n, that the newer and
truer knowledge comes, and not from the false ideas. What we speak
of, from one point of view, as closer attention to the facts of the
common consciousness, may, from another point of view, be spoken of as
an increasing manifestation, or a clearer revelation, of the divine
personality, revealed or manifested to the common consciousness. Those
are two views, or two points of view, of one and the same process. But
whichever view we take of it, the process does not proceed solely by
the negative method of exclusion: it is a process which results in the
unfolding and disclosure, not merely of what is in the common
consciousness, at any given moment, but of what is implied in the
divine personality revealed to the common consciousness. If we choose
to speak of this unfolding or disclosure as evolution, the process,
which the history of religion undertakes to set forth, will be the
evolution of the idea of God. But, in that case, the process which we
designate by the name of evolution, will be a process of disclosure
and revelation. Disclosure implies that there is something to
disclose; revelation, that there is something to be revealed to the
common consciousness--the presence of the Godhead, of divine
personality.

II

THE IDEA OF GOD IN MYTHOLOGY

The idea of God is to be found, it will be generally admitted, not
only in monotheistic religions, but in polytheistic religions also;
and, as polytheisms have developed out of polydaemonism, that is to
say, as the personal beings or powers of polydaemonism have, in course
of time, come to possess proper names and a personal history, some
idea of divine personality must be admitted to be present in
polydaemonism as well as in polytheism; and, in the same way, some
idea of a personality greater than human may be taken to lie at the
back of both polydaemonism and fetishism.

If we wish to understand what ideas are in a man's mind, we may infer
them from the words that he speaks and from the way in which he acts.
The most natural and the most obvious course is to start from what he
says. And that is the course which was followed by students of the
history of religion, when they desired to ascertain what idea exactly
man has had of his gods. They had recourse, for the information they
wanted, to mythology. Later on, indeed, they proceeded to enquire into
what man did, into the ritual which he observed in approaching his
gods; and, in the next chap