med worthless, and putting the rest into some kind of
shape, in order to clear my workshop for other work.

The first and second volumes which I am now publishing contain essays
on the early thoughts of mankind, whether religious or mythological,
and on early traditions and customs. There is to my mind no subject
more absorbing than the tracing the origin and first growth of human
thought;--not theoretically, or in accordance with the Hegelian laws
of thought, or the Comtian epochs; but historically, and like an
Indian trapper, spying for every footprint, every layer, every broken
blade that might tell and testify of the former presence of man in his
early wanderings and searchings after light and truth.

In the languages of mankind, in which everything new is old and
everything old is new, an inexhaustible mine has been discovered for
researches of this kind. Language still bears the impress of the
earliest thoughts of man, obliterated, it may be, buried under new
thoughts, yet here and there still recoverable in their sharp original
outline. The growth of language is continuous, and by continuing our
researches backward from the most modern to the most ancient strata,
the very elements and roots of human speech have been reached, and
with them the elements and roots of human thought. What lies beyond
the beginnings of language, however interesting it may be to the
physiologist, does not yet belong to the history of man, in the true
and original sense of that word. Man means the thinker, and the first
manifestation of thought is speech.

But more surprising than the continuity in the growth of language, is
the continuity in the growth of religion. Of religion, too, as of
language, it may be said that in it everything new is old, and
everything old is new, and that there has been no entirely new
religion since the beginning of the world. The elements and roots of
religion were there, as far back as we can trace the history of man;
and the history of religion, like the history of language, shows us
throughout a succession of new combinations of the same radical
elements. An intuition of God, a sense of human weakness and
dependence, a belief in a Divine government of the world, a
distinction between good and evil, and a hope of a better life, these
are some of the radical elements of all religions. Though sometimes
hidden, they rise again and again to the surface. Though frequently
distorted, they tend again and again