THE INTERPRETATION OF NATURE. 79 



ception of deity already undergoing deanthropomorphization. More 

 and more, therefore, in the higher mind of the race, the Divine Being, 

 not only losing his former bodily form, but yielding even the grosser 

 attributes of personality with which he has been invested, becomes 

 for the thought of man a psychical being in the deepest sense of that 

 term. Anthropomorphism, or man-likening, passes away, and in its 

 place comes psychomorphism, or mind-likening. 



Two aspects are thus recognizable in the mental interpretation of 

 the environment: on the one hand an aspect which may be called 

 causal, since it seeks the source of the power exerted by Nature forces 

 and objects; on the other, an aspect which is obviously formal, its 

 main significance being that it condenses, so to speak, groups of 

 qualities into a single mental sign. The causal aspect yields, in how- 

 soever simple or complex a form, a theory of the cosmos or of its 

 parts; the formal aspect is no more than a means, ready at hand, in 

 the visible bodies of animals and men for facilitating the use of that 

 theory in processes of thought. Hence we may regard vitalism, 

 animism, psychomorphism as so many stages of man's attitude to- 

 ward the external system, corresponding with the degree of his power 

 to apprehend the more abstract as distinguished from the more par- 

 ticular and superficial characters of things that come within the 

 range of his knowledge. In the first, he explicitly recognizes vitality, 

 the most obvious character of Nature force ; in the second, subsuming 

 vitalism, he raises the soul life to the place of honor; in the third, 

 subsuming both vitalism and animism, he emphasizes in psycho- 

 morphism the highest human qualities which his mind enables him 

 to recognize. 



The passage from the idea of multiplicity to that of unity is 

 itself an inseparable part of the total process. As at the beginning 

 man reads vitality into the separate objects and forces of Nature, 

 without any thought of their underlying unity, so he regards as dis- 

 crete, unconnected, objectively unrelated, the multifarious souls with 

 which, in his thought, these various powers of the environment have 

 come to be animated. But in course of time, by an inner necessity of 

 intellectual growth, relations come to be perceived between the forces 

 of Nature, likenesses are recognized between the functions of spirits 

 and deities — between the powers put forth and the results achieved. 

 The result is a process of coalescence which, to describe it in the brief- 

 est way, first merges a large number of spirit-evolved gods into a 

 smaller number of relatively independent divinities, forms these into 

 pantheons of gods each subordinated to a superior, and finally unites 

 all beings regarded as divine in the single, all-comprehending, omnis- 

 cient and omnipotent Deity of monotheism. 



In all this advance, moreover, we find that the process illustrated 



