B] Note on some primitive conceptions 257 



that creation has a causative and a mediatorial aspect. 

 It is quite true that this notion is based on inadequate 

 physiological conceptions, only partially sound But the 

 point is, that something in the human mind found a 

 satisfaction in the idea of duality that it did not gain 

 from the idea of pure unity, and fuller knowledge has 

 not banished it. A unifying principle, too, hovers in the 

 background, indicating clearly enough that the human 

 mind demands unity as well as duality, though it tries 

 to gain this queerly enough through the conception of 

 an impersonal essence of some kind, in which the two 

 creative aspects are sometimes unified, while sometimes 

 it seems to provide but a third kind of spiritual reality, 

 impersonal, and coexistent with the personal gods. It 

 may be said that to argue thus is to import unjustified 

 subtleties into a primitive conception that is, after all, 

 very simple. Male and female are needed for human 

 creation; well then, what more natural than to ima- 

 gine male and female necessary for, or at least symbolic 

 of, divine creation? Such a contention does not take 

 account of the vital fact that the dual conception per- 

 sists when man is no longer primitive. I believe that 

 the true way to gain insight into primitive religion is to 

 focus one's attention on the germ of truth, as it grows 

 into a great stem; not on the fallen leaves of dead years. 

 Leaves, as they fall, rid the tree of waste products; 

 their loss is a mode of excretion. Fetishism has gone, 

 or is going, but the truth of fetishism survives, and we 

 may read it in the words imputed in the Logia to Christ, 

 "Raise the stone, and thou shalt find Me; cleave the 

 wood, and I am there." Animism is dead, but its truth 

 remains in the doctrine of Immanence, and in the theory 

 of the relation between body and mind 1 . Sacrifice is 

 dead, but its truth lives on in sacrament and atonement. 

 It is sounder to trace the development of a germ of truth 

 > Cf . MacDougall, Body and Mind. 



