Of course in us cultured folk perfect love, sentimentality, softness of fibre, heedlessness, forgetfulness, and general superficiality of life--to make a very inadequate list--have combined to cast out fear, "for fear hath torment"; and we thank God loudly that we are so much wiser than our benighted ancestors. Even our New England fathers feared God, though they feared nothing else, but we fear only everything else except God and law. But the unlucky scientific wight living and working in the shadow of adamantine law remains in hopeless bondage to fear. "Nach ewigen ehernen, grossen Gesetzen Mussen wir alle unseres Daseins Kreise vollenden."[156] These great powers might not necessarily be hopelessly hostile. They might be appeased or won over, possibly controlled. What could he do to please them? For something must be done. Here ritual arises.[157] Possibly he offers to one or more of them a share in the feast which he so much enjoys after a successful hunt. In time this may become a sacrifice, sent up and out on the wings of fire.[158] Or he practises a wind or rain dance as the outlet and expression of his intense desire; and to awaken, encourage, and help the powers of these elements. He holds a hunting-dance to rehearse and gain power for the killing of the bear. Call it objectification of his heart's desire, or magic if you prefer. Magic and religion grow up side by side, and probably from the same root in these early stages: as alchemy and chemistry, astrology and astronomy will spring up later. The pictures on the cave-walls of France probably had a magical or religious purpose. Here we find very few representations of human beings. But in a rock-painting at Cogul, possibly Neolithic though probably older, we see a group of women apparently engaged in some rite of magic or religion. The occurrence of amulets also does not surprise us. We cannot make a study of primitive ritual magic and religion, their origin, form, and content. But even our hasty glance shows us that man had been wondering and thinking about this subject during millennia before our Neolithic time, had been forced to accept many profound convictions, containing germs of sublime truth overlaid, like our own, with many errors; he had elaborated a system of ritual, and had travelled far along the road of religious experience and discoveries long before this comparatively recent epoch.