t chapter, we are not concerned so much with the
problem of the number and inter-relations of the superhuman agents at
work in the universe as with the idea of personal agency itself. The
point I wish to call attention to is that the change from polytheism to
monotheism did not involve any essential modification of the accepted
notions of agency. Nature--and human life with it--was thought of as
under the control of a superpersonal agent who guided the course of
events in accordance with his purposes. An ethical refinement of the
idea of deity had supervened which lifted it far above the crudities of
the so-called nature-religions. Was this not because man and human
society had evolved ethically and socially? But no marked break in the
setting of the idea had arisen. And this fact presents the thinker
with a problem.

In its origins, religion is innately hostile to the extension of
impersonal causation to the cosmos, for the obvious reason that such a
conception conflicts with the operation of special agency. Religion
begins with the postulation of powerful agents whom man can placate.
Up to the present, the evolution of religion has not involved a
withdrawal of this primary assumption but only its ethical refinement
and the reduction of the number of agents. In the Western world, at
least, religion and the idea of an ethical control of the course of
nature have been inseparable. This latter idea underlies prayer for
material blessings, miracles, and the various conceptions of
providence. Can this primary assumption be taken from religion without
destroying it?

{114}

The difficulties which confront this assumption for the educated man of
to-day must not blind us to its naturalness in the past. But that is
the very point to grasp. The primitive view of the world is not being
so much refuted as outgrown. Slowly and painfully, man has learned
that events are conditioned by antecedents of an inflexible character,
and that his wishes and desires must have hands and feet working for
them before they can affect things. He has bettered his condition
through invention and discovery and social organization. Of course,
the world might have been different, and moral categories might have
been the proper ones to apply to nature; but the brute fact of the case
is that our particular universe is not of that sort.

Once given the notion of superhuman agents of a social character, the
after-development of religion