Content of Primitive Supersensuous World 499 
I act (or rather, react to outside stimulus), and so I come to think. 
Thus there is set going a recurrent series: act and thought become 
in their turn stimuli to fresh acts and thoughts. In examining 
religion as envisaged to-day it would therefore be more correct to 
begin with the practice of religion, i.e. ritual, and then pass to its 
theory, theology or mythology. But it will be more convenient to 
adopt the reverse method. The theoretical content of religion is to 
those of us who are Protestants far more familiar and we shall thus 
proceed from the known to the comparatively unknown. 
I shall avoid all attempt at rigid definition. The problem before 
the modern investigator is, not to determine the essence and definition 
of religion but to inquire how religious phenomena, religious ideas 
and practices arose. Now the theoretical content of religion, the 
domain of theology or mythology, is broadly familiar to all. It is 
the world of the unseen, the supersensuous ; it is the world of what 
we call the soul and the supposed objects of the soul’s perception, 
sprites, demons, ghosts and gods. How did this world grow up? 
We turn to our savages. Intelligent missionaries of bygone days 
used to ply savages with questions such as these: Had they any 
belief in God? Did they believe in the immortality of the soul? 
Taking their own clear-cut conceptions, discriminated by a developed 
terminology, these missionaries tried to translate them into languages 
that had neither the words nor the thoughts, only a vague, inchoate, 
tangled substratum, out of which these thoughts and words later 
differentiated themselves. Let us examine this substratum. 
Nowadays we popularly distinguish between objective and sub- 
jective; and further, we regard the two worlds as in some sense 
opposed. To the objective world we commonly attribute some reality 
independent of consciousness, while we think of the subjective as 
dependent for its existence on the mind. The objective world consists 
of perceptible things, or of the ultimate constituents to which matter 
is reduced by physical speculation. The subjective world is the world 
of beliefs, hallucinations, dreams, abstract ideas, imaginations and 
the like. Psychology of course knows that the objective and sub- 
jective worlds are interdependent, inextricably intertwined, but for 
practical purposes the distinction is convenient. 
But primitive man has not yet drawn the distinction between 
objective and subjective. Nay, more, it is foreign to almost the 
whole of ancient philosophy. Plato’s Ideas', his Goodness, Truth, 
Beauty, his class-names, horse, table, are it is true dematerialised 
as far as possible, but they have outside existence, apart from the 
1 I owe this psychological analysis of the elements of the primitive supersensuous world 
mainly to Dr Beck, ‘‘Erkenntnisstheorie des primitiven Denkens,” see p. 498, note 1, 
32—2 
