also Hastings's Encycl. art.
”Ethnology”; and Havelock Ellis, ”The Origin of War,” in The Philosophy of Conflict and other Essays.
No doubt many geologists and anthropologists would favor periods greatly LONGER than those here mentioned; but possibly there would be some agreement as to the RATIO to each other of the times concerned: that is, the said authorities would probably allow for a VERY long animal-man (1)-period corresponding to the first stage; for a much shorter aggressively 'self conscious' period, corresponding to the Second Stage--perhaps lasting only one thirtieth or fiftieth of the time of the first period; and then--if they looked forward at all to a third stage--would be inclined for obvious reasons to attribute to that again a very extended duration.
(1) I use the phrase 'animal-man' here, not with any flavor of contempt or reprobation, as the dear Victorians would have used it, but with a sense of genuine respect and admiration such as one feels towards the animals themselves.
However, all this is very speculative. To return to the difficulty about Language and the consideration of those early times when words adequate to the expression of religious or magical ideas simply did not exist, it is clear that the only available, or at any rate the CHIEF means of expression, in those times, must have consisted in gestures, in att.i.tudes, in ceremonial ACTIONS--in a more or less elaborate ritual, in fact. (1) Such ideas as Adoration, Thanksgiving, confession of Guilt, placation of Wrath, Expiation, Sacrifice, Celebration of Community, sacramental Atonement, and a score of others could at that time be expressed by appropriate rites--and as a matter of fact are often so expressed even now--MORE readily and directly than by language.
'Dancing'--when that word came to be invented--did not mean a mere flinging about of the limbs in recreation, but any expressive movements of the body which might be used to convey the feelings of the dancer or of the audience whom he represented. And so the 'religious dance' became a most important part of ritual.
(1) See ch. ix and xi.
So much for the second stage of Consciousness. Let us now pa.s.s on to the Third Stage. It is evident that the process of disruption and dissolution--disruption both of the human mind, and of society round about it, due to the action of the Second Stage--could not go on indefinitely. There are hundreds of thousands of people at the present moment who are dying of mental or bodily disease--their nervous systems broken down by troubles connected with excessive self-consciousness--selfish fears and worries and restlessness. Society at large is peris.h.i.+ng both in industry and in warfare through the domination in its organism of the self-motives of greed and vanity and ambition. This cannot go on for ever. Things must either continue in the same strain, in which case it is evident that we are approaching a crisis of utter dissolution, OR a new element must enter in, a new inspiration of life, and we (as individuals) and the society of which we form a part, must make a fresh start. What is that new and necessary element of regeneration?
It is evident that it must be a new birth--the entry into a further stage of consciousness which must supersede the present one. Through some such crisis as we have spoken of, through the extreme of suffering, the mind of Man, AS AT PRESENT CONSt.i.tUTED, has to die. (1) Self-consciousness has to die, and be buried, and rise again in a new form. Probably nothing but the extreme of suffering can bring this about. (2) And what is this new form in which consciousness has to rearise? Obviously, since the miseries of the world during countless centuries have dated from that fatal attempt to make the little personal SELF the centre of effort and activity, and since that attempt has inevitably led to disunity and discord and death, both within the mind itself and within the body of society, there is nothing left but the return to a Consciousness which shall have Unity as its foundation-principle, and which shall proceed from the direct SENSE AND PERCEPTION of such an unity throughout creation. The simple mind of Early Man and the Animals was of that character--a consciousness, so to speak, continuous through nature, and though running to points of illumination and foci of special activity in individuals, yet at no point essentially broken or imprisoned in separate compartments. (And it is this CONTINUITY of the primitive mind which enables us, as I have already explained, to understand the mysterious workings of instinct and intuition.) To some such unity-consciousness we have to return; but clearly it will be--it is not--of the simple inchoate character of the First Stage, for it has been enriched, deepened, and greatly extended by the experience of the Second Stage. It is in fact, a new order of mentality--the consciousness of the Third Stage.
(1) ”The mind must be restrained in the heart till it comes to an end,” says the Maitrayana-Brahmana-Upanishad.
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