Magical Element in Primitive Ritual 503 
“soul” without lapsing into a sensuous mythology. The Cartesians’ 
sharp distinction between res extensa non cogitans and res cogitans 
non extensa is remote. 
So far then man, through the processes of his thinking, has provided 
himself with a supersensuous world, the world of sense-delusion, of 
smoke and cloud, of dream and phantom, of imagination, of name 
and number and image. The natural course would now seem to 
be that this supersensuous world should develop into the religious 
world as we know it, that out of a vague animism with ghosts of 
ancestors, demons, and the like, there should develop in due order 
momentary gods (Augenblicks-Gétter), tribal gods, polytheism, and 
finally a pure monotheism. 
This course of development is usually assumed, but it is not 
I think quite what really happens. The supersensuous world as we 
have got it so far is too theoretic to be complete material of 
religion. It is indeed only one factor, or rather it is as it were a 
lifeless body that waits for a living spirit to possess and inform it. 
Had the theoretic factor remained uninformed it would eventually 
have separated off into its constituent elements of error and truth, 
the error dying down as a belated metaphysic, the truth developing 
into a correct and scientific psychology of the subjective. But man 
has ritual as well as mythology; that is, he feels and acts as well as 
thinks; nay more he probably feels and acts long before he definitely 
thinks. This contradicts all our preconceived notions of theology 
Man, we imagine, believes in a god or gods and then worships. The 
real order seems to be that, in a sense presently to be explained, 
he worships, he feels and acts, and out of his feeling and action, pro- 
jected into his confused thinking, he develops a god. We pass 
therefore to our second factor in religion :—ritual. 
The word “ritual” brings to our modern minds the notion of a 
church with a priesthood and organised services. Instinctively we 
think of a congregation meeting to confess sins, to receive absolution, 
to pray, to praise, to listen to sermons, and possibly to partake of 
sacraments. Were we to examine these fully developed phenomena 
we should hardly get further in the analysis of our religious 
conceptions than the notion of a highly anthropomorphic god 
approached by purely human methods of personal entreaty and 
adulation. 
Further, when we first come to the study of primitive religions 
we expect a priori to find the same elements, though in a ruder 
form. We expect to see “The heathen in his blindness bow down 
to wood and stone,” but the facts that actually confront us are 
startlingly dissimilar. Bowing down to wood and stone is an occu- 
