256 Note on some primitive conceptions [APP. 



magical rapport, to which Andrew Lang compares it 1 ; 

 it is a Spiritual Principle that lies behind everything 2 . 

 I imagine there are few, if any, religions in which this 

 Spirit cannot be traced, though it loses itself in the 

 idea of the Great Spirit or Supreme God, or sometimes 

 in the Demiurge 8 . We thus find three Divine Activities 

 vaguely resembling the three Persons of the Trinity 

 early distinguished by an instinctive theology, one 

 creative, another mediatorial, another all pervading. 

 We also find a marked tendency to fuse these into one, 

 as the need for unity grows upon man. Is it too much 

 to say that even among the Hebrews, with their com- 

 paratively pure monotheism, the remains of the older 

 thought are traceable in the sacred name of lahweh? 

 though it must be confessed that the Hebrew letters 

 miT, with their omission of the vowel sounds, show no 

 evidence of it as indeed might be expected, when we 

 remember the intense horror of the Hebrews for any- 

 thing that suggested idolatrous symbolism. Finally, 

 although among the great thinkers, whether Buddhist, 

 Hindu, or Roman Catholic, the unity of the Godhead 

 overshadows every other conception, yet among the less 

 educated we have clear evidence of the more primitive 

 stratum where the three aspects are visualised as iso- 

 lated divinities. Nay, it is not a great overstatement 

 to say that Protestant Christianity is quite definitely 

 tritheistic in all but name, except among the deepest 

 thinkers. 



We find, then, that the sense of need for a godhead 

 that is dual in function, however multiple in actual 

 imagination, rests first upon a vague understanding 



1 The Making of Religion, p. 199. 



' Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, passim. 



H. G. Wells' Veiled Being shows an instructive return to 

 these more primitive conceptions (God the Invisible 

 metaphysically, to Kant's thing-in-itself. 



