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Updated: May 21, 2025
But it owes the presence of this alien body of scientific knowledge also in part, and in a higher degree, to members of the industrious classes who have been in sufficiently easy circumstances to turn their attention to other interests than that of finding daily sustenance, and whose inherited aptitudes and anthropomorphic point of view does not dominate their intellectual processes.
But to this argument a theologian may not unreasonably object, that this terminal phase differs from all the previous phases in one all-important feature viz., in effecting a total abolition of the anthropomorphic element.
And the Fetishism, Ancestor-worship, Hero-worship, and Demonology of primitive savages are all, I believe, different manners of expression of their belief in ghosts, and of the anthropomorphic interpretation of out-of-the- way events which is its concomitant.
The process by which an anthropomorphic god or hero succeeds to the exploits of animals, of theriomorphic gods and heroes, is the most common in mythology, and is illustrated by actual practice in modern India. When the Brahmins convert a pig-worshipping tribe of aboriginals, they tell their proselytes that the pig was an avatar of Vishnu.
The antiquated conception of an anthropomorphic personal God is destined, before the present century is ended, to drop out of currency throughout the entire domain of truly scientific philosophy; the corresponding conception of a personal devil even as late as last century connected with the former and very generally accepted has already been given up once for all by all persons of education.
Thus the Ptolemaic conception of the universe dominated the thought of Europe for a thousand years, and could not be substituted by the true theory without a fierce struggle; and, to cite an even more striking illustration, the early generalizations of primitive man which explain numberless phenomena of nature as due to an influence of unseen anthropomorphic beings remain to this day one of the most powerful influences that affect our race an influence from which we shall never shake ourselves altogether free until the average man and particularly the average woman learns to be a good observer and a logical reasoner.
There is a point of view, indeed, from which the economic interest is of weight only as being ancillary to these higher, non-economic interests. For the present purpose, therefore, some thought must be taken to isolate the economic interest or the economic hearing of these phenomena of anthropomorphic cults.
An essentially human faculty, an anthropomorphic attribute, by which God is thought to look into the future according to the progress of events, in the same way that we men look into the past, following the perspective of chronology and history.
If the Divine Presence fills him with a mystic ecstasy, he has, indeed, attained it upon this earth, but this bliss is only for the very blessed sage; and he, too, looks forward to the more lasting union with the Godhead after this terrestrial life is over. True at once to the principles of Platonism and Judaism, Philo admits no anthropomorphic conception of Heaven or of Hell.
In those early days positive knowledge was not to be had, but the craving after it needed, at all hazards, to be satisfied, and according to the country, or the turn of thought of the speculator, the suggestion that all living things arose from the mud of the Nile, from a primeval egg, or from some more anthropomorphic agency, afforded a sufficient resting-place for his curiosity.
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