The Sphere of Religion 291 



for the higher things of the spirit than the material forms of his 

 worship would show, and, on the other hand, as mere material 

 objects, his reverence for his sacred things does not seem to have 

 been much greater than ours. 



The reason for their sacredness was quite apart from their 

 actual value even for him. What he valued them for can be 

 explained by a quasi-material presence, and the explanation would 

 be right enough, because the mark of the primitive mind is 

 inability to think except in material forms. But, if that were all, 

 we should have expected him to see it only in the highest material 

 forms. We have to ask why the objects might be at once trivial 

 and yet so sacred as to be valued above life itself. Only the sense 

 of a higher world could have required from him such surrender of 

 what embodies all natural values. This must have meant in- 

 tense and deep experiences. But he embodied them' in such crude 

 forms, because, as a matter of fact, they came to him in this context 

 of strange objects. Even in our own better ordered minds, our 

 deepest feelings and our highest thoughts are often stirred by the 

 trivial and not infrequently by the repellant, and are by no 

 means rigidly reserved for sublime occasions. The experiences of 

 primitive man apparently were much more accidental, sporadic, 

 unarranged and uncriticised even than ours : and to the extent 

 in which this was so, the difference in his view of the sacred 

 depended on different experiences. Yet it was only to this extent. 

 The real difference was not due to anything in the experiences 

 themselves, but to the absence of power to deal freely with them. 

 The main reason why his higher experiences remained embedded 

 in crude material things is simply that, lacking free ideas, he was 

 unable to separate any part of his experience from the whole 

 context in which it happened to him. Our emancipation entirely 

 depends on this freedom, which enables us to set our ideas at liberty 

 from their accidental associations. Without this power, we too 

 should have had few sacred things free from bizarre material 

 associations, and even as it is, we are, perhaps, not quite so superior to 

 the savage as we imagine. But the lack of this power of free ideas, 

 this power of selecting from his experience, and thinking it as his 

 own generalised thought and finding what is to be revered in it apart 

 from its material embodiments, is precisely what makes man primi- 

 tive. His experience, being as it were solid with its context, was 

 necessarily material in form. Moreover, this form was cherished, 



