In the stage of human evolution known as animism, everything which acts--or is supposed to act--is supposed to be, like man himself, a person. But though, in the animistic stage, all powers are conceived by man as being persons, they are not all conceived as having human form: they may be animals, and have animal forms; or birds, and have bird-form; they may be trees, clouds, streams, the wind, the earthquake or the fire. In some, or rather in all, of these, man has at some time found the being or the power, greater than man, of whom he has at all times been in quest, with the enquiry, addressed to each in turn, 'Art thou there?' The form of the question, the use of the personal pronoun, shows that he is seeking for a person. And students of the science of religion are generally agreed that man, throughout the history of religion, has been seeking for a power or being superior to man and greater than he. It is therefore a personal power and a personal being that man has been in search of, throughout his religious history. He has pushed his search in many directions--often simultaneously in different directions; and, he has abandoned one line of enquiry after another, because he has found that it did not lead him whither he would be. Thus, as we have seen, he pushed forward, at the same time, in the direction of fetishism and of polytheism, or rather of polydaemonism; but fetishism failed to bring him satisfaction, or rather failed to satisfy the common consciousness, the consciousness of the community, because it proved on trial to subserve the wishes--the anti-social wishes--of the individual, and not the interests of the community. The beings or powers that man looked to find and which he supposed he found, whether as fetishes in this or that object, or as daemons in the sky, the fire or the wind, in beast or bird or tree, were taken to be personal beings and personal powers, bearing the same relation to that in which, or through which, they manifested themselves, as man bears to his body. They do not seem to have been conceived as being men, or the souls of men which manifested themselves in animals or trees. At the time when polydaemonism has, as yet, not become polytheism, the personal beings, worshipped in this or that external form, have not as yet been anthropomorphised. Indeed, the process which constitutes the change from polydaemonism to polytheism consists in the process, or rather is the process, by which the spirits, the personal beings, worshipped in tree, or sky, or cloud, or wind, or fire came gradually to be anthropomorphised--to be invested with human parts and passions and to be addressed like human beings with proper names. But when anthropomorphic polytheism is thus pushed to its extreme logical conclusions, its tendency is to collapse in the same way, and for the same reasons, as fetishism, before it, had collapsed. What man had been in search of, from the beginning, and was still in search of, was