at which we form of another individual
mind: it is much more general, vague, and so far unlike the pattern of
our own subjectivity that even to ascribe to it the important attribute
of personality is felt, as we have just seen, to approach the grotesque.
Still, in this vague and general way we do ascribe to society ejective
existence: we habitually think of the whole world of human thought and
feeling as a psychological complex, which is other than, and more than,
a mere shorthand enumeration of all the thoughts and feelings of all
individual human beings.

The ejective existence thus ascribed to society serves as a
stepping-stone to the yet more vague and general ascription of such
existence to the Cosmos. At first, indeed, or during the earliest stages
of culture, the ascription of ejective existence to the external world
is neither vague nor general: on the contrary, it is most distinct and
specific. Beginning in the rudest forms of animism, where every natural
process admits of being immediately attributed to the volitional agency
of an unseen spirit, anthropomorphism sets out upon its long course of
development, which proceeds _pari passu_ with the development of
abstract thought. Man, as it has been truly said, universally makes God
in his own image; and it is difficult to see how the case could be
otherwise. Universally the eject must assume the pattern of the subject,
and it is only in the proportion that this pattern presents the features
of abstract thinking that the image which it throws becomes less and
less man-like. Hence, as Mr. Fiske has shown in detail, so soon as
anthropomorphism has assumed its highest state of development, it begins
to be replaced by a continuous growth of 'deanthropomorphism,' which,
passing through polytheism into monotheism, eventually ends in a
progressive 'purification' of theism--by which is meant a progressive
metamorphosis of the theistic conception, tending to remove from Deity
the attributes of Humanity. The last of these attributes to disappear is
that of personality, and when this final ecdysis has been performed, the
eject which remains is so unlike its original subject, that, as we shall
immediately find, it is extremely difficult to trace any points of
resemblance between them.

Now it is with this perfect, or imago condition of the world-eject, that
we have to do. Mr. Herbert Spencer, in what I consider the profoundest
reaches of his philosophic thought, has well sho