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Until we have exhausted the human element in every form of belief, and that can only be done by what we may call comparative spiritual anatomy, we cannot begin to deal with the alleged extra-human elements without blundering into all imaginable puerilities.
Our understanding has then this peculiarity as concerns the judgment, that in cognitive understanding the particular is not determined by the universal and cannot therefore be derived from it. Kant here brings forward two reasons why it is permissible to conceive of the existence of an extra-human, archetypal reason.
It is hard to judge how far such human qualities as we now read into his work, could be apparent to one who only approached him through it. But the extra-human note in Shelley's genius irresistibly suggested to the Browning of fourteen, as it still did to the Browning of forty, the presence of a lofty spirit, one dwelling in the communion of higher things.
Here, then, is humanism again carried to the very heart of the citadel. Religion at its source contains no real perceptions of any extra-human force or person. What seemed to be such perceptions were only the felt participation of the individual in a collective consciousness which is superindividual, but not superhuman and always continuous with the individual consciousness.
It is very easy to imagine how, as the cycles went on and down, and the Adept-Kings ceased to incarnate continuously, these religious officials would have crystallized themselves into a close corporation, an hereditary caste; and what power their custodianship of the sacrificial literature would have given them; how that literature would have come to be not merely sacred in the sense that all true poetry with the inspiration of the Soul behind it really is; but credited with an extra-human sanction.
They forgot that a man had made it, or if for a moment it did occur to them that it was the product of some agency outside of and above itself, that agent loomed vaguely as a mysterious, extra-human power, like the winds or the cold or the great Wilderness itself. It did not seem possible that he could feel the need for food, for rest, that ever his vital forces could wane.
And in this excellent forest there are beautiful ranges of woods, rich with the aroma of various blossoms, and hummed over by the black bees. And, O Bhima, behold on all sides the excellent sporting ground of the celestials. By coming here, we have attained extra-human state, and been blessed.
Alchemy was a part of magic; for magic interprets and corrects the knowledge gained by the senses by the touchstone of generalisations which have been supplied, partly by the emotions, and partly by extra-human authority, and accepted as necessarily true. The conception of natural order which regulates the life of the savage is closely related to that which guided the alchemists.
Most, if not all, animals in extra-human conditions, including the minuter things such as insects, shellfish, and invisible aquatic organisms, have been brought into a condition of 'adjustment' to their parasites as well as to the other conditions in which they live: it is this most difficult and efficient balance of Nature which Man everywhere upsets.
Our study thus far has made it clear that there are mystic dangers to be guarded against from human as well as extra-human sources. There is weakness to be feared as well as power, as shown by the food and sex taboos. And once again there is mystery in the different, the unusual, the unlike, that causes avoidance and creates taboos.
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