urb the terrific and
demonic violence of passions which else indeed might easily rend the
community asunder. And so on. It is easy to see that granted an early
stage of simple unreflecting nature-consciousness, and granting
this broken into and, after a time, shattered by the arrival of
SELF-consciousness there would necessarily follow in spontaneous yet
logical order a whole series of religious institutions and beliefs,
which phantasmal and unreal as they may appear to us, were by no
means unreal to our ancestors. It is easy also to see that as the
psychological process was necessarily of similar general character in
every branch of the human race and all over the world, so the religious
evolutions--the creeds and rituals--took on much the same complexion
everywhere; and, though they differed in details according to climate
and other influences, ran on such remarkably parallel lines as we have
noted.

Finally, to make the whole matter clear, let me repeat that this event,
the inbreak of Self-consciousness, took place, or BEGAN to take place,
an enormous time ago, perhaps in the beginning of the Neolithic Age.
I dwell on the word "began" because I think it is probable that in its
beginnings, and for a long period after, this newborn consciousness had
an infantile and very innocent character, quite different from its later
and more aggressive forms--just as we see self-consciousness in a little
child has a charm and a grace which it loses later in a boastful
or grasping boyhood and manhood. So we may understand that though
self-consciousness may have begun to appear in the human race at this
very early time (and more or less contemporaneously with the invention
of very rude tools and unformed language), there probably did elapse
a very long period--perhaps the whole of the Neolithic Age--before the
evils of this second stage of human evolution came to a head. Max Muller
has pointed out that among the words which are common to the various
branches of Aryan language, and which therefore belong to the very early
period before the separation of these branches, there are not found
the words denoting war and conflict and the weapons and instruments of
strife--a fact which suggests a long continuance of peaceful habit among
mankind AFTER the first formation and use of language.

That the birth of language and the birth of self-consciousness were
APPROXIMATELY simultaneous is a probable theory, and one favored by many
thinkers