that the world, like
himself, possesses consciousness also. Just as a child talks to his doll
or his dog as if it understood what he was saying, so the savage
believes that his fetich hears him when he speaks to it, and that the
angry storm-cloud is aware of him and deliberately pursues him. For the
newly born mind of the primitive natural man has not yet wholly severed
itself from the cords which still bind it to the womb of Nature, neither
has it clearly marked out the boundary that separates dreaming from
waking, imagination from reality.

The divine, therefore, was not originally something objective, but was
rather the subjectivity of consciousness projected exteriorly, the
personalization of the world. The concept of divinity arose out of the
feeling of divinity, and the feeling of divinity is simply the dim and
nascent feeling of personality vented upon the outside world. And
strictly speaking it is not possible to speak of outside and inside,
objective and subjective, when no such distinction was actually felt;
indeed it is precisely from this lack of distinction that the feeling
and concept of divinity proceed. The clearer our consciousness of the
distinction between the objective and the subjective, the more obscure
is the feeling of divinity in us.

It has been said, and very justly so it would appear, that Hellenic
paganism was not so much polytheistic as pantheistic. I do not know that
the belief in a multitude of gods, taking the concept of God in the
sense in which we understand it to-day, has ever really existed in any
human mind. And if by pantheism is understood the doctrine, not that
everything and each individual thing is God--a proposition which I find
unthinkable--but that everything is divine, then it may be said without
any great abuse of language that paganism was pantheistic. Its gods not
only mixed among men but intermixed with them; they begat gods upon
mortal women and upon goddesses mortal men begat demi-gods. And if
demi-gods, that is, demi-men, were believed to exist, it was because the
divine and the human were viewed as different aspects of the same
reality. The divinization of everything was simply its humanization. To
say that the sun was a god was equivalent to saying that it was a man, a
human consciousness, more or less, aggrandized and sublimated. And this
is true of all beliefs from fetichism to Hellenic paganism.

The real distinction between gods and men consisted in the fact