Excerpt from Cults, Myths and Religions
In the eyes of the evolutionist - and we are all evolutionists nowadays - man springs from beast, humanity from animality. But man, take him where and when you will, is a religious animal; and religiosity, as the Positivist would say, is the most essential of his attributes. It can no longer be maintained, with Gabriel de Mortillet and Hovelacque, that quaternary man was ignorant of religion. Unless, then, we admit the gratuitous and childlike hypothesis of a primitive revelation, we must look for the origin of religions in the psychology, not of civilised man, but of man the farthest removed from civilisation.
Of this man, anterior to all history, we have no direct knowledge, beyond what we glean from the implements and artistic products of the quaternary period. True, these teach us something, as I have striven to show on a later page; but, equally truly, they teach us far less than we could wish. To supplement our information, three other sources have to be tapped: the psychology of the present-day savage, the psychology of children, and the psychology of the higher animals.
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