"[Thus] the hills and vales, though to a peevish and weary
traveler they may seem incommodious and troublesome, yet are a
noble work of the great Creator, and wisely appointed by him for
the good of our sublunary world."
You see how natural it is, from this point of view, to treat
religion as a mere survival, for religion does in fact perpetuate
the traditions of the most primeval thought. To coerce the
spiritual powers, or to square them and get them on our side,
was, during enormous tracts of time, the one great object in our
dealings with the natural world. For our ancestors, dreams,
hallucinations, revelations, and cock-and-bull stories were
inextricably mixed with facts. Up to a comparatively recent date
such distinctions as those between what has been verified and
what is only conjectured, between the impersonal and the personal
aspects of existence, were hardly suspected or conceived.
Whatever you imagined in a lively manner, whatever you thought
fit to be true, you affirmed confidently; and whatever you
affirmed, your comrades believed. Truth was what had not yet
been contradicted, most things were taken into the mind from the
point of view of their human suggestiveness, and the attention
confined itself exclusively to the aesthetic and dramatic aspects
of events.
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