with which he is familiar
when he is awake. Before long his soul or ghost or spirit is conceived as
something which possesses two qualities: it can be disassociated from his
body and enter the spirit-world where it seems to defy all the laws of
waking life, for with the quickness of thought it visits neighboring
islands as readily as it passes to the next hut; and it possesses
immortality, for it is exactly like the persistent spirit-individualities
of those who have died before him. The other cause for the development of
the conception of gods and God in the mind of the savage is the fact that
things have been made which neither he nor any other man can make. He can
dig a ditch, and make a house, and fashion a canoe, and build ramparts of
earth; but human power has obviously been insufficient to construct rivers
and mountains and forests and their denizens. Mankind itself has certainly
been made in some way, for it exists. Because the savage cannot conceive
of things being made excepting as they are made by the human hand, and
because so much confronts him that is beyond the power of human
construction, he comes to postulate the existence of man-like, but greater
than human, personalities, and as he cannot see them in the light of day,
they belong to the spirit-world to which souls go. Imagination sometimes
gives human outlines to shadows among the moon-lit trees, so that elves
and pixies, nymphs and fairies, become established in the world as the
primitive man conceives it. Larger tasks are discharged by more important
spirits, and everything natural thus becomes animated by supernatural
beings. Thor was the god of thunder; Freia the goddess of spring and
vernal awakening; Athena inspired the minds of men. Venus and Aphrodite
played their special parts, also. But such powers as these, established by
the untutored mind, needed to be accounted for, and so in the more
advanced religions Jove and Jupiter were created as the more ultimate
causes, in response to intellectual demands. By combining all powers into
one, God and Brahma are the results.

Thus in merest outline the conception of the infinite personality works
out its evolution. At all times, among primitive and higher religions, the
powers are clothed with human forms, and gods are pictured as men endowed
with intellects and passions, and motives of vengeance and benignity. Man
cannot shape his postulated deities save in such forms, with the possible
exception of