Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/77

Rh same existence to all outward objects, he did so, as we have seen, without drawing any distinctions between consciousness and personality. The idea of their divinity in any sense would be an inference, not a sensation; and the analysis of language, which shows that all predicative words are the expression of general ideas, does not show us that the human mind was immediately exercised by any train of connected reasoning. If, however, this earliest state was not followed by one which invested outward things with a personal life, if in some way men could believe in a malignant yet unconscious and nonsentient power residing in stones and rocks, there would at once be developed a fetish worship, the most degrading and the most hopeless, which, if expanded at all, could issue only in a polytheism of devils. Yet even here some faint perceptions might remain of moral qualities, unless we believe that the Divine likeness might be wholly blotted out; but is it possible to account for the loathsome earthliness of some forms of heathenism, except by the hypothesis that on them the idea of Deity has never dawned? If, however, when gradually awakened, the consciousness of their own personality might lead others to attribute the same personal life to outward objects, the deification of these objects or powers would not follow as an immediate or even as a necessary consequence. For a long time they might scarcely be conscious of the degree to which they personified them; or they might continue to look upon them as beings condemned to the same life of toil and trouble with themselves. Such a thought, it is obvious, might lead at once to the idea of One (distinct from all that they saw or heard), who ordained this life of labour; and the conviction of a supreme God, the Maker of all things, might take possession of the mind. But it is not less clear that such a conviction would not necessarily affect their ideas as to what they saw in the world around them. The Sun in all his various aspects, the Morning, the Evening, and the Night, might become more and more personal, even while the belief in a God exalted high above all might continue to gain strength. In other words, the foundation of their moral belief would at once be distinct from the foundation of their future mythology. Still, except to the thoughtful few, the personality of the great objects of the natural world would be more and more