_The origin of religion._--Just as the illiterate man of to-day believes that his wrath is the cause of his being angry, that his mind is the cause of his thinking, that his soul is the cause of his feeling, in short, just as a mass of psychological entities are still unthinkingly postulated as causes; so, in a still more primitive age, the same phenomena were interpreted by man by means of personal entities. Those conditions of his soul which seemed strange, overwhelming, and rapturous, he regarded as obsessions and bewitching influences emanating from the power of some personality. (Thus the Christian, the most puerile and backward man of this age, traces hope, peace, and the feeling of deliverance to a psychological inspiration on the part of God: being by nature a sufferer and a creature in need of repose, states of happiness, peace, and resignation, perforce seem strange to him, and seem to need some explanation.) Among intelligent, strong, and vigorous races, the epileptic is mostly the cause of a belief in the existence of some _foreign power_; but all such examples of apparent subjection--as, for instance, the bearing of the exalted man, of the poet, of the great criminal, or the passions, love and revenge--lead to the invention of supernatural powers. A condition is made concrete by being identified with a personality, and when this condition overtakes anybody, it is ascribed to that personality. In other words: in the psychological concept of God, a certain state of the soul is personified as a cause in order to appear as an effect. The psychological logic is as follows: when the _feeling of power_ suddenly seizes and overwhelms a man,--and this takes place in the case of all the great passions,--a doubt arises in him concerning his own person: he dare not think himself the cause of this astonishing sensation--and thus he posits a _stronger_ person, a Godhead as its cause. In short, the origin of religion lies in the extreme feelings of power, which, being _strange,_ take men by surprise: and just as the sick man, who feels one of his limbs unaccountably heavy, concludes that another man must be sitting on it, so the ingenuous _homo religiosus,_ divides himself up into _several people._ Religion is an example of the "_altération de la personalité._" A sort of _fear_ and _sensation of terror_ in one's own presence.... But also a feeling of inordinate _rapture_ and _exaltation._ Among sick people, the _sensation of health_ suffices to awaken a belief in the proximity of God. 136. _Rudimentary psychology of the religious man:--_All changes are effects; all effects are effects of will (the notion of "Nature" and of "natural law," is lacking); all effects presuppose an agent. Rudimentary psychology: one is only a cause oneself, when one knows that one has willed something.