To represent the divine, man has never had any but the resources which are in himself. These representations have varied therefore with the general progress of experience and of thought.... From beginning to end the evolution of religious images and notions is based on the idea of spirit. It is in this idea that the resemblance and the kinship of man to his God is based; only by this can there be understanding, converse, harmony between them. Primitive religions, doubtless, are neither spiritualist nor materialist; they are animistic. A simple animism gives to men their first conceptions. The child projects the life which animates him; he endows the things around him with a personality similar to his own. For him there is nothing dead or inert; the world is peopled with living beings with which he contends, and talks, and is angry, to which he gives his love and his caresses. Do not let us smile too much at this simplicity. The latest steps of philosophy are rejoining our earliest thoughts. We are coming to see that in sum we know nothing but ourselves, that our science is but the projection of our consciousness without, and that it is solely on this condition that the world becomes intelligible to us. Man never worships anything purely material, anything that cannot hear and answer him. When he perceives that the object of his worship is inanimate, he thinks his god has deserted him, and he sets himself to pursue him. He usually finds him and retains him under other names and forms. By faith in ghosts, and by the memory of his dreams, he has learnt to double himself, and to oppose his will to his thought, his interior ego to his body, which he calls his house. He may easily quit this for another. Nothing is more ancient than the idea of the transmigration of souls. But at the same time he doubles the being of his gods; he distinguishes between the god and the object in which he habitually resides. This is the period at which _idolatry_ begins. It will only be completed when the spirit-god has broken the bonds which bind him to its visible prison and its material image; when He shall speak who says that "God is a Spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth." From that moment, mythology transforms itself into theology, and external rites into inward piety.