ts the sense of touch.
Apparently touch is the deepest down, most primitive, of senses. The
rest are specialisations and complications. Primitive man has no formal
rubric "optical delusion," but he learns practically to distinguish
between things that affect only one sense and things that affect two or
more--if he did not he would not survive. But both classes of things are
real to him. Percipi est esse.
So far, primitive man has made a real observation; there are things that
appeal to one sense only. But very soon creeps in confusion fraught with
disaster. He passes naturally enough, being economical of any mental
effort, from what he really sees but cannot feel to what he thinks
he sees, and gives to it the same secondary reality. He has dreams,
visions, hallucinations, nightmares. He dreams that an enemy is beating
him, and he wakes rubbing his head. Then further he remembers things;
that is, for him, he sees them. A great chief died the other day and
they buried him, but he sees him still in his mind, sees him in his
war-paint, splendid, victorious. So the image of the past goes together
with his dreams and visions to the making of this other less real,
but still real world, his other-world of the supersensuous, the
supernatural, a world, the outside existence of which, independent of
himself, he never questions.
And, naturally enough, the future joins the past in this supersensuous
world. He can hope, he can imagine, he can prophesy. And again the
images of his hope are real; he sees them with that mind's eye which
as yet he has not distinguished from his bodily eye. And so the
supersensuous world grows and grows big with the invisible present, and
big also with the past and the future, crowded with the ghosts of the
dead and shadowed with oracles and portents. It is this supersensuous,
supernatural world which is the eternity, the other-world, of primitive
religion, not an endlessness of time, but a state removed from full
sensuous reality, a world in which anything and everything may happen,
a world peopled by demonic ancestors and liable to a splendid vagueness,
to a "once upon a time-ness" denied to the present. It not unfrequently
happens that people who know that the world nowadays obeys fixed laws
have no difficulty in believing that six thousand years ago man was
made direct from a lump of clay, and woman was made from one of man's
superfluous ribs.
The fashioning of the supersensuous world comes out
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