admit
to be the proper material of religion; but other elements are more
surprising; such are class-names, abstract ideas, numbers, geometrical
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 ("Primitive Culture", Vol. II.
page 245 (4th edition), 1903.) 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 haltia 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. (For a full discussion of this point see Beck, "Nachahmung" page
41, "Die Sprache".) 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 SEVENness, 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 an