is salutary conformation of the earth we may add another great
convenience of the hills, and that is affording commodious places for
habitation, serving (as an eminent author wordeth it) as screens to
keep off the cold and nipping blasts of the northern and easterly
winds, and reflecting the benign and cherishing sunbeams and so
rendering our habitations both more comfortable and more cheerly in
winter.

"Lastly, it is to the hills that the fountains owe their rise and the
rivers their conveyance, and consequently those vast masses and lofty
piles are not, as they are charged such rude and useless excrescences
of our ill-formed globe; but the admirable tools of nature, contrived
and ordered by the infinite Creator, to do one of its most useful
works. For, was the surface of the earth even and level, and the
middle parts of its islands and continents not mountainous and high as
now it is, it is most certain there could be no descent for the rivers,
no conveyance for the waters; but, instead of gliding along those
gentle declivities which the higher lands now afford them quite down to
the sea, they would stagnate and perhaps stink, and also drown large
tracts of land.

"[Thus] the hills and vales, though to a peevish and weary traveler
they may seem incommodious and troublesome, yet are a noble work of the
great Creator, and wisely appointed by him for the good of our
sublunary world."

You see how natural it is, from this point of view, to treat religion
as a mere survival, for religion does in fact perpetuate the traditions
of the most primeval thought. To coerce the spiritual powers, or to
square them and get them on our side, was, during enormous tracts of
time, the one great object in our dealings with the natural world. For
our ancestors, dreams, hallucinations, revelations, and cock-and-bull
stories were inextricably mixed with facts. Up to a comparatively
recent date such distinctions as those between what has been verified
and what is only conjectured, between the impersonal and the personal
aspects of existence, were hardly suspected or conceived. Whatever you
imagined in a lively manner, whatever you thought fit to be true, you
affirmed confidently; and whatever you affirmed, your comrades
believed. Truth was what had not yet been contradicted, most things
were taken into the mind from the point of view of their human
suggestiveness, and the attention confined itself exclusively to the
aesthetic