Schleiermacher's theory, which attributes the origin, or rather the
essence, of the religious sense to the immediate and simple feeling of
dependency, appears to be the most profound and exact explanation.
Primitive man, living in society, feels himself to be dependent upon the
mysterious forces invisibly environing him; he feels himself to be in
social communion, not only with beings like himself, his fellow-men, but
with the whole of Nature, animate and inanimate, which simply means, in
other words, that he personalizes everything. Not only does he possess a
consciousness of the world, but he imagines that the world, like
himself, possesses consciousness also. Just as a child talks to his doll
or his dog as if it understood what he was saying, so the savage
believes that his fetich hears him when he speaks to it, and that the
angry storm-cloud is aware of him and deliberately pursues him. For the
newly born mind of the primitive natural man has not yet wholly severed
itself from the cords which still bind it to the womb of Nature, neither
has it clearly marked out the boundary that separates dreaming from
waking, imagination from reality.
The divine, therefore, was not originally something objective, but was
rather the subjectivity of consciousness projected exteriorly, the
personalization of the world. The concept of divinity arose out of the
feeling of divinity, and the feeling of divinity is simply the dim and
nascent feeling of personality vented upon the outside world.
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