Author Description

Excerpt from The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire As a dog endeavors to get the good will of man by abjectly crawling toward him on his belly and licking his feet. There was no ele ment of true worship in the propitiatory offerings of primitive man; in the beginning he was essentially a materialist - he became a spiritualist later on. Man's first religion must have been, necessarily, a material one he worshiped (propitiated) only that which he could see, or feel, or hear, or touch; his un developed psychical being could grasp nothing higher; his limited understanding could not frame an idea involving a spiritual element such as animism undoubtedly presents. Ap ropos of the dream birth of the soul, all ter restrial mammals dream, and in some of them, notably the dog and monkey, an observer can almost predicate the subject of their dreams by watching their actions while they are nu der dream inuence; yet no animal save man, as far as we know, has ever evolved any idea of ghost or soul. It may be said, on the other hand, that since animals show, unmistakably. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.