than his critics, and to have aimed his rude arrows at the philosophic
mark more successfully than a vast number of his learned and scientific
successors. A consideration of what we have said above would show that
early people felt their unity with Nature so deeply and intimately
that--like the animals themselves--they did not think consciously or
theorize about it. It was just their life to be--like the beasts of the
field and the trees of the forest--a part of the whole flux of things,
non-differentiated so to speak. What more natural or indeed more
logically correct than for them to assume (when they first began to
think or differentiate themselves) that these other creatures, these
birds, beasts and plants, and even the sun and moon, were of the same
blood as themselves, their first cousins, so to speak, and having the
same interior nature? What more reasonable (if indeed they credited
THEMSELVES with having some kind of soul or spirit) than to credit these
other creatures with a similar soul or spirit? Im Thurn, speaking of the
Guiana Indians, says that for them "the whole world swarms with beings."
Surely this could not be taken to indicate an untutored mind--unless
indeed a mind untutored in the nonsense of the Schools--but rather a
very directly perceptive mind. And again what more reasonable (seeing
that these people themselves were in the animal stage of evolution) than
that they should pay great reverence to some ideal animal--first cousin
or ancestor--who played an important part in their tribal existence, and
make of this animal a totem emblem and a symbol of their common life?

And, further still, what more natural than that when the tribe passed
to some degree beyond the animal stage and began to realize a life more
intelligent and emotional--more specially human in fact--than that
of the beasts of the field, that it should then in its rituals and
ceremonies throw off the beast-mask and pay reverence to the interior
and more human spirit. Rising to a more enlightened consciousness of its
own intimate quality, and still deeply penetrated with the sense of its
kinship to external nature, it would inevitably and perfectly logically
credit the latter with an inner life and intelligence, more
distinctly human than before. Its religion in fact would become MORE
'anthropomorphic' instead of less so; and one sees that this is a
process that is inevitable; and inevitable notwithstanding a
certain parenthesis in th