There is, to begin with, over the thousands of years of the first age,[474] the colourless throng of primitive populations, which stand fearfully agape in the presence of the chaotic environment, whose enigmas continually weigh upon them, for no man amongst them is able logically to master it. Lucky in comparison with them is the animal, who is awake and yet not thinking. An animal knows fear only from case to case, whereas early man trembles before the whole world. Everything inside and outside him is dark and unresolved. The everyday and the dæmonic are tangled together without clue and without rule. The day is filled with a frightened and painful religiousness, in which it is rare to find even the suggestion of a religion of confidence--for from this elementary form of the world-fear no way leads to the understanding love. Every stone on which a man stumbles, every tool that he takes in his hand, every insect buzzing past him, food, house, weather, all can be dæmonic; but the man believes in the powers that lurk in them only so long as he is frightened or so long _as he uses them_--there are quite enough of them even so. But one can love something only if one believes in its _continued_ existence. Love presupposes the thought of a world-order that has acquired stability. Western research has been at great pains, not only to set in order individual observations gathered from all parts of the world, but to arrange them according to assumed gradations that “lead up” from animism (or other beginnings, as you please) to the beliefs that it holds itself. Unfortunately, it is one particular religion that has provided the values of the scheme, and Chinese or Greeks would have built it quite differently. In reality no such gradation, leading a general human evolution up to one goal, exists. Primitive man’s chaotic world-around, born of his discontinuous understanding of separate moments and yet full of impressive meaning, is always something grown-up, self-complete, and closed off, often with chasms and terrors of deep metaphysical premonition. Always it contains a system, and it matters little whether this is partially abstracted from the contemplation of the light-world or remains wholly within it. Such a world-picture does not “progress”; nor is it a fixed sum of particulars from which this one and that one ought to be (though usually they are) picked out for comparison irrespective of time, land, and people. In reality they form a _world of organic religions_, which, all over the world, possessed (and, where they linger, still possess) proper and very significant modes of originating, growing, expanding, and fading out, and a well-established specific character in point of structure, style, tempo, and duration. The religions of the high Cultures are not developed from these, but different. They lie clearer and more intellectual in the light, they know what understanding love means, they have problems and ideas, theories and techniques, of strict