Page:Psychology and preaching.djvu/358

 34O PSYCHOLOGY AND PREACHING

And yet upon nature they are immediately, continuously, and absolutely dependent for the simplest means of life. Of course, there is a sense in which this may be said of men at every stage of their development ; but primitive men have learned so little of the art of controlling natural forces, have accumulated so small a stock of economic goods and live in such isolation from other human groups that a local drought or storm or pestilence leaves them without any reserve power or other human resource. They feel themselves en compassed by and helplessly dependent upon vast, dimly ap prehended forces, of whose operations, which mean imme diate weal or woe to them, they have practically no compre hension and control.

2. The dominance of the interests which grow out of the pressure of the natural environment upon the human spirit is so complete, it appears, because the human environment is at this stage relatively so insignificant. In the first place, the number of human beings with whom an individual in such a social state has any conscious relationship is small. The groups in which men live are not large, and intercom munication between them is difficult and rare. Even when many of them are comprehended in one great political em pire, as in the European States of the Middle Ages or in China of the present day, communication between them is slow and uncertain, and for the individuals of any one group the distant groups are practically non-existent. The round of one s life is spent in a small circle of human con tacts. In the second place, the system of social life is sim ple. There are not a great many organized relationships in which men stand to one another. The family is the main institution ; besides it are the priesthood and the civil magis tracy, both of which are comparatively simple in constitu- tution, and if one looks back far enough, both of them are seen to merge in the head of the kinship group. In the third place, very little has been done in the creation of artificial conditions of living. Buildings are small and simple in structure. Roads are little more than trails through vast

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