oved, it was conceived in the plane of Naturalism, possessed "self
power"; the river was a living thing, as was also the fountain; a
stone that fell from a hill fell of its own accord; a tree groaned
because the wind caused it to suffer pain. This idea that inanimate
objects had conscious existence survived in the religion of the
Aryo-Indians. In the Nala story of the Indian epic, the _Mahabharata_,
the disconsolate wife Damayanti addresses a mountain when searching
for her lost husband:

This, the monarch of all mountains, ask I of the king of men;
O all-honoured Prince of Mountains, with thy heavenward soaring
peaks ...
Hast thou seen the kingly Nala in this dark and awful wood....
Why repliest thou not, O Mountain?"

She similarly addresses the Asoka tree:

"Hast thou seen Nishadha's monarch, hast thou seen my only
love?...
That I may depart ungrieving, fair Asoka, answer me...."
Many a tree she stood and gazed on....[305]

It will be recognized that when primitive men gave names to mountains,
rivers, or the ocean, these possessed for them a deeper significance
than they do for us at the present day. The earliest peoples of
Indo-European speech who called the sky "dyeus", and those of Sumerian
speech who called it "ana", regarded it not as the sky "and nothing
more", but as something which had conscious existence and "self
power". Our remote ancestors resembled, in this respect, those
imaginative children who hold conversations with articles of
furniture, and administer punishment to stones which, they believe,
have tripped them up voluntarily and with desire to commit an offence.

In this early stage of development the widespread totemic beliefs
appear to have had origin. Families or tribes believed that they were
descended from mountains, trees, or wild animals.

Aesop's fable about the mountain which gave birth to a mouse may be a
relic of Totemism; so also may be the mountain symbols on the
standards of Egyptian ships which appear on pre-dynastic pottery; the
black dwarfs of Teutonic mythology were earth children.[306]

Adonis sprang from a tree; his mother may have, according to primitive
belief, been simply a tree; Dagda, the patriarchal Irish corn god, was
an oak; indeed, the idea of a "world tree", which occurs in Sumerian,
Vedic-Indian, Teutonic, and other mythologies, was probably a product
of Totemism.

Wild animals were considered to be other forms of