II. ESSAYS ON THE SCIENCE

OF RELIGION
LAST ESSAYS
BY THE
Right Hon. Professor F. MAX MULLER, K.M.
LATE FOREIGN MEMBER OF THE FRENCH INSTITUTE
SECOND SERIES
ESSAYS ON THE SCIENCE OF RELIGION
LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON NEW YORK AND BOMBAY 1901
[. A/l rights reserved ]
2i r*. ''Ufa)
PREFACE
In the preface to the First Series of my father’s Last Essays, I expressed the hope that I should be able, at the expiration of a year from the date of publication of the last of his articles on the Religions of China, to bring out a further volume of his Essays not hitherto republished.
Thanks to the kindness of the editors of the various reviews in which these articles first appeared, I am enabled to offer to the public a Second Series of Last Essays, dealing exclu- sively with subjects connected with the Science of Religion, the favourite study of my father during the latter part of his literary career.
But besides this obligation to the editors of the Nineteenth Century and other periodicals, I am further indebted to the kindness of Mr. Archibald Douglas, who not only gave me permission to include his article on his visit to the Monastery of Himis in connexion with Notovitch’s Unknown Life of Christ, but also
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supplied me with a supplementary note giving- further details of his investigations.
The essay on Ancient Prayers has never, as far as I can ascertain, been published before. On looking through my father’s papers I dis- covered it among several unfinished essays, and as it was apparently ready for press I have included it in the present volume.
The last essay, c Is Man Immortal ? ’ has also never been published in England, though it appeared in several American newspapers some years ago under the auspices of the American Press Association. I am very grateful to that Association for supplying me with the manuscript which enables me to give it here as originally written. I have placed this article at the end of the volume, as it seemed to me that, whether they agree with its reasoning or not, every reader of my father’s writings will feel that the last paragraph forms a beautiful ending to his literary work, a fitting farewell to the world which he was always trying to instruct and improve.
W. G. Max Muller.
San Sebastian,
October 12, 1901.
CONTENTS
PAGE
Forgotten Bibles (1884) 1
Ancient Prayers ......... 36
Indian Fables and Esoteric Buddhism (1893) . . . 79
Esoteric Buddhism (a Reply by Mr. A. P. Sinnett) . 1 34
Esoteric Buddhism (a Rejoinder) . . . . .156
The Alleged Sojourn of Christ in India (1894). . . 171
Statement of the Chief Lama of Himis, by Mr. J. A.
Douglas . . . . . . , . .184
Postscript by F. M. M 202
Supplementary Note by Mr. J. A. Douglas . . . 203
The Kutho-Daw (1895) 210
Buddha’s Birthplace (1898) 231
Mohammedanism and Christianity (1894) .... 240
The Religions of China (1900) : —
(1) Confucianism 259
(2) Taoism . . . . . . . . . .278
(3) Buddhism and Christianity 300
The Parliament of Religions at Chicago (1894) . . .324
Why I am not an Agnostic (1894) ..... 346
Is Man Immortal ? 357
LAST ESSAYS.
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THE first series of Translations of the Sacred Books of the East 2, consisting of twenty-four volumes, is nearly finished, and a second series, which is to comprise as many volumes again, is fairly started. Even when that second series is finished, there will be enough material left for a third, and fourth series, and though I shall then long have ceased from my labours as editor, I rejoice to think that the reins when they drop out of my hands will be taken up and held by younger, stronger, and abler conductors.
I ought indeed to be deeply grateful to all who have helped me in this arduous, and, as it seemed at first, almost hopeless undertaking. 'VV'here will you get the Oriental scholars, I was asked, willing to give up their time to what is considered the most tedious and the most ungrateful task, translating difficult texts that have never been translated before, and not being allowed to display one scrap of recondite learn- ing in long notes and essays, or to skip one single passage, however corrupt or unintelligible ?
1 Nineteenth Century , June, 1884.
2 Forty-eight volumes are now printed. — Ed.
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And if you should succeed in assembling such a noble army of martyrs, where in these days will you find the publisher to publish twenty-four or forty- eight portly volumes, volumes which are meant to be studied, not to be skimmed, which will never be ordered by Mudie or Smith, and which conscientious reviewers may find it easier to cut up than to cut open ?
It was no easy matter, as I well knew, to find either enthusiastic scholars or enthusiastic publishers, but I did not despair, because I felt convinced that sooner or later such a collection of translations of the Fathers of the Universal Church would become an absolute necessity. My hope was at first that some very rich men who are tired of investing their money, would come forward to help in this undertaking, but though they seem willing to help in digging up mummies in Egypt or oyster-shells in Denmark, they evidently do not think that much good could come from digging up the forgotten Bibles of Buddhists or Fire-worshippers. I applied to learned Societies and Academies, but, of course, they had no disposable funds. At last the Imperial Academy of Vienna- all honour be to it — was found willing to lend a helping hand. But in 1875, just when I had struck my tent at Oxford to settle in Austria, the then Secretary of State for India, Lord Salisbury, and the Dean of Christ Church, Dr. Liddell, brought their combined influence and power of persuasion to bear on the Indian Council and the University Press at Oxford. The sinews of war were found for at least twenty-four volumes. In October, 1876, the under- taking was started, and, if all goes well, in October,
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1884, the first series of twenty-four volumes will stand on the shelves of every great library in Europe, America, and India. And more than that. Such has been the interest taken in this undertaking by the students of ancient language, religion, and philo- sophy, that even the unexpected withdrawal of the patronage of the India Office under Lord Salisbury’s successor1 could not endanger the successful continua- tion of this enterprise, at least during the few years that I may still be able to conduct it.
