d
more rarified, 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 "soul" without lapsing
into a sensuous mythology. The Cartesians' sharp distinction between res
extensa non cogitans and res cogitans non extansa 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-Gotter), 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, projected 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 anth