Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/170

 THE SEVERAL ORIGINS OF THE IDEAS OF UNSEEN, PERSONAL BEINGS.

BY PROF, J. H. LEUBA, BRYN MAWR, U.S.A.

inquiry into the origin of the belief in unseen, personal powers is primarily concerned with the individual geniuses of the social groups considered. From time to time new ideas come to birth in the minds of specially gifted individuals, and through them become the possession of the community. This fact should be kept in mind throughout the following paper. But the statement that the conceptions out of which the gods arise are of individual origin is not inconsistent with the fact that the individual and religion are, in a very real sense, the products of the social group.

It is, I suppose, the passion for simplicity and unity that has led anthropologists and historians stubbornly to seek the origin of superhuman, personal powers in some one class of phenomena. According to Tylor, the idea of gods had its starting point in such things as dreams, visions, swoons, trances. Spencer is even more emphatic in deriving gods and worship from one original source,—the worship of the dead. Max Müller also ascribes to the gods one origin; he holds that the god-ideas proceed from the personification of natural objects. This unfortunate assumption of the unitary origin of the ideas of gods is, I believe, one of the chief causes of the unsatisfactory condition of our knowledge regarding the origin and the development of religion. In this paper I shall advance brief arguments, both psychological and historical, in support of the four following propositions:—