But while personally I rejoice that all obstacles which were placed in our way, sometimes from a quarter where we least expected it, have been removed, and that with the generous assistance of some of the best Oriental scholars of our age, some at least of the most important works illustrating the ancient religions of the East have been permanently rescued from oblivion and rendered accessible to every man who understands English, some of my friends, men whose judgement I value far higher than my own, wonder what ground there is for rejoicing. Some, more honest than the rest, told me that they had been great admirers of ancient Oriental wisdom till they came to read the translations of the Sacred Books of the East. They had evidently expected to hear the tongues of angels, and not the babbling of babes. But others took higher ground. What, they asked, could the philosophers of the nineteenth century expect to learn from the thoughts and utterances of men who had lived one, two, three, or four thousand years ago? When I humbly suggested that these
1 The expense of the Second Series has been entirely defrayed by the Oxford University Press.— Ed.
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books bad a purely historical interest, and that the history of religion could be studied from no other documents, I was told that since Comte’s time it was perfectly known how religion arose, and through how many stages it had to pass in its development from fetishism to positivism, and that whatever facts might be found in the Sacred Books of the East, they must all vanish before theories which, like all Comtian theories, are infallible and incontrovertible. If any- thing more was to be discovered about the origin and nature of religion, it was not from dusty historical documents, but from psycho-physiological experiments, or possibly from the creeds of living savages.
I was not surprised at these remarks. I had heard similar remarks many years ago, and they only convinced me that the old antagonism between the historical and theoretical schools of thought was as strong to-day as ever. This antagonism applies not only to the study of religion, but likewise to the study of language, mythology, and philosophy, in fact of all the subjects to which my own labours have more specially been directed for many years, and I therefore gladly seize this opportunity of clearly defining once for all the position which I have deliberately chosen from the day that I was a young recruit to the time when I have become a veteran in the noble army of research.
There have been, and there probably always will be, two schools of thought, the Historical and the Theore- tical. Whether by accident or by conviction I have been through life a follower of the Historical School, a school which in the study of every branch of human knowledge has but one and the same principle,
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namely, 1 Lecvrn to understand what is by learning to understand what has been.'
That school was in the ascendent when I began life. It was then represented in Germany by such names as Niebuhr for history, Savigny for law, Bopp for language, Grimm for mythology ; or, to mention more familiar names, in Trance by Cuvier for natural history ; in England by a whole school of students of history and nature, who took pride in calling them- selves the only legitimate representatives of the Baconian school of thought.
W hat a wonderful change has come over us during the last thirty or forty years ! The Historical School which, in the beginning of our century, was in the possession of nearly all professorial chairs, and wielded the sceptre of all the great Academies, has almost dwindled away, and its place has been taken by the Theoretical School, best known in England by its eloquent advocacy of the principles of evolution. This Theoretical School is sometimes called the synthetic , in opposition to the Historical School, which is analytic. It is also characterized as con- structive, or as reasoning a priori. In order to appreciate fully the fundamental difference between the two schools, let us see how their principles have been applied to such subjects as the science of language, religion, or antiquities.
The Historical School, in trying to solve the problem of the origin and growth of language, takes language as it finds it. It takes the living language in its various dialects, and traces each word back from century to century, until from the English now spoken in the streets, we arrive at the Saxon of
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Alfred, the Old Saxon of the Continent, and the Gothic of Ulfilas, as spoken on the Danube in the fifth century. Even here we do not stop. For finding that Gothic is hut a dialect of the great Teutonic stem of language, that Teutonic again is but a dialect of the great Aryan family of speech, we trace Teutonic and its collateral branches, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Slavonic, Persian, and Sanskrit, back to that Proto-Aryan form of speech which contained the seeds of all we now see before us, as germs, plants, flowers, fruits in the languages of the Aryan race.
After having settled this historical outline of the growth of our family of speech, the Aryan, we take any word, or a hundred, or a thousand words, and analyse them, or take them to pieces. That words can be taken to pieces, every grammar teaches us, though the process of taking them to pieces scienti- fically and correctly, dissecting limb from limb, is often as difficult and laborious as any anatomical preparation. Well, let us take quite a modern word— the American cute, sharp. We all know that cute is only a shortening of acute, and that acute is the Latin acutus, sharp. In acutus, again, we easily recognize the frequent derivative his, as in cornutus, horned, from cornu, horn. This leaves us acu, as in cicu-s, a needle. In this word the u can again he separated, for we know it is a very common deriva- tive, in such words as pec-u, cattle, Sanskrit pasti, from PA S, to tether ; or tanu, thin, Greek ravv, Lat. tenu-i-s, from TAN, to stretch. Thus we arrive in the end at AK, and here our analysis must stop, for if we were to divide AIv into A and Iv, we should get. as even Plato knew (Theaetetws, 205), mere letters, and
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no longer significant sounds or syllables. Now what is this AK ? We call it a root, which is, of course, a metaphor only. What we mean hy calling it a root is that it is the residuum of our analysis, and a residuum which itself resists all further analysis. But what is important is that it is not a mere theoretic postulate, but a fact, an historical fact, and at the same time an ultimate fact.
With these ultimate facts, that is, with a limited number of predicative syllables, to which every word in any of the Aryan languages can be traced back, or, as we may also express it, from which every word in these languages can be derived, the historical school of comparative philology is satisfied, at least to a certain extent ; for it has also to account for certain pronouns and adverbs and prepositions, which are not derived from predicative, but from demon- strative roots, and which have supplied, at the same time, many of those derivative elements, like tus in acu-tus, which we generally call suffixes or terminations.
After this analysis is finished, the historical student has done his work. AK, he says, conveys the concept of sharp, sharpness, being sharp or pointed. How it came to do that we cannot tell, or, at least, we cannot find out by historical analysis. But that it did so, we can prove by a number of words derived from AK in Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Slavonic, and Teutonic speech. For instance : Sanskrit asu, quick (originally sharp), Greek wkvs, Lat. oc-ior, Lat. ac-er , eager, acus, acuo, acies, acumen ; Greek; the highest point, our edge, A.-S. ecg ; also to egg on ; aKcov, a javelin, acidus, sharp, bitter, ague, a sharp
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fever, ear of corn, Old High German ahir, Gothic aks, Lat. acus , aceris, husk of grain, and many more.
