You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Religion has not always been the inseparable companion of humanity; rather, in the history of evolution, a prereligious stage has assumed a large place and with this stage, we must deal first in order to gain an insight into the physical genesis of religion.
The attitude ruling men in this prereligious epoch was the animistic, that is, primitive races peopled the world with beings to whom they ascribed life and soul, like themselves; the recognition of inanimate objects of the outer world was still lacking to them. In order to succeed in this conception, man had first to acquire the capability of sharply distinguishing between the processes of the external world and endopsychic perceptions. So long as the division into internal and external world, ego and non-ego, had not been fully elaborated, the knowledge that the psychic reality produced by hallucinatory means is different from objective reality perceived by the senses could not become fixed. Only by degrees, does reality, not only practically, but also theoretically, compel the recognition of its independent existence, so that the necessity is provided of controlling it with real means adapted to it, and not merely as the result of reflection. With progressive adaptation to reality, the previous feeling of omnipotence, based on the mingling of objective with psychic reality, had to be in large part renounced and this feeling now saved itself in the field of endopsychic gratification in phantasy life.
Here is to be sought the starting point of all those structures which aim at guaranteeing to man in a mentally autonomous field withdrawn from reality, the pleasures which he had to sacrifice to the progress of culture. The phantasy gratification has at first no differentiated forms, gaining sharply