United States or Angola ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Having said so much, is it open to us, amid all the mental anguish and suffering which this terrible war has engendered, without profaning the sorrow of our fellow-men and women, to give to those who are in mortal fear as to the fate of some one whom they love the hope of finding, among those extrahuman phenomena which have been unjustly and falsely disparaged, a consoling gleam of light that shall not be a mere mockery or delusion?
+1017+. We assume a human society recognizing some supernatural or extrahuman object or force that is regarded as powerful and as standing in some sort of effective relation with human life. It is possible that societies exist that do not recognize any such object or force or, recognizing them, do not employ any means of entering into relation with them.
Indeed, most manifestations of extrahuman power in the earliest times may be said to come to man incidentally, since he does not generally demand them from the gods or make experiments in order to discover them. But in the nature of the case many things meet him as to which he is obliged to use judgment, and of these a certain number appear to him to be powerful.
The simplest form of early worship is the presentation of an offering to the dead or to some extrahuman object of reverence. Such objects were held to exist in all the world, in the sky, in rocks, streams, woods, caves, hills and mountains, and beneath the surface of the earth; but it was chiefly in places of human resort that their presence was expected.
But if that leaden sleep is one of the known phases of ordinary vampirism, if Gilles de Rais was merely a sexual pervert, we must admit that he distinguished himself from the most delirious sadists, the most exquisite virtuosi in pain and murder, by a detail which seems extrahuman, it is so horrible.
The ritual act itself, in the earliest systems, is powerful, in a sort magical, but tends to lose this character and take on the forms of ordinary human intercourse. +1018+. The precise ways in which extrahuman Powers were first approached by men it is not possible now to determine these procedures lie far back in a dim prehistoric time.
Right here on earth how could any of us deny that we are hemmed in by mystery, in our homes, in the street, everywhere when we came to think of it? It was really the part of shallowness to ignore those extrahuman relations and account for the unforeseen by attributing to fate the more than inexplicable. Did not a chance encounter often decide the entire life of a man?
This method of determining the attitude of the deity continued into late stages of social life, and still exists even in professedly Christian communities. +9+. As the basis of the religious feeling we must suppose a sense and conception of an extrahuman Something, the cause of things not otherwise understood.
This thoroughgoing conception of civic autonomy in religion connects itself with the supreme stress laid on conduct in the Confucian system, which represents the final Chinese ideal of life: man constructs his own moral life, and extrahuman Powers, while they may grant physical goods, are chiefly valued as incidents in the good social life.
As religion springs from the human demand for safety and happiness as the gift of the extrahuman Powers, hostility to them has been generally felt to be opposed to common sense. +4+. Instead of complete friendliness and unfriendliness in early tribes we find more commonly between the two a middle ground of self-regarding equipoise.
Word Of The Day