ous times and climes led folk
of the most diverse surroundings and heredity--and perhaps even sprung
from separate anthropoid stocks--to develop their social and religious
ideas along the same general lines--and that even to the extent of
exhibiting at times a remarkable similarity in minute details. This is a
theory which commends itself greatly to a deeper and more philosophical
consideration; but it brings us up point-blank against another most
difficult question (which we have already raised), namely, how to
account for extremely rude and primitive peoples in the far past, and on
the very borderland of the animal life, having been SUSCEPTIBLE to the
germs of great religious ideas (such as we have mentioned) and having
been instinctively--though not of course by any process of conscious
reasoning--moved to express them in symbols and rites and ceremonials,
and (later no doubt) in myths and legends, which satisfied their
FEELINGS and sense of fitness--though they may not have known WHY--and
afterwards were capable of being taken up and embodied in the great
philosophical religions.

This difficulty almost compels us to a view of human knowledge which has
found supporters among some able thinkers--the view, namely, that a vast
store of knowledge is already contained in the subconscious mind of man
(and the animals) and only needs the provocation of outer experience
to bring it to the surface; and that in the second stage of human
psychology this process of crude and piecemeal externalization is
taking place, in preparation for the final or third stage in which the
knowledge will be re-absorbed and become direct and intuitional on a
high and harmonious plane--something like the present intuition of the
animals as we perceive it on the animal plane. However this general
subject is one on which I shall touch again, and I do not propose to
dwell on it at any length now.

There is a third alternative theory (3)--a combination of (1) and
(2)--namely, that if one accepts (2) and the idea that at any given
stage of human development there is a PREDISPOSITION to certain symbols
and rites belonging to that stage, then it is much more easy to accept
theory (1) as an important factor in the spread of such symbols and
rites; for clearly, then, the smallest germ of a custom or practice,
transported from one country or people to another at the right time,
would be sufficient to wake the development or growth in question
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