Religion

RELIGION. The treatment of this subject will fall into two distinct sections, A. Primitive Religion and B. The Higher Re ligions.

Definition of Primitive Religion.

Amongst the number less definitions of religion that have been suggested, those that have been most frequently adopted for working purposes by an thropologists are Tylor's and Frazer's. Sir E. B. Tylor in Primitive Culture (I), i. 424, proposes as a "minimum definition" of re ligion "the belief in spiritual beings." Objections to this definition on the score of incompleteness are, firstly, that, besides belief, practice must be reckoned with (since, as W. Robertson Smith has made clear in his Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, sqq.,ritual is in fact primary for primitive religion, whilst dogma and myth are secondary) ; secondly, that the outlook of such belief and practice is not exclusively towards the spiritual, un less this term be widened until it mean next to nothing, but is likewise towards the quasi-material, as will be shown presently. The merit of this definition, on the other hand, lies in its bilateral form, which calls attention to the need of characterizing both the religious attitude and the religious object to which the former has reference. The same form appears in Sir J. G. Frazer's definition in The Golden Bough (3rd ed.), i. 222. He understands by religion "a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life." He goes on to explain that by "powers" he means "conscious or personal agents." It is also to be noted that he is here definitely opposing religion to magic, which he holds to be based on the (implicit) assumption "that the course of nature is determined, not by the passions or caprice of personal beings, but by the operation of immutable laws acting mechani cally." His definition improves on Tylor's in so far as it makes worship integral to the religious attitude. By regarding the ob ject of religion as necessarily personal, however, he is led to ex clude much that the primitive man undoubtedly treats with awe and respect as exerting a mystic effect on his life. Further, in maintaining that the powers recognized by religion are always superior to man, he leaves unclassed a host of practices that display a bargaining, or even a hectoring, spirit on the part of those addressing them (see PRAYER). Threatening or beating a

fetish cannot be brought under the head of magic, even if we adopt Frazer's principle (op. cit. i. 225) that to constrain or coerce a personal being is to treat him as an inanimate agent; for such a principle is quite inapplicable to cases of mere terrorism, whilst it may be doubted if it even renders the sense of the magician's typical notion of his mode of operation, viz., as the bringing to bear of a greater mana or psychic influence (see be low) on what has less, and must therefore do as it is bidden. Such definitions, then, are to be accepted, if at all, as definitions of type, selective designations of leading but not strictly uni versal features. An encyclopaedic account, however, should rest rather on an exterior definition which can serve as it were to pigeon-hole the whole mass of significant facts. Such an exterior definition is suggested by E. Crawley in The Tree of Life, 209, where he points out that "neither the Greek nor the Latin lan guage has any comprehensive term for religion, except in the one lepa and in the other sacra, words which are equivalent to `sacred.' No other term covers the whole of religious phenomena, and a survey of the complex details of various worships results in showing that no other conception will comprise the whole body of religious facts." It may be added that we have here no gen eralization imported from a higher level of culture, but an idea or blend of ideas familiar to primitive thought. An important consequence of thus giving the study of primitive religion the wide scope of a comparative hierology is that magic is no longer divorced from religion, since the sacred will now be found to be coextensive with the magico-religious, that largely undifferentiated plasm out of which religion and magic slowly take separate shapes as society comes more and more to contrast legitimate with illicit modes of dealing with the sacred. We may define, then, the religious object as the sacred, and the corresponding religious attitude as consisting in such manifestation of feeling, thought and action in regard to the sacred as is held to conduce to the welfare of the community or to that of individuals considered as members of the community.