Life as a Fine Art. 409 



their pathway was not cheered by great hopes and high 

 ideals, neither was it darkened by our customary forebodings 

 of future evils, real or imaginary. The day's experience 

 was sufficient unto itself. It brought its little conventional 

 round of joys and sorrows. Its problems were compara- 

 tively simple, and belonged to the immediate present. Each 

 one was solved, as well as might be when it arose, on a 

 purely empirical basis. Primitive man viewed the world by 

 piecemeal. His sense of the causal correlation of events 

 was undeveloped by experience. He had little comprehen- 

 sion of the relations between phenomena, and no concep- 

 tion of an underlying or indwelling unity. For him the 

 thought of 



"One God, one law, one element " 



was impossible. His apprehensions of impending evils 

 dominated his beliefs. His deities were as numerous as his 

 fears, and his temples were rather pandemoniums than pan- 

 theons. Of natural law he had no knowledge. His morals, 

 like his conduct in general, were based upon the egoistic 

 data of a narrow personal experience or the authority of ar- 

 bitrary mandates the " thou shalt " and " thou shalt not " 

 of an irresponsible, autocratic hierarchy. 



As man grew in intelligence, the world gradually assumed 

 for him a different aspect. Beneath its vast, orderly, and 

 manifold activities, at first dimly and afterward more clear- 

 ly, he apprehended the reality of the one permanent Being 

 which is the nexus of all fleeting and transient phenomena, 

 and whose constant methods of operation, symbolized in the 

 steadily moving order of these phenomena, he interpreted 

 subjectively and described as the laws of Nature. With the 

 development of the historical sense due to a truer concep- 

 tion of the time-element in its relation to the life of the 

 individual and of society, he became conscious of the dra- 

 matic tendency thus revealed in the progressive life of the 

 world. A perception of the unity of the Kosmos the di- 

 vine order and beauty manifested in the processes of Nature 

 grew upon him. With the deepening consciousness of 

 his relationship to the past of the race came co-ordinately 

 an intenser outlook toward the future. New hopes, new 

 desires, awakened within his mind The vague fears of im- 

 pending evil, which filled the soul of primitive man with 

 dread, developed into a calmer and more philosophic sense 

 of awe and reverence, and lent more powerful sanctions to 

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