502 Darwinism and the Study of Religions 



Ghosts and sprites, ancestor worship, the soul, oracles, prophecy ; 

 all these elements of the primitive supersensuous world we willingly 

 admit to be the proper material of religion ; but other elements are 

 more surprising ; such are class-names, abstract ideas, numbers, geo- 

 metrical figures. We do not nowadays think of these as of religious 

 content, but to primitive men they were all part of the furniture of 

 his supernatural world. 



With respect to class-names, Dr Tylor 1 has shown how instructive 

 are the first attempts of the savage to get at the idea of a class. 

 Things in which similarity is observed, things indeed which can be 

 related at all are to the savage kindred. A species is a family or 

 a number of individuals with a common god to look after them. 

 Such for example is the Finn doctrine of the haltia. Every object 

 has its haltia, but the haltiat were not tied to the individual, they 

 interested themselves in every member of the species. Each stone 

 had its haltia, but that haltia was interested in other stones ; the 

 individuals disappeared, the haltia remained. 



Nor was it only class-names that belonged to the supersensuous 

 world. A man's own proper-name is a sort of spiritual essence of 

 him, a kind of soul to be carefully concealed. By pronouncing a 

 name you bring the thing itself into being. When Elohim would 

 create Day " he called out to the Light ' Day,' and to the Darkness 

 he called out 'Night'"; the great magician pronounced the magic 

 Names and the Things came into being. " In the beginning was the 

 Word " is literally true, and this reflects the fact that our conceptual 

 world comes into being by the mental process of naming 2 . In old 

 times people went further ; they thought that by naming events 

 they could bring them to be, and custom even to-day keeps up the 

 inveterate magical habit of wishing people " Good Morning " and a 

 " Happy Christmas." 



Number, too, is part of the supersensuous world that is thoroughly 

 religious. We can see and touch seven apples, but seven itself, that 

 wonderful thing that shifts from object to object, giving it its seven- 

 ness, that living thing, for it begets itself anew in multiplication 

 surely seven is a fit denizen of the upper-world. Originally all 

 numbers dwelt there, and a certain supersensuous sanctity still clings 

 to seven and three. We still say " Holy, Holy, Holy," and in some 

 mystic way feel the holier. 



The soul and the supersensuous world get thinner and thinner, 

 rarer and more rarefied, but they always trail behind them clouds 

 of smoke and vapour from the world of sense and space whence they 

 have come. It is difficult for us even nowadays to use the word 



1 Primitive Culture, Vol. n. p. 245 (4th edit.), 1903. 



z For a full discussion of this point see Beck, Nachahmung, p. 41, Die Sprache. 



