by supernatural means.

Enough has been said to indicate the kind of environment in which
primitive man moves, and also to understand why ideas concerning the
supernatural exert such an enormous influence in early society. In a
world where everything was yet to be learned, man's first attempts at
understanding himself and his fellows were necessarily blundering and
tentative. His first attempts at explanation are expressed in terms of
his own nature. He sees himself, his own passions, strengths, and
weaknesses reflected in the nature around him. This is the outstanding,
dominating fact in primitive life. Leave out this consideration and
primitive sociology becomes a chaos. Admit it, and we see the reason why
social institutions assumed the form they took, and also a key to much
that happens in subsequent human history. In primitive life religious
beliefs are not something separate from other forms of social life; so
far as man seeks consciously to shape that life they are to him an
essential part of it. And the mistake once made is perpetuated. The
initial blunder once committed, daily experience seems to give it
constant justification. In the absence of knowledge concerning natural
forces every event,--particularly if unusual,--every case of disease,
endorses and strengthens the mistake made. A psychological fatality
drives the human race along the wrong path of investigation, and only
very slowly is the mistake rectified. One cannot see how it could have
been otherwise. The only corrective is knowledge, and knowledge is a
plant of slow growth. This psychological first step was man's first
attempt to frame a theory of things satisfactory to his intellect--an
attempt that, beginning in the crude animism of the savage, ends in the
verifiable laws of modern science.

From the point of view of our present enquiry two things are to be
noted. The first is that man's conviction of the nearness of a
supernatural world began in his lack of knowledge concerning the nature
of natural forces. Of this there can be little doubt. One can take all
the facts upon which primitive mankind built, and still builds, its
theories of supernaturalism, and show that they may be explained in a
quite different manner. The movements of the planets, the rush of
comets, the presence of disaster, the thousand and one operations of
natural forces no longer suggest to educated minds the action of
personal beings. The whole data of the primitive theor