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community resented, and if harm came of it, visited with punishment (ch. xiii. “Fetishism"). Or he might, with the approval of the community, and by the intermediation of the priest, place his family or himself under the immediate protection of one of the community's gods. In any case, however, licit or illicit, the ritual adopted was copied from that observed by the community in approaching its gods (ch. xiv. "Family Gods and Guardian Spirits "). Like all other private cults, the worship of ancestors was modelled on the public worship of the community; and as the family is an institution of later growth than the tribe or clan, the worship of family ancestors is a later institution than the worship of the tribal god (ch. xv. "Ancestor Worship").

We now return to public worship. Species of trees and plants might be, and were, taken for totems, as well as species of animals. This led to the domestication of plants. Another result was that bread (or maize) and wine came to furnish forth the sacramental meal in the place of the body and blood of the animal victim hitherto sacrificed (ch. xvi. "Tree and Plant Worship"). The breeding of cattle and cultivation of cereals made man more dependent than heretofore on the forces of nature (conceived by him as supernatural powers), and led him to worship them with the same ritual as he had worshipped his plant or animal totems (ch. xvii. “Nature Worship"). Agriculture made it possible to relinquish a wandering mode of existence for settled life; and settled life made it possible for neighbouring tribes to unite in a larger political whole, or "state." But this political union involved a fusion of cults, and that fusion might take one of two forms: if the resemblance between the gods worshipped by the two tribes was close, the two gods might come to be regarded as one and the same god; if not, the result was polytheism (ch. xviii. "Syncretism and Polytheism "). In either case the resulting modifications in the tribal worship required explanation, and was explained, as all things were explained by primitive man, by means of a myth (ch. xix. "Mythology"). Myths were not the work of priests-that is but a form of the fallacy that the priest made religion, the truth being that religion made the priest (ch. xx. "Priesthood").

Sometimes the next life was conceived as a continuance of this life, under slightly changed and less favourable conditions (ch. xxi. "The Next Life"). Sometimes, by a development of the belief that man after death assumed the form of his totem, it was conceived as a transmigration of the soul (ch. xxii. "The Transmigration of Souls"). Neither belief, however, proved permanently satisfactory to the religious consciousness; and in the sixth century B.C. the conviction spread from Semitic peoples to Greece, that future happiness depended on communion with (some) God in this life by means of a sacrament, and consisted in continued communion after death (ch. xxiii. "The Mysteries "). In Greece this belief was diffused especially by the Eleusinian Mysteries (ch. xxiv. “The Eleusinia").

There remains the question, what we are to suppose to have been the origin of Monotheism (the subject of ch. xxv.), on which will depend largely our theory of the Evolution of Belief (discussed in ch. xxvi.).

CHAPTER III

THE SUPERNATURAL

THERE are no savages in existence to whom the use of implements and the art of making fire are unknown; and vast as is the antiquity of the earliest remains of man, they do not take us back to a time when he was ignorant of the art of making either fire or stone-implements. It is therefore mere matter of speculation whether there ever was such a period of ignorance. It was man's physical inferiority to his animal competitors in the struggle for existence which made it necessary that he should equip himself with artificial weapons, if he was to survive; and the difficulty of maintaining existence under the most favourable natural conditions is so great for the savage even now, when he has fire and tools at his command, that we may imagine he could not, in the beginning, have long survived without them, if at all. But as there must have been one weapon which was the first to be made, one fire which was the first ever kindled, we must either infer that for a time man was without fire and without implements, or else we must assign this discovery to some hypothetical, half-human ancestor of man. Whichever was the case, whether there was ever or never such a period of human ignorance, the object of this chapter is to argue that from the beginning man believed in a supernatural spirit (or spirits) having affinity with his own spirit and having power over him. It is of course only with the existence of this belief that a history of religion has to do. Its validity falls to be discussed by the philosophy of religion.

Thanks to the assiduous labours of a long line of men of science, the laws of nature have been so exactly laid down, and the universe works with such regularity nowadays, that

it is difficult even to conceive a time when there were no natural laws. And yet to him who knows not the law of a thing's movements, the thing's behaviour is as though it had no law, for ex hypothesi he does not know what it will do next. If, then, we suppose a time when no natural laws had as yet been discovered, all things then must have appeared to happen at haphazard; and primitive man's experience must have consisted of a stream of events as disjointed and disconnected as the successive incidents in a dream. So Eschylus describes the condition of men before Prometheus :

οἱ πρῶτα μὲν βλέποντες ἔβλεπον μάτην,
κλύοντες οὐκ ἤκουον, ἀλλ ̓ ὀνειράτων

ἀλίγκιοι μορφαῖσι τὸν μακρὸν βίον
ἔφυρον εἰκῇ πάντα.

Of what might happen in those early days, when nature had but few laws to obey and obeyed them by no means uniformly, we have fortunately plenty of contemporary evidence the fairy tales which were composed in the infancy of the human race, and are still the delight of childhood, faithfully reflect what actually happened in the daily life of primitive man. The proof of this statement is the fact that for savages now existing the incidents of which fairy tales are made up, and which seem to us most extravagant and supernatural, are matters of ordinary if not everyday occurrence. The transformation of men into beasts and vice versa is not only believed to take place, but is actually witnessed by savages, and in the case of witches has been proved in many an English court of law. "The Jacoons believe that a tiger in their path is invariably a human enemy who assumes by sorcery the shape of the beast to execute his vengeance or malignity. They assert that, invariably before a tiger is met, a man has been seen or might have been seen to disappear in the direction from which the animal springs. In many cases the metamorphosis they assert has plainly been seen to take place" (Cameron). The Bushmans say their wives can change themselves into lions and so get food for the family (Anderson). Even in Europe, a woman still (1860) living in Kirchhain changed herself not long ago into a wolf, and scratched and tore a

"who

girl going across the fields (Mühlhausen). The giant had no heart in his body," and was invulnerable and immortal because he had deposited his heart or soul in a safe place, was but doing what the Minahassa of Celebes do whenever they move into a new house: "A priest collects the souls of the whole family in a bag, and afterwards restores them to their owners, because the moment of entering a new house is supposed to be fraught with supernatural danger." 1

The helplessness of primitive man set down in the midst of a universe of which he knew not the laws, may perhaps be brought home to the mind of modern man, if we compare the universe to a vast workshop full of the most various and highly-complicated machinery working at full speed. The machinery, if properly handled, is capable of producing everything that the heart of primitive man can wish for, but also, if he sets hand to the wrong part of the machinery, is capable of whirling him off between its wheels, and crushing and killing him in its inexorable and ruthless movement. Further, primitive man cannot decline to submit himself to the perilous test he must make his experiments or perish, and even so his survival is conditional on his selecting the right part of the machine to handle. Nor can he take his own time and study the dangerous mechanism long and carefully before setting his hand to it: his needs are pressing and his action must be immediate.

It was therefore often at the actual cost and always at the danger of his life that primitive man purchased that working knowledge of the laws of nature and the properties of matter, without which modern man could never have acquired either the theoretic science or the material comfort which he now enjoys. But if modern man owes his science and his comfort to primitive man, primitive man in his turn owes his preservation in his perilous quest to a gift by the power of which mankind has conquered the material universe; that gift is the faith in the uniformity of nature, the belief that what has once happened will in similar circumstances happen again. The existence of this belief in the earliest times is a matter susceptible of easy demonstration, and is of some importance for the history of religion. It is important, because when it 1 Frazer, G. B. ii. 327.

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