ABSTRACT
Man's relation to the powers of the universe appears in three forms, as participation, religion and world religion. Participation is a purely physical bond: through his emotions, his sensations and through magic, man merges with his ancestral and totemistic demons. In religion, man for the first time faces his life-giving principle in the deity per se, detached from its human descendants. Frequent wars were caused by a struggle for expansion and for favorable dwelling-places. Those tribes that were numerically the strongest and that were most vital—which often meant more barbarous—overran the smaller tribes and established cultures. The gradual evolution of the human mind, manifesting itself in the religious concepts of the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Persians and the Jews, must be considered as successive steps in the process of humanization, personalization and spiritualization of the deity, and at the same time, humanization, personalization and temporalization of the human being.
