FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTIONS AND METHODS 453 



him to seek to enter into relations with it of the same nature as those 

 which he sustained to his clpser kith and kin. 



No essential element of religion is likely to have been wholly 

 lacking even in the earliest efflorescence of the religious conscious- 

 ness. A real animism, a conscious personification of natural objects 

 and forces, had not yet been developed by reflective introspection 

 and reasoning from analogy; but the failure to distinguish between 

 animate and inanimate, human kind and other kinds, produced 

 similar religious phenomena, and was the necessary condition for the 

 growth of animism. There was no ancestral worship, for the con- 

 ception of an ancestry was wanting and there was no reflection on 

 a possible survival after death; but the relation of the younger to the 

 older members of early human society and the memory of the dead 

 prepared the way for the establishment of ancestral worship when 

 the epoch-making generalization should be made from such phe- 

 nomena as sleep, trance, and apparent death. Totemism was not 

 yet, seeing that the idea of descent was unknown and the causal 

 connection between sexual intercourse and pregnancy and child- 

 birth is not likely to have been perceived; but the copulation with 

 animals, from which it originated and which flourished into late 

 historic times, must in the earliest ages have been widely prevalent. 

 Tabuism is based on the conception of a special communicable 

 sanctity, attaching to certain objects by virtue of their relation 

 to the spirits worshiped, and rendering it unlawful to touch them 

 or to use them for ordinary profane purposes. This is certainly an 

 idea too advanced for the stage here considered; but the first step 

 in this direction is taken when certain things become the objects 

 of special religious consideration. Similarly, fetishism, which seems 

 essentially to consist in the individual appropriation of a part of a 

 sacred object, standing as the representative of the whole, and 

 bringing all its virtues to the owner, implies a somewhat advanced 

 mode of reasoning, though the fragrance remaining in a leaf taken 

 from a flower, or the power of motion preserved in the tail of a 

 reptile severed from the body, may easily have given rise to it. 

 Magic, the experimental science of the savage, operates with the 

 peculiar word by whose subtle power it can call forth and conjure 

 the spirits, and the peculiar act by which extraordinary benefits 

 may be derived from them. Its development is no doubt dependent 

 upon the early growth of human speech, and though possibly not 

 coeval with the awakening of the religious consciousness in man, 

 it touches that epoch with some of its constituent elements. The 

 roots of all these ideas and practices go back to the very origin of 

 religion. They are likely to have extended through the major part 

 of the long palaeolithic age before the earliest tombs announce the 

 new stage of religious development to which neolithic man has 



