In the earlier stages, the instability of men's
imaginings and conceptions was kaleidoscopic; but it was no
more governed by wanton fickleness and caprice than is the
course of modern thought. The human spirit was striving then,
as now, to realise worlds vaguely experienced and dimly
surmised. The more imperfect expression was continuously
yielding place to the less imperfect--the lower concept
continuously yielding place to the higher. And at the base of the
whole great movement upwards was sensation, as the simplest
mode of intuition--sensation being, in its various forms and
developments, the outcome of man's intercourse with an
external world that, in its essence, is spiritual like himself.
The main error of animism was its failure to draw distinctions.
It tended to look upon nature as equally and fully human in all
its parts. It translated its intuitions of kinship into terms of
undifferentiated similarity, and thereby entangled itself in
hopeless confusions. But by degrees the stubborn facts of
existence made their impression, and compelled men to realise
that life on the human plane is one thing, and quite another on
the plane of external nature. The attempt to absorb the larger
truth thus sighted was only partially successful, and gave birth
to the wondrous world of mythology. Its chief characteristic
was that the will which was at first conceived to be within, or
identical with, the object, was separated from the object and
accorded a personal, or quasi-personal existence.
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