Note 140 — LECTURE III. Primitive Religious Expression: in the Word.

I have presented this subject with greater detail in an article “On the Origin of Sacred Numbers” in the American Anthropologist, April, 1894. The contrast of symbolism of the three and the four is familiar to students. Such a popular text-book as Keil’s Manual of Biblical Archæology states that four was the predominating number in the temples, altars, and rites of the ancient world, it being, “according to an idea common to all antiquity, the symbol of the cosmos”; while the three was “the mark of the Divine Being in His various manifestations” (pp. 127, 128).