The Five Basic Paradigms

Abstract

As has been said in the introduction, the tracing of historical roots for the views which human beings have held on their predicament and for their conceptions of life and death, cannot in our context go further back than the point in time at which there first emerge sufficiently well written sources to provide us with adequate information. We have to leave out all that the anthropologists have found concerning the views held on such matters by various primitive peoples of their time, peoples whose ideas and perceptions reflect the state of the human mind in prehistoric ages.