73
imagine for God or the Demiurge later. The word “panthelism” of Greek origin expresses very
well this state of human intelligence; which, first of all, sees in nature not some soul/minds
more or less distinct from bodies, but simply some intentions, desires, wills inherent to the
very objects.In short, the simplest or most primitive representation, that Man can imagine
about nature, it is not to see in it phenomena depending on each other; but some wills more
or less independent and endowed with an extreme power, being able to act the ones on the
others, and on us. The world is understood as a set of wills, physically and socially
powerful.But they are not only objects as well as beings in nature that Man, at this stage of
his development, imagines as wills, they are also actions, because they seem to him like
some objects. The display of any physical or mental energy is accompanied by variations of
emotional state, which cause, in turn, the apparition of such or such images. These images
symbolize the act, represent it, and in a way embodies it. And so, as the acts, the passions
which move men, the desires who attract them, are personified or take tangible shapes, and
that spontaneously, without any aware and thoughtful tendency to allegory takes
place.Language besides completes the work begun with images and emotions, and confers to
these beings of thought a whole and entire reality or almost. Consequently, Man himself, like
whole nature, is in his own eyes a kind of Republic of Powers more or less confusedly
represented, but, however, identical in their appearance to the multiple objects which appear
in their former perception. And these objectified images; he feels them as being forces, as
being energies. From there is made more complete the identification between the nature
which surrounds him, and the man who lives, on it, but also in it.
We will never insist too much, besides, on the crucial role played, in the development of the
notion of life of things; by the knowledge the primitive ones have of animals, and the design
they imagine of their intimate nature. They are too similar to man in all their steps, in all their
manners of behaving, with him and in relation each other; so that he could think of arranging
them in a category different from that in which he placed himself. However, they differ, at such
point of him – some of them at least - by their appearance; that they hardly seem to him
related more closely but plants, water which moves and which speaks too, and rocks in which
something of his shape sometimes seems to remain. It is a reason, moreover, so that he
estimates that all these beings are, like him, living beings, and living beings who want.
According to a very perspicacious remark of the great Scottish philosopher that was Edward
Caird, man at the same time designed himself in the image of nature objects, and imagined
nature in the image of his will; things and men are of comparable essence, invested with the
same attributes, with powers of a similar quality, if not of the same extent.[Editor’s note. And
that also regards quite obviously the god-or-devil of the three monolatries, who is only a
superman!]What it is important to notice here; it is that these attributes and these powers,
according to such an idea of the world, are very different from the attributes and from the
human powers such as we design them nowadays. They are much more varied, much more
numerous. The action of Man , according to them, runs in a thousand fields we know now
withdrawn from the influence of his will. He can act on rain and clouds, wind and sun, make
the plants grow or the leaves be dried out ; he can to his liking take the shape which suits him
or impose it on others.The primitive man believed he can do all that, and the other wills,
similar to his, of which the world thread is made, also could do it, according to him, quite in
the same way.For the primitive man, all the beings are magicians, but they are magicians with
unequal power and also with unequal science. The natural gift, the mana which is not got (the
word mana indicates in Melanesia the whole of the natural and supernatural gifts of which a
man is endowed, the set of the powers over men and things which belong to him) as well as
the knowledge, of good rules, of good recipes; such are the elements which make possible
some persons to command supreme thunder,ocean, animals in the forests. For the primitive
man, there is in phenomena, no rule, and no uniform succession. The idea of natural law is
absent from his mind. Causality, such as he succeeds to imagine it, is a capricious and
dubious causality. He does not imagine the universe as a super-unit of which all the parts are
bound; but as a collection of persons always in fight and of whom sometimes one overcomes,
sometimes the other, without it is possible to know in advance to whom the advantage will
remain. He sees it as given up to the unceasingly changing impulses of never bridled
passions. And no being is subjected to a part fixed and determined in advance, no being has
special function, for which it would be made exclusively. It can do everything, and that all the
more surely as a more effective virtue, that a higher mana, is in it. Each “will,” each “power,”
appears in a thousand different ways, and no particular field is assigned to him with the