There are two antagonistic schools--the one believing in a descending, the other in an ascending development of the human race; the one asserting that the history of the human mind begins of necessity with a state of purity and simplicity which gradually gives way to corruption, perversity, and savagery; the other maintaining that the first human beings could not have been more than one step above the animals, and that their whole history is one of progress towards higher perfection. With regard to the beginnings of religion, the one school holds to a primitive suspicion of something that is beyond--call it supernatural, transcendental, infinite, or divine. It considers a silent walking across this bridge of life, with eyes fixed on high, as a more perfect realisation of primitive religion than singing of Vedic hymns, offering of Jewish sacrifices, or the most elaborate creeds and articles. The other begins with the purely animal and passive nature of man, and tries to show how the repeated impressions of the world in which he lived, drove him to fetichism and totemism, whatever these words may mean, to ancestor worship, to a worship of nature, of trees and serpents, of mountains and rivers, of clouds and meteors, of sun and moon and stars, and the vault of heaven, and at last to a belief in One who dwells in heaven above. _Chips._ MIND OR THOUGHT Wherever we can see clearly, we see that what we call mind and thought consist in this, that man has the power not only to receive presentations like an animal, but to discover something general in them. This element he can eliminate and fix by vocal signs; and he can further classify single presentations under the same general concepts, and mark them by the same vocal signs. _Silesian Horseherd._ Language and thought go hand in hand; where there is as yet no word, there is not yet an idea. The thinking capacity of the mind has its source in language, lives in language, and develops continually in language. _Silesian Horseherd._ All our thoughts, even the apparently most abstract, have their natural beginnings in what passes daily before our senses. _Nihil in fide nisi quod ante fuerit in sensu._ Man may for a time be unheedful of these voices of nature; but they come again and again, day after day, night after night, till at last they are heeded. And if once heeded, those voices disclose their purport more and more clearly, and what seemed at first a mere sunrise becomes in the end a visible revelation of the infinite, while the setting of the sun is transfigured into the first vision of immortality. _Hibbert Lectures._