natural." Later, it
is regarded under its various exhibitions as separable phenomena, as in
polytheisms, in which must be included trinitarian systems and the
dualistic doctrine of the Parsees. But among the Egyptians, Greeks and
Aztecs, as well as in the words of Zarathustra and in the theology of
Christianity, we frequently meet with the distinct recognition of the
fundamental unity of all power. At core, all religions have seeds of
monotheism. When we generalize the current concepts of motion or force
beyond individual displays and relative measures of quantity, we
recognize their qualitative identity, and appreciate the logical unity
under which we must give them abstract expression. This is the process,
often unconscious, which has carried most original thinkers to
monotheistic doctrines, no matter whence they started.

The idea of power controlling the unknown would of itself have been of
no interest to man had he not assumed certain relations to exist between
him and it on the one hand, and it and things on the other. A
dispassionate inquiry disproves entirely the view maintained by various
modern writers, prominently by Bain, Spencer and Darwin, that the
contemplation of power or majesty in external nature prompts of itself
the religious sentiment, or could have been its historical origin. Such
a view overlooks the most essential because the personal factor of
religion--the wish. Far more correct are the words of David Hume, in the
last century, by which he closes his admirable _Natural History of
Religions_: "We may conclude, therefore, that in all nations the first
ideas of religion arose not from a contemplation of the works of nature,
but from a concern with regard to the events of life, and from the
incessant hopes and fears which actuate the human mind." A century
before him Hobbes had written in his terse way: "The natural seed of
religion lies in these four things: the fear of spirits, ignorance of
secondary causes, the conciliation of those we fear, and the assumption
of accidents for omens."[81-1] The sentiment of religion is in its
origin and nature purely personal and subjective. The aspect of power
would never have led man to worship, unless he had assumed certain
relations between the unseen author or authors of that power and
himself. What these assumptions were, I shall discuss in the next
chapter.

Finally, as has so often been remarked in a flippant and contemptuous
way,[82-1] which the fact