even then he was so far conscious of the uniformity of nature as to act upon it: once bitten, doubtless he was twice shyelse he would have soon perished. Even then, too, he acted on the belief that everything had a cause-but for him every cause was personal, every effect the effect of some will or other. This, however, was not a religious belief: the wills he assumed rivers and trees to have were in his eyes natural not supernatural, not superhuman, but like his own human will. They were inferences, immediate inferences, made by his reason from the facts of his external consciousness, and were an early piece of philosophy-just as to this day theism. is a philosophical rather than a religious belief. That man from the beginning had some conception, some sentiment, of the supernatural, is not here denied. What is maintained is that that sentiment was not derived from the external facts of which he was conscious, but from his own heart: the sense of his dependence on a supernatural will, not his own, though personal like his own, was found by him in his inner consciousness- a fact of which he had no more doubt than he doubted that fire burns. That he should look for that supernatural will amongst the external, physical embodiments of will, such as plants, animals, rivers, clouds, etc., by which he was surrounded, was an inevitable consequence of the fact that he had as yet made little progress in the work of discriminating the contents of his consciousness, external and internal. But that the contemplation of such external objects could be the source of the sentiment of the supernatural, is impossible-that lay within him.

It is an established fact of psychology that every act, mental or physical, requires the concurrence, not only of the reason and the will, but of emotion: in any given act one of these three elements may predominate so much that the other two may easily be overlooked; but that they are present for all that, is agreed by all psychologists. That for the concentration of the attention on the facts of spiritual consciousness an effort of the will is required, we have already argued. Coleridge, indeed, said that it required the greatest effort that man could make. Be that as it may, no one will doubt that acts of worship are accompanied by emotion. Nor can there be any doubt as to the quality of that emotion: it is

desirable, it has its own peculiar joy, peace, and blessedness; it is envied by those who think they cannot share it; it strengthens those who feel it in the habit and activity of faith. Now these are facts which cannot be overlooked when we come to consider that religion and worship are universal among mankind. It is true that the widest-spread forms of religious belief are the lowest, but the persistence of religion under conditions the most unfavourable for its survival is proof that even in those conditions it has not entirely lost its prerogative. We may therefore safely infer that from the beginning man not only recognised his dependence on a personal and supernatural will, but that he found a peculiar happiness in the recognition. To put it another way as the laws of nature were in existence and in operation long before they were formulated by man, so before the truth was formulated that God is Love, His love was towards all His creatures; and as even primitive man acted on the conviction that nature is uniform, so his heart responded with love to the divine love, though he may have reasoned little or not at all on either point. Indeed, the reason of primitive man was ex hypothesi undeveloped; and, in any case, religious belief is not an inference reached by reason, but is the immediate consciousness of certain facts. Those facts, however, may be and are taken, like other facts of consciousness, as the basis for reasoning, and as the premisses from which to reach other facts not immediately present to consciousness. The motive for this process is the innate desire of man to harmonise the facts of his experience, to unite in one synthesis the facts of his external and his inner consciousness. The earliest attempt in this direction took the form of ascribing the external prosperity which befell a man to the action of the divine love of which he was conscious within himself; and the misfortunes which befell him to the wrath of the justly offended divine will. Man, being by nature religious, began by a religious explanation of nature. To assume, as is often done, that man had no religious consciousness to begin with, and that the misfortunes which befell him inspired him with fear, and fear led him to propitiate the malignant beings whom he imagined to be the causes of his suffering, fails to account for the very thing it is intended to explain, namely, the

existence of religion. It might account for superstitious dread of malignant beings: it does not account for the grateful worship of benignant beings, nor for the universal satisfaction which man finds in that worship.

In the conviction that all events have will for their cause, and in the recognition, bringing with it its own delight, of man's dependence on that will, there was nothing to suggest to the mind of man more than one object of worship; and there is reason to believe that it is a psychological impossibility for the mind of man to seek communion with two objects of worship simultaneously. It is, however, certain that with the (disputed) exception of the Hebrews -polytheism has been universal amongst mankind; and it is certain that man sought the God, of whose "everlasting power and divinity" from the beginning he was conscious in his heart, in external nature. And there can be no reasonable doubt that this was one of the consequences of his attempt to synthesize the external and internal facts of consciousness by a reasoning process: all external objects were conceived by him as personal, and he identified now one and now another of them with the will with which his heart prompted him to seek communion. If, as is maintained in this book, animals were the first of the external objects that thus came to be worshipped, and totemism was the first form of that worship, then for a long period man continued to have only one object of worship, namely, the totem or tribal god. It was not usually until one tribe united with another or several others to form a new political whole and a new religious community, that polytheism came into existence.

