e process, due to obvious elements in our
'Civilization' and to the temporary and fallacious domination of
a leaden-eyed so-called 'Science.' According to this view the true
evolution of Religion and Man's outlook on the world has proceeded not
by the denial by man of his unity with the world, but by his seeing and
understanding that unity more deeply. And the more deeply he understands
himself the more certainly he will recognize in the external world a
Being or beings resembling himself.

W. H. Hudson--whose mind is certainly not of a quality to be jeered
at--speaks of Animism as "the projection of ourselves into nature:
the sense and apprehension of an intelligence like our own, but more
powerful, in all visible things"; and continues, "old as I am this same
primitive faculty which manifested itself in my early boyhood, still
persists, and in those early years was so powerful that I am almost
afraid to say how deeply I was moved by it." (1) Nor will it be quite
forgotten that Shelley once said:--

The moveless pillar of a mountain's weight
Is active living spirit. Every grain
Is sentient both in unity and part,
And the minutest atom comprehends
A world of loves and hatreds.

(1) Far Away and Long Ago, ch. xiii, p. 225.

The tendency to animism and later to anthropomorphism is I say
inevitable, and perfectly logical. But the great value of the work done
by some of those investigators whom I have quoted has been to show that
among quite primitive people (whose interior life and 'soul-sense' was
only very feeble) their projections of intelligence into Nature were
correspondingly feeble. The reflections of themselves projected into
the world beyond could not reach the stature of eternal 'gods,' but
were rather of the quality of ephemeral phantoms and ghosts; and the
ceremonials and creeds of that period are consequently more properly
described as, Magic than as Religion. There have indeed been great
controversies as to whether there has or has not been, in the course
of religious evolution, a PRE-animistic stage. Probably of course human
evolution in this matter must have been perfectly continuous from stages
presenting the very feeblest or an absolutely deficient animistic sense
to the very highest manifestations of anthropomorphism; but as there is
a good deal of evidence to show that ANIMALS (notably dogs and horses)
see ghosts, the inquiry ought certainly to be enlarged so far as to