ave derived all religion from
it.[705] This view is now generally rejected for the reason that it does
not accord with known facts; it is only by forced (though often
ingenious) interpretations that a plausible case is made out for it. To
reply in detail to the arguments advanced in its favor would be to go
over the whole ground of the origin of religious observances; the answer
is furnished by setting forth the nature of the various cults, as is
attempted in this and following chapters. If, for example, there is
reason to believe that savages have always regarded the lower animals as
powerful beings, there is no need, in accounting for the veneration
given them, to resort to the roundabout way of assuming a
misinterpretation of names of men derived from beasts.

+382+. Between Euhemerism and the theory that explains myths as a
"disease of language" there is little or no essential difference of
principle. Both theories assume that man, having devised certain
epithets, later came to misunderstand them and to build up histories on
the misunderstanding. Both thus rest the immense mass of human religious
customs and beliefs, which form so large a part of human history, on the
precarious foundation of passing fancy and inadvertence, and they must
be put into the same category with the naive theory, once popular, that
religion is the invention of priests who sought to control men through
their fears.

+383+. Ancestor-worship is the feeling of kinship with the dead,
invested by religion with peculiar intensity and solemnity. It has been
one of the great constructive forces of society.

CULTS OF GENERATIVE POWERS

+384+. The origin of religion is not to be referred exclusively to any
one order of ideas; it springs out of man's total life. All objects and
processes have been included in men's construction of nature, and the
processes, when they have been held to bear on human well-being, have
been ascribed to a force inherent in things or to the activity of
supernatural beings.

+385+. The study of processes has gone hand in hand with the creation of
divine beings who are supposed to manifest themselves in the processes.
The great spectacle of nature's productivity has been especially
recognizable in the vegetable world and in the world of man; in both of
these life has been perpetually unfolding itself under men's eyes as a
mysterious process, which, by virtue of its mysteriousness, has become
religious material and has