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They quote an isolated line from an early lay about the "Pilot who weathered the storm," which they apply to Gladstone in his human or political aspect, when the storm-spirit had been anthropomorphised, and was regarded as an ancestral politician.
The proof therefore rests on the anthropomorphised pre-prophetic accounts, and on the ritual, of Jehovah. But man naturally 'anthropises' his deities: he does not thereby demonstrate that they were once ghosts. But we have shown that among the lowest races neither are ghosts worshipped by sacrifice, nor does the Supreme Being, Darumulun or Puluga, receive food offerings.
They do not seem to have been conceived as being men, or the souls of men which manifested themselves in animals or trees. At the time when polydaemonism has, as yet, not become polytheism, the personal beings, worshipped in this or that external form, have not as yet been anthropomorphised.
Indeed, the process which constitutes the change from polydaemonism to polytheism consists in the process, or rather is the process, by which the spirits, the personal beings, worshipped in tree, or sky, or cloud, or wind, or fire came gradually to be anthropomorphised to be invested with human parts and passions and to be addressed like human beings with proper names.
We know that Israel had, in an early age, the conception of the moral Eternal; we know that, at an early age, that conception was contaminated and anthropomorphised; and we know that it was rescued, in a great degree, from this corruption, while always retaining its original ethical aspect and sanction.
Whether this be the case or not, the fact that these deeper moods are among the richest acquisitions of human nature, will not be denied either by those who think that Christianity associates them with objects destined permanently to awake them in their loftiest form, or by others who believe that the deepest moods of which man is capable, must ultimately ally themselves with something still more purely spiritual than the anthropomorphised deities of the falling church.
Be this as it may, we are justified in saying, indeed we are compelled to recognise, that in mythology, all the world over, we see a process of reflection at work, by which the beings, originally apprehended as superior to man, come first to be anthropomorphised, that is to be apprehended as having the parts and passions of men, and then, consequently, to be seen to be no better than men.
Personified Science Science is being daily more and more personified and anthropomorphised into a god.
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