This universal postulate, the psychic origin of all religious thought, is the recognition, or, if you please, the assumption, _that conscious volition is the ultimate source of all Force_. It is the belief that behind the sensuous, phenomenal world, distinct from it, giving it form, existence, and activity, lies the ultimate, invisible, immeasurable power of Mind, of conscious Will, of Intelligence, analogous in some way to our own; and,—mark this essential corollary,—_that man is in communication with it_. What the highest religions thus assume was likewise the foundation of the earliest and most primitive cults. The one universal trait amid their endless forms of expression was the unalterable faith in Mind, in the super-sensuous, as the ultimate source of all force, all life, all being. Science and Christianity teach the same, but with this difference: the progress of observation has taught us the existence of certain uniform sequences which we call “laws of nature,” based solely on Mind, but representing its processes of realisation. The savage knew not these. He imagined every motion in nature was the immediate exhibition of Will, his own will in his own motions, some seen or unseen will in other motions. The seen were of another being like himself; the unseen were to that extent unknown, and these were his gods. I repeat, wherever we find the divine, the spiritual agency, set forth in myth or symbol, creed or rite, we find it characterised by two traits: it is of the nature of the human mind, that is, super-sensuous; and it is the ultimate source of power. It will be my aim to show the expressions of these universal postulates of the religious sentiment in the rudest faiths of the world. You may ask, by what process of thinking did primitive man assign mind to nature. The process is extremely simple, and is illustrated by the action of any child. Let one be accidentally hurt by an empty rocking-chair in motion; at once, it is angry at the chair, and is gratified to see it whipped! The child-mind assigns to the object the will and the sensations of which it is conscious in itself. This is the simplest explanation it can imagine for action. Precisely so is it with the savage man. Wherever he perceives motion, independent of a living being, he assumes the presence of a conscious agent, not visible to his senses. As Professor Sayce remarks of the early Chaldeans: “To them the spiritual, the _Zi_, was that which manifested life, and the test of the manifestation of life was movement.”[36] This is universally true of primitive faiths.