8 38 ECCLESIASTICAL INSTITUTIONS. 



belief was absolutely false, all derived beliefs must be 

 absolutely false.&quot; 



This objection looks fatal ; and it would be fatal were its 

 premiss valid. Unexpected as it will be to most readers, the 

 answer here to be made is that at the outset a germ of truth 

 was contained in the primitive conception the truth, namely, 

 that the power which manifests itself in consciousness is but 

 a differently-conditioned form of the power which manifests 

 itself beyond consciousness. 



Every voluntary act yields to the primitive man, proof of 

 a source of energy within him. Not that he thinks about his 

 internal experiences ; but in these experiences this notion 

 lies latent. When producing motion in his limbs, and 

 through them motion in other things, he is aware of the 

 accompanying feeling ol effort. And this sense of effort 

 which is the perceived antecedent of changes produced by him, 

 becomes the conceived antecedent of changes not produced 

 by him furnishes him with a term of thought by which to 

 represent the genesis of these objective changes. At first 

 this idea of muscular forces as anteceding unusual events 

 around him, carries with it the whole assemblage of associated 

 ideas. He thinks of the implied efforts as efforts exer 

 cised by beings like himself. In course of time these 

 doubles of the dead, supposed to be workers of all but the 

 most familiar changes, are modified in conception. Besides 

 becoming less grossly material, some of them are developed 

 into larger personalities presiding over classes of phenomena 

 which, being comparatively regular in their order, suggest a 

 belief in beings who, while far more powerful than men, aro 

 less variable in their modes of action. So that the idea of 

 force as exercised by such beings, comes to be less associated 

 with the idea of a human ghost. Further advances, by 

 which minor supernatural agents are merged in one general 

 agent, and by which the personality of this general agent is 

 rendered vague while becoming widely extended, tend still 

 further to dissociate the notion oi objective force from the 



