phenomenon, but, smitten by fear or awe, simply sought, by the means familiar to him in the case of known personal beings, to conciliate whatever power might lurk beneath an unwonted form. And although a comparatively definite conception of a personality might in time crystallize, to be transformed later by the evolution of animism into the idea of a spirit, yet there must always have remained, after all these crystallizations, the vague and formless Unknown, confronted in all its more prominent manifestations through the medium of an undefined dread of power which might at any time be revealed from it. In this relation of the personal and the impersonal lies, as it seems to me, the secret of primitive philosophy, if philosophy it may be called, all un-selfconscious as {30} it must have been. There is no written record of man’s earliest guesses at the meaning of the universe. Whatever they were, they were limited to his immediate surroundings and the relation of these surroundings to himself. We must judge of them as they are represented in the beliefs and actions of modern, or at all events much later, savages and in those of great historic nations. For all scientific enquirers are agreed that the history of the human mind has been that of a slow evolution from something lower than the lowest savagery known to-day, that it has not everywhere evolved in the same way or to the same degree, and that the course it has taken has left traces, discoverable by close inspection, upon every mental product and in every civilization throughout the world. The testimony on which we have to rely in the investigation is of the most various value, and often most difficult of interpretation. Its difficulties and defects have already been touched upon; nor do I propose further to consider them now. The minute examination and relentless criticism to which it has been subjected have revealed its weakness; they have also revealed its strength. They have left a solid body of evidence from which we may cautiously but confidently reason. What can we learn from it on the point under discussion?