Let us now look at the Theoretical School and its treatment of language. How could language arise? it says ; and it answers, Why, we see it every day. We have only to watch a child, and we shall see that a child utters certain sounds of pain and joy, and very soon after imitates the sounds which it hears. It says Ah ! when it is surprised or pleased ; it soon says Baa ! when it sees a lamb, and Bow-wow ! when it sees a dog. Language, we are told, could not arise in any other way ; so that interjections and imitations must be considered as the ultimate, or rather the primary facts of language, while their transition into real words is, we are assured, a mere question of time.
This theory seems to be easily confirmed by a number of words in all languages, which still exhibit most clearly the signs of such an origin; and still further, by the fact that these supposed rudiments of human speech exist, even at an earlier stage, in the development of animal life, namely, in the sounds uttered by many animals ; though, curiously enough, far more fully and frequently by our most distant ancestors, the birds, than by our nearest relation, the ape.
It is not surprising, therefore, that all who believe in a possible transition from an ape to a man should gladly have embraced this theory of language. The only misfortune is that such a theory, though it easily explains words which really require no explanation, such as crashing, cracking, creaking, crunching, scrunching, leaves us entirely in the lurch when we come to deal with real words — I mean words expressive
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of general concepts, such as man, tree, name, law — in fact, nine-tenths of our dictionary.
I certainly do not wish to throw unmerited contempt on this Theoretical School. Far from it. We want the theorist quite as much as the historian. The one must check the other, nay, even help the other, just as every government wants an opposition to keep it in order, or, I ought perhaps to say, to give it from time to time new life and vigour. I only wished to show by an example or two, what is the real differ- ence between these two schools, and what I meant when I said that, whether by temperament, or by education, or by conviction, I myself had always belonged to the Historical School.
Take now the science of religion, and we shall find again the same difference of treatment between the historian and the theorist.
The theorist begins by assuring us that all men were originally savages, or, to use a milder term, children. Therefore, if we wish to study the origin of religion, we must study children and savages.
Now at the present moment some savages in Africa, Australia, and elsewhere are supposed to be fetish- worshippers. Therefore we are assured that five thousand or ten thousand years ago religion must have begun with a worship of fetishes — that is, of stones, and shells, and sticks, and other inanimate objects.
Again, children are very apt not only to beat their dolls, but even to punish a chair or a table if they have hurt themselves against it. This shows that they ascribe life and personality — nay, something like human nature — to inanimate objects, and hence we
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are told that savages would naturally do the same. A savage, in fact, is made to do everything that an anthropologist wishes him to do ; but, even then, the question of all questions, why he does what he is supposed to do, is never asked. We are told that he Avorships a stone as his god, but how he came to possess the idea of God, and to predicate it of the stone, is called a metaphysical question of no interest to the student of anthropology — that is, of man. If, however, we press for an answer to this all-important question, we are informed that animism, personifica- tion, and anthropomorphism are the three well-known agencies which fully account for the fact that the ancient inhabitants of India, Greece, and Italy believed that there was life in the rivers, the mountains, and the sky ; that the sun, and the moon, and the dawn were cognizant of the deeds of men, and, finally, that Jupiter and Juno, Mars and Venus, had the form and the beauty, the feelings and passions of men. We might as well be told that all animals are hungry because they have an appetite.
We read in many of the most popular works of the day how, from the stage of fetishism, there was a natural and necessary progress to polytheism, monotheism, and atheism, and after these stages have been erected one above the other, all that remains is to fill each staije with illustrations taken from every race that ever had a religion, whether these races were ancient or modern, savage or civilized, genealogically related to each other, or perfect strangers.
Again, I must guard most decidedly against being supposed to wish to throw contempt or ridicule on
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this school. Far from it. I differ from it ; I have no taste for it ; I also think it is often very misleading. But to compare the thoughts and imaginations of savages and civilized races, of the ancient Egyptians, for instance, and the modern Hottentots, has its value, and the boldest combinations of the Theoretic School have sometimes been confirmed in the most unexpected manner by historical research.
Let us see now how the Historical School goes to work in treating of the origin and growth of religion. It begins by collecting all the evidence that is accessible, and classifies it. First of all, religions are divided into those that have sacred books, and those that have not. Secondly, the religions which can be studied in books of recognized or canonical authority, are arranged genealogically. The New Testament is traced back to the Old, the Koran to both the New and Old Testaments. This gives us one class of religions, the Semitic.
Then, again, the sacred books of Buddhism, of Zoroastrianism, and of Brahmanism are classed together as Aryan, because they all draw their vital elements from one and the same Proto-Aryan source. This gives us a second class of religions, the Aryan.
Outside the pale of the Semitic and Aryan religions, we have the two book-religions of China, the old national traditions collected by Confucius, and the moral and metaphysical system of Lao-tse. This gives us a class of Turanian religions. The study of those religions which have sacred books is in some respects eas}’-, because we have in these books authoritative evidence on which our further reasonings and conclusions can be safely based. But, in other
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respects, the very existence of these books creates new difficulties, because, after all, religions do not live in books only, but in human hearts, and where we have to deal with Vedas, and Avestas, and Tripitakas, Old and New Testaments, and Korans, we are often tempted into taking the book for the religion.
Still the study of book-religions, if we once have mastered their language, admits, at all events, of more definite and scientific treatment than that of native religions which have no books, no articles, no tests, no councils, no pope. Any one who attempts to describe the religion of the ancient Greeks and Romans — I mean their real faith, not their mythology, their ceremonial, or their philosophy — knows the immense difficulty of such a task. And yet we have here a large literature, spread over many centuries, we know their language, we can even examine the ruins of their temples.
Think after that, how infinitely greater must be the difficulty of forming a right conception, say, of the religion of the Red Indians, the Africans, the Australians. Their religions are probably as old as their languages, that is, as old as our own language ; but we know nothing of their antecedents, nothing but the mere surface of to-day, and that immense surface explored in a few isolated spots only, and often by men utterly incapable of understanding the language and the thoughts of the people. And yet we are asked to believe by the followers of the Theoretic School that this mere surface detritus is in reality the granite that underlies all the religions of the ancient world, more primitive than the Old
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Testament, more intelligible than the Veda, more instructive than the mythological language of Greece and Rome. It may be so. The religious map of the world may show as violent convulsions as the geological map of the earth. All I say to the enthusiastic believers in this contorted evolution of religious thought is, let us wait till we know a little more of Hottentots and Papuans ; let us wait till we know at least their language, for otherwise we may go hopelessly wrong.
The Historical School, in the meantime, is carrying on its more modest work by publishing and translating the ancient records of the great religions of the world, undisturbed by the sneers of those who do notfind in the Sacred Books of the East what they, in their ignorance, expected — men, who, if they were geologists would no doubt turn up their noses at a kitchen- midden, because it did not contain their favourite lollypops. Where there are no sacred texts to edit and to translate, the true disciples of the Historical School — men such as, for instance, Bishop Caldwell or Dr. Hahn in South Africa., Dr. Brinton or Horatio Hale in North America
do not shrink from the drudgery of learning the dialects spoken by savage tribes, gaining their con- fidence, and gathering at last from their lips some records of their popular traditions, their ceremonial customs, some prayers, it may be, and some confession of their ancient faith. But even with all these materials at his disposal, the historical student does not rush at once to the conclusion that either in the legends of the Eskimos or in the hymns of the Vedic Aiyas, we find the solution of all the riddles in the science of religion. He only says that we are not
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likely to find any evidence much more trustworthy, and that therefore we are justified in deriving certain lessons from these materials. And what is the chief lesson to be learnt from them ? It is this, that they contain certain words and concepts and imaginations which are as yet inexplicable, which seem simply irrational, and require for their full explanation ante- cedents which are lost to us ; but that they contain also many words and concepts and imaginations which are perfectly intelligible, which presuppose no antecedents, and which, whatever their date may be, may be called primary and rational. However strange it may seem to us, there can be no doubt that the perception of the Unknown or the Infinite was with many races as ancient as the perception of the Known or the Finite, that the two were, in fact, inseparable. To men who lived on an island, the ocean was the Unknown, the Infinite, and became in the end their God. To men who lived in valleys, the rivers that fed them and whose sources were unapproachable, the mountains that protected them, and whose crests were inaccessible, the sky that overshadowed them, and whose power and beauty were unintelligible, these were their unknown beings, their infinite beings, their bright and kind beings, what they called their Devas, their £ Brights/ the same word which, after passing through many changes, still breathes in our Divinity.
This unconscious process of theogony is historically attested, is intelligible, requires no antecedents, and is, so far, a primary process. How old it is, who would venture to ask or to tell ? All that the Historical School ventures to assert is that it explains one side of the origin of religion, namely, the gradual process
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of naming or conceiving the Infinite. While the Theoretic School takes the predicate of God, when applied to a fetish, as granted, the Historical School sees in it the result of a long-continued evolution of thought, beginning with the vague consciousness of something invisible, unknown, and unlimited, which gradually assumes a more and more definite shape through similes, names, myths, and legends, till at last it is divested again of all names, and lives within us as the invisible, inconceivable, unnameable — the infinite God.
I need hardly say th^rt though in the science of religion as in the science of language, all my sympathies are with the Historical School, I do not mean to deny that the Theoretical School has likewise done some good work. Let both schools work on, carefully and honestly, and who knows but that their ways, which seem so divergent at present, may meet in the end.
Nowhere, perhaps, can we see the different spirit in which these two schools, the Historical and the Theoretical, set to work, more clearly than in what is called by preference the Science of Man, Anthropology ; or the Science of People, Ethnology ; or more generally the science of old things, of the works of ancient men, Archaeology. The Theoretic School begins, as usual, with an ideal conception of what man must have been in the beginning. According to some, he was the image of his Maker, a perfect being, but soon destined to fall to the level of ordinary humanity. According to others, he began as a savage, whatever that may mean, not much above the level of the beasts of the field, and then had to work his way up through sue-.
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cessive stages which are supposed to follow each othei by a kind of inherent necessity. First comes e stage of the hunter and fisherman then that of the
breeder of cattle, the tiller of the soil, and lastly that of the founder of cities.
As man is defined as an animal which uses tools, we are told that according to the various materials of which these tools were made, man must again by necessity have passed through what are called the t stages or ages of stone, bronze, and non, reusing by means of these more and more perfect tools to what we might call the age of steel and steam and electricity, in which for the present civilization seems to culminate. Whatever discoveries are made by excavating the ruins of ancient cities by opening tombs, by ransacking kitchen-middens, by explon once more the flint-mines of prehistoric races, all must submit to the fundamental theory, and each specimen of bone or stone or bronze or iron must take the place drawn out for it within the lines and limits of an
infallible system. .
