preposterous and unreasonable as some of the taboos were,
they undoubtedly had the effect of compelling the growth
of self-control. Fear does not seem a very worthy motive,
but in the beginning it curbed the violence of the purely
animal passions, and introduced order and restraint among
them. Simultaneously it became itself, through the gradual
increase of knowledge and observation, transmuted and
etherealized into something more like wonder and awe
and (when the gods rose above the horizon) into reverence.
Anyhow we seem to perceive that from the early beginnings
(in the Stone Age) of self-consciousness in Man there has been a
gradual development--from crass superstition,
senseless and accidental, to rudimentary observation,
and so to belief in Magic; thence to Animism
and personification of nature-powers in more or less human
form, as earth-divinities or sky-gods or embodiments of
the tribe; and to placation of these powers by rites like
Sacrifice and the Eucharist, which in their turn became
the foundation of Morality. Graphic representations made
for the encouragement of fertility--as on the walls of Bushmen's
rock-dwellings or the ceilings of the caverns of Altamira--
became the nurse of pictorial Art; observations of
plants or of the weather or the stars, carried on by tribal
medicine-men for purposes of witchcraft or prophecy, supplied
some of the material of Science; and humanity emerged
by faltering and hesitating steps on the borderland of those
finer perceptions and reasonings which are supposed to be
characteristic of Civilization.

The process of the evolution of religious rites and ceremonies