Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 1.djvu/764

748 us to reason correctly about the causes of such everyday phenomena as an echo, a shadow, or a reflection in a pool of water, we can readily see how impossible it must be for primitive man to reach the solution of the recondite problems that nature constantly thrusts upon him. But the fact that, unlike the humbler and more sensible creatures below him, he tries to solve these problems, is just what stamps him as a superior being. This act of his is the beginning of philosophy, and the study of the philosophy of primitive man constitutes legitimate data for sociology. Primitive philosophy is always anthropomorphic. A phenomenon, from its very name, is a change, a transformation, an activity. But the only being the primitive man knows to possess the power of spontaneous activity is himself, and he naturally imputes to every other change the same power. I need not trace the steps from this primordial stage to a full-fledged mythology, but mythology constitutes the philosophy of all undeveloped races. Out of mythology grows religion, if it is not itself religion, and religion is essentially a product of man's rational faculties applied to transcendental questions. It can only be from a profound misconception of this truth that Mr. Benjamin Kidd in his book on "Social Evolution" repeatedly speaks of religion as "ultra-rational." It has surprised me greatly that the religious world has failed to call him to account for such a fallacy, and in seeming rather to uphold him, it is tacitly admitting this, greatly to its discredit. Religion is primarily and fundamentally rational. It had its origin in an effort of the reason. No being without a well-developed reason is capable of conceiving of a religious idea. It is, in fact, one of the great branches of philosophy, and the history of religion is in great part the history of human thought. At every stage it constitutes most important data for the science of sociology.

And then we might go back again and take up another great trunk line of social history and trace the rise and progress of the arts. Nothing is more fundamentally important to sociology than to study the workings of the inventive faculty, spurred on by its strict mother necessity. Leaving it to the psycholo-