concerned with morality." That was also the answer which had
previously been given by Professor Hoeffding, who says in his
_Philosophy of Religion_: "in the lowest forms of it ... religion
cannot be said to have any ethical significance" (p. 323). Originally,
the gods were "purely natural forces which could be defied or evaded,"
though eventually they "became ethical powers whom men neither could
nor wished to defy" (p. 324). This first stage of early religion seems
on the terms of the hypothesis to be supposed to be found in the period
of animism and fetichism; and "the primitive conception of spirit" is,
Mr. Hobhouse says (II, 16), of something "feeling and thinking like a
rather stupid man, and open like him to supplication, exhortation, or
intimidation." If {216} that is so, then Professor Hoeffding may be
justified in saying that in the lowest forms of religion "the gods
appear as powers on which man is dependent, but not as patterns of
conduct or administrators of an ethical world order" (p. 324). Now, in
the period termed animistic because inanimate things are supposed to be
animated and actuated by spirits, it may be that many or most of such
spirits are supposed to feel and think like a rather stupid man, and
therefore to be capable of being cajoled, deluded, intimidated, and
castigated by the human being who desires to make use of them. But it
is not all such spirits that are worshipped then. Indeed, it is
impossible, Mr. Hobhouse says (II, 15), that any such spirit could be
"an object of worship in our sense of the term." Worship implies the
superiority of the object worshipped to the person worshipping. But,
though not an object of worship in our sense of the term, the spirit
that could be deluded, intimidated, and castigated was, according to
Mr. Hobhouse, "the object of a religious cult" on the part of the man
who believed that he could and did intimidate and castigate the spirit.
Probably, however, most students of the science of religion would agree
that a cult which included or {217} allowed intimidation and
castigation of the object of the cult was as little entitled to be
termed religious as it is to be called worship. In the period of
animism, then, either there was no religious cult, no worship in our
sense of the term; or, if there was religion, then the spirit
worshipped was worshipped as a being higher than man. Whether man has
at any time been without religion is a question on which the