THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION 291 



And he very appropriately adds, " none of these possibilities can re- 

 main utterly unrealized/' 



For the fact is that man is a seK-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 natu- 

 rally 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 con- 

 ceptions 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 ob- 

 jects 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 him- 

 self 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 ob- 

 ject that constantly gives a baby pleasure it pats and caresses with af- 

 fection. 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 ob- 

 ject 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. 



