rpreted to bring them into accord with new ideas,
social, moral, and religious. Their history, in a word, is the history
of the development of human ideas, and it sets forth the religious unity
of the race. The selections given above are only a small part of the
known material, a full treatment of which would require a separate
volume.

CHAPTER IV

EARLY CULTS

+225+. The lowest tribes known to us regard the whole world of nature
and the human dead as things to be feared and usually as things to be
propitiated. In most cases they conceive of some anthropomorphic being
as the creator or arranger of the world. But in all cases they regard
animals, plants, and inanimate objects as capable of doing extraordinary
things. All these beings they think of as akin to men; transformations
from human to nonhuman and from nonhuman to human are believed to be
possible and frequent.

+226+. From the point of view of the savage mind this theory of the
world is inevitable. Ignorant of what we call natural law, they can see
no reason why the phenomena of life should not be under the control of
any of the powers known to them; and for sources of power they look to
the things around them. All objects of nature are mysterious to the
savage--stones, hills, waters, the sky, the heavenly bodies, trees,
plants, fishes, birds, beasts, are full of movement, and seemingly
display capacities that induce the savage to see in them the causes of
things. Since their procedures seem to him to be in general similar to
his own, he credits them with a nature like his own. As they are
mysterious and powerful, he fears them and tries to make allies of them
or to ward off their injurious influences.

+227+. But while he excludes nothing from his list of possible powers,
he is vitally interested only in those objects with which he comes into
contact, and he learns their powers by his own experience or through the
wisdom inherited from his forefathers. His procedure is strictly
scientific; he adopts only what observation has shown him and others to
be true. Different tribes are interested in different things--some are
indifferent to one thing, others to another, according to the
topographical and economic milieu. The savage is not without
discrimination. He is quite capable of distinguishing between the
living and the dead. Not all stones are held by him to be alive in any
important sense, and not all beasts to be powerful. He is a practical
thin