People

It must seem strange that among uncultured peoples the ideal essence of religion should have been so grossly realized, cast into such imperfect forms. But similar cases can be pointed out in other areas of the spiritual life of savages: the desire for beauty is undoubtedly inherent in them, but their works of art are of such a rude nature that, in our opinion, beauty is out of the question here. In the same way, the savage everywhere seeks that higher and ideal being of which he considers himself the slave; not being able to rise above the surrounding appearance, he begins to look for this ideal being in nature itself, and gives its objects and phenomena the properties of personal and rational being. It is very likely that the same way was the formation of religious ideas and primitive man.

The religious life of the savage finds its explanation in the peculiarities of his mental Constitution. Here we can observe a fairly close analogy with the state of the soul in childhood, although, of course, this analogy can not be brought to full identity. Like a child, the savage is not only unable to form a correct idea of the phenomena occurring around him, but is also unable to approach the explanation of them. At every step nature presents him with riddles; to him everything is an unsolved mystery. Impelled by the natural instinct, he everywhere seeks a higher and ideal being, before which he could bow as before his prototype. And so for him all nature becomes a world of spirits, on which, in his opinion, all the surrounding life depends. Not being able to establish a causal relationship between individual phenomena, he is ready to recognize the impossible as possible, any fiction-probable. The imagination is given the widest scope here, since the capacity for systematic observation is absent and the results of experience are not systematized. Therefore there is no such incongruity, no such wild fiction, which the savage, like the child, would not believe. “Children’s stories, which tell of the most incredible facts, such as that man visits the sun and winds in their homes, that animals speak human language, that a witch or sorceress, gifted with knowledge of everything that happens in the world, turns up at the right moment, that in life at every step of the spirits act, that man, like an animal, can be subjected to all sorts of transformations, – all this for the savage is not absurd and unreliable stories, but a very real truth and an undoubted fact” (Menzies). However, this mental feature persists in people even at higher levels of culture.

Another outstanding feature in the savage’s mental Constitution is an extremely developed tendency to spiritualize the environment. Like a child, the primitive savage cannot make a deep distinction between his inner state and the surrounding life. It seems to him that nature feels the same way, thinks the same way, lives the same way as he does. Not only animals, but also plants, even stones and heavenly bodies, etc., appear to him as animated as man himself. It seems to us that only an unintelligent child can talk to a doll as a living being, treat it, be angry with it, and so on; but this transfer of his own mental States to the surrounding objects of nature was experienced by all mankind before its transition to a cultural state.