Professor Kohler points out that in the history of the world’s religions, although the belief in the omnipotence of God has become so widespread, it is not thought inconsistent that a Buddha, claiming to incarnate the Supreme Being completely within himself, should appear.] [Sidenote: Man’s Craving for Religion] [Sidenote: Beginnings of Nature Worship] [Sidenote: The Realm of Shadows] Religion is belief in God; that is, belief in spiritual forces inseparable from and interwoven through the universe--forces that render all things distinct and separate, yet make all coalescent and firm, permeating all, and giving to every object its individuality. Man is impelled by Nature to conceive of the universe as divine. This idea exhibits itself universally among primitive folk in the form of animism--a belief that the entire internal and external world is animated, filled with supernatural beings that have originally no determinate nature, but which may appear in the most varied of forms, may vanish and may create themselves anew, as clouds arise from unseen vapour in the air. Spirits are supposed to be not far removed from man; families as well as individuals consider themselves to stand more or less in connection with them; and men, too, have a share in the invisible world when they have cast aside the garment of the body in dream or in death. Thus, every man is thought to have his protecting spirit, his _manitou_, that reveals itself to him through signs and dreams. Special incarnations, objects in which supernatural beings are inherent or with which they are in some way connected, are called “fetiches”; hence arises fetichism, in regard to which the strangest ideas were held in previous centuries when the science of anthropology was unknown. Trees, rocks, rivers, bits of wood, images of one’s own making--any of these are thought capable of containing beings of divine nature. Naturally, the tree or the fragment of wood or of stone is not worshipped, as men formerly thought, but the spirit that is believed to have entered it. In many cases the belief approaches worship of Nature, especially among agricultural peoples. Divinity is recognised in the shape of factors essential to agriculture--sun, sky, lightning, thunder; these being the beneficent deities, in contrast to whom are the earth-spirits who bring pestilences, earthquakes, and other evils to mankind. Thus the cult is refined; spirits are no longer attached to fetiches, but men worship the heavens, and the earth also. Religion accompanies man from birth to death. Spirits both for good and for evil are supposed to hover about him at his very birth. The soul of some being--perhaps an animal, perhaps an ancestor--enters into the new-born child, and from this spirit he receives his name.