PRE-ANIMISM 67 



evil, his daily affairs, and who, therefore, are "squared" 

 accordingly. Indra, the old Vedic weather-god, elbowed out 

 of human affairs by local rain-gods, is a type of the multitude 

 of High Nature-gods with whom man is on only a bowing 

 acquaintance ; who reign, but do not govern, a remote 

 theocracy, subject of the scornful inscription which Renier 

 found in Algeria ; Dis Securis : " To the gods who take no 

 heed." 



There can be no convincing answer to the objection which 

 may be raised, that the hypothesis of pre-animistic stages in 

 the evolution of religion rests on assumption unsupported by 

 examples. Science starts with hypotheses. The existence 

 of an ethereal medium was assumed to account for the 

 phenomena of radiant and other forms of energy, and its 

 actual constitution remains an unsettled problem. The theory 

 that life had a beginning is not weakened by the fact that no 

 traces of the primitive organisms exist, for the assumed nature 

 of these was such as to make preservation of their remains 

 impossible. So the answer to any argument against a pre- 

 animistic theory is not without force when it submits that, in 

 the impossibility of producing examples from the incalculably 

 remote period in which their presence may be predicated, the 

 higher is the value of the barbaric and civilized examples 

 cited above. For the persistence of conceptions of nameless 

 and imageless gods which they preserve witnesses to their 

 primitiveness. Their character betrays them as survivals ; 

 moreover, they testify to a spiritual unity and continuity 

 which has its correspondence in the physical universe. 



So much, then, may be assumed concerning the attitude 

 of what may be called the primitive mind before phenomena 

 whose nature it could not grasp. 



Brief return may now be made to what was said at the 

 outset about man as gregarious, because religion is primarily 

 and fundamentally social. There is no individualism in 

 primitive groups. " Religious beliefs are not the clever 

 inventions of individual minds, but imposed on the indivi- 

 dual from without. Or, to speak more strictly, we must 

 give up thinking of the individual as having any separate 

 existence over against society, and rather conceive him as 

 completely immersed in one continuous social mentality." 1 



Like revolutions, religion begins in the stomach. The 

 perpetuation of the groups depended on the sex impulse. To 



1 Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy^ p. 42. 



