a refuge from the failure of science, magic from mechanism, and
by means of them and their kind, blissful immortality, complete
self-fulfilment is to be attained--after death. There is a "beautiful
land of somewhere," a happy life beyond, but it is beyond life. In fact,
although religion confuses value and existence, it localizes the great
value-forms outside of existence. Its history has been an epic of the
retreat and decimation of the gods from the world, a movement from
animism and pluralism to transcendentalism and monism; and
concomitantly, of an elaboration and extension of institutional devices
by which the saving value-forms are to be made and kept operative in the
world.

VI

Let us consider this history a little.

Consciousness of feeling, psychologists are agreed, is prior to
consciousness of the objects of feeling. The will's inward strain,
intense throbs of sensation, pangs and pulses of pleasure and pain make
up the bulk of the undifferentiated primal sum of sentience. The soul is
aware of herself before she is aware of her world. A childish or
primeval mind, face to face with an environment actual, dreamt, or
remembered, does not distinguish from its privacy the objective or the
common. All is shot through with the pathos and triumph which come
unaccountably as desired good or evaded evil; all has the same tensions
and effects ends in the same manner as the laboring, straining,
volitional life within. These feelings, residuary qualities, the last
floating, unattached sediment of a world organized by association and
classified by activity, these subtlest of all its beings, finally termed
mind and self, at first suffuse and dominate the whole. Even when
objects are distinguished and their places determined these are not
absent; and the so-called pre-animistic faiths are not the less suffused
with spirit because the spiritual has not yet received a local
habitation and name. They differ from animism in this only, not in that
their objects are characterized by lack of animation and vital tonality.
And this is necessary. For religion must be anthropopathic before it
becomes anthropomorphic; since feeling, eloquent of good and evil, is
the first and deepest essence of consciousness, and only by its
wandering from home are forms distinguished and man's nature separated
from that of things and beasts.

When practice has cooerdinated activity, and reflection distinguished
places, animism proper arises. Fi