le body; such a position is
possible, however, only in a period of very advanced culture.

+3+. There being no records of initial humanity, it is hardly possible
for us to know certainly what the earliest men's feeling was toward the
animate and inanimate forces around them. Not improbably it was simply
fear, the result of ignorance of their nature and absence of social
relations with them. But in the human communities known to us, even the
lowest, the relations with extrahuman beings appear to be in general of
a mixed nature, sometimes friendly, sometimes unfriendly, but neither
pure love nor pure hatred. So refined a feeling as love for a deity is
not found among savages. As religion springs from the human demand for
safety and happiness as the gift of the extrahuman Powers, hostility to
them has been generally felt to be opposed to common sense.[3] Coercion
there has been, as in magical procedures, or to bring a stubborn deity
to terms; and occasional antagonism (for example, toward foreign gods);
but not hatred proper as a dogma, except in the great ethical religions
toward evil spirits, and in certain elaborate philosophic systems--as,
for example, in the Gnostic conception of an imperfect Demiurge, or in
the assumption of an original blind Chance or blind Will whose products
and laws are regarded as not entitled to respect and obedience.

+4+. Instead of complete friendliness and unfriendliness in early tribes
we find more commonly between the two a middle ground of self-regarding
equipoise. The savage, the half-civilized man, and the peasant often
deal with superhuman Powers in a purely selfish commercial spirit,
courting or neglecting them as they seem likely to be useful or not.
The Central Australian (who may be credited with a dim sense of the
superhuman) conducts his ceremonies, intended to insure a supply of
food, apparently without the slightest emotion of any sort except the
desire for gain.[4] The Italian peasant, who has vowed a wax candle to a
saint in return for a favor to be shown, does not scruple to cheat the
saint, after the latter has performed his part of the agreement, by
offering tallow instead of wax, if he thinks he can do so with impunity.
A recusant deity is sometimes neglected or even kicked by way of
punishment or to force him to give the desired aid, and a god or a saint
is valued and sought after in proportion to his supposed ability to be
useful.

+5+. And this naively utilitarian p