the story of man's first coming, which had been handed down from
generation to generation since the mists of antiquity? Man wants to
know about himself, how he came here, and whither he is going. The
vogue of the _Rubaiyat_ of Omar Khayyam is in large measure due to the
haunting sense of man's ignorance of his place in the world. Who set
the stage and placed the puppets on it? Primitive man always answered
his questions in terms of Beings like himself, although more powerful
and longer lived. _All agency was for him personal agency_. And there
are, even now, a surprisingly large number of people who can think in
no other terms. The universe is for them the playground of spirits who
work their will upon it. Matter and energy and the slow growth of
years are ideas which strike them cold. Their view of the universe is
dramatic and even melodramatic; it is personal, mythical.

Let us glance at some of these attempts to account for the world. We
shall not find them very coherent or deep, but we shall always find
them instructive for the light they throw upon man, himself, and the
limits set to his theories about origins by the concrete agency to
which he perforce appealed. We shall then realize how natural were the
questions which man asked and which he sought to answer, and how
impossible it was for him to offer any other solutions than those
imaginative ones which grew up in folk-lore and which have been
developed and re-cast in the various religions.

No early race had the idea of an absolute beginning. {32} The attempt
made was simply to carry things back to different conditions, to a less
developed state of things, and then to trace the larger steps by means
of which the later world, as they saw it, came about. Those races
which had little power for abstract thinking and had achieved few
impersonal ideas kept very near to concrete phenomena and explained
their own origin in terms of a mythical ancestor, or animal magician,
while they left the earth and the sky very much as it was. The
Iroquois Indians, for instance, believed that their original female
ancestress fell from heaven. There was no land to receive her, but it
suddenly bubbled up under her feet and waxed bigger, so that ere long a
whole country was visible. Other branches of the tribe held that
otters and beavers hastened to dig up enough earth from beneath the
water to provide her with an island on which to dwell. The Athapascans
of Northwe