Polytheism presupposes totemism: its existence is in itself proof of the existence of totemism in a previous stage. The animal sacrifices offered to polytheistic gods, the animal forms in which those gods appear in mythology, the animals with which they are associated in art, find their only satisfactory explanation in the hypothesis that those gods were originally totem animals. Totemism, again, is an attempt to translate and express in outward action the union of the human will with the divine. In totemism that outward act took the form of animal sacrifice, because in that

stage of intellectual development man sought to reconcile his internal and external experience by identifying the personal divine will, which manifested itself to his inner consciousness, with one of the personal agents in the external world that exercised an influence on his fortunes; and the personal agents which his immature reasoning led him to regard as exercising that influence were various species of animals. Having thus chosen as the seat of that influence an external agent, he necessarily adopted an external means of communion with it; and the only means which man in that stage of social development (the tribal) knew for effecting permanent union with anyone external to the tribe, was a blood-covenant. The covenant with the animal totem therefore took the form of participating in the blood of the animal totem. Animal sacrifice continued as an institution long after totemism was a thing of the forgotten past; but as a survival it points back to totemism, as totemism in its turn points to the previous conviction of the necessity and the comfort of union with the divine will.

It is a commonplace that no lie can circulate unless it contains some truth; that it is the element of truth in it which is seen to correspond to facts, and therefore is supposed to lend its countenance to the elements of error associated with it. So in religion, the notion that animal sacrifice was an essential condition of communion with God was an error; but it was an error which could neither have come into existence nor have continued to exist, unless there had been a desire for such communion-and the desire is inexplicable except on the assumption that its satisfaction was found, as a matter of immediate consciousness, to bring spiritual comfort. But it was the patent truth of the facts that floated the erroneous reasoning imposed upon them. The fact that some degree of spiritual communion-in proportion to the extent to which God was revealed to the particular worshipper-was attained after the offering of animal sacrifice, was fallaciously interpreted to imply that communion was the effect of animal sacrifice: post hoc ergo propter hoc. The truth that some external act of worship is necessary to the continued exercise of the habit of faith, may easily be made into an argument in favour of a

mischievous rite. Errors may attach themselves to the truth, but the truth must first be there before they can do SO. In this sense, that is to say logically, totemism, animalworship, presupposes a stage in which man had not yet found, as he supposed, in the external world the source of his inner consciousness of the divine, and had not yet identified it, by a process of vain reasoning, with an animal species. The historical existence of this stage can only be matter of conjecture, and must rest mainly on the difficulty of supposing that man, the moment he was man, invented the idea of animal sacrifice an idea which, whatever its origin, can hardly be regarded as innate or even as obvious.

The nature of religious belief in the pre-totemistic stage is also entirely matter of conjecture. That it was exclusively of the nature of fear is, however, improbable. Man did indeed find himself in the midst of a world of forces (conceived by him as personal agents) over which he had in the main no control, and by which his fortunes were affected, often disastrously. But these forces were not all of them inimical, that he should fear them. Again, love and gratitude are just as natural, just as much integral parts of the constitution of man, as fear and hatred. There is no probability in the idea that the only emotion early man felt or was capable of feeling was fear. Indeed, the fact that in the totemistic stage he selected now one and now another of the personal agents, which made up the world for him, as the embodiment of the Being after whom his heart instinctively sought peradventure it might find Him, is itself a presumption that he did not regard everything external with fear. In the same way the fact that in the stage of totemism the clan has but one totem, one tribal god, constitutes some presumption that man was conscious of but one God, before he identified Him with one or other of the forces of nature. So far belief in this stage may be termed monotheism; for, as already said, there is reason to believe that polytheism was developed out of totemism, and does not occur until a relatively late period in the evolution of society.

On the other hand, man's consciousness of God must, in