Beneficent

On the other hand, beneficent phenomena of nature, such as the sun with its life-giving warmth, evoke in the animal an “affectation of humility before greatness”: gratitude and surprise before these beneficent phenomena, through a process of analogy and spiritualization, pass in the animal into a certain adoration of the beneficent phenomenon. However, even van-Ende still does not dare to ascribe to animals a real religious life: in his opinion, they lack the ability to generalize in order to come to a complete synthesis of the psychic factors of religion-the idea of the spirit, the idea of fate and the process of analogy; but in this case, the savage, they say, is not much different from the animal, because he is not good at generalization, why his religious consciousness is hardly significantly different from the consciousness of the animal. Thus, according to van Ende, religion, at least in its most rudimentary form, is not entirely alien to animals, and therefore it does not constitute a specific feature of man.

The views of E. Hartmann and van Ende do not contain anything scientific. This is not the result of a careful observation of the life of an animal and a deep insight into the essence of religious feeling, but only a bold assumption, or rather an unrestrained flight of imagination. Dreams are also possible in the field of science; even if dead nature is sometimes attributed to processes other than physiological (nutrition, defecation, irritation, etc.).), but also psychological (memory, will, etc.) 1, even if the heavenly bodies are raised to the level of conscious and intelligent beings 2; so what is surprising in the fact that animals are assimilated all the properties of the human soul? The animal is as unresponsive as the dead, so any mental state can be attributed to it. To say that animals are characterized by humility, generosity, remorse, even a sense of duty, that cosmic phenomena are represented by them as living beings, that the beneficial phenomena of nature cause them to “affect humility before greatness” and the deification of these phenomena, can only be if we recognize the complete identity between the psychic life of the animal and the spiritual life of man. But the scientific work of the best biologists and psychologists do not give any reason for this.

That animals feel a sense of fear at the terrible phenomena of nature, this, of course, no one will deny. But fear itself is not yet a religious feeling. Fear, for example, of a thunderstorm or an earthquake in most cases does not arise from a religious feeling, but only from a sense of self-preservation.