Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/53

Rh, appreciated them with his consciousness. The next step was to trace them to the beneficent will of some Being possessing the attributes of humanity, and love, and gratitude and admiration were the necessary results. Until this comparatively late period of civilization, his only sentiments in regard to the invisible and unknown power, which stormed, thundered and lightened, and overwhelmed him with all kinds of misfortunes and pains, were of unmixed dread and horror.

Upon this sentiment of fear are based all the primitive forms of religious worship. Care was taken not to provoke the invisible, powerful enemy and the lively, childlike imagination of prehistoric man, his trains of incoherent reasoning, made it easy for him to see in any circumstance a possible source of annoyance to his great enemy. If he was provoked, no pains were spared to appease him. His avarice was gratified by spreading presents before him, offering him sacrifices. His vanity was flattered by singing his praises, and glorifying his virtues. Man humbled himself before him, tried to touch him by prayers and supplication, and even occasionally to frighten him by threats. Prayers, sacrifices and vows are thus expressions of the same sentiment, which Darwin in his work "Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals," claims to be the cause of the wagging and crouching of the dog, the purring of the cat, and the bowing and removal of the hat by civilized man—acts of submission to a more powerful being. To condense these details—causality, which is one form of human thought, was conceived of by primitive man as something necessarily material and concrete. He sought for every circumstance which disturbed him, some cause near at hand. His incapability of carrying on abstract thought confined him to concrete conceptions which appeared to his imagination