The Worship of Animals

Abstract

We have seen that religious cosmology is concerned with the relation between man and the world around him, and in particular with the way he is determined by that world. The fact that he is determined by the phenomena of the world is, seen from the religious point of view, not a mechanical determination, for that would make of man a mechanical product. He is himself spirit, and he can only be determined by spirit. In the natural event there are spiritual factors at work; these are the ultimate factors, which cannot be reduced to anything else. There are not two forms of spirit; one life or one spiritual reality encompasses both man and nature. Nature, the cosmos, to which man is related, is thus essentially spirit. The visible emerges from the invisible; what can be perceived is finite and rational; it can be defined. On the other hand, what cannot be perceived is self-subsistent or divine (self-subsistence is a definition for the divine). So the religious man always looks beyond the rational towards the irrational. Even visible phenomena have an irrational essence, for the self-subsistent element must always be the essential and sovereign factor.