lO INTRODUCTORY. 



external nature. And if, in an age in which science 

 loves to pry into the origins of all things, it were 

 once to turn its attention to its own origin, it would 

 quickly appear that the origin of science, philosophy 

 and rehVion was to be found in one and the same 

 fact, the fact that the world is so constituted that 

 we can not in thoughtless content acquiesce in what 

 is given. The perplexity, with which thought starts 

 on its road to knowledge, is forced upon it from 

 without. So far from its being true, as Aristotle 

 said, that man naturally desires knowledge, it is 

 rather the case that man is originally as lazy and 

 uninquiring as the beasts, and that the necessity of 

 knowledge is hardly borne in upon him by the stern 

 struggle for existence. Primitive man could not 

 acquiesce in the chaos of phenomena, because its 

 improvident and thoughtless acceptance meant 

 death. Then, as always, knowledge was power, 

 and to survive, man had to understand the world 

 he lived in. And so the first steps in knowledge 

 were directly necessitated by external pressure, and 

 the primitive theory of life was the first reaction 

 of thought upon its environment. And as such it 

 contained, in an undifferentiated whole, the germs 

 of activities that have since drifted far apart. 

 AnimisJ7t is the first theory of the world, and out of 

 it have differentiated science, philosophy, and reli- 

 gion. The single basis of all three was the *' anthro- 

 pomorphic " assumption that all things were to be 

 interpreted on the analogy of what man conceived 

 to be his own nature, and hence supposed that volit- 

 ion was the cause of motion, and that all events 

 were to be ascribed to the action of personal spirits, 

 with wills as capricious as man's own. 



§ 6. This theory was the basis of religion, in 



