y comparable to the conscious
religious beliefs of later times, which were worked out in many
instances by an ingenious priesthood. The period when group feeling
predominated far antedated such civilizations as those of Egypt and
later Greece, for example, in which very elaborate religious systems
existed.

With primitive people these deeper feelings appear to arise
unconsciously rather than consciously. Moreover, probably as a result of
collective thought and feeling, motives and beliefs are developed and
elaborated in a way quite beyond the mental capacity of any one
individual of the community. Beliefs are formulated which have a
grandeur of conception and a beauty of expression well worthy of
admiration. The beauty and native vigor of some of the earlier myths are
examples of this. They live in the tribe as traditions. No one person
seems to have written them; in fact, they are added to, changed and
improved until they represent the highest expression of national
feelings. Gilbert Murray has indicated this in the _Rise of the Greek
Epic_. He emphasizes that there is found an expression of racial
feelings, built up from many sources. Such Sagas are not the property of
any one individual. The feelings they express are associated with the
unconscious of the race, if such a term is permissible. Gilbert
Murray,[3] in interpreting this element in primitive literature states:
"We have also, I suspect, a strange unanalyzed vibration below the
surface, an undercurrent of desires and fears, and passions, long
slumbering yet eternally familiar, which have for thousands of years
lain near the root of our most intimate emotions and been wrought into
the fabric of our most magical dreams. How far in the past ages this
stream may reach back I dare not even surmise; but it sometimes seems as
if the power of stirring it or moving with it were one of the last
secrets of genius."

The importance of the collective or group feeling has been emphasized as
thereby one sees how a fundamental racial motive becomes an integral
part of the mental life of each and every member of the group. In
primitive life every individual contributes something to this motive and
in turn receives something from it. It enters into the developing mind
and becomes inseparably associated with it. In studying the evolution of
these motives one is studying the evolution of the human mind.

The motive which we have undertaken to explain has to do with one of the