Shinto. Aston William George

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СКАЧАТЬ between the ideal truth and its sensible investment." The late Mr. Fiske held substantially the same view. He goes so far as to apply it to Dante, whose "Charon beating the lagging shades with his oar," "Satan crushing in his monstrous jaws the arch-traitors Judas, Brutus, and Cassius," "Bertrand de Born looking at his own dissevered head," he regards as "in the minds of Dante and his readers living, terrible realities." True it is that a stern reality underlies these grotesque fancies. But it is not of the physical order. No one knew better than Dante the virtue of the altro intende in such matters. We may be quite sure that he did not believe in a real inscription over the gate of Hell, in Italian terza rima, and composed by himself. It is a mistake, I submit, to imagine him, "like Katerfelto, with his hair on end at his own wonders." When Dickens tells us that he decidedly looked on his heroes as living persons we must take this statement cum grano salis. We know what would have happened if some one had offered him, by way of payment, a cheque bearing the signature of Mr. Boffin, Dombey & Son, or the Brothers Cheeryble.

      Mere inferences are often taken for facts, but, under normal conditions, the imaginative man is not the dupe of his own inventive faculty. It may be said that, however true this may be of more modern religious myth, the attitude of the "primitive man" towards the naive creations of his fancy is different. Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a primitive man. However far we may go back, we shall find men with parents, and preceded by an infinite line of ancestors. Still there can be no harm in using this term to designate mankind at some ill-defined stage of progress above the highest lower animal and below the savage of our own days. Strange things are told us of the primitive man. He is said to be unable to distinguish between his imaginations and facts, and that he is in the habit of taking his dreams49 for real occurrences. Fiske says: "Our primitive ancestors knew nothing about laws of nature, nothing about physical forces, nothing about the relations of cause and effect, nothing about the necessary regularity of things… The only force they knew was the force of which they were directly conscious-the force of will. Accordingly, they imagined all the outward world to be endowed with volition and to be directed by it." Of course our primitive ancestors expressed themselves differently from ourselves. They did not talk about laws of nature and the necessary regularity of things. But can we conceive them ignorant of the law of the regular alternation of night and day, of summer and winter, of the phases of the moon? Did not the "primitive man" know just as well as Newton that when an apple is detached from a tree it falls to the ground? He knew that from a blow as cause we may expect pain, wounds, or even death as the effect. He had sufficient acquaintance with dynamics to be aware that he could not raise himself from the ground more than a few feet, and with chemistry to have learnt that the savour of food is improved or spoilt, according to circumstances, by the application of fire. Nor is it true that he ascribed all forces to volition. It is only by exception that the child, the savage, and the primitive man attribute life to inanimate things. This requires imagination, a faculty which is notoriously feebler with them than with the adult civilized man. The progress of humanity is from a sporadic towards a general recognition of will in or behind the material universe, from fitful and sportive fancies involving this idea to an earnest and steady conviction of its truth, and from the fragmentary personification of the part as animated to the conception of a living, universal whole. Agnosticism, which ignores volition in matter, belongs, therefore, to the lower end of the scale of progress. Where it appears in civilized man, it is a case of arrested development. The average savage is a materialist, who associates volition with the energies of nature in a much less thorough and systematic way than the Christian, who believes that a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without the Father.

      We must not confound the primitive maker of religious myth with the primitive man. It would lead to error if we modelled our idea of the average modern European on Bunyan, Milton, or Dante.

      It is sometimes asserted that the impossible and miraculous occurrences which we so often meet with in the narratives of the primæval myth-maker are to him true. Why should he be limited to fact in this way? No doubt his standard of truth is different from our own. He would regard as possible many things which we know to be impossible. But is it necessary to suppose that his knowledge that a thing was impossible should prevent him, any more than our modern storytellers, from utilizing it in his imaginative work? Jules Verne well knew that a voyage round the moon is an impossibility. The unknown author or authors of 'Cinderella' surely need not be credited with a belief that pumpkins can be converted into coaches by the stroke of a fairy wand; the inventor of the story of the birth of Minerva from the brain of Jupiter knew quite well that such obstetrical operations were not feasible; and it is unnecessary to believe that the myth-makers of the Kojiki and Nihongi thought that children could be produced by crunching jewels in the mouth and spitting them out.

      There is, however, an exception to the rule that a storyteller does not believe in the truth of his own inventions. It is notoriously possible for the author of a fictitious narrative to become, after a time, unable to distinguish it from a statement of actual facts. There is a case on record in which a learned judge communicated to the Psychical Society in perfect good faith a ghost story, all the principal features of which were proved to be imaginary. They had their origin in his own talent as a distinguished raconteur. But this is a morbid phenomenon which must not be confounded with the normal action of the imagination in the child, the savage, or the primitive (or, indeed, any other) myth-maker.

      The inability to distinguish between imagination and fact is really not a special characteristic of the primitive man or savage, but of the literal-minded of all ages, in presence of the creations of imaginative genius. Some few primitive men may distinguish between the spiritual kernel and its imaginative envelopment. But for the multitude this is impossible. Unable to discriminate between these two elements, and dimly conscious that the whole is a valuable possession, they wisely accept it indiscriminately as actual fact.

      De Gubernatis, in his 'Zoological Mythology,' relates a story which illustrates the respective attitudes of the myth-maker and his hearers. He tells us that "when he was four years old, as he was walking one day with a brother, the latter pointed to a fantastical cloud on the horizon, and cried, 'Look down there: that is a hungry wolf running after the sheep.' He convinced me so entirely of that cloud being really a hungry wolf that I instantly took to my heels and escaped precipitately into the house." Take, again, the following sun-myth, fresh coined from the mint of Mr. George Meredith: -

      "The sun is coming down to earth, and the fields and the waters shout to him golden shouts. He comes, and his heralds run before him, and touch the leaves of oaks and planes and beeches lucid green and the pine stems redder gold: leaving brightest footprints upon thickly weeded banks, where the foxglove's last upper bells incline and bramble shoots wander amid moist herbage," &c.

      This myth, like the old Greek tales of Prometheus and Tantalus, which Wordsworth calls

      Fictions in form, but in their substance truths,

      has a spiritual significance of which Mr. Meredith cannot have been unconscious. Though nobody at the present day supposes that the author or his readers take it for a narrative of actual events, cannot we fancy Macaulay's New Zealander, being told as a fact some traditional, time-worn, corrupt, and ill-interpreted version of it, and, especially if he is a literal-minded philosopher, wondering how it was possible for the English to believe in such a concatenation of anthropomorphic fancies?

      The literal acceptation of myth or metaphor is not confined to the lower class of intellect. It was a "teacher of Israel" who could not see how "a man could enter into his mother's womb and be born again." Motoöri and Hirata, highly educated scholars, well versed in Chinese and Indian religious literature, received the stories of the Kojiki and Nihongi as genuine history.

      Even Dante and Milton, men of profound spiritual insight, probably accepted in their most literal sense some of the imaginative figments of their predecessors.

      There have always been literal-minded unbelievers, who reject the myth and its religious contents without discrimination, and simply value it, СКАЧАТЬ