THE ORIGIN OF THE RELIGIOUS CULT.--If we go back to the times in which the religious life flourished to the greatest extent, we find a fundamental conviction, which we now no longer share, and whereby the doors leading to a religious life are closed to us once for all,--it concerns Nature and intercourse with her. In those times people knew nothing of natural laws; neither for earth nor for heaven is there a "must"; a season, the sunshine, the rain may come or may not come. In short, every idea of natural causality is lacking. When one rows, it is not the rowing that moves the boat, but rowing is only a magical ceremony by which one compels a _dæmon_ to move the boat. All maladies, even death itself, are the result of magical influences. Illness and death never happen naturally; the whole conception of "natural sequence" is lacking,--it dawned first amongst the older Greeks, that is, in a very late phase of humanity, in the conception of _Moira,_ enthroned above the gods. When a man shoots with a bow, there is still always present an irrational hand and strength; if the wells suddenly dry up, men think first of subterranean _dæmons_ and their tricks; it must be the arrow of a god beneath whose invisible blow a man suddenly sinks down. In India (says Lubbock) a carpenter is accustomed to offer sacrifice to his hammer, his hatchet, and the rest of his tools; in the same way a Brahmin treats the pen with which he writes, a soldier the weapons he requires in the field of battle, a mason his trowel, a labourer his plough. In the imagination of religious people all nature is a summary of the actions of conscious and voluntary creatures, an enormous complex of _arbitrariness._ No conclusion may be drawn with regard to everything that is outside of us, that anything will _be_ so and so, _must_ be so and so; the approximately sure, reliable are _we,_--man is the _rule,_ nature is _irregularity,_--this theory contains the fundamental conviction which obtains in rude, religiously productive primitive civilisations. We latter-day men feel just the contrary,--the richer man now feels himself inwardly, the more polyphonous is the music and the noise of his soul the more powerfully the symmetry of nature works upon him; we all recognise with Goethe the great means in nature for the appeasing of the modern soul; we listen to the pendulum swing of this greatest of clocks with a longing for rest, for home and tranquillity, as if we could absorb this symmetry into ourselves and could only thereby arrive at the enjoyment of ourselves. Formerly it was otherwise; if we consider the rude, early condition of nations, or contemplate present-day savages' at close quarters, we find them most strongly influenced by _law_ and by _tradition_: the individual is almost automatically bound to them, and moves with the uniformity of a pendulum. To him Nature--uncomprehended, terrible, mysterious Nature--must appear as the _sphere of liberty,_