Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/537

Rh naturally seem alive, agencies alike for good or evil, with powers mysterious indeed but not wholly dissimilar. Even inorganic things, stones and sticks, whatever may ever have been observed to move without apparent cause, might be supposed to be able to move, as animals might naturally be supposed to be able to talk. As the primitive man would urge on his half-tamed wolf or jackal to seize the deer or wild beast he was hunting, he would tend to caress or urge on the spear he threw or the bow he aimed; for, before subjective knowledge or abstract thought was possible, as soon as a thing moved, although the man pushed it, bent or threw it, it would become a moving thing, and seem to him to act as a living thing. The notion of a cause of motion, wholly independent of the moving thing, could not arise without greater power of abstract thinking than can be attributed to primitive men.

So soon as intelligent curiosity began to mingle with the dull wonder with which human beings had long regarded unusual natural events—such as, for instance, an eclipse, a flash of lightning, or a flood—the only explanations that could suggest themselves would be the logical result of the prevalent habits of thought, of such simple analogical reasoning as has been referred to. All moving things being vaguely felt to be living, the sun in eclipse would be thought of as sick or wounded; the lightning as a creature like a rattlesnake that makes a noise, glides swiftly, and strikes suddenly; the flood as the river itself in a rage or passion. Such vague explanations as these of the nature of the external universe, or of special events in it—explanations so little self-conscious and so little reasoned as hardly to deserve the name of "explanations"—would seem to be in the natural course of evolution the first notions that could be called religious; but such notions are pure fetichism. The characteristic of such a state of thought is, that the moving principle is not thought of as separate from the moving thing, nor the living principle as separate from the living being, nor the spirit of other men or animals as separate from their bodies. The observances appropriate to such a religion would consist in appeals to those external beings or imprecations upon them, similar to those appropriate between man and man, because those beings would be regarded as living and so not felt to be wholly different from men; but in every case the thing or object itself, and not anything unseen, would be the object of any ceremonial observance.

A community of children between the ages of two and five might naturally evolve a somewhat similar religious system. The baby who cries out, "Naughty door!" when it pinches its fingers in the hinges; the child who urges a spinning-top to continue spinning, or is angry with it for stopping; or who listens with wondering awe to a watch and asks if it is alive, long before any of them have any notion of spirit or ghost, or of unseen causes of action—all illustrate how naturally fetichism results from simple modes of thinking and reasoning. Similar habits of