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Updated: May 21, 2025
The like is true in a general way of the personal service consumed under this head; such as priestly education, priestly service, pilgrimages, fasts, holidays, household devotions, and the like. At the same time the observances in the execution of which this consumption takes place serve to extend and protract the vogue of those habits of thought on which an anthropomorphic cult rests.
To debate whether one be better for mankind than the other betrays what I call an anthropomorphic turn of mind; it is therefore a problem which, so far as I am concerned, does not exist. I content myself with establishing the fact that progress and civilization are incompatible, mutually exclusive."
Hence came the multiplicity of myths, developed in brilliant anthropomorphic groups in different theologies, gradually becoming more simple as time went on, then uniting in the vague primitive personification of the winds, the storms, the sun, the dawn; in short, of astral and meteorological phenomena.
Instead of maintaining that God is like man magnified to infinity, who has absolute, irresponsible control of a universe which is external to him the rather rude anthropomorphic account of the ultimate nature of the universe contained in the Bible Spinoza maintains that God is identical with the universe and must be and act according to eternal and necessary laws.
Science, on the other hand, which begins in myth, gradually divests this subjectivity of its anthropomorphic character, until pure reason is attained, and with this the power of indefinite progress.
In translating existence into human terms they give human nature its highest exercise. Science should be mathematical and religion anthropomorphic. If man were a static or intelligible being, such as angels are thought to be, his life would have a single guiding interest, under which all other interests would be subsumed.
The Hellenic philosophies prior to Plato, both physical and intellectual, and also the psychological morality of Socrates, had already accomplished the first evolution of this typical stage of universal polytheism, substituting for anthropomorphic representations physical and intellectual principles and powers.
The conception of the numen being so formless and indefinite, it is not surprising that in the genuine Roman religion there should have been no anthropomorphic representations of the divinity at all.
The artisan class, on the other hand, is notoriously falling away from the accredited anthropomorphic creeds and from all devout observances.
For in the case of mythical entification the tendency to impersonation was always increasing and becoming more distinctly zoomorphic and anthropomorphic, and in this form it was crystallized or mummified, while science on the other hand was always enlarging its sphere and dissipating the first mythical form of its conception, until nothing was left but a purely rational idea.
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