This being my main purpose, I believed that I might at once reject the thought of giving the various facts a proportionate degree of attention. In the case of the better known phenomena, it appeared sufficient to sketch their place in the general development. That which was less familiar, however, or was still, perhaps, generally unknown, seemed to me to require a more detailed discussion. Hence the following pages deal at some length with the forms of original tribal organization and of the consummation of marriage, with soul, demon, and totem cults, and with various other phenomena of a somewhat primitive culture. On the other hand, they describe in barest outline the social movements that reach over into historical times, such as the founding of States and cities, the origin of legal systems, and the like. No inference, of course, should be drawn from this with regard to the relative importance of the phenomena themselves. Our procedure, in this matter, has been governed by practical considerations alone. The above remark concerning the less familiar and that which is as yet unknown, will already have indicated that folk psychology in general, and particularly a history of development in terms of folk psychology, such as this book aims to give, are as yet forced to rely largely on suppositions and hypotheses, if they are not to lose the thread that unites the details. Questions similar to the ones which we have just mentioned regarding the beginnings of human society, or others, which, though belonging to a later development, nevertheless still fall within the twilight dawn of history--such, for example, as those concerning the origin of gods and of religion, the development of myth, the sources and the transformations in meaning of the various forms of cult, etc.--are, of course, as yet largely matters of dispute. In cases of this sort, we are for the most part dealing not so much with facts themselves as with hypotheses designed to interpret facts. And yet it must not be forgotten that folk psychology rests on precisely the same experiential basis, as regards these matters, as do all other empirical sciences. Its position in this respect is similar, more particularly, to that of history, with which it frequently comes into touch in dealing with these problems of origin. The hypotheses of folk psychology never refer to a background of things or to origins that are by nature inaccessible to experiential knowledge; they are simply assumptions concerning a number of conjectured empirical facts that, for some reason or other, elude positive detection. When, for example, we assume that the god-idea resulted from a fusion of the hero ideal with the previously existing belief in demons, this is an hypothesis, since the direct transition of a demon into a god can nowhere be pointed out with absolute certainty. Nevertheless, the conjectured process moves on the factual plane from beginning to end. The same is