s successful
neither in allaying evil nor in extending good. Its benefits are
adventitious and its malfeasance constant. Food buried with the dead was
food lost; blood smeared upon the bow to make it shoot better served
only to make the hands unskilful by impeding their activity. Initiation,
ceremony, sacrificial ritual, fasting, and isolation involved
privations for which no adequate return was recovered, even by the
medicine-man whose absolute and ephemeral power needed only the betrayal
of circumstances for its own destruction, taking him along with it,
oftener than not, to disgrace or death.

As the cumulus of experience on experience grew greater, chance
violations of tradition, or custom, or ritual, or formula achieving for
the violator a mastery or stability which performance and obedience
failed to achieve, the new heresy became the later orthodoxy, for in
religion, as in all other matters human, nothing succeeds like success.
An impotent god has no divinity; a disused potency means a dying life
among the immortals as on the earth. And as the gods themselves seemed
often to give their worshipers the lie, the futility of the personal and
dramatic definitions of the immediate environment became slowly
recognized, the recognition varying in extent, and clearer in practice
than in discourse.

Accordingly the most primitive of the animisms underwent a necessary
modification. The plasticity of objects under destructive treatment, the
impotence of _taboo_ before elementary needs, the adequate satisfactions
which violations of the divine law brought,--these killed many gods and
drove others from their homes in the hearts of things. The objects so
purged became matters of accurate knowledge. Where animation is denied
the _whole_ environment, wisdom begins to distinguish between
spirit-haunted matter and the purely material; knowledge of person and
knowledge of things differentiate, and science, the impersonal and more
potent knowledge of the environment, properly begins. Familiarity leads
to control, control to contempt, and for the unreflective mind,
personality is not, as for the sophisticated, an attribute of the
contemptible. The incalculable appearance of thunder, the magic greed of
fire, the malice, the spontaneity, the thresh and pulse as of life which
seems to characterize whatever is capricious or impenetrable or
uncontrollable are too much like the felt throbs of consciousness to
become dehumanized. To the va