rst the environment is felt as the
soul's kindred; then its operations are fancied in terms dramatic and
personal. The world becomes almost instinctively defined as a hegemony
of spirits similar to man, with powers and passions like his, and
directed for his destruction or conservation, but chiefly for their own
glory and self-maintenance. The vast "pathetic fallacy" makes religion
of the whole of life. It is at this point indistinguishable from science
or ethics. It is, in fact, the pregnant matrix of all subsequent
discourse about the universe. Its character is such that it becomes the
determinating factor of human adaptations to the conditions imposed by
the environment, by envisaging the enduring and efficacious elements
among these conditions as persons. The satisfaction of felt needs is
rendered thereby inevitably social; and in a like manner fear of their
frustration cannot be unsocial. Life is conceived and acted out as a
miraculous traffic with the universe; and the universe as a band of
spirits who monopolize the good and make free gifts of evil, who can be
feared, threatened, worshiped, scolded, wheedled, coaxed, bribed,
deceived, enslaved, held in awe, and above all, used for the prosecution
of desiderated ends and the fulfilment of instinctive desires. The first
recorded cognized order is a moral order in which fragmentary feelings,
instinctive impulsions, and spontaneous imaginings are hypostatized,
ideas are identified with their causes, all the contents of the
immature, sudden, primitive, blundering consciousness receive a vital
figure and a proper name. So man makes himself more at home in the world
without,--that world which enslaves the spirit so fearfully and with
such strangeness, and which just as miraculously yields such ecstasy,
such power, such unaccountable good! In this immediate sense the soul
controls the world by becoming symbolic of it; it is the world's first
language. It is, however, an inarticulate, blundering, incoherent thing
and the cues which it furnishes to the nature of the environment are as
often as not dangerous and misleading. When bows and arrows, crystals
and caves, clouds and waters, dung and dew, mountains and trees, beasts
and visions, are treated as chiefs and men must be treated, then the
moral regimen initiated, taking little account of the barest real
qualities manifested by these things, and attributing the maximum
importance to the characters postulated and foreign, i