Various
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 53, No. 329, March, 1843
"All observable bodies," he says "being thus immediately personified and endowed with passions suited to the energy of the observed phenomena, the external world presents itself spontaneously to the spectator in a perfect harmony, such as never again has been produced, and which must have excited in him a peculiar sentiment of plenary satisfaction, hardly by us in the present day to be characterized, even when we refer back with a meditation the most intense on this cradle of humanity."
Do not even these few fragments bear out our remarks, both of praise and censure? We see here traces of a deep penetration into the nature of man, coupled with a singular negligence of the historical picture. The principle here laid down as that of fetishism, is important in many respects; it is strikingly developed, and admits of wide application; but (presuming we are at liberty to seek in the rudest periods for the origin of religion) we do not find any such systematic procedure amongst rude thinkers—we do not find any condition of mankind which displays that complete ascendancy of the principle here described. Our author would lead us to suppose, that the deification of objects was uniformly a species of explanation of natural phenomena. The accounts we have of fetishism, as observed in barbarous countries, prove to us that this animation of stocks and stones has frequently no connexion whatever with a desire to explain their phenomena, but has resulted from a fancied relation between those objects and the human being. The charm or the amulet—some object whose presence has been observed to cure diseases, or bring good-luck—grows up into a god; a strong desire at once leading the man to pray to his amulet, and also to attribute to it the power of granting his prayer.50
We carry on our quotation one step further, for the sake of illustrating the impracticable unmanageable nature of our author's generalizations when historically applied. Having advanced to this stage in the development of theologic thought, he finds it extremely difficult to extricate the human mind from that state in which he has, with such scientific precision, fixed it.
"Speculatively regarded, this great transformation of the religious spirit (from fetishism to polytheism) is perhaps the most fundamental that it has ever undergone, though we are at present so far separated from it as not to perceive its extent and difficulty. The human mind, it seems to me, passed over a less interval in its transit from polytheism to monotheism, the more recent and better understood accomplishment of which has naturally taught us to exaggerate its importance—an importance extremely great only in a certain social point of view, which I shall explain in its place. When we reflect that fetishism supposes matter to be eminently active, to the point of being truly alive, while polytheism necessarily compels it to an inertia almost absolute, submitted passively to the arbitrary will of the divine agent; it would seem at first impossible to comprehend the real mode of transition from one religious régime to the other."—P. 97.
The transition, it seems, was effected by an early effort of generalization; for as men recognized the similitude of certain objects, and classified them into one species, so they approximated the corresponding Fetishes, and reduced them at length to a principal Fetish, presiding over this class of phenomena, who thus, liberated from matter, and having of necessity an independent being of its own, became a god.
"For the gods differ essentially from pure fetishes, by a character more general and more abstract, pertaining to their indeterminate residence. They, each of them, administer a special order of phenomena, and have a department more or less extensive; while the humble fetish governs one object only, from which it is inseparable. Now, in proportion as the resemblance of certain phenomena was observed, it was necessary to classify the corresponding fetishes, and to reduce them to a chief, who, from this time, was elevated to the rank of a god—that is to say, an ideal agent, habitually invisible, whose residence is not rigorously fixed. There could not exist, properly speaking, a fetish common to several bodies; this would be a contradiction, every fetish being necessarily endowed with a material individuality. When, for example, the similar vegetation of the several trees in a forest of oaks, led men to represent, in their theological conceptions, what was common in these objects, this abstract being could no longer be the fetish of a tree, but became the god of the forest."—P. 101.
This apparatus of transition is ingenious enough, but surely it is utterly uncalled for. The same uncultured imagination that could animate a tree, could people the air with gods. Whenever the cause of any natural event is invisible, the imagination cannot rest in Fetishism; it must create some being to produce it. If thunder is to be theologically explained—and there is no event in nature more likely to suggest such explanation—the imagination cannot animate the thunder; it must create some being that thunders. No one, the discipline of whose mind had not been solely and purely scientific, would have created for itself this difficulty, or solved it in such a manner.51