292 Science Religion and Reality 



because his sole method of seeking to revive his experience of 

 higher reah'ty was to return as much as possible to the material 

 conditions in which it first came. This explains not only why 

 primitive religion has many crude sacred objects, but why it is so 

 much occupied with particular places, marking them with pillars 

 or stocks or such-like. It was in order to return to the exact spot 

 and thereby to revive the presence of the sacred formerly felt in 

 it. Our imagination may still remain baffled before its amazing 

 pantheon, not only of the sky and the hosts of heaven and of river 

 and mountain, but of birds and beasts and creeping things ; yet, 

 when we think of the way of arriving at it, we should not be wholly 

 without understanding. But, above all, we ought to see that the 

 experience may concern high matters which are really and truly 

 sacred, while the embodiment of it is, so to speak, rather gargoyle 

 than seraph. And with that should go his queer and, to us at least, 

 absurd and irrational taboos, for they are all ways of respecting the 

 presence of sacred powers, of powers not at any cost to be brought 

 down to the convenient. 



This limitation, which tied his conception of higher ideas to 

 material objects, is not at all confined to religion or to ideas of the 

 sacred, because primitive man could no more conceive sharpness 

 apart from a cutting instrument than sacredness apart from material 

 embodiment. Yet as he knew, in spite of that, what sharpness 

 meant, so he knew also what sacredness was. Therefore, if the 

 absence of free ideas left the sacred unemancipated from a sporadic 

 and unreasoned and material experience, we ought not to conclude 

 that there was nothing in it besides the accidental and material. 

 On the contrary, the recognition of anything as sacred, as of an 

 absolute value above desire and even above life, was the well- 

 spring of all endeavour after emancipation from a material world 

 merely appealing to his appetites, because this alone in his life 

 was not measured by them. Manifestly, therefore, he was finding 

 a higher power which made this victory possible, and this he made 

 plain by revering it above all might of visible things and obeying 

 its requirements at all cost of loss or hazard. 



This valuation as sacred, therefore, we ought to esteem as the 

 spring of all self-mastery and all mastery over the world, as the 

 sublime attainment by which man became truly man. Man with 

 a taboo, which he would not break for any earthly gain or even to 

 save his life, was no longer a mere animal whose only inhibition 



