Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/172

 150 (f) Various experiences included under the terms clairvoyance, divination, monition, etc.

(g) Striking motor and sensory abnormalities, such as are met with in hysteria.

The desire to explain the phenomena of the last three groups implies a considerable degree of mental development; therefore, before these causes could become operative, man must have been already in possession of a variety of ideas of superhuman beings and of gods. But, if these phenomena could hardly have become sources of original god-ideas, they have undoubtedly led to important modifications of them by the ascription to the gods of the moral qualities and of the powers implied in these experiences. With the appearance of the moral conscience, for instance, gods became promoters of morality.

It is to be noted that the metaphysical arguments for the existence of God,—for instance, the cosmological and the ontological proofs and the argument from design,—stand in a different relation from the facts here classified to the belief in superhuman beings. The metaphysical proofs are primarily arguments by which man sought to establish the objective validity of god-ideas already in existence. These proofs have also served to give greater precision to the god-ideas, and, above all, to modify their content. How radically the metaphysical and the naive empirical methods differ becomes evident in a comparison of the cosmological argument with the manner in which non-civilized man comes to believe in a Maker.

II. The affective and the moral needs. These needs become potent relatively late in human history; so that, when they appear as factors in the making of gods, beliefs in superhuman beings have already come into existence through the agency of phenomena of the first class. The experiences of this second class result, therefore, in a transformation of existing superhuman beings by the ascription to them of affective and moral qualities.