and growling, so to tribal men the mask-wearer was for the time being much more than an ordinary man. The human and the extra-human fused. Here we have all the elements and motives necessary for belief in exalted beings having qualities of both men and animals. These elements are consolidated into a tradition by the recurring festival, with its retelling of the old stories and its re-enactment of the ancient ceremonies under conditions, such as night, secrecy, and prolonged strain of attention, that favor the reinstatement of the emotion. What gives vitality to the whole is the feeling that great interests are at stake-food, health, all kinds of success, even unnamed and vague welfare and illfare.

In the general characteristics of emotional thinking we have the basis for spiritistic beliefs also. The origin of religion used to be sought in animism, or the belief that objects are inhabited by spirits. Such belief is, indeed, universal at certain levels of culture, and it has had an important part in the evolution of religion. The question is, What part? Clearly, animism as such is simply a general level of thought. It contributes something to the god-idea, but it is not of itself religion. We must still search for the motives, the life-issues. Moreover, animism is not a strictly primitive form, even of thought. It involves the notion of a difference between spirit and body, a notion that could have been achieved only through a considerable process. As the achievement of this notion is, of course, one phase of religious evolution, a preanimistic stage of religion is now recognized.

Let us try, then, to represent to ourselves how the (idea of a spirit separable from the body arose. On the

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converse side, this is the question how men first began to think of body as separable from spirit. Not that all objects whatsoever were at one time thought of as alive and friendly or unfriendly; for objects habitually present without emotional accompaniments were probably as colorless to early man as they are to us. But this does not mean that early man thought of them specifically as not alive, as "mere" things; it means, rather, that he did not raise the question. But any one of these habitually colorless things might, merely by the laws of mental association, become the focus of emotional interest and therefore reveal itself as alive like a man. Now, to be alive like a man was not, at first, to be compounded of soul and body, but just to have the breath of life (anima). The Hebrew creation myth says that God "breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul." The question, then, is how this bodily soul came to be thought of as a spirit, that is (primarily), a second or double capable of existence on its own account and of uniting itself with bodies, whether human, animal, or other. An old theory has it that from the shadow that accompanies a man but is intangible; from the reflection of one's face in a pool; from dream memories in which one recalls having been at a distance from the spot in which one's body certainly lay; and from visions, at night or by day, of persons whose bodies are at a distance or perhaps buried, men inferred the existence of a man within a man, but separable from the tangible body. Wundt adds the experience of trance, in which the body seems strange or "not here." This "second" is still body, but intangible-a ghost through which a sword may be thrust without wounding.

This notion, once reached in respect to man, could be extended to other things-the whole world could be peopled with flitting spirits or demons. Without doubt some such association of ideas occurred, but its effect was merely to render more precise and differentiated the thought factor already described as present from the beginning, namely, the self-projection characteristic of emotional situations. Spirits are at bottom not an intellectual "find"; they are rather a focalized representation of intense experience with its spontaneous Einfühlung.

Some important results flowed from the attainment of this notion. First, death received a fairly definite interpretation, at first a terrifying one-that the spirit of a dead man is a malignant power that lingers about the body for a time and then wanders abroad-but later, in the more progressive groups, the more constructive notion of continuity of social bonds between living men and their departed ancestors. Secondly, it became increasingly easy to attribute exalted human qualities to the superior powers. The vagueness of mana and the equivocally human nature of the totemic ancestor could not remain unchanged; they became conformed to the image of the human. But, thirdly, the unsocial tendencies of men were objectified in swarms of capricious, even malignant, spirits. There is no absolute dividing line between gods and such spirits; all have human qualities, all are projections of what men felt in themselves when they were excited. Even very great or divine spirits were often tricky, passionate, filled with the cunning of magicians rather than the wisdom and justice of magistrates. But as the larger, more stable

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interests of society came to be represented in certain spirits, who were approached by prayer and group ceremonial, so the more petty, less social interests were taken over by inferior spirits, who were in some degree controlled by individuals rather than worshiped by the group. Thus arises the opposition between religion and magic and the identification of magic with spiritism.

The prominence of sun, thunder, mountains, and the like in early god-ideas led many students to the supposition that these ideas sprang directly out of wonder at striking phenomena. No doubt there is a grain of truth here. Phenomena that excited strong emotion were doubtless taken as the presence of living things capable of friendly or unfriendly attitudes. But there remains the problem as to how experiences as commonplace as sunshine can awaken such emotion. We know definitely that early ceremonies in which sun, moon, rain, springtime, and autumn are prominent commonly have to do with the food supply. We may fairly infer that, though curiosity as to the causes of striking phenomena was never absent, the chief organizing interests, the ones that could produce recurring emotional excitement with reference to even these commonplace phenomena, were such obvious, vital issues as hunger, sickness, death, marriage, and war. The chief source of the god-idea is organic and social need; free curiosity is secondary.

A general answer can now be given to our second question, What were men about when they put all these factors together into god-ideas? It is clear that godideas attribute human qualities to the extra-human. This is sometimes called imaginative projection of the

human self. But to early man there is no "projection" at all; the gods are simply realities of experience when it is most vivid. If he could have phrased his procedure, he might have said something like this: "I feel alive most intensely when with my tribe I wrestle with some sense of common need or rejoice in some common joy. At such moments I realize that our feeling is more than ours; it is something that overwhelms us; it is shared by those beings-ancestors, spirits, nature-powers-that are close to us in our struggle to live. They want what we want; they work with us to obtain it; and they that be with us are stronger than they that be against us.”

In short, the genesis of the god-idea is a spontaneous, underived conviction that what is most important for us is really important, that is, respected and provided for by the reality upon which we depend. For early man the world of values is the real world.