with our true commercial instinct what profit we
could extract from them. But they, the primitives, loved and admired
the animals; they domesticated many of them by the force of a natural
friendship, (1) and accorded them a kind of divinity. This was the age
of tribal solidarity and of a latent sense of solidarity with Nature.
And the point of it all is (with regard to the subject we have in hand)
that this was also the age from which by a natural evolution the sense
of Religion came to mankind. If Religion in man is the sense of ties
binding his inner self to the powers of the universe around him, then it
is evident I think that primitive man as I have described him possessed
the REALITY of this sense--though so far buried and subconscious that
he was hardly aware of it. It was only later, and with the coming of
the Second Stage, that this sense began to rise distinctly into
consciousness.

(1) See ch. iv. Tylor in his Primitive Culture (vol. i, p. 460,
edn. 1903) says: "The sense of an absolute psychical distinction between
man and beast, so prevalent in the civilized world, is hardly to be
found among the lower races."

Let us pass then to the Second Stage. There is a moment in the evolution
of a child--somewhere perhaps about the age of three (1)--when the
simple almost animal-like consciousness of the babe is troubled by a new
element--SELF-consciousness. The change is so marked, so definite, that
(in the depth of the infant's eyes) you can almost SEE it take place. So
in the evolution of the human race there has been a period--also marked
and definite, though extending intermittent over a vast interval
of time--when on men in general there dawned the consciousness of
THEMSELVES, of their own thoughts and actions. The old simple acceptance
of sensations and experiences gave place to REFLECTION. The question
arose: "How do these sensations and experiences affect ME? What can _I_
do to modify them, to encourage the pleasurable, to avoid or inhibit the
painful, and so on?" From that moment a new motive was added to life.
The mind revolved round a new centre. It began to spin like a little
eddy round its own axis. It studied ITSELF first and became deeply
concerned about its own pleasures and pains, losing touch the while with
the larger life which once dominated it--the life of Nature, the life of
the Tribe. The old unity of the spirit, the old solidarity, were broken
up.

(1) See Bucke's Cosmic Consciousness