78 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



lie gradually confounded the disembodied human power with the 

 soul of the Nature power, and through the law of least effort, used the 

 concrete image of the departed human being to stand in his mental 

 processes for the much more difficult thought of the Nature force. 

 But, whatever the process, animal shapes were obviously needed to 

 reduce the Nature powers to such a degree of concreteness as would 

 make it possible for primitive man to deal with them as objects of 

 thought. And it is not less certain that while, for some races, the 

 earliest shapes thus utilized were those of the lower animals, the final 

 form for all races was that of man himself. 



In the anthropomorphic stage, then, there is the same effort to un- 

 derstand the external system by assimilating it to something with 

 which man is already familiar. The worshiped deities may be many 

 or few, numberless as the Nature forces, polytheistic as among the 

 Greeks and Romans, or one as in the monotheism of the Semite. 

 Man likens them to himself, attributes to them not only his outward 

 shape, but also his failings and virtues, making his Pantheon re- 

 semble not only the social order, but also the political system under 

 which he happens to live. It is the completeness of this assimilation 

 which made anthropomorphism the most, persistent aspect of man's 

 intellectual growth the world has known. Yet the view could linger 

 only as the possession of the intellectually slothful and immature. 

 The inadequacy, the crudeness, of the conception in which Deity was 

 imaged as a gigantic man gradually forced itself upon the attention 

 of the more thoughtful. Increased mental activity, a better acquaint- 

 ance with natural processes, brought the idea of a power above 

 Nature rather than merely superior to man; and as the human mind 

 passed from the conception of the superhuman to that of the super- 

 natural as, moreover, the thought of merely local gods gave way to 

 the idea of gods not limited in their functions- to particular areas 

 the anthropomorphic shapes naturally fell away from the powers they 

 could no longer adequately represent. 



Then other changes, strictly correlated with man's advancing 

 knowledge of himself, ushered in the latest stage of his attitude toward 

 the external system. For in the same mind which had been com- 

 pelled to reject crude anthropomorphism, there had been growing 

 the consciousness, of man as something more than a mere compound 

 of vitality, consciousness, and will something more than a set of 

 bodily and mental capacities essential to the work of self-maintenance 

 the thought that man was the sum of his higher, not of his lower 

 qualities, that henceforth he must be measured by the activities which 

 he carried on in the domain of pure thought. And this recognition 

 of mental attributes as the most worthy, the most exalted characters 

 of human personality, could not fail to impress itself upon the con- 



