nd verse, and
paintings and forms of art and figures of the gods. A wonderful Panorama
indeed, or poem of the Centuries, or, if you like, World-symphony with
three great leading motives!

And first we have the stage of Simple Consciousness. For hundreds of
centuries (we cannot doubt) Man possessed a degree of consciousness not
radically different from that of the higher Animals, though probably
more quick and varied. He saw, he heard, he felt, he noted. He acted or
reacted, quickly or slowly, in response to these impressions. But the
consciousness of himSELF, as a being separate from his impressions, as
separate from his surroundings, had not yet arisen or taken hold on him.
He was an instinctive part, of Nature. And in this respect he was very
near to the Animals. Self-consciousness in the animals, in a germinal
form is there, no doubt, but EMBEDDED, so to speak, in the general
world consciousness. It is on this account that the animals have such
a marvellously acute perception and instinct, being embedded in Nature.
And primitive Man had the same. Also we must, as I have said before,
allow that man in that stage must have had the same sort of grace and
perfection of form and movement as we admire in the (wild) animals now.
It would be quite unreasonable to suppose that he, the crown in the same
sense of creation, was from the beginning a lame and ill-made abortion.
For a long period the tribes of men, like the tribes of the higher
animals, must have been (on the whole, and allowing for occasional
privations and sufferings and conflicts) well adapted to their
surroundings and harmonious with the earth and with each other. There
must have been a period resembling a Golden Age--some condition at
any rate which, compared with subsequent miseries, merited the epithet
'golden.'

It was during this period apparently that the system of Totems arose.
The tribes felt their relationship to their winged and fourfooted mates
(including also other objects of nature) so deeply and intensely that
they adopted the latter as their emblems. The pre-civilization Man
fairly worshipped, the animals and was proud to be called after them.
Of course we moderns find this strange. We, whose conceptions of these
beautiful creatures are mostly derived from a broken-down cab-horse,
or a melancholy milk-rummaged cow in a sooty field, or a diseased and
despondent lion or eagle at the Zoo, have never even seen or loved them
and have only wondered