g that the sacredness of supernatural beings communicates
itself to whatever is connected with them. The view that the victim is
not in itself sacred is contradicted by all the phenomena of early
religion. Though the essay of MM. Hubert and Mauss formulates no
definition of the ultimate efficient cause in sacrifice, passing remarks
appear to indicate that they look on the offering as a gift to
superhuman Powers, and that their object is to show under what
conditions and circumstances it is to be presented.

+1051+. _Sacrifice as the expression of desire for union with the
Infinite._ Professor C. P. Tiele, dissatisfied with existing theories of
the significance of sacrifice, contents himself with a general
statement.[1902] After pointing out that the material of sacrifice in
any community is derived from the food of the community, he passes in
review briefly the theories of Tylor (gifts to deities), Spencer
(veneration of deceased ancestors), and Robertson Smith; all these,
though he thinks it would be presumptuous to condemn them hastily, he
finds insufficient, most of them, he says, confining themselves to a
single kind of offering, whereas every kind should be taken into
account, gifts presented, objects and persons consecrated, victims slain
with or without repasts, possessions and pleasures renounced, acts of
fasting and abstinence, every kind of religious self-denial or
self-sacrifice. The question being whether one and the same religious
need is to be recognized in all the varieties, he finds the root of
sacrificial observances in the yearning of the believer for abiding
communion with the supernatural Power to which he feels himself akin,
the longing of finite man to become one with the Infinity above him.

+1052+. Tiele here has in mind the highest form of the religious
consciousness, which he carries back to the beginnings of religious
thought. He is justified in so doing in so far as all later developments
must be supposed to exist in germinal form at the outset of rational
life; but such a conception tells us nothing of the historical origin of
customs. The idea of the relation between the finite and the infinite is
not recognizable in early thought; to trace the history of such an
institution as sacrifice we desire to know in what sort of feeling it
originated, and we may then follow its progress to its highest
definition. All the details mentioned by Tiele are included under the
head of gift except acts of