Small wonder then that the adult human being, confronted with the mighty forces of nature, the laws of which he is compelled to follow, if he would avoid destruction, but which--especially if he be ignorant or uncivilised--he cannot comprehend, tends to revert to the attitude of mind in which, in childhood, he looked upon his parents as the forces--equally powerful, as they then seemed, and equally inscrutable--that controlled his fate. In proportion as the child, with increasing age and experience, loses the delusions he had entertained as regards the all-powerfulness, all-knowingness and all-goodness of his parents, he begins to realise, both from his own experience and from instruction and tradition, that there are powers in the Universe which exceed the greatest human might, powers before whom the child's own parents--together with all other mortals--must acknowledge their own humility and impotence, powers so vast that it may seem only reasonable and befitting to regard the wielder of them as the possessor of those qualities of omnipotence and omniscience that were once, in the crude ignorance of infancy, vaguely attributed to the parents and to other adult persons of importance. The divine and superhuman forces, about which the child thus begins to have some notions, constitute in this way a very natural substitute for the exaggerated and idealised estimation of the parents which the child's increasing knowledge of human life compels him to abandon, but which he nevertheless, as we have seen (_cp._ above p. 55), gives up reluctantly. [Sidenote: The divine and the human parent] The displacement of the parent-regarding emotions and tendencies in this direction is, in the case of the individual, often further facilitated in the three following ways:--(1) owing to the generally pronounced animistic tendency of the primitive mind, the child naturally and indeed inevitably conceives of natural forces in a personal and usually in a human form; (2) the child early learns to conceive of the supreme forces of the Universe as creative--creative on a large scale, just as his own parents and other human beings are creative on a small scale; further he learns that he owes his own creation to God as much as to his own parents--to God ultimately, to his parents proximately; (3) in both these respects the individual tendency to endow the Divinity with attributes derived from the parents is greatly stimulated and reinforced by the suggestive power of religious tradition, working through the channels of direct teaching or of representation in language, literature and art. [Sidenote: Remoter ancestors as divine parent substitutes]