PROGRESS 5 



Savages have endowed the objects around them, 

 living and inanimate, with supernatural qualities. 

 At a higher grade of development they have created 

 gods made with hands, visible images of their fears 

 or their desires, by whose worship and service they 

 assuaged the urgent need within their breast. Still 

 later, turning from such crudity, they became servants 

 and worshippers of unseen gods, conceived under the 

 form of persons, but persons transcending human 

 personality, beings in whom was vested the control 

 of man and of the world. 



Up to this point there had been an increase of 

 spirituality in the constructions by which human 

 thought satisfied its need ; none the less, the 

 ideas underlying the mode of these constructions 

 had not materially altered. As Voltaire so pun- 

 gently put it, man had created God in his own 

 image. 



What remains ? there remains to search in the 

 external world, to find there if possible a foundation 

 of fact for the belief drawn from the inner world of 

 mind, to test the conceptions of a supreme being or 

 supereminent power against ever more and more 

 touchstones of reality, until the most sceptical shall 

 acknowledge that the final construction represents, 

 with whatever degree of incompleteness, yet not a 

 mere fragment educed to fill a void, however inevit- 

 able, to satisfy a longing, however natural, but the 

 summary and essence of a body of verifiiable fact. 