The Historical School takes again the very opposite line It begins with no theoretical expectations with no logical necessities, but takes its spade and shovel to see what there is left of old things - it describes them, arranges them, classifies them, and thus hopes in the end to understand and explain them. W hen a Schliemann begins his work at Hissarl.k he >g away, notes the depth at which each relic has been found, places similar relics side by side, unconcern whether iron comes before bronze, or bronze before flint. Let me quote the words of a young and very careful archaeologist, Mr. Arthur Evans, in describing
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this kind of work, and the results which we obtain from it h
‘ I'1 the topmost stratum of Hissarlik,’ lie writes ‘(which some people like to call Troy), extending six feet down, we find remains of the Roman and Macedonian Ilios, and the Aeolic colony ; and the fragments of archaic Greek pottery discovered (hardly dis- tinguishable from that of Sparta and Mykenai) take us back already to the end of the first millennium before our era.
Below this, one superposed above the other, lie the remains of no less than six successive prehistoric settlements, reaching down to over fifty feet below the surface of the hill. The formation of this vast superincumbent mass by artificial and natural causes must have taken a long series of centuries ; and yet, when we come to examine the lowest deposits, the remains of the first and second cities, we are struck at once with the relatively high state of civilization at which the inhabitants of this spot had already arrived.
The food-remains show a people acquainted with agriculture and cattle-rearing, as well as with hunting and fishing. The use of bronze was known, though stone implements continued to be used for certain purposes, and the bronze implements do not show any of the refined forms — notably th e fibulae — characteristic of the later Bronze Age.
Trade and commerce evidently were not wanting. Articles de luxe of gold, enamel, and ivory were already being imported from lands more directly under Babylonian and Egyptian influence, and jade axelieads came by prehistoric trade-routes from the Kuen- Lun, in China. The local potters were already acquainted with the use of the wheel, and the city walls and temples of the second city evince considerable progress in the art of building.’
Such is the result of the working of the Historical School. It runs its shaft down from above ; the Theoretical School runs its shaft up from below. It may be that they are both doing good work, but such is the strength of temperament and taste, even among scientific men, that you will rarely see the same person working in both mines ; nay, that not seldom 37°u hear the same disparaging remarks made by one
1 Academy, December 29, 1883.
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party and the other, which you may he accustomed to hear from the promoters of rival gold-mines in
India or in the south of Africa.
I might show the same conflict between Historical and Theoretical research in almost every branch of human knowledge. But, of course, we are all most familiar with it through that important controversy, which has occupied the present generation more than anything else, and in which almost every one of us has taken part and taken sides— I mean the con- troversy about Evolution.
It seems almost as if I myself had lived m pre- historic times, when I have to confess that, as a young student, I witnessed the downfall of the theory of Evolution which, for a time, had ruled supreme m the Universities of Germany, particularly m the domain of Natural History and Biology. In the school of Oken, in the first philosophy of Schelling,. in the eloquent treatises of Goethe, all was Evolution, De- velopment, or as it was called in German, Das 11 erden, the Becoming. The same spirit pervaded the philo- sophy of Hegel. According to him, the whole world was an evolution, a development by logical necessity, to which all facts must bow. If they would not, taut pis 'pour les f aits.
I do not remember the heyday of that school, but I still remember its last despairing struggles. I still remember at school and at the University rumours of Carbon, half solid, half liquid, the famous TJrscMeim now called Protoplasm, the Absolute Substance out of which everything was evolved. I remember the more or less amusing discussions about the less of the tail, about races supposed to be still in possession of that
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ancestral relic. I well remember my own particular teacher, the great Greek scholar Gottfried Hermann 1, giving great offence to his theological colleagues by publishing an essay in 1840 in which he tried to prove the descent of man from an ape. Allow me to quote a few extracts from this rare and little noticed essay. As the female is always less perfect than the male, Hermann argued that the law of development required that Eve must have existed before Adam, not Adam before Eve. Quoting the words of Ennius —
‘ Simia quam similis, turpissima bestia, nobis,’ he goes on in his own peculiar Latin : —
Ex hac nobili gente quid dubitemus unam aliquando simiam exortam putare, quae paullo minus belluina facie et indole esset ? Ea, sive illam Evam sive Pandoram appellare placet, quum ex alio simio gravida facta esset, peperit, ut saepenumero fieri constat, filium matri quam patri similiorem, qui primus homo fuit.
Haec ergo est hominis generisque humani origo, non ilia quidem valde honesta, sed paullo tamen honestior multoque probabilior, quam si ex luto aqua permixto, cui anima fuerit inspirata, genus duceremus.’
Surely Gottfried Hermann was a bolder man than even Darwin, and to me who had attended his lectures at Leipzig in 1841, Darwin’s Descent of Man, pub- lished in 1871, was naturally far less novel and startling by its theory than by the facts by which that theory was once more supported. Kant’s philo- sophy also had familiarized students of Anthropology with the same ideas. For he, too, towards the end of his Anthropologie, had spoken of a third period in the development of nature, when an Oran-Utano- or
O
Evam ante Adamum creatam fuisse, sive de quodam communi apud Mosen et Hesiodum errore circa creationem generis humani,’ in Ilgen s Zeitschrift fur die histor. Theologie , 1840, B. X. pp. 61-70.
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Chimpanzee may develop his organs of locomotion, touch, and speech to the perfection of human organs, raise his brain to an organ of thought, and slowly elevate himself by social culture.
But this was not all. Oken (1779-1851) and his disciples taught that the transition from inorganic to organic nature was likewise a mere matter of deve- lopment. The first step, according to him,, was the formation of rising bubbles, which he called infusoria, and the manifold repetition of which led, as he taught, to the formation of plants and animals. The plant was represented by him as an imperfect animal, the animal as an imperfect man. To doubt that the various races of men were descended from one pair was considered at that time, and even to the. days ot Prichard, not only a theological, but a biological heresy. All variety was traced back to unity am in the beginning there was nothing but Being ; which Being, coming in conflict with Not-being, entered upon& the process of Becoming, of development,, of evolution. While this philosophy, was still being preached in some German universities, a sharp re- action took place in others, followed by the quick ascendency of that Historical School of which I spoke before. It was heralded in Germany by such men as Niebuhr, Savigny, Bopp, Grimm, Otfried Muller, Johannes Muller, the two Humboldts, and many others whose names are less known in England,, bu who did excellent work, each in his own special line.
I have tried to describe the general character 01 that school, and I have to confess that during the whole of my life I have remained a humble disciple of it. I am not blind to its weak points. It fixes
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its eye far too much on the individual; it sees differences everywhere, and is almost blind to simi- larities. Hence the bewildering mass of species which it admitted in Botany and Zoology. Hence its strong piotest against the common origin of mankind ; hence its still stronger protest against the transition from inorganic to organic life, from the plant to the beast, from the beast to the man. Hence, in the science of language, its reluctance to admit even the possibility of a common origin of human speech, and, in the science of religion, its protest against deriving the reli- gion of civilized races from a supposed anterior stage of fetishism. Hence in Geology its rejection of Plutonic and Volcanic theories, and its careful obser- vation of the changes that have taken place, or are still taking place, on the surface of the earth, within, or almost within, the historical recollection of man.
In the careful anatomy of the eye by Johannes Muller, and his philosophical analysis of the condi- tions of the process of seeing, we have a specimen of what I should call the best work of the Historical School, even in physical science. In Mr. Herbert Spencer’s account of the origin of the eye, we have a specimen of what I call the best work of the Theoretical School. Mr. Spencer tells us that what we now call the eye consisted originally of a few pigmentary grains under the outermost dermal layer, and that rudimentary vision is constituted by the wave of disturbance which a sudden change in the state of these pigmentary grains propagates through the body ; or, to put it into plain English, that the eye began with some sore place in the skin, sensitive to light, which smarted or tickled, and thus developed
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in time into what is now the most wonderful mechan- ism, as described by Johannes Muller, Helmholtz, and others.
Now I have little doubt that many of my readers who have patiently followed my argument up to this point, will say to themselves : ‘ What then about Darwinism V Is that historical 01 theoretic 1 Is it a mere phase in the evolution of thought, 01 is it something permanent, and beyond the reach of further development ? Such a question is not easy to answer. Nothing is so misleading as names— I mean, even such names as materialism, idealism, lealism, and all the rest— which, after all, admit of some kind of definition. But when we use a proper name— the name of a philosopher— and then speak of all he has been and thought and taught, as his ism , such as Puseyism or Darwinism, the confusion becomes quite chaotic. And with no one is this more the case than with Darwin. The difference between Darwin and many who call themselves Darwinians, is as great at least as that between the horse and the mule. But Darwin himself is by no means a man who can he easily defined and classified. The very greatness and power of Darwin seem to me to consist in his com- bining the best qualities of what I have called the Historical and Theoretical Schools. So long as he observes and watches the slow transition of individual peculiarities into more or less permanent varieties ; so long as he exhibits the changes that take place before our very eyes by means of artificial breeding, as in the case of pigeons ; so long as he shows that many of the numberless so-called species among plants or animals share all that is essential in
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common, and differ by accidental peculiarities only ; so long as be traces living species back to extinct species, the remains of which have been preserved to us in the geological archives of our globe ; so long, in fact, as he goes backward, step by step, and opens to us page after page in the forgotten book of life, he is one of the greatest and most successful representa- tives of the Historical School. But when his love of systematic uniformity leads him to postulate four beginnings for the whole realm of organic life, though not yet one, like his followers ; when he begins to sketch a possible genealogical tree of all generations of living things, though not yet with the heraldic minuteness of his pupil, Professor Haeckel ; when he argues that because natural selection can account for certain very palpable changes, as between the wolf and the spaniel, it may also account for less palpable differences, as between the ape and the man, though no real man of science would venture to argue in that way ; when, in fact, he allows his hopes to get the better of his fears, he becomes a follower and a very powerful supporter of the Theoretic School.
It may be the very combination of these two characters which explains the enormous influence which Darwin’s theories have exercised on the present generation ; but, if so, we shall see in that combina- tion the germs of a new schism also, and the con- ditions of further growth. Great as was Darwin’s conscientiousness, we cannot deny that occasionally his enthusiasm, or his logical convictions, led him to judge of things of which he knew nothing, or very little. He had convinced himself that man was genealogically descended from an animal. That
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was as yet merely a theoretical conviction, as all honest zoologists — I shall only mention Professor Vii- ch o w — now fully admit. As language had been pointed out as a Rubicon which no beast had ever crossed, Darwin lent a willing ear to those who think that they can derive language, that is, real logos , from interjections and mimicry, by a process of spontaneous evolution, and produced himself some most persuasive arguments. We know how able, how persuasive a pleader Darwin could be. When he wished to show how man could have descended from an animal which was born hairy and remained so during life1, he could not well maintain that an animal without hair was fitter to survive than an animal with hair. He there- fore wished us to believe that our female semi-human progenitors lost their hair by some accident, were, as Hermann said, ‘ minus belluina facie et indole,, and that in the process of sexual selection this partial or complete baldness was considered an attraction, and was thus perpetuated from mother to son. It was difficult, no doubt, to give up Milton’s Eve for a semi- human progenitor, suffering, it may be, from lepiosy or leucoderma, yet Darwin, like Gottfried Hermann, nearly persuaded us to do so. However, in defending so hopeless, or, at all events, so unfortified a position as the transition of the cries of animals into the language of man, even so great a general as Darwin undoubtedly was will occasionally encounter defeat, and, I believe I may say without presumption, that, to speak of no other barrier between man and beast, the barrier of language remains as unshaken as ever,
1 Beseem of Man, ii. p. 377, where more details maybe found as to the exact process of baldness or denudation in animals.
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and renders every attempt at deriving man genealogi- cally from any known or unknown ape, for the present at least, impossible, or, at all events, unscientific.
After having described, however briefly and imper- fectly, the salient features of the two great schools of thought, the Historical and the Theoretical, I wish in a few words to set forth the immense advantage which the followers of the Historical School enjoy over the mere theorist, not only in dealing with scientific pro- blems, but likewise in handling the great problems of our age, the burning questions of religion, philosophy, morality, and politics.
History, as I said before, teaches us to understand what is by teaching us to understand what has been. All our present difficulties are difficulties of our own making. All the tangles at which we are pulling were made either by ourselves, or by those who came before us. Who else should have made them ? The Historical School, knowing how hopeless it is to pull and tear at a tangled reel by main force, quietly takes us behind the scenes, and shows us how first one thread and then another and a third, and in the end hundreds and thousands of threads went wrong, but how in the beginning they lay before man’s eyes as even and as regular as on a weaver’s loom.
Men who possess the historical instinct, and who whenever they have to deal with any of the grave problems of our age always ask how certain difficul- ties and apparent contradictions first arose, are what we should call practical men, and, as a rule, they are far more successful in unravelling knotty questions than the man who has a theory and a remedy ready for everything, and who actually prides himself on
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his ignorance of the past. I think I can best make my meaning’ clear by taking an instance. W hethei Dean Stanley was what is now called a scientific historian, a very laborious student of ancient chroni- cles and charters, is not for me to say ; but if I weie asked to define his mind, and his attitude towards all the burning questions of the day, whether in politics, or morality, or religion, I should say it was historical. He was a true disciple of the Historical School.
I could show it by examining the position he took in dealing with some of the highest questions of theology. But I prefer, as an easier illustration, to consider his treatment of one of the less exciting questions, the question of vestments. Incredible as it may seem, it is a fact nevertheless that not many years ago a controversy about surplices, and albs, and dalmatics, and stoles raged all over England. The question by whom, at what time, and in what place, the surplice should be worn, divided brothei fiom brother, and father from child, as if that piece of white linen possessed some mysterious power, or could exercise some miraculous influence on the spirit of the wearer. Any one who knew Stanley would know how little he cared for vestments or garments, and how difficult he would have found it to take sides, either right or left, in a controversy about millinery or ritual. But what did he do 1 ‘ Let us look at the
surplice historically ,’ he said. What is a surplice 1 —and first of all, what is the historical origin or the etymology of the word. Surplice is the Latin super- pelliciuvi. Super -pellicium means what is worn over a fur or fur-jacket. Now this fur-jacket was not worn by the primitive Christians in Rome, or Constanti-
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nople, or Jerusalem, nor is there any mention of such a vestment at the time of the Apostles. What, then, is the history of that fur-jacket ? So far as we know, it was a warm jacket worn by German peasants in the colder climate of their country, and it was worn by laity and clergy alike, as in fact all garments were which we now consider exclusively ecclesiastical. As this fur-jacket was apt to get dirty and unsightly, a kind of smock-frock, that could be washed from time to time, was worn over it — and this was called the super-pellicium , the surplice.
Stanley thought it sufficient gently to remind the wearer of the surplice that what he was so proud of was only the lineal descendant of a German peasant’s smock-frock ; and I believe he was right, and his historical explanation certainly produced a better effect on all who had a sense of history and of humour than the most elaborate argument on the mystical meaning of that robe of purity and inno- cence.
He did the same with other vestments. Under the wand of the historian, the alb turned out to be the old Roman tunic or shirt, and the deacon officiating in his alb was recognized as a servant working in his shirt- sleeves. The dalmatic, again, was traced back to the shirt with long sleeves worn by the Dalmatian peasants, which became recognized as the dress of the deacon about the time of Constantine. The cassoclc and chasuble turned out to be great coats, worn originally by laity and clergy alike — while the cope, descended from the copa or capa , also called pluviale, was translated by Stanley as a ‘waterproof.’ The mitre was identified with the caps and turbans worn
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in the East by princes and nobles, and to this day by the peasant women. The division into two points was shown to be the mark of the crease which is the consequence of its having been folded and canied under the arm, like an opera-hat. The stole, lastly, in the sense of a scarf, had a still humbler origin. It was the substitute for the ovarium or handkerchief, used for blowing the nose. No doubt, the possession and use of a handkerchief was in early times restricted to the ‘ higher circles.’ It is so to the present day in Borneo, for instance, where only the king is allowed to carry a handkerchief and to blow his nose. In like manner then as in Borneo the handkerchief became the insignia of royalty, it rose in the Roman Church to become the distinctive garment of the deacon.
I know that some of these explanations have been contested, and rightly contested, but the general drift of the argument remains unaffected by such reserva- tions. I only quote them in order to explain what I meant by Stanley’s historical attitude, an attitude which all who belong to the Historical School, and are guided by an historical spirit, like to assume when brought face to face with the problems of the day.
But what applies to small questions applies likewise to great. Instead of discussing the question whether the mystic mari'iage between Church and State can ever be dissolved, the historian looks to the register and to the settlements, in order to find out how that marriage was brought about. Instead of discussing the various theories of inspiration, the historian asks, who was the first to coin the word? In what sense
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did he use it? Did he claim inspiration for himself or for others ? Did he claim it for one book only, or for all truth? How much light can be thrown on this subject by a simple historical treatment may be seen in some excellent lectures, delivered lately before a Secularist audience by Mr. Wilson1, the Head Master of Clifton College, in the presence of the Bishop of Exeter, and published under the title, The Theory of Inspiration, or, Why men do not Believe the Bible.
