lds join? Because,
it would seem, mana, the egomaniac or megalomaniac element, cannot get
satisfied with real things, and therefore goes eagerly out to a false
world, the supersensuous other-world whose growth we have sketched. This
junction of the two is fact, not fancy. Among all primitive peoples dead
men, ghosts, spirits of all kinds, become the chosen vehicle of mana.
Even to this day it is sometimes urged that religion, i.e. belief in
the immortality of the soul, is true "because it satisfies the deepest
craving of human nature." The two worlds, of mana and magic on the one
hand, of ghosts and other-world on the other, combine so easily because
they have the same laws, or rather the same comparative absence of law.
As in the world of dreams and ghosts, so in the world of mana, space and
time offer no obstacles; with magic all things are possible. In the one
world what you imagine is real; in the other what you desire is ipso
facto accomplished. Both worlds are egocentric, megalomaniac, filled to
the full with unbridled human will and desire.
We are all of us born in sin, in that sin which is to science
"the seventh and deadliest," anthropomorphism, we are egocentric,
ego-projective. Hence necessarily we make our gods in our own image.
Anthropomorphism is often spoken of in books on religion and mythology
as if it were a last climax, a splendid final achievement in religious
thought. First, we are told, we have the lifeless object as god
(fetichism), then the plant or animal (phytomorphism, theriomorphism),
and last God is incarnate in the human form divine. This way of putting
things is misleading. Anthropomorphism lies at the very beginning of
our consciousness. Man's first achievement in thought is to realise that
there is anything at all not himself, any object to his subject. When
he has achieved however dimly this distinction, still for long, for very
long he can only think of those other things in terms of himself; plants
and animals are people with ways of their own, stronger or weaker than
himself but to all intents and purposes human.
Again the child helps us to understand our own primitive selves. To
children animals are always people. You promise to take a child for a
drive. The child comes up beaming with a furry bear in her arms. You say
the bear cannot go. The child bursts into tears. You think it is because
the child cannot endure to be separated from a toy. It is no such thing.
It is the intoler
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