104 DEVELOPMENT AND PURPOSE CHAP. 



human strength. He is distinct from any material, from 

 the stone or the image or the animal in which his ancestor 

 the spirit was merged. Also in sympathy with the general 

 extension of order in experience he has much more exten- 

 sive powers than a spirit. From being the underlying vital 

 principle of a tree he has become the god of vegetation, 

 perhaps the god of all the earth or of the sea. Or again he 

 is the god of the people, the centre of national patriotism, 

 and destined accordingly to a higher elevation, to sit en- 

 throned among the congregation of gods, to deny their 

 right to worship and ultimately to existence. 



Thus the divine takes independent shape, and the gods 

 have a world of their own, a world on the border of the 

 empirical, but neither threatening it with conquest nor 

 divided by any very scientific frontier. Indeed, at the 

 outset there is little difficulty in mutual accommodation. 

 The empirical order is not so firmly established but that 

 miraculous interventions may obtain credence, nor have the 

 structural categories been thought out to the point at 

 which philosophical difficulties interpose, nor has criticism 

 turned its edge upon the foundations of the supernatural. 

 There are rules of art, but the craft has a god to help with 

 that divine touch which no rule can fully secure, to temper 

 the irori to the right point, to raise the cream and keep the 

 milk from turning sour. In the graver issues of life, where 

 human control is still very weak, prayer and ceremonial 

 are of wonderful psychic staying power, at lowest as an 

 anodyne, at best as a tonic and an inspiration. The two 

 orders help each other, and conflict is but occasional and 

 unnecessary. 



(5) It is otherwise as the organising work of common 

 sense draws towards its limit. As it extends its sphere and 

 begins definitely to conceive Nature as a whole, as a system, 

 in short as (pvans, it must also begin to be aware of its own 

 methods, of the categories which it uses and the postulates 

 on which it rests. Long before this stage is reached the 

 fatal demand for exactitude has been raised. The sciences 

 of number and of space have begun to take shape, and 

 accuracy has been practised in the records of astronomy. 

 Alongside the looser ideas of common sense, bodies of 



