RELIGION AND SCIENCE 279 



conscious, side by side with more developed methods 

 that have arisen later. 



The use of concrete symbols or images is the most 

 widespread of these primitive modes of thought. It 

 is natural that the more complex should at the first 

 be described in terms of the less complex, that those 

 experiences for which no proper terminology has been 

 hammered out should be given names out of man's 

 existing vocabulary. That is inevitable: but there 

 is an even more fundamental process at work. It 

 seems as if the human mind works, on its most primi- 

 tive levels, by means of image-formation, and that 

 emotions and concepts for which no simple image 

 exist may call up symbolic images by association and 

 indeed often dress themselves in these new clothes 

 before they present themselves to consciousness. 

 Some such process appears to take place in dreams 

 (including day-dreams!) and possibly in the ordi- 

 nary thought-processes of savages. More advanced 

 modes of thought substitute the currency of an arbi- 

 trary token such as a word or a formula for the barter 

 of images and concrete symbols; the freshness and 

 vividness of the image is lost, but more efficient and 

 speedier working is attained. However, in most of 

 us the concrete image-using mode of thought is a re- 

 lief from the apparently less natural and more arti- 

 ficial (though more efficient) operations of reason, 

 and we relapse into it, wholly or partially, more 

 often than we realize. 



This unconscious irrational tendency to symbol- 



