eaning) of intimate relationship and unity with all this outer
world, the instinctive conviction that the world can be swayed by the
spirit of Man, if the man can only find the right ritual, the right
word, the right spell, wherewith to move it. An aura of emotion
surrounded everything--of terror, of tabu, of fascination, of desire.
The world, to these people, was transparent with presences related to
themselves; and though hunger and sex may have been the dominant and
overwhelmingly practical needs of their life, yet their outlook on the
world was essentially poetic and imaginative.

Moreover it will be seen that in this age of magic and the belief in
spirits, though there was an intense sense of every thing being
alive, the gods, in the more modern sense of the world, hardly existed
(1)--that is, there was no very clear vision, to these people, of
supra-mundane beings, sitting apart and ordaining the affairs of
earth, as it were from a distance. Doubtless this conception was slowly
evolving, but it was only incipient. For the time being--though there
might be orders and degrees of spirits (and of gods)--every such being
was only conceived of, and could only be conceived of, as actually a
part of Nature, dwelling in and interlaced with some phenomenon of Earth
and Sky, and having no separate existence.

(1) For a discussion of the evolution of RELIGION out of MAGIC,
see Westermarck's Origin of Moral Ideas, ch. 47.

How was it then, it will be asked, that the belief in separate and
separable gods and goddesses--each with his or her well-marked outline
and character and function, like the divinities of Greece, or of India,
or of the Egyptian or Christian religions, ultimately arose? To
this question Jane Harrison (in her Themis and other books) gives an
ingenious answer, which as it chimes in with my own speculations (in the
Art of Creation and elsewhere) I am inclined to adopt. It is that the
figures of the supranatural gods arose from a process in the human mind
similar to that which the photographer adopts when by photographing a
number of faces on the same plate, and so superposing their images on
one another, he produces a so-called "composite" photograph or image.
Thus, in the photographic sphere, the portraits of a lot of members
of the same family superposed upon one another may produce a composite
image or ideal of that family type, or the portraits of a number of
Aztecs or of a number of Apache Indians the