Mr Cornford regards the savage idea of a collective consciousness as the germ of the idea of divine power or of God. Now this is connected with the question of animism, preanimism, and dynanimism. It may be true that the notion of _mana_ is the common prime source of religious and magical ideas, but it does not follow that the idea of God is arrived at by way of a notion of collective _mana_. No doubt that would be the probable course of events, if the savage had so little sense of his individuality as Cornford supposes; but it seems to me rather that the savage’s strong sense of individuality has led at an early stage to the personalisation, the individuation, of _mana_, the vaguely conceived spiritual power and influence, and that it was only by a long course of religious and philosophical speculation that men reached the conception of the Absolute or of God as a universal power of which each personal consciousness is a partial manifestation. It is interesting to note that, if we could accept Cornford’s views, we could now claim to witness the completion of one full cycle of the wheel of speculation, the last step having been made in an article in a recent number of the _Hibbert Journal_[39]; for it is there suggested that the only God or super-individual power we ought to recognise and revere is, not a collective consciousness conceived as a supra-individual unity of consciousness, but the collective mind of humanity in the sense in which I am using the term, a system of mental forces that slowly progresses towards greater harmony and integration. M. Lévy Bruhl has written an interesting, though highly speculative, account of savage mental life which he represents as differing profoundly from our own, chiefly in that it is dominated by ‘collective representations[40].’ His view is not unlike that put forward by Cornford. Collective representations or ideas are rightly said to be the product of the group mind rather than of any individual mind; that is to say, they have been gradually evolved by collective mental life; and they are said to differ from our ideas in being “states more complex in which the emotional and motor elements are integral parts of the ideas.” Thinking by aid of these collective representations is said to have its own laws quite distinct from the laws of logic.