Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 74.djvu/295

Rh And he very appropriately adds, "none of these possibilities can remain utterly unrealized."

For the fact is that man is a self-conscious being. And inasmuch as he is endowed with some degree of reason and will, he can not stand still and passively gaze at the objects about him as though he were a mere brute. He must at least exert himself enough to form some kind of a conception of the powers around and above him, and put forth some degree of energy to place himself in harmonious relations with them. But it should not at all surprise us if, at the outset of his career as a religious being, he shows the same confusion of ideas about the objects he worships, as he does about all the other matters that come within the sphere of his experience. On the contrary, we should naturally expect to find him growing and developing in his religious ideas as he grows and develops in all others.

As a matter of fact, this is actually the case, and it will be our present purpose to trace out in a general way some of the principal steps that he has taken as he has advanced from lower to higher conceptions on this subject in the course of history.

It is now generally agreed by careful students of anthropology that the most primitive form of all religion is best characterized by the word spiritism. This is the naive and unreflective belief that most objects in this world, especially those that are capable of motion, contain an unseen being which, for the lack of a better term, we will call a demon, or spirit; that these spirits have superhuman powers and can affect for good or ill everything that concerns the ongoings of nature and the lives and happiness of man. In this stage of development human beings attribute all their pleasant experiences to friendly demons, and all their disagreeable ones to just the opposite source. Hence they make use of every means in their power to win the favor of the good spirits, and ward off the envy and wrath of the bad.

The reason for this state of things it is not hard to find. For when the primitive man first begins to give form to his religion, he is himself the only being that he knows anything about that possesses the power of spontaneous action. He can not help attributing the same power to all the objects with which he in any way comes in contact. He acts just as every little child acts in a similar condition. Any object that constantly gives a baby pleasure it pats and caresses with affection. The one from which it gets a hard pinch or knock it wants to pound and kick with all its power. It spontaneously assigns to the object the same sensations and feelings and will as it is itself conscious of. Its experience is so limited and crude that it does not know enough to do otherwise. So it is with primitive man. To him every other is another, and he attributes to that other all of his own powers. In his opinion the world about and above him is made up of a vague.