followed up before the ground can be pronounced clear for authoritative
conclusions--those of anthropological archæology (including comparative
mythology and comparative hierology) and economic analysis. On both
lines, however, great progress has been made; and on the former in
particular the result is profoundly disintegrating to traditional
belief. The lessons of anthropology had been long available to the
modern world before they began to be scientifically applied to the
"science of religion." The issues raised by Fontenelle and De Brosses
in the eighteenth century were in practice put aside in favour of
direct debate over Christian history, dogma, and ethic; though many
of the deists dwelt on the analogies of "heathen" and "revealed"
religion. As early as 1824 Benjamin Constant made a vigorous attempt
to bring the whole phenomena under a general evolutionary conception
in his work De la Religion. [1929] But it was not till the treasure of
modern anthropology had been scientifically massed by such students
as Theodor Waitz (Anthropologie der Naturvölker, 6 Bde. 1859-71) and
Adolf Bastian (Der Mensch in der Geschichte, 3 Bde. 1860), and above
all by Sir Edward Tylor, who first lucidly elaborated the science
of it all, that the arbitrary religious conception of the psychic
evolution of humanity began to be decisively superseded.
In 1871 Tylor could still say that "to many educated minds there seems
something presumptuous and repulsive in the view that the history of
mankind is part and parcel of the history of nature; that our thoughts,
wills, and actions accord with laws as definite as those which govern
the motion of waves, the combination of acids and bases, and the growth
of plants and animals." [1930] But the old repulsion had already been
profoundly impaired by biological and social science; and Tylor's book
met with hardly any of the odium that had been lavished on Darwin and
Buckle. "It will make me for the future look on religion--a belief
in the soul, etc.--from a different point of view," wrote Darwin
[1931] to Tylor on its appearance. So thoroughly did the book press
home the fact of the evolution of religious thought from savagery
that thenceforward the science of mythology, which had never yet
risen in professional hands to the height of vision of Fontenelle,
began to be decisively adapted to the anthropological standpoint.
In the hands of Spencer [1932] all the phenomena of primitive mental
life--beliefs, practices, institutions--are considered as purely
natural data, no other point of view being recognized; and the
anthropological treatises of Lord Avebury (Sir John Lubbock) are at
the same standpoint. When at length the mass of savage usages which
lie around the beginnings of historic religion began to be closely
scanned and classified, notably in the great latter-day compilations
of Sir J. G. Frazer, what had appeared to be sacred peculiarities
of the Christian cult were seen to be but variants of universal
primitive practice. Thenceforth the problem for serious inquirers
was not whether Christianity was a supernatural revelation--the
supernatural is no longer a ground of serious discussion--but whether
the central narrative is historical in any degree whatever. The defence
is latterly conducted from a standpoint indistinguishable from the
Unitarian. But an enormous amount of anthropological research is
being carried on without any reference to such issues, the total
effect being to exclude the supernaturalist premiss from the study
of religion as completely as from that of astronomy.
Section 6.--Philosophy and Ethics