the
phenomena of the weather, rain, storm, and thunder and lightning, are
the objects. It cannot be too clearly borne in mind that what was
worshipped was originally the natural object itself, regarded, after
the earliest habit of thought, as living. To heaven itself, to the
sun as he rose or set, to the storm itself, men addressed prayers and
made offerings; and in many quarters, both among savages and in the
great religions, the same thing occurs to this day.

But it was impossible for man to stop here, his imagination would not
allow him to do so. In some races, imagination was more active than
in others, but nowhere was it quite inoperative; and so it happened
that man was led, here to a greater there to a less extent, beyond
the direct and simple adoration of the powers of nature. When he
began to give them names, a first and a great step was taken in
advance of the original simplicity. A name is a power; if it is
anything more than a mere title or label, and all primitive names are
more than this, it brings with it associations of its own, and thus
men are led to ascribe to the object indicated by the name, a new
character and new powers. They proceed to argue about the name and
draw conclusions from it as to the nature of the being they worship,
and so come to think of their deity in quite a different manner. Even
to classify objects together and give them a common title, "the
bright ones," or "the living ones," as the early Aryans did, gives
them an independent position of their own, and tempts the imagination
to go further in describing them. Striving to find names for those
beings he worships and thinks about so much, early man gives them the
names of living creatures with whom he is familiar, and in this way
he brings them much nearer to himself, and at the same time appears
to himself to know a great deal more about them. The moon, for
example, has horns, the moon is a cow. Heaven is over all, heaven is
a father. And as he knows all about a cow, and all about a father, he
at once has these deities made much more real to him, they have an
independent existence to him. But, on the other hand, he has got
something more in his deity than there is in the natural object. It
is no longer the mere naked heaven or the mere moon he worships; but
these beings with additions made to them by his own imagination.

As time goes on the additions grow more and more. Having got living
persons for his deities, early man rea