Content of Primitive Supersensuous World 499 



I act (or rather, react to outside stimulus), and so I come to think. 

 Thus there is set going a recurrent series : act and thought become 

 in their turn stimuli to fresh acts and thoughts. In examining 

 religion as envisaged to-day it would therefore be more correct to 

 begin with the practice of religion, i.e. ritual, and then pass to its 

 theory, theology or mythology. But it will be more convenient to 

 adopt the reverse method. The theoretical content of religion is to 

 those of us who are Protestants far more familiar and we shall thus 

 proceed from the known to the comparatively unknown. 



I shall avoid all attempt at rigid definition. The problem before 

 the modern investigator is, not to determine the essence and definition 

 of religion but to inquire how religious phenomena, religious ideas 

 and practices arose. Now the theoretical content of religion, the 

 domain of theology or mythology, is broadly familiar to all. It is 

 the world of the unseen, the supersensuous ; it is the world of what 

 we call the soul and the supposed objects of the soul's perception, 

 sprites, demons, ghosts and gods. How did this world grow up ? 



We turn to our savages. Intelligent missionaries of bygone days 

 used to ply savages with questions such as these : Had they any 

 belief in God? Did they believe in the immortality of the soul? 

 Taking their own clear-cut conceptions, discriminated by a developed 

 terminology, these missionaries tried to translate them into languages 

 that had neither the words nor the thoughts, only a vague, inchoate, 

 tangled substratum, out of which these thoughts and words later 

 differentiated themselves. Let us examine this substratum. 



Nowadays we popularly distinguish between objective and sub- 

 jective ; and further, we regard the two worlds as in some sense 

 opposed. To the objective world we commonly attribute some reality 

 independent of consciousness, while we think of the subjective as 

 dependent for its existence on the mind. The objective world consists 

 of perceptible things, or of the ultimate constituents to which matter 

 is reduced by physical speculation. The subjective world is the world 

 of beliefs, hallucinations, dreams, abstract ideas, imaginations and 

 the like. Psychology of course knows that the objective and sub- 

 jective worlds are interdependent, inextricably intertwined, but for 

 practical purposes the distinction is convenient. 



But primitive man has not yet drawn the distinction between 

 objective and subjective. Nay, more, it is foreign to almost the 

 whole of ancient philosophy. Plato's Ideas 1 , his Goodness, Truth, 

 Beauty, his class-names, horse, table, are it is true dematerialised 

 as far as possible, but they have outside existence, apart from the 



1 I owe this psychological analysis of the elements of the primitive supersensuous world 

 mainly to Dr Beck, "Erkenntnisstheorie des primitiven Denkens," see p. 498, note 1. 



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