he various elements we have so briefly
indicated cross and recross each other, in endless combinations; none
of them is to be found entirely by itself. There is no fetish worship
which is not accompanied by traces of an early belief in great gods;
there is no belief in great gods which is not accompanied by a belief
in lower spirits. With regard to every savage religion the student
has to ask what the constituent elements of it are, in what way the
various beliefs of the early world, beliefs arising from such
different sources, meet in it and combine with one another.

In each of the higher religions, too, the same questions have to be
asked. The beliefs which we have sketched are the materials out of
which they also arose. They did not _originate_ the belief in high
gods with power over nature, nor the belief in the lesser spirits
which busy themselves with man's affairs. They did not originate the
belief in a life after death, nor was it left to them to appoint
sacred seasons in the year, or to consecrate the spots to which
worship has always clung. All these beliefs are prehistoric, and what
remained for the great religions was not to bring them forward for
the first time, but to surround them with a new kind of authority,
and to establish as a matter of positive ordinance or revelation what
had formerly grown up without any ordinance by the unconscious work
of custom. It was not left for any of the great founders to plant
religion in the world as a new thing, but only to add to the old
religion new forms and new sanctions.

It may be said that if these are the elements of which religion as a
whole is made, then religion arose at first out of illusions. That is
no doubt true, in a sense. It was an illusion on the part of early
man to suppose that the powers of heaven were animated beings who
could be his allies and answer his appeals; it was an illusion to
think that the tree or the stone contained a spirit, and an illusion
to think that men's spirits can go and wander about the earth by
themselves, leaving their bodies untenanted. But these illusions were
after all only the outward and inadequate expression in which the
spirit of religion then clothed itself. Religion must always express
itself in terms of the knowledge which exists in the world at a
particular time; and if the knowledge is defective to which the world
has attained, religious beliefs must share in its defects. But, on
the other hand, religion is s