IDEALIZATION AND RELIGION 3 07 



The developing sense of dependence in its intellectual phase 

 gives rise to the two categories of cause and design x which enter 

 as elements into the construction of his ideal of the great spirit; 

 in its ethical phase it gives rise to such attributes of Deity as jus- 

 tice, mercy, grace, love and righteousness. This sense of depend- 

 ence further explains the essential anthropomorphism of the 

 religious consciousness. 2 



There are two elements in the " personal sense " as revealed in 

 this anthropomorphism: " (1) There is the tendency to make 

 ejective the ideal person reached by the road already traced; to 

 make it real, a separate being or personality. There must be 

 somewhere, feels the child, a self which answers to all the elements 

 of the law: to the charity, the love, the beauty of the ideal, whose 

 presence in my thought makes my own self morally so incom- 

 plete. . . . The great spirit becomes the way of speaking of 

 this being, — that is, it is the race-child's way. (2) The other 

 element in religious emotion is the child's expectation of yet more 

 manifestations from this highest of all persons, — manifestations 

 which he cannot anticipate nor cope with; which he must submit 

 to when they come, learn of only when they have come, propitiate 

 in the ways that please persons, and stand in awe of from first to 

 last." 3 



" The ejective, personifying element, which the history of 

 primitive peoples puts so clearly in evidence," our author con- 

 tinues, " gives positive content to the religious sentiment as 

 mentioned above; while the projective or negative element, as 

 seen thus in this latter aspect of the child's growth, is the awe- 

 inspiring, something-over of mystery equally emphasized in the 

 rites and cults of primitive ceremonial." * 



This developing sense of mystery in the dialectic of personal 

 growth is analyzed as follows: — 



First. The ethical child, — and man too, — must think of God as thinking of 

 him; as having a positive ethical attitude toward him. . . . 



Second. In this highest stretch, therefore, of the religious life into which 

 the child is now entering, God is a real person, standing in real relations of 



1 Social and Ethical Interpretations, p. 337; also to those of " omnipotence and 

 omnipresence," p. 346. 



2 Ibid., p. 346. 3 Ibid., pp. 330, 331. « Ibid., p. 331. 



