502 Darwinism and the Study of Religions 
Ghosts and sprites, ancestor worship, the soul, oracles, prophecy 3 
all these elements of the primitive supersensuous world we willingly 
admit to be the proper material of religion; but other elements are 
more surprising; such are class-names, abstract ideas, numbers, geo- 
metrical figures. We do not nowadays think of these as of religious 
content, but to primitive men they were all part of the furniture of 
his supernatural world. 
With respect to class-names, Dr Tylor! has shown how instructive 
are the first attempts of the savage to get at the idea of a class. 
Things in which similarity is observed, things indeed which can be 
related at all are to the savage kindred. A species is a family or 
a number of individuals with a common god to look after them. 
Such for example is the Finn doctrine of the haltia. Every object 
has its haltia, but the haltiat were not tied to the individual, they 
interested themselves in every member of the species. Each stone 
had its haltia, but that haléia was interested in other stones; the 
individuals disappeared, the haltia remained. 
Nor was it only class-names that belonged to the supersensuous 
world. A man’s own proper-name is a sort of spiritual essence of 
him, a kind of soul to be carefully concealed. By pronouncing a 
name you bring the thing itself into being. When Elohim would 
create Day “he called out to the Light ‘Day,’ and to the Darkness 
he called out ‘Night’”; the great magician pronounced the magic 
Names and the Things came into being. “In the beginning was the 
Word” is literally true, and this reflects the fact that our conceptual 
world comes into being by the mental process of naming®. In old 
times people went further; they thought that by naming events 
they could bring them to be, and custom even to-day keeps up the 
inveterate magical habit of wishing people “Good Morning” and a 
“Happy Christmas.” 
Number, too, is part of the supersensuous world that is thoroughly 
religious. We can see and touch seven apples, but seven itself, that 
wonderful thing that shifts from object to object, giving it its seven- 
ness, that living thing, for it begets itself anew in multiplication— 
surely seven is a fit denizen of the upper-world. Originally all 
numbers dwelt there, and a certain supersensuous sanctity still clings 
to seven and three. We still say “Holy, Holy, Holy,” and in some 
mystic way feel the holier. 
The soul and the supersensuous world get thinner and thinner, 
rarer and more rarefied, but they always trail behind them clouds 
of smoke and vapour from the world of sense and space whence they 
have come. It is difficult for us even nowadays to use the word 
1 Primitive Culture, Vol. 1. p. 245 (4th edit.), 1903. 
* For a full discussion of this point see Beck, Nachahmung, p. 41, Die Sprache. 