And this historical treatment seems to me the best, not only for religious and philosophical, but also for social problems. Who has not read the eloquent pages of Mr. Henry George on Progress and Poverty ? Who has not pondered on his social panacea, the nationali- zation of the land ? It is of little use to grow angry about these questions, to deal in blustering rhetoric, or hysterical invective. So long as Mr. Henry George treats the question of the tenure of land historically, his writings are extremely interesting, and, I believe’ extremely useful, as reminding people that a great portion of the land in England was not simply bought for investment, but was granted by the sovereign on certain conditions, such as military service, for instance, those who held the land had to defend the land, and it may well be asked why that duty, or why the taxes lor army and navy, should now fall equally on the whole country. It might be said that all this happened a long time ago. But the reign of Charles the Second does not yet belong so entirely to the realm of fable that the nation might not trace its privileges back to that time quite as much as certain families 1 Now the Archdeacon of Rochdale.
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whose wealth dates from the same period. Again, if Mr. Henry George shows that in more recent times common land was enclosed in defiance of historical right, he is doing useful work, if only by reminding lords of the manor that they should not court too close an inspection of their title-deeds.. If there are historical rights, there are historical rights on both sides, on the side of those who have no land quite as much as on the side of those who have, and surely we are all of us most thankful that at the time of Charles the Second, and earlier still, at the time of Henry the Eighth, some large tracts of land were nationalized— were confiscated, in fact— that is, trans- ferred from the hands of former proprietors to the fiscus, the national treasury. What would our national Universities be without nationalized land ? They would have to depend, as in Germany, on taxation, and be administered, as in Germany, by a Government Board. If, at the same time, some more land had been nationalized in support of schools, hospitals, almshouses, aye, even in support of army and na\ y, instead of being granted to private individuals, should we not all be most grateful? But though we may regret the past, we cannot ignore it, and, to quote Mr. Henry George’s own words, ‘ instead of weakening and confusing the idea of property, we should surround it with stronger sanctions.’
So far all historical minds would probably go with Mr. Henry George. But when he joins the Theoretical School, and tells us that every human being born into this world has a divine right to a portion of Gods earth, it is difficult to argue with him, for how does he know it? Again, how does he know how much it
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should be, and, what is more important still, in what part of the world it should be ? An acre of land in the city of London is very different from an acre of land in Australia. Besides, what is the use of land unless it has been cleared ? An old Indian lawgiver says very truly, ‘ The deer belongs to him who sticks his arrow into him, and the land to him who dio-s the stumps out of it V If a man by his spade has made a piece of waste land worth having, surely it belongs to him as much as a sheet of paper belongs
to the man who has made it worth having; by his pen. ° J
But, though I do not see how, with any regard for the rights of property, which Mr. Henry ° George regards as sacred, the nationalization of the land could ever be carried out in an ancient country, such as England, without fearful conflicts, or without a religious revival, nor how it could effect, by itself alone, the cure of the crying evils of the present state ol our society, I admire Mr. Henry George for the truths, the bitteT truths, which he tells us, and it seems to me sheer intellectual cowardice to say that his ideas are dangerous, and should not be listened to. The facts which he places before us are dan- gerous but there is far less danger in his theories even if we all accepted them. We all hold theories which might be called dangerous, if we ever thought of carrying them out. We all hold the theory that we ougnt to love our neighbour exactly as our-
1 In Australia, if two or more spears are found in the same
Lst Mcokv f ? th6 Pr°perty of him who threw the
1879 p, u y’ AcC0Unt the of Western Australia, Perth.
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selves ; but no one seems afraid that we should ever do so.
One more question still waits for an answei. Although the historical treatment may he the best, and the only efficacious treatment of all problems affecting religion, philosophy, morality, and politics, should we not follow up our tangles in a straight line, from knot to knot, from antecedent to antece- dent ? And if so, what can be the use of the Sacred Books of the East for the religious problems of the West 1 What light can the Rig-veda or the Vedanta philosophy of India throw on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason ? How can the Koran help us in facing modern problems of morality ? How can the Laws of Manu, applicable to the village system of ancient India, help us in answering the social problems ot
Mr. Henry George1? _ .
Perhaps the readiest answer I can give, is— Look at the sciences of Language, of Mythology, of Religion. What would they be without the East? They would not even exist. We have learnt that history does not necessarily proceed from the present to the past m one straight line only. The stream of history runs in many parallel branches, and each generation has not only fathers and grandfathers, but also uncles and great-uncles. In fact, the distinguishing character of all scientific research in our century is comparison. We have not only comparative philology, but also comparative jurisprudence, comparative anatomy, com- parative physiology. Many points in English Law become intelligible only by a comparison with German Law. Many difficulties in German Law are removed by a reference to Roman or Greek Law. Many even
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of the most minute rules of German, Roman, and Greek Law become intelligible only by a reference to
e ancient customs and traditions preserved in the Law-books of India.
This being so, it follows that a real historical study ot the ancient language, the ancient philosophy, and the ancient religion of the East, and, more particularly ot India, may have its very important bearing on the questions nearest to our own hearts. The mere lesson that we are not the only people who have a Bible, that our theologians are not the only theologians who claim for their Bible a divine inspiration, that our Church is not the only Church which has declared that those who do not hold certain doctrines cannot
be saved, may have its advantages, if rightly under- stood.
These indirect lessons are often far more impressive than any more direct teaching. We see them our- selves, or we must draw them for ourselves, and that is always a better discipline than when we have simply to accept what we are told. It may seem a roundabout way, and yet it often leads to the end ar more rapidly than a more direct route, nay, in some cases it is the only practicable route.
Let us take comparative anatomy as an illustration.
V\ e all of us want to know what our bodily or- ganism is like, how we ^ee or hear, how we breathe ow we digest— m fact, how we live. But for a Iona time people shrank from dissecting a human body! They then took a mollusk, or a fish, or a bird, or a og or even so man-like an animal as an ape, am they soon grew accustomed to the idea that the muscles, bones, nerves, or even brains in the