or were retained in the popular religion
of Egypt. This theory recommended itself to Lobeck. "We may believe that
ancient and early tribes framed gods like unto themselves in action and
in experience, and that the allegorical softening down of myths is the
explanation added later by descendants who had attained to purer ideas
of divinity, yet dared not reject the religion of their ancestors."(2)
The senseless element in the myths would, by this theory, be for the
most part a "survival"; and the age and condition of human thought
whence it survived would be one in which our most ordinary ideas about
the nature of things and the limits of possibility did not yet exist,
when all things were conceived of in quite other fashion; the age, that
is, of savagery.

(1) We have been asked to DEFINE a savage. He cannot be defined in an
epigram, but by way of choice of a type:--

1. In material equipment the perfect savage is he who employs tools of
stone and wood, not of metal; who is nomadic rather than settled; who
is acquainted (if at all) only with the rudest forms of the arts of
potting, weaving, fire-making, etc.; and who derives more of his food
from the chase and from wild roots and plants than from any kind of
agriculture or from the flesh of domesticated animals.

2. In psychology the savage is he who (extending unconsciously to the
universe his own implicit consciousness of personality) regards all
natural objects as animated and intelligent beings, and, drawing no hard
and fast line between himself and the things in the world, is readily
persuaded that men may be metamorphosed into plants, beasts and stars;
that winds and clouds, sun and dawn, are persons with human passions
and parts; and that the lower animals especially may be creatures more
powerful than himself, and, in a sense, divine and creative.

3. In religion the savage is he who (while often, in certain moods,
conscious of a far higher moral faith) believes also in ancestral
ghosts or spirits of woods and wells that were never ancestral; prays
frequently by dint of magic; and sometimes adores inanimate objects, or
even appeals to the beasts as supernatural protectors.

4. In society the savage is he who (as a rule) bases his laws on the
well-defined lines of totemism--that is, claims descent from or other
close relation to natural objects, and derives from the sacredness of
those objects the sanction of his marriage prohibitions and blood-feuds,
while