278 ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST 



personality in God. Can we suppose that this di- 

 rect intuition gives us that handle? To say so, to my 

 mind, would be simple obscurantism. Intuition, if 

 it shows us reality, can only show a reality capable 

 in the long run of intellectual analysis; to deny this 

 is to deny all our premisses. No: their intuition 

 shows us that something akin to personality is per- 

 ceived, but permits no pronouncement as to whether 

 its resemblance to personality is given in its real 

 nature, or introduced into it by their thought. 



If we look into the history of religion, we find 

 over and over again that man has taken something 

 from his own mind and projected it into the external 

 world. The magic power of fetishes, the tabus in- 

 curred by contact with certain objects, the endow- 

 ment of the idea of external powers, of God, with hu- 

 man form, the ascription of miraculous influence to 

 places or things — in every case there has been this 

 projection. And there is no reason to doubt that 

 here again there has been a similar occurrence, that 

 man has organized his idea of external power after 

 the pattern of a personality, and has then ascribed 

 this type of organization to the external power itself. 

 This projection Blake symbolized in a sentence: 

 'Thus men forgot that All Deities reside in the Hu- 

 man breast." 



The rival schools of psychology may disagree: 

 but all are agreed that some modes of thinking are 

 more primitive than others, and even in the most 

 educated amongst us tend to persist, often in the sub- 



