UTILITARIAN SCIENCE 7 



susceptible of being manipulated. But the astral body covers only 

 ignorance and ghosts vanish before the electric light. 



Memory-pictures likewise arise to produce confusion in the mind. 

 The record of past realities blends readily with the present. Men are 

 gregarious creatures and their speech gives them the power to add to 

 their own individual experiences the concepts and experiences of 

 others. Suggestion and conventionality play a large part in the 

 mental equipment of the individual man. 



About the sense-impressions formed in his own brain each man 

 builds up his own subjective universe. Each accretion of knowledge 

 must be cast more or less directly in terms of previous experience. 

 By processes of suggestion and conventionality the ideas of the 

 individual become assimilated to those of the multitude. Thus 

 myths arise to account for phenomena not clearly within the ordin- 

 ary experiences of life. And in all mythology the unknown is 

 ascribed not to natural forces, but to the action of the powers that 

 transcend nature, that lie outside the domain of the familiar and the 

 real. 



It has been plain to man in all ages that he is surrounded by 

 forces stronger than himself, invisible and intangible, inscrutable in 

 their real nature, but terribly potent to produce results. He cannot 

 easily trace cause and effect in dealing with these forces; hence it is 

 natural that he should doubt the existence of relations of cause and 

 effect. As the human will seems capricious because the springs of 

 volition are hidden from observation, so to the unknown will that 

 limits our own we ascribe an infinite caprice. All races of men capable 

 of abstract thought have believed in the existence of something 

 outside themselves whose power is without human limitations. 

 Through the imagination of poets the forces of nature become per- 

 sonified. The existence of power demands corresponding will. The 

 power is infinitely greater than ours; the sources of its action in- 

 scrutable: hence man has conceived the unknown first cause as an 

 infinite and unconditioned man. Anthropomorphism in some degree 

 is inevitable, because each man must think in terms of his own 

 experience. Into his own personal universe, all that he knows must 

 come. 



Recognition of the hidden but gigantic forces in nature leads men 

 to fear and to worship them. To think of them either in fear or in 

 worship is to give them human forms. 



The social instincts of man tend to crystallize in institutions even 

 his common hopes and fears. An institution implies a division of 

 labor. Hence, in each age and in each race men have been set apart 

 as representatives of these hidden forces and devoted to their pro- 

 pitiation. These men are commissioned to speak in the name of each 

 god that the people worship or each demon the people dread